The narrator of Kamby Bolongo Mean River has trouble with words. Some words trigger a lifetime of associations, memories saturated with emotion, very much alive in the narrator’s present moment. Other words stand alone for him like solid objects, necessitating rigorous inspection.
“The trouble is some people use words one way but other people use those same words a different way altogether. My problem is I think about one word for too long. A caller will say a word like injury and I will think about the word for a minute or two and not hear the other words. I won’t know who has the injury or why it matters. This always happens to me and this is why should the phone ring I might let it keep ringing until the machine answers.
“A word like injury can split your head open.”
The narrator’s head is always splitting open. The novel itself is basically the speaker’s head broken open so that we can see inside—split like a cantaloupe or a geode. What you’ll find in there is fascinating, revolting, and heartbreaking.
The book is birthed by a simple phrase—“Should the phone ring...”—the response to which reveals the entire insides of the narrator. He doesn’t like it when the phone rings. It’s an intrusion so frightening that he falls over sometimes. He loves answering machines.
Other things we know about him: He’s being monitored in a hospital. Doctors are watching him through a two-way glass. Military Police and security guards are guarding his room. His brother is Charlie and his mother is Mother. People call him; often they are wrong numbers. Sometimes he pretends to be the person they are calling for, especially if they’re calling for Charlie. His phone doesn’t dial out. He’s from Injury, Alaska. He has a headache.
Like Part of the World, it’s hard to know what parts of the narrator’s account are reliable. And like Part of the World, it seems likely that the narrator is suffering some kind of brain injury. It’s important to understand that neither of these things matter.
While a more predictable writer might create a brain-damaged character so distanced from the reader that he exists as an anomaly, Lopez creates a narrator whose internal conversation feels universal, familiar. The narrator’s injury only clarifies the faultiness of all consciousness—the unreliability of memory, the power of association, the present reality of the past.
The resulting effect has some kinship with A.R. Luria’s case studies of brain-injured patients. Both of Lopez’s books lead me back to The Man with a Shattered World—the case study of a Russian soldier who suffered a massive head injury in 1943. The case study is largely a first-person account of what it was like for the patient to wake up with very few mental faculties (it was hard for him to think of words or understand what he was seeing), to gradually recovering memories of the distant past, and continuously struggling to regain his mind.
In the end, Luria’s patient discovers that he is able to write much more easily than he’s able to speak. He begins to journal, and in writing, finds a way to restore some semblance of function.
A correlation could be drawn to the narrator of Kamby. The narrator can’t dial out. He’s often lost in the pull of his own memories. He discovers though that he can draw stick figures, and with the encouragement of his doctors, he fills the floor and walls of his room with stick figured accounts of his life. Akin to cave drawings, they tell the story of Charlie and Mother, his dark childhood, his longing for connection and clarity.
The narrator’s unflinching love for Charlie is like a dog that follows you home and waits outside your door, even though you come outside every hour and beat it with a stick. And where is Charlie? He doesn’t call or visit. And Mother, the second most important person in the speaker’s life is not there either. Whether she’s in prison, dead or just absent—we don’t know. What we know is that the speaker of Kamby Bolongo Mean River is confused, forsaken, alone, and just like us.
Through astonishingly organic and layered language, Robert Lopez has created an inner world so remarkable you might fall over with fright, and then stay on the floor to laugh a while.
“Sometimes if it is a wrong number I pretend I am the person the caller intended to call. In other words, I pretend to be an actor like the hypothetical Charlie Robertson playing summer stock in upstate Alaska somewhere.
“After I answer they will say something like Hey Gracie it’s Maggie calling and I’ll say Hello Maggie how are you. Then I will ask about the kids and work because most people named Maggie have both kids and work. Sometimes they realize I’m not Gracie and when this happens I will ask if they are Gracie themselves. This is when I ask to speak to Gracie. I say Maggie put Gracie on the phone. I say what have you done to Gracie Maggie. This is when they usually hang up if I haven’t done so first.”
