Those dusty people on carless roads mapping a timeless town I was just telling you about—I had seen them before. Let me try to remember. It was some summers before, flying to visit my mother for Solstice and the New Years—both the Gregorian January first much of the world celebrates, and Tweede Nuwe Jaar the following day, the carnivalesque traditional celebrations of nineteenth-century enslaved South Africans. Freed for a day, they could act as though this day could become every day, as though their celebrations were not equally entertainment for their enslavers.
The cabin lights blink on, so I think we must be nearing Johannesburg. Passengers raise their window shades to look out at a river of people winding across the dry veldt. The slow trickle of humans is somehow urgent; something must have happened while we were in flight. Something always seems to happen when one is on long flights. Emergency landing on the edge of a town, the plane is about to take off again as I rush down a ladder with Sheila. We walk against a stream of people so mute in their devastation that I cannot interrupt their sorrow to ask what they endured.
Tripping up the stairs of a colorfully-painted block of wooden buildings, I look for a phone or computer, some connection to my mother or news or familiar life. The building runs on for several blocks, with unlocked doors leading through shops apparently ready for their business of selling bright costumes, restaurants with food still steaming on tables, and social spaces strewn with half-played backgammon games, rubber balls rocking when my steps creak the floorboards. I call out ‘hello’ and ‘dumelang,’ then random greetings—willkommen, benvenuta, 歡迎—as though reading out an airport poster, welcoming myself to an anonymous abandoned place. I might have become hysterical, had I not emerged at the end of the building, overlooking a beach. No one is swimming, and dust-covered legs camouflaged in the dunes might be cryptozoological human-crab hybrids. The far end of the sand, where the waves seep highest, is dominated by a phallic structure. It is not a lighthouse, but perhaps a memorial to an already forgotten hero of this newly displaced society. Sheila waves me down to two bicycles she requisitioned, which we push through sand so thick it can only be a dreamscape.
Flying slightly above us are wasps so colorful I imagine they are those souvenirs made from repurposed cans. On the packed-dust road, we ride to the mouth of a broad canal, where a hotel boat docks just long enough for us to board before its tall water-wheel reminiscent of a nineteenth century river cruise begins to spin. Sheila’s son stands beside me at the stern, denying that this is a video game he has designed, as we watch small brightly clothed bodies jumping into the canal to follow our boat, their splashes rhythmic punctuation, as though trying to keep a beat in the chaos. Bodies pummel the river like it’s a ghoema drum: where are the trombones and banjos to make it a new year’s celebration?
The children do not know how to swim. I, more frantic than they, mimic first freestyle then breaststrokes with my arms. But they flail in the water now filling with suitcases and their futile splashes, which turn into the splutter of machine-gun fire along the shore. I am sure my shoulder has taken a bullet. I wake to burning not of lead and brass, but rather from my arm twisting contorted above my head, safe in my own Taipei bed. Safe, at least, for the moment of waking into a pillow that war and disaster have not yet reached. Safe enough to ignore that this dream could become every day.