July 6^th:

It’s funny, when this whole Abraham thing started, I thought how much of a romance novel cliché it would be for me to go running off with this hot young guy.  But nothing so far has been like a romance novel.  He even takes me to Africa, beautiful landscape, the whole nine yards.  And what happens?  We spend most of our days in-doors.  I took my journal with me this time because I thought it would be a comfort, but there’s little here that’s uncomfortable.

So for starters, our liaison is a white American with a mid-western accent.  Blonde, pale, the least African person I’ve ever seen in my life.  We’re trying to buy the PDLC from this company called VGDAII, something something international industries, but the place we do most of our business in is this lodge that might as well be the Africa exhibit at Disney World.  They say the lodge is part of this big silverback refuge, but they have all these creepy stuffed gorillas all over the exhibit hall too thick to even walk comfortably around.  It’s dark in there because all the stuffed gorillas block out the light.  This whole thing is either fishy or stupid, if you ask me, and I’m leaning toward that second option.

I asked Abraham why he thought I’d find this exciting, and he said, “It’s Africa.  Jungle.  Rolling hills.  Safaris.”

I said, “Why do you assume I’ve never been here before?”  It was rather condescending of him to assume he had the ability to show me something new here, but I let it slide.  I told him I used to run around the world with this guy named Dante, but I didn’t actually go into detail.

That’s when I flashed back to that first Africa trip I took with Dante.  He told me something on that trip I thought was total bullshit, but I’m thinking about more and more these days.  We were tracking down a stolen fragment of the Nag Hammadi codices.  We tracked it all the way down to the Ngoma Lungundu Temple in the Lemba lands, Zimbabwe.  I didn’t make an effort to remember everything the way I should have.  That’s back when I’d let Dante do all the planning and work and thinking.  I gave to him the duty of all understanding and remembering, but now I’m grasping desperately for any sort of faint memory of that time in my life.  I wish I would’ve had one of these things back then to write it all down.

One thing I remember very clearly, it was snowing in Zimbabwe.  One in a billion chance.  Dante had gone through all the trouble of buying off this guide and commandeering, in a way only Dante could do, a Land Rover to get us to this town, I forget the name but it translated to something like “The bitterness of the walnut.”  Then it snowed.  It hadn’t snowed in that area since mammoths roamed the landscape.  So the guide had no idea where he was going.  It was essentially flat there, and the snow made everything look the same.  Eventually he told us, “Drive slow.  Drive slow.”  He had these giant coke bottle glasses, and I wondered how he was able to see anything.  We drove slow for the longest time, but then suddenly below us I heard a cracking noise.  Of all the things, we were on top of a pond.  The back right tire cracked through, and the back left tire soon followed.  I imagine now, looking back, it couldn’t have been a very deep pond, but it scared the hell out of me.  The guide, all he heard was cracking, and with those coke bottle glasses, who knows what he thought the noise was because immediately he jumped out and ran across the snow.  Dante had this way with soldiers, so usually the people we hired were soldiers.  Who knows why he didn’t just hire regular citizens with fewer personal issues.  This guide probably thought a bomb went off behind him.

I waited for Dante to save me.  I sat in the car while he stepped carefully on to the ice.  He took my hand and helped me out.  We walked carefully in the guide’s footsteps.  I knew the guide had only been lucky and any minute we would both crash down into the water.  Time seemed to stop then.  Later, when Karl would talk about time stopping, I thought back to that moment.  The snow coming down so slowly it might as well be suspended there.  Each step we took was a step into a suspended forever that might go all the way down to blackness.  There was no sound anywhere.  Even when the Land Rover cracked some more and sent spider webs under our feet, it seemed to happen soundlessly.  My heart was pounding faster and faster, but it seemed to thump down into that black water below us.

We finally made it to shore.  It felt like we had been walking across that ice a year at least.  We found some shelter in some ruins.  Of course, of all the shelter we could find, Dante finds shelter in ruins.  All white around us, there in our dark, dry cave, it felt like we had entered another world ruled by slow moving rock monsters making their way toward heaven.  There in our shelter, Dante told me something I’ll never forget: “Why are you afraid to be happy?”

“What?” I said.

“Or maybe you just don’t like happiness.  I know you better than you think, Sophie.  With your family’s company, you can have anything in the world you want.  What I think you want is to be unhappy because that’s where you’re comfortable.”

“Where do you get this idea?” I said, laughing it off.

“It’s something I’ve observed in you a long time now.  For example, you’re no damsel in distress – far from it – so why do you act like one?”

“I trust you.  You’ve done this sort of thing before.”

“Bull shit.  When I first met you, I thought you were going to be a spoiled little rich girl.  Then I saw all the superficial opportunities for happiness didn’t allow you to pursue what you wanted.  You wanted to be unhappy.  Now here you are, and still nothing can satisfy you.  My question is, should I give you what you want, or should I try to make you actually happy?”

I didn’t reply.  It seemed ridiculous.  Why would any human being want to be unhappy?

Anyway, I thought that would be something relevant to relate, considering the purpose of this journal.  Meanwhile, I’m here in the middle of Africa listening to recorded jungle noises.  If Dante was right that all I wanted was to be unhappy, well then I must be ecstatic right now.