Platform
by Jacob Weber
Naanti needed a cause, and she needed one by three o’clock. That’s the deadline she’d set, as much for herself as for the media, because she always worked well with deadlines. Need to lose four and a half kilograms by the end of the month for Monaco? Done. She’d picked the last day of her husband’s football training camp—the football in the States, not the football the rest of the world played—on the day she agreed to go with him.
She could hardly claim she’d been too busy to find time to make up her mind. The entire camp, Ben (known as Bazooka Ben to most of the world for the strength of his arm) had been gone for fourteen hours a day while he worked with his team through drills in ninety-five degree heat, then retreated with his coaches to watch video of more football for another six to eight hours. That left Naanti to sit and think in the most modest hotel she’d been in since she’d first hit a runway at age sixteen.
It wasn’t rodent and insect infested, like her home she’d grown up in on the banks of the Omo River in Ethiopia, and she supposed she ought to be happy to have a roof over her head, food in the lobby, and air conditioning as a shield against the heat in this godforsaken suburb of Chicago. But the food in the lobby was mostly pastries and other carbs favored by the press who covered her husband’s team, and the gym didn’t have enough equipment in it to work those carbs off, so she mostly sat and thought futilely about what cause to announce as hers. Every retired model needed a cause. Chiasoka had taught her that over a decade ago when Naanti was replacing her as the world’s African supermodel. (“The world can only support one at a time,” Chiasoka had joked, without an ounce of bitterness. She was ready to go.)
Bazooka Ben was talking to the media on the television in the room, the daily press conference where reporters peppered him with questions about what he thought of the rookie who’d been drafted to replace him when he finally retired, and if that retirement would take place at the end of the coming season. Ben dodged questions about a “quarterback controversy” this year by saying he’d had to earn his spot on the team every year, and this year would be no different. He had a great jawline, and he might have shown up in commercials for razors and cologne even if he couldn’t throw a football. Twitter often debated about whether Ben or Naanti was the prettier one. Ben complained about the media to Naanti in private, but anybody watching him could see he loved talking to them. It was a group of people paid to ask him questions about football, which was the only subject he seemed to love. He certainly couldn’t stomach much discussion about modeling.
“So, you like, stand around and wear clothes people are trying to sell and then try to look the way they tell you too?”
That was the kind of question Ben had asked Naanti at their own mini-press conferences over dinner during their brief courtship. It was fine with Naanti. She was done modeling and didn’t care if she ever talked about it again.
It was one o’clock. She’d have to leave in ninety minutes. The bathroom had plastic fixtures made to look like something fancier than plastic. Naanti had friends with similar fixtures on their bodies. Even in the harsh light of the bathroom, the mirror didn’t show her a flaw in her face. It was her face that had carried her away from the banks of the Omo, where yearly floods brought fish and nutrients to grow sorghum, to the catwalks of places she’d never dreamed of going.
The people in her village, who saw her face a lot more than she did, determined she should be a model before she knew what one was. One of the elders managed to secure a pile of out-of-date fashion magazines from Addis Ababa and presented them to Naanti’s father with an injunction to have the girl practice looking like the women in the magazines. Naanti spent her early adolescence with a pouty expression on her face, her hand on one hip with the elbow bent like a jebena. She did that until Chiasoka headlined a “Future of Africa” tour that traveled the continent, and the village put its money together to buy her a ticket to the show, where Chiasoka immediately picked Naanti out of the crowd as the girl she wanted to pass her mantle to. Naanti knew people who had struggled their whole lives for nearly nothing, and she’d had fame and wealth come to her just by showing up with the face God gave her.
Naanti decided to go simple with her makeup and her attire. This was supposed to be for some purpose of importance to humanity, not an opportunity to pimp for brand names or point out yet again her good fortune in being born beautiful. But what on Earth was the cause she would announce?
Chiasoka had taught her everything about modeling, from what kind of exercise would make her lose weight but not get too muscly to how to pretend not to care how you looked to how to choose a man consistent with her brand out of the thousands of seemingly reasonable choices. But when it came to picking her own post-career cause, Chiasoka had been uncharacteristically nonchalant.
“What will you do now, haftey?” Naanti had asked her backstage after Chiasoka had announced the news she was hanging up her heels. Both of them were more than a little drunk on champagne, wobbling on their legs so much they’d had to sit down on the floor.
“I don’t know. Go try to save some rhinos or some shit. Something stereotypically African and terribly cliched but also very on-brand for me.”
Naanti couldn’t try to save rhinos. The Rhinos were Ben’s team, and she needed to stand out from him. She’d picked him as a husband, to the shock of millions, because even though he was ten years older and nearing retirement age and Naanti’s manager worried she would disappear next to someone as good looking and famous as him, his fame in America ensured her an enormous platform she could use for her cause.
But what good was a platform if you didn’t know what to do with it? She couldn’t half-ass her choice like Chiasoka did. She’d been handed a life almost everyone in the world would be jealous of, and she’d done nothing to earn it. She had to repay the universe by doing as much good as possible. But how? It had to be something African, of course, because the world would never tolerate anything else. Child soldiers seemed like an older generation’s cause, while clean water was maybe too young for her now and would require her to know science things. She didn’t want anything too overtly political, because the only political cause she knew about was how the Chinese had dammed the Omo River and it no longer flooded. If she spoke out about that, though, there might be repercussions for her hometown in Ethiopia. Besides, it wasn’t a model’s job to pick a cause on behalf of one small group of people somewhere, Chiasoka had told her. People don’t like specifics in their causes. They want the broad and breezy generalization. Peace. Charity. Love. A retired model’s job was to do something for the whole world, and by doing so, to show her thankfulness to God for having been made so beautiful. But like with modeling, the key to a cause was to leave room for a little mystery.
Ben must have said something funny to the media, because she heard laughter coming from the TV in the other room.
“And then Lyle over here would have to explain that to his wife!”
There was even more laughter. She didn’t know what the set-up to the joke had been, but Ben had apparently been up for driving it home. Professional football defenses had learned that Ben almost always took advantage of the opportunities they gave him, and the press now knew he could do the same with a joke. Naanti started to apply matte caramel eye shadow to go with a simple white dress. Maybe she could just go with not knowing what it was she wanted to do, wear basic colors and say she was starting the Naanti Ahmed Foundation for Doing Good Things to Help People.
“Speaking of wives, Ben, we hear your beautiful wife is planning an announcement of her own for media day, is that right?”
She’d have been nervous how he was going to handle this if he wasn’t such a pro with reporters. He knew she’d been having a tough time picking something. He’d find a way to deflect, to manage expectations. There were a lot of drawbacks to having married an older man, but his long-won expertise in these matters was a big plus. Ben doted on a nineteenth century book called On War by Carl von Clausewitz, which he’d come across during the two years of college he attended before declaring for the pro football draft. He said the book taught that war was politics by other means. To him, it meant that he treated everything in life like it was football, and football like it was war.
That’s what made his response so hard for Naanti to believe.
“Oh, yeah. She’s very excited about it. She’s going to be starting a foundation to save the whales. Her chance to give back. But I don’t want to spoil it for her, so I’ll let her tell you all about it when she comes on herself later today.”
Naanti dropped the brush she was using to apply eye shadow, and it came to rest on top of the hard water stains at the bottom of the sink.
Whales? Sharmuta, of all the causes on Earth, where the hell had he come up with whales? That was a cause from two generations before even Chiasoka, back when models still hoped that taking up a cause might actually bring about the change in the world they claimed to be trying to achieve. Whales? Hadn’t the oceans already been polluted beyond hope? Hadn’t global warming killed off all their food? Were there even any whales left to save, and if so, how could you hope to save them, when that meant the coordinated efforts of politicians all over the world? It was the stupidest, most hopeless, most anachronistic, and most embarrassing cause he could have given her, but now that he’d said it, it’s what she had to choose. Pointing out that he hadn’t been listening would have been an embarrassment and a killer for her brand.
He must have misunderstood. She remembered now. They’d been talking in bed one night, and it had seemed he was only half-listening, but he had asked her to explain more about what she meant by needing a cause.
“You know, a cause. Feed the starving children. Save the whales. That kind of thing.”
She’d picked it out as the most obvious and cheesy example of a celebrity cause just because she thought it would help him get the point. She’d never imagined he would take it literally. Why hadn’t he picked the feed the children thing? That was at least a cause she could take in several directions, one of which she could maybe live with. Whales was the worst cause she could think of, and it was her cause now.
She had eighty-three minutes before she needed to leave. She turned off the television and turned on her laptop. She resisted the urge to open her Twitter. She’d been off it for a week, pretending to have a social media fast to refocus her spiritual energy, when really she’d just been trying to think of what the hell she was going to pick. She had no time for Twitter now. She needed to learn about whales in a hurry.
She managed to find a documentary on whales. It was likely not supposed to be on YouTube, but she inwardly thanked whatever intellectual property lawbreaker had put it there. The hotel Internet was shit, but with everyone gone, she had just enough bandwidth to keep up with the stream.
A sperm whale sat just below the surface of the ocean. It didn’t do anything. The jaw was so low on its bulky head, she wondered how it could see its food to know how to eat. The whale could have been a floating pile of ocean trash or a capsized ship and it would have been as entertaining. Next came a blue whale, the largest animal ever to live on Earth. It blew air and water out as it broke the surface of the water, the exhalation sounding like the surf. Vapor floated and whirled before dissipating. Much of the video was of whales diving out of sight of the cameras, to the great depths where they spent most of their lives, doing things humans still don’t understand well. Flukes flipped powerfully yet slowly, the whales cruising with greater and more genuine indifference than Naanti had ever managed to effect on a runway. Ten minutes were given to the sounds whales use to navigate, and a symphony of clicks and whistles and mournful wails followed one after another. It was beautiful in a sad way.
Her phone buzzed. It was her manager, Etelle.
“Check Twitter,” the message said. “Nyaring is at it again. Didn’t take her long. What the fuck is wrong with Ben?”
Etelle hadn’t been as happy about her top client marrying an American football star as Chiasoka had been. Naanti opened Twitter and found Nyaring’s post.
Whales. Okay. And a bunch of emojis Naanti didn’t understand, some of which seemed like they were laughing. And then @therealNaantiahmed to make it clear who the subject of her Tweet was.
Goddamn it. Chiasoka loved to beef on social media. She thought it was fun and also good for business. Twitter to her was war by other means. Chiasoka would say that Naanti should be happy; if Nyaring was choosing to beef with Naanti, that meant Naanti was still relevant. Chiasoka had intentionally started more than one fake media feud with Naanti when Naanti took over the crown as African supermodel ten years ago. She still started occasional dust-ups on Twitter or Instagram now. Naanti didn’t have to lift a finger. Chiasoka handled the whole thing. She’d start a fight, then send Naanti’s publicist the responses Naanti should post on her social media to make sure their beef got maximum exposure. What seemed to the public like the resurgence of a bitter feud was actually a monologue from Chiasoka in which she was doing her friend a favor by handling her social media work for her.
With Nyaring, though, it was different. The girl was Dinka and the tallest model anyone had ever seen. The girl didn’t starve herself for her career, either—she had muscles, and people compared her to the Williams sisters, but it didn’t hurt her career at all. She did things on her own terms, and she seemed to enjoy the fights she got into and to mean the things she said. They’d met at a number of functions, and Naanti was always afraid of her. Nyaring hadn’t waited until the end of her career to find a cause, and hers was as political and specific as they come—she lobbied for the plight of her country, torn apart by civil war since before it had even celebrated its first year of independence.
Chiasoka was surprisingly religious, and she quoted a psalm whenever she got into a feud online: Let not my enemies triumph over me. But why did Nyaring need to be her enemy?
If Naanti didn’t want to let her enemy triumph over her in the next two hours, she needed to learn enough about whales to fake her way through a press conference explaining why she had chosen to try to save them. What possible connection could she point to? Since the year after she was born, Ethiopia had been a landlocked country. Her father had never forgiven the TPLF for giving the ocean away to Eritrea. None of her village had, which they all suspected had something to do with why the government was willing to let the Chinese dam the river.
Naanti went back to the video. Animals that looked something like a dog—not the toy things Naanti’s friends carried in backpacks, but the kinds that hunted in packs for deer back home—had started fishing fifty-five million years ago. Over time, they’d started doing more and more in the seas, until finally, they became the whales of today, like the humpbacks she saw curling and circling, like dye poured into water, lazily wending its way through the glass before someone shook it and mixed it in.
A humpback mother nursed its calf along the shoreline of Mexico. They were in danger from pollution. They were in danger from everything. While the calf was young, they were even in danger even from other whales, because Orcas liked to pick on young humpbacks. The mother lived its life hoping her enemies would not triumph over her.
The air conditioner rattled. Ben didn’t stay in hotels like this anymore, either, but during summer training camp, the team stayed in an older facility, because they thought it built camaraderie for everyone to stay there together. Naanti wasn’t even supposed to be there, but because it was maybe Ben’s last year with the team, they let it happen. For some reason, Ben had convinced her it would bring them closer, too, although he only showed up just before bed, at which time he would remind her that they’d both agreed that now would be a good time to start a family. Family was also politics by other means.
It had never occurred to her to marry for love. Her parents had been an arranged marriage, so when Chiasoka had told Naanti what kind of man to marry, that had seemed natural, too. Children should be just as natural.
But to support a baby meant you either had to kill someone else’s calf or fight so your own calf didn’t get killed. You had to either triumph over your enemies or hope they didn’t triumph over you. There was no way out of it. Following the most natural instincts imaginable, like having children, meant linking yourself to politics, and through politics, to war. Kill or be killed—that’s what was really natural. She ought to be an advocate for zero population growth, make Ben wear a rubber until her eggs stopped dropping. Do the unnatural thing, because the natural way would end up with everyone dead sooner or later, whales and people alike.
The documentary ended with a humpback breaching and inspirational music. Naanti wondered if she should try to eat something. She’d be leaving soon and wouldn’t have a chance to eat again until late evening. She’d be with Ben during the press conference. Her own conference would only attract people who followed modeling, but to bring in real participation meant she’d need a broader audience, the kind who watched American football. Only Ben could bring her that.
Ben said that in a way, On War was just von Clausewitz writing about why Napoleon had been so successful, and wanting his own country to copy that success. When your enemy keeps kicking your ass, it’s maybe time to learn something and start to fight like your enemy.
She closed her laptop, made some final touches to her makeup. She turned the handle to the room, which only worked if you pulled up and not down, and walked the empty hallway to the elevator. The carpet in the hallway seemed as old as the hotel, which was probably older than Naanti. Maybe as old as Ben. She wondered what the carpet was made of. Was carpet a fabric like clothes? Was it wool or polyester? No, it had to be able to withstand way more abuse than those fabrics could. She thought of all the fabrics that had touched her over the years. Each garment she’d worn had passed through dozens, maybe hundreds of hands before being wrapped around her body. It had made her career feel like it was the pinnacle of things, the point to which it all led. Ben had explained to her that quarterbacks got all the glory, but they relied on other people protecting their backs and doing a million things most fans never noticed in order for quarterbacks to succeed. Maybe they were more alike than her agent realized.
There was a long line of events that flowed downstream to make a garment before emptying onto the sea of her body. What would happen if that river were blocked somewhere? If something unnatural dammed up the stream?
The elevator descended, carrying Naanti alone. The press conference would have the wrong lighting for her grape-colored skin. She could have just skipped all her care with her makeup. It wouldn’t matter anyway. After the conference was over, not even Nyaring would be talking about how Naanti had looked. For the first time, she felt like she had a message she wanted to give, and she was going to give it. After all, what was a platform for?
JACOB WEBER is a translator living in Maryland. He has published fiction in The Baltimore Review, Another Chicago Magazine, The Chattahoochee Review, and other journals. His book of short stories, Don't Wait to Be Called, won the 2017 Washington Writers' Publishing House Award for Fiction.