Not a stick, thinks Lion, a staff, from the Ethiopian Imperial Navy.
“Manley gets back to Jamaica,” continues Shiz, “tells people Selassie has bestowed upon him the Rod of Correction. From the Bible, the actual rod Solomon used to beat down foolishness; Manley gwan use it to beat back corruption, lift up Jah people.”
“Starved Jah people,” says Luther, going back to his paper. “And someone pass me that joint.”
Penelope walks it over.
“Manley holds rallies in the Blue Mountains,” Shiz continues. “Dreads rain down. Weeping, bowing before the Rod, dem waiting in line for days to kiss it. Manley turns it into his campaign slogan: ‘Lick ’em, lick ’em, with the Rod of Correction.’”
“And this worked?” asks Penelope.
“Rastas ate it up,” says Shiz, “and Hugh Shearer knows, if he want stay in power, the I-Rod is trouble.” Lifts his hands up, palms open. “But how ya fight Jah symbol?”
“Steal the Rod?” asks Luther, still behind the paper.
“Exactly,” says Shiz, snapping his fingers twice, the same beatnik clap that infected Arctic. “Labor send badman to rob Manley the challenger. Dem steal the I-Rod, and Manley man steal it back. Then there’s two Rods—the Rod of Correction versus the Stick of Deception. In Jah end,” spreading his hands wide, “downpressor man, where you gwan run to?
“So Manley won?” asks Penelope.
Shiz jabs his left foot forward, nicking the bottom edge of the paint can. It flips straight up into the air and lands in his hand. “In a landslide.”
Penelope turns to face Lion. “And you found this thing?”
“The story before the story that got me fired,” he says. “I was in Jamaica writing about the forty-year anniversary of Bob Marley’s death and the cultural impact of reggae. How it became the foundation for both hip-hop and punk, proto-poly-tribe stuff.”
Shiz loses interest in the conversation the moment Shiz stops talking. Eyes wandering around the room. Either typical rock-star ADD or the Prince is more stoned than suspected.
“I was talking to some Rasta elders,” explains Lion, “and they told me about the Rod of Correction. Shiz was right, it changed everything.”
“How does a walking stick change everything?” asks Penelope.
Before he can answer, Shiz says, “I’ll be right back,” and stomps out of the room.
Lion watches him go. Seems to be moving in slow motion. Maybe Lion’s more stoned than suspected.
“Lion?” she says, snapping him back.
“Between the signifier and the signified: Rises,” he says. “It’s a classic example.”
“Her tattoo?” asks Shiz, coming back into the room a moment later, a bottle of beer in one hand and a small silver box in the other. Interesting, thinks Lion, that Shiz knows about Penelope’s tattoo.
Then Shiz opens the box.
More interesting, what’s inside.
Thirty-six white capsules, in six neatly spaced rows of six.
“Bredren,” says Shiz, holding out the box, “celebration in Zion.”
“Celebration?” asks Lion.
“Glad you asked,” says Shiz, smiling broadly. “My suggestion: We take Molly, remove our outerwear, and see what happens.”
Looks from Lion to Penelope.
“Shut your mouth when you talk to me, Shiz,” says Penelope. “I told you already, we’re not shaggin’.”
Then she reaches into the box, removes a couple of capsules, chases one down with a swig of Shiz’s beer, hands the other to Lion.
“But Lion Zorn,” she says, shrugging off her army jacket and letting it fall to the floor, “em-tracker of the Rod of Correction.”
“Affirmative,” he says.
“You I might shag.”
“Here we go again,” says Luther, still behind his paper.
THE ORIGINAL REDEMPTION SONG
Penelope, Lion concludes, has the entirety of a T. S. Eliot poem tattooed on her left leg. Black ink broken into seventeen stanzas. Starting out “We are the hollow men,” on the meat of her calf; rising toward “This is the way the world ends,” on the crest of her ass.
Shiz and Luther and the Black Power twins are elsewhere. Lion and Penelope are naked, afloat in Shiz’s waterbed, awash in chemically induced serotonin and more feral, postcoital chemistry. They’re staring up at a million gently rotating points of light, the whole of the cosmos projected onto the cabin’s roof.
Like bathing in intergalactic space.
Beneath that sky, Lion’s been using the light of his phone to slowly read his way across Penelope’s skin. It’s the only light in the room save for the galaxies above and the glimmering below. Under them, the bed’s platform is a queen-sized aquarium, black-light lit and populated by translucent jellyfish robots in pinks and purples, mechanical innards visible through their bells. Like steampunk in Day-Glo, their slow pulse jet propulsion refracted in mirrors that stripe the bottom half of the room’s walls.
“Come here,” she says softly, patting the spot beside her.
Shiz has navy-blue sheets that seem to writhe in the light. Could be nano-particles sewn into the weave. Could be the drugs. Molly does something to the eyes, but unearthing one semester of advanced psychopharmacology so many semesters later? While his own psychopharmacology is retarded? Retracted? What’s the politically correct opposite of advanced?
“Ya range wee shite, come here and pet my head.”
So yeah, retarded works.
He slides up next to her. Kisses her. Gets a little lost. “You wanted something,” he says, remembering.
“Pet my hair,” then, sometime later: “Moved you how?”
“What?”
Penelope tries to sit up, which takes some maneuvering. An elbow prop, pale leg darting out of navy sheet and held akimbo for balance, finally upright, the sheet falling into her lap, the chrome barbells piercing her nipples catch the glimmer of Andromeda as it passes by overhead.
“The Rod of Correction,” she says. “You never told me why it moved you.”
“I don’t know that I can.”
“We’re naked.”
A line of Hebrew text slants from her right hip and onto her belly. The letters, he decides, look angry.
“Lion?”
“Yup,” snapping back, “we’re naked.”
“Now’s when you’re supposed to tell me.”
“No,” he says, sitting up beside her, setting his phone on the bedside table, “not like that. Not sure how to work my mouth.”
But he does, suddenly, remember how MDMA affects vision. Dampens down our ability to perceive negative emotions. The Morphed Facial Recognition Task; Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, that’s how we know what we know. The filtering even works with memories. It’s harder to recall negative experiences on MDMA, and the ones recalled are blunted.
Then Lion recalls a negative, not blunted. Blurts, “Where are the guns?” and louder than intended.
“Which guns?”
“The ones you took from Kali and Shiva.”
“Safe,” touching his shoulder, “safe, baby.”
“No,” he says, suddenly a lot more sober than he feels, “not safe.”
“Shhh,” tracing a line on his chest, “locked in the safe. In the recording studio. Shiz barely remembers the combination sober,” runs her hands through his hair, “no way he can figure it out now.”
Now he gets it. Safe and safe. He’s safe-safe. Laughs, thinking about Balthazar’s ninja—and Penelope’s fingers like ghosts dancing on his skull.
Lion floats off with her touch.
“Moved you why?” she asks again, reeling him back.
“Jamaica, in ’72, wasn’t some cargo cult backwater. People could read. There were major industries. Lots of contact with the outside world. But the whole country gets turned upside down because of a hoax built on a myth resting on a fable sitting on a fairy tale? The Rod, Selassie’s deity status, Marcus Garvey’s Back to Africa prophecies, the enti
re Rasta religion.”
“It’s the ultimate arbitrary signifier stack,” she says.
“Yeah,” nodding in agreement, “but the voodoo worked. It changed culture. Anyway, I had to see the Rod for myself.”
“It’s still around?”
“Bob Marley,” he says.
“What about him?”
“Got shot in ’76, splits from Trench Town for London and smuggles out the Rod. Chris Blackwell, Island Records founder, ends up with it. Like three decades later, a cleaning woman finds it in Blackwell’s basement, and someone, one of his kids maybe, sends it back to the last surviving Wailer.” Shrugs. “Turned out to be the cousin of the cousin of the dread who told me the story. He brought me to see it.”
“I think your mouth works just fine,” says Penelope, almost kissing him, pulling gently back. “So then what happened?”
“I had…” What had Fetu called it? That trauma studies loanword? “An inciting incident.”
“I-Lion was I-cited by the I-Rod?” In near perfect patois.
Smiles at her. “I thought you didn’t speak Rasta.”
“I and I a quick study.”
“I was I-cited,” he says, riding a serotonin pulse deeper into her arms. “Some em-trackers see colors, or hear words. I get the feels. I picked up the Rod and bam: I felt what that first Rasta felt. How society didn’t give a fuck about him so he wouldn’t give a fuck right back. One righteous, punk rock decision, the original Redemption Song, turning powerlessness into power. And how reggae carried that decision through time and space.”
Two loud bangs on the door and it opens wide. Luther, skin as dark as coal, muscles stacked atop of muscles, and wearing a bright yellow rubber-ducky pool float around his waist, strolls in.
“Luther,” says Penelope, “are we going swimming?”
“Lady,” he says, not smiling, “what gives you that idea?”
Then laughs.
“We’re in the studio, laying down tracks, come join,” and he’s gone. The door being swallowed by the Horsehead Nebula as it closes.
Hazy, long pause.
“That happened?” asks Lion, eventually.
“Luther, rubber ducky?”
“Affirmative.”
“Affirmative.”
“You have pretty eyes.”
“Focus.”
“What was I saying?”
“Reggae.”
“The word is an insult,” says Lion. “Did you know that? It’s an uptown way of saying ragga, which is just a rude word for ragamuffin, which is what the rich in Jamaica used to call the poor.”
A crowded galaxy whirls overhead; Lion pauses for a moment to watch before continuing.
“But the music gives Jamaica’s poor a voice. Then comes punk, basically exported Jamaican ska on speed, which gives voice to a different poor. White and poor. And hip-hop, which was Jamaican toasting from way back, proto-reggae, gives voice to black and poor. All that music, it’s an empathy drug. Like Sietch Tabr before Sietch Tabr. Or Molly before Molly, if that makes any sense. And where are my cigarettes?”
“Clothes, pile on the floor, sort of makes sense.”
Lion leans left over the bed, swats through the pile until he fishes tobacco and lighter from his coat pocket. Getting back into the bed afterward, that part taking some effort.
“Empathy is the brain’s way of answering a question,” he says, fumbling out a rolling paper, spilling tobacco all over the bed, coordination iffy. “Whenever we encounter anything living, the brain asks a series of ‘is this thing like me or not like me’ questions. Does this thing look like me? Smell like me? Move like me? Talk like me? Make meaning like me?”
His fingers seem to be made of some alien material, still unable to roll that cigarette.
“If it’s like me, maybe I can fuck it. Or cooperate with it. If it’s not like me, maybe I need to kill it, or run away. ‘Like me or not like me,’ for every conscious organism in the world, that’s the question. Emotions are answers. Empathy is just a bunch of yes-like-me answers bundled into one clear signal.”
“Yes, let me,” she says, taking the tobacco out of his hands and quickly rolling a cigarette.
Lights it, passes it back.
“Yes, thank you.” Inhales and smiles. “Christ, smoking on drugs, that’s one goddamn thing God definitely got right.”
“That’s how you became an em-tracker,” she says, “you touched the Rod?”
“As far as origin stories go,” taking another drag of the cigarette, exhaling, “mine’s lame. All I did was tell a couple Rasta elders that the Rod had some juice left, and maybe they should do something useful with it.”
“Like what?”
Shrugs. “Make it the symbol of the world’s first pot-friendly airline or something.”
“The very first time an em-tracker got paid to be an em-tracker,” says Penelope. “Lion Zorn, empathy-preneur.”
“I didn’t think you knew the story.”
“Jenka runs extra-specials,” she says, touching her fingers to his face, “I research extra-specials.”
“I thought you were hired muscle.”
“I am,” she says, smiling, her fingers tracing the side of his jaw, “muscle and research. I and I contain multitudes.”
Her touch seems to precipitate some deep shift in his system. Is he coming down?
No, going up.
Must be hitting her too. Teeth-grind, and eyes like pinballs. Sexy, wild green pinballs floating in a sea of clover.
Jesus is he fucked up.
Shivers, sweats, and a memory of Shiz, in satin underwear, offering them a second hit of Molly and when was that?
But the question gets lost in the blast of the blastoff, and the feeling of his soul being sucked up, one molecule at a time, through Penelope’s fingers.
BETWEEN JAH ROCK AND JAH HARD PLACE
They’re gone for minutes, hours, or weeks. Probably all three. Penelope says something to him, a whisper he watches more than hears. Her lips moving, sound traveling, going somewhere.
Does he answer?
Maybe he’s dreaming, maybe it’s later, maybe they made a decision of some kind. Which is when he notices, he’s vertical. Out of bed and moving forward and amazed that his limbs actually remember this part. Amazed, come to think of it, that he has limbs at all.
He tries to get his bearings.
It’s a little hard to say, but they seem to be oozing through the intergalactic space of the bedroom and into the candlelight flicker of the recording studio. Smaller than the bedroom, a lot smaller than the main cabin. There’s a candelabra on an end table in one corner, just about the only light in the room, and illuminating fresh spray paint on the walls. Looks like, well, not another Banksy.
It’s a cartoon image Lion’s seen somewhere before. A small, furry creature with an oversized brush mustache, standing on a tree stump. Text as well: “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
Not a chance that data bit finds data bit.
But Lion’s eyes are starting to gain ground on the situation. In a mirror beside the not-Banksy, he catches his reflection. He appears shirtless, barefoot, and wearing baggy Detroit Pistons sweatpants that he must have borrowed from Shiz. Penelope is wrapped around him. Underwear, army jacket, and possibly nothing else. They seem to be swaying slightly, some kind of pitch-and-yaw problem.
Looking left of the mirror is when he realizes.
“Not sure what to do now,” he whispers to Penelope. “You didn’t say anything about there being other people here.”
“Bloody hell,” she whispers back, folding deeper into him, knocking him backward. Pitch goes left, yaw goes right.
“Between Jah rock and Jah hard place,” intones Shiz, starting to come into focus, on a small stool in a corner of the room. He’s sitting at a keyboard, near a tall stack of electronics, wearing navy-blue satin boxers, a black-and-gray-checked topcoat, and paint-splattered combat boots.
“You two are a shit-show, alright,” says Luther, slapping congas from a spot beside Shiz. He’s traded in the rubber ducky for a black silk robe. Dark skin, dark robe, dark room—making him nearly invisible.
Then Lion spots the twins, deep in the cushions of a long black couch, just past Shiz. Kali in camo-colored lace and a white headband with IRONIC printed across its middle. Shiva has on a cutoff pair of army shorts and a living-display bra, C-cups animated with the same furry creature as the graffiti on the wall.
Shiz hits a key on the keyboard. Funky Outkast bass licks rise over Luther’s slow drum swat and some kind of Cuban rhythm. Coming out of surround-sound speakers.
“I rap for the trees,” raps Shiz, “for the trees have no tongues.”
Shiva, from her perch on the couch, shimmies her C-cups, bringing up another image: same furry creature, standing in a forest of slender trees, their foliage starburst explosions in pinks, yellows, and purples.
“Shiz is turning the Lorax into a rap opera,” explains Kali, pointing at the bra. “I’m designing the wardrobe.”
The Lorax—that’s the image on the wall. Another wobble.
“How you guys doing over there?” asks Luther. “Just an opinion, but the couch could be safer.”
“The Lorax?” asks Lion, unable to peel himself off the wall. “A rap opera?”
“Next phase,” says Shiz, “coming out of Banksy, trying to learn to channel Seuss. Adding more poly to the poly-tribe.”
Lion knows channeling is a Rilkean idea. Extreme empathy exercise, an archetypal embodiment practice, sort of like method acting. Becoming the other’s art in order to become the other, another way to live the questions.
Shiz spins on his stool, putting his back to the keyboard, turning to face Lion directly, “Lion Zorn,” he says, adding a little island spice to his pronunciation, “gwan tell I and I why you wanted to reason?”
Couldn’t be a worse time to try to reason, thinks Lion, which, he suspects, might be exactly why Shiz wants to do so now. He takes an unsteady step forward, limbs not working properly. Penelope comes to his rescue, walking them over to the couch, pulling him down beside her. He lands in a heap, her arms slide around his torso, legs wrap his waist, drawing him closer.
Last Tango in Cyberspace Page 16
