This story originally printed in the Spring 2024 (Carnation) Issue of the Portland Tennis Courterly
“Excerpt from an International Crime Novel with a Tennis Subplot”
By Jay Boss Rubin
When I came to, my vision was still cloudy from the chemicals that had been sprayed in my face. I tried not to panic. You trust your intuition more than your eyesight, I reminded myself. On the tennis court, I use to hit volleys without looking anywhere near the ball. My immediate preoccupation wasn’t visual. As usual, it was linguistic. I knew I was being held ransom, but I didn’t know what to call the thing I was being held in. While I waited for my vision to return, I reached out with my fingertips and felt for clues. Matofali. The bricks surrounding me were damp, almost clammy, as if they’d been rubbed with something. Instead of meeting at right angles, they curved around in a circle. Slowly, I steadied myself and got to my feet. I craned my head back and, over the course of what felt like several minutes, I detected starlight. There was an opening at the top.
Was I in a shed? A cell? Maybe it was more like a shell? The word shell reminded me of a riddle I learned back when I was an introductory Swahili student: nyumba yangu haina mlango. My house has no door. That’s what I would call it: yai. I was being held inside an egg.
I banged with my fists but the walls of the eggshell refused to crack. I tried shimmying up the shell’s convex sides but they were too slick with albumen. Defeated, I lay down with my back against the packed sand and extended my legs upward. Blood rushed to my head and I thought of the riddle again. In East Africa, riddles were used to educate children and keep them occupied while their mothers cooked dinner. But the egg was also bound up with that terrible Western riddle. Gazing out through the opening, I felt the old conundrum of causality creeping up—the original problem I had hoped to dodge, or defuse, with knowledge gained in Tanzania. What came first, the chicken or the house with no door?
Confusion wasn’t the right word for it. It was more like an anxious inner monologue: A, B, A, B; cause, effect; chicken, egg. English poked and prodded. Every thought split into its constituent components, positive and negative, before and after. Neither side ever won. The score always added up to zero. Swahili provided a sweeter, more sociable soundtrack—but it hadn’t succeeded in drowning out that other voice in my head.
Deep in the night, transfixed by the stars, I recalled an image that had nothing to do with the criminal case that had brought me back to Tanzania on short notice and nothing to do with Swahili. And yet, it had everything to do with learning another way of being. It was a sign posted at the private athletic facility where, decades earlier, I first recognized my intuition on the tennis court. THERE ARE WALLS BEHIND THESE CURTAINS, the sign read. All of a sudden, I was a boy again, staring up at the laminated warning. The words and concepts morphed and inverted. How did I know there weren’t more curtains beyond the hidden walls? And beyond that, more walls covering up another set of curtains? Wall, curtain, wall, curtain—what was real and what wasn’t; how was I supposed to deduce the difference? Stop worrying over that sign, Rock. I heard the comforting voice of Lamont Turner, my old coach, as if he were right beside me. What you ought to worry about is your footwork. The years I’d spent training at Teaneck Tennis Center had never been in direct dialogue with the period of my life when I became a Swahili speaker. The two aspects, formative and transformative, batted the ball back and forth. The rally was long and semi-cooperative, but it was also excruciating. Inside the yai, nothing was separate. English, Swahili, Tennis in an American suburb, a cartel caper that stretched from a jail on the Brooklyn waterfront to bustling Bongoland. I couldn’t keep any of it walled or curtained off from the rest. My mind was a house with no doors.
Faces appeared in the starry sky, as if projected from within me. My former lover, Zuhura, who was there when I’d been taken captive, and who I hoped was searching for me now. My client back in America, Feruzi Fahari, who radiated pride even from within his roomy prison jumpsuit. And from a much earlier chapter, connected to the storyline at a level deeper than language: Lamont Tuner, Tennis Professional.
A lone gull overhead interrupted my reverie and signaled it was almost morning. Seagulls first came to the Coast Region on German ships, like stowaways. Of Fahari and I, neither of us were stowaways, but we both went looking for something we lacked. Msafiri, traveler. Swap the “s” and the “f” and it becomes mfasiri, translator. Travelers across oceans and continents. Travelers across taps of the tongue and gulps of the glottis. My mind roamed and rearranged, right up until the arrival of the mosquitoes.
I had to get a hold of whoever my captor was. I had to break out of the egg. I’d seen men in this part of the world scale coconut trees that were nearly vertical. I tried climbing, but the bricks were too slippery for me to get any traction. “Unisaidie!” I screamed, but my throat was too dry for sound to project. The mosquitoes swarmed in on me. I crouched down, buried my face in the sand, and covered the back of my neck with my hands. How far away was my jailer? What were my captors demanding in exchange for my release? A snake slithered across the back of my eyelids. An eagle swooped down and clawed at the gash on the top of my head. My brain felt like an overripe jackfruit, festering and about to burst.
Sleep, if you can call it that, came just before sunrise. After the buzzing abated but before the blazing began.