asked, his voice now muted with fatigue. “A family connection or a desire for justice?”
“Actually,” I told him, “I intended to be a novelist.”
“A novelist?” he repeated.
“Yes, I loved books as a child and … and, in a sense, I guess they saved me.”
I hesitated, but Oméga seemed genuinely interested.
“My family was poor,” I continued, “and novels gave me the impression of infinite possibility. As a child, I often read novels of gifted, solitary youths desperate to escape a repressive rural place. For them, saving the world was an excuse to set out and discover it, and be transformed. Years ago, I was hired as a research guide for a rich university student with internationalist ambitions and I took him to Nairobi. ‘Isn’t this amazing?’ I kept saying, but he’d already seen it all on YouTube. He experienced it as information, not as a sanctuary from his past or a gateway to a new self.”
Maybe exhaustion was releasing the thoughts my conversation with Sola had stirred up. My words came out more intimate than I intended: how stories deepened my love of landscape, connecting me to the world in a way that I still experience only when I’m in motion.
My grandmother once told me that loquacity ran in the family, an impulse so strong it had to be a biological mandate. So I let myself finish, saying that the young man of the YouTube generation hadn’t first encountered distant places as the reward for bodily exertion. He hadn’t experienced them as reveries merging into sight, becoming memory before they’d been fully felt in the nerves of the eyes.
Oméga sat in silence, perhaps waiting to be sure that I’d completed my thoughts, before he spoke in an enlivened voice.
“Books were the same for me, and freedom is why many of us came to Kinshasa.” He gestured to the driver and bodyguard, and they nodded. “We also wanted a future. Even my name, Oméga, is taken from a poem. I was a young man. This was during the war in the east, when I often faced death. I came into a house that had been pillaged. A book was on the floor. It was the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, and I read ‘Vowels,’ in which each letter has a color and an image:
Silences crossed by Worlds and Angels:
— O the Omega, the violet ray of His Eyes!
I decided then that I would survive and preach God’s word, that I would take the name Oméga. I could sense the violet light pouring out of His loving eyes.”
I myself had read this poem as a teenager, wishing I had synesthesia, but my response now seemed impoverished by the vitality of Oméga’s. I felt guilty that, while speaking, I’d worried that the cultural context of everything I was sharing would be too removed. I’d skimmed, saying nothing of agency and purpose—villains and the intensity of solitude in foreign lands.
“The Bible,” Oméga pressed on, “was of course the most important book for me. There were nights in the war when I lay in my shelter recalling the stories in Kings and Prophets. The machine guns fired and the mortars fell and I was Elijah listening for the word of God in the thunder and trembling earth.”
The Land Rover had turned onto a narrow road, past a car’s stripped-down carcass in the ditch, in a nest of weeds that had grown through and around it.
“I’m glad you shared your story,” he said. “Normally, I don’t like foreign journalists. Their investigations begin with a judgment, and they have come to find the evidence of what they already believe. But you are welcome in my church and home. You will have dinner with my wife and daughters. How do you like the sound of that?”
“That sounds quite nice.”
“Quite nice? Ha! You mundele speak pearly words but are all jackals.”
He turned in the seat next to me. In the street light, his fingers were again on the button of his shirt. They shifted to his collar, holding it, and then peeled it back.
A thick, glossy scar twisted from the base of his throat, near his jugular, and ran down toward his heart.
“And then I will tell you the story of my scar, and you will know why my congregation calls me prophète. Maybe you will begin to see. I’ve read about the brain and how our beliefs can keep us from seeing the truth. Maybe in the Congo you will learn that there are powers you don’t understand, and you’ll realize why books have saved you. All books are leading us back to the one good book.”
ROOM 22(2)
&
THE WILDLIFE OF ASPEN
At the hotel, I was so stunned when the clerk handed me my room card that I failed to ask for a different one before he moved on to the next guest. I took the elevator up and walked directly to the door. Two metal squares read 22 next to a patch of adhesive where the third had hung. I swiped and stepped inside, and stood in the gloom of drawn blinds outlined by the city’s faint electric effusion.
Room 22(2) had been my home for five months during my trip here over a decade ago, when I decided to become a war reporter. In the French style, the second floor was two stories up from the ground level—“too high to jump and yet too close to the violence in the streets to feel safe,” I joked with friends. The nation was Zaire back then, for a few weeks after my arrival, before Laurent-Désiré Kabila marched out of the east and into Kinshasa with a ragtag army of Congolese and battle-hardened Rwandan Tutsis, set up his government in the hotel’s top floors, and rolled back the country’s name to Congo.
Evenings, when I went downstairs to see what was on the menu, men with gold glasses, bejeweled rings, and suits more expensive than everything I owned combined sometimes invited me to their tables. For lack of an Eastern European weapons dealer, they had me sit with them. “Un journaliste,” they said and laughed. “You’ve come to the Congo at the right time, my friend.” Other evenings, they left me alone, as they were already seated with more authentic figures—white men with narrow faces, crooked, tightly shaved jaws, and gazes that were cold, unwavering, and predatory.
In my room, I awakened each sunrise to an avocado on my windowsill. I’d received it one afternoon, during a long power outage when I was trying to finish an article before my laptop battery died. Someone had banged on the door, and when I opened it, a paratrooperish man exuding the etheric cloud of prolonged inebriation said he’d knocked on the wrong one but then, in a low voice, warned me not to write offensive nonsense, before peeling the hand grenade off his vest with an extravagant gesture of bounty—as if he were the tree of life—and handing it to me.
“You never know,” he told me and laughed, showing a broken tooth.
A few months later, the embers of the First Congo War—which had rippled out from the Rwandan Genocide—reignited in the east, fracturing the country and precipitating the Second Congo War: a continuation of one long bloodletting in the eyes of many Congolese. As its massacres began, I left the hotel to get a closer look at a despairing people, to interview warlords, the hollow-faced human rights activists and UN inspectors tasked with body counts, and the mai-mai militiamen doused in the holy oils that made both them and their enemies believe they were bulletproof.
