Prologue
Prologue
There is a Nescafé tin on the shelf above my desk, the kind with the red lid that never closes properly after the first month. It has been with me through four addresses. It has ridden in the back of Timo's pickup, in a matatu with a chicken on somebody's lap, and once, in a bad year, in a plastic bag I was fully prepared to leave on a bench at the Botanical Gardens in Entebbe. I did not leave it. I told myself I forgot, which is the kind of lie you tell yourself when the truth is that your hands would not open.
I am thirty-four now. I have a house I drew myself, with a window that faces east, because somebody once told me a house should be built to meet the morning. I have a kettle that whistles at the wrong pitch and a neighbour who grows tomatoes over the boundary wall and pretends it is an accident. I have opinions about concrete. I am, by most measures that people use at weddings, a settled man.
People at weddings like to ask me things. They lean in with a glass in one hand and a face that says they are about to be wise, and they ask: How did you know? They ask it the way you would ask a man how he found his way through a forest, expecting a compass, expecting some clean, portable rule.
I usually say something about patience. I say it well; I have had practice. What I do not say is that for a long stretch of my twenties I could not have told you the difference between wanting a person and loving one, and that I did not think there was a difference, and that I made a small, cold religion out of not thinking so.
I did not say I was afraid. Nobody builds a religion around fear. You build it around principle. You call it freedom, or honesty, or just being real about what people want. You say it in a good jacket, in a bar in Kabalagala, with a woman's laughter close enough to your ear that you can feel the warmth of it, and you believe every syllable, and then you go home and lie in the dark and listen to the refrigerator.
I have thought about those years often. Not with shame exactly, though there is some in there, filed under names I would rather not say in full. More with the puzzled tenderness you feel toward a younger brother who did something stupid and expensive and thought he was being clever.
Some of what happened to me happened because of a woman named Naomi, who I loved so completely and so badly that I mistook the badness for the completeness. The rest happened because of a woman named Maya, who did not save me, and who would be furious if I wrote it that way. She will read this. She reads everything I write with a pencil in her hand and no mercy, which is one of the ways I know.
Inside the tin, there was once a ring. There was also an envelope with my name on it, in handwriting I would know in the dark, and for a long time the envelope was sealed. I carried that envelope for twenty months without opening it, and I carried it the way some men carry a cracked tooth: not touching it, not treating it, arranging my whole life around the side of my mouth that did not hurt.
What was in the letter is coming. What I did on the night that made her write it is coming too, and I will not make myself the victim of it. But you should know, before I begin, that I am not going to hand you a lesson tied up in ribbon. I have been asked how did you know enough times to distrust every answer that sounds like one.
So instead I will tell you what happened, in the order it hurt.
I will tell you about the women, because there were women, and I will try to tell it without making it sound like a trophy cabinet, because it was not one. It was closer to a row of unlit rooms I kept walking into, hoping one of them would finally have a window.
And I will tell you about the question. I asked it out loud once, in a parked car in the rain, to a woman who had every right to walk away and did not, yet. I asked it as if it were a riddle with a tidy answer. I have been trying to answer it for years, and I have some of it, and I will give you what I have.
But start here, with the tin. Start with a man who thought he had closed the lid.
It never did close properly.