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The Liminal War

Page 10

by Ayize Jama-everett


  “What if Prentis isn’t a hostage?” he asks.

  “Fuck your face you split-cocked—”

  “Hold it together, girl,” I tell her.

  “You said it yourself,” Mico starts again. “A pinpoint absence in his memory. A dream cat. Your girl controls animals.”

  “Her powers don’t work on dreams,” I tell him.

  “And you’re a healer who learned how to inflict indescribable hurt under his tutelage. Isn’t that exactly Nordeen’s M.O.? Find a Liminal, twist them for his own purpose, then unleash them on a foreign land?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Tam says, coldly, calmly.

  “Oh, I think it matters a great deal,” Mico starts. “If she’s working with Nordeen . . .”

  “Then she’s under some spell or shit. We knock her out and bring her home. Get her free back there.”

  “Lost or running,” I add, “don’t matter. She’s clan. I—we won’t let her stay under Nordeen’s claws. Better to stay on task and figure out how to get to her.”

  Mico nods gravely then slides out to hang with Marley back at his table. As he stands I see his sense of defeat in his body language. That’s the last thing we need.

  “Good job on getting the Marley knowledge,” I tell him. “But there’s got to be more.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “He hasn’t even blown up yet. Look around. Half these people don’t even know who he is. He’s young, hungry, raw. And Nordeen went for his dreams. Tell me the why of it. We know that, we can figure out the next move. I simply can’t believe we run into a young Marley on the streets of London by chance.”

  “Maybe its coincidence?”

  “Ask a unicorn where the coincidence is—wanna hear what he’ll say?” Tam starts.

  “Enough. Go hang with your new buddy,” I tell him.

  Luck starts with a song. An absent forgotten tune the two singers hum together in a unity impossible to practice. Mico uses the linoleum table top for a beat as Bob Rasta starts singing an old R&B tune in a Jamaican patois. The jam meets the activists exiting the back room and they can’t help but join in, giving it more of a protest feeling. Some intelligent individual gives Marley and Mico guitars and they start jamming in earnest.

  Tam rocks with the music and soon the bolder of the young bucks are skanking and winding near her like peacocks trying to gain her attention. Her 21st century dancing, even muted, makes the respectable Caribbean girls in dour plaid skirts and dresses envious. They dance first in spite, then in partnership with the peacocks. In it all I see the power of Mico and Marley. They draw the crowd, bless the union of people, anoint the celebration.

  Marley only has one album out in the U.K., Mico is totally unknown, but random pedestrians are flowing in, caught in the power of their jam. In under two hours, they’ve got the makings of a band that would put most of the London Blues-chasing rockers to shame. Three conga players, a bassist, and a flutist all get jam lessons sitting in with Mico and Marley. They could have had more adepts at their feet, but they don’t instruct with words, instead with intonation, musical phrasing, and chords. Those that hear their language can jam. The rest of us can only enjoy.

  I was expecting more reggae tunes, but they actually stay more toward blues. I guess American radio made it to Jamaica when Marley was growing up, because he’s an easy match for Mico’s wailing and complex string plucking without breaking a sweat. Occasionally Mico will drift into a Roots Manuva jam or a Fishbone riff, but then drift back to a more ’60s groove. They take a break as the waiters in the restaurant give up on the capitalist enterprise and clear tables for a semi-proper dance floor. Tam points out Mico’s goofy grin to me as he does a quick tuning play of “Old Man Tucker,” treating his guitar like a banjo. Like a battle rap, Marley responds with a verse that holds running, Christmas, and hounds in the first verse. In the relative new silence of the Mangrove, with the night just making its appearance—sweaty Caribbeans and whites holding up the walls waiting for the danceable music to begin again—the verse makes its most disturbing impact on Mico. Unlike on all of the other Marley songs, he stumbles before he joins in. But when he does join in, there’s no more powerful voice than his. It even impresses Marley; he closes his eyes and jams with his entire soul.

  It’s another half an hour before Mico feels comfortable enough to leave the band in Marley’s hands. Reading his body tells me he’s both exhausted and invigorated. It means little to Tam.

  “Good on the cat guts Jah Puba, yeah? Now wot go on with tracking Prentis?” she asks while he drinks the bottle of Ting I give him.

  “I . . .” He starts, then lets his downturned brow answer for him.

  “A size six to the dome helpful? ’Cause I’m sure I can produce.”

  “Tamara! Be useful. Give him a break.”

  “Have you lost your bloody mind? How’s this git’s jam banding supposed to—”

  “Okay, we’ll try your idea. What was it again?”

  She walks to the bathroom.

  “I can’t hear it all anymore, Taggert. The guitar was just a metaphor. It can’t help. . .”

  “Tam and I would never have gotten close to Marley. That was you. By yourself. No god, no followers, just you. You keep taking yourself out of the play, Mico, but I’ve been inside your head, remember? Most people clock about thirty or forty thoughts per second. Yours count in the thousands. That grand biological and psychic architecture is still in you and I tell you, I’m beginning to think all of this has less to do with me and Tamara, Prentis even, and more to do with you.”

  “I abandoned my god.” It’s hard for him to say. “I doubt it’s going to provide aid now.”

  “You misunderstand,” I say softly. “I don’t think what’s brought us together and sent us through time has our best interest at heart.”

  “Did you hear the tune Nesta played . . .”

  “The one you stumbled on. Yeah. What about it?”

  “It’s a song that, since I was a child, scared the shit out of me.”

  “Hard to play?”

  “No. Hard to hear. It’s Robert Johnson’s ‘Hellhound On My Trail.’ It . . . I don’t have the words for it . . .”

  “Shit, I probably wouldn’t understand them anyway. That doesn’t matter. Here’s what does: those musicians. Robert Nesta Marley understands what you’re thinking and playing perfectly. Work it out with them then tell us what we need to do, where we need to go. Feel me?”

  He nods, takes down the rest of the Ting, and heads back to the makeshift stage like a boxer down by a few rounds. Tam comes up behind me after casually rejecting a third of the peacocks with a glance. She’s looking at me like I have answers.

  “Stop acting like you aren’t enjoying the music,” I tell her.

  “Nah, mate. That’s the bloody reason I jumped through space and time, to hear Jah Puba rock it out with his musical idol. Seriously, Tag, what’s the play?”

  “Not sure yet. But whatever it is, it’s going to come from that guy or no one at all.” She gains distance from me. Waiting isn’t her thing.

  An hour later I look on the small band, fingers near bloody, resonating with every tune. Calling this “music” elevates every other auditory experience to undeserved heights. They rock every song and make it their own, remixing and rectifying sonic defects of the original authors. I’m not surprised to see Mico in a trance, operating as a receptacle and transmitter of sound alms. Marley is almost there with him. Tam is . . . Tamara is gone. She’s outside.

  She’s rounding the corner to St. Lukes Mews just as I get to the door. My shout isn’t catching her attention. But from Powis Gardens, at the opposite end of the street, one hundred Bobbies with a clear intention of doing no good at the Mangrove move in quickly. Without Mico and Marley in there the choice would be easy. Still, I give Mico gas to pop him out of his trance, and spontaneous orgasms to the six people closest to the window, and aim toward St. Lukes Mews. If they aren’t curious after that, Mico doesn’t deserve th
e title Prophet.

  I’m happy, with the knives in my hands, when I turn the corner and see Tamara gleefully walking toward a seven-foot-tall praying mantis.

  “Oy!” I’m altering my mouth, throat, and tongue to whistle a tone designed to hit Tam’s teen ears perfectly, as well as most animals in the vicinity. “What it do, little girl?”

  “It’s Prentis,” she’s saying with confident glee.

  “Use my eyes.” With thought-speed, she occupies my mind for a second and sees my truth.

  “What the fuck?” she shouts, and pushes the giant insect back with the force of her rage. “How in the hell did that happen?”

  “If I had to guess,” I say, spinning on my heels to see another five mutant mantises—from near pale to deep green—cutting the block off, “I’d say Nordeen is involved.” I advance to deal with the first mantis, confident my girl will have my back.

  With a razor-sharp claw the size of a linebacker’s bicep, a mantis swipes at my head. I duck under it and turn toward my right as it swipes again. I high-jump over the attacking limb and twist, aiming my entropy knife towards it. Damn things have four arms.

  It strikes at me with another, and I manage a quick stab/punch. It hurts the creature but doesn’t drop it. The knives want more mantis blood, so despite my best attempt to stop them, they drag me in for the kill. In launching its mostly-eye head at me and biting, the mantis loses its advantage. As it reels back to full height again I catapult my body high at its “chest” with both blades. The creature stands fully erect and the blades stab deep just below its neck. My weight and gravity do the work to release fetid entrails, organ juice, and glass-like chitin body armor. By the time my feet touch the ground, there is no more life left in the insect.

  Tamara takes no joy in her work, ripping an arm off one mantis with her power and hurling it into another while dodging the curved forelegs of two attackers. I clear the space between us just as the de-limbed one bites for my girl. With a knife in its eye as an anchor, I ride it back up to a standing position as Tamara gets smart in her moves.

  She takes the detritus of the block—loose stone, broken glass, metal trash cans—and sends them into her assailants at Mach 3. I play it simple and take my ridden mantis’s head off with a double chop from my blades. Its body twitches and keeps striking until one of its brethren pushes its body against me, hoping to pin me against a wall. I spring off against the wall in time only by luck. I flip over the bug’s body and get shoulder-to-shoulder with my girl.

  The final two rub their front claws together in preparation. But rather than attack, these fuckers sprout wings and try to take to the sky.

  “The hell you say!” Tam uses all her might to hold them down.

  “Play it smart, girl,” I bark. “Fastball special.”

  Battle-trained-quick, Tamara puts all her focus on one mantis—the bigger one—and grounds it. Instantly she shifts focus to me and sends me hurling into the still airborne mantis. Damn thing swats at me. I twist in the air, catching the tip of its forearm with my blade. I rebound off its back and onto a nearby fire escape. Bleeding and angry, my flying mantis comes in at full speed. I wait until I see its mandibles separate. I jump hard at it, shoving my blade deep in its maw. I hack at its thorax with my free hand while the creature falls. We land on top of its ally, now fully eviscerated by a piece of rebar and Tamara.

  “Godless fucking predatory shits!” she snaps, pulling apart the giant insects with her telekinesis.

  “It ain’t over,” I tell her as a green mist that even the most emerald mantis couldn’t match rises off the collective cadavers. It forms a human-ish hooded figure, rounded shoulders with yellow glowing orbs looking out its shadowed head. I know it before it hisses out its first words.

  “Witless healer,” the Nordeen ghost mist chides me. I have to hold Tamara back.

  “There’s nothing here to hit,” I tell her.

  “The curse of your era,” my old teacher says. “You are out of time. The animal totem girl is mine. Go home.”

  “Fuck off!” Tamara screams.

  “You endanger your own daughter bringing her with you,” the green mist tells me, already dissipating. “Cut your losses before you lose all you value.”

  I want blood—Nordeen’s, mantis, it doesn’t matter. I go stomping through the fog over the bodies back to All Saints Road. I’ve heard legends of the street battles between Black Britain and the Queen’s finest. I expect it, want to slice into it. Instead I find a police force forming a respectable parameter around Mico, Marley, and a crew of other musicians, all playing on the street. The scene infuriates me.

  “What, Taggert? Did they get you?” Tamara asks behind me.

  I rage. I turn to see her, want to stab her pretty brown eyes out. Just like her mother. I want to slash her throat.

  “It’s the knives,” Tamara says slowly with mouth and mind. “You would never do anything to hurt me, Tag. Fight it.” Like an idiot she exposes her throat to me. No defense. Even with her power I could slice her in two before she could think—bathe the blades in liminal blood. What wouldn’t they be able to cut then? The liminal blood of my daughter. With filicide, what could stop me?

  The idea breaks me. Terrifies me. Not Tamara. Not her. I sheathe the blades and put them in my jacket.

  “What happened to you two?” Mico asks after he’s able to clear himself from his adoring crowd.

  “As usual, Tag to the rescue is all. Wot go on here, Jah Puba? Gotta draw a crowd no matter what you do?”

  “It was either that or watch a riot jump off,” he says. “But I think I figured out where Prentis is.”

  “Go on then.”

  “Mississippi.”

  “’Cause that makes sense how?”

  “Around June 1938.”

  We both walk away from him.

  Chapter Nine

  “Who the bloody hell is Robert Johnson and what the fuck does he have to do with Prentis?” Back at the flat Tamara starts barking at the crooner. She’s tired. After the mantises, I had her wipe Marley, et al’s memory of us just be sure we don’t fuck time streams or anything, despite Mico’s assurance we can’t. My girl did it, but combined with the combat, she can’t help but be cranky.

  “He’s a famous Blues man I’ve been obsessed with since I was a child,” Mico says, trying not to patronize her.

  “This a Mico Magical Music Tour through time now?”

  “No, but your father was right—”

  “Don’t call him that!”

  “Fine then. Taggert was right. All of this is about . . . Prentis is just a means to an end. She’s a tool . . .”

  “A weapon.” My voice lets me know how tired I am.

  “Exactly. A weapon to be used against me,” he confesses.

  “High opinion of yourself, ya git. Tag and I squared off against giant praying mantises while you were performing your proto-Live Aid. They didn’t seem concerned about you.”

  “The Alters . . . Nordeen knows a direct physical attack wouldn’t equal much against me. But an assault that combined the psychic, the physical, and the spiritual? Without the aid of the Manna? That would destroy me.”

  “Marley’s cat.” I’m beginning to understand. “The dream of a demon animal isn’t something you can sing away, is it?”

  “Exactly. It hits on the very level of my abilities.”

  “’Fuck does it even mean?” Tamara demands, putting herself on the floor mattress. “Dream of a demon anything?”

  “People like Robert Nesta Marley—like Mico—their dreams and lives hold potency and power. What’s more they pull the attention of the Nordeens of this world,” I tell her. I’m fighting to keep my eyes open.

  “It’s more than that,” Mico interrupts. He’s up on the broken-tiled kitchen counter looking down at us as though he were about to give a lesson. Where did that discombobulated mess of a man I led to food this morning go? Tamara goes quiet for a moment.

  “The music you heard, the way we go
t here, can sound like noise. But if you can hear with it, jam with it, let it own you, then it gives you power, the ability to speak with reality. Marley speaks—spoke—that reality clearly, deliberately. His acumen with it is almost as good as mine . . . was.”

  “Wot reality? The man died of cancer too damn young. Why didn’t he hear that song?”

  “Because he focused on representing the black human life as a full spiritual life instead of focusing on his own life. But you’re right, he missed a beat. It’s hard work, constantly listening to the universe. I think Robert Johnson did an even poorer job of manipulating the forces he had access to.”

  “Meaning what?” And there goes her accent.

  “Meaning what Marley kept inside in a dream, Robert Johnson sang out loud and hard. Nesta and I both heard it on the recording of the man. A compilation of his work was released recently—relatively I mean. But it was recorded in 1937. Less than a year later, Johnson died.”

  “I’m not a bluesman, but even I’ve heard the legend. He sang at the crossroads and sold his soul,” I tell him.

  “This isn’t that,” Mico corrects. “Robert Johnson never really settled down; he travelled a haphazard path his entire life. Other musicians would be playing with him on the street and he’d just walk away, disappear for weeks. They said it was like he was always running.”

  “From what?” my girl asks.

  “That song Nesta and I chanted back at the Mangrove—”

  “Which bloody one?”

  “‘Hellhounds on my Trail.’” My voice is almost a whisper. “You’re saying they were real? The hellhounds?”

  “Real enough for Nordeen to grab the way he grabbed the demon cat from Marley’s dream,” Mico wants to confirm. “I think.”

  “Well, get right certain before you asks me to do that time travel fucking jump thing again, yeah?” She almost shoves him with her power as she stands and heads to the door. Then to me, “Giant mantises I can deal with. This guy . . .”

 

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