Iron Balloons

by Channer, Colin

  When he makes this point, which he always does, his voice gets a little spacey and drops a bit in pitch, and he speaks of floating somewhere above the operating theater, looking down at his body, the table being cold, the doctor and his nurses frenzied, at first frightened, then excited, their faces asking, “The boy came back to life but what the hell did we do?”

  Before he’d met the woman at the party and she’d bamboozled her way into his life (he’d leave his wife of eighteen years for her and move with her to Barbados), he’d had no recollection of dying and coming back. Today he has a dream life in a beach house and his exwife does her best with my help to raise his kids.

  But I must admit that Kenny has always had a certain gift. It’s not so much that he can see things. He gets premonitions. He gets the feeling that there might be things to watch for, good things or bad.

  The day our mother had a fatal heart attack, he’d spent the morning calling round to see if everybody was okay. The week before I got the call that four of my plays were going to be made into CXC texts, he called to tell me it was time I word-processed my scripts. And he’d been suddenly obsessed with weeding out the family plot in the weeks before Pierre shed his bag of burdens and walked on air in a subway station in Toronto only to be grounded by a train.

  “My blasted son is dead.”

  I’d never said it that way before. I’d said that he’d passed on, or made his transition, or gone to a better place, but I’d never said that he was dead. Death is something for old people, something appropriately final for people who’ve gotten to a certain age, something as wide and deep as the sea at the end of a long highway. Young people aren’t made for death. Death doesn’t suit them. Doesn’t fit them right. They haven’t lived enough to earn their eulogies. They haven’t paid the price.

  Since Pierre’s death six months before, I’d been trying to pay his debt, been trying to lead a better life. Trying to make it so that when my time came I’d earn the eulogy for both of us, trying to make it so that when they spoke of me they’d talk about how much I’d changed because of him, how much I’d used my life to live his dreams. Pierre was a dreamer. He wanted to do everything … make music, make movies, make art … make me understand that he was not going to be a replica of me … make peace with me, make peace with himself, with his sexuality, make sense of what it meant to have ADD … make sense of a world that refused to remain in one spot so he could focus. Could take his time and look.

  When he said he thought he’d do better in college somewhere else, was I too glad to pay the fare? Should I have kept him there in Kingston, the place that my career had made my home, and watch him suffer, watch him lock himself inside his room, watch his pants drip down when he didn’t eat for days? Should I have encouraged him to try another treatment, get other drugs prescribed? Was it too easy to say yes when he said he’d like to go? Was I really trying to help him or help myself? Was I right or wrong?

  “My blasted son is dead,” I said again.

  “I know,” she said, and crossed her arms. “I know.”

  I needed comfort. Badly.

  I asked, “What’s your name, by the way?”

  “Chloe.”

  She came forward once again.

  “How are you, Chloe?”

  “I’m okay.”

  “I’m Irving, by the way.”

  “Nice to meet you.”

  “So,” I said, “how do you know about my son?”

  His death was small news even in Toronto, so I figured she’d heard about it from Pelham or Tina. People see. People ask. People talk. Chloe could have asked them what was wrong with me, why I seemed so down, and they could have said, Poor thing, he’s lost his son.

  But instead of being reassuring, her IknowIknow felt glib. Pretentious. Airy-fairy cryptic. Which made me feel toyed with. Irritated. Annoyed.

  “I know things,” she said.

  I shoved a cigarette in my mouth. My hand was trembling. I couldn’t light it. She reached to help me and I slapped her hand away. The cigarette fell. I stomped it. Kicked what was left of it. Raised grass and dirt in the air.

  “When I was fifteen,” she said, while backing off, “I was living in Blanchichessue and I caught a fever and started to burn. It took three days before my mother realized that I was really sick, that this was no ordinary thing like she was telling the neighbors for two days. By the time she could get some men to put me in a van and carry me to the clinic, they said I was dead. No pulse. No breath. When they got to the clinic, they put me in a room to wait for the doctor to come and pronounce me. But everybody knew I was dead. When the doctor came, he gave me a shot and told the nurse to give me some chicken soup when I woke. She looked at him like he was crazy and he said a single word—‘typhoid’—before explaining that although my vital signs were very weak, I wasn’t gone. That is one death. My second death was fifteen years ago. I was working as a junior secretary in the Red House when Abu Bakr and the Jamaat stormed the place and held the government hostage. That was 1990 during the coup. They shot several people. You remember that? Well, I was one of them.”

  She moved toward me now with her arms crossed and went to sit again where she’d sat when she’d begun to smoke her spliff, and I walked over. She wiped her face and said, “No,” as I approached, and it was only then that I saw her tears.

  “Both times,” she said softly, as her shoulders squeezed up, “my soul looked down on my body from above. I saw it all. The nurse in the country clinic. The surgeon in the theater down at General, searching for the bullets in my chest.”

  Lightning looks for water. Men are drawn to women’s tears. If I dig deep enough to analyze it, I might find out why. Maybe it’s because experience teaches that a love-up is the hero’s just reward. Maybe it’s because the tears provide us with a chance to catch up on the moments we missed with our children. Maybe it’s because a breakdown is exactly what we want them to feel when we’re inside them, turning like tornados, collapsing them with overwhelming force.

  But I’ve never analyzed it—even now—which means I didn’t analyze it that night. In the moment I just knew I wanted to hold her close and tell her what she needed to hear to make the crying stop, whatever that might have been … to make her pull herself together, to make her feel the world was alright, to hold her, perhaps, as I wished I’d held Pierre the last time he cried before he made that leap of faith, chancing that there had to be a better place on the other side of life.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I whispered, in the way I should have whispered to my own sweet boy. And before I knew it, I’d held my arms toward her and she’d stood and come to me and I’d held her close. She was heavy in my arms, as if her legs had lost their strength to fully hold her up, and her body shook and trembled like there wasn’t just a single Chloe in her floral dress but several Chloes rolling round and crawling round, scrounging for a place where they could rest, could fit, be safe, find home.

  “Your boy wants to talk to you,” she said through tears. “He wants me to connect you. He trusts me cause I’ve been to the other side. He sent me here to you.”

  By then she was no longer Chloe to me. The more I held her and thought of Pierre, the more I felt her changing, the more I felt her changing into him, the more I needed her to be him, for my sake, just so I could tell him that I loved him, that I loved him so, and that it was my fault, my fault, my frigging fault for not trying harder to know, to feel, to understand, to accept, to protect, to soothe, to query, to challenge, to fight, to encourage, to permit.

  “Oh my boy,” I whispered. “Oh my sweet boy. It’s okay. You can tell me anything. Anything. You have my ear. My ear and my heart belong to you.”

  “First of all,” she said, “your son wants you to know that he is in a place of incredible beauty. So beautiful that he finds it hard to describe. You would never believe it. More than that, he is surrounded by a group of loving, intelligent souls who are taking care of him, so you should not be worrying about where he i
s or what is happening to him. He’s fine. He’s more than fine. He’s happy.”

  I wanted to let her go. Her words felt inauthentic. She was struggling with the role. But I held her still. She was all I had. My blasted son was dead.

  “Thank you,” I told her. “Thank you. Thank you, darling. Thank you.”

  “Next, he wants you to stop beating up yourself with guilt. What happened was meant to happen.”

  I eased my hold on her. Fear rushed in between us, and I squeezed her tightly once again.

  “No. No. No,” I said. “Don’t say that. Don’t say that. No, son. It was not supposed to happen. That’s not how it’s supposed to be at all. You were supposed to grow old and carry my casket to my grave and cry for me, my love, then smile as you claimed your inheritance, all the things I left for you—the shoes in which I married your mother, the life insurance payback, the playbills signed by Derek Walcott, the house on the hillside in Dominica, all my artwork, the steel penknife which my father said had cut the tangled ropes on one of the Titanic’s lifeboats, all the old kaiso LPs, my personally autographed copy of Giovanni’s Room.

  I began to find it hard to breathe. Like I was holding her too hard. It was fear. Fear like a blade trying to get between us. Like wind prying shingles from a roof.

  A car had backfired on the plain and I’d been yanked out of the movie I was making in my mind, the one in which I was the loving father cradling his son, and the sounds of the world rushed inside my head … a mix of heartbeat, music, tree frogs, crickets, wind, and distant human voices … and I became aware of myself as I was, a desperate man holding a broken woman whom he wanted to die and come back as his son.

  I saw myself like I was not myself, but another Irving watching from above. Or so I wanted to think. So I wanted to believe. And I willed myself to believe it, and as soon as I did this, I could ask her to speak to him.

  “Pierre,” I whispered, “if you’re here, let me know. Are you here?”

  A hand slipped up my back and cupped my head. A voice said, “Yes.”

  “How do I know?”

  “It’s me. Yes, it’s me.”

  “Me who?”

  “Daddy?”

  “Yes, son?”

  “No. It’s not Daddy. It’s not Daddy.”

  “Yes, it’s me. Yes it’s me.”

  “No. It’s not Daddy.”

  “Yes, Pierre. It’s me. Please believe me. It’s me.”

  “It’s not Daddy. It’s not Daddy. It’s Dad.”

  “God bless you. God bless you. God bless you, my son. Yes. God bless you. Yes. It’s Dad.”

  “Dad? Dad?”

  “Yes, Pierre.”

  “I love you, Dad. Stop worrying. It’s over. Don’t bother to try and live for me. You can’t live for me. Move on with your life. It’s over, Dad. It’s finished. It’s done.”

  I stood there holding Chloe for a very long time. How long, I’m not sure. But long enough for Pelham and Tina to feel they had to come and find me.

  It was an awkward scene: Chloe and I were hugging each other in silence with our eyes closed, rubbing each other’s backs, crying when the crying would come, quiet when the quiet brought relief, but not talking, not talking. Then, in the middle of this search for peace, I heard Tina calling from a distance and Pelham coughing to warn me.

  “I think we getting ready,” Tina shot from thirty yards away. She was angry for sure. When I looked, she was already tramping up the grade. Pelham was squatting with his elbows on this thighs and moving his head from side to side as if he had to double-check what he’d seen. Before he left, he clapped his hands and laughed.

  “So you’re gone?” Chloe said, composing herself.

  I began to do the same. “Yes. I gone.”

  “Thanks for holding me.”

  In a mutter, I said, “No. Thank you.”

  And somehow I knew, perhaps in the way my brother knew he wasn’t dreaming that time, that I’d return to Kingston as a slightly different man. Different how and to what degree, I didn’t know. But I knew.

  “Be good,” Chloe said, and kissed her palm. She placed it on my cheek.

  “I will,” I mumbled. “I hope to see you again.”

  “Some things you should leave in their time,” she said.

  “You’re right, you know. That’s true.”

  “You’re not coughing anymore,” she said brightly.

  I touched my throat. “I only cough when I smoke,” I said, and smiled.

  “But you don’t do that anymore.”

  “How you know that?”

  “I know a lot of things,” she said, and shooed me off. I realized then that she was wearing bangles. They clattered when they shook.

  As I walked up the grade toward the house, I turned to look at her again. She was lighting up a spliff.

  “He never used to call me Daddy, you know,” I shouted. “He only used to call me Dad.”

  “I know.”

  “I was going to ask you how you know, but I think I know. Or at least I know what I want to know.”

  “You know,” she said, “you’re just putting up a fight.”

  “How you know?”

  “Because,” she said, “I know.”

  She was veiled in smoke. I could see the glow and smell the spliff burning fierce and new. My last impression was a shadow in a swirl of smoke dissolving in the glimmer of the city’s lights.

  SOMEONE TO TELL

  by A-dZiko Simba

  It’s the most incredible thing you’ve seen in your whole life. You can’t move because of the incredibleness. It has stuck you right to the spot, so all you can do is stay there not moving. It has opened up your eyes wide, wide, so all you can do is look, and you can’t even make a sound because it have yuh mouth seal up and lock down.

  The only thing you can do is look and think. And the only thing you can think is “incredible.”

  Incredible. And you’re so glad that last term Mr. Swaby gave you new words to learn every week, because without that, without that, you wouldn’t even know what to think, but you do know … incredible.

  But now the night is starting to come down and the trees are starting to turn into people with long arms and too many fingers and the Christmas breeze is starting to blow. It has a coldness in it, and when it passes, the tree people begin to moan and crack their bones like old people. Like tired old people grumbling up stairs. You run out of the bush and onto the road. It is not that you are frightened. Of course you are not frightened, but you just think you have seen enough incredibleness for one day, and anyway, you are hungry and now is a good time, a very good time, for you to go home. You run all the way. Not because the old tree people are after you, not because Delroy once told you that on certain nights, in certain places, dead people come alive in trees and take up stray children. You just run because you like to run and home is a good place to run too. That is all.

  Mary Janga is on the porch. Mary Janga is always on the porch playing mummy with her dollies.

  She talks to them like they’re real people, like they can really hear her. Then she combs their hair and takes off their clothes and combs their hair and puts their clothes back on again. Then she gives them dirt and cut-up leaves to eat and you shake your head and you wonder about Mary Janga. Wonder if there is any hope. And when she stops talking and combing and feeding and bends her head to listen to what the dollies have to say, you realize there’s no hope for Mary Janga at all.

  But even so, you are happy to see her sitting on the porch because she is someone to tell.

  Mary Janga says she will only listen if you tell her dollies too. You are too excited to care. You tell her, “Yes,” and you wait for her to line them all up so they can all look in your face and hear what it is you are saying. Now they are ready. Mary Janga and her dollies are all lined up, all ready to listen, except for Floppy Florenzo the Rabbit, who keeps dropping over on his face.

  Mary Janga listens with eyes open big and wide. When you get t
o the end she makes a face like she is trying to squash it up into a ball and stuff it through a little hole. And then she says, “Yuck!”

  Mary Janga is not from planet Earth. An alien spaceship left Mary Janga in your yard one day. She has come from a place where they talk to plastic dollies and they say “Yuck” to incredible stories. One day her people will come back for her and you won’t have to put up with this nonsense anymore.

  You suck your teeth to let her know that you know the spaceship is coming any day now, and then you run inside to tell your mother.

  She is in the kitchen. She is always in the kitchen. You wonder what it is about being a girl that always keeps them in places.

  You just start to tell your mother the story. You don’t even get anywhere yet, but she turns around and smiles and says, “That’s nice.”

  Nice? Nice?

  Nice bounces around in your head. You cannot believe she said, “Nice.”

  You feel like shouting, “NICE?” Like if you can make it big enough and make it have enough of a question in it, she will realize it’s not the thing to say.

  You have just seen the most incredible thing in the whole wide world and your sister says, “Yuck,” and your mother says, “Nice.”

  You go outside to look for your father.

  The truck’s hood is wide open like a huge mouth. It has swallowed your father right up to his waist. Just as you reach him, the truck spits out his arm, and his hand searches around in the tool box, finds a spanner, and then disappears again.

  The engine is roaring. The engine is louder than your voice.

  You have to call him three times before he hears you.

  He turns off the engine and stands up.

  The light from the lamp stuck onto the battery puts shadows on his face. Where there are no shadows, you can see sweat and lines of black grease. He looks like he belongs to some tribe or some gang. In his hands are spanners and ratchets and screws and wires and chunks of metal that don’t belong in his hands. He doesn’t speak. Not with his mouth. He speaks with the look on his face. It says, What happen? like he doesn’t want an answer, like he would rather listen to the engine. Like the engine has something more incredible to tell him than you do, like you don’t have nothing incredible to tell him at all. But you do, so you open your mouth to tell him and he says, “Pass me the three-quarter socket.”