Free Leaving Before the Rains Come by Alexandra Fuller Page B

know, because she wasn’t the one whose identity was in question.
    I said, “Not anymore. Not especially.”

    After the reading, I found my way up to the rooftop of my hotel and lay shoeless on a sun lounger until midnight. High, thin clouds were misted pink with city lights. Behind them, the stars were muted in a moonless sky (the moon—waning crescent—would be rising late). I knew without being able to see them that a few thousand feet up, there would be star-reading birds migrating north out of this heat toward our unrolling Wyoming mountain summer: owls, thrushes, orioles, sparrows. I knew that for some birds, migration is almost all they do, nonstop, hundreds of miles north, hundreds of miles south, back and forth, a ceaseless rustle of wings, years shaved off their wild lives with all the effort of near perpetual motion.
    Once, twenty-five years ago, camping near a waterfall on the Zambian border with Zaire, I had caught a glimpse of a distant flock of birds traveling at night against a full moon, fleeting black cut-out shapes, intent on destination. Often since then, I’ve searched the night sky, and although I have caught the brief twist of bats flitting through currents of insects, I have never again seen that nighttime miracle of birds, secretly stitching together south and north with their hunger, with their collective, insistent, mounting realization of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
    “I am an African,” I said aloud to myself now. It sounded ridiculous. To be honest, I had thought it sounded faintly ridiculous even when Thabo Mbeki had said it, like P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster assessing Shakespeare: “Sounds well, but doesn’t mean anything.” I knew I would never apply the label of African to myself again, and not only because it wasn’t strictly correct (how can a person belong to a whole continent?), but also because it was something I would be called upon to defend endlessly. So, as long as the question continued to be asked, I would likely continue to respond as I had tonight: “Not anymore. Not especially.” And in any case, what life had taught me is that where we come from is a point—not the starting point, not the defining point—just a point. It’s where we are that really counts.

MARRIAGE ADVICE FROM THE END OF THE WORLD
    T he next day, I caught the plane back from Texas to Wyoming, and two weeks later, I fell ill. I lay in bed with a fever, the windows thrown open, our brown velvet curtains billowing in an early June breeze. The fever evolved into a cough. The cough evolved into something that became all I was. I coughed until I lost my voice. I coughed until I felt as if my ribs might disconnect from my spine. I coughed until I was the sum of my biology. By night, I sat with my back against the cool tile of the bathroom, hot water running into clouds of steam, and I coughed until I was winded. I grew exhausted. Charlie grew exhausted too. Not only from being up nights listening to me but also from some nameless, deeper, more worrying weariness.
    Then one late morning, in the middle of the illness—proving unseemly long—Charlie walked into our bedroom with his latest calculation of our finances and abruptly announced, “If something doesn’t happen soon we’re going to lose the house.” In my drained, mildly hallucinatory state, I pictured the house lifting off its foundation and splintering to pieces in the sky. I pictured Carl Fredricksen, the retired balloon salesman from the movie
Up,
flying our house to Paradise Falls (or, more likely, Idaho Falls, Sioux Falls, Twin Falls). I pictured us coming home from the children’s school one day and finding the house gone, the land reforested and wild-encroached.
    I contemplated Charlie’s profile, gray and shadowy in the darkened room. I wanted to ask him, “If you and I are not this house, then who are we?” But I said nothing partly because I didn’t have the spare breath, and partly because I knew