For a long moment Veronica doesn't understand what she is doing lying on a stone floor pressed between two other bodies. Then memory jolts her like a thunderbolt and she moans with terror, instantly wide awake.
She hurts seemingly everywhere: badly blistered feet, cuts on her legs, a big bruise on her hip, a pulled calf muscle, aching shoulders, skinned wrists, chafed ankle, headache, hunger, thirst, stiffness everywhere, an overall feeling that she has been hit by a freight train. At least her clothes are now mostly dry. The cave is dark. She has no idea how long she has slept. Jacob, Derek and Susan seem asleep, albeit uneasily. She hears but can't make out soft, frightened whispers from Tom and Judy. Veronica wants to lie where she is and sleep for days, and she is so exhausted that despite the hard, cold, uneven stone floor she probably could, but she needs to pee. At least she isn't dehydrated.
Just getting to her feet feels like climbing K2, but somehow she manages. Her right calf won't flex at all, she can barely walk, but that hardly matters, the chain on her left ankle keeps her from going more than twenty feet from the anchor rock. She isn't sure where to go, but she has to go somewhere, so she limps near the waterfall. Her chain clanks bleakly behind her, as if she's the ghost in a ghost story. She doesn't want to pee so close to the others, but tells herself they can't afford niceties like personal embarrassment anymore, and anyway the white noise of the waterfall swallows up the sound.
Veronica drinks from the waterfall, soothing her throat. The water feels cool and clear. She hopes it is also clean, that no upstream village dumps dead animals or feces into the water. Dysentery is all she needs right now. Maybe she shouldn't drink from it, but she already did last night, what the hell. She feels her way back to her slot between Jacob and Derek, lies laboriously back down, and starts to cry. It feels like an involuntary physical reaction, like sneezing. She can't stop, she starts weeping more violently. Derek wakes up and rolls over to face her.
"Sorry, I'm sorry," she bleats.
"It's okay," he mutters, and reaches out for her, wraps his arms around her, holds her close as she sobs against his shoulder. She tries to relax into his arms and let her exhaustion carry her back into sleep. It doesn't seem to work, she is not conscious of having fallen asleep, but somehow, when she next opens her eyes, the cave is filled with filtered dawn, the sun is on the rise, and others are up and moving.
The ceiling of the cave is barely high enough to stand, and except near the waterfall, it is so dark she has to squint. Veronica moves as close to the light and the water as she can, as quickly as she can, heedless of the pain in her strained muscles. Being buried alive has long been her greatest fear. Yesterday she was too exhausted to react to her surroundings, and fear of imminent death trumped claustrophic anxiety, but now just the thought of being in one of the dark corners of this cave makes her dizzily lightheaded and a little nauseous.
Once they have moved from lying on stone to sitting on a rock there is precious little to do. Jacob mutters, "I'm hungry," and there is general agreement. Otherwise everyone seems dazed and disinterested, too weak for conversation. Diane seems better, she's at least ambulatory, but she doesn't speak and her eyes are wide as a child's.
"You have to tell them to get me a phone," Michael says, breaking a brooding silence. "I'll get them money. Tell them I can get them a million dollars if they let us go."
Veronica wonders if the us in question means all of them, or just Michael and Diane.
"I will," Derek says. "When they come."
"I can do it fast. I can transfer fifty thousand dollars today, over the phone."
"What makes you think they'll let you go once they have the money?" Jacob asks.
Michael flinches. "What - why wouldn't they?"
"Wrong question. Why would they?"
Nobody has an answer.
The waterfall noise changes as two men push through its flowing curtain. One of them is the muscled one-eyed man. They other they have not seen before. He is even taller than Jacob, at least six foot six, he reminds Veronica of basketball players she has met. The cave is not quite big enough for him and he has to stoop. He wears sneakers, black shorts, and a ragged blue T-shirt too small for him, and he walks with a pronounced limp. The one-eyed man carries a plastic bucket full of some pale pastelike substance, and a jute sack holding a half-dozen spherical things about the size of human heads. Veronica freezes in place as it dawns on her that they might actually be human heads. Both men carry pangas lashed to their belts.
"Good morning," the tall man says, putting down sack and bucket. His accented English is soft-spoken and Veronica has to strain to hear him over the waterfall. "My name is Gabriel."
"I can get you money," Michael bursts out. "Give me a phone and I can get you a million dollars if you let us go."
Gabriel examines him curiously. "What is your name?"
"Michael Anderson."
"You are a rich man, Mr. Anderson?"
"Yes I am," Michael says. "And I'm ready to make you rich too."
"C'est vrai? The Bible says it is harder for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven."
Michael stares at him. "Don't you want money?"
"Of course I want money. But please, how is it you would give it to me?"
"I can do a bank transfer today, for fifty thousand dollars, I can do it in ten minutes if you give me a phone -"
Gabriel half-smiles. "Do I seem like a man who has an account at a Swiss bank? Please, Mr. Anderson. Be sensible. Who will negotiate the arrangements? Who will transform the numbers in your bank account into dollars that I can hold? Such a magical transformation. Like water into wine. Who will bring me those dollars? Where will we meet? How will my safety be guaranteed? Are these arrangements that you can make today, in ten minutes, Mr. Anderson?"
Veronica is relieved, listening to him. He doesn't talk like a brutal thug. He talks like an educated, reasonable man.
"I'll find a way," Michael says. "I'll work with you. We can make these arrangements together."
"Thank you. But I prefer to work with professionals. Please, all of you, do not be afraid. Put your minds at ease. There is a long history in my country of trading tourists for money. Laurent Kabila, the lamented father of our president, he did this often when he was a fighter in the bush, like me. Today no tourists come to Congo, we must seek them out in Uganda, but the principles remain the same. Please. I will negotiate arrangements with your governments, not with you."
Veronica takes a deep breath and lets herself look away from the sack full of headlike objects. She feels a little steadier. They will be ransomed. Everything will be fine. Or at least survivable.
"That all sounds terrific," Derek says. "But there's something you need to understand."
Gabriel looks at him.
"Our governments will insist on verifying our well-being before they pay you one dime. And if we've been abused, they will come down on you so hard you won't know what hit you. Kabila kidnapped his tourists last century. The world is different now. You kidnap some Americans and Brits and Canadians, and then you ransom us unhurt, fair enough, you're not worth chasing down. But you hurt us again and you will die. That animal tried to rape her last night." He indicates the one-eyed man and Susan. "He pulls any of that shit again, he uses that whip again, anything happens to us, even if it's not your fault, even if one of us gets sick, then you and all your men will fucking die. Is that clear? Do you understand that?"
Veronica is awed by the intensity and casual certainty of his voice.
Gabriel seems less impressed. "What is your name?"
"Derek Summers."
The tall man nods. "I see. Mr. Summers. I have no intention of harming you. But not because of your ridiculous threats. For two other reasons. One is that I know you white people are like cut flowers, so weak that from only a little injury you wilt and die. The other is because I am not an evil man. None of us are. You called this man an animal. I know that is what you think of us. All Congolese, maybe all black men, we are all animals to you. I want you to think of this. I studied physics once, at a university. I travelled to Europe. Now my country is in ruins, my family is dead, I must fight and kill only to survive. That is why we have captured you. That is why we must have the money you will bring. Only to survive. This man Patrice, my friend, this man you call an animal, he was once the finest drummer in Nord-Kivu, maybe the finest in all the Congo, and though I doubt you know this, we Congolese are famous through all Africa for our music. He lost his music when he lost his eye, in battle, saving my life. He lives every day with terrible pain from those wounds. Crippling pain. Pain that would reduce you to an animal, I promise you that. But he is a man still. He is the most brave and most strong man I know. I want you to think of this the next time you call him an animal. You will not be harmed by my men, none of you, unless you bring it on yourselves. But if you do I will have no mercy. Because I think no better of you than you do of us. Is that clear, Mr. Summers? Do you understand that?"
After a moment Derek says, quietly, "Yes."
Gabriel nods to Patrice, who draws his panga. Veronica freezes, as Patrice reaches into the sack - and pulls out a pineapple, which he cuts into a dozen fragments, wielding the machete with a craftsman's mechanical grace. The smell makes Veronica's mouth water and her stomach cramp.
"You see," Gabriel says, as Patrice arrays the wedges on a flattish rock and begins to chop up another pineapple. "When you are here we treat you well. If there is trouble you will have yourselves alone to blame."
* * *
Tom reaches his hand into the plastic bucket, withdraws another baseball-sized dollop of pocho, stares at it with a wrinkled face, and announces, "This is the worst bloody Club Med I've ever been to."
Everyone laughs. It sounds almost like real laughter. Gabriel has kept his word, they have not been harmed further, and their bellies are at least half-full. The pineapples were so deliriously delicious that Veronica now feels almost well-disposed towards Patrice. But eating this pocho, a kind of banana pounded to the consistency of underdone mashed potatoes, is like chewing wet cardboard.
"You think the food is bad, wait 'til the activities begin," Derek says, smiling.
"Everybody up for the sunrise flagellations!" Jacob adds.
"I'm definitely not going to tip the staff." Diane's voice is quavery, but they are the first words she has spoken since entering the cave, and everyone laughs uproariously with relief.
"Pocho can be good," Susan says from her seat next to Derek. She sounds oddly defensive. "This just hasn't been cooked enough. And it usually comes with a sauce."
"Tell Nigella, not me," Tom says around a mouthful. "This is one taste I promise you I will never acquire. Rather have a bucket full of Vegemite. Well, let's look at the silver lining. A few weeks here and we'll finally get our slender figures back."
"Great," Jacob said. "I'll just start thinking of this as a whips-and-chains fat farm. We could probably market it when we get back home. People would pay for the experience."
Judy takes a bite and her face wrinkles. She makes herself chew and swallow, then turns to Susan and asks, amazed, "You actually eat this back in Kampala? By choice?"
Susan looks around uncertaintly. "Not Kampala. The camp where I work, near Semiliki. There's Western food if you like, but I try not to eat differently from the refugees when I'm there. I think it's patronizing, it reinforces the barriers."
"Could do with a few more barriers at the moment," Tom says drily.
"Do you speak the language?" Michael asks Susan.
She hesitates. "Not really. There are so many of them around here, it's mad. In Zimbabwe there was only Shona and Ndebele. Here, I expect there's a dozen languages within a hundred miles. I can speak some Swahili. A little Luganda, not much, I've only been here eight months. I think the pygmies were talking Swahili to the men when we came here, but the men were speaking something else, not Luganda."
"Kinyarwanda?" Derek asks.
"I don't know. I wouldn't recognize it. But I don't think they'd speak that around here."
"They would if they were interahamwe."
"If they were interahamwe I rather think we'd all already be… " Susan's voice trails off.
Michael asks, "Interahamwe?"
Derek looks at him like he just failed to recognize Kurt Cobain's name. "You've heard of the Rwandan genocide?"
"Of course." Michael sounds a little insulted.
Susan says, "The interahamwe were the ones responsible."
Derek frowns. "Responsible's a big word. Ordinary Hutus did most of the killing. But it was the interahamwe militias who organized it. It's a Rwandan word, means 'let us strike together.' When the genocide was over, after Kagame took over the country, a million refugees ran away into the Congo. Specifically right here, North Kivu province, right next door. Remember those volcanos we saw in the distance on the drive into Bwindi? They're right on the Uganda-Rwanda-Congo triple border. Anyway, most of the refugees went home eventually, but the hardcore interahamwe, the real genocidists, the mass murderers, they stayed. There's still supposed to be about ten thousand of them in eastern Congo."
"And you think these might be interahamwe?" Michael asks.
Derek hesitates, then shrugs. "Probably not. Susan's right. We'd all be dead already. These guys are probably exactly what they seem. A local warlord doing a fundraising drive with us as the poster children."
"He seems like an okay guy," Jacob says.
Derek's laugh has no warmth in it. "Do me a favour. Don't get all Stockholm syndrome on me. Sure, he talks pretty. But let's hope real hard we never have to find out just how nice he actually is."
* * *
After breakfast Veronica sits by the waterfall and does what she can for people's injuries. Her one tool is the plank of cheap purple soap Gabriel brought. She uses it to wash assorted cuts, bruises, blisters and whip wounds. Jacob and Diane shudder and groan as Veronica soaps their flayed skin. Diane once again doesn't seem like she's all there, her eyes stare into the distance. There's no clean fabric for bandages; all she can tell them is to try to keep the wounds clean and dry until they scab over. Tom has somehow sprained a wrist, and Veronica ties his T-shirt around it tightly for support. Michael is still walking gingerly, but he doesn't approach her, and Veronica knows his swollen testes should be fine in a day or two without help.
When finally done she rinses blood from the soap. On impulse she sticks her head through the waterfall. Outside, the water plunges into a small pool that becomes a burbling creek, wending its way through little patches of beans and millet until it reaches a stand of banana trees. The ashen remains of a fire lie on a rock beside the pool. Two guards sit nearby, carrying pangas but not rifles. Veronica thinks they were part of yesterday's kidnapping crew. They leap to their feet when they see her head emerge from the water, and one begins to shout in French. She recoils, frightened. The two guards storm in after her, yelling sternly but not angrily.
"In case their body language was somehow unclear," Jacob says drily after they depart, "they said we weren't supposed to go outside."
Veronica swallows. Her knees are weak from the confrontation.
For a long time nobody says anything. Veronica wishes somebody else would talk. She can't do it herself. All the words in the world seem to have fled from her mind. Instead all she can think about is everything that might go wrong at any moment. If Patrice comes storming in drunk, murder and rape on his mind. If they are discovered, their location reported by some curious local child, and Gabriel decides to cut his losses before the UN arrives. If he is unable to make contact with their governments before interahamwe enemies come and take his prisoners for themselves. If the ransom exchange goes terribly wrong and ends in gunfire. If there is cholera in the water. These all feel like very real possibilities, far easier to imagine than returning to safety.
Jacob speaks deadpan into the silence: "Well now. I suppose you've all been wondering why I've asked you here."
The laughter that follows is giddy to the point of hysteria.
"What you don't realize," he continues, his voice rigid, "is that this is the casting call for the world's newest and ultimate reality show. It's called Survivor Congo, and the big twist this season is we've replaced 'getting voted off the island' with 'getting your fucking head chopped off.'" More laughter, not as loud. "Of course some of you will have to make ultimate sacrifices, but Jesus, people, just imagine the ratings."
"Do I get a million dollars if I win?" Derek asks.
"No. You win not getting your fucking head chopped off."
The laughter that follows is now thin and nervous.
"Sounds fair," Derek agrees. "See, this is why I invited Jacob to Africa in the first place. Black comic relief."
"It's not really the right continent for racist jokes," Jacob shoots back.
"You thought they were funny in high school."
"That was a character. And a highly satiric one. Who I did only once."
Derek smiles. "Because DeShawn nearly beat the living shit out of you."
"Discretion is often the better part of comedy."
Veronica interrupts their repartee. "You two went to high school together?"
Jacob nods. "Twenty years I've known this guy. High school, university, now here. His fault I'm here in the first place. Talked me into an eighty percent pay cut to work for some friend of a friend of his. I still can't believe I actually signed up."
"Sure, it's all my fault," Derek says darkly. "Salesman of the century, that's me. Sand to the Bedouin, Africa to Canadians."
"I want my money back. You'll hear from my lawyers."
"What? Why? I promised you exotic adventure. If this doesn't qualify I don't know what does."
Jacob snorts. "Teach me a lesson. Jungle accommodation with a waterfall and a sunset view, you said. The company of beautiful women. A long walk through lovely rainforest with expert guides, culminating with quaint local rituals involving big fucking whips and machetes. Yep, definitely should have read the fine print."
Their humour is forced, but everyone manages a smile.
"No, really, my own fault I'm here," Jacob says bitterly. He takes a deep and shuddering breath. "I keep thinking maybe this is a dream, and when I wake up tomorrow we'll be back in the park, or maybe in Kampala, and I'll say, hey, guess what, you'll never believe this dream I just had."
"Yeah." Veronica knows the feeling.
"These last few weeks already, most mornings I wake up and can't believe I'm in Africa in the first place. That was already surreal. This is even crazier. It's like I'm playing a video game inside a dream or something."
"You've just been here a few weeks?" Susan asks.
Jacob nods.
"Me too," Veronica says softly. "Just a month."
Judy asks her, "You came as a tourist?"
Veronica shakes her head. "I was working with this HIV research group."
"We were supposed to fly home tomorrow," Diane says. "They took our tickets. It isn't fair. We're philanthropists. We would have been home tomorrow."
Veronica sympathizes. She too probably would have been going home soon. Her month in Kampala has taught her that Africa isn't for her: too foreign, too chaotic, too poor, too intense. She was probably just weeks away from leaving. It doesn't seem fair that now she is trapped in this awful place instead.
Michael says angrily, "I grew up poor, you know. I paid my own way through college. Now we give money to churches, orphanages, ministries all over the world. There are dozens of African children who rely on us to survive. Hundreds. We travel all over the world to inspect our good works and make sure our money isn't wasted. That's why we were here. We don't deserve this. We just don't deserve it."
Susan looks like she wants to say something, but doesn't.
Jacob shrugs. "It's like Clint Eastwood says. Deserve's got nothin' to do with it."
"We would have been home tomorrow," Diane repeats, as if she can make it come true by saying it often enough.
Judy says, "You never think it will happen to you, do you? You always think this is the kind of thing that happens to other people. We're just tourists. Uganda was so lovely. We travel every year, never had a moment's trouble before."
"We should have gotten married," Tom says, very seriously.
Judy half-laughs, half-sobs. "You've been saying that for fourteen years."
He takes her hand gently. "We get out of this, darling, first thing, I'm going to make an honest women of you at last."
"Fourteen years?" Veronica asks.
Tom explains: "It's been a very long engagement. Like that French film with whatshername from Amelie. I used to be a coal miner, up near Leeds, Jude here was a hairdresser. A month after we started going out, we were both sacked, on the same day. Fourteen years ago next month. The very next day we put our heads and bank balances together, started a delivery service. Nowadays we've got eleven vans, forty employees, it's a real going concern. But starting up shop was such a bloody bother we never found time to officially get married."
As Veronica listens, she begins to feel a slippery looseness deep in her guts, a faint cramp. She swallows nervously. Just a little dyspepsia, she tells herself. You ate too much too fast. That water you drank was clean. You can't be sick. Not now.
"Every year we talk about it," Judy says, "and every year we decide we'd rather spend the time and money travelling."
Tom rolls his eyes. "She decides."
"Come on, love. You've said yourself every trip's been better than a wedding. You hate weddings."
"I'd rather get married than eat pocho again."
"Fair point," Judy concedes, and everyone chuckles.
"It's really not that bad if it's prepared correctly," Susan protests, but she too is smiling.
Silence falls, and with it, the almost-cheerful mood darkens again.
Eventually Tom says to Susan, "What's your story then, pocho-eater? What are you doing in Africa?"
"Me?" Susan looks around awkwardly, discomfited by their collective attention. "Not half so romantic as yours. I used to be an actress. Not a very good one, I don't think. I went to all the right courses, did a few little roles in provincial tours, a few film walk-ons, but it never really happened for me. Fame. Success." She shrugs. "Then five years ago I came to Kenya for what was supposed to be two weeks, to help teach local theatre groups how to put on AIDS awareness plays. The slums there, the way people live, I'd never seen anything like it. I'd never even imagined. And it's so unnecessary. The waste. The fucking waste of it all. Their government stealing their money, and the money that's supposed to go to them, just outright stealing it plain as day, thieves and murderers, killing their people in a dozen different ways, and all of them propped up by our governments, our aid organizations, we're helping to kill them too." Susan glares at Michael and Diane as if they are personally responsible for Africa's poverty. Then she seems to come to herself, and her face softens again, her voice becomes shy and hesitant. "I've been here ever since. Working at places I can believe in. Refugee camps, mostly. The aid industry mostly makes Africa worse. But in the camps I can make a difference."
"Did the people at the camp know you were coming to see the gorillas?" Derek asks.
Susan considers. "I told a few. The authorities must already know we're all missing, they took our passport details when we entered the park."
Derek nods as if that wasn't quite what he was asking.
"How long have you been in Africa?" Tom asks Derek.
Derek too looks a little uncomfortable answering questions. "Almost a year now."
"You were in the service, you said? You've seen action?"
"Yeah. In Bosnia. I was a so-called peacekeeper. Ten years ago now. Private security, since. Iraq a couple years ago, working for Blackwater. Then Thailand before I came here. Beaches and girls. Probably should have stayed."
"What you should have stayed in was university." Jacob turns to the others. "This guy was supposed to do a triple major in politics, philosophy and economics, while I did computer engineering. We were going to found a startup once we graduated. The dot-com boom was just starting. We would have been millionaires. But loser-boy here had to go and change his major to drugs and girls."
Derek smiles and quotes, "Never let your schooling get in the way of your education. So I dropped out."
Jacob clears his throat skeptically.
"No, I did. How many times have I told you this? You can check U of T's records. I officially withdrew a whole day before they would have expelled me."
"And then you joined the army and went to Bosnia? Why?" Veronica asks, trying to ignore her increasing intestinal discomfort.
Derek says, as if it is all the answer the question requires, "I was twenty-one."
A hush falls over the cave. Nobody seems to have anything else to say. Veronica tries not to think about the slithering uneasiness in her belly, or about how many things could go wrong with their ransoming. She tries to think back to happier times. But those were too long ago to come into focus. She can't tear her mind away from being afraid; every time she tries to distract herself there is a sudden reminder: the tightness of her ankle chain, a groan from Diane, and Veronica gasps weakly as she remembers where she is, and her stomach writhes and twists anew. She feels like she is slowly sliding into a dark whirlpool that will swallow her whole.
"I'm sick," she mutters. There is no longer any denying it. Her guts are lurching and roiling with illness, she can't hold out much longer. She rises weakly to her feet. "Shit. Fuck. I'm sick."
"What is it?" Derek asks, concerned.
"Just a stomach bug," she insists. "I've got to … I'm sorry."
She grabs the empty pocho bucket and stumbles as far away as possible; only twenty feet, thanks to the chain. The others look studiously away as she squats over the bucket. Knowing that this could be cholera or dysentery, could actually kill her in a matter of days, somehow doesn't dull the humiliation. At least there doesn't seem to be any bleeding, at least not yet.
"I don't feel well either," Jacob groans.
"Oh, Jesus," Michael says, panicky. "This is all we need. Tell them we need a doctor. Go tell them!"
Derek stands. He looks grim. "I'll try. But Jacob's right, they're not going to care. Even if they did there's probably nothing they could do."