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By Root 315 0

overwhelming quaintness, its thatched roofs and oversaturated flowerings, this was a world that had more to do with the fevered Caucasian dreams of Tolkien and Disney than with any European reality. During my African sojourn, I remember having seen my Afrocentric countrymen land at the airport in Accra and wander around a city that wasn’t there. They were so firmly entrenched in their ideologies, so tightly wrapped in their kente cloth, helmeted from truth by leather kufis, that they failed to see the real Africa before them. They wanted only the Africa where everyone was either a king, a queen, or a descendant of both. Where a Wakandian fantasy civilization hid just beyond the palms.‡ Where black diasporans would be greeted at the airport as long-lost offspring, like the Hawaiians do with the leis. Determined, they walked on the continent seeing only what they wanted and blamed all they didn’t like or understand on the white man. All the while ignoring that at the same moment the locals called them “white man” to their backs and faces. But on the other end of the spectrum, how much better than real Europe was this fantasy of Whiteness which Garth took for granted? The romance of castles and armor removed from the context of constant war, serfdom, and feudal lunacy. Conan barbarianism, Dungeons & Dragons alternates to plague-ridden reality. That delusion was everywhere, but it was a dreamworld that was no less absurd for its ubiquity.

“It’s not art,” I blurted out. It was a cruel thing to do, but at the moment I wasn’t responding to Garth Frierson’s taste in art, just fighting for intellectual space in this oversaturated room.

“Dog, you silly. Course it’s art. It’s the best art. Thomas Karvel, he’s the bestselling painter in America, probably in the world. See this one right here, this one?” Garth grabbed a sunset over a sandy beach with seagulls flying by. “This is Dawn at Surfside. When Thomas Karvel was creating this, they did a limited release of like twelve hundred hand-painted, signed copies. I ordered mine three months in advance, and by the next day, it was sold out. By the time the FedEx man dropped it at my door, it was already worth damn near double what I paid for it. The majority of people love it. It’s art.”

“But what if now the majority of people are dead out there, Garth? Then what good would it be?” I asked, motioning to the paintings around us.

“Shit. If that was true, what good would anything be?” It was a question we both responded to with silence, just sitting there.

I was hoping that Augustus would want to spend the night at the Creole base camp, and that maybe I could even convince him this would be a much better living arrangement for both of us—given the state of his hovel, I had high hopes for this plan. Unfortunately, I wasn’t back in my room for more than fifteen minutes before I heard an explosion of liquid violence coming from the kitchen area. There, sprawled out on the linoleum, was Augustus, heaving and clammy. A long stream of white vomit strung from his pale lips to the hard floor around him. I would have thought this reaction was due to his caloric overindulgence had we not experienced a fairly significant breakthrough at that moment.

“Cold,” Augustus said.

The creature had spoken! Making sure that Augustus hadn’t simply caught something in his overused throat, I repeated the word I thought I had heard, and he, in progressively fainter tones, said it back to me. Cold, he kept saying. It made sense that he would have knowledge of the word’s existence, having heard me use it repeatedly as I chattered my teeth. His comprehension of the word was obviously limited, though, because it was specifically not cold inside the Creole base. In fact, for the first time in days the frozen ache I’d felt all over my body had left me and I was even working up a light sweat, dressed as I was. Augustus was clearly not cold either because he was dripping with sweat as if he had a great fever and his pale pores were trying to flush it away.

“Goddamn. I think that boy is melting,” Garth offered as he