Open City_ A Novel Part 1

Open city: a novel.

by by Teju Cole.

PART 1.

Death is a perfection of the eye

ONE.

And so when I began to go on evening walks last fall, I found Morningside Heights an easy place from which to set out into the city. The path that drops down from the Cathedral of St. John the Divine and crosses Morningside Park is only fifteen minutes from Central Park. In the other direction, going west, it is some ten minutes to Sakura Park, and walking northward from there brings you toward Harlem, along the Hudson, though traffic makes the river on the other side of the trees inaudible. These walks, a counterpoint to my busy days at the hospital, steadily lengthened, taking me farther and farther afield each time, so that I often found myself at quite a distance from home late at night, and was compelled to return home by subway. In this way, at the beginning of the final year of my psychiatry fellows.h.i.+p, New York City worked itself into my life at walking pace.

Not long before this aimless wandering began, I had fallen into the habit of watching bird migrations from my apartment, and I wonder now if the two are connected. On the days when I was home early enough from the hospital, I used to look out the window like someone taking auspices, hoping to see the miracle of natural immigration. Each time I caught sight of geese swooping in formation across the sky, I wondered how our life below might look from their perspective, and imagined that, were they ever to indulge in such speculation, the high-rises might seem to them like firs ma.s.sed in a grove. Often, as I searched the sky, all I saw was rain, or the faint contrail of an airplane bisecting the window, and I doubted in some part of myself whether these birds, with their dark wings and throats, their pale bodies and tireless little hearts, really did exist. So amazed was I by them that I couldn't trust my memory when they weren't there.

Pigeons flew by from time to time, as did sparrows, wrens, orioles, tanagers, and swifts, though it was almost impossible to identify the birds from the tiny, solitary, and mostly colorless specks I saw fizzing across the sky. While I waited for the rare squadrons of geese, I would sometimes listen to the radio. I generally avoided American stations, which had too many commercials for my taste-Beethoven followed by ski jackets, Wagner after artisa.n.a.l cheese-instead tuning to Internet stations from Canada, Germany, or the Netherlands. And though I often couldn't understand the announcers, my comprehension of their languages being poor, the programming always met my evening mood with great exactness. Much of the music was familiar, as I had by this point been an avid listener to cla.s.sical radio for more than fourteen years, but some of it was new. There were also rare moments of astonishment, like the first time I heard, on a station broadcasting from Hamburg, a bewitching piece for orchestra and alto solo by Shchedrin (or perhaps it was Ysae) which, to this day, I have been unable to identify.

I liked the murmur of the announcers, the sounds of those voices speaking calmly from thousands of miles away. I turned the computer's speakers low and looked outside, nestled in the comfort provided by those voices, and it wasn't at all difficult to draw the comparison between myself, in my spa.r.s.e apartment, and the radio host in his or her booth, during what must have been the middle of the night somewhere in Europe. Those disembodied voices remain connected in my mind, even now, with the apparition of migrating geese. Not that I actually saw the migrations more than three or four times in all: most days all I saw was the colors of the sky at dusk, its powder blues, dirty blushes, and russets, all of which gradually gave way to deep shadow. When it became dark, I would pick up a book and read by the light of an old desk lamp I had rescued from one of the dumpsters at the university; its bulb was hooded by a gla.s.s bell that cast a greenish light over my hands, the book on my lap, the worn upholstery of the sofa. Sometimes, I even spoke the words in the book out loud to myself, and doing so I noticed the odd way my voice mingled with the murmur of the French, German, or Dutch radio announcers, or with the thin texture of the violin strings of the orchestras, all of this intensified by the fact that whatever it was I was reading had likely been translated out of one of the European languages. That fall, I flitted from book to book: Barthes's Camera Lucida Camera Lucida, Peter Altenberg's Telegrams of the Soul Telegrams of the Soul, Tahar Ben Jelloun's The Last Friend The Last Friend, among others.

In that sonic fugue, I recalled St. Augustine, and his astonishment at St. Ambrose, who was reputed to have found a way to read without sounding out the words. It does seem an odd thing-it strikes me now as it did then-that we can comprehend words without voicing them. For Augustine, the weight and inner life of sentences were best experienced out loud, but much has changed in our idea of reading since then. We have for too long been taught that the sight of a man speaking to himself is a sign of eccentricity or madness; we are no longer at all habituated to our own voices, except in conversation or from within the safety of a shouting crowd. But a book suggests conversation: one person is speaking to another, and audible sound is, or should be, natural to that exchange. So I read aloud with myself as my audience, and gave voice to another's words.

In any case, these unusual evening hours pa.s.sed easily, and I often fell asleep right there on the sofa, dragging myself to bed only much later, usually at some point in the middle of the night. Then, after what always seemed mere minutes of sleep, I was jarred awake by the beeping of the alarm clock on my cellphone, which was set to a bizarre marimba-like arrangement of "O Tannenbaum." In these first few moments of consciousness, in the sudden glare of morning light, my mind raced around itself, remembering fragments of dreams or pieces of the book I had been reading before I fell asleep. It was to break the monotony of those evenings that, two or three days each week after work, and on at least one of the weekend days, I went out walking.

At first, I encountered the streets as an incessant loudness, a shock after the day's focus and relative tranquillity, as though someone had shattered the calm of a silent private chapel with the blare of a TV set. I wove my way through crowds of shoppers and workers, through road constructions and the horns of taxicabs. Walking through busy parts of town meant I laid eyes on more people, hundreds more, thousands even, than I was accustomed to seeing in the course of a day, but the impress of these countless faces did nothing to a.s.suage my feelings of isolation; if anything, it intensified them. I became more tired, too, after the walks began, an exhaustion unlike any I had known since the first months of interns.h.i.+p, three years earlier. One night, I simply went on and on, walking all the way down to Houston Street, a distance of some seven miles, and found myself in a state of disorienting fatigue, laboring to remain on my feet. That night I took the subway home, and instead of falling asleep immediately, I lay in bed, too tired to release myself from wakefulness, and I rehea.r.s.ed in the dark the numerous incidents and sights I had encountered while roaming, sorting each encounter like a child playing with wooden blocks, trying to figure out which belonged where, which responded to which. Each neighborhood of the city appeared to be made of a different substance, each seemed to have a different air pressure, a different psychic weight: the bright lights and shuttered shops, the housing projects and luxury hotels, the fire escapes and city parks. My futile task of sorting went on until the forms began to morph into each other and a.s.sume abstract shapes unrelated to the real city, and only then did my hectic mind finally show some pity and still itself, only then did dreamless sleep arrive.

The walks met a need: they were a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and once I discovered them as therapy, they became the normal thing, and I forgot what life had been like before I started walking. Work was a regimen of perfection and competence, and it neither allowed improvisation nor tolerated mistakes. As interesting as my research project was-I was conducting a clinical study of affective disorders in the elderly-the level of detail it demanded was of an intricacy that exceeded anything else I had done thus far. The streets served as a welcome opposite to all that. Every decision-where to turn left, how long to remain lost in thought in front of an abandoned building, whether to watch the sun set over New Jersey, or to lope in the shadows on the East Side looking across to Queens-was inconsequential, and was for that reason a reminder of freedom. I covered the city blocks as though measuring them with my stride, and the subway stations served as recurring motives in my aimless progress. The sight of large ma.s.ses of people hurrying down into underground chambers was perpetually strange to me, and I felt that all of the human race were rus.h.i.+ng, pushed by a counterinstinctive death drive, into movable catacombs. Above-ground I was with thousands of others in their solitude, but in the subway, standing close to strangers, jostling them and being jostled by them for s.p.a.ce and breathing room, all of us reenacting unacknowledged traumas, the solitude intensified.

ONE S SUNDAY MORNING IN N NOVEMBER, AFTER A TREK THROUGH the relatively quiet streets on the Upper West Side, I arrived at the large, sun-brightened plaza at Columbus Circle. The area had changed recently. It had become a more commercial and tourist destination thanks to the pair of buildings erected for the Time Warner corporation on the site. The buildings, constructed at great speed, had just opened, and were filled with shops selling tailored s.h.i.+rts, designer suits, jewelry, appliances for the gourmet cook, handmade leather accessories, and imported decorative items. On the upper floors were some of the costliest restaurants in the city, advertising truffles, caviar, Kobe beef, and pricey "tasting menus." Above the restaurants were apartments that included the most expensive residence in the city. Curiosity had brought me into the shops on the ground level once or twice before, but the cost of the items, and what I perceived as the generally sn.o.bbish atmosphere, had kept me from returning until that Sunday morning. the relatively quiet streets on the Upper West Side, I arrived at the large, sun-brightened plaza at Columbus Circle. The area had changed recently. It had become a more commercial and tourist destination thanks to the pair of buildings erected for the Time Warner corporation on the site. The buildings, constructed at great speed, had just opened, and were filled with shops selling tailored s.h.i.+rts, designer suits, jewelry, appliances for the gourmet cook, handmade leather accessories, and imported decorative items. On the upper floors were some of the costliest restaurants in the city, advertising truffles, caviar, Kobe beef, and pricey "tasting menus." Above the restaurants were apartments that included the most expensive residence in the city. Curiosity had brought me into the shops on the ground level once or twice before, but the cost of the items, and what I perceived as the generally sn.o.bbish atmosphere, had kept me from returning until that Sunday morning.

It was the day of the New York Marathon. I hadn't known. I was taken aback to see the round plaza in front of the gla.s.s towers filled with people, a ma.s.sive, expectant throng setting itself into place close to the marathon's finish line. The crowd lined the street leading away from the plaza toward the east. Nearer the west there was a bandstand, on which two men with guitars were tuning up, calling and responding to the silvery notes on each other's amplified instruments. Banners, signs, posters, flags, and streamers of all kinds flapped in the wind, and mounted police on blindered horses regulated the crowd with cordons, whistles, and hand movements. The cops were in dark blue and wore sunshades. The crowd was brightly attired, and looking at all that green, red, yellow, and white synthetic material in the sun hurt the eyes. To escape the din, which seemed to be mounting, I decided to go into the shopping center. In addition to the Armani and Hugo Boss shops, there was a bookshop on the second floor. In there, I thought, I might catch some quiet and drink a cup of coffee before heading back home. But the entrance was full of the crowd overflow from the street, and cordons made it impossible to get into the towers.

I changed my mind, and decided instead to visit an old teacher of mine who lived in the vicinity, in an apartment less than ten minutes' walk away on Central Park South. Professor Saito was, at eighty-nine, the oldest person I knew. He had taken me under his wing when I was a junior at Maxwell. By that time he was already emeritus, though he continued to come to campus every day. He must have seen something in me that made him think I was someone on whom his rarefied subject (early English literature) would not be wasted. I was a disappointment in this regard, but he was kindhearted and, even after I failed to get a decent grade in his English Literature before Shakespeare seminar, invited me to meet with him several times in his office. He had, in those days, recently installed an intrusively loud coffee machine, so we drank coffee, and talked: about interpretations of Beowulf Beowulf, and then later on about the cla.s.sics, the endless labor of scholars.h.i.+p, the various consolations of academia, and of his studies just before the Second World War. This last subject was so total in its distance from my experience that it was perhaps of most interest to me. The war had broken out just as he was finis.h.i.+ng his D.Phil, and he was forced to leave England and return to his family in the Pacific Northwest. With them, shortly afterward, he was taken to internment in the Minidoka Camp in Idaho.

In these conversations, as I now recall them, he did almost all the talking. I learned the art of listening from him, and the ability to trace out a story from what was omitted. Rarely did Professor Saito tell me anything about his family, but he did tell me about his life as a scholar, and about how he had responded to important issues of his day. He'd done an annotated translation of Piers Plowman Piers Plowman in the 1970s, which had turned out to be his most notable academic success. When he mentioned it, he did so with a curious mixture of pride and disappointment. He alluded to another big project (he didn't say on what) that had never been completed. He spoke, too, about departmental politics. I remember one afternoon that was taken up with his recollection of a onetime colleague whose name meant nothing to me when he said it and which I don't remember now. This woman had become famous for her activism during the civil rights era and had, for a moment, been such a campus celebrity that her literature cla.s.ses overflowed. He described her as an intelligent, sensitive individual but someone with whom he could never agree. He admired and disliked her. It's a puzzle, I remember him saying, she was a good scholar, and she was on the right side of the struggles of the time, but I simply couldn't stand her in person. She was abrasive and egotistical, heaven rest her soul. You can't say a word against her around here, though. She's still considered a saint. in the 1970s, which had turned out to be his most notable academic success. When he mentioned it, he did so with a curious mixture of pride and disappointment. He alluded to another big project (he didn't say on what) that had never been completed. He spoke, too, about departmental politics. I remember one afternoon that was taken up with his recollection of a onetime colleague whose name meant nothing to me when he said it and which I don't remember now. This woman had become famous for her activism during the civil rights era and had, for a moment, been such a campus celebrity that her literature cla.s.ses overflowed. He described her as an intelligent, sensitive individual but someone with whom he could never agree. He admired and disliked her. It's a puzzle, I remember him saying, she was a good scholar, and she was on the right side of the struggles of the time, but I simply couldn't stand her in person. She was abrasive and egotistical, heaven rest her soul. You can't say a word against her around here, though. She's still considered a saint.

After we became friends, I made it a point to see Professor Saito two or three times each semester, and those meetings became cherished highlights of my last two years at Maxwell. I came to view him as a grandfatherly figure entirely unlike either of my own grandfathers (only one of whom I'd known). I felt I had more in common with him than with the people who happened to be related to me. After graduation, when I left, first for my research stint at Cold Spring Harbor, and then to medical school in Madison, we lost touch with each other. We exchanged one or two letters, but it was hard to have our conversations in that medium, since news and updates were not the real substance of our interaction. But after I returned to the city for interns.h.i.+p, I saw him several times. The first, entirely by accident-though it happened on a day when I had been thinking about him-was just outside a grocery store not far from Central Park South, where he had gone out walking with the aid of an a.s.sistant. Later on, I showed up unannounced at his apartment, as he had invited me to do, and found that he still maintained the same open-door policy he had back when he had his office at the college. The coffee machine from that office now sat disused in a corner of the room. Professor Saito told me he had prostate cancer. It wasn't entirely debilitating, but he had stopped going to campus, and had begun to hold court at home. His social interactions had been curtailed to a degree that must have pained him; the number of guests he welcomed had declined steadily, until most of his visitors were either nurses or home health aides.

I greeted the doorman in the dark, low-ceilinged foyer and took the elevator to the third floor. When I entered the apartment, Professor Saito called out. He was seated at the far end of the room, near large windows, and he beckoned me over to the chair in front of him. His eyes were weak, but his hearing had remained as sharp as when I had first met him, back when he was a mere seventy-seven. Now, bunched up in a soft, large chair, swaddled in blankets, he looked like someone who had gone deep into the second infancy. But that wasn't altogether the case: his mind, like his hearing, had remained acute and, as he smiled, the wrinkles spread all over his face, creasing the paper-thin skin on his forehead. In that room, into which always seemed to flow a gentle and cool northern light, he was surrounded by art from a lifetime of collecting. A half dozen Polynesian masks, arranged just above his head, formed a large dark halo. In the corner stood a life-size Papuan ancestor figure with individually carved wooden teeth and a gra.s.s skirt that barely concealed an erect p.e.n.i.s. Referring to this figure, Professor Saito had once said: I adore imaginary monsters, but I am terrified of real ones.

From the windows that ran the length of that side of the room, the shadowed street was visible. Beyond it was the park, which was demarcated by an old stone wall. I heard a roar from the street just as I was sitting down; I quickly got up again and saw a man running alone through the alley that had been created by the crowd. He wore a golden s.h.i.+rt, with black gloves that somehow reached up to his elbows, like a lady's at a formal dinner, and he had begun to sprint with renewed energy, buoyed by the cheers. He raced, his energies revived, toward the bandstand, the fervent crowd, the finish line, and the sun.

Come, sit, sit. Professor Saito coughed as he motioned toward the chair. Tell me how you are doing; you see, I've been sick; it was bad last week, but it's much better now. At my age, one falls sick a lot. Tell me, how are you, how are you? The noise outside rose again, and ebbed. I saw the runners-up dash through, two black men. Kenyans, I guessed. It's like this every year, for almost fifteen years now, Professor Saito said. If I have to go out on the day of the marathon, I use the building's rear entrance. But I don't go out much anymore, not with that attached to me, pinned to me like a tail on a dog. As I settled into the chair, he pointed to the transparent bag hanging on a little metal pole. The bag was half full of urine, and a plastic tube led to it from somewhere under the nest of blankets. Someone brought me persimmons yesterday, lovely, firm persimmons. Would you like some? Really, you should try them. Mary! The nurse-aide, a tall, strongly built, middle-aged woman from St. Lucia whom I had met on previous visits, appeared from the corridor. Mary, would you please bring our guest some persimmons? After she disappeared into the kitchen, he said, I find chewing a bit difficult these days, Julius, so something as rich and available as a persimmon is perfect for me. But enough about this, how are you? How is work?

My presence energized him. I told him a little about my walks, and wanted to tell him more but didn't have quite the right purchase on what it was I was trying to say about the solitary territory my mind had been crisscrossing. So I told him about one of my recent cases. I had had to consult with a family, conservative Christians, Pentecostals, who had been referred by one of the pediatricians at the hospital. Their thirteen-year-old son, their only child, was about to undergo a leukemia treatment that posed a serious later risk of infertility. The pediatrician's advice to them was that they have some of the boy's s.e.m.e.n frozen and stored, so that when he became a man and got married, he could artificially inseminate his wife and have children of his own. The parents were open to the idea of sperm storage, and had nothing against artificial insemination, but were resolutely opposed, for religious reasons, to the idea of letting their son m.a.s.t.u.r.b.a.t.e. There was no straightforward surgical solution to the conundrum. The family was in crisis over it. They consulted with me, and after a few sessions, and after much prayer on their part, they decided to risk not having grandchildren. They simply could not let their boy commit what they called the sin of onanism.

Professor Saito shook his head, and I could see that he had enjoyed the story, that its strange and unhappy contours had amused him (and troubled him) in the same way they had me. People choose, he said, people choose, and they choose on behalf of others. And what about outside your work, what are you reading? Mostly medical journals, I said, and then many other interesting things that I begin and am somehow unable to finish. No sooner do I buy a new book than it reproaches me for leaving it unread. I don't read much either, he said, with the state my eyes are in; but I have enough tucked away up here. He motioned to his head. In fact, I'm full. We laughed, and just then Mary brought in the persimmons, in a porcelain saucer. I ate half of one; it was a little oversweet. I ate the other half, and thanked him.

During the war, he said, I committed many poems to memory. I suppose that expectation is gone from the schools now. I saw the change during the time I was at Maxwell, how the later generations that came in had little of this preparation. For them, memorization was a pleasant diversion that came with a specific course; for their forebears of thirty or forty years before, there was a strong connection to the life of poems that came with having memorized several. College freshmen had a corpus of works with which they already had a relations.h.i.+p, even before they stepped into a college-level English literature cla.s.s. For me, in the forties, memorization was a helpful skill, and I called on it because I couldn't be sure I would see my books again, and anyway, there wasn't much to do at the camp. We were all confused about what was happening; we were American, had always thought ourselves so, and not j.a.panese. There was all this time of confused waiting, harder for the parents, I think, than for the children, and in that waiting time, I stuffed bits of the Prelude Prelude, and Shakespeare's sonnets, and large tracts of Yeats into my head. Now I don't remember the exact words of any of them anymore, it's been too long, but I need only the environment created by the poems. Just one or two lines, like a little hook-he demonstrated with his hand-just one or two, and that's enough to snag everything, what the poem says, what it means. Everything follows the hook. In summer season when soft was the sun, I wore a shroud as I a shepherd were In summer season when soft was the sun, I wore a shroud as I a shepherd were. Do you recognize it? I don't suppose anyone memorizes anything anymore. It was part of our discipline, just as a good violinist has to have his Bach part.i.tas or Beethoven sonatas by heart. My tutor at Peterhouse was Chadwick, an Aberdonian. He was a great scholar; he'd been taught by Skeat himself. Haven't I ever told you about Chadwick? A grouch through and through, but it was he who first taught me the value of memory, and how to think of it as mental music, a setting to iambs and trochees.

His reverie took him out of the everyday, away from the blankets and the bag of urine. It was the late thirties again, and he was back in Cambridge, breathing the damp air of the fens, enjoying the tranquillity of his youthful scholars.h.i.+p. At times, it seemed as though he was talking more to himself, but he suddenly asked a direct question and, interrupted from my own little train of thought, I scrambled for an answer. We reprised the old relations.h.i.+p, student and teacher, and he continued steadily, regardless of whether my responses were accurate or not, whether I took Chaucer for Langland or Langland for Chaucer. An hour went by quickly, and he asked if we could pause there for the day. I promised to return soon.

When I came out to Central Park South, the wind had become colder, the air brighter, and the cheer from the crowd steady and loud. A great stream of finishers came coasting down the homestretch. As Fifty-ninth Street was cordoned off, I walked down to Fifty-seventh and came back up again to join Broadway. The subway was too congested at Columbus Circle, and so I walked toward Lincoln Center, to catch the train at its next uptown stop. At Sixty-second Street, I fell in with a lithe man with graying sideburns who carried a plastic bag with a tag on it and was visibly exhausted, limping on slightly bowed legs. He wore shorts and black tights, and a blue, long-sleeved fleece jacket. From his features, I guessed he was Mexican or Central American. We walked in silence for a while, not intentionally walking together but finding ourselves moving at the same pace and in the same direction. Eventually, I asked him whether he had just finished the race and, when he nodded and smiled, congratulated him. But, I began to think, after twenty-six miles and 385 yards, he had simply collected his bag, and was walking home. There were no friends or family present to celebrate his achievement. I pitied him, then. Speaking again, deflecting these private thoughts, I asked if it had been a good race. Yes, he said, a good race, the conditions were good for running, not too hot. He had a pleasant but worn face, and must have been about forty-five or fifty. We walked a little farther, for two or three blocks, punctuating our silences with small talk about the weather and the crowds.

At the street crossing in front of the opera houses, I bid him goodbye and began myself to walk faster. I imagined his limping form receding as I pressed ahead, his wiry frame bearing a victory apparent to none but himself. I had bad lungs as a child and have never been a runner, but I instinctively understand that burst of energy a marathoner can usually find at the twenty-fifth mile, so close to the finish. More mysterious is what keeps such people going through the nineteenth, the twentieth, the twenty-first mile. By that point the buildup of ketones would have made the legs rigid, and acidosis would be threatening to quell the will and shut the body down. The first man who ever ran a marathon had died instantly, and small wonder: it is an act of extreme human endurance, still remarkable no matter how many people now do it. And so, turning around to look at my erstwhile companion, and thinking of Phidippides' collapse, I saw the situation more clearly. It was I, no less solitary than he but having made the lesser use of the morning, who was to be pitied.

I soon arrived at the big Tower Records store on the corner of Sixty-sixth Street, and was surprised to see the signs outside which announced that the store as well as the company behind it were going out of business. I had been in the store many times before, had probably spent hundreds of dollars on music there, and it seemed right, if only for old times' sake, to revisit it, before the doors closed for good. I went in, intrigued also by the promise that prices had been slashed on all items, although I didn't particularly feel like buying anything. The escalator took me to the second floor, where the cla.s.sical section, busier than usual, seemed to have been commandeered in its entirety by old and middle-aged men in drab coats. The men were going through the CD bins with something of the patience of grazing animals, and some of them had red shopping baskets into which they dropped their selections, while others clutched the s.h.i.+ny plastic packages to their chests. The store's stereo was playing Purcell, a rousing anthem I recognized right away as one of the birthday odes for Queen Mary. I usually disliked whatever was being played on a music store's speakers. It spoiled the pleasure of thinking about other music. Record shops, I felt, should be silent s.p.a.ces; there, more than anywhere else, the mind needed to be clear. In this case, though, because I recognized the piece, and because it was something I loved, I didn't mind.

The next disc they played, though utterly unlike the first, was another I immediately recognized: the opening movement of Mahler's late symphony Das Lied von der Erde Das Lied von der Erde. I returned to my browsing, moving from bin to bin, from reissues of Shostakovich symphonies played by long-forgotten Soviet regional orchestras to Chopin recitals by fresh-faced Van Cliburn Compet.i.tion runners-up, feeling that the price reductions were insufficiently sharp, losing any real interest in shopping, and finally beginning to acclimatize to the music playing overhead and to enter the strange hues of its world. It happened subliminally, but before long, I was rapt and might have, for all the world, been swaddled in a private darkness. In this trance, I continued to move from one row of compact discs to another, thumbing through plastic cases, magazines, and printed scores, and listening as one movement of the Viennese chinoiserie succeeded another. On hearing Christa Ludwig's voice, in the second movement, a song about the loneliness of autumn, I recognized the recording as the famous one conducted by Otto Klemperer in 1964. With that awareness came another: that all I had to do was bide my time, and wait for the emotional core of the work, which Mahler had put in the final movement of the symphony. I sat on one of the hard benches near the listening stations, and sank into reverie, and followed Mahler through drunkenness, longing, bombast, youth (with its fading), and beauty (with its fading). Then came the final movement, "Der Abschied," "Der Abschied," the Farewell, and Mahler, where he would ordinarily indicate the tempo, had marked it the Farewell, and Mahler, where he would ordinarily indicate the tempo, had marked it schwer schwer, difficult.

The birdsong and beauty, the complaints and high-jinks of the preceding movements, had all been supplanted by a different mood, a stronger, surer mood. It was as though the lights had, without warning, come blazing into my eyes. It simply wasn't possible to enter the music fully, not in that public place. I placed the small pile of discs in my hand onto the nearest table and left. I made it into the uptown train just as the doors were closing. By this time, the crowds from the marathon were beginning to thin out. I sat down and leaned back. The five-note figure from "Der Abschied" "Der Abschied" continued on from where I escaped, playing through with such presence that it was as though I were in the store listening to it. I sensed the woodsiness of the clarinets, the resin of the violins and violas, the vibrations of the timpani, and the intelligence that held them all together and drew them endlessly along the musical line. My memory was overwhelmed. The song followed me home. continued on from where I escaped, playing through with such presence that it was as though I were in the store listening to it. I sensed the woodsiness of the clarinets, the resin of the violins and violas, the vibrations of the timpani, and the intelligence that held them all together and drew them endlessly along the musical line. My memory was overwhelmed. The song followed me home.

Mahler's music fell over my activities for the entirety of the following day. There was some new intensity in even the most ordinary things all around the hospital: the gleam on the gla.s.s doors at the entrance of the Milstein Building, the examination tables and gurneys down on the ground floor, the stacks of patients' files in the psychiatry department, the light from the windows in the cafeteria, the sunken heads of uptown buildings from that height, as if the precision of the orchestral texture had been transferred to the world of visible things, and every detail had somehow become significant. One of my patients had sat facing me, with his legs crossed, and his raised right foot, which twitched in its polished black shoe, also somehow seemed a part of that intricate musical world.

The sun was setting as I left Columbia Presbyterian, giving the sky the look of tin. I took the subway down to 125th Street and, on my walk up to my neighborhood, feeling much less frayed than I usually did on Monday nights, I took a detour and walked for a while in Harlem. I saw the brisk trade of sidewalk salesmen: the Senegalese cloth merchants, the young men selling bootleg DVDs, the Nation of Islam stalls. There were self-published books, das.h.i.+kis, posters on black liberation, bundles of incense, vials of perfume and essential oils, djembe drums, and little tourist tchotchkes from Africa. One table displayed enlarged photographs of early-twentieth-century lynchings of African-Americans. Around the corner of St. Nicholas Avenue, the drivers of the black livery cabs gathered, smoking cigarettes and talking, awaiting the fares they could pick up off the clock. Young men in hooded sweats.h.i.+rts, the denizens of an informal economy, pa.s.sed messages and small nylon-wrapped packages to each other, enacting a ch.o.r.eography opaque to all but themselves. An old man with an ashen face and bulbous yellow eyes, pa.s.sing by, raised his head to greet me, and I (thinking for a moment that he was someone I surely knew, or once knew, or had seen before, and quickly abandoning each idea in turn; and then fearing that the speed of these mental disa.s.sociations might knock me off my stride) returned his silent greeting. I turned around to see his black cowl melt into an unlit doorway. In the Harlem night, there were no whites.

At the grocery store, I bought bread, eggs, and beer, and next door, at the Jamaican place, I bought goat curry, yellow plantains, and rice and peas to take home. On the other side of the grocery store was a Blockbuster; though I had never rented anything from there, I was startled to see a sign announcing it, too, was going out of business. If Blockbuster couldn't make it in an area full of students and families, it meant that the business model had been fatally damaged, that the desperate efforts they had made recently, and which I now recalled, of lowering rental prices, launching an advertising blitz, and abolis.h.i.+ng late fines, had all come too late. I thought of Tower Records-a connection I couldn't help making, given that both companies had for a long time dominated their respective industries. It wasn't that I felt sorry for these faceless national corporations; far from it. They had made their profits and their names by destroying smaller, earlier local businesses. But I was touched not only at the pa.s.sage of these fixtures in my mental landscape, but also at the swiftness and dispa.s.sion with which the market swallowed even the most resilient enterprises. Businesses that had seemed unshakable a few years previously had disappeared in the span, seemingly, of a few weeks. Whatever role they played pa.s.sed on to other hands, hands that would feel briefly invincible and would, in their turn, be defeated by unforeseen changes. These survivors would also come to be forgotten.

As I approached the apartment building with my bags, I saw someone I knew: the man who lived in the apartment right next to mine. He was coming into the building at the same time, and he held the door open for me. I did not know him well, in fact hardly knew him at all, and I had to think for a moment before I remembered his name. He was in his early fifties, and had moved in the previous year. The name came to me: Seth.

I had spoken briefly with Seth and his wife, Carla, when they first moved in, but hardly at all since. He was a retired social worker, following a lifelong dream to return to school for a second degree, in Romance languages. I saw him only about once a month, just outside the building or near the mailboxes. Carla, whom I had met only twice after they moved in, was also retired; she had been a school princ.i.p.al in Brooklyn, and they still kept a home there. Once, when my girlfriend, Nadege, and I had a day off together, Seth had knocked on my door to ask if I was playing guitar. When I said that I didn't play, he explained that he was often home in the afternoons, and that the noise from my speakers (it must be your speakers, he said, though it sounds like live music) sometimes disturbed him. But he added, with genuine warmth in his voice, that they were always away on weekends, and that we were free to be loud from Friday afternoons onward if we so wished. I felt bad about it, and apologized. After that, I had made a conscious effort not to trouble them, and the issue hadn't come up again.

Seth held the door open. He, too, had been shopping, and carried plastic bags. Getting cold, he said. His nose and earlobes were pink, and his eyes watered. Yes, yes, it is, in fact I thought about taking a cab from 125th. He nodded, and we stood silently for a while. When the elevator arrived, we got in. We got off on the seventh floor, and as we walked down the hallway, our nylon bags rustling, I asked him if they still got away on the weekends. Oh yes, every weekend, but it's just me now, Julius. Carla died in June, he said. She had a heart attack.

I was stunned into momentary confusion, as if I had just been told something that wasn't possible. I'm so sorry, I said. He tilted his head, and we kept walking down the hallway. I asked if he had been able to take some time off from school. No, he said, I've just continued right through. I placed my hand on his shoulder, for a moment, and said again how sorry I was, and he thanked me. He seemed vaguely embarra.s.sed, having to deal with my belated shock at what, for him, was far more personal but also much older news. Our keys clinked, and he entered apartment twenty-one, and I twenty-two. I closed the door behind me, and heard his close, too. I didn't switch on the light. A woman had died in the room next to mine, she had died on the other side of the wall I was leaning against, and I had known nothing of it. I had known nothing in the weeks when her husband mourned, nothing when I had nodded to him in greeting with headphones in my ears, or when I had folded clothes in the laundry room while he used the washer. I hadn't known him well enough to routinely ask how Carla was, and I had not noticed not seeing her around. That was the worst of it. I had noticed neither her absence nor the change-there must have been a change-in his spirit. It was not possible, even then, to go knock on his door and embrace him, or to speak with him at length. It would have been false intimacy.

I finally switched the light on and moved into my apartment. I imagined Seth tussling with his French and Spanish homework, conjugating verbs, laboring on translations, memorizing vocabulary lists, doing composition exercises. As I put away my groceries, I tried to remember when, exactly, it was that he had knocked on my door to ask if I played guitar. Eventually I satisfied myself that it was before, and not after, his wife's death. I felt a certain sense of relief at this, which was taken over almost immediately by shame. But even that feeling subsided; much too quickly, now that I think of it.

TWO.

I was on the phone with Nadege, a few nights later, when I heard noises from far off, noises that were hardly audible to begin with, but that within a few seconds drew closer and became louder. A single voice, a woman's voice, shouted, and a crowd responded. After this had happened a few times, I could identify the crowd as mostly or entirely female. Several whistles pierced the air, but it was not a festive sound; that much I could tell even before I opened my window and looked out. It was something more serious. There were drums, and as the crowd approached, the drums took on an increasingly martial tone (my mind went to a hunting party flus.h.i.+ng rabbits out of their holes). It was late, well past ten. Several of my neighbors across the street had leaned out of their windows; we all craned our necks toward Amsterdam Avenue. The voice leading the crowd became even louder, but the words did not resolve into meaning, and most of the crowd, marching toward us, remained obscured by darkness. Then, as the crowd, all of them young women, pa.s.sed under the streetlamps, their chanting became clearer. was on the phone with Nadege, a few nights later, when I heard noises from far off, noises that were hardly audible to begin with, but that within a few seconds drew closer and became louder. A single voice, a woman's voice, shouted, and a crowd responded. After this had happened a few times, I could identify the crowd as mostly or entirely female. Several whistles pierced the air, but it was not a festive sound; that much I could tell even before I opened my window and looked out. It was something more serious. There were drums, and as the crowd approached, the drums took on an increasingly martial tone (my mind went to a hunting party flus.h.i.+ng rabbits out of their holes). It was late, well past ten. Several of my neighbors across the street had leaned out of their windows; we all craned our necks toward Amsterdam Avenue. The voice leading the crowd became even louder, but the words did not resolve into meaning, and most of the crowd, marching toward us, remained obscured by darkness. Then, as the crowd, all of them young women, pa.s.sed under the streetlamps, their chanting became clearer. We have the power, we have the might We have the power, we have the might, the solitary voice called. The answer came: The streets are ours, take back the night The streets are ours, take back the night.

The crowd, several dozen strong but tightly packed, pa.s.sed under my window. From several floors above, I watched them, as their faces came in and out of the spotlights of the streetlamps. Women's bodies, women's lives, we will not be terrorized Women's bodies, women's lives, we will not be terrorized. I shut the window. It was only a little bit cooler outside than it was in the apartment. Earlier that evening, I had gone walking in Riverside Park, from 116th Street down to the Nineties and back. It wasn't cold yet, and the entire time I was out in the park-as I watched the dogs and their owners, all of whom seemed to have converged on the same paths as I had, an endless stream of pit bulls, Jack Russells, Alsatians, Weimaraners, mutts-I wondered why it was still so warm in the middle of November.

Coming up the hill to my place, just as I crossed the corner of 121st, I saw my friend. He lived only a few blocks away, and had been out shopping for groceries. I hailed him, and we spoke briefly. He was a young professor in the Earth Sciences Department, four years into the uncertain seven-year journey to tenure. His interests were broader than his professional specialty suggested, and this was part of the basis for our friends.h.i.+p: he had strong opinions about books and films, opinions that often went against mine, and he had lived for two years in Paris, where he'd acquired a taste for fas.h.i.+onable philosophers like Badiou and Serres. In addition, he was an avid chess player, and an affectionate father to a nine-year-old girl who mostly lived with her mother on Staten Island. We both regretted that the demands of work kept us from spending as much time together as we would have liked.

My friend was especially pa.s.sionate about jazz. Most of the names and styles that he so delighted in meant little to me (there are apparently any number of great jazz musicians from the sixties and seventies with the last name Jones). But I could sense, even from my ignorant distance, the sophistication of his ear. He often said that he would sit down at a piano someday and show me how jazz worked, and that when I finally understood blue notes and swung notes, the heavens would part and my life would be transformed. I more than half-believed him, and would even occasionally worry about why I seemed not to have a strong emotional connection with this most American of musical styles. Too often, it merely sounded sweet to me, cloying even, and I especially disliked it as background music. As my friend and I talked, a homeless man sang just across the street from us, and we caught his voice in the s.n.a.t.c.hes as the wind came over in gusts.

These pleasant thoughts were interrupted by a presentiment of the conversation I would have that evening with Nadege. And how odd it was, hours later, to hear her strained voice, in counterpoint with the protesters down below. She had moved to San Francisco a few weeks before, and we had said we would make an effort to work things out at the distance, but we'd said the words without meaning them.

I tried to imagine her in that crowd, but no image came to mind, nor could I picture her face as it would be if she'd been in the room with me. The voices of the protesters soon faded, as the marchers drifted off with their flags and whistles toward Morningside Park. The heart-altering thump of their martial drum went on, and then that faded too, and I could hear only her diminished voice at the other end of the line. It was painful, this breaking apart, but it surprised neither of us.

THE FOLLOWING EVENING, ON THE 1 TRAIN, I SAW A CRIPPLE SAW A CRIPPLE dragging his broken leg behind him as he moved from car to car. He adjusted his voice to a reedier tone to make his body seem more frail. I disliked his act and refused to give him money. A few minutes later, when I got on the platform, I saw a blind man. His long white stick ended in a tennis ball, and he swept it in a limited arc in front of him and to his side, and when he came close to falling (so it seemed to me) off the edge of the platform, I went up to him and asked if I could help. Oh no, he said, oh no, I'm just waiting for my train, thank you. I left him and walked the length of the platform, toward the exit. I was confused to see, just at that moment, another blind man, who also carried a long white stick with a tennis ball at its end, and who, ahead of me, climbed the stairs out into the light. dragging his broken leg behind him as he moved from car to car. He adjusted his voice to a reedier tone to make his body seem more frail. I disliked his act and refused to give him money. A few minutes later, when I got on the platform, I saw a blind man. His long white stick ended in a tennis ball, and he swept it in a limited arc in front of him and to his side, and when he came close to falling (so it seemed to me) off the edge of the platform, I went up to him and asked if I could help. Oh no, he said, oh no, I'm just waiting for my train, thank you. I left him and walked the length of the platform, toward the exit. I was confused to see, just at that moment, another blind man, who also carried a long white stick with a tennis ball at its end, and who, ahead of me, climbed the stairs out into the light.

I got the idea that some of the things I was seeing around me were under the aegis of Obatala, the demiurge charged by Olodumare with the formation of humans from clay. Obatala did well at the task until he started drinking. As he drank more and more, he became inebriated, and began to fas.h.i.+on damaged human beings. The Yoruba believe that in this drunken state he made dwarfs, cripples, people missing limbs, and those burdened with debilitating illness. Olodumare had to reclaim the role he had delegated and finish the creation of humankind himself and, as a result, people who suffer from physical infirmities identify themselves as wors.h.i.+ppers of Obatala. This is an interesting relations.h.i.+p with a G.o.d, one not of affection or praise but of antagonism. They wors.h.i.+p Obatala in accusation; it is he who has made them as they are. They wear white, which is his color, and the color of the palm wine he got drunk on.

It had been months since I had last been to a movie. At around ten, I entered a bookshop, one of the famous chains, to kill some time before the film began, and as I went in I remembered a book I had wanted to look at for a long time: a book of historical biography by one of my patients. I found it quickly-The Monster of New Amsterdam-and settled in among the quieter stacks to read it. V., an a.s.sistant professor at New York University and a member of the Delaware tribe, had based the book on her doctoral dissertation at Columbia. It was the first comprehensive study of Cornelis Van Tienhoven. Van Tienhoven had been notorious as a seventeenth-century schout schout of New Amsterdam, officially empowered to enforce the law among the Dutch colonists of Manhattan Island. He had arrived in 1633, as a secretary for the Dutch East India Company, but as he climbed up the social ladder, he became known for his many brutal acts, notable among them a raid he led to murder Canarsie Indians on Long Island, after which he had brought back the victims' heads on pikes. In another raid, Van Tienhoven had been at the head of a party of men that murdered over a hundred innocent members of the Hackensack tribe. V.'s book made for grim reading. It was full of violent events, and in the endnotes were reprinted the relevant seventeenth-century records. These were written in calm and pious language that presented ma.s.s murder as little more than the regrettable side effect of colonizing the land. In its patient recounting of these crimes, of New Amsterdam, officially empowered to enforce the law among the Dutch colonists of Manhattan Island. He had arrived in 1633, as a secretary for the Dutch East India Company, but as he climbed up the social ladder, he became known for his many brutal acts, notable among them a raid he led to murder Canarsie Indians on Long Island, after which he had brought back the victims' heads on pikes. In another raid, Van Tienhoven had been at the head of a party of men that murdered over a hundred innocent members of the Hackensack tribe. V.'s book made for grim reading. It was full of violent events, and in the endnotes were reprinted the relevant seventeenth-century records. These were written in calm and pious language that presented ma.s.s murder as little more than the regrettable side effect of colonizing the land. In its patient recounting of these crimes, The Monster of New Amsterdam The Monster of New Amsterdam was like those biographies of Pol Pot, Hitler, or Stalin that almost always did well on the bestseller lists. A sticker on the cover of the copy I was holding indicated that it had been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The blurbs on the flyleaf, written by leading American historians, were fulsome, praising the book for shedding light on a forgotten chapter in colonial history. From time to time during the previous couple of years, reading the newspaper, I had seen some aspect of this critical acclaim, and for this reason, I had heard V.'s name and had some sense of her professional success before she ever became my patient. was like those biographies of Pol Pot, Hitler, or Stalin that almost always did well on the bestseller lists. A sticker on the cover of the copy I was holding indicated that it had been nominated for the National Book Critics Circle Award. The blurbs on the flyleaf, written by leading American historians, were fulsome, praising the book for shedding light on a forgotten chapter in colonial history. From time to time during the previous couple of years, reading the newspaper, I had seen some aspect of this critical acclaim, and for this reason, I had heard V.'s name and had some sense of her professional success before she ever became my patient.

When I began treating her for depression at the beginning of last year, I was surprised by her shy manner and slight frame. She was a little older than I, but appeared much younger, and she was at work on her next project, which as she explained it, was a broader study of the encounters between the northeastern native groups-the Delaware and Iroquois in particular-and European settlers in the seventeenth century. V.'s depression was partly due to the emotional toll of these studies, which she once described as looking out across a river on a day of heavy rain, so that she couldn't be sure whether the activity on the opposite bank had anything to do with her, or whether, in fact, there was any activity there at all. Her biography of Van Tienhoven, pitched though it was to a general readers.h.i.+p, came with all the scholarly apparatus and with much of the emotional distance typical of an academic study. But it was clear, too, from talking to her that the horrors Native Americans had had to endure at the hands of the white settlers, the horrors, in her view, that they continued to suffer, affected her on a profound personal level.

I can't pretend it isn't about my life, she said to me once, it is my life. It's a difficult thing to live in a country that has erased your past. She fell silent, and the sensation created by her words-I remember experiencing it as a subtle s.h.i.+ft in the air pressure of the room-deepened in the silence, so that all we could hear was the going and coming outside my office door. She had closed her eyes for a moment, as though she had fallen asleep. But then she continued, her shut eyelids now trembling: There are almost no Native Americans in New York City, and very few in all of the Northeast. It isn't right that people are not terrified by this because this is a terrifying thing that happened to a vast population. And it's not in the past, it is still with us today; at least, it's still with me. She stopped, and then she opened her eyes, and as I recalled all this sitting on the carpet between those tall shelves at the bookshop, I could picture V.'s curiously serene face that afternoon, on which the only physical signs of distress were her tear-filled eyes. I got up and went to the counter, and paid for the book. I knew I would not have time to read all of it, but I wanted to think more about what she had written, and I also hoped that the book might, in those moments when it left the strict historical record and betrayed some subjective a.n.a.lysis, give me further insight into her pyschological state.

After paying, I walked the four blocks to the movie theater on what, I recall, was a warm night. I had my recurrent worry about how warm it had been all season long. Although I did not enjoy the cold seasons at their most intense, I had come to agree that there was a rightness about them, that there was a natural order in such things. The absence of this order, the absence of cold when it ought to be cold, was something I now sensed as a sudden discomfort. The idea that the weather was changing noticeably bothered me, even if there was as yet no evidence that this warm fall in particular wasn't due to a perfectly normal variation in patterns that stretched across centuries. There had been a natural little ice age in the Low Countries in the sixteenth century, and so, why not a little warm age in our own time, independent of human causes? But I was no longer the global-warming skeptic I had been some years before, even if I still couldn't tolerate the tendency some had of jumping to conclusions based on anecdotal evidence: global warming was a fact, but that did not mean it was the explanation for why a given day was warm. It was careless thinking to draw the link too easily, an invasion of fas.h.i.+onable politics into what should be the ironclad precincts of science.

Still, the way my thoughts returned to the fact that it was the middle of November and I hadn't yet had occasion to wear my coat made me wonder if, already, I was one of those people, the overinterpreters. This was part of my suspicion that there was a mood in the society that pushed people more toward snap judgments and unexamined opinions, an antiscientific mood; to the old problem of ma.s.s innumeracy, it seemed to me, was being added a more general inability to a.s.sess evidence. This made brisk business for those whose specialty was in the promising of immediate solutions: politicians, or priests of the various religions. It worked particularly well for those who wished to rally people around a cause. The cause itself, whatever it was, hardly mattered. Partisans.h.i.+p was all.

The crowd at the ticket counter of the movie theater was atypical, but this is what I had expected, given the late hour of the film, the fact that it was set in Africa, and the absence of marquee Hollywood names. The ticket buyers were young, many of them black, and dressed in hip clothes. There were some Asians, too, Latinos, immigrant New Yorkers, New Yorkers of indeterminate ethnic background. The last film I'd seen at the same theater, months earlier, had had an audience consisting almost entirely of white-haired white people; many fewer of those were now in attendance. In the great cave of the theater, I sat alone. No, not alone, exactly: in the company of a hundred others, but all strangers to me. The lights went down, and as I slouched in a plush seat, as the film began, I noticed someone else in my row, at its far end: an old man, asleep, his head thrown back and his mouth open, so that he looked more dead than sleeping. He did not stir even when the film began.

The jaunty credit sequence featured music from the right time period, but not from the right part of Africa: what had Mali to do with Kenya? But I had come prepared to like some things about the film, and I expected that some other things would annoy me. Another film I had watched the previous year, about the crimes of large pharmaceutical companies in East Africa, had left me feeling frustrated, not because of its plot, which was plausible, but because of the film's fidelity to the convention of the good white man in Africa. Africa was always waiting, a substrate for the white man's will, a backdrop for his activities. And so, sitting to experience this film, The Last King of Scotland The Last King of Scotland, I was prepared to be angry again. I was primed to see a white man, a n.o.body in his own country, who thought, as usual, that the salvation of Africa was up to him. The king the t.i.tle referred to was Idi Amin Dada, dictator of Uganda in the 1970s. Decorating himself with spurious t.i.tles was only the least grim of his many hobbies.

I knew Idi Amin well, so to speak, because he'd been an indelible part of my childhood mythology. I remembered the many hours I had spent at my cousins' watching a film called The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin The Rise and Fall of Idi Amin. In that film, no detail was spared to present the callousness, insanity, and sheer excitement of the man. I was seven or eight at the time, and those images of people being shot and stuffed into car trunks, or decapitated and stored in freezers, stayed with me. The images were genuinely shocking because, unlike the blood-spattered American war movies we also enjoyed during those long school vacations, the victims in Rise and Fall Rise and Fall looked like our fathers and uncles, with their safari suits, afros, and s.h.i.+ny foreheads. The cities in which this mayhem played out looked like our own city, and the bullet-riddled cars were the same models as the ones we saw around us. But we enjoyed the shock of it, its powerful and stylized realism and each time we had nothing to do, we watched the film again. looked like our fathers and uncles, with their safari suits, afros, and s.h.i.+ny foreheads. The cities in which this mayhem played out looked like our own city, and the bullet-riddled cars were the same models as the ones we saw around us. But we enjoyed the shock of it, its powerful and stylized realism and each time we had nothing to do, we watched the film again.

The Last King of Scotland mostly avoided such gory imagery. Its story was concentrated, instead, on the relations.h.i.+p between Idi Amin and the briefly innocent Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, whom he pressed into service as his personal physician. This was the story of a man in whom the cla.s.sic traits of dictators.h.i.+p had taken the most extreme form. With his extroverted madness-parts anger, fear, insecurity, quicksilver charm-Idi Amin murdered some 300,000 Ugandans during his rule, expelled the large community of Ugandan-Indians, destroyed the country's economy, and earned himself a reputation as one of the most grotesque stains on Africa's recent history. mostly avoided such gory imagery. Its story was concentrated, instead, on the relations.h.i.+p between Idi Amin and the briefly innocent Scottish doctor, Nicholas Garrigan, whom he pressed into service as his personal physician. This was the story of a man in whom the cla.s.sic traits of dictators.h.i.+p had taken the most extreme form. With his extroverted madness-parts anger, fear, insecurity, quicksilver charm-Idi Amin murdered some 300,000 Ugandans during his rule, expelled the large community of Ugandan-Indians, destroyed the country's economy, and earned himself a reputation as one of the most grotesque stains on Africa's recent history.

While watching the film, I recalled an uncomfortable meeting I'd had one evening, in an opulent house in a suburb of Madison a few years before. I was a medical student at the time, and our host, an Indian surgeon, had invited me and a number of my cla.s.smates to his house. After we had eaten, Dr. Gupta ushered us into one of his three lavish living rooms, and went round pouring champagne into our gla.s.ses. He and his family, he told us, had been expelled from their homes and lands by Idi Amin. I am successful now, he said, America has made a life possible for me and for my wife and children. My daughter is doing graduate studies in engineering at MIT, and our youngest is at Yale. But, if I may speak frankly, I'm still angry. We lost so much, we were robbed at knifepoint, and when I think about Africans-and I know that we are not supposed to say such things in America-when I think about Africans, I want to spit.

The bitterness was startling. It was an anger that, I couldn't help feeling, was partly directed at me, the only other African in the room. The detail of my background, that I was Nigerian, made no difference, for Dr. Gupta had spoken of Africans, had sidestepped the specific and spoken in the general. But now, as I watched the film, I saw that Idi Amin himself hosted wonderful parties, told genuinely funny jokes, and spoke eloquently about the need for African self-determination. These nuances in his personality, as depicted here, would no doubt have brought a bad taste to the mouth of my host in Madison.

I wished to believe that things were not as bad as they seemed. This was the part of me that wanted to be entertained, that preferred not t