The Imaginary Lives of Mechanical Men by Randy F. Nelson

Author:Randy F. Nelson
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780820328454
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Published: 2006-10-01T04:00:00+00:00

River Story

FOR SUSAN

Behavioral and personality changes are often the first signs of CNS involvement. Later more florid psychological changes may occur, with hallucinations or delusions. Reversion of sleep rhythm is characteristic, with drowsiness during the day, a feature from which the disease derives its name. Other nervous symptoms include tremor, most characteristically of the face and lips, and hyperesthesia, causing some patients to avoid common practices such as closing or locking doors. Without treatment, the patient’s level of consciousness progressively deteriorates.

—Quinn, African Trypanosomiasis

I have the sleeping sickness. I believe that Brawley has it too, so I watch him very carefully.

I watch him focus on the flies, reaching rather than swatting with the hand that holds his cigarette. Half a swarm buzzes up through the smoke, settling on the lip of his glass, strutting like soldiers on parade, and he begins to quarrel without even looking in my direction. “Okay, here’s the problem,” he tells me. “World’s got no lost cities anymore, right? Blokes like you and me? This is it. I mean what I’m sayin’, Jocko. This—right here—is it. That’s the problem.” And pecks at the table with blunt fingers, scattering ashes without disturbing the insect world around him. “Jesus Christ, I’m sweatin’. What time is it?”

“Eight o’clock.”

“I’m sweatin’ like the dengue ’n it ain’t even eight o’clock yet. And lookit that fog. Out there on the river an’ all. You know wha’ that means? Means today’s gonna be stinking bloody hell and a half, that’s what.” While we watch the barge drift closer, waiting for the inevitable collision and the sharp, satisfying sounds of disaster.

I let the flies drink from the back of my hand. They are not tsetse flies; they’re handsome iridescent creatures, quick, alert, top-of-the-line flies, as green and glowing as peacock feathers. The tsetse is drab and slow, a gray-brown unattractive fly that drinks from below the skin. It owns this part of Africa. That’s what I’ve learned.

Brawley tries to smoke himself into consciousness, studying the grain of the tabletop, listening suspiciously to beggars and fruit vendors below us. Their bellow and cry. After a while he shifts his squint to a European couple besieged at one end of the market—something about them that he doesn’t like. “You know they got French tourists in Machu Picchu? You know that? Amer’can teenagers all over Kathmandu and no place to get lost at. You hear what I’m sayin’? I seen whole Jap families up there at Abu Simbel crawling across the feet of Ramses the bloody Second, that’s what. Flittin’ and crawling about. It’s like Edgar Rice Burroughs is dead in this part of the world, how you like that for a report on your life?”

“Nobody knows what you’re talking about,” I say.

“Oh right. It’s you, the Reverend Pogue as I live an’ breave. For a minute I thought I was talkin’ to Tarzan out here in the eight o’clock my-asma. Luxuriatin’ upon this lovely teakwood portico all cantilevered over the edge of hell drinkin’ French beer and waiting for them poor bastards out there in the mist to drown.

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