anti-rape, Tuuro thought, and yet at that time the boy had been dead. When he was raped he was alive. My God. Who would do such a thing? That must be sin, Tuuro thought. A thing a person would give anything to erase.
Tuuro sat up on his cot, pulled the blanket around him like a cape. “Will they let me out, then?” There was a whomping noise, and a fresh blast of cold air shot out from the vent above the door. Outside Tuuro’s cell, Kelso the guard stood at the door to the pod and stared at the seam between the wall and the ceiling.
“There is a charge.” English looked embarrassed. “Not murder, they don’t have the evidence. Desecration of a corpse. I know”—English took in Tuuro’s stare—“it’s a crazy charge. No one at the office believes it either. You had nothing to do with the dogs! All we can figure is that they’re wanting to flush out Nenonene.” English glanced toward Kelso and gestured to Tuuro to stand and come to the bars. “He was very attached to this grandson,” English whispered. “Supposedly he wants to visit the boy’s grave.”
“The general, Nenonene? He wants to visit Dayton?”
English smiled tightly, his eyes searching the cell behind Tuuro. Is he looking for a camera? Tuuro thought. But when English spoke his voice resonated with the wistful admiration Tuuro had heard before—but not from a white man—when people mentioned the Alliance general. “He’s not your average person, Nenonene.”
When English left, Tuuro curled back on his side again, his hands rubbing his arms. The cold air was still blasting. Before English’s visit he’d felt as if he’d been tossed into a big forgotten hole. Now it seemed this hole wasn’t forgotten at all. He glanced up at the vent, wondering whether the cold air was reward or punishment.
Years ago he had been wanted. He’d been fought over.
—Darling little boy, that little boy’s not growing up to be a stucko addict like some people.
—Look at you, all scrawny. Those ribs stick out like corrugation. Why don’t you play outside, boy? Build up some meat on those bones.
—Reading already! I’ll bring him some good books for him to read.
—Tuuro, look what Tati found. Almost full!
—I hate to see a child of intelligence living in a house without words.
He had never seen it as bliss, his childhood. Quite the opposite. But now he understood the comfort of being wanted.
some tales of sanity
AMONG THE MANY rescue stories of the Torah, Chad’s mother’s particular favorite was the tale of Joseph, the boy with the coat-of-many-colors that his father had given him, the youngest son so hated by his brothers that they planned to kill him.
Of course that wasn’t the good part. That was the nasty part.
The good part was that the oldest son, Benjamin, persuaded his brothers not to kill Joseph but to abandon him in a pit, then take Joseph’s coat and stain it with animal blood and take it home to their father to show him that Joseph was dead.
The best part was that Benjamin planned to rescue Joseph from the pit, although when Benjamin went to do this he ran into traders traveling to Egypt who bought Joseph from Benjamin as a slave—a twist of fate that worked out well for everyone in Joseph and Benjamin’s family, because it led to Joseph being accepted in the royal Egyptian court as an interpreter of dreams, which led, over time, to a position of authority for Joseph in the Egyptian government, which led to Joseph eventually identifying, testing, and helping the brothers who had abandoned him years before.
Benjamin, in Chad’s mother’s opinion, was the stealth hero of the Joseph story. Not that Benjamin was perfect, not that he did everything he hoped for, but he was the brother with a good heart and a plan, and those two things together could lead to greatness.
IT’S WELL KNOWN—as Chad said in his Dayton course—that in 1913 John Patterson saved Dayton. John was born in the town, and he grew up to head National Cash Register, known locally as NCR or “the Cash.” He started the company in 1885, and was its CEO until he died. By 1890 National Cash Register was the biggest employer in Dayton, and by 1911 it had sold a million cash registers, a huge volume at the time. They were the cash register company. Their products showed up in the paintings of Edward Hopper. In building his company Patterson made innovations that transformed business: clean and well-lit factories, the whole idea of a sales force with “territories,” international sales. For Cash employees he set up night schools, gardens, group exercises, and a credit union. In exchange for this attention to his workers, John Patterson had certain expectations. He could, and did, fire a room full of people in one outburst. An executive who’d disappointed him came back from a trip abroad to find his desk and chair in flames on the company lawn. (That last story was apocryphal, but Chad always used it, admitting its unlikelihood only after the class reacted.)
Patterson was—no surprise—insanely competitive, and he saw no reason for cash register companies other than his to exist. He condoned certain shenanigans. A defective register might be affixed with a competitor’s name. A merchant who mentioned purchasing another company’s product could be threatened. NCR lawsuits for libel and patent infringement cluttered the courts. All this resulted, in 1913, in an antitrust conviction for John Patterson and the sentence of a year in jail.
Notice my words, Chad would say: the sentence. Patterson appealed, and five weeks later it started raining. You could almost say that the resultant disaster was the answer to Patterson’s prayers.
LYING CURLED UP in his cellblock bed, Tuuro thought of Nenonene. Everyone knew the stories. What Nenonene had done, originally, was what most of the world thought impossible: he unified Africa. Oh, not totally, and not without grief and murder, but Africa was now a different place. It was a threat. After all those years of Muslims versus Christians, of famines and epidemics and tribal warfare (and it wasn’t just Africans who noticed that word “tribal,” as if African hatreds were primitive and inescapable), now the African Union was a player on the world’s stage. Of all the African countries, only Egypt was not part of the AU—a reflection of the U.S.-Egypt alliance forged in the early twenties.
It helped his rise that Nenonene was from Gambia, an out-of-the-way country that threatened no one; that he was educated, the son of a doctor and trained as a doctor himself, although he never practiced; that he was an unevangelizing Christian as likely to quote Mohammed as Jesus or John Wesley; that he was, in the peculiarly un-self-conscious way of some people of faith, comfortable with his own power. It also helped that he rose to leadership under the wing of Mamawe, whose cheesy corruptibility (he had once sold mineral rights to two provinces for American cash, two thousand pounds of pornography, 720 German rifles, and a case of Cointreau) made Nenonene appear all the more virtuous, at the same time Mamawe’s unvarnished power gave Nenonene protection and clout. And Nenonene made his mark. He saw himself, during the siege of Rabat (known by some as the Massacre of Rabat, or the Forty Days), as the embodiment of Pinchas, the priest in Numbers who ensured his place at the top of the rabbinical line by impaling an Israelite and his heathen bride together in their private parts.
When a colonel had betrayed him, Nenonene had shot the man in the heart himself, Nenonene standing right in front of him, his jaw set and a video camera running. He was from an older time; a warrior, a man as capable of violence as of self-restraint.
I could talk to him, Tuuro thought. He would understand me. Tuuro saw them in two wingback chairs, half facing each other, coffee in china cups on the table between them. Tuuro
