Happy Halloween

Halloween 2007 – Bahir Dar, Ethiopia

And what could a child know of the darkness of God's plan? Or how
flesh is so frail it is hardly more than a dream.
-From Suttree, by Cormac McCarthy

I was getting feeling as of hauntedness or spectrality when I
realized it was Halloween. Of course the day is not marked in this
part of the world, but maybe I carry its annual occurrence within me
by dint of long programming, a dozen odd evenings spent knocking on
genteel doors, a gaudy lunatic among many. There is something about
Lake Tana that gives me the creeps. Out of place that there should be
a lake vast enough to suggest the curvature of the earth on its
horizon in the middle of the Ethiopian highlands. Its muddiness also
gives it the look of a river suddenly stilled and septic, or one of
those ghastly gravelbedded ponds you see in latterday housing
developments. Not just that general otherworldliness, but much
specific strangeness as well. The schoolchildren who on seeing a white
face will dare each other to approach and turn a sudden beggar's
trick; real beggars looking like Halloween caricatures of squalor and
maimed depravity. The fact of having been here before, at this precise
hotel in this unlikely faraway place a quarter of a decade ago in a
different season with a different companion and with different
expectations. I am thinking back, to salvage some part of myself as I
was then...what was I exactly?

It is more than fitting that the staff should fail to recognize me,
but that they know how to deal easily and congenially with my kind--we
replaceable transients, often with no inkling of our own
expendability, fungible dollar-wielders with an unaccountable and
inflated notion of self, pretenders to the throne of wholeness moving
flotsamlike through these wastes where (as everywhere) what is human
is not whole; and that I should have no more than a dim and
tendentious recognition of any of the staff, though I might recognize
a certain gargantuan fig leaning into the lake, and the grim
grottolike bedrooms, and that carbuncular shower where on that long
ago and so immediate occasion my companion stood shivering and crying under the cold stream and rinsed herself of the city's human waste in which she had stood up to her neck after a misstep in the dark. What else in the way of specific hauntedness? The buzzards this morning glimpsed circling in the blinding infinite overhead, plumage flashing with black brightness as they wheeled on their stacked isobars of updraft. The cackling of other birds in the canopy over my tent, one of them with a mocking chimp's howl. The dark and deathly beauty of the grounds with their thousands of man-high irises swaying like muted red and yellow flames; beds of bloodshot growth like prehistoric radicchios; papayas and palms twisting and shooting to escape occlusion by the canopies of giant overspreading figs--a riot of green carrying the taint of humus and rot, a walk among which suggests all the slavering predatory forms of an original forest, as if there were a very thin line between tended grounds and a cemetery featuring the friable ruins of what you would never know had ever been a hotel, everything from concrete foundation to sapling's bark to human expression reticulate with the spreading chaos that will claim us all. After which Lake Tana will still be there, ineffably lapping at the shore where stand its new harvest of uneasy beholders. On some Halloween, perhaps, long hence, when we shall have passed and left the way open for new tracks to be made for whatever purpose across these spectral highlands and down into the searing pan below. Happy Halloween.