why this appeals to him. It’s also why I’m going to help out.”
I read the final paragraphs—a maudlin edge in his words about how long he’d searched and how much he deserved this breakthrough.
“And situations like these,” I asked, “they’re related to your work?”
“I’ve done time in many fields, but I sell myself as a cross-cultural consultant.”
“That’s why he contacted you?”
“No. He’s a personal connection—one that,” she took a moment to renew the air in her lungs, “I have been doing my best to manage from a distance. But a friend is a friend. Besides, I have other work in the Congo.”
Maybe it was the dark plane cabin and the droning fuselage, or the collective lull of so many sleeping bodies, but in the overlapping halos of our reading lights, I felt as if we were alone.
“You’re also an anthropologist?” I asked as she put away her phone.
“Among the many things I’ve been, yes, that’s one of them.”
Her words made me realize that society had trained me to expect statements of career change and exploration from men. I wanted to ask if and where she’d studied anthropology, but I sensed her reticence, possibly a desire not to be pigeonholed, and this further lit up my brain.
“What are you doing in the Congo?” she asked.
I smiled, suddenly uneasy, trying to hear my answer before I spoke it.
“I’m a journalist. I’m working on a story about, well, an American who has been living in the rainforest for three decades, who’s basically gone rogue.”
“A Kurtz?” she said and laughed.
“Yes,” I admitted, feeling less self-conscious. “I wish it were otherwise.”
“Well, if you don’t find him, I’m sure you’ll stumble across some other ones.”
“That’s the backup plan.”
“Are you independent?”
“I am. It leaves time for personal writing. Years ago, when I began doing this, I’d buy a one-way ticket to strand myself overseas and then write to make enough money to pay my way back. It taught me to find stories everywhere.”
“It sounds as if you could have become a Kurtz yourself.”
“It wasn’t inconceivable.”
Coming down the aisle sideways, an old white man in khaki clutched the seats. He encroached on our circle of light like a night creature testing a boundary—and then loomed over us, before lurching on.
She reached up to the reading lights and turned one off.
I considered what to say next, refraining from asking a question that would tie her coloring to Africa or mark her interest there as part of her heritage. But she spoke first, the absence of any strong regional inflection in her voice again making me wonder if English wasn’t her native language.
“I suppose you might like to write about our little white witch.”
“I would of course credit the anthropologist’s work and interview him.”
“That should do the job.” She laughed. “He is no enemy to recognition.”
The story of a black girl possessed by a white demon and turned white was already lacerating the edges of my imagination, and I was glad for her response.
She talked more about the girl, about how the anthropologist had been interviewing her with the help of a Congolese interpreter before transcribing and then translating her responses.
“His project is fraught. He asks questions in French that the interpreter translates to Lingala, since the girl doesn’t respond to French, despite her rudimentary grasp. The translator then renders her answers into French, from which my friend translates them into English, since he is doing post-doctoral work at Dartmouth. We must assume that a lot is lost.”
I liked how she spoke—the fluency of her pauses, as if she were simply emphasizing, and how, sometimes, she turned her palms up to stress a point, loosely knitting her fingers.
Past her shoulder, the night topography began to shift, and she followed my gaze. She tapped the button on the window, clearing the dark tint from the glass, and we were suddenly staring down at an alien horizon of bottom-lit clouds, as if flying over a gas giant. The alienating distance from our planet registered in my body, a pulse of uncertainty in the nerves along the bones of my chest.
“So how did you get into writing?” she asked, suddenly sounding tired.
“I grew up poor, and we didn’t have much in the house other than used books my mom picked up. She had artistic ambitions for me, to say the least, and there wasn’t much else to do but read or go to the library.”
I suddenly felt divided. I wanted to say, “Stories saved my life.” It was a line I often found myself thinking, during moments when I considered what a truly narrative species we are—measured, constrained, or liberated by story. I sometimes said it when giving talks, since it jolted the audience into presence, into a connection with me. It was exaggerated in a way that obliged people to listen closely, to judge whether I was being authentic, and in that moment I could offer the best I had.
I glanced past her, to where the moon peered at us from above the plunging curve of the earth, beneath the cavernous hood of space. I hesitated, afraid of being manipulative, but that we were among the few passengers not overcome by torpor gave me a sense of being separate, even special—or at least of intimacy and trust.
“Stories,” I said, “novels, actually—they saved my life.”
She turned a little more toward me and looked into my eyes, waiting.
“My father had a fifth-grade education,” I told her. “When he saw me reading, he would hunch and glare at me. I guess my reading must have made him feel smaller, like a failure. He’d never read a novel, and I often read one a day.
“Anyway, he told me how the future should look, but I knew there were other futures. I’d read them in books.”
The sunrise emanated from the clouds, shining on the wingtip like a star and creeping red along the metal. The hum of the fuselage had become faintly shrill, and our fatigue was suddenly apparent. The air felt staticky as she yawned. There were circles under her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” she said and touched my wrist. “Thank you for sharing that.”
“The fatigue comes on hard, doesn’t it?”
“It’s as if we see the sun and realize we haven’t really slept.”
I wanted to finish the story, but it seemed too much to explain my eroding faith in free will, or that novels had also taught me to chase impossibilities, conjuring villains as I crossed the planet to find them.
I was again tempted to ask where she was from—to cement her in my mind
