LITMIR.BIZ

      SOLA

      I crossed the ocean on the blade of a knife.

      I read this line on the phone she held between us as she spoke it, slowly, and then said, “It sounds contrived to me, not at all the words of a child …”

      This is how I met Sola, high above the Atlantic. When I’d boarded, she’d had an eye mask on, its elastic holding her dark, loosely curled hair in place, and during the flight’s first hours, she’d slept by the window, an empty seat between us. Her mouth and the tip of her nose were visible, her lips slightly full and her skin a shade lighter than gold, almost flaxen.

      As passengers lapsed into sleep, I remained restless. A hostess passed through the unlit cabin, balancing a tray of plastic cups, and I took one to wash down my malaria pill, and then I read. Sometime after midnight, I unbuckled myself and made my way back through the half-reclined bodies whose postures of disturbed repose gave me the impression that I was in the sickbay of a ship.

      On my return, I paused to take stock of who was there. The sleepers’ jaws conveyed unease—heaviness, futility, even sadness—or were disconnected, dropped like a burden. I felt grateful to return to hers, her mouth that, resting, retained its dignity, if somewhat severe. And yet this impulse gave me pause: how even on the half-covered face of a stranger, the mind begins to compose.

      I was considering a nap when she reached up to her mask and looked at me from beyond the domain of my reading light, her eyes too reflective to disclose the nuance of their color.

      “You don’t sleep well on planes?” she asked, and I wondered if her question was a way of telling me that I had awakened her.

      “I can’t blame air transportation for my sleep problems,” I said.

      “Is Belgium your final destination?”

      “No. The Congo.”

      “Congo–Kinshasa?” Her voice was pleasingly neutral, its accent American but faintly bookish—more considered than automatic, so possibly an acquisition and not a birthright.

      “Yes.”

      “Me too.”

      “Oh, what for?” I asked, resisting the temptation to articulate a synchronicity. We were flying from DC to Brussels, the Congo’s old colonial warden, so obviously many of the passengers shared our route.

      “It’s a strange story,” she said. “I don’t want to interrupt your reading.”

      “My reading can wait. I’m all ears,” I told her, though I normally shunned conversation in flight, for fear of losing anonymity, of having to be attentive to a stranger.

      “Well,” she said and appeared to gather her thoughts. “Someone I know—an anthropologist—he works with street children in Kinshasa and has found a white child, not an albino, but a blond, blue-eyed girl who speaks Lingala and the usual bits of street French.”

      “How old is she?” I asked.

      “Maybe twelve, possibly thirteen.”

      “So you’re going to help repatriate her to wherever she’s from?”

      “There’s more to it. The girl believes she’s black—that she’s Congolese by birth—but that a demon—a white demon, according to her—has possessed her and turned her white.”

      That was when Sola reached up, adjusted her reading lamp in its orbit, and turned it on. She opened her bag and took out her phone. Then she lifted her armrest, shifted partially into the empty seat, and positioned the screen so that we could both read.

      I crossed the ocean on the blade of a knife, the e-mail began without salutation, clearly one of many messages in a thread. Each time we take a break from talking and start again, the girl repeats this line. I ask why, whether she believes she came to Kinshasa on a knife, and she says no, that she was born here, that her family are Congolese. The line, she says, is the demon’s memory. The white demon rode on a knife to Kin and used it to cut open her heart so that he could live inside her.

      I paused from reading to meet her gaze—her irises were nearly sepia, with a thin bright rim of black—to confirm it was okay that I continue, and she nodded.

      The girl’s way of speaking is nonlinear and dualistic. The demon inhabits her and she embodies its power, and yet she is also its victim, fleeing it as she tries to find ways to kill it and win her freedom. She claims that she has no parents and yet that she was born in Congo. She doesn’t verbally respond to English, but when I tell her in English that I have hidden a treat for her in the room, she gets it as soon as I leave. This doesn’t work with other languages, except French, but her French bears no European inflections. It was clearly learned in the streets of Kin. Since her arrival in my care, I have dropped my other projects. I must confess that I have developed a possibly unhealthy fascination with her story.

      “He’s somewhat dramatic,” I said before I could catch myself.

      “Yes, he is. It’s why this appeals to him. It’s also why I’m going to help out.”

      I read the final paragraphs—a maudlin edge in his words about how long he’d searched and how much he deserved this breakthrough.

      “And situations like these,” I asked, “they’re related to your work?”

      “I’ve done time in many fields, but I sell myself as a cross-cultural consultant.”

      “That’s why he contacted you?”

      “No. He’s a personal connection—one that,” she took a moment to renew the air in her lungs, “I have been doing my best to manage from a distance. But a friend is a friend. Besides, I have other work in the Congo.”

      Maybe it was the dark plane cabin and the droning fuselage, or the collective lull of so many sleeping bodies, but in the overlapping halos of our reading lights, I felt as if we were alone.

      “You’re also an anthropologist?” I asked as she put away her phone.

      “Among the many things I’ve been, yes, that’s one of them.”

      Her words made me realize that society had trained me to expect statements of career change and exploration from men. I wanted to ask if and where she’d studied anthropology, but I sensed her reticence, possibly a desire not to be pigeonholed, and this further lit up my brain.

      “What are you doing in the Congo?” she asked.

      I

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