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3 African Promise Chad: August–September 2006 The throbbing music emanating from Le Carnivore Restaurant behind our hotel grows tinnier with each tortured beat, the voices rising to ever-higher levels of screeching. Although Darren and I feel exhausted from the twenty-four-hour flight from Boston to here, N’Djamena, the corrupt capital of the ruined African country of Chad, the merciless pulse of distortion refuses us sleep. We have no choice but to immerse ourselves until we are inured to the shrill bombardment and find, if not sleep, at least an accommodation with the noise. We seat ourselves at a round table that tips beneath the weight of our elbows and sinks into the soft dirt floor. Ravenous cats dart about, devouring meat scraps. We squint in the pale candlelight at murals of pink camels advancing ponderously through purple sand dunes. Dwarfing the murals are the jagged lunging shadows of the singers. Players of trumpet, saxophone, banjo, and guitar sit in a ring beneath a plastic Valentine’s heart of colored lights and a blinking neon wreath. U.S. oil workers shout over their sauce-smeared plates on which a few French fries lie untouched. Their shadows bob, entwined with those of the singers in a crazed copulation. The singers themselves gyrate without expression, as if they have lost all connection to the stage. To me the singers seem to exist only as a manifestation of the dead weight overwhelming me that in time might pass for sleep. Suddenly trails of exploding static dim their voices to broken barks. 35 36 conflic t zones Women in bright orange and yellow dresses strut past the stage— unbidden and not the least distracted by this failure of the sound system— to troll the oil workers. One by one they escort the men into the street, where the night absorbs them just beyond a fringe of blinking lights. A young woman asks to join us and sits down without waiting for an answer. She orders a beer. Our dime. She introduces herself. Princess. A hairdresser and, she adds, a great soccer player. Perhaps she will leave for London and turn professional. What do we think? Of course. Makes perfect sense. “Do you want to go to a club?” “No.” She strokes little swirls through the sweat-dampened hairs on my arm. I shake my head no. She asks Darren to take her to our room for a back rub. “No.” Princess shrugs and finishes her beer. “Where will you go from here?” she asks. “Abeche.” “And then?” “The border.” “With Sudan.” “Yes.” “We think of the Sudan border as people trying to solve an ethnic problem. It’s a private problem.” She stands, peels the plastic tablecloth from her hot arms, then kisses me on both cheeks, turns, and dissolves into the crowd. Her thin scent hovers about my face until it too passes. I ask a server where the bathroom is and she points outside. Soldiers and security guards lounging on the backs of pickup trucks watch where I go. The cave darkness of the overcast August sky has not a star and deepens ever blacker with storm clouds. It is the last month of the rainy season. Disoriented in the gloom, I slosh through puddles. I recognize an oil worker from the restaurant and ask him for directions to the bathroom before I realize that he stands naked from the waist down, pants pooled at his ankles before a kneeling woman. She pauses in her ministrations, bloodshot eyes barely discernible in the depthless shadows, and pleasantly points the way toward the toilet. African Promise 37 “Thank you,” I say. I retreat toward a dimly lit hall, abandoning her to her transaction in the secluded corner of a broken cinder-block wall. “What do you do?” a man on our flight to N’Djamena had asked Darren. A freelance photographer, Darren had answered only “journalist.” “Oh. I do something counterproductive. I’m in oil.” Back in Le Carnivore, I watch an oil worker prance on stage, exposing his buttocks to us bleary-eyed pilgrims, the boards quaking beneath the heavy clomp of his boots. Darfur and Chad and the plight of thousands of people lie lost somewhere beneath the abundance of money dispensed for drinks and whores and whatever other tawdry commerce might come available this night. Darren and I wave off the servers, mutely mesmerized by the obscenity of that jiggling white ass blurring before us as, slumped in...

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