The African Safari Papers Paperback - 2002

Excerpt

Thursday, August 11
7:23 p.m.
In Flight – Paris to Nairobi

Dad has us sitting in different parts of the plane. It’s in case we crash. He has a plan for everything. This way, one of us will presumably survive, proudly pick up the fallen torch and carry on.

I hope it’s me.

Checked on mom. She was crying. Jesus. Wouldn’t say why. Just stared out the window. Dad was sitting in the back, drinking scotch. He didn’t seem too happy when I told him. He got up right away to see what was wrong.

I went and smoked a bowl in the bathroom. What about the smoke alarms, Richard? No problem. Designed for the uninspired . . . not the desperate. How do you do it? I smoke with a small pipe and haul every last burned leaf and stem deep into my lungs. I exhale through a straw into a sink full of water. A few wisps curl into the air but not enough to set off those pesky alarms. Any remaining odour gets zapped with a tiny room freshener I carry. Fresh orange fragrance . . . made from real oranges. Mom swears by the stuff. Spritz, spritz. So do I.

I left the bathroom humming nicely. Like the big furnace gran had in the basement of her old house. Warm and buzzing. It didn’t matter that the plane was getting bounced around like a pop can tossed from a moving car. I passed mom and dad. He seemed agitated. She kept staring out the window watching those wings dip and dive.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” said dad, trying hard to be compassionate but wanting nothing better than to get her in a headlock and run her forehead into a pole.

“Then why aren’t we sitting together?”

“It’s just a sensible precaution.”

“A precaution for what, Ted? Crashing. If you didn’t think it was possible, we’d be sitting together. I hate you for putting these thoughts in my head.”

“Janet, the odds of being killed in a plane crash are one in four million. You’ve got a better chance of winning ten million dollars in the lottery.”

“What are the odds of a freak of nature, a blast of sudden and catastrophic wind shear?”

Yes dad, what about that?

“Wind shear does not bring down planes at 37,000 feet.”

“Oh no? What about rolling thunder?”

“Rolling what?”

She had already told me about this. I have to admit that she succeeded in twisting a knot in my stomach, a knot that had remained tied until my visit to the latrine.

Mom began her account sounding like a somber narrator on a disaster documentary. “Mount Fuji. British Airways. March 5, 1966. Boeing 707. Perfectly clear day. Suddenly, wham! The plane disintegrates. 124 dead. The crash investigators determined that a rolling mass of air, something like horizontal wind shear, smashed into the plane and blew it to pieces.” Mom took a deep breath and her voice dropped to a whisper. “Do you know what happens when a plane breaks apart at 37,000 feet? All your clothes get ripped from your body. Shoes, socks, underwear. Everything. You fall to the ground completely naked.”

Dad was left mute. There are certain images you don’t want interfering with the dull and reassuring drone of those big engines. I don’t think he was affected by the image of plummeting to his death. He was probably thinking about the embarrassment of being found by a Sudanese search-and-rescue team, spread-eagled in a field, without a stitch.

Mom wrenched her eyes from the wobbly wing and reached into her purse. “I need a cigarette.”

Dad grabbed her wrist. “You can’t smoke here,” he growled.

Having the three of us scattered about the fuselage might have been a good idea for a runway crash but it left mom in a non-smoking seat. She had already been back to my section to smoke several times. She didn’t like dad’s survival plan and by the look on her face she liked his grip on her wrist even less.

Mom whipped her hand free, snagged a cigarette, lit it, and blew an anxious plume into the cabin. Dad’s momentary courtship with compassion was over. He spat out a barely comprehensible “Goddamn it,” before standing too quickly, hitting his head on the luggage compartment and swerving back to his seat.

It was a matter of seconds before the protests began.

A loud American woman behind us made a sorry-ass attempt to get mom’s attention with her coughing. Just once I would like to meet a quiet American abroad. I realize I have a better chance of seeing a hairy frog but I have hope.

Defeated in her effort to stop the clouds of smoke with her coughing, and undeterred by mom’s comment that she had quite a cough and it was a good thing she didn’t smoke, the loud American woman leaned forward. “There’s no smoking.”

Mom was thoroughly enjoying her cigarette. She glanced at her fingernails like she often did at home in our living room.
“Says who?”

“It’s the law.”

“Fuck the law.”

That’s when I left. Good for mom. Yes, it’s a non-smoking seat, but it’s not the complaint, it’s the attitude that travels with it, like a magpie splashing wet shit on your head. Fuck off. Find something worth getting excited about. I like anti-abortion activists more than I like anti-smokers. At least pro-life fanatics get excited about something that matters.

Oh I know, all those tests warn us about the evils of secondhand smoke. But if anyone thinks that brief exposure to one cigarette is going to give them cancer, then they had better save their money and purchase one of those plastic bubbles that John Travolta lived in for that TV movie in the 70s. Because that’s the only place they’re going to be safe. Anyone who thinks they can get cancer so easily is insane. They should be locked up.

I agree with one gloomy forecast. If you’re locked in a small basement room with no ventilation with a person who smokes two packs a day, and you never leave that room for forty years, you might, not for sure, not a guarantee, but you might run the risk of getting cancer.

Media reviews

"Robert Sedlack is a writer worth watching. Like his narrator, he is articulate, cheeky and, in the best sense, dangerous. Above all, he knows how to keep a reader reading. More please!" --Timothy Findley

“Think J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield meets Hunter S. Thompson and you begin to get the flavour of The African Safari Papers.” -- Calgary Herald

“It’s a startling debut.... It also says, Robert Sedlack is here. And it’s about time.” -- The Globe and Mail

“Sedlack is not afraid to make mischief nor to concoct a witches’ brew of perverse paradoxes, madness, horror -- things that remind us how shaky civilization is.” -- The Toronto Star

“Robert Sedlack has written a spectacular first novel. Hysterically funny and darkly comic. I devoured The African Safari Papers. I want his second novel now.” -- Rick Mercer