Into Thick Air (32 page)

I retreated to room 9. The night went poorly. It was not the jive talk of James that bothered me, but the mattress. Like a black hole, an invisible ring of gravity sucked me into a pit in the center. I woke with an aching back to discover that mosquitoes had feasted on me. I shambled over to my first-aid kit and got out the Malarone. I didn't want to forget my morning pill and have malaria spoil my Djibouti holiday.

 

THE AIR CONDITIONER shuddered to a stop at 9 AM. Under a cloudless sky a pretty girl with braids jumped rope on her way to a school behind an iron gate. A yellow tabby slunk along the hotel wall. It was the thinnest cat in the world.

I dressed for success, with money stashed in three places on my body, and strode out into the early heat. Nobody but me wore a hat. Jeeps and green-and-white taxis and minibuses cruised the Boulevard du General de Gaulle. The minibuses had sassy names, like Texas or Cobra, splashed across the windshield, but if you wanted to know the destination you had to listen to the young man hollering out the open door. I understood only one locale: “
Rimbaud!
”

Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet and a sensation. First published in 1870 at age fifteen, he pursued the “systematic derangement of the senses” with the aid of absinthe and hashish. Thus primed, he spouted glowing verse like
The Drunken Boat
. His drunken lover shot him with predictably poor aim, but good enough to inspire Rimbaud to write
A Season in Hell.
Soon afterward, he quit writing and began the long wandering that would lead to Djibouti in 1885.

Except there was no Djibouti yet, only the condensing ambitions of French colonialism. The British had a colony in Yemen, the scalding port of Aden. The Italians were grasping for Eritrea. But the French had not built Suez only to let others be the gatekeepers of the Red Sea. They acquired their own colony, French Somaliland, bit by bit, and peaceably enough with payoffs to the appropriate sultans.

The future nation of Djibouti was in the right place, and not only because every ship had to pass within ten miles. To the west, high above the desert, the landlocked Ethiopians wished to continue business as usual, bringing coffee and slaves to the sea and international markets and taking home all sorts of interesting merchandise. When the soon-to-be Emperor Menelik of Ethiopia desired guns, he swung a deal with an ex-poet turned arms dealer who'd recently moved to French Somaliland. Rimbaud promised to deliver 1,755 rifles and 750,000 rounds of ammunition.

With one hundred camels, he did—yet failed to turn a profit. He tried general trading, but then a kind of cancer began to eat his knee. He returned to France on a stretcher, where the bad leg was sawed off. Two years later, at thirty-seven, Rimbaud was dead.

“I loved the desert, burnt orchards, tired old shops, warm drinks,” Rimbaud imagined while still a teen in France. Today it was not hard to find a
warm drink in a tired old café. The sun was turned away with heavy drapes. There were no lights, and the waitress brought me not only the menu but also a flashlight. She appeared to be wrapped head to toe in a sheet of silk. She served Ethiopian coffee the luscious black of crude oil, then returned to her preparations for the afternoon
khat
chew, placing sumptuous cushions around a platter of teacups and a cone of incense in a burner hewn from coral.

Rimbaud Plaza was just beyond the European Quarter, where the arcades petered out at a big white mosque with a single thick minaret like a lighthouse. To the south was a tornado of pigeons and honking minibuses surrounded by hundreds of market sheds of blue steel and hundreds of other vendors in pools of shade beneath ragged umbrellas. I weaved through the noise and flies and escaped into the alleys of the African Quarter. Looking for nothing, I paused near a row of knee-high aluminum jugs of cooking oil, chopped dates, and a frothy liquid. The vendors were ladies in billowy dresses in splashy patterns with matching head scarves. I said hello in Arabic. They responded, then asked,
Where are you from?

America, I said. I don't speak French. Tourist. Seventeen days in Djibouti, to see Lac Assal.

Cries of amazement bought the alley to a standstill. The women wanted me to have a drink of the froth. It was camel's milk. I declined, and a sleek man wearing a sarong butted in and said in English, “These ladies, Somaliland. Me, Somaliland. We British Africans. Not African.

“Look, nose. Not like this.” He squashed his nose. “Look, hair. Not like this.” His fingers curled into claws. “Hair like this.” His fingers relaxed.

They were refugees from the civil war in Somalia, a country united by a common language but split by ancient grudges and the last century's colonialism: some parts were British, some Italian.

The cook at the nearby Maskali Restaurant was a refugee, too. The Maskali looked like it was built in a day from plywood and corrugated steel, but it was freshly painted the pink and blue of sororities and swimming pools. The obvious owner, in a spotless white gown and skullcap, stood at an entrance decorated with Mecca postcards.

Inside were a half-dozen men at four tidy tables with napkins of sharply folded newspaper from Malaysia. There was no music or TV. There was one lunch: oven-charred fish, mystery soup, and flatbread dripping with honey. As soon as I finished, the man next to me handed me a small leafy branch. He'd been waiting. Now his eyebrows arched in expectation. He smiled and revealed green teeth. Dessert was served.

 

KHAT
IS THE NAME of a little tree. In Djibouti they say “cot.” It grows in Arabia and Africa, where its leaves are chewed with varying degrees of fervor among those who find its effects pleasing without knowing or caring that the reason is a molecule called cathinone. It's a member of the large and happy family of alkaloids, recognizable by their sturdy ring of carbon atoms with a nitrogen atom tucked into the circle or hanging off to the side. The list of desirable alkaloids is a who's who of addiction: nicotine, cocaine, morphine, codeine, mescaline, caffeine, and, lest you think you are immune to the allure, aminophylline from cocoa. The cathinone in
khat
is structurally related to ephedrine, a stimulant first discovered in a plant that grows in my Arizona home: Mormon tea, one of the genus
Ephedra
. Besides helping the Mormons wake up, ephedrine makes my bee-sting allergy injector tighten up my blood vessels.

But as any allergy medicine makes ambiguously clear on the warning label, its effects can improbably be both stimulant and sleep-inducer. In the case of cathinone, the United States Drug Enforcement Agency sternly warns that “widespread frequent use of
Khat
impacts productivity because it tends to reduce worker motivation.”

But the Maskali cook, Nasir, implied the opposite. “You eat this, you become fresh,” he said in fine English.

I looked at the men sitting beneath a painting, in a serious wood frame, of nineteenth-century frigates locked in sea battle. Nobody was actually
eating
the
khat
. They looked as if they were storing walnuts in their cheeks. I followed suit, stripping the leaves from the stem, chewing the mass, and tucking the cud into my cheek.

Very fresh, I said.

“Yes, it comes every day on a plane,” said Nasir. A young man, he had
excellent green teeth and powerful shoulders. “Nine thousand kilos. Just don't drink beer with
khat
, or you will be finished.”

Speaking of beer, I said, is there a bar where I could buy one? I mean, if I wasn't eating
khat
.

My question provoked grave frowns and whispers. I looked up to see a poster of the genealogy of the Prophet, with Adam at the trunk and Mohammed as the shining terminus of the highest branch. Suddenly I felt subterranean—as if I'd asked for a date with Satan.

Nasir delivered the verdict. “We do not know about the beer. This is not good for your spirit.”

Tea was served. Several more sprigs were produced. My beer blunder was forgotten as we resumed “grazing the salad.” The
khat
went to work, and I was consumed by a humming curiosity. The men taught me the Somali words for
water, thank you, wife,
and
may I take your photo.
I passed around my driver's license. One man discovered that the letter I in “ArIzona” was actually a saguaro cactus. This, we agreed, was fascinating.

Khat
was achieving its contrary promise: a relaxing stimulant. With the drool of a baby but the wisdom of a sage, I casually circulated my passport among the total strangers. They were gracious, and they were very curious. With Nasir as translator, I answered the usual family questions: children, wives, brothers and sisters. Nasir told of his father, killed in the civil war, and his brother in Los Angeles.

A couple entered and ordered lunch. The woman vanished into the ladies-only room. Nasir invited me into the kitchen. “Watch,” he said as he split and gutted a foot-long
arabi
in ten seconds. “This is what I would like to do if I make it to the United States.” The gleaming white flesh he slathered with a sauce. “I want to work in a restaurant with my brother.” He hooked the fish with an iron claw and dropped it into a hole in an earthen oven.

I mentioned that blackened fish is very popular in the United States, and in inadvertently raising his hopes I earned another fish for lunch, on the house. I followed with an offer to buy the next round of
khat
. Nasir took me out into the market and around a corner piled with big blue plastic jugs. People were picking up for the afternoon. A woman shooed flies from the mounds of sticky dates before wrapping them in a hobo bundle.
A man with buttered hair trotted past holding a clutch of long wands that flexed with each step.

“The toothbrush plant,” said Nasir. The banana-sized bundles of
khat
lay under wet burlap on a wooden table belonging to a young woman with skin the color of tobacco. Nasir greeted her. Fatima's gold hoop earrings swung out from her head scarf as she leaned forward to pick a bunch. It was carefully swaddled like the baby Jesus, except in plastic wrap and crisscrossed strings. Three bucks for a day's chew.

Back at the Maskali, the chatter had subsided. I donated the
khat
and excused myself before I became hooked within twenty-four hours of my arrival.

I wandered back through the now-calm Rimbaud Plaza. With the men dispatched by
khat
, the market was inhabited mostly by women washing the sidewalks or dampening the dirt. Along Boulevard Thirteen was a music shop selling the same tunes that drifted from the minibuses, with snake-charmer horns and strings echoing the lament of a melody, or a piccolo and twanging guitar chasing the happy slap of bongos. I bought one of each, and was instructed to wait while the owner copied the original onto a cassette.

Waiting was easy. It was no hotter than Tucson in September. There were no sirens in Djibouti Town, no guns, no bulletproof glass. It was not as if there was nothing to steal. Earlier, at a money exchange in Menelik Plaza, the man in front of me had exchanged $1,600, yet other than a screen there was hardly more security than at a lemonade stand.

The sun vanished and life returned to Rimbaud Plaza. The call for prayer wailed over the square. The European Quarter was cooling down and lighting up. I hesitated at the sort of place I'd avoided the night before: the Club de Rire, whose sign was a man in a bowler hat that spouted party favors. From behind its doors—black, with pink ladybug polka dots—came the click of pool balls and the snicker of women.

I heard someone yell, “Get out of here!” Instead, I went in.

 

“AMERICAN?” guessed the smiling doorman. “Yes, we have Americans! Over here, by the pool tables.”

There were two Americans and six women at the pool tables, big American sailors, one named Jack and a younger one whose name I didn't catch. Jack was built like a sack of grain and clutched a vodka tonic. The younger man leaned unsteadily on a pool cue pressed into service as a third leg. He blurted, “Where you from?”

I told him.

“Get the fuck out of here! You're kidding! What the fuck are you doing in Djibouti?”

His Heineken-carbonated brain was no match for my
khat
clarity. I calmly said, Tourist. Just curious, I guess.

“Get the fuck out of here! You're mad!”

Women outnumbered men two to one—and that was counting the French Legionnaires in the opposite corner. Both the French and the women wore tight clothes, and the effect was to make the women look less dangerous than the French.

The young sailor chalked up and missed an easy shot. A woman cleared the table. Apparently she had lots of practice.

I asked Jack, What's that guy's name?

“I can't remember. It's a big ship, an 880-foot tanker converted to hauling grain for the UN. I work on the bridge. He's a third-class engineer.”

A woman approached and immediately sized us up. How did she know where her chances lay? She ignored me and Mr. Wobble and headed straight for Jack. “You big tired man, need to relax.”

She was maybe twenty, in second-skin jeans, clingy tank top, and lipstick. She was not bashful. She ran her fingers lightly over her breasts, where her shirt said
Sports Girl.

“Look. Sports Girl. Me Sports Girl. Sports fucking.”

Her method was a bit aggressive, and Lord knows what circumstances in life had brought her to the Club de Rire. At the moment, however, none of this mattered. In the airy recesses of the male skull, her words and actions neatly pole-vaulted over all other thought processes and landed precisely on the neural klaxons whose job was to alert those parts of the anatomy that really wouldn't mind a bit more exercise. Sports Girl knew she had our complete attention. She smiled and did a hip grind and took
advantage of the moment to wheedle a Heineken out of Jack, meaning he agreed to pay for what she would fetch.