Dominion

by Nicole Givens Kurtz

  Anywhere else, the crowds would turn into riotous gathering. But here, the waves of UDC supporters in yellow and green, dancing behind painted trucks of the same colors and laden with loud speakers blasting melodious and rhythmic Zulu songs, opened up to make way for the smaller crowds of Ubuntu protestors who also sang their own songs, stomping their feet to a different beat. The overwhelming yellow and green were broken by white and red blotches that dissolved into yet another crowd.

  It was hard to keep Demba quiet; he kept jumping up and down on the mailbox, eager to join the demonstrators, ignorant of the politics but drawn to the liveliness of their humanity, still too foolish to know danger of what he yearned for.

  “Calm down boy,” Ibrahima said. “Or you’ll fall and get trampled upon.”

  “But daddy!”

  “No,” Ibrahima answered firmly. “Believe me, if I had my way, I would have gotten rid of you a long time ago, but your mother would never forgive me. So better be careful.”

  Demba looked at his father slyly. Ibou would have to keep an eye on him. Demba had all his mother’s mischiefs and if Ibou let go of his hand, the little puppy would dash and bolt away and make his life miserable.

  It was hard to believe that he was almost seven. It was three years since they had left the Caliphate for the Southern African Confederacy. It took him four years to finally show Nabu that he was a man of his word. He saved scrap after scrap until he found a job and a modest place for them to stay.

  They could have continued staying in the Caliphate or moved to Bamako or Jos or any of the coastal cities and find work there, but why they move to live the same life they had lived in the village? Seynabu had wanted more for Demba, and she had gotten it.

  “Do we have the same thing back home?” his son asked.

  Ibou nodded. He would have to bring him back to the village soon.

  “Yes, of course,” he said. “Taking to the streets and complaining is the most human thing there is, along with finding an excuse not to go to work.”

  Demba laughed. The boy was smart and kind and strong, another thing he inherited from his mother. He was already much bigger than the other children in his class and looked like he was twelve and would look down on his father any day now.

  “It’s getting late, boy; your mother will be home soon.”

  “Why did she have to work and not you?” Smart and observant too.

  “Because your father is lazy, because your mother is not, and the world is unforgiving to teachers while it is kind on construction workers.”

  And, of course, working for ChinaCorp had its benefits. The corporation supported the demonstrations, trying to get the government to give in to its demands and allow mining to resume in earnest. Han Industries had already signed contracts with the Congolese Brotherhood, although authorities in Kigali had not let them test their satellites yet. It was only a matter of time, but in the meantime, there were weekly demonstrations and ChinaCorp paid its employees double not to work.

  That wasn’t true for government employees. Nabu would remind him of that. She reminded him of a lot of things these days. That he had to move up in the world. That she couldn’t carry the three of them forever. That he wasn’t a boy anymore. That he was not the man he used to be… And in those moments, he missed his village, he missed Mame Fatou’s comforting arms, he missed his friends, he missed his band, but more than anything else, he missed how carefree Nabu used to be.

  “Jump off!” he told the kid, opening his arms to catch him.

  Demba shook his head and climbed down the mailbox himself.

  Ibrahima smiled.

  Any day now, he thought, any day.

  ✦✦✦

  “Do you think we were right to leave him home alone?”

  “He’s twelve,” she said, picking up her glass of wine, her full lips wrapping the glass gently, leaving a faint imprint along the edge when she put it down. “He’s gonna have to learn to handle the house. Plus, how much damage can he do?” she finished with a smirk.

  “Are you serious?” he asked, waving at the waiter. “A lot, that’s how much. A lot.”

  “You gotta give him more credit than that.” “You give him too much.”

  She laughed.

  “Is that what our life has come down to? Bickering over a preteen? You’re starting to sound like Mame Fatou…”

  “What?!”

  Nabu laughed harder. It was that laugh that kept his heart open through the years; the glimmer in her eyes hadn’t changed either, though there was so much mischief there, so much wit and intelligence, and something hard and tough, like steel wrapped in silk. And all for show.

  What had happened to them? They used to be so good together.

  In the corner of the dining room, the band played the rhythms of the Congolese Brotherhood. He couldn’t speak Lingala but the music spoke for itself, of good times and cheerful evenings, interrupted by the sirens outside.

  “A dust storm is moving through IKapa,” an androgynous voice boomed through the loudspeakers. “I repeat, a dust storm is moving through IKapa. All customers are requested to remain indoors. This is a minor storm. ETA in fifteen minutes. Estimated duration: twenty minutes. Expect some disruptions in the electric system.”

  Ibrahima sighed.

  “Aren’t you glad we moved?” he asked sarcastically.

  Nabu raised an eyebrow.

  “Why do you have to be cynical? We would have had to move anyway; they’re mining everywhere in the Caliphate nowadays.” She paused to dip some lobster into the butter by her plate, and continued with her mouth full. “You are co- director of a construction company you started working for five years ago—where else would that have happened? Where else would we have found as good a school for Demba? I’m the Dean at my high school. It’s all worth a little dirt.”

  Ibrahima didn’t answer. She was right of course. At least the Confederacy only allowed limited operations. The dust storms were a byproduct but nowhere near as bad here as in other parts of the continent.

  He looked out the window as the blinds lowered against the incoming storm. He hadn’t felt the calling of the beam in years. He barely felt anything at all anymore. He should have been happy, but he felt empty, like the husk of a beetle eaten from the inside by hundreds of ants, tearing little parts of himself out, morsel by morsel. So he’d sought other thrills.

  The lights started to flicker. Nabu put her glass down with a frown.

  “Who is she Ibou?” she asked flatly, looking him straight in the eye, all the mirth gone from her voice.

  There it is.

  “What?” he asked.

  “Don’t be coy with me. Of all the things you can do, don’t insult me more than you already have.”

  He should have known she would find out. She had always been too smart for him. How long had she known and said nothing?

  He didn’t answer but continued staring into his glass of wine. There had been more than one over the years, more of them as Nabu and he grew further apart.

  “Does it matter who she is?” He asked.

  Nabu paused to think.

  “No. No, I suppose it doesn’t.”

  “Look,” he started, reaching for a hand that she pulled away, his fingers landing on the tablecloth as hers slipped passed.

  “Nabu,” he tried desperately. The building rattled with the strength of the flash storm. “She doesn’t matter to me, I….”

  Nabu smiled.

  “Hmmm,” she said, shaking her head. “I should have asked who this one was.” He stopped.

  “Years Ibou. Years. First, I tried to ignore it. Then I decided it was just a phase. That you would come clean and we could move on. Years. But it’s too late now. It never stopped. It never will.”

  “Nabu…” but she cut him short again, her voice shaking.

  “We have a child Ibou. We had a good life. Not a great life but a good one. How could you do this?”

>   How could he tell her? What could he say that would make any sense? That he felt hollow? That he had some bizarre connection to ChinaCorp’s technology that even he couldn’t explain? That Mame Fatou told him he was special? That he hadn’t felt close to her in years? That he missed his home, doing everything she wanted while all he wanted was a simple life in a village now destroyed by mining operations in the Caliphate? That I just won’t grow up? There was nothing to say, but he tried anyway.

  “I’m sorry.”

  She waved a hand dismissively and downed the last gulp in her glass just as the androgynous voice announced the storm had passed and the metallic blinds were slowly raised.

  “Save it,” she said, standing up. “I’ve lost my appetite. Time to go home.”

  ✦✦✦

  Ibrahima lay on the bed next to Seynabu, shivering in the cool breeze blowing from the sea into the room through the window. Shivering at his own shame.

  He breathed in deeply and let himself fall asleep, to wake up in what felt a few minutes later but could have really been hours. He was standing in the middle of a desert, the ground shaking beneath his feet. The sunny sky was a dusty beige under a cloud of dust and the soul-rattling vibration of the beam poured from the clouds like a waterfall of blood from a wounded giant, boring relentlessly into the ground.

  “Where…” he started.

  A million voices cut him off.

  “Silence, young one. You know where you are.”

  Ibou looked around at the lacerated ground around him.

  This wasn’t a desert. It was now but jutting from the ground, crusted with dirt and rock. He recognized the towers of what used to be IKapa; he recognized the dome of the courthouse. He recognized the blasted anvil of what had once been called the Table Mountain looming in the distance. But gone were the green of gardens, the scent of iodine blowing from the bay, and the chatter of seagulls.

  He looked up at the beam towering over him, at the ochre brown vortex of death and dust swirling around them, enveloping him and the ray.

  “Do not rest yet,” the beam said in its legion of voices. “We are not done with you yet.” With every syllable the voices gained clarity, spinning around him with the storm, faces flashing in the vortex.

  Ibrahima breathed in deep despite the grit burning his throat and lungs and slowly turning his insides to sand.

  “Who are you?” he screamed. His voice sounded torn and he exhaled dirt back into the air.

  “We are the bedrock,” the voices answered, now only a few.

  “We are the buried.” Now only two voices, the beam closing down only a few feet away from him, the radiating heat burning the flesh from his body and blowing it into the storm.

  “We are the bones,” the last voice concluded, the spinning sands shifting, slowly taking form in swirling static, and growing into a face. Ibrahima knew that last voice all too well. His eyes were running, liquefied along his flayed cheeks, stinging what was left of his nerves. He couldn’t see the face but knew the look its eyes would hold. The last of his flesh peeled off, leaving a statue of sand, eaten away by the beam.

  The beam that sounded like Mame Fatou.

  ✦✦✦

  Ibrahima woke up hours later. Turning around to wrap Nabu to himself, he found his bed empty. He stepped out of his room and down the hall to Demba’s room, his heart collapsing, the house void of morning scents. Demba’s room was empty as well.

  ✦✦✦

  The sun dropped behind the mountains, biting its dark teeth into the sky, the last ray of sunlight pulling back from the tiny tornadoes of sand drifting across the hundred square mile plain which the South African Confederacy had authorized ChinaCorp to mine.

  Ibrahima stared outside the window of the small sheebeen connecting three workers’ camps, his phone glued to his ear, looking at what had been a month’s work. A month’s work of mowing and cutting down trees, rounding up animals and shipping them off to preserves, and digging out remains from traditional burial grounds. Displacing villagers—that was always the hardest part; no one wanted to leave, despite whatever they were offered. They were proud. They would resist.

  They would die.

  A month of work and death to make way for more destruction.

  “Pick up, pick up, pick up…” Ibrahima whispered into the phone. It was his third call. No one had picked up yet.

  “Hey Westaf!” Felicien, a dark and large man from Bujumbura, bellowed at him. “You done with the phone yet?”

  “I’ll trade you a drink for it,” Ibou slurred back at him, walking towards the bar and dropping the phone in Feli’s lap.

  Feli picked it up, scrubbed it with his shirt, and shook his head.

  “You need a drink like a diabetic needs a soda transfusion. You can’t keep doing this to yourself every day, man. Let me tell you what, Caliphate boy. I’ll drive you back into the city tomorrow, but you’ve got to get some rest. You don’t want to sleep through the mining tomorrow. You won’t wake up if you do.”

  “…I’ll go…when they…pick up!” He screamed at Feli. Feli rolled his eyes, shook his head again and walked away.

  “Hey love!” Ibrahima screamed into the phone. “We’re done here. I’ll be home soon…”

  Ibrahima dropped on a stool and rested his head in his arms on the bar.

  “Another shot?” asked the bartender, a young Xhosa girl named Philasande.

  No! He thought, but murmured, “Yes,” anyway.

  Here, the ChinaCorp employees were called Satellite Hounds or China Rats, neither of which was preferable. They were probably called by different names in other parts of the continent. They were doing the Republic’s dirty work against their own land, their own people. Felicien was lucky he had a wife who was probably selling herself at another sheebeen at another site somewhere. But such was this world, this tiny, filthy excuse for a community.

  You came here to forget where you came from. Then you started drinking to forget you came here. Neither of them worked.

  “Neither of them work!” he yelled, slamming his fist against the bar between three empty shot glasses.

  Three more? he thought.

  Felicien walked back to the table.

  “Jesus, Ibou! What has the world done to you?”

  “Just hand me the phone, Feli,” Ibou answered, snatching it out of Felicien’s hands and walking back to the window where he stood to dial the number.

  “Pick up, pick up, pick up…” he whispered as the dial tone started ringing.

  “Hello?” a male teenage voice answered.

  “Demba!” Ibrahima screamed.

  “Dad?!” the voice responded “Dad? Is that you?” “Son! It’s me! I…”

  “Fuck you dad! Who the hell do you think you are calling here!” “Demba look…”

  “It’s been three years. Three years since you bothered to call.”

  “You both left me!”

  “And? What did you think was gonna happen? Mom told me everything. How could you do that to her? How could you do that to us? You’re a piece of shit dad.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that! I’m still your father!”

  “Demba! Demba who is that?” Ibrahima heard Nabu’s voice on the other end of the line, every sensual memory of her plunging into the liquor in his stomach, building to a pressure point and lurching out of the window. “It’s dad!” he heard his son answer, a slimmer of excitement in his voice in spite of everything. “Hang up!” he heard Nabu yelling “Hang up now!”

  And the line went dead.

  ✦✦✦

  “Let me go!” Ibrahima screamed, trying to pull himself free of Felicien’s gargantuan grip, and failing miserably.

  He had slept only a couple of hours, on the floor of the sheebeen, his legs lying in his vomit, his shirt crusty with it, his breath drifting into his nose in redolent bursts of guts and bile. He wouldn’t have touched himself. He wouldn’t even have looked at himself i
f he’d walked past himself on the street. Yet Feli seemed intent on saving his smelly life, probably because his bible told him to do so.

  Felicien yelled back at him. “No matter how bad things are, you…will live… caliphate boy!”

  Ibrahima could feel Feli’s grip weaken; perhaps Feli had realized that not all wretches could be saved.

  “There is a place for you Ibrahima!” Feli continued. “God says…”

  I knew it, Ibrahima thought. He screamed aloud: “Fuck your God!” He spit in Felicien’s eyes, kicking him in the stomach, and falling back to the ground as Feli released his grip on him. “Fuck! Your! God!”

  Feli looked down at him, seeing him in all his filth for the first time, and he turned and spit on the ground. “To hell with you, caliphate boy!” he said. “You want to die here?! Then die! You’ll find out too late what the afterlife has for you!”

  He picked up his bag and stomped out of the sheebeen, hopping into the last taxicab waiting for the last workers to flee the area before ChinaCorp blasted the area with radiation.

  Ibrahima heard the engine start, and the faint smell of gasoline seeped through the open door and into his nose, covering his own stench for a blissful second.

  He pushed himself up, hesitating to chase after the car. Nabu popped in his mind. Naked and sweating in the arms of another man. Demba… He couldn’t even picture his son now. He remembered him as a child, as a teenager; but he didn’t know the man he was becoming. Most of all, he felt his anger surge amidst his desperation.

  His son’s cursing. Nabu’s eagerness at hanging up on him.

  Where was their forgiveness? After all he had done for them? Had his dreams ever mattered? His pain?

  He pushed himself off the ground and stood on his legs and wobbled towards the bar for some hair of the dog.

  He found a half-empty bottle of Castle Beer. Sitting warm and flat behind the counter, he drained it in a few gulps. His stomach lurched again, struggling against the punishment it was taking. Ibrahima rested a hand on it.

  “Don’t worry,” he said out loud, “it’s almost over.”

  He had loved her so much. He had never stopped loving her, even when with other women; he still loved only her. Even now. He’d just… Her and their son. He would be a foot taller than his father now. The little boy who loved to dance and pull pranks on his parents and neighbors. In his experience, it was always the more troublesome ones who became the best adults.