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ROOM 22(2)

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THE WILDLIFE OF ASPEN

At the hotel, I was so stunned when the clerk handed me my room card that I failed to ask for a different one before he moved on to the next guest. I took the elevator up and walked directly to the door. Two metal squares read 22 next to a patch of adhesive where the third had hung. I swiped and stepped inside, and stood in the gloom of drawn blinds outlined by the city’s faint electric effusion.

Room 22(2) had been my home for five months during my trip here over a decade ago, when I decided to become a war reporter. In the French style, the second floor was two stories up from the ground level—“too high to jump and yet too close to the violence in the streets to feel safe,” I joked with friends. The nation was Zaire back then, for a few weeks after my arrival, before Laurent-Désiré Kabila marched out of the east and into Kinshasa with a ragtag army of Congolese and battle-hardened Rwandan Tutsis, set up his government in the hotel’s top floors, and rolled back the country’s name to Congo.

Evenings, when I went downstairs to see what was on the menu, men with gold glasses, bejeweled rings, and suits more expensive than everything I owned combined sometimes invited me to their tables. For lack of an Eastern European weapons dealer, they had me sit with them. “Un journaliste,” they said and laughed. “You’ve come to the Congo at the right time, my friend.” Other evenings, they left me alone, as they were already seated with more authentic figures—white men with narrow faces, crooked, tightly shaved jaws, and gazes that were cold, unwavering, and predatory.

In my room, I awakened each sunrise to an avocado on my windowsill. I’d received it one afternoon, during a long power outage when I was trying to finish an article before my laptop battery died. Someone had banged on the door, and when I opened it, a paratrooperish man exuding the etheric cloud of prolonged inebriation said he’d knocked on the wrong one but then, in a low voice, warned me not to write offensive nonsense, before peeling the hand grenade off his vest with an extravagant gesture of bounty—as if he were the tree of life—and handing it to me.

“You never know,” he told me and laughed, showing a broken tooth.

A few months later, the embers of the First Congo War—which had rippled out from the Rwandan Genocide—reignited in the east, fracturing the country and precipitating the Second Congo War: a continuation of one long bloodletting in the eyes of many Congolese. As its massacres began, I left the hotel to get a closer look at a despairing people, to interview warlords, the hollow-faced human rights activists and UN inspectors tasked with body counts, and the mai-mai militiamen doused in the holy oils that made both them and their enemies believe they were bulletproof.

In the years since the Congo wars, I worked in Afghanistan, Somalia, Colombia, and Iraq before moving to Brooklyn, where I fell into a slump, not answering messages, lying in bed all day reading and leaving my sublet only for groceries.

One night, a friend passing through the city convinced me to meet her for dinner with the promise of a journalistic scoop. She told me that the US had allocated millions to protect the Congo rainforest and that corporate conservation organizations, the majority of which had failed to get a foothold there during both Mobutu’s dictatorship and the war, had, in the decade since, been jockeying for the areas of highest biodiversity, often doing harm to local social structures and wasting as many resources competing with each other as they used for conservation.

The timing was fortuitous, since I was living off credit cards. The next day, I e-mailed a pitch to Mother Jones—“Big Conservation’s Scramble for Africa”—and a week later, I flew to Aspen, Colorado, for a conference that was bringing together organizations and donors to discuss the Congo’s future.

The lodge where I’d booked a room—the cheapest I could find—had an unpainted wood exterior and interior that gave it a look less rustic than outmoded. A stout woman with a yellow perm checked me in and then put a placemat-sized map in front of me.

“You can walk along the river here,” she told me, sliding her finger along a blue line. “It’s a nice trail, though sometimes people run into mountain lions on it. But if you’re looking for cougars, I would suggest these three bars near the lifts.”

“Pardon me,” I said. “I’m not sure I understand.”

“Come on. You’re a handsome young man who’s checked in alone, and most of the guys who come here try out the cougar bars. Aspen has some of the richest cougars in the country—the ex-trophy wives of millionaires and billionaires.” She made a vague motion to her face and chest. “Which means the best doctors and the hottest cougars.”

I thanked her, and after a light dinner at a nearby restaurant, I went for a jog along the fragrant hedges of high-summer Aspen. On all sides, summits curtailed the night sky, cradling the few, vivid stars. The purity and thinness of the mountain air made the insides of my lungs feel pleasantly scraped. There was a slight altitude-induced tightness at the back of my neck, and a stinging each time I took a breath, but though I was tired, when I returned to my bed, I couldn’t sleep.

I got up and dressed without the light, since I hoped the dark might lull me back to bed, but my brain glowed with the thought of a previously unimagined romantic connection after so many months without even going on a date—and then I was unplugging my phone and stepping out.

The bar was an elegant fusion of oaken frontier virtue and classic speakeasy leather, though the only thing smoky about the place was its lack of visibility. The designer must have specialized in lighting for a certain kind of face. The ambience was dusky and smoothing, like a social media filter for everything after midlife.

There were no mirrors. Draped and veiled in fashionable shadows, the women were each other’s mirrors. And yet the eye needs a fraction of a second to judge an artificial smile. Real ones fluctuate, hesitate, an entire language in how they linger. These were fairy tale smiles, waiting beneath ice.

At the table nearest me, a woman’s pale-violet gown cleaved to precise curves, and she turned, advertising a countenance as smooth as a plaque.

Another woman, this one my age and with blond dreads like hawsers, sat across from her.

“Looking for someone?” she asked.

“I’m in town for a conference. I thought I’d have a drink before bed.”

She slapped the seat next to her. “Join us. I’m here for it too.”

The older woman moved her lips faintly, some disappointment showing in her eyes, and then stood and crossed the bar.

“She’s saying hi to a friend,” the dreadlocked woman told me. “Oh, I’m Terra.”

“Terra Sylvan-Gaia?”

“Shit. My reputation precedes me.”

“I’ve read about your work,” I said but refrained from adding that I’d expected someone closer to Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey’s generation. It was too soon to discuss my research, so I made small talk, asking how much time she’d spent in Aspen.

“A fair bit. My aunt lives here. I’ve been catching up with her.” She lifted her jaw in the direction of the woman who’d left the table.

Terra must have read something in my expression, since she added, “Cougars run in the family, but that’s because beauty and money do, though never enough. It’s hard to give up any sort of power, and since beautiful women are weak on shelf life and those in my family are smart enough to know it, we’re strong on prenuptials.”

I felt slightly taken aback, uninformed and parochial in comparison to her matter-of-fact assessment of the scene around us: the young men arriving alone in jeans and tight T-shirts, flaunting gym-fit biceps, and soon downing the single malt whiskeys that their straight-backed dames ordered with a regal lift of a finger.

I did my best to hide my discomfort, since Terra was one of the people I hoped to interview. I’d learned about her from articles—though not when she’d confectioned her name or who she’d been before—and I was uncertain as to her allegiance with the big organizations that were carving the Congo into fiefdoms. I knew only that she lived among a rare gorilla species, a largely forgotten cousin to the famed mountain gorilla, in the war-torn east.

As we got to talking about her work and its ever-elusive funding, she made it instantly clear—“off the record,” she said, when I told her I was a journalist—that she was no friend to the big organizations. She was here in a last-ditch effort to win over a certain former four-star general and possible future presidential candidate who would be in attendance, since he was a major donor and adviser to nature foundations.

She then began talking about working overseas and the ravages of being eternally single.

“Men like the idea of me,” she said.

“I know exactly what you mean, but with women.”

She studied my face for a moment.

“You don’t seem like a journalist to me.”

“Why’s that?”

“Too thoughtful. There’s too much emotion under the surface. You’re a cogitator if I’ve ever seen one—a Pisces, I bet …”

I hated astrology and mystical quackery, and was considering how to respond when she asked, “What drives you?”

“I guess … I guess it’s a manic sense of responsibility, the idea that—”

“I knew it,” she said. “We’re the casualties of a generation of bleeding heart liberal parents.”

She wasn’t wrong, and I told her how my mother had raised me to be aware of every injustice (racism, imperialism, the war on drugs, the death penalty, nuclear armament, the abuses of crony capitalism).

“Are you on medication?” she asked.

“No, but I do microdose with lithium,” I confessed, “though that’s a mineral. Really, it should be in all multivitamins.”

“Is it prescribed?”

“I get it on Amazon. I read an article about it in the New York Times.”

“And it works?”

“It’s hard to say. I started it at the same time as vitamin D megadoses.”

“Vitamin D is fucking manna. Every person in America should be mainlining it!”

I nodded, blanking briefly as I wondered what her standards for a thoughtful man were, but then she realized that I hadn’t mentioned my name. I told her and she said, “Béchard? Is that French Canadian?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m half.”

“Oh. What a tease. I wish I were free. J’aime les Québécois. They’re so earthy, so bodily. My family used to go on summer vacations up there. We had a little beach place in the Gaspé, on the water. My father would tell me how much he loved the peasant exuberance of the French Canadians and the joie de vivre despite the poverty. He always talked about those dark French Canadian beauties. He was a total pig beneath his WASP trappings, but I loved him. Anyway, I was up in Montréal for a conference recently, and, man, c’était le fun! I really hope your American side hasn’t screwed you up.”

“I hope not too,” I said, not sure if I should be offended or flattered, and certain that I’d been screwed up from all sides: collaboration on a grand scale.

Maybe she sensed my discomfort or lack of words, because she circled back to the subject of responsibility. I was feeling guarded now, exposed when I was supposed to be the one doing the exposé, and I wanted to reinvest myself with journalistic restraint. So I listened to her talk about her drive to do something for the world, the innocence and kindness of gorillas, their purity, and how protecting them alleviated her perpetual sense of guilt.

I sympathized. Sometimes, like tonight, by going to a cougar bar, I did things to defy my sense of moral obligation—though also to step out of my life, into a circumstance where my self might become so unfamiliar that I could briefly perceive it.

Terra stood and picked up her corduroy jacket and purse.

“Normally,” she said, “I’d invite you back to my hotel, but I’m saving my eligibility for the general. It would be weird to disengage tomorrow so that I can seduce him.”

“I can see how that could be problematic,” I replied.

As soon as she left, her aunt, Michaela, returned and sat with me. The stillness of her face made it appear carefully balanced as it tilted toward me on her long neck. She’d been a choreographer and was now an art collector. She spoke softly, intelligently. We forget how much we hear words simply from facial expressions. I moved closer, inclining my ear toward her, and we remained like that, in murmured conversation, until the bar closed, and we said good night.

The next day, I switched to the hotel hosting the conference to take advantage of the attendee rate. The inaugural event was just starting, and the hall seemed to proclaim nature’s salvation, its windows built to frame the views and catch the refracted softness of mountain light.

Everyone was murmuring about the general, and when the lean, gray-haired man entered, Terra was already at his side, her dreadlocks hidden in a white turban that made the blues and whites of her eyes shine in her tanned face. She displayed her freckled cleavage in a long green dress, as if nature had cleverly sent a white dryad to steer the general toward the deliverance of black people’s forests.

He took the stage and in the gruff voice of leadership, worldliness, and pragmatism painted the future of conservation with a watery mix of magniloquence and corporate euphemism. The twenty-minute talk boiled down to saving the rainforests and their species, which he compared to renaissance art, from the hoi polloi who want to cut down or fry up everything, but how, alas, the saving could be done only with the help of the hoi polloi, by educating them, by brotherhood, etc.

Terra was waiting as he descended, and with his sylph at his side, he took questions, the crowd turning around them—a great Charybdis of networking. Eventually, conferees broke into groups that, from their postures, suggested the animals they hoped to protect: a sloth, a skulk, a bloat at the buffet; a troop and pandemonium at the wine bar; a bask, a rout, a zeal, all near the high windows, admiring a pink sunset.

As I loitered, the talk seemed perfunctory—who was on the ground, doing what. The conferees spoke in appropriated oppression (slaving away at a project, shackled to their desks) but as soon as they learned I was a journalist, they became wary or excused themselves.

One man wandered between flock and busyness with an air of exile. As if he’d acquired a skin irritation in some tropical redoubt, or simply a mosquito bite, he kept scratching his back, going about with his elbow lifted like a dorsal fin.

I intercepted him. His eyes were brown—soft, intelligent, a little shut down, as if he expected to be made fun of.

“A journalist!” he said. “I shouldn’t be seen talking to you, but I shouldn’t even be here. I booked this conference the week before I was laid off. Funding cuts. The eternal funding cuts that target the dissenters.”

I knew I’d found my man and barely had to prompt.

“Nature conservation is bullshit,” he told me. “The reality is we’re consigned to offices and our relationship to the field is that of excursionists on weekend outings. I’m serious. We’re disconnected. That’s why people can’t out someone like you—”

“Pardon me?”

“Someone like Hew,” he repeated in a whisper, though hundreds of voices clamored in the hall. “H-E-W. It’s the name no one’s saying but everyone’s thinking.”

“I haven’t heard of him.”

“He’s the node in the jungle they plug their machine into. Without him, the lights don’t turn on. No grand successes to brag about. No pretty maps of new parkland. No photos of dashing white men in khaki with smiling Pygmies. That’s what this conference is really about—the illusion of achievement in order to raise money. Terra is surrounded by enemies. She’s trying to save herself from Hew.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

“What you need to get is that the real cannibals in the jungle are the big Western organizations. They chase donor cash, and those who get it consume the projects of those who don’t. Everyone here is a competitor, but they’re forced to put on good faces and spout salvationist doctrine. Now, Terra, she’s the real deal. It’s her work that’s about to be devoured. She used to be a typical tree hugger—”

“Aren’t all conservationists tree huggers?”

“Hardly. We live and breathe realpolitik. It’s like believing in democracy and human rights but having to do business with China.”

“Or other countries believing in democracy and human rights but having to do business with the US.”

“Point taken. Anyway, Terra is a little on the crunchy woo-woo mystical side of things, but she does phenomenal work. She goes native at quantum speeds. Believes in their values. Participates in their ceremonies. Holds and kisses the babies. None of it’s for show. She’s been living out there for a decade, trying to generate support for the eastern lowland gorilla, but it never caught on as a species. It had a bad name and wasn’t sexy. It lacked the primal, hippie shagginess of the mountain gorillas.”

He was animated now, rubbing his knuckles against his palm, as if to purée the information he was conveying, afraid I’d fail to digest it.

“Now imagine this. The big organizations don’t want to support her because her style of conservation is all local initiative and doesn’t show up on the map in the form of parks, which the big organizations need to brag about to raise money. That’s when Hew gets involved. Richmond Hew. Look him up. He’s been in the Congo thirty years, even during the war. He knows the gears of power and if the big organizations fill his coffers, he’ll come in like a conqueror, throw around a lot of cash, get locals to sign conservation agreements, and then kick them off the land. He’ll destroy everything she’s built.”

Other attendees were glancing over at us now, a few gesturing with concern.

“Just talking to you like this,” he said and blinked a few times, nervously, as if to calm a facial spasm, “it’s going to ruin me. Conservation is the mafia. I’ll never work again. But fuck it—this is my conscience speaking. I got into the game for good reasons, and it has poisoned me. So this is the last thing I’ll tell you. Hew is dangerous. I mean, really, really dangerous. People gossip about him. Fucked up stories make their way out. Murder. Rape. Some stuff to do with little girls. But we keep throwing money at him.”

“Would you be willing to go on the record with any of this?” I asked.

“No. I don’t know. Maybe. Tell me your name. I’ll find you online.”

As soon as I handed him my card, he hurried off, in the direction of the bathrooms, and I drifted from gaggle to parade—from ambush to leap to charm—without luck. Then the buffet was carted off and the hall emptied, and the building was silent but for the distant hard shoes of a staff person closing up for the night.

A few hours later, after a long session researching Hew and gorillas online, I headed to the hotel spa to use the sauna.

The hallway was softly lit, creating a nocturnal ambiance, and in the distance I recognized Terra, walking barefoot along the tan carpet, her dress disheveled and her dreadlocks loose.

“How’s the general?” I asked.

“He took an Ambien, I did a line. We had fun, but we weren’t in the same groove. I’ll reclaim him in the morning.”

As she sighed, her bloodshot eyes looked me up and down, as if inspecting a freshly painted post.

“How’s the prospecting going?” she asked.

“Not bad. I was actually wondering if you would talk to me about Richmond Hew.”

“Of course I’ll talk to you about Hew.” She lifted her arm as if declaring her words on stage. “Anything you want to know. Gun running. Diamond smuggling. He’s tied up in everything. The guy is a warlord. He’s about to ruin my fucking life. The Congolese love me and they tell me his secrets. He fucks little girls. He’s murdered people. He’ll do anything to stay in power. You should talk to Thomas Oméga tomorrow. He’s the pastor of the Congo’s president and he’s here. Rumors have it he’s next in line for a sinecure as the minister of the environment.”

She was wearing a small pouch on a string around her neck and dipped her fingers into it.

“Here,” she said, “chew this.”

The dried leaves crackled in my mouth. They were spicy. My lips and tongue felt as if they were buzzing. I had the impression that my face was one of those surrealist portraits of a face composed of other objects, flowers or vegetables—in my case, bees.

“What is that?” I asked.

“Something the gorillas love. I call it ‘gorilla love.’”

My throat was beginning to itch, and I considered asking if she had an EpiPen but didn’t want to come across as dramatic. The tingling spread down along my neck and chest, and suddenly I had an erection.

I was afraid that she would notice, but a look of exhaustion had come over her. Her high was ending and she was crashing. She took a few heavy steps to an upholstered bench in a recess, and sat.

“Are you okay?” I asked, the itching in my throat increasingly manageable.

“I’m great,” she said and smiled. She placed her hand on her knee and slid it along the inside of her thigh, drawing back her dress and showing white panties.

Then she closed her eyes and her head dropped back against the wall, and she was asleep.

I turned hesitantly and, hobbling ever so slightly, made my way to my suite.

Two weeks later, by the time I stepped into the familiarity of room 22(2), Oméga was my lone contact, since the embittered conservationist had failed to write, and, a few days after Aspen, Terra had returned to her site in the eastern Congo only to vanish on a dirt road near Butembo. Her 4Runner was found overturned in a ditch, riddled by bullets, and she, her supplies, and her driver were gone.