Sunspot Jungle

by Bill Campbell

  They shipped us here, I remember. Damaged goods, just like other states shipped their mentally ill to Berkeley on Greyhound buses: a one-way ticket to nowhere, to a place that is said to be restful and warm in the shadow of the buildings, under the bridges, camouflaged from this life by smells of pot and piss. I am luckier than most. Numbers come easy to me, and I look grave and presentable in my heavy jackets that are not armor. Their long sleeves hide the self-inflicted scars.

  I remember little. Slivers. But I still bind my chest and use the pronoun they, and I wear a tight metal bracelet on my left arm. It makes me feel secure, if not safe. It’s only a ploy, this bracelet I have found, a fool’s game at hope. The band is base metal but without any markings, lights, or familiar pinpricks of the signal. Nothing flows. No way for Tedtemár to call, if ever Tedtemár could come here.

  Northern California is where they ship the damaged ones, yes, even interstellars.

  Nights are hard. I go out to the back yard, barren from my attempts at do-it-yourself landscaping. Only the redwood tree remains and at the very edge, a stray rose bush that blooms each spring in spite of my efforts. I smoke because I need it, to invoke and hold at bay the only full memory left to me: the battlefield, earth ravished by heaving and metal, the screech and whoosh of detonations overhead. In front of me I see the short, broad figure of my commanding officer. Tedtemár turns around. In dreams their visor is lifted, and I see their face laughing with the sounds of explosions around us. Tedtemár’s arms are weapons, white and broad and spewing fire. I cannot hear anything for the wailing, but in dreams Tedtemár’s lips form my name as the ground heaves.

  I have broken every wall in my house, put my fist through the thinness of them as if they’re nothing. I could have lived closer to work, but in this El Cerrito neighborhood nobody asks any questions; and the backyard is mine to ravage. I break the walls, then half-heartedly repair them over weekends only to break them again. At work I am composed and civil and do not break anything, though it is a struggle. The beautiful old plaster of the office walls goes gritty gray like barracks, and the overhead lights turn into alarms. Under the table I interlace my fingers into bird’s wings, my unit’s recognition sign, as my eyes focus resolutely on spreadsheets. At home I repair the useless walls and apply popcorn texture, then paint the whole thing bog gray in a shade I mix myself. It is too ugly even for my mood even though I’ve been told that gray is all the rage with interior designers these days.

  I put my fist through the first wall before the paint dries.

  Today, there is music on Embarcadero. People in black and colorful clothing whirl around, some skillfully, some with a good-natured clumsiness. Others are there simply to watch. It’s some kind of a celebration, but I have nothing to celebrate and nothing to hope for except for the music to shriek like a siren. I buy a plate of deep-fried cheeseballs and swallow them, taste buds disbelieving the input, eyes disbelieving the revelry even though I know the names of the emotions expressed here. Joy. Pleasure. Anticipation. At the edge of the piers, men cast small nets for crabs to sell to sushi bars, and in the nearby restaurants diners sip wine and shiver surreptitiously with the chill. I went out on dates with women and men and with genderfluid folks, but they have all avoided me after a single meeting. They are afraid to say it to my face, but I can see. Too gloomy. Too intense. Too quiet. Won’t smile or laugh.

  There is a person I notice among the revelers. I see them from the back—stooped, aloof. Like me. I don’t know what makes me single them out of the crowd, the shape of the shoulders perhaps. The stranger does not dance, does not move; just stands there. I begin to approach, then veer abruptly away. No sense in bothering a stranger with—with what exactly? Memories?

  I cannot remember anything useful.

  I wish they’d done a clean job, taken all my memories away so I could start fresh. I wish they’d taken nothing, left my head to rot. I wish they’d shot me. Wish I’d shoot myself, and have no idea why I don’t, what compels me to continue in the conference rooms and in the overly pleasant office and in my now fashionably gray house. Joy or pleasure are words I cannot visualize. But I do want—something. Something.

  Wanting itself at least was not taken from me, and numbers still keep me safe. Lucky bastard.

  I see the stranger again at night, standing in the corner of my backyard where the redwood used to be. The person has no face, just an empty black oval filled with explosives. Their white, artificial arms form an alphabet of deafening fire around my head.

  The next day I see them in the shape of the trees outside my office window, feel their movement in the bubbling of Strawberry Creek when I take an unusual lunch walk. I want, I want, I want, I want. The wanting is a gray bog beast that swallows me awake into the world devoid of noise. The suffocating safe coziness of my present environment rattles me, the planes and angles of the day too soft for comfort. I press the metal of my bracelet, but it is not enough. I cut my arms with a knife and hide the scars old and new under sleeves. I break the walls again and repaint them with leftover bog gray, which I dilute with an even uglier army green.

  Over and over again I take the BART to Embarcadero, but the person I seek is not there, not there when it’s nearly empty and when it’s full of stalls for the arts and crafts fair. The person I seek might never have existed, an interplay of shadows over plastered walls. A coworker calls to introduce me to someone; I cut her off, sick of myself and my well-wishers, always taunting me in my mind. In an hour I repent and reconsider and later spend an evening of coffee and music with someone kind who speaks fast and does not seem to mind my gloom. Under the table my fingers lace into bird’s wings.

  I remember next to nothing, but I know this: I do not want to go back to the old war. I just want—want—

  I see the person again at Montgomery in a long corridor leading from the train to the surface. I recognize the stooped shoulders and run forward, but the cry falls dead on my lips.

  It is not Tedtemár. Their face, downturned and worn, betrays no shiver of laughter. They smell unwashed and stale, and their arms do not end in metal. The person does not move or react like the others perhaps-of-ours I’ve seen here over the years, and their lips move, saying nothing. I remember the date from the other day, cheery in the face of my silence. But I know I have nothing to lose. So I cough, and I ask.

  They say nothing.

  I turn away to leave when, out of the corner of my eye, I see their fingers interlock to form the wings of a bird.

  Imprudent and invasive for this world, I lay my hand on their shoulder and lead them back underground. I buy them a BART ticket, watch over them as even the resolutely anonymous riders edge away from the smell. I take them to my home in El Cerrito, where broken walls need repair and where a chipped cup of tea is made to the soundtrack of sirens heard only in my head. The person holds the cup between clenched fists and sips, eyes closed. I cannot dissuade them when they stand in the corner to sleep, silent and unmoving like an empty battle suit.

  At night I dream of Tedtemár crying. Rockets fall out of their eyes to splash against my hands and burst there into seeds. I do not understand. I wake to the stranger huddled to sleep in a corner. Stray moonrays whiten their arms to metal.

  In the morning I beg my guest to take sustenance or a bath, but they do not react. I leave them there for work, where the light again makes mockery of everything. Around my wrist the fake bracelet comes to life, blinking, blinking, blinking in a code I cannot decipher, calling to me in a voice that could not quite be Tedtemár’s. It is only a trick of the light.

  At home I am again improper. The stranger does not protest or recoil when I peel their dirty clothes away, lead them into the bath. They are listless, moving their limbs along with my motions. The sudsy water covers everything—that which I could safely look at and that which I shouldn’t have seen. I will not switch the pronouns. When names and memories go, these bits of language, translated inadequately into the local vernacular, remain to us. They ar
e slivers, always jagged slivers of us, where lives we lived used to be.

  I remember Tedtemár’s hands, dragging me away. The wail of a falling rocket. Their arms around my torso, pressing me back into myself.

  I wash my guest’s back. They have a mark above their left shoulder as if from a once-embedded device. I do not recognize it as my unit’s custom or as anything.

  I wanted so much—I wanted—but all that wanting will not bring the memories back, will not return my life. I do not want it to return, that life that always stings and smarts and smolders at the edge of my consciousness, not enough to hold on to, more than enough to hurt—but there’s an emptiness in me where people have been once, even the ones I don’t remember. Was this stranger a friend? Their arms feel stiff to my touch. For all their fingers interlaced into wings at Montgomery station, since then I had only seen them hold their hands in fists.

  Perhaps I’d only imagined the wings.

  I wail on my way to work, silent with mouth pressed closed, so nobody will notice. In the office I wail, open-mouthed and silent, against the moving shades of redwoods in the window.

  For once I don’t want takeaway or minute-meals. I brew strong black tea and cook stewed red lentils over rice in a newly purchased pot. I repair the broken walls and watch Tedtemár-who-is-not-quite-Tedtemár as they lean against the doorway, eyes vacant. I take them to sleep in my bed, then perch on the very edge of it, wary and waiting. At night they cry out once, their voice undulating with the sirens in my mind. Hope awakens in me with that sound, but then my guest falls silent again.

  An older neighbor comes by in the morning and chats at my guest, not caring that they do not answer—like the date whose name I have forgotten. I don’t know if I’d recognize Tedtemár if I met them here. My guest could be anyone, from my unit or another or a veteran of an entirely different war shipped to Northern California by people I can’t know because they always ship us here from everywhere and do not tell us why.

  Work’s lost all taste and color, what of it there ever was. Even numbers feel numb and bland under my tongue. I make mistakes in my spreadsheets and am reprimanded.

  At night I perch again in bed beside my guest. I hope for a scream, for anything; fall asleep in the silent darkness, crouched uncomfortably with one leg dangling off to the floor.

  I wake up with their fist against my arm. Rigid fingers press and withdraw to the frequency of an old alarm code that hovers on the edge of my remembrance. In darkness I can feel their eyes on me but am afraid to speak, afraid to move. In less than a minute, when the pressing motion ceases and I no longer feel their gaze, I cannot tell if this has been a dream.

  I have taken two vacation days at work. I need the rest but dread returning home, dread it in all the different ways from before. I have not broken a wall since I brought my guest home.

  Once back, I do not find them in any of their usual spots. I think to look out of the kitchen window at last. I see my stranger, Tedtemár, or the person who could be Tedtemár—someone unknown to me from a different unit, a different culture, a different war. My commanding officer. They are in the backyard on their knees. There’s a basket by their side, brought perhaps by the neighbor.

  For many long minutes I watch them plant crocuses into the ravaged earth of my yard. They are digging with their fists. Their arms, tight and rigid as always, seem to caress this ground into which we’ve been discarded, cast aside when we became too damaged to be needed in the old war. Explosives streak past my eyelids and sink, swallowed by the clumps of the soil around their fists.

  I do not know this person. I do not know myself.

  This moment is all I can have.

  I open the kitchen door, my fingers unwieldy, and step out to join Tedtemár.

  Bottled-Up Messages

  Basma Abdel Aziz

  translated by Ruth Ahmedzai Kemp

  What if I were to start my day on a different footing for a change? I could break my habit of a lifetime and leave the house without my usual cup of tea in the kitchen. What if I tried out being lazy? I could shove aside the reams of paper people are always streaming into the office with. I could just ignore it all and let it pile up and clog up the system—accidentally, of course, on purpose.

  Or perhaps I could go and sit in the bathroom and idle away a couple of hours in there. I could wander aimlessly from one colleague’s office to another, stopping here and there for a chat, maybe a cup of coffee or a bite to eat. I’d sit back with a carefree yawn, my notebooks and files piled up in front of me, gnawing on a pencil that splinters between my teeth. I wouldn’t bother with any correspondence or with responding to any queries, no matter how pressing. Instead, I’d gaze on idly as the people wait, crushed by their exasperation. But why should I feel the need to do anything about it?

  I could also let myself go, put on a bit of weight. As my clothes got tighter, my bulging ass would shake when I walk. My stomach would rise in shapely contours rather than clinging as it does to my spine. No longer would my bones almost protrude from my flesh, grating on the metal chair when I sit. Instead, they would be generously cushioned by my ample backside. And I could make the most of my new look to try out new outfits like flowing skirts and tight, flowery tops with revealing necklines that give a glimpse of my neck and shoulders. And silly leather shoes.

  I lie in bed a while after waking up and indulge these vivid daydreams. I stretch out my legs and fidget between the warm and cold patches, ignoring the knock at the door and the fact that the cleaning lady might go if I don’t let her in. I get up and stretch lazily as I walk to the bathroom. I turn on the tap and wait for the hot water to trickle out, feeling even more relaxed once the knocking stops and I know that I’m on my own. I massage my face with some moisturizer a colleague gave me a few years ago after a trip to the Gulf and which I’ve never used. Then I sit down and surrender myself to the sun. I ring round my girlfriends to catch up on the TV news and the latest chart hits. The hum of their voices spills into my ear from the handset, the chatter of girls who have no idea that there is a revolution taking place in the next country, girls who are oblivious to the fact that our neighbours have taken to the streets, that their tyrant has fallen, and that others have followed.

  Like them, I change the channel when the news comes on. I stick plugs in my ears and wander off into the kitchen to make myself a snack. I try not to notice the dust kicked up by everything crashing down around me. I get out the vacuum cleaner and run it over everything in my path, trying to suck up the words swirling in the air around me, determined not to let them spoil my new mood.

  It isn’t long before the vacuum cleaner is full and overflowing. Reaching its bursting point, it starts to spew out everything it has sucked up, choking the space I have just cleared around me. I realize that my attempt to slip out of my skin has come crashing down. The moisturizer hasn’t made the slightest difference. A frown beckons, tantalizingly—a scowl that has lurked within me for years. If only I’d just let the chubby cleaning lady in and let her do her job, she would have saved me from having to change everything and I could have carried on with life as it was.

  I sit at the table, my elbows resting on the vast quantities of notes I’ve scribbled. I am always writing one thing or another because I am overwhelmed by impossible possibilities because their failure to materialize is wearing me down and because their materialization has become my only dream. And all this time I’ve been living at the bottom of a huge glass bottle. This bottle is where I wash my clothes, where I eat, where I exercise, where I work, where I write and study and scream out loud. It’s where I sleep, where I wake up, where I relieve myself. This bottle is running out of space for me and my non-proverbial excretions; but no matter the pressure, the stopper never pops open to let me pour out. The bottle insists on keeping me trapped inside. When it once decided to expand a little, I relaxed, telling myself I could finally breathe. But it wasn’t long before it went back to how it was before—hard and inflexible. It pressed again
st me so tightly and for so long that I was reduced to a mere figment of myself. Nothing remained of me but a hoarse, broken voice.

  I resolved years ago that I’d escape, but I never get anywhere, no matter how I twist and contort myself. I’ve tried every position, every posture—to no avail. But maybe if I get fat and lazy, if I keep quiet and keep my head down and my skin well moisturized—maybe then the bottle will break.

  And while I wait for this bottle to shatter around me, I write about an idyllic day when I can finally let my guard down, when I don’t need to shout or scream. I walk among the protestors, a little light-headed from the exhaust fumes. I buy myself some sugar cane juice and lean against the metal police barrier, the sun beating down, making me frown. But then I half-smile, my mouth slightly open. The sugar cane juice has doubled in price, but I pay for it without losing that light-headed, happy feeling. I wipe my lips and throw the paper napkin onto the ground, which is covered in little puddles. I watch the edges of the paper soak up the water. I see the sodden tissue expand and stick to the ground. I wipe my shoes with it until they shine, and I walk on in peace.

  The sheet of paper I’ve scrawled on is covered in random, misshapen blobs inching along, trickling from one word to another. Some words have merged, others are illegible. Despite disappearing from the page, these words are still trapped in this bottle. Perhaps one of them will find it and crack it open. Perhaps that someone will pour some of the contents down his gullet. And as he belches, the bottle’s trapped contents will seep out into the air, filling it with the fresh scent of revolution for everyone to inhale.

  Acception