for both of us.
We almost couldn’t break it off, because just when I’d made the decision someone killed his cat. He had adopted a stray. One night he went home and found it strangled on his kitchen table. The house had been locked. He was very shaken. Then letters to him started turning up with razor slits across the address, just that, the contents not touched. I was terrified, but I kept making mistakes. Here was my heinous suggestion: I thought he should get away for a while and I proposed he come with me to a game area. I had some contacts in the safari business in Maun and I knew how we could do this for next to nothing. I told him it was ridiculous of him to be in Botswana for whatever reason and never see the last and greatest unfenced game area in the world. He looked at me as though I were a criminal. I tried to argue him into it by saying he was missing a unique experience, because camping out in a game area was the only way you could get the frisson of what it must have been like to be a lone human being who was the subject of predation by stronger, bigger, and more numerous animals. This was deeply stupid, and he let me see it. He was already a prey. My heart was in the right place, but that was the end for us.
Nothing happened to him, finally. People I met glancingly throughhim were ultimately killed by the South Africans, not in Botswana but in Angola or Zimbabwe, where they had gone for safety. He got to England. The ANC has a choir, which he has something to do with.
The British Spy
My last relationship before Nelson Denoon rose in the skies of my life was with a spy, Z. Z is for zed, meaning the last in a series of things of a certain kind. It took me awhile to get him to admit it, but the reason he initially sought me out was because his information was that I was going with Martin Wade, in whom the British High Commission had an interest. I was no longer seeing Martin but I was still trying to keep track of him, see how he was doing, regretting things. It even occurred to me that I could use Z’s attentions to me as a way to get back with Martin by offering to disinform Z, if that was appropriate.
Z didn’t know that thanks to Martin, I knew Z was a spy. I felt I had enormous leverage, for once. Everything I do is so overdetermined. I was moved by the feeling that this was just what I deserved—a spy. He pulled up beside me in a black Peugeot as I was walking home with a netbag of groceries over my shoulder and offered me a lift. Whites do that for one another. I hated to accept free lifts from fellow whites: the Batswana notice it and I empathize with them standing waiting forever for jammed taxis or vans while the whites slide off into the sunset. But I got in. I got in because I had some dairy products I needed to rush to my refrigerator, but I got in even more because Z was a spy.
He must have been mid-fifties. I found him attractive. I don’t despise people for fighting old age tooth and nail, which he was. I like the impulse more in men than I do in women, though, which I should probably explore sometime. He was still well built but showing a little gynecomastia, which didn’t really go with his rectilinear, almost columnar midsection. Later, his first evasion on that subject would be that he was wearing a truss. Then it came out that it was a girdle. He was wearing the usual safari shirt and shorts, and I noticed he had touched up a couple of varicosities with something pink. He was a leading-man type who was just over the line into paterfamilias roles and hating it. He hadgray hair worn long on one side and carefully articulated and spray-fixed over his bald crown. His eyebrows were like ledges. I wondered if wanting to be sexually plausible, which he clearly did, had anything to do with needing to be able to do his job, id est extracting confidences. He seemed very tan, but there was something off about the hue, which was another secret of his I ultimately extracted.
What would a spy
We almost couldn’t break it off, because just when I’d made the decision someone killed his cat. He had adopted a stray. One night he went home and found it strangled on his kitchen table. The house had been locked. He was very shaken. Then letters to him started turning up with razor slits across the address, just that, the contents not touched. I was terrified, but I kept making mistakes. Here was my heinous suggestion: I thought he should get away for a while and I proposed he come with me to a game area. I had some contacts in the safari business in Maun and I knew how we could do this for next to nothing. I told him it was ridiculous of him to be in Botswana for whatever reason and never see the last and greatest unfenced game area in the world. He looked at me as though I were a criminal. I tried to argue him into it by saying he was missing a unique experience, because camping out in a game area was the only way you could get the frisson of what it must have been like to be a lone human being who was the subject of predation by stronger, bigger, and more numerous animals. This was deeply stupid, and he let me see it. He was already a prey. My heart was in the right place, but that was the end for us.
Nothing happened to him, finally. People I met glancingly throughhim were ultimately killed by the South Africans, not in Botswana but in Angola or Zimbabwe, where they had gone for safety. He got to England. The ANC has a choir, which he has something to do with.
The British Spy
My last relationship before Nelson Denoon rose in the skies of my life was with a spy, Z. Z is for zed, meaning the last in a series of things of a certain kind. It took me awhile to get him to admit it, but the reason he initially sought me out was because his information was that I was going with Martin Wade, in whom the British High Commission had an interest. I was no longer seeing Martin but I was still trying to keep track of him, see how he was doing, regretting things. It even occurred to me that I could use Z’s attentions to me as a way to get back with Martin by offering to disinform Z, if that was appropriate.
Z didn’t know that thanks to Martin, I knew Z was a spy. I felt I had enormous leverage, for once. Everything I do is so overdetermined. I was moved by the feeling that this was just what I deserved—a spy. He pulled up beside me in a black Peugeot as I was walking home with a netbag of groceries over my shoulder and offered me a lift. Whites do that for one another. I hated to accept free lifts from fellow whites: the Batswana notice it and I empathize with them standing waiting forever for jammed taxis or vans while the whites slide off into the sunset. But I got in. I got in because I had some dairy products I needed to rush to my refrigerator, but I got in even more because Z was a spy.
He must have been mid-fifties. I found him attractive. I don’t despise people for fighting old age tooth and nail, which he was. I like the impulse more in men than I do in women, though, which I should probably explore sometime. He was still well built but showing a little gynecomastia, which didn’t really go with his rectilinear, almost columnar midsection. Later, his first evasion on that subject would be that he was wearing a truss. Then it came out that it was a girdle. He was wearing the usual safari shirt and shorts, and I noticed he had touched up a couple of varicosities with something pink. He was a leading-man type who was just over the line into paterfamilias roles and hating it. He hadgray hair worn long on one side and carefully articulated and spray-fixed over his bald crown. His eyebrows were like ledges. I wondered if wanting to be sexually plausible, which he clearly did, had anything to do with needing to be able to do his job, id est extracting confidences. He seemed very tan, but there was something off about the hue, which was another secret of his I ultimately extracted.
What would a spy
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