Future Memory--A True Story

8/6/2019 Future Memory--A True Story

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Future Memory: A True Storyby Devon Pitlor

I. In the cafés of Abidjan

Of all the strange sights one sees in the coastal cities of western Africa amongst the jumble

of tribes, races and clans which pour into the urban areas, often half starved from aseason of drought and famine and usually begging for the merest scraps of sustenance, are

surprisingly those eccentric refugees from Europe who straggle into the teeming cities of

the Ivory Coast and Senegal still wearing the torn scraps of uniforms once issued bydisbanded and forgotten regiments of tirailleurs, spahis, zouaves and chasseurs, those

weathered "anciens" who once made up the spinal cord of the Army of Africa and who

still guard almost abandoned outposts in regions so infertile and arid as to be practicallydevoid of population save for the wandering bands of untamed and barbarous Tuaregs,

Fulanis and Toubous, who have wandered the endless stretches of the caravan routes of the Sahel and its murderous mountains and ergs since the Middle Ages and once

composed the backbone of the mystical and evanescent Songhai Empire which stretched

from the quiet coastal plains of Senegal across endless tracks of nothingness into what aretoday the emerging countries of Niger and Chad.

These old soldiers, lifers so to speak, bound forever to the French Army of Africa, growold under an arson sun and respirate a dust choked atmosphere, which has not mollified

itself since the dawn of human habitation. Their faces, twisted and gnarled, are creased in

a million lines of stress and wear. Their jagged visages mirror the horrors of the TenereDesert, the Grand Erg of Bilma and, above all, the remote, foreboding and nearly

inaccessible Aïr Mountains which spring up like granite citadels from the blazing sands of

the Central Massif where no permanent habitations of humans have ever been establishedand where nomads of differing clans routinely kill one another instantly upon contact.

Eventually, these old ones manage to fight their way down the antediluvian camel pathsfrom the barren mountains into struggling centers of civilization like Niamey,Ouagadougou and eventually to Dakar or Abidjan or Lomé, where they are always

uncomfortable and feel upon their souls the tug of the lifeless ergs and desolate granite



slopes calling them back to the austere emptiness of the sunbaked high plateaus, where,still wearing the shreds of their regimental uniforms, they continue to serve France by

dividing ferocious warriors from one another until the latter can round yet another duneor rock outcropping and engage each other in blood feuds which have their origins in atime when Europe was struggling to emerge from the Dark Ages.

Why these old soldiers remain in the worst parts of Africa always seems to be a mystery,

as is how they manage to subsist on a diet of sand swimmers, horned vipers, grilled

scorpions, python meat and wart hog droppings and still manage to stay alive. In thecommerce-charged air of places like Abidjan, they long for the desert and the rocks, for

the thorns and the scrub-tree shea bark brews like the forbidden aragi and ogogro, which

distilled in large rusty drums once used for petroleum lubricants, date from the shadowsof the pre-Islamic past when every tribe distilled its own raw alcohol from whatever

sparse ingredients could be rasped and scoured from the blistering sands and caused to

ferment and be passed through a crude alembic.

Nearly all of these old soldiers despise the young and conscripted, as I was, who are given

easier military posts along the coast, and, even though in the Ivory Coast bullets wereflying over our heads nearly every day and there was always the risk of a Baoule rebel

bomb detonating under our feet, have a much softer task of protecting Marianne'sinterests than do these leathery androids of the desert and the rock.

One such old soldier, still wearing the threadbare uniform of the Chasseurs du Maroc wasa loquacious relic whose name I learned later to be Gérard Jolicôté, who had once hailed

from Toulon where he had been released from a prison on the condition that he join the

ragged strings of wretched spahis that guarded the environs of the lugubrious MountGréboun from the unrestrained ferocity of the constantly warring Tuaregs and Fulanis.

Jolicôté had spent over twenty-five years, therefore, on the high plateaus of the Aïr and

had the haggard visage of one who had seen most everything.

And I suppose he had.

He sat across from me in a palm shaded café sipping palm wine spiked with native

absinthe and pretended to read Le Monde, but it was clear that Jolicôté was most probably



an unseen prey. Jolicôté examined the bird through his bulging orbs that wereaccustomed to staring into the sun for hours on end without risking blindness.

"A bird of worship," he began. "In the interior, on the slopes they worship those things,and for good reason...." Jolicôté, whose name meant "pretty side" in a language he had

nearly forgotten, cut himself short. He gazed back at me, envying perhaps my clean-cutschoolboy youth. "Animists," he continued. "The tribes. They find special powers in

birds like that. And I know they are right. They have dances that bring them to earth, big

vultures like that, only featherless. They can enchant hairless dogs off of the desert too.Most people don't even know they live there."

"Hairless?" I said, hoping to get more.

Jolicôté nodded. "Not a strand of hair on their bodies." He took another sip of pastis and

gazed back into the sky. "A bird like that once saved my life, but that is another storyaltogether."

I asked him what story he most wanted to tell, and he informed me that "ignorant as hewas" he understood the word 'context.' "You mentioned me no longer having a European

context," he muttered. "You're right. I don't. I could never live there anymore. Themountains and the caldera are my context now. Killing Tuaregs whenever I get the

chance. Getting some little pension from France, but mostly surviving on my own. But Iknow what context means. And it is because of context that I don't understand half of thethings I have seen on the massif."

When I asked him to explain, he did---perhaps begrudgingly, but he did. And what hetold me was not what I was expecting at all. It was, in effect, one of the strangest stories I

have ever heard in my life. But first I have to tell you about Amber Casteel, a girl I used

to date in New York.

Jolicôté can wait because it is due to Amber that I once again remembered him.

III. Amber Casteel



I was all of nineteen years old when I met Jolicôté and heard his story. I was wearing theuniform of a country that I later forsook when I was twenty-two. How I left Africa,

returned to France and eventually settled in the United States really doesn't matter here,so I won't bore the reader with it. Neither will I bore the reader with a tedious tale of howI entered a well-known American university and began my studies toward a masters

degree in general economics. I will describe Amber only briefly: She was pretty, young,smart and a student at my university. For a time, she liked me and I liked her. But it was

only for a time. In one's life many bed partners float in and out of the passing parade.

For me, Amber was just one of them. She had long, shiny brown hair, a svelte physiqueand deep set, shaded eyes. During a short period, I was fascinated with her. There.

Enough said.

What was important about Amber was that she was a history student, and her specialty

was the Sixteenth Century in France, the century that gave us the baffling and eerie

quatrains of one Michel de Notre Dame, otherwise known as Nostradamus in English-speaking countries. During his lifetime, Nostradamus went into virtual trances and

produced over nine hundred four-line verses which, according to many, clearly foretold

specific events from a future far removed from his own time. Many and variousinterpretations have arisen on the exact meaning of his quatrains, but all who study them,

as Amber did, come away with the disturbing feeling that Nostradamus saw things in adetailed way but in no particular order nor following any special theme. He simply saw

the future and named names and places---and I will suppose here that the reader is farmore familiar with his anomalous predictions than I will ever be.

Amber Casteel was spellbound by Nostradamus, but she had a particular take on him by

the time I met her. One day after our classes, Amber and I met for a drink in a campushangout and sat looking at each other in a dim corner with our books piled up in front of

us like folded fishing nets at the seashore. Like Jolicôté a few years before, it was clear

that Amber had something she wanted to tell me. It began as the same dull repetition shealways had on matters that involved Nostradamus: his indecipherable verses, his relative

closeness of names and events, like a powerful dictator called Hister (Hitler) who wouldtry to take over the world "with steel" but would fail. Like an "islander" named Bon Ami(Bonaparte) who would offend the pope by conquering Lombardy (Italy). Hundreds of

other examples prevail.



Above the racket of the chattering student crowds, Amber told me her theory. In short, it

amounted to the fact that Michel de Notre Dame had no particular idea of what he waswriting about because he had indeed seen things but had no valid context to put them into."He got a lot wrong because he didn't know what he was hearing or seeing," she said.

"Who could do that? He got visions from hundreds of years into the future...even beyondour own time today. He must have only half-comprehended what he saw. To understand

events beyond our knowledge, we need a context ," she said. "Nostradamus had no more

of a context on the future than we do from our time. But he saw things."

That evening as Amber and I strolled down the busy and well-lit campus lanes, Jolicôté

came back to me. He too had mentioned context in his story. I decided to let Amber talk and say nothing about Africa and Jolicôté. In truth, I wanted to forget what I knew about

Africa, what I had seen. And to tell it rightly, since this is biographical, I had a wife, and I

was unfortunately cheating on her with Amber. But we did things like that in those days,and that is another story which really has no business here.

IV. The dog restaurant

Yes, I was temporarily "on leave" from my American wife, the girl who had brought me tothis country, and she was temporarily "on leave" from me. If that offends any readers, so

be it. I was twenty-five years old and separated by an ocean from my old friends andfamily. I could do anything I wanted. Amber was a kind of fling, whatever that means,and I soon got over her.

But not before we went into New York City's lower East Side and had the adventure of eating at a barely legal Cambodian restaurant that served dog meat. It was something

that we both wanted to do, and don't bother to ask me why. I had eaten market dog

before in both Dakar and Abidjan, and then again in Marseille. I was just something Ichallenged Amber to do. In the snaking streets of the East Village there were all sorts of

outlandish ethnic cuisines. Eating spit-roasted dog flesh was no big deal. So we bothagreed on doing it. It was, I should note, something my wife at the time would have nevercountenanced. Maybe that was one reason I liked Amber. It doesn't matter.



What does matter is that the sheltered interior of the restaurant held a cage that was fullof small chow-chow dogs which were specifically bred for their meat. Readers who have

experienced a meal of grilled dog will know what I am referring to when I say that thesedogs were both hairless and vacant-eyed. Whatever peculiar breed the Cambodians usedfor food was, in effect, exactly like what I had experienced in both Senegal and France in

the past. They were like dogs that didn't bark or show affection or display any sort of sentient behavior. Hollow-eyed beasts, they made you feel much less guilty about eating

them. They were not bred to be smart or affectionate anymore than cows were. Also, their

bodies were smooth and brown, and, above all, hairless

But they brought back another memory.

Something Jolicôté had said.

I lit a cigarette and shared it with Amber. We both knew we were breaking up soon. Ourundergraduate days were nearly over, and we were going our separate directions. I knew

that if I was ever going to tell Jolicôté's saga, it had to be now.

"The Kanuri," I began. "They live on the high plateaus of the Aïr Mountains in the

Republic of Niger and are totally nomadic. They breed only within their own tribe, andmost of them have never been beyond the boundaries of the Sahel. They worship dogs like

these." I pointed to the pile of fatty, red rib bones in my plate. "They wander sometimesinto the temporary oasis pools and perform rituals using smoke, incense, dancing andsome sort of spice that they ferret out from under the sands. They produce what is called

'future memory,' or so they claim."

"Memories of what?" asked Amber, opening her eyes slightly wider in the greasy smoke of

the occluded restaurant.

"They themselves are not even sure. As you might say, they have no context. But they

believe that the past, present and future are all the same and embedded in the petroglyphsburied beneath the sands of the desert. They really don't know what they see during thesesacraments, but they know the hairless dogs are important---and not as food---important

to their descendants in a future time. The same goes for featherless birds that have



enormous wingspans and look like big fleshy vultures. They worship them because of something they know from the future."

Amber, a student of Nostradamus, snubbed out our cigarette and said "Silly, primitivenonsense."

"Maybe not," I retorted. "I heard the story of one old spahi , a desert denizen, who was

invited to one of their rituals. Would you like to hear it? It may be about context or

whatever."

V. Return to Jolicôté

In reality, Jolicôté had told me two interlocking stories that day in the bazaar café of

Abidjan. One was a chilling account from his mounted spahi days about how he and a

small unit of infantry tirailleurs had been taken prisoner by a cutthroat band of Tuaregswho had decided summarily to kill them in a very usual African way, which was to put

worn out tires around their bodies from head to toe, douse them with flammable doum

palm oil and set them aflame to roast on a concrete ledge near the base of MountGréboun. Jolicôté recounted how he and his comrades were all stripped naked and the

surplus tires were wedged onto their emaciated bodies. He invoked the smell of the horridoil and the mad chantings of the Tuaregs who liked nothing better than to roast

Frenchmen.

At the last moment just before a burning knot of brush thorn was thrust onto the tires, the

leader of a band of nomadic Kanuris, sworn enemies of the Tuaregs, came up and began to

negotiate with the Tuaregs in the Hausa language, the commercial lingua franca of allNiger. Apparently, the Kanuris, ultra-darkskinned wanderers, had some sort of

unfinished commerce with this coterie of Tuaregs who were about ready to kill the

Europeans. The Kanuris somehow convinced the Tuaregs to sell the Frenchmen as slavesto them, and, surprisingly, the Tuaregs, who generally relished killing white skinned

invaders more than any other sport on Earth, decided to wait to see if the Kanuris wouldguarantee them some rights to a stone oasis pit within the limits of their sparse territory.This guarantee needed to come at once from a powerful chieftain named Ngueme-Fol.

The problem was that Ngueme-Fol was over three hundred kilometers away in the sand-



baked, mud hut village of Tanout. Without the promise of Ngueme-Fol, Jolicôté and hiscohort would be torched without hesitation.

To the best of Jolicôté's understanding of the Hausa language, the Kanuris convinced theTuaregs to wait for the chief's arrival, which under normal circumstances would have

taken days over roadless dunes and mountainside stone outcroppings in the Aïr range.The Tuaregs, who also occasionally ate the livers of their victims, did not wish to wait, but

the Kanuris convinced them that Ngueme-Fol could be on hand before sunrise the next

day, so the Tuaregs killed a wart hog, drank its blood, and stripped its flesh away andproceeded to eat it raw, as was their manner. During the entire desert mountain night,

Jolicôté and his unfortunate fellows waited, bound standing in oil soaked tires, for the

Kanuri chieftain to arrive. None of them had any hope for salvation. Ngueme-Fol wassimply too far away, and neither horse nor camel could get him to their location before

dawn.

But he did arrive. And it was just before sunrise as the Tuaregs were once again lighting

knotted brands to set fire to the Frenchmen.

And I remember Amber rolling her eyes languidly and asking "And how was that?"

I hesitated before answering the question. After all, we were far from the stark ergs andgranite outcroppings of the virtually unpopulated mountain range of central Niger. We

were in New York City, albeit in a dog-eating restaurant, but within reach of all theamenities of cutting edge civilization.

"Let's have another drink," I suggested. And out came some rice brandy in shallow

bowls. The dog bones were not removed from the plates in front of us. Amber went to therest room to relieve herself. Then I did the same. When we were both once again seated, I

resumed just as if I had never paused.

"It was something they had learned from the future," I said. "Something in their future

memory for which they did have a sort of crude context."

What Jolicôté had casually explained to me was that a huge and totally bald bird arrived

on the camp scene. It looked like a featherless vulture, but it was not one. It was a



different species entirely. In its beak was a large piece of eucalyptus bark covered overwith unfamiliar symbols scratched onto it. One of the Kanuris took it from the bird, held

it in front of the Tuareg leaders and proceeded to translate it into broken Hausa. Itannounced, Jolicôté said, that the bird was inhabited by the mind and spirit of Ngueme-Fol and it gave his secret password, which the Tuaregs readily accepted. The guarantee of

oasis rights was sealed for a handful of tirailleur and spahi prisoners who were summarilyreleased into the care of the Kanuris, who took them on as slaves.

And when this commerce was finished, the bird flew off into the rising sun over themountains, and the Tuaregs, satisfied, went on their own way, as did the Kanuris with

their prisoners tied with thorn vine ropes.

This type of negotiation was apparently quite common with the Kanuris. The fact that

their chief could enter the body of a huge bird was not taken as shocking by either tribe,

although Jolicôté learned later that it was a "future memory" secret which only theKanuris knew.

And that was that.

Amber seemed duly impressed by the story.

VI. Hairless dogs and featherless birds

That was the last encounter I would ever have with Amber Casteel, and we both knew it as

we walked back to our separate quarters by Manhattan moonlight. Along our way we

paused in a small deserted park, sat down on a bench, and I told her the rest of the storyand how to Jolicôté context was so important.

The Kanuris, it seemed took a liking to the small band of French soldiers and used themwell. They fed them on dry dates and grilled sand swimmers and gave them huge gourds

of Islamically forbidden distilled burukutu to drink. Then they concluded a kind of pactwith them. Once again, it involved French soldiers being used as peacekeepers to dividethe bellicose tribes of the mountainous desert. Days later in their own separate camp

removed by several meters from the Kanuris, the real Ngueme-Fol arrived by camel. His



physical journey had indeed taken several long days.

Ngueme-Fol had lived in the parched city of Agadez for some time and spoke perfectFrench. He confirmed that the birds were only "borrowed" as a means of transportation,as were certain hairless dogs into which the Kanuris could, through ritual, thrust their

consciousness for short periods of time. This was something that came from a futurememory and involved---once again---the usage of smoke, incense, dancing, chanting and

ceremonial rites which only the Kanuris knew how to perform.

Finally, it became obvious that Jolicôté had been invited to attend one of these smoke and

shadow rituals, and, for some reason, he did not readily want to talk about it.

"Of course not," interjected Amber in the inky darkness of the New York night, "he

wanted you to pay for more drinks and give him time to think up something really wild."

"I suppose so," I grimaced, glancing at my watch. "I hope you have enjoyed the story

even though it is second hand. Those old Africa types always had something interesting to

spin as yarns."

"As long as you paid for their drinks and meals," responded Amber with some disdain. "Ienjoyed your story, Dévon, but unfortunately that is all it is, a story."

"This coming from a girl who has spent countless hours pondering over the quatrains of Nostradamus."

A quiet, unspoken tension was edging itself between Amber and myself. It was the exitdoor out of a relationship that neither of us should have been having in the first place.

Within days I would be reunited with my young wife and attending the final classes

required for my first degree. Within weeks I would be in graduate school. Within monthsall would be well between my wife and me again, and we would resume our uneasy pact

which would last several more years until it became intolerable to both of us. Amber waslittle more than an escapade, and a rather shameful one at that, but an escapadenonetheless. Guilt began to well up in my chest, and I rose to my feet making some weak

excuse for needing more sleep and study time. Final exams were coming. The night was



aging into day. The stars were invisible. Anything...anything to extricate myself fromAmber. As we shook hands and embraced for the last time ever, she shot me a hard glance

and said: "Dévon, all I have really learned from you is that you were an impressionableboy drafted into your country's forces in Africa at eighteen. You liked to listen stories of the old drunken veterans, and this one stuck in your mind. A lot of mumbo-jumbo

nonsense...."

"Like Nostradamus," I half-smirked. "You can't get him off your mind, and, to tell the

truth, I don't want to let go of Jolicôté. Not ever. Because Jolicôté was as real to me asNostradamus is to you. I'll be twenty-five next week and a college graduate shortly after

that. There are some things from one's youth that one never wishes to unclench."

"I am going to be one of those things you have no trouble doing that with," sighed Amber

at length, her long straight, shimmering brown hair glistening in the lights of a hundred

night spots and small cafés that encircled our vantage point in the little park. She releasedmy hand and glided off down East 8th Street framed by hosts of dancing moths beneath

the yellowing street lamps of Washington Square Park. By the time she met Broadway,

she was only a silhouette in the shadows, one of the millions who swarmed in our ownmuddled and chaotic population pool. As she disappeared into the naked glare of

Broadway, she ceased to be a real person and melded irretrievably into the late nightpedestrian masses. All that was left with me was her observation that Nostradamus had

very well seen visions of a distant future, but that he could only understand them in thecontext of his day.

As I walked silently back to my third-floor cold-water sleeping room, I realized that both

Amber Casteel and Gérard Jolicôté had been right. Context was everything. Withoutcontext, you could witness the most miraculous things and have no idea of how they were

different from the glaring billboards on 42nd Street. In fact, if you saw too much, your

visions would of necessity take up the grotesque shapes and images of these all toomundane urban signposts. The strangest pictures which danced into your awareness

would be interpreted only as the effects of a hangover and too much many lightshowscompeting for your attention on the street.

And that was Jolicôté's experience exactly. Nearly everything he witnessed during the



arcane Kanuri rituals needed by force to remain in the context of the sterile Aïr Desertand the sand dune immensity of the Grand Erg of Bilma. Some of it could be explained by

the memories he still guarded of the twisting port side streets of Toulon and the towering,snow-capped Maritime Alps which rose behind the city toward the inland, but much was

just apparition after apparition of people, places and events that he could not place in any

cognitive framework that he had ever developed during the tedious years of wearingshabby, unkempt uniforms amidst clans of natives who not only avoided him but secretly

scorned him as an non-integrated outsider doomed to linger behind the thin thresholds of

any sort of deeper or more sympathetic perception. Such is the white man in Africa,condemned forever to only gaze through the filmy windows of distorted observation at

worlds that he can never hope to fathom.

VII. Professionalism and the shadows of Mount Gréboun

It was good two years later when, solidly reconvened, rejoined and reconciled withMeredith my wife and having the serious assurance of not only a good job as an economic

analyst but savoring the prospect of a new baby who was about to enter our world, that I

thought of Jolicôté again...his story...the Kanuri ritual and what the staggering old"ancient soldat" had told me he witnessed during the illicit Kanuri sacrament to which he

and his scarecrow companions had been invited to attend.

Meredith had decided--yet once again---that she loved me and had taken a sudden interestin hearing about the recondite hours of my childhood and early manhood, which in thepast she had only dismissed as boyhood fantasies. We sat on our rented streetfront porch

in Canarsie under a much quieter moon, and she stroked my legs with a kind of sensual

delight that, if nothing else, loosens men's tongues, the sort of temperate touch which isalways a prologue to passion among civilized and patently Western women.

"So what about that guy Jolicôté?" she blurted suddenly, pulling her creaky, woodenchair a few inches closer to mine. "What exactly did the natives show him at that ritual?"

"Smoke and mirrors, incense and insane, frenzied dancing," I sighed dismissively. Therewas no way---no context---for me to divulge what Jolicôté had really said. Besides, it had

been in crude, idiomatic French, and I had no appetite for translation---then or now. No



sooner had I banished the question than a huge floppy eared stray dog of someindeterminate breed streaked out of the shadows of the far end of our peaceful street,

clattering as it were a string of empty beer cans taped to its tail and panting madly as itdissolved once again into the gloominess which fringed the boundaries of Flatlands Avenueand led toward the always dark and undisturbed cemetery of the Canarsie dead. It was a

dog out of context. Its story had no beginning nor end. Its plight offered no explanation.It had neither a future nor a past. It just was. That was how Jolicôté had explained the

Kanuris' ritual visions to me: as great amorphous events that came out of nowhere and

dissolved into nothingness. If one understood them somehow, then the observer was lucky,then the observer had a context. But in each wispy, evanescent hallucination there sprang

a sort of spiraling revelation about a time that was not his, about places that were not on

the Tenere Desert nor in the Aïr Mountains. They were vignettes of things to come, or of things that had already passed, huge vignettes depicting a world that was neither now,

then or even in Africa for that matter. What opened were fleeting but lucid windows into

a time yet to come. And the observers, Jolicôté and company, were left with what thenatives simply called future memory.

"So what is going to happen in the future?" whispered Meredith somewhat indulgently inmy ear as we lay snuggled flank to flank in our undersized half bed listening to roar of an

occasional elevated train passing overhead. "What did this Pretty Side guy say he saw?"

"It was all in French and, besides, it was a long time ago and far, far from here."

"But what was it?" Meredith insisted, now turning on her side and gazing down at my

half-lit face in the dim bug-dotted glow of a streetlight that illuminated our humble

bedroom.

"I don't know and I don't remember. Just the ramblings of a crazed old vet who had

spent too much time under the desert sun, a madman who had ingested too much of thatraw oil drum burukutu."

But as sleep overtook us both, I realized that I was lying. Jolicôté had been neither drunk nor mesmerized. Of the impenetrable weirdness of Africa he had seen enough not to be

tricked by drug induced hallucinations. What Jolicôté saw was real, and though he did



not have a context for most of it, he made do with the tools of experience that his feverishbrain had already provided.

And these were things that I never fully told Meredith or Amber or anyone else during theforty-six years that I have spent on Earth. They were things that surely must have died

along with Jolicôté, as Jolicôté , well on in years then, must have surely been dead by now.

VIII. Context

In the greasy smoke of the Kanuri campfire on a barren stretch of jagged granite lost in a

treacherous and uninhabitable desert highland, Jolicôté and his tight band of rescued

tirailleurs and spahis had glimpsed the future in fleeting images and bursts of sound thatpierced their ears and convulsed their wondrous brains. Before their eyes danced visions

of what was a world yet unborn: Great concrete structures being erected off the coasts of

islands, buildings so tall that they were skirted by clouds. Thunderous and earsplittingconvulsions in the Earth which cracked an entire continent asunder, followed by appalling

torrents of sea water which rushed in to fill the cavernous new voids and create fresh

oceans, the distant shores of which were shrouded in the invisibility of the unspeakableremoteness from the dry land they had replaced. Deafening engines booming endlessly

under the ground, churning up tidal waves of colloidal rock and surface debris.

And men. Men who had divided themselves by color and stature. Men who lived on theawesome bridges and archways which wove between the lofty and soaring structures builtagainst the sea. Men who lived beneath the surface of the soil and were as pale as the

Tenere sand swimmers of the Grand Erg. Men who had developed new organs to breathe

salt water along with the appendages to navigate its ferocity. Men and women whoenjoyed the luxury of endless sleep and others who endured the drudgery of ceaseless toil

chained to gleaming rods of metallic machinery which (in Jolicôté's context) looked like

huge pistons and which pumped vast quantities of burnished golden liquid from theirspreading maws. Men and women who lacked noses and wore strange masks around the

center of their mutilated visages. Men and women who could enter the body of hybridanimals, like vacant-eyed, hairless dogs and travel great distances with ease only toemerge and rejoin their own bodies. Men who flew, like Ngueme-Fol, in the bodies of

bald, commandeered birds. The "wet" biology of a thousand new technologies built



around living creatures bred and subjugated to human transportation, sporting andsexual needs. Travel by beast....game and sex by animal. Animals everywhere. All dull-

eyed and hollow. All serving the multifaceted purposes of human beings who couldcommand their movements as their own, much as one takes a taxi from Manhattan toQueens today.

And food. Huge mushroom-like things rising up from the Earth taller than the highest

trees and buildings, puffing out black clouds of spores which were gathered by people into

vast piles by machines resembling gargantuan vacuum cleaners. Ready, tasty, availableand free foodstuffs pushing up everywhere from the ground, tended by no one, eaten at

will by all. The end of famine. Golden liquid in pools. The end of drought.

And savage children. Children with eye slits in the rear of their skulls who could observe

in two directions. Children with slithering tentacles where hands should have been.

Happy, content children, freakified by technologies that were not even dreamt of in thepresent and for purposes that remained thankfully unrevealed.

IX. Another revelation

And as Jolicôté reminded me, everything was in the wrong context, which was to say his

context. Perhaps the buildings were not really buildings, the mushrooms not actual

mushrooms, the animals not truly animals, the Earth tremors and seismic seizures notreally earthquakes but something else. Likewise the machines, the gleaming steel, mayhave not really been machines or steel, as the water may have not in truth been water, and

the dark sun overlooking the scenes may have not really been the sun at all as we know it.

It was all in a context. The Kanuris had already learned from these dreamland episodes

how to fashion mindless animals for sport, sex and transportation purposes. The Kanuris

had already discovered some of their own now pale brethren living in endless cavernsbelow the ergs in sunless worlds from which they would only emerge to trade in desert

foodstuffs of an unknown yet strangely fungal nature. The Kanuris had already takenpart of the future of mankind, as they saw it, as their own---and these were the secrets of the great Aïr Massif beyond the innermost rifts where even the Tuaregs and the Fulanis

dared not venture. The Kanuris had seen disconnected pieces of the future of mankind on



Earth or perhaps on some other world, and some of these pieces they had already madereal.

Jolicôté was pale, faint, haggard and exhausted when he finished his monologue andambled away back to a thirty céfa per night flop house where he had a flaxen mattress

filled with crawling vermin and another boiler can of aragi. The next day he would begone back up through the gouged valleys and dry river beds to his little contingent of

soldiers who had remained far beyond their appointed time in a land so accursed and

desolate that even its natives needed to keep constantly moving in order to assure theirown survival from one bleak day to the next. Jolicôté would never quit this blighted and

damnable terrain for the remainder of his days because now he was an inseparable part of

it, like the gnarled and knotty roots of some primitive baobab which had withstoodcountless seasons of shifting sands and gut-wrenching famine and drought.

When he left our table in the cacophonous Abidjan café, he didn't bother to pay. That wasleft to a new and weaker brand of soldier like myself who ventured not onto the high

sandswept plateaus nor onto the harsh and razor-like ledges of the vacant piedmont. That

was left to a bewildered and baffled one-time French schoolboy who would only be inuniform for a short time and that in a place far more protected than any zone the old

soldier still craved to occupy. He was, after all, Jolicôté, the man who had seen the future.

X. Epilogue

I awoke the next day hours before Meredith. I stood before a bathroom mirror and

examined the deepening lines on my once fresh face. I twisted on the requisite tie, knotted

it, and walked out into the conspicuous haze of a Brooklyn morning carrying at my side ahalf-filled briefcase loaded with documents that I barely understood and about which I

cared even less. I walked smartly to the subway entrance, took the B train into the city

and sat down in front of a computer screen at a desk which was deemed to be mine. On itwas propped the smiling countenance of my pregnant wife, a woman whom I knew would

never ask me again about Africa or Jolicôté. I was already an American, soon to be afather, and already some peculiar anomaly which the facile world around me knew only asDevon Pitlor.



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Devon Pitlor -- July, 2011*/*/*/*/*/*/

Future Memory--A True Story

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