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ANOTHER KIND OF MADNESS

They came around the tip of Paté Island. The coastal channel gave way and she felt the rhythm of the sea begin. Ndiya tasted salt on her lips. Trade winds filled the sails and the boat lunged. Shame slept. After midnight, the clouds parted revealing diamonds, a milk of stars. Ndiya had checked the map. She figured six more hours, Kiwayu was midway between Lamu and Ras Kamboni. “At the coast,” the captain had confided to her, smiling and with a motion of his hands as if releasing invisible doves, “the border doesn’t exist at all.”

Malik had said something like that, “Take a dhow, go to Kiwayu, there are no borders there, you’ll find, between the sea and the sky. You always feel like you’re gliding.”

The mate had unrolled a mattress across the mangrove slats in the open boat. Ndiya watched Shame sleep under starlight. The open sea woke him. He sat up and she leaned against him, thinking. That thing about gliding. Malik must have meant during the daytime. The waves were soft and black to the east, the border was very clear. At the horizon, the stars turned red before, all at once, they ceased. Something about that horizon, something in the ceasing made her say,

–You know we have to go back.

Ndiya felt his head nod. The bandage on Shame’s arm against the dark, like exposed bone.

–How far?

–I mean all the way back.

–Chicago?

–No, I mean farther than that.