White. Deni Ellis Bechard

the white woman stood behind us and, having folded Le Monde into her purse, sighed impatiently. He went ahead, a roundness in how he walked, the fullness of presence or authority, as if he inhabited an orb that moved through space. He passed quickly, and I followed. In the baggage claim, I wondered if he would distance himself, but he waved me over. We stood at the conveyor belt, talking as coffin-sized packages wrapped in cellophane rode past.

      Sola came into the room, walked up to us, and shook Oméga’s hand.

      “Pastor Thomas Oméga.” He dipped his head.

      “Sola,” she said. She couldn’t have been much older than her early thirties. She was of medium height, but with her poise and direct gaze, she had the sort of presence that made me think of spiritual and mental training, or perhaps concerted healing from trauma.

      Oméga said a few words in Lingala, and she responded haltingly before they shifted to French—a language that she spoke fluently despite her slight accent, which had suddenly revealed itself more clearly.

      “You are American?” he asked.

      “I am,” she replied, and the pause that followed was brief—a terse silence.

      “You’re here for work?”

      “Yes. And you? Is this home or a visit?”

      “Home,” he said, “though sometimes I wonder what that really means.”

      She’d been observing him but now her eyes became more alert, lifting slightly to search into his. Though he hadn’t posed a direct question as I might have, his contemplative statement had quietly invited her to share her pedigree.

      A gray, hard-bodied roller bag passed on the conveyor, and she caught it.

      “It’s been a pleasure meeting you,” she told him and then smiled at me. She neared her hand to her cheek, signaling that she would call, before striding to the exit, beyond which someone was waiting for her—a thin, gaunt man in a pale suit motioning from the crowd seconds after the door swished open.

      Oméga also watched her go.

      “What leads to a man meeting a beautiful woman on a flight?” he asked. “You can say chance, but if that’s so, then how drab life is. I say the spirits or God’s design. Then we have a world that is fully alive.”

      I caught myself midshrug and tried to make myself appear less dismissive.

      “I think the design is in the story,” I replied.

      “How so?”

      “A man who is happily married might sit next to an attractive woman, and she will not fit into the story he tells himself about his life. But for a single man, especially the eternally single type, the opposite may be true.”

      “Yes, but we must separate man’s illusions from the divine order.”

      “Maybe the divine order is simply our grandest illusion. I know many people who believe that everything that happens is fated. They meet their spouses and say it was meant to be, but a few years later they divorce.”

      Oméga laughed. “And then the story becomes one of trials and growth.”

      He stepped away to pull a bulging suitcase off the conveyor belt, and then a second and a third.

      “Come,” he told me. “I’ll drop you off at your hotel.”

      Not long after, a bodyguard, it seemed—given the man’s girth and carriage—arrived with the driver and helped load Oméga’s luggage into a new, powerfully air-conditioned Land Rover. The two men sat in front, Oméga and I behind them, and we drove into the city, past Armageddon scenes of roadside fires and people running through the headlights of charging traffic. Their sudden silhouettes—impressions of fragility and endurance—stung my retina, awakening memories of a worse time, when I’d last been here, during the war.

      “How did you become a journalist?” Oméga asked, his voice now muted with fatigue. “A family connection or a desire for justice?”

      “Actually,” I told him, “I intended to be a novelist.”

      “A novelist?” he repeated.

      “Yes, I loved books as a child and … and, in a sense, I guess they saved me.”

      I hesitated, but Oméga seemed genuinely interested.

      “My family was poor,” I continued, “and novels gave me the impression of infinite possibility. As a child, I often read novels of gifted, solitary youths desperate to escape a repressive rural place. For them, saving the world was an excuse to set out and discover it, and be transformed. Years ago, I was hired as a research guide for a rich university student with internationalist ambitions and I took him to Nairobi. ‘Isn’t this amazing?’ I kept saying, but he’d already seen it all on YouTube. He experienced it as information, not as a sanctuary from his past or a gateway to a new self.”

      Maybe exhaustion was releasing the thoughts my conversation with Sola had stirred up. My words came out more intimate than I intended: how stories deepened my love of landscape, connecting me to the world in a way that I still experience only when I’m in motion.

      My grandmother once told me that loquacity ran in the family, an impulse so strong it had to be a biological mandate. So I let myself finish, saying that the young man of the YouTube generation hadn’t first encountered distant places as the reward for bodily exertion. He hadn’t experienced them as reveries merging into sight, becoming memory before they’d been fully felt in the nerves of the eyes.

      Oméga sat in silence, perhaps waiting to be sure that I’d completed my thoughts, before he spoke in an enlivened voice.

      “Books were the same for me, and freedom is why many of us came to Kinshasa.” He gestured to the driver and bodyguard, and they nodded. “We also wanted a future. Even my name, Oméga, is taken from a poem. I was a young man. This was during the war in the east, when I often faced death. I came into a house that had been pillaged. A book was on the floor. It was the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, and I read ‘Vowels,’ in which each letter has a color and an image:

       Silences crossed by Worlds and Angels:

       — O the Omega, the violet ray of His Eyes!

      I decided then that I would survive and preach God’s word, that I would take the name Oméga. I could sense the violet light pouring out of His loving eyes.”

      I myself had read this poem as a teenager, wishing I had synesthesia, but my response now seemed impoverished by the vitality of Oméga’s. I felt guilty that, while speaking, I’d worried that the cultural context of everything I was sharing would be too removed. I’d skimmed, saying nothing of agency and purpose—villains and the intensity of solitude in foreign lands.

      “The Bible,” Oméga pressed on, “was of course the most important book for me. There were nights in the war when I lay in my shelter recalling the stories in Kings and Prophets. The machine guns fired and the mortars fell and I was Elijah listening for the word of God in the thunder and trembling earth.”

      The Land Rover had turned onto a narrow road, past a car’s stripped-down carcass in the ditch, in a nest of weeds that had grown through and around it.

      “I’m glad you shared your story,” he said. “Normally, I don’t like foreign journalists. Their investigations begin with a judgment, and they have come to find the evidence of what they already believe. But you are welcome in my church and home. You will have dinner with my wife and daughters. How do you like the sound of that?”

      “That sounds quite nice.”

      “Quite nice? Ha! You mundele speak pearly words but are all jackals.”

      He turned in the seat next to me. In the street light, his fingers were again on the button of his shirt. They shifted to his collar, holding it, and then peeled it back.

      A thick, glossy scar