They changed clothes and walked to a raised viewing platform which looked over the fence, into a dry river bed inside the park.  A uniformed waiter brought chardonnay for her and a gin martini for Rob.  Like the people at the desk and the maids pushing carts, the waiters and bartender were black; all the guests were white.  It was accepted, expected, but still strange.  Rob surveyed the river bed through binoculars.  “Nothing,” he said, put them down, and smiled at her.  “Howzit?” he asked, a phrase they heard in Cape Town.  How is it, how are you, how are we.

    “Fine,” Elizabeth answered.  “It’s fine.”  The wine was good, the seats were comfortable, the sun was fading.  Still she kept her sunglasses on, and Rob put his back on too.  They were their masks, their shields.  She saw herself reflected in his glasses, her blonde hair bright.  In the glasses the streaks of gray didn’t show.  She looked out to the riverbed, where quiet animals could possibly be watching them.   From the corner of her eye she caught a movement, but it was a waiter, scanning the tables.

---

    Rob used to come into the bookstore in Portland where she worked.  Over coffee, she told him that she’d like to own her own shop someday.  After they married, Rob financed her used bookshop, which she’d renamed “The Literary Lion.” 

    One particular image from their honeymoon trip often occurred to her.  It was the view of a small Spanish town from the courtyard window of an ancient castle converted into a hotel where they spent the night.  The window was long and tall, with no casement or glass, and through it the Spanish town shone in late-afternoon sun in colors of brown and gold, a lion’s colors.  She lost herself staring, feeling her mind go soft and blank with joy; it seemed as if she was swimming in beauty, as if she could reach through the golden air and touch beauty. 

There was movement in the brush beyond the dry river bed:  impalas, the white stripes of their flanks moving through the bushes.  Rob gave her the binoculars and she focused in on one lifting its head and looking in her direction.  She thought of her mother’s eyes:  they just appeared before her, looking at her.  Her mother had been young once, had been beautiful and full of hope.  Her mother had thought her life would go on forever, that there would always be another chance.  Now she was gone, it was all over, and her daughter’s life went on, lived at the moment under the skies of another continent, under the Southern Cross. She would love to be here, Elizabeth thought.  Or anywhere, in the sunlight, with people she loved, with air to breathe.  With a day to enjoy.  In the fading light Robert took his sunglasses off and reached for her hand to hold.  They rested there, a man and a woman motionless holding hands, until the pounding of drums announced dinner. 

Maybe it was something she ate.  God knows she’d never eaten ostrich, springbok or crocodile before, but there they were, spread out buffet-style on tables before her.  A young man wearing traditional dress, animal skin loincloth and fur on his calves and forearms, with bare dark chest gleaming in the firelight, pointed out the dishes and named them for her, his teeth startling white as he smiled.  She filled her plate with small portions of each and sat at their table close to the fire flickering in a pit.  That night as she lay in bed her thoughts were exaggerated and restless.  Perhaps it was the extra glass of wine, or the malaria pills, taken the last three nights—it was probably the malaria pills.  She lay half-awake for hours, nerves jumping and brain filled with African visions.  Dark faces, breaking open in smiles, a softness to them here that she didn’t see at home, a welcome.  The faces were joyful, in spite of the poverty all around; a reaction to the sun, to the ocean, to the hope of the new country.  An unfamiliar energy, a bursting African rhythm seemed to push the images up from her subconscious.  In her agitated state of mind when she thought of the faces it was as if she could see deeply into them, see past personality to the real person, the quick, the marrow.  The man in the hut, his dark eyes gleaming as he handed her the mask, whispering something about ancestors—yes, she was sure that’s what he’d said.  Ancestors.  He must have been a magic man, a sangoma, and he’d cast a spell on her.  By buying the mask she’d opened herself to the desires of her ancestors, or someone’s ancestors, those long gone, wanting to live again through her.  

The curtain was open a crack, and in the faint light coming in she saw something small and dark on the opposite wall.  Just a shadow, she thought, until it moved suddenly, and she knew it was a lizard.  She pulled the sheet over her head.  Her blood was the beat of the drums, her feet were lizards, and her heart was the spider, moving its legs delicately on its web, hungry. 
She’d met Caleb during jury duty.  The Grand Jury, which met four times during the past year.  They sat together at the back of the room, exchanging whispered comments on the sordid dramas which unfolded before them like live soap opera.  He wore flannel shirts, jeans and muddy boots to jury duty.   A guy who always needed a haircut and a shave, but looked good anyway, looked comfortable.  He lived on a small farm in the country where he grew organic foods, and other, less-legal things.  He took a great interest in the details of a marijuana hoist the police described.  “Keep it small,” he’d confided in her during break.  “That’s the key, I think.  Just enough for myself.  And a friend or two, of course.”  He was amazed when Elizabeth told him she’d made it through college without ever trying marijuana.  “That’s a crime,” he said.  “An absolute crime.”  He’d said she must come out to the farm sometime to give it a try. 

When the sky was beginning to turn light and she was finally drifting off to sleep Elizabeth dreamed a huge structure made of hammered metal, painted in bright colors of green and pink, catching the light and glittering, being wheeled somewhere by laughing dark-skinned men.  In her half-sleep she knew it was called the God of Daylight and Sunshine.
    In the real sunshine, the next morning, she walked by herself on the path to the main building.  Robert was still shaving.  She heard movement and chattering above her, and looked up to see monkeys—two, three, more—in the trees above her head, running along the branches like squirrels.  They made the branches dip and shake as if in a breeze. 
    The country of South Africa was a huge mystery to her, its squalid miles of tin shacks leaning together in the dust, donkeys pulling wrecked cars on flat wagons on the freeway, not far from elegant houses, Cape Dutch style with their stucco curlicues; sweeping wineries, and estates behind high fences topped with electric wire.  Everything was jumbled together in this country.  Here they were protected by sliding electronic gates from the locals, and electrified fences from the animals.
    She took a seat in the restaurant, which like the lobby was open to the morning.  The light was strong through the leaves, broken into zebra-like patterns.  Large green fruit clustered where branches met the trunks of trees.  Elizabeth still felt the force of her sleepless night and her dreams, heightening everything she saw.  She sipped the strong coffee.  Sleeplessness and disorientation made her distrust her perceptions, as if she were high.  The world seemed to shift in ways she couldn’t predict, tilting dangerously. 

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