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Ridge, in the mist and the thin, crisp air, and the weather that can hide behind mountains and appear from anywhere, and is always unpredictable and forever changing. The missionaries chose Akwapim when they came to Ghana because it was too cold for the mosquitoes that killed them down on the coast. And though they’re now gone, the ridge is filled with churches and schools, and the old buildings they left behind, falling to ruin slowly.
    What happened to him here, over the course of a few months, started one evening as he sat with the five hundred other students in the school hall where meals were taken. The rain was coming down, as it had been on and off for a few days. It hammered on the tin roof so hard that night that it drowned out the sound of the talking and shouting of the children gathered there, so that soon people stopped trying to speak at all, and they ate in silence, surrounded by the storm, while the smell of the wet ground began to rise up, rich and choking.
    After the meal the rain still had not stopped. It was at least a five-minute walk to the closest dormitory, and so the children all gathered outside under the eaves of the dining room, pressed against the walls.
    As he stood there somebody dashed out—a girl, running, laughing at her daring. He’d never talked to her before, though he’d noticed her a few times—the first, a few weeks before in one of the telecentres in town, from which his mother had made him phone to let her know he’d arrived safely. The girl had been there with a friend. They’d seen him staring, and laughed as they left.
    Now, standing under the eaves, he watched the girl running out into the storm, as the rain wrapped her up in her clothes.
    Something beautiful passing by, he reflected.
    Then gone.
    The sky was a little short of night. There was texture still in it, andhe could make out the rise of the hill that separated the school from the town, and the half-presence of electric light behind it. There was a breeze—not cold, but damp—and he felt it in his shins and through his shoes, as if it were trying to flow into him. He stood for a few moments there. And then there seemed no point in standing there any longer, and he put his hands in his pockets and stooped his head into the evening and walked through the rain the distance back to his boarding house.
    By morning he had a fever. He spent the next four days in bed. On the first night he was given an extra blanket. Meals were brought down to him, then taken away untouched. He lay in his bunk during the day while the other boys were in classes. He slept, and when he was tired of sleeping, stared at the ceiling and thought.
    He thought about many things. He thought about what had happened. He thought about how his life was now, and how it had been before, and why his father had sent him back, and why he felt so alone, and how these things were connected.
    And then he was so tired he could no longer think. He could hardly go to the other side of the room to get water. Noise came in through the windows all the time, but he was defenseless against it. The fan above him was catching, crinkling like plastic, throbbing in the ceiling, but he needed the breeze to keep his temperature down.
    And as he lay in bed, sweating and distracted and wishing for things to be different, he suddenly felt a lightness—which at last was calming, and felt like sleep, so that he gave into it, and when he woke he no longer felt agitated at all, but rather disconnected from himself, as if he’d become an observer, a mere witness, removed from events that were happening in his own life.
    While his body recovered, he continued to feel this strange feeling of absence. He continued to attend classes. He continued to speak to people. Complete distance was impossible. They slept ten to a room at that place, on double bunks, and woke, and washed and ate together, worked, then slept again, and the physical living of their lives was very closely bound.