Igo out and sit on the landing, and I recall the night when Dolores came out into the garden in her T-shirt and heard the mockingbird and time stopped and she started to be me again. Now it is just that moment when, as the Arabs say, a white thread can just be distinguished from a black one. The garden is monochrome, the air utterly still, not a whisper, the air poised after the death of the sea breeze; the foliage is monumental, as if cast in metal, and at this, the lowest temperature of the day, all the water has been wrung from the humid air and plated out onto every smooth surface, like a glittery varnish. I reflect that this may be the last dawn of my life, and I find that I’m not afraid of death. I’m only afraid of being eaten, like my husband was.
The moment passes. In two eyeblinks, there is color again, Polly’s roof is red, the hibiscus is pink, and the sky is pale blue with the big clouds starting their usual tropical morning pileup overhead. The birds begin their morning flittings and twitterings, and the first zombie shuffles into the yard, like a meter inspector on a route, and walks back into the shadow of the croton hedge. I wave to it in a friendly way. Time to work.
I dress in my painter’s overalls and a T-shirt and walk up the stairs. Luz is still sleeping. I sit on the edge of her bed and look at her, as the day slowly drifts into the room. If Witt and I had conceived a child, she might have been a slight bisque-colored creature like this. If one believes, as I suppose I must, in the primacy of the psychic world, perhaps Luz is that child, spiritually, a brand snatched from the bonfire of my late marriage. The Olo believe that the guys up there in m’arun are pretty smart, and when they want something to happen, it happens, and never mind the molecules. I confess it: I tried, that last season in New York, to get pregnant anyway, but it never took. Yet here she is: ga’lilfanebi lilsefunite tet, as they say in Olo?soul love is stronger than blood. I have to believe it. She wakes, not with a start, the way I do, but slowly, like a flower; my eyes are the first thing she sees, supposedly a good omen too.
But the first thing she says, her eyes going to the Burdines shopping bag standing on her night table, is “Did you fix my costume?”
I have not, lazy slut and bad mother. I apologize, she sniffles. We go to Providence. Ms. Lomax volunteers to do the costume. She takes the Burdines bag from me, at the school door, looking at me strangely.
Then I go and spend a very large amount of money. I buy clothes and supplies, and, for seventy-eight thousand dollars, the Guitar schooner. I survey it myself. It’s old but in great shape, all the latest gear, a rich man’s toy. I arrange with the kid who watches it to have it stocked with groceries and gas for a month on the water, and also to have the name painted out and changed to Kite. I change myself, too, a haircut in the Grove, and I slip into an elegant cream linen pantsuit and a straw hat.
By now it’s midafternoon. I have not slept in, what is it now, three days? There was the night at the ile, and then the night when Paz came and took me to dinner and we had our cruise on the bay, and then I took the grel out of Barlow, and then last night and now it’s now. I take a seat at a restaurant overlooking Dinner Key, and order a banana daiquiri in memory of Mom, whose favorite drink it was, and for years virtually her only sustenance. I watch people, I meet eyes, I attract admiring glances. A stylish woman at her ease, alone, a fraud, but they don’t know that; and I find the old Jane has become too small for me, just like Dolores was; a surprise.
The Olo say it was jiladoul, the sorcerers’ war, that underlay the general catastrophe of West Africa, the wars, slavery, the colonizers, the chaos. They may be right; they seem right about so many other things. Maybe it’s starting to happen here, and I feel a pang of regret, even for this city I hate. Do I have the remotest chance? Yes. Weak as I am in myself, there are powers behind me. I think of Eshu standing there in my kitchen when I opened the door to m’arun for the divination, of the orishas descending on Ortiz’s ile. There will be help, I think, if I get it right, if the allies are in place at the time, if I’m not afraid, then the elements will all snap neatly into place, in a manner beyond my understanding, without screws, like my Mauser pistol.
I finish my daiquiri and I’m about to order another when the paarolawats appears. He is (or was, I suppose) a filthy, bearded white man in a fatigue jacket with the sleeves cut off, knee-length shorts black with filth, and combat boots, no socks. His face and the fronts of his shins are covered with small red sores. The tourists don’t see it, their eyes slide away, as they do when they confront its nonzombie brothers in adversity. Maybe he will do something crazy, they are thinking, or demand money. A couple of the waiters are eyeing it, too. Bad for business, this wreck. I pay my bill and leave, toting my elegantly labeled bags. The thing cranks up, wheels slowly, and shuffles after me.
Another one is hanging around the church grounds when I go to pick up Luz at Providence. He’s sending me a message: he’s got me covered. It’s not like him to be so unsubtle and insistent. Perhaps being a witch has ruined his taste.
I’m a little early. The children are rehearsing one of the songs they are to sing at the pageant about Noah’s ark. They are grouped by what sort of animal they are representing and they sing, in turn, the appropriate songs, “Teddy Bears’ Picnic,” “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Then they all sing the “Navy Hymn,” which I think is fine. It was one of the first songs I ever learned myself. My dad taught it to me when I was about Luz’s age. He will be glad to see she knows it when they meet. Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, for those in peril on the sea.
After, Luz asks me if I know what a peril is. What? I ask. Sharks, she says, in a whispering voice, lest she attract any. We have a paper bag with the famous costume in it. Luz says she will model it for me, tonight. Oh, not tonight, baby.
We go home. We gloat over the new clothes, the toys. I order a pizza, which amazes Luz, her introduction to takeout. I read her Charlotte’s Web until she grows sleepy, and I put her to bed in her new lace nightie. Then I change into another of my new outfits, a green silk shirt and yellow slacks, Ifa’s colors for my big night.
Paz comes by around seven, looking frightened behind his usual bravado. He eyes Peeper in its cage on the table.
“Tell me not to feel stupid,” he says.
I say, “Don’t feel stupid. I see you’re still wearing your mom’s amulet. That’s wise. Also, you have to give me your gun.”
After a moment’s pause, he hands over a Glock 15 and I put it on the high cupboard shelf, with the other pistol and the kadoul. Which I take down and plunk on the table. He looks at it. “What’s that?”
“African magic sauce,” I say. “Would you care for some tea?”
“What kind of tea?” Suspicious.
“Tetley, Paz. Look, you have to trust me here. This”?here I tap the kadoul with my fingernail?”is for me. I’m the only one going into the unseen world. You’re just along for the ride. Like the chicken.”
“I don’t have to do anything?”
“Just be yourself.” Just. And not what you think you are either. The real Paz, please. I make the tea. My hands were shaking earlier, but now the jaw-grinding trembles have passed off. I am on the down slope. I sweeten my tea with sugar, a lot of it.
“What’s new at the cops?” I ask.
“No comment, mostly. They’re leaking that the killer introduced a gas into the A/C of the hotel and that’s how he did it. Knocked out the guards. The same for the craziness that went on last night. Inspired by that cult in Japan, releasing nerve gas on the Tokyo subway. Terrorism. They’re deciding whether to call in the National Guard. Mostly everyone is going around like it’s business as usual. It didn’t really happen in the way that everyone knows it happened. Occam’s razor.” He shrugs. My heart gives a jiggle, he looks so lost.
“Yes, good old Occam,” I say. ” ‘Do not increase causes beyond necessity.’ But what’s necessity? Occam was a churchman; he probably believed God was a necessary cause. And we restrict the phenomena that are eligible for explanation even before we apply the razor. Two guys detect a neutrino and it’s solid science. Ten thousand people see an apparition of the Virgin on a Sicilian hillside and it’s mass hysteria, not worth investigating. The brain is making drugs every second, but the ones that show us neutrinos are kosher and the ones that show us the Virgin are not. We don’t consider the notorious unreliability of eyewitnesses …”
He waves a weak hand to stop my flow. “Please, Jane, no more philosophy. I’m hanging on by a thread here.” I stop, abashed. He says, after a while, “I saw Barlow. They got him in Jackson.”
“How is he?”
“He says he feels fine. He thinks what happened was a dream. The last thing he’s really sure about is breakfast the day we tried to arrest your husband. Retrograde amnesia is what they say. I don’t think they’ll charge him, but he’s off the job.”
A car scrunches the shell gravel of the drive and heavy steps sound on the stairs. I get up at the knock. Mrs. Paz is looking grim and businesslike in a white dress embroidered around the yoke with blue seashells. She is holding two heavily loaded shopping bags. When I let her in, she thumps them down and looks me and my place over. I do not expect any compliments. We have a little staring contest, too. Her eyes are much darker than his. In them I read suspicion, fear, pain; she blinks before I do. When she opens up again, there is resignation. She touches my cheek. “Is it true you are made to Orula?” Women are never made to Orula in regular Santeria.
“To Ifa? Not the way you mean, but he seems to be interested in me. You’re made to Yemaya.”
“Yes, for many years. She’s given me good fortune, but I always felt that someday I would have to pay back, you understand? I think this is that time.”
He says, “What’s in the bags, Mami?”
“Food.” She indicates one of them with her foot. “Go put it in the refrigerator, Iago.”
“What do we need food for?”
“To eat, afterward, what do you think?” He does what she asks, unloading Tupperware bowls and boxes onto my nearly empty shelves. I offer my dark rum, and all of us have a little ritual drink. No one speaks. Then Mrs. Paz busies herself with the contents of the other bag. She places a little concrete pyramid at the door for Eleggua-Eshu, guardian of the ways. Around her neck she hangs a heavy necklace made of blue and white stone beads, the eleke, and around her right wrist the ide, a turquoise and shell bracelet. On the windowsill over the stove she arranges fan shells set with blue and white ribbons in a plaster base. These are the fundamentos of Yemaya, the depository of the spiritual power of her guardian orisha. She lights incense coils in the four corners of the room and candles made of wax poured into glass cylinders, imprinted with pictures of the santos. Finally, she sprinkles rum in precise directions, chanting. Paz watches all this incredulously. Finally, he blurts, “Jesus, Ma! Why didn’t you tell me you were into all this?”
She continues with her chant, ignoring him. The room fills with the smoke. The chant stops. I seem to smell the sea, now. She says, not looking at him, “You’re an American boy, football, television?I thought you’d be ashamed, you’d think it was an old tata thing.”
“You should’ve told me,” he says, in an unattractive petulant tone.
“Yes, and you should’ve told me about what you were doing, the girls, the sneaking out, God knows what! You didn’t talk to me for years.”
He’s irritated and embarrassed now, the detective made to look a fool in front of me. I want to tell him not to sweat it, that being a fool is the necessary prior for this kind of work, but I don’t, and he snarls something in Spanish and she snaps back and they get into it, too fast for me to follow, but the volume rising. I pick up my jar and step between them and say, We need to start now, and they calm down right away. Yemaya, besides being the sea goddess, is also the goddess of maternity and maternal love, which like the sea is stormy sometimes on the surface, but infinitely deep. These two people are in love and terrified of it.
A loud explosion, far off. We all jump. I look at Paz and I see that he’s not Paz, never was Paz, but my husband. He’s reaching out for me, his hand is going inside my head …
My arm is gripped tight, I feel myself shaken. Mrs. Paz is staring me in the face. She says, “Don’t be afraid.”
I say, “He’s coming. He’s coming through the city. People are going mad.”
She strokes my arm, speaks soothingly in Spanish. Her eyes are without fear. Ignorance, or maybe she has something I don’t have. I make myself look at Paz. He’s confused, but I see that under the shell of cop-toughness there is a lovely innocence, a look my Witt had once.
Sirens are calling again. Mrs. Paz says, “If you’re going to do this, you should start now.”
So we begin. There is a little ritual with rum and chant that seals them to me in the m’doli and we move right into that. Mrs. Paz looks at me with awe, surely not a familiar experience with respect to the women her son has brought around; Paz seems a little wooden, overly precise, the response of a brave man frightened. My dad was like that in the storm at sea. And the chick? It tweets and hops and flutters wildly when I blow rum at it. Then I drink the drink.
The kadoul is bitter; most sorcerous stuff is bitter, because most of it contains alkaloids and things that were evolved by plants to keep us warm-blooded creatures from dining on them. I sit down. Mrs. Paz sits next to me at the table, and Jimmy goes and flops into my raggedy lounger. She takes my hand, strokes it. It comes on fast. I have nothing in my stomach to slow it down except a half slice of pizza and some banana daiquiri. In five minutes I shuck off my body.
The wonders of m’doli are difficult to describe. A savage spot, as lonely and enchanted as ere beneath the waning moon was haunted by a woman wailing for her demon lover. A little like that. You experience it in poetry, uncanny, but recall it in prose. Multiple levels of awareness, too. I’m conscious of my body, slumped in its chair, and Paz and his mother and the little bird, my allies, I can feel them, as we feel a chair, or a bed, or water around us in a pool, supporting, a circle of protection, connecting back to m’fa. I detect … what’s that? Something a little off, an imbalance there, an absence, like running on a loose heel. The wobble of a bike when you haven’t been on one for years. Too late, now, so I ignore it and float out of the apartment to the landing.
Which seems to be larger, much larger than it is in m’fa, more of a broad veranda, a little like the back deck of Lou Nearing’s place in Hyde Park where I met my husband, and a little like a set for the last scene in Tosca, a fortress tower. It is indistinct. A breeze brings the odors of summer in the city, traffic fumes and the smoke from barbecues. There is a party going on, with music, not Motown this time, but an Olo song, a song about the exile from Ile-Ife, full of their peculiar grating harmonics and insistent rhythms. I can’t make out the words, but I’m dying to because it’s the whole story of the Olo’s expulsion and hegira, the Ilidoni, which I’ve never heard before, and for some reason it is enormously important. But it seems like the more I strain to hear, the fainter the music grows.
I know a lot of the people here. I see my sister and my mother, and Marcel and some of the Chenka, and Lou Nearing and the old guy, George Dorman, who used to clean out our furnace at Sionnet when I was a little girl. He died when I was eight. I once asked Ulune whether the dead people we met in m’doli were real or created by our minds, like the figures in dreams. He laughed at me. How silly to imagine that the people in dreams were not real. How silly to have such a term as real.
My husband is here, dressed in white Olo clothes, carrying the corkscrew thornwood cane that marks the Olo witch. He opens his arms to embrace me, like he did at the tent rock, the bone place, at Danolo, when I failed Ulune. I feel myself drawn to him. This is the first little skirmish.
I can resist. I walk away; that is, the deck we are on becomes larger, the party recedes. I feel a touch at my elbow. My mother, looking gorgeous, in a tiny evening sheath, black, with her neck and hands heavy with diamonds. Have a drink, Jane, you’re old enough. She holds out a blender pitcher, and I smell the sweet, cloying scent of bananas and rum. I refuse. Jane, you’re such a drip. You’re no fun, Jane, that’s your problem. You’re a drip like your father. Not words, but the feeling I had when she used to say stuff like that.
I ignore her and focus my attention on Witt. I say, I want to speak to Witt. Amusement. Talk to me, I’m here. I say, No, you’re not. You’re Durakne Den. I want Witt. It’s not really talking we’re doing, it’s the meaning under language.
His teeth are filed in the manner of witches and he has the zigzag cheek and temple scars. You mean Mebembe. His witch name. The figure is getting taller now, changing. The scene is changing, too, and the odors are dust, and dung, and millet cooking, and the rank sharp scent of bruised African vegetation, and, permeating all, the not-stink of dulfana, intolerably strong, and of a peculiar decayed flavor. We are in an Olo bon, the one outside Danolo, where the witch lived. I never saw Durakne close-up, back then, except that one occasion at night. He is a tall, well-fed man, very dark, with his head shaved except for a long braided topknot. I look into his face.
Ulune always told me that the first rule of ndol, the work in the magical realm, was never to be afraid. Fear takes away the legs and the arms and the eyes, he said. It is what the witches use to destroy you there, to render you helpless and … I forget the rest. I actually forget everything, just now, what I am doing here, what I am. I’m drowned in fear.
Not like looking into the eyes of an animal, because there you understand it is an animal, you have no expectations, and there is a certain mindless dignity in its glance. These eyes, however, shine with intelligence, intelligence made hideous by the utter absence of any empathy, eyes as void of love as the black dots that rim the head of a spider. Inhuman is a word we use, in our false pride, to describe people who participate in behavior that is characteristically human?murder, torture, rape?but here for once it is apposite. Now I comprehend that I am not looking into the eyes of a person at all but at a writhing mass of grelet, the beings who colonized Durakne Den as a child and have grown fat in him, far fatter than these psychic parasites normally get, thick greasy maggots a foot long, eating, always hungry, reaching out for me. I dreamed him once, I recall, when I was with Ulune. Worms in the eyes. It, not him. I move away, slowly, as in a dream, I hear myself screaming, but there are no doors. I batter at the mud walls.
Witt’s voice comes from It: Do you really want to see me? I’m right here. It takes a little carved wooden box off a shelf, places it on the floor. It lifts the lid. In the box is a doll of some kind, no, or a small animal, it’s moving. My dream again. I get down on my hands and knees and peer in. It’s Witt, six inches high, at a desk, with the white lined pads he favored stacked around him, writing away. I feel a pang of sympathy for him, he’s working so hard, and I reach out a hand to touch him. My hand and my whole arm and shoulder go into the box. I rub his back, as I used to when he was at his desk. But I am off balance, and so I place one foot in the box and then the other. There is plenty of room, and it’s an escape from the witch.
I’m standing next to Witt. We are in a little room, the apartment over the boathouse at Sionnet. There is no door where there should be one, but otherwise it’s the same: a maple desk, an old wooden swivel chair, a somewhat ratty couch, bookshelves, a mini-stereo set, and the windows, to one side opening on the terrace and to the harbor on the other. I’m so glad to be home. I see my reflection in this window. I’m wearing a piece of patterned cloth around my waist; my breasts jut out like dark shiny plums. I am black. Oh, good, I think, now we will be happy. I go to him. He is writing away. I ask him how he is doing, how’s the Captain? He smiles, fine, great, it’s flowing good; he does not stop writing. I look over his shoulder. He writes: over the breasts of the spring, the land, amid cities, amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peeped from the ground spotting the gray debris … The writing fades, however, as he writes it. The pile of finished pages is quite blank. But he seems happy and so what if he’s writing Whitman, the important thing is … I have forgotten what the important thing is.
Suddenly, I am terrifically horny. My groin tingles and grows damp. I am dying for it. I tug at his arm, whisper endearments, salacious suggestions. I drop my cloth wrap, I tear at his clothes, I drag him naked into the little bedroom, and oh, good, he has a huge hard-on, far bigger than Witt’s actual thing, parodically immense, black as obsidian glass, shiny wet. There is no room on the bed, for the bedroom is full of naked women. They are all playing with babies, newborns, crooning, tickling, nursing. Most of the women are black, but there are several with blond hair, one of whom looks Cuban. All the babies are dead, though, because the tops of all their heads have been sliced neatly off and their brains are missing; the tiny empty skulls gape like fledglings, but the women don’t seem to notice, or to notice that their own bellies have been sliced open, and that everything in the room is coated with, gelid with, slick, dark blood. I am insane with frustration, the desire is intolerable, I rub at my genitals. I shout at the women, I shoulder them aside, pushing them off the bed.
One is my sister. She looks me in the face, such a look as I cannot recall my sister ever giving me, full of love and compassion. I lie on my back and raise my knees and he falls on me and shoves it in, huge, impossible, I am being ripped apart, but the pleasure is so overwhelming that I don’t care if I die. Then my sister says, into my ear, “Forgive me.”
It is like an electric shock. Someone is holding me from behind, there is motion, we are on a boat, there’s a cheek pressed against mine, my hands are on a tiller. He’s guiding my hands, my father’s big freckled hands on mine. I can smell him. It’s dark, we’re sailing through the dark, through black water. A voice in my ear, warm breath. It’s a sad voice, disappointed. I know I’ve screwed up badly. The unevenness I felt earlier is explained. The wrong ally. There’s a hole in the circle of protection. The son and the mother are solid, but the yellow bird is wrong. The wrong yellow bird. I didn’t pay enough attention. I was distracted by fear.
The hands on mine turn stringy and black-skinned.
Now Ulune is sitting in front of me and the boat has turned into the landscape around Danolo, still moving, a heavy nauseating roll. Glowing lines radiate out from Ulune’s head, a thick meshwork that envelopes me, too, and everything else. I see the net of fate, and I understand that my whole life? my whole life?was for this purpose, my family, my childhood, my education. Marcel, the Chenka, Witt, Africa, all has been arranged so that I would be in a position to be where I am now, to function as a weapon in the jiladoul.
Shooting blanks, as it turns out, a broken blade. I’ve failed.
Sadness is flowing out of Ulune’s face. I see it as a colored mist, taste it as bitter, smell it as blood, earth, damp cloth. He is fading. I am still enclosed by arms, still feel breath on my cheek, but the arms and hands are turning into the limbs of a beast, the breath is rank and too hot.
Ulune wait! One question.
His face flows back into focus; an interested look appears on it. This is a tradition. The teacher always waits for one last question, but only one.
I say, now tell me about the Ilidoni. Where did that come from? Stupid! I have wasted my one question on a historical detail, but Ulune seems pleased by it. The net lines flowing from his breast become brighter. I hear his voice. Knowledge flows into me.
In Ife, long ago, the orishas were not yet divided from the ajogun; all were the same, all were honored. The orishas walked the streets of Ife alongside the Olo people. But then some of the Olo became proud, for although they had much, they desired more. These people said, Why must we dwell here in m’fa, where we must labor for our food, where we sicken and die like the animals? In m’arun the orishas live forever, and have nothing but pleasure. Let us conquer m’arun, and make it our own. These people were great sorcerers and with gifts, magic, and clever talk they corrupted half of the number of the gods. These became the ajogun. The evil ajogun showed the Olo sorcerers the way of great power, the okunikua. They tore the babies from the wombs of women, and ate their parts, and became strong as the gods. They assaulted m’arun and there was a great war. Now Olodumare was angered and showed his face. Ife was brought to ruin, and the Olo sent on their wandering, and many of the ajogun were destroyed, too, which is why there are now four hundred and one orishas, but only two hundred ajogun, and why the orishas are always vigilant, to this day, and the Olo honor them and walk in their paths. The ajogun are like rats in the house, allowed to eat a little grain; yes, the orishas will not tear down the house for that, but if they bite the baby, then they tear down the house.
That was a good question, Jeanne. You are a brave little goat.
He smiles, and waves his cane and walks off, and he drags the world along with him, the heaving landscape sky air and sound, leaving me alone in the quivering darkness between the worlds. Why was it a good question? Goat? What did he mean by … the thought flies out of my mind. There is a pulling. I am being pulled home like a naughty child. It is a torment, it is like being jerked through a keyhole by a meathook. And oddly enough, through the pain, I understand that this is necessary, too, this is what, in a way, the Chenka would have done to me had I the courage then, the death of all the ogga and of old Jane. In m’doli there is no time of the sort we are used to in m’fa, so this flensing goes on for quite a while, and is quite inexplicable. A log being lathed down to the size of a toothpick. Somehow in the middle of it, I become a Catholic again, my faith restored. What is pulling at me can’t possibly understand this part. It merely wants me back in my body. It’s focused on the fact that I am no danger to him now, that my circle of protection is broken, that my stool rests on two legs. The wrong yellow bird. I feel the flesh of m’fa grow around me again. A little ray of hope here. I am helpless, yes, but I am also quite a different sort of being from what It thinks I am. They will tear down the house if the rat bites the baby. And the goat. That’s important, too, I think, as I open my eyes and see my apartment again.