Leaving Before the Rains Come Read Online Free Page B

their inner arms threaded blue with needle tracks.
    We were both speaking in shorthand, assuming a shared language. But the way most Westerners immediately envisioned a sepia-charmed life of hunting trips, spectacular sunsets, and fez-donned, white-gloved servants when I mentioned I had grown up on farms in Zimbabwe and Zambia, I conjured a blighted inner-city life when Charlie mentioned mainlining and Philadelphia. And it fit perfectly with what I thought I knew of the place.
    The United States of my youthful imagination was an impression created by our postcolonial, Maoist-socialist governments, who were forever warning against the debauched evils of capitalism. And where our governments left off scaring us about the West, the secretary at the farm agency in Mkushi enthusiastically took up. Waving one of her South African tabloid magazines at me, she said she had it on good authority: ruthless capitalist American drug dealers casually injected unsuspecting passing pedestrians with heroin just for the evil sake of creating more addicts. “No, Bobo,” she said, speaking through an exhaled punctuation of cigarette smoke. “It’s a terrifying place, I promise you.”
    The supposed fact that Charlie not only hailed from drug addicts but also had a trigger-happy grandmother who owned a ranch in Wyoming did not seem incongruous to me. After all, my family had owned a farm in Rhodesia and had worked on ranches and estates in Malawi and Zambia half the size of Rhode Island, and that did not preclude us from whole years of almost itinerant destitution. Also, having very little experience with drug addicts except the pot-smoking sons of a neighbor, and Adamson, our perpetually stoned cook, I didn’t think of the unlikelihood that heroin-riddled parents could have produced someone as straight-limbed and clear-eyed as Charlie.

    Now I said to Charlie, “I’ve never canoed before.”
    “That’s okay. I’m a guide. I’ll get us down.”
    And he sounded so unalarmed by me, so unconcerned about my lack of experience, so sure of his own prowess, that I fell there and then. And in my experience, once the falling has started, there are few options for recovery. To struggle one’s way back to a pre-falling place, one would need to have planned in advance, to have packed parachutes, or ropes and harnesses, to have arranged for self-arrest. But, not seeing it coming, I had taken none of these precautions. And in any case, the falling was wondrous from this altitude, as if the whole world lay in miraculous miniature below us, too many miles to foresee the landing, and, gusted about by more or less comforting currents, the sensation was rather of flight than of anything plummeting.
    Time took on a weird dimension too—eternity possessed in an instant. Having invented it, we tend to believe that everything happens over time, the way the seasons ease their way around the globe steady and measurable and relaxed. But the truth is, most of the things that change the course of our lives happen in fleeting unguarded moments; grief buckling us at the knees; fear shattering through us like buckshot; love pulling us out on an unseen tide. And finding ourselves in the grip of these overpowering emotions, we then invent reasons based on the flimsy evidence we have accrued why they have happened, trying to make sense of the insensible with armloads of self-justification, distortions, and deliberate misinterpretations.
    So I said, “Yes,” knowing even then that this was no ordinary yes, no yes with a get-out clause, no penciled-in yes. It was a certain forever yes. It was the yes my Scottish grandmother had given when she consented to go on a picnic with my grandfather in Kenya, certain the whole rest of her life would hinge on that single syllable. “Hodge’s nose,” she told me fifty-five years later. “It takes years of breeding to get a nose like that.” And it was the yes my mother gave to my father, explaining afterward that she had