The Shaggiest Dog

When it was time for Cloris's Junior Year Abroad, she had so many choices it was hard to believe they were real. Paris! Florence! Sydney! Berlin! Each of those had its attractions, of course, beginning with its distance from Austin, where she was not only attending college but where she had had the distinctly mixed pleasure and pain of growing up. But somehow, she had reasoned, she would get to those places eventually on her own—so went the thinking of the comfortable, more or less (or soon to be) sophisticated daughter of the middle class—but when would she have a chance to live in Africa? The bonus was that her choice was certain to irritate her father, who seemed comfortable only around the eighteenth hole these days, and terrify her mother, who was not comfortable anywhere but did a bit better with a glass in her hand.

Her younger sister, when she heard, gave a yelp of horror that delighted her. Though both sisters were blonde, she knew herself to be merely serviceably attractive. Dellie's beauty queen looks were leading her down what Cloris knew, with guilt-tinged satisfaction, to be a path to destruction; boys swarmed around her, swooping and banking like swallows, most of them vapid and bent only on being seen with her by their frat buddies. Dellie was like a parody of a Tennessee Williams character, Blanche DuBois or Amanda Wingfield, at the age they went on and on about—the stuck story—their days as belles and heartbreakers.

She forged her mother's name on the parental approval forms and presented her decision to them as a fait accompli. She had her own ambitions: to be the opposite of everyone in her family, and to bring home enough intrepid photographs to make them into her senior portfolio and then into a book. So she underwent an endless series of shots in arm and buttock, bought a large packet of mosquito netting, made sure her parents' insurance covered her on other continents, and read Mary Kingsley's vivid accounts of her encounters with traders whose salty language did not faze her, with beautifully scarred men dressed in patchy straw and loincloths that flapped when the wind got heavy, with mountain lions unconstrained by—Cloris gulped at this—anything, certainly not respect for a Victorian lady whose black crepe de chine covered her ankles. She took these as challenges: if a cosseted mid-nineteenth-century Londoner could master the Congo alone, she could go to the university in Melambe, presumably safe from predators.

She wanted unfamiliarity, wanted the little rill of danger that flowed up and down her body when she told people where she was going. She planned to wield her camera, if need be, like a shield or even a weapon. She had heard that if you offered your subjects a copy of a photograph, that little handheld mystery, you could walk away intact from just about anything. As it happened, she had that backward—many people in the distant world were in fact frightened or infuriated by such a mystery—but that fact did not break upon her until the first time someone tried to grab her camera to throw it to the ground and crack it open like a cowrie shell.

Up close, not counting the astonishing chaos of downtown Melambe and the constant sense that the city was holding at bay a country too huge and strange to be encompassed—holding it back like a levee piled against inundation—some of the challenges turned out to be all too familiar. By the time Cloris arrived, her roommate, Tina, from a small college in New Jersey, had already taken up most of the closet space. The drains in the bathroom sinks were plugged with who-knew-what, and no one answered the girls' urgent pleas for a plumber. The fare in the cafeteria veered from the native—casaba, plantain, boiled ground nuts—to the worst her own country had taught the rest of the world to love: greasy hamburgers the color and consistency (she couldn't help thinking) of snot...