What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng Read Online Free PDF Page B

ever signed his name to since he was eleven—now cover the floor.
    I walk back to the living room and stop. They are here. Tonya and Powder are in my apartment again and now I am scared. They don’t want a witness. It had not occurred to me before but now it seems understandable. But how will they shoot me without alerting the fifty-four other residents of the building?
    There might be another way to kill me.
    I stand in the doorway and watch them. They make no move toward me. If they do, I will have a moment to lock myself in my bedroom. That might buy me enough time to escape through the window. I step slowly back.
    “Stay there, Africa. Just stand motherfucking still.”
    Powder has his hand on his gun. The television is on the floor between them.
    “We can repack the trunk,” Tonya says to him.
    “We’re not gonna repack the trunk. We got to get the fuck out of here.”
    “You’re not telling me we’re leaving this here.”
    “What you want to do?”
    “Let me think.”
    I am a fool, as I’ve said before. Because I am a fool, and because I was taught too many times by good men and women with rigid moral codes, I find strength in asserting what is right. This has rarely served me in situations such as this. Watching them argue, an idea occurs to me, and I again speak.
    “It is time you two left. This is over. I’ve already called the police. They’re coming.” I say it in an even tone of voice, but while I am uttering the last two words, Powder is heading toward me, and in rapid succession he says, “You haven’t called shit, fool,” and then swings his arm at me. Thinking he’s aiming for my face, I cover my head, leaving my torso unprotected. And for the first time in my life, I am struck in a way that I think might kill me. To be punched in the stomach with all the force of a man like Powder—this can scarcely be borne, much less by someone like me, built with poor engineering, six foot three and 145 pounds. It is as if he has removed my lungs from my chest. I gag. I spit. Eventually I list and I fall, and while lunging earthward my head hits something hard and unbreakable, and that is the end, for now, of Valentino Achak Deng.

 

    III.

    I open my eyes and the scene has changed. Most of my possessions are gone, yes, but the TV is still here, now on the kitchen table. Someone has turned it on. Someone has plugged it in and there is a boy watching it. The boy can be no more than ten, and he is sitting on one of my kitchen chairs, his feet dangling below. He has a cell phone in his lap, and takes no notice of me.
    I could be hallucinating, dreaming, anything. It does not seem possible that there is a young boy at my kitchen table contentedly watching television. But I keep my eyes on him, waiting for him to evaporate. He does not evaporate. There is a ten-year-old boy in my kitchen, watching my television, which has been moved. Someone relocated the set from the living room to the kitchen, and took the time to reattach the cable. My head pulses with a pain far surpassing any of the many headaches I have had since I landed at JFK five years ago.
    I lie on the carpet, wondering whether I should make another attempt to move. I do not even know who this boy is; he could be in the same sort of trouble I am. I try to find my arms and realize they are behind me, tied with what I assume is the phone cord.
    This, too, is a first for me. I have never been restrained like this, though I have seen men tied by the hands, and I have seen these men executed before me. I was eleven years old when I saw seven such men killed in front of me, in front of ten thousand of us boys in Ethiopia. It was meant to be a lesson to us all.
    My mouth is taped closed. It is packing tape, I know, because Achor Achor and I had been using it on the food we were storing in the freezer. Powder and Tonya must have wrapped it across my mouth; now the roll is lying next to my shoulder. My voice and movements are restricted by the things I