Go, Went, Gone

Richard returns the next day, and a security guard tells him he’ll have to wait for a staff member to escort him inside. This makes Richard recall a term he recently read about, “bureaucratic geometry,” in a book about colonialism. The term describes how colonizers overload the colonized with bureaucratic red tape to prevent them from taking political action.  

Eventually a staff member arrives and escorts Richard upstairs, to a different room, where Richard interviews a young man (Apollo)—a boy, really—who tells Richard he is from Niger. When Richard asks if the boy has parents, the boy says no and doesn’t elaborate. Inwardly, the boy reflects on all the possible reasons he might not have parents—perhaps they were some of the people buried alive by the Nigerian soldiers. He spent most of his youth “work[ing] as a slave”—could his own parents have sold him? The boy tells Richard he knows Tamasheq, the Tuareg language. He also knows Hausa, Arabic, and French, and now he’s learning German.

At some point, a man named Awad knocks on the door and says he heard Richard has come to hear people’s stories. He tells Richard he can find him next door, in room 2020, then he leaves. Richard ends his interview with the boy “who looks exactly the way [Richard] always imagined Apollo,” not long after—the conversations are far more exhausting than Richard ever imagined they could be.