The Best of Friends Read online

  In late December, John and Ken and I hitched a ride on a Black Hawk back to Mogadishu, feeling incredibly safe in that mighty, forbidding machine. I spent Christmas Eve with the marines. As I listened to them belt out “Hark! the Herald Angels Sing,” then scale the treacherous slope of “Silent Night” under a giant spangled sky, I imagined their families back home. I pictured them baking Christmas cookies and wrapping presents, the house scented with pine and cinnamon but the presence of someone absent even more powerful. I felt I could see their reflections in the eyes of those marines as they gathered around their makeshift tree, a pole draped in camouflage netting and festooned with pictures of little girls with ponytails, boys in braces and baseball caps, sweethearts in V-neck sweaters. And it was impossible to watch that scene without thinking of my own home, the tree we hadn’t bought, the ornaments we hadn’t hung, a marriage which had once blazed bright as a Christmas star now sparking on, then off, like a worn-out strand of lights. I shook myself. How frivolous to worry about whether my relationship would survive when so many here were fighting to survive at all.

  BEFORE I KNEW it, it was New Year’s, 1993, and I was back in New York, where I logged on to my computer to discover a string of congratulatory messages, including a warm note from Bryant about the story on Muslima. I let out a deep breath. Not only was my work going well but CD had landed a job as a producer. We celebrated by buying a three-story Victorian in the suburbs, wedding cake white, with a mint green yard for the dog. It seemed both of us had everything we wanted.

  And yet. The house echoed with silence even when both of us were home. I got vertigo stepping onto the front sidewalk. I would look up at that looming structure, which suddenly seemed crooked, flawed in some invisible yet fundamental way that no amount of remodeling could fix. And once inside, in the chill front hall, I would pause and brace myself for the plunge through the outer wave of ominous quiet, knowing that I should ask questions, yet that I didn’t want to. Perhaps tomorrow he would be the man I remembered instead of a polite, reserved stranger. I told myself I loved him too much to lose him, but of course I had nothing of his worth keeping anymore, and in such willful self-deception, all I was losing was myself.

  I’d been assigned to London for a month of bureau duty that summer—an opportunity to fill in for one of the foreign correspondents who was taking a vacation. By then the silence had become a vibrating presence, building like a great cumulus wall, impossible to ignore. And as I packed my suitcase, layering plastic dry-cleaning wrappers between each fold so the clothes wouldn’t wrinkle, it felt like something inside me broke and the first drops began to fall. When the alarm went off at 4 A.M., I was shocked to see how horribly puffy and miserable I looked. I doused my face in cold water, pressed a compress against my eyes, and then caked on under-eye concealer because I was filling in on Today before leaving that night. After the show, I stopped by my office and heard the phone ringing before I unlocked the door.

  “What’s wrong with you? You looked awful.” My agent was apoplectic.

  “I’m a little under the weather. Was it obvious?”

  “Obvious!? Get over here. Now. And tell me what’s going on.”

  In the spare, cool skyscraper which houses N. S. Bienstock, I made my way back to Stu’s office, where I closed the door and gave a Cliff Notes version of my personal life. He listened patiently, and his response was sympathetic but firm.

  “Listen, I know this is rough. Marriage is tricky. You’ll figure everything out when you come home. Meantime, you have a great job, a job you’ve wanted your whole life. And if you pull another stunt like you did today, you are going to blow it. There are too many people who want to be network correspondents, who want to fill in on Today, who want your life. Now get on that plane, get over to London, and do a hell of a job.”

  Once again I boarded an American Airlines flight that left JFK at 11 P.M.. Once again I left the overhead light on and burrowed into my seat, opening a book and angling my body toward the aisle to liberate myself from any obligation to socialize. Surely there must be something I could do. And surely there would be time enough to do it when I came home.

  11

  GINGER (1992–1993)

  NO!™ I SCREAMED. “Oh God, please no.” Nad hit the brakes and the Land Rover skidded to a stop. I saw the scene in pieces—the tattered pants, the leather belt, the shriveled skin. This couldn’t be happening. In Mozambique or Angola, perhaps, and certainly in Somalia, where Sara was covering the war, for those were places of meaningless death. Not here. Sara had volunteered for such assignments. I hadn’t. She’d seen death and knew that, almost in spite of herself, she could handle it. I wanted none of it. Yet it seemed that our world here had gone crazy, that the natural cycle of life in the Kuiseb River had spun out of control. There, lying in the sand, was the latest proof. Half of a man.

  “What on earth is going on?” I was thirty-two years old, far too young to be losing my mind.

  “Oh, Ginger. I don’t know.” Nad looked at me sadly, afraid that this would push me deeper into the abyss of depression. “You stay here. I’ll go have a look.”

  I slumped down on the seat and sobbed.

  In the next two days the pieces fell into place, creating a sad, senseless answer. Though his sun-wrinkled corpse looked as if he were seventy, this man was no older than I. He had tried to walk from his village on the escarpment to the coastal town of Walvis Bay. On the advice of his elders, he’d chosen a path through the Kuiseb River where both shade and water should have been found. He’d found neither.

  He had died alone under desperate conditions. An infernal east wind had howled across the desert for a week. It was like opening the doors of a furnace, the air desiccating, the baking heat trapped by the walls of the canyon. The river was dry, yet he was eight miles away from a village with a hand-pump well. Two empty water bottles were found among his few possessions. The rest, including the other half of his body, had been dragged away by hyenas.

  Nad and I had been away for four days, but that was long enough for this drama to play out in the riverbed—one man alone against nature. If we had been there, he would have stumbled toward us, we would have run to him with a water bottle and watched as he drained it and another. We would have saved him. But we weren’t there, and now his death was on my conscience. There would be others.

  After three years of sharing the ephemeral Kuiseb River with the baboons, we knew the cycle of life well. Each year huge storm clouds would build far to the east, in the 14,000-square-kilometer catchment area. The clouds would grow bigger and bigger, consuming each other like cannibals until one mass dominated the sky. These were the lion tamers, cracking lightning, whipping thunder, and stirring emotion. Only after three days of watching them grow and change did we start to listen closely for signs that the rains had forced the river to flow.

  The first sound that the fury of these clouds had unleashed a flood was the rattling of seedpods. As the waters swept down from the highlands across the sand, they gathered speed and pieces of fallen debris in their path. Pods, tree trunks, and animal bones were pushed by headwaters in a cacophony of sound. We raced the headwaters out, running back to tease them, then racing ahead again. We swam, we laughed, we celebrated. It was the best game of the year. But this past year the rainy season had been brief, rainfall light, and river flow meager. The river had flowed for just four days. Where pools would normally have recharged seeps, it was dry. The cycle wasn’t complete. A man was dead, the baboons were running out of water, and yet it would be months before rain clouds appeared on the horizon, months before there would be another chance of a flood.

  Just as their ancestors had done for more than one hundred years, the baboons adapted to life in the desert. They ate moist foods, they rested, they avoided moving too far in the heat of the day, and then they began to die. So far the troop had lost just one member, a tiny baby we had yet to name for fear of becoming too attached to it.

  “I can’t stand this, Nad, I rea
lly can’t.”

  “Can’t stand what? What are you talking about?”

  “It is too early. There is no water and I am not going to watch them die. Not all of them, not Cleo, I can’t do it.”

  I knew he hated the thought of them suffering, too, but his advice to “just think about something else” didn’t work. The fear of watching the baboons waste away consumed me. Day and night, I couldn’t escape it. The horror of their dying haunted my dreams.

  One night we slept on the roof of the Land Rover to avoid a wave of ticks crawling on the ground below. I tossed as much as I dared and gazed up at the sky for a long time before falling asleep.

  Ginger, listen to me. I rolled over, eyes tightly closed, and listened. I knew I was dreaming, but the voice was so honest and reassuring I wanted to believe it was real.

  You don’t have to worry about us. We will be fine.

  The voice belonged to Bo, the smallest, toughest female baboon, mother of Cleo and Smudge. I felt her beside me, touching me gently on the shoulder, saying, Soon we’ll get water. Then she was gone. The dream was over but the impact remained. I woke up feeling rested and absurdly confident. The baboons would be all right. Somehow I knew they would make it.

  Two days later, in the late afternoon, the sky darkened prematurely and we followed the baboons up to the top of the canyon. I wasn’t sure what was happening, only that it was far too early for them to sleep. They mumbled excitedly as lightning flashed in the eastern sky. A tower of clouds was unleashing a mighty streak of rain, falling in sheets over one tiny speck of this vast desert. For a half hour we watched, mesmerized by the promise. Then, as suddenly as the storm arrived, it disappeared.

  The next morning, long before sunrise, we heard rocks falling and excited murmurs as the baboons scampered down from their sleeping cliff. We skipped coffee, grabbed cameras, a handful of nuts, and set off after them. Following their tracks, we crawled over rocks, rounded trees laden with pods, passed one tiny seep, and covered about eight miles quickly. “Where could they possibly be going?” was the persistent question. We turned a corner against the north side of the canyon, a place we had never been before, and climbed. Nad lifted me up over boulders. I shimmied through crevices and we found them, drinking from a huge rain puddle. The dream had come true, saved by a freak thunderstorm. I thought this pool would be big enough, deep enough to sustain them until the floods came. It turned out that Bo and I were almost right.

  Over the next six weeks the pool grew smaller. Evaporation was taking its toll, while Grin, the dominant male, took his. He always drank first. Some days he sat by the pool for hours, allowing females to groom him, and the little ones to dart in and steal a quick drink. Only when Grin left the water’s edge did the rest of the baboons drink in order of rank, males first, followed by females. After a few weeks the pool was so small that SP, the lowest-ranking female, gave up even trying. She was forced to satisfy her need for moisture by stripping bark from nearby trees.

  Years later I can still hear the gnawing of tooth on wood, the sound of desperation. With the troop spread out in a grove of acacia trees, the baboons used their teeth to cut through the bark, ripping, biting, all in the struggle for a tiny drop of water. It took hours of repeated motion, tearing through the bark, stuffing strips of wood into their mouths, and squeezing, like wads of tobacco in a baseball player’s mouth, before spitting out a solid mass of wood. It was just enough moisture to survive another day.

  By the middle of November 1992, the baboons had gone thirty days without drinking water. Thirty days under the blaring sun, thirty days of stripping bark. Then sixty days. After ninety days, they moved less than ten feet during the day, and ate at night to avoid the sun. Then Patch disappeared. She had survived ninety-five days without drinking water. When she died, the troop lost its highest-ranking female and Jesse, her first baby to ever survive, lost her mother.

  We had been living with the baboons for three years, filming their lives for half of that time, but now when I loaded film into magazines my hands shook at the thought of what might be captured. What was unfolding was almost too difficult to bear, much less film.

  When SP’s baby died after being kidnapped by Amy, we drank flat, hot champagne. Such was the horror of this baby’s short life that we celebrated her death. Within the first hour of its life, Amy had lifted the infant from SP’s arms and carried it away. Amy tenderly groomed the baby; she allowed it to suckle but she didn’t have milk, and soon the baby didn’t even have enough strength to cry. SP maintained a silent vigil at Amy’s side, watching the color drain from her infant’s face. A day later, she watched her baby die in Amy’s arms.

  Pandora, a baby when we first arrived, was now biting her own mother in the back, challenging her for a higher rank, for the chance to jump ahead in line to drink, to survive. Friends didn’t help friends in this animal world. Coalitions were made for momentary gain and then abandoned. In a battle against Mother Nature, each individual, myself included, was alone.

  Our paradise was lost and I was so depressed I could hardly get out of bed. Nad combed my matted hair, wiped the tears from my eyes, and said over and over again, “This is their history. They will survive this.” They might have survived previous droughts, but by early 1993 there wasn’t a cloud in sight.

  Back in 1989 when we’d started our project, Nad and I had vowed not to change the baboons’ world—to habituate them only by our presence. We wouldn’t give them food or water; we’d keep things utterly natural. We’d been so naïve. Now they were dying. In the back of our Land Rover, we had twenty gallons of water, the power to change this, to save them. And we didn’t. In the pursuit of science, of truth and a good story, what had we become? Were we monsters? I hated Nad because he wasn’t as weak as I was. He clung to the belief that we were right not to alter the natural order, and because I needed to believe, I clung to him. He held firm, observing behavior, making notes, gathering data, staying rooted in what was controllable. I couldn’t. I questioned everything. Did I love him or did I just need him in this place? I questioned my morality, but most of all, I questioned my sanity.

  We drove back and forth from the riverbed to the research station twenty miles away, spending days at the station looking for mail and listening to the radio, hoping for news from Sara and of rains inland. Neither came. Nad sat in a dark office surrounded by research papers and academic books, using a pencil stub to write his thesis. I hardly left our tiny trailer. I couldn’t sleep, couldn’t focus. I wasn’t sure if I felt worse when I was with the baboons or away from them.

  A week later we returned to a scene of utter disaster. Nad found Grey’s dead body. Her broken finger that had been her signature in the sand stuck out from the decaying bones. Later we found Bo’s body in the middle of the riverbed, as if she had fallen over in her tracks while trying to keep up with the others. I wondered if Cleo and Smudge had stayed with her, tried to lift her, willing her to walk with them. Did Oke, her four-month-old infant, cry to be nursed? When did the three of them decide that to survive themselves they would have to abandon her? If we had been there, we might have been able to save Bo and Grey. But would we have made that choice? I don’t know. I only know that with Pandora we tried.

  It was late that same night and we’d just laid out our sleeping bags when a tiny figure rounded the canyon wall. It was Pandora. She stumbled like a drunk and sat down beside us. Her eyes were swollen shut and she was so thin we could count her ribs.

  “Here, darlin’,” I said as I placed a cup of water on the sand for her. To hell with science. To hell with research. And my scientist boyfriend didn’t argue. She drained it and another and quickly another. We gave her an orange and watched as she held it in her hand, using her front teeth to gingerly peel back the skin before devouring the flesh. Then she stood and slowly climbed up the cliff, perching on a ledge just over our sleeping bags. Tonight we were her troop.

  For the next three days we gave her water and oranges so that she’d have enoug
h strength to keep up with the others. If she could just hold on another few days, storm clouds were building. We watched them grow, thinking each day that this would be the day the floodwaters came down. But the river remained dry, and no matter how much water we gave her, Pandora became slower, weaker, weaving like a boxer too broken to continue the fight.

  “Oh, my girl. What has happened to you?” Pandora had nearly fallen off the cliff. Her eyes were still puffy, almost swollen shut, but now green slime was running out of her nose and mouth. She stumbled past me, wiping her face with her arm and then tentatively licking it. It looked awful but it was moist. I chased after her with water and oranges. She stumbled on, as if she couldn’t see me.

  I fell to the ground, wondering what had happened to me. Four years before, I had come to this desert knowing it was a place where I would heal. I’d willed the desert to sweep away the pains of the past and restore my faith in my talents and my future. But on that day, I knew the desert had won. It had destroyed me as surely as it had destroyed our baboons.

  Nad stooped down beside me and brushed the hair out of my face. “Gin, come on. We need to get back to the station tonight. You’ll see them again tomorrow.” I couldn’t speak. Limp as a rag doll, I draped my arms over his shoulders and tucked my head in the curve of his neck. He had to carry me back to the Land Rover.

  IF ONLY THERE were a letter, I prayed. I needed news of a celebration—a birth, a marriage, a party, even a hangover. I needed to be reminded that there was a world beyond this.

  Mail was precious in the desert. Many times it had taken months for letters to reach us; sometimes they never arrived. But that day, there was a letter. News from home, something I needed as surely as the baboons needed water.

  I lay down on a mattress under a huge acacia tree and unfolded the letter slowly, wanting to savor the moment. It was short, a single page. I read it once. And read it again. The third time I read it, I was crying. Many of the words were soft and gentle, but I only remembered one—divorce. As in, Sara and I are getting a divorce. And the letter was from Sara’s husband. I felt sick. I simply could not believe it. Why? Where was Sara? Why hadn’t she written to tell me? What the hell was going on?