“That’s all I have,” I said.

We waited for a few minutes. It felt like thirty, but was possibly two.

His radio sounded. “Ten-nine.”

“Individual has no license. Name is Wala, whiskey—”

Radio: “Hold on.”

Cars whizzed by. A light freezing drizzle began to fall.

“Eighteen?” from the radio.

“Go ahead,” the trooper said.

“Does he have a dog with him?”

“What? Yeah. He’s got a crippled dog in a baby seat. He’s not armed. He is Black. You heard me say that, right?”

“Cut him loose,” the radio voice crackled.

“He has no license. He’s Black.”

“Cut him loose, eighteen.”

“Can you hear me clearly? I have a Black man here with no license driving a fucking BMW. He’s got a faculty ID from some college in Rhode Island.”

“Understood, eighteen. Now cut him loose.”

The officer turned away from me, put his mouth against his device, and said, “He’s Black. He really doesn’t have a license.”

“Let him go. Do you copy?”

“He’s Black.”

“Do you copy.”

“Copy that.” The trooper looked at me, but sort of through me. He was terribly confused and, indeed, so was I.

“Thank you, Mr. Kitu, you can go.”

“Just like that?”

“I know, right?”

“May I ask you a question?”

He looked at me and nodded.

“Why did you pull me over?”

“You’re Black.”

“That’s it? Because I’m Black?”

“That’s usually enough.” He looked south down the highway. “Your driving was a little erratic.”

“That’s because I learned to drive three days ago.”

“What?”

“The woman I bought the car from took me to a mall parking lot and gave me a basic lesson.”

He stared at me and walked away, on his radio again. “Base, I have to report that this guy doesn’t even know how to drive.”

“Eighteen, you have your orders.”

“Problem?” I asked.

He turned back to me. “No. Go on, I guess. They told me to let you go. So go. Go before I shoot you.”

I watched the trooper grow smaller in my mirror. It seemed odd that I would feel threatened by having been let go, but that was exactly how I felt. He had clearly received orders from someone other than his immediate superiors to let me go. But who? My money was on Bill Clinton, but I didn’t really know whom he worked for. What troubled me was that they seemed to know where I was at any point in time and just where I was going. Perhaps there was a GPS tracker in my car or on me. Perhaps my apartment was bugged and they heard my conversation with Sill. Perhaps drones equipped with infrared cameras were flying through the dark above me at that very moment. I considered the possibility that Clinton and Mitchell were in a black midseventies Lincoln Town Car, following me at a prescribed distance, eating White Castle burgers out of a paper bag. My judiciously paranoid imagination was nothing if not excruciatingly detailed.

2

The night came on full and road matters went a little better for me after I managed to find the headlights and switch them on. The drizzle became a hard rain and the semitrucks roared past me, kicking up a spray that blinded me. I found the windscreen wipers and that helped some. I discovered that a small amount of pressure applied evenly and consistently to the accelerator made for a far more comfortable ride than pressing hard and releasing continuously. Seven hours later, at two in the morning, I was in Washington. Perhaps any city is dead at 2:00 a.m., but this city certainly was. I didn’t know where in the city to go, so I drove and drove, past the White House, the Mall, up to the zoo, and back down into a deserted Georgetown. I parked and walked along a canal with Trigo on my chest.