They cleaned him and carried him down the stairs shrouded in blankets. They laid him in the car, patting him softly like a puppy, as the one in red drove them for five hours through country roads and small villages, until they reached Munich. They carried him into another hotel, with a larger suite of several rooms, a kitchenette, and a view over a lake.
They sterilized the room with steaming white towels and buckets of warm disinfectant. They dressed his sores and gave him painkillers, while Rhea made plans on the phone for all of them to travel to Miami in a few days time. They sang hymns, said nothing.
The hymns carried him back. They took him back to Jamaica, and he was too weak to fight the way they carried him to familiar places of comfort and possibility. They sang with the thick, round harmonies that could consume a room with their force, their weight. They kept guard on the door, and when the doctor came the next day to see him, they blocked him from entering. They told the doctor that Joseph was already out of the country.
The doctor left, but he was followed by Joseph’s disgruntled entourage who had been camped out in his room, in the hallway, scattered around the hotel—fucking women, smoking weed, lingering as if someone had already declared a wake. They came to the new hotel, some brandishing vulturous knives. The women stood firm. “Stab me den, nuh. Stab me,” the green woman said calmly. The men walked away. The women let Russell, Joseph’s cook, come in. Joseph would not eat from anyone else. Not even Rhea. Russell was the only one who expressed relief at Rhea’s arrival. He had felt helpless obeying the doctor’s twisted instructions about food for the dread. “If ’im gwine dead, den ’im might as well enjoy a good livity while ’im ’ave life.” Rhea agreed without agreeing. She told him to cook the food that Joseph liked. He served up mounds of mashed yams islanded in thick callaloo and okra stew, spiced with various herbs and coconut oil. Joseph ate gratefully. He trusted Russell.
Rhea told Joseph the plan. He listened. He could feel his body slipping from him. His scalp was hurting him more than ever. He knew that the sores were now all over his head. He imagined that their seepage inwards was touching his brain.
He picked up his guitar one morning and began to sing. Soon he forgot the words. He started to cry. He sat there, staring at the brown high-rise buildings and the misty skyline, and his mind was blank. He could not remember the words.
Russell sat in a chair behind him. He realized what had happened to Joseph and quickly began to recite Psalm 139. As the words came out of Russell’s mouth, Joseph began to sing with him. His fingers worked their way around the fret board and he found melodies to carry the psalm. The two continued like this, a song breaking out in the room, the sweet taste of holiness. Russell’s face had the wooden toughness of a sun-hardened sea jetty. His locks were virtually red and clumped in disarray around his head, just like the heads of his fellow bredren who fished the waters of Bull Bay on the rugged south coast of the island. His face was a lumped mass of muscle and overgrown pimples. Few recognizable expressions passed through that face. But sitting there, looking at the back of Joseph’s head, his face softened into strange liquid textures. He was crying as he spoke.
The song carried through the room, around and around in circles. The women did not look at each other. Their eyes were filled.
Lord, you have searched I and known I,
You know my sitting down and my rising up;
You understand my thoughts from a far off.
You comprehend my path and my lying down,
And are acquainted with all my ways.
For there is not a word on my tongue
But behold, O LORD, You know it altogether.
You have hedged I behind and before
And laid your hand upon I.
Such knowledge is too wonderful for I;
It is high, I cannot attain it,
It is high, I cannot attain it,
It is high, I cannot attain it.
Where can I and I go from your spirit
Or where can I and I flee from your presence?
If I and I ascend to heaven you are there;
If I and I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there.
If I and I take the wings of the morning
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there your hand shall lead I,
And your right hand shall hold I.
Line after line Russell spoke, and line after line Joseph transformed into a melody. His fingers feathered the frets as his right hand brushed the strings to create a wash of harmonics. He was just barely managing to bar the chords to create clean notes. He chanted, coaxing his clumsy fingers to speak in the familiar sharp slash of the reggae chop—bright, fresh, yet always behind everything. Russell’s voice was a steady bass line making spaces and filling them, making spaces and filling them. Outside the gray of the town seemed insignificant.
“We leaving tomorrow,” Rhea said quietly. “We going home.”
Joseph nodded. He was ready.
5.
He wakes up and knows that it is night by the sound of the crickets; their sluggish noises echo in the small room. For a moment, he is sure that a cricket is in the room with him. He panics, his heart pounding at the imposition, and then his situation comes back to him like an old sick smell—he is not trying to live. A cricket, a scorpion, a lizard, a snake, what would any of those matter to him now? The tape seems to have stopped. He reaches for it, when a sudden click reminds him that it is simply turning over. Soon “Natural Mystic” grows like a web of whispers around him.
Joseph knows he has been dreaming about dying. He knows the end of the dream and yet he wants to finish the dream. He prefers to call it a dream even though he knows that he is not really sleeping. What he is doing is thinking. He is thinking so deeply that it feels like a dream. His thinking is like a prayer—a way of making some order out of his life. Or maybe it is not order he wants, perhaps he wants to recreate it.
There is a tendency to helplessness that has haunted him for years. It made him sit dumbly in the room while Melanie, his woman, virtually begged him to say, “Please stay,” by prolonging her departure, by the way her body seemed to soften despite the harshness of her words, by the wetness in her eyes. He sat there helplessly saying nothing to her. So she left.
For him, to have acted then would have been utter hypocrisy. His life has been shaped by this incapacity to act.
He sees.
He sees the brutish way of this country of his. He knows personally many of the high-ranking politicians and business folk whose cynicism has led them to engage in the crude violence of the society. He knows that the stories of violent death, corruption, terror, and fear are rooted in something quite simple—people taking advantage of centuries of abuse. He says nothing about any of this. He does not complain, he does not accuse; he sees. He cannot imagine a way out of this morass. He has tried to write songs about it, thinking that perhaps were he to turn away from those friends, turn from the system that birthed him, turn to the myths of reggae, he would find a way to fight, to resist. But it does not happen. He is still himself, still consumed by the rituals of his privilege and unable to speak the language of radical action. It is a failure of the imagination, he knows.
How to reconcile the two worlds he thinks are his? Melanie helped him to feel, at least for a moment, that there was a true path for him—a man who could look at his country with new eyes, her eyes—and find a music to speak to that country. Now she has gone. She has gone because he was not there to protect her when she was attacked. She has gone because he could not step away from his anger at her goading him to act, to shake off the inertia of entitlement that he wore, her way of making friends with everyone she saw regardless of their class, their color, their age. She has gone because he told her that she was a true Jezebel—a bloodsucking woman who had tricked him into bringing her to Jamaica. He told her this and never took it back. So she has gone because she was an alien in an alien world and it was hard for her to sleep
at night not knowing what he would do. She left because she no longer believed his promise to be her guide, to lead her along the paths to the place where the berries are, the soft place of noises, sounds, and sweet airs that he had described so well to her as he seduced her outside a club in a forgettable southern American town.
She left because he would not take the medication. She did not know who she would meet hovering over her late at night, and he could not tell her anything to reassure her.
Somewhere at the back of his mind he is waiting to hear her slipping the key into the lock, and then to see her peering into the room with that smile on her face. “Hey, baby,” the way she would say it that would make his skin prick, his groin tickle instinctively.
He is listening over the sound of the music. All he hears are the crickets.
6.
The God, tall, light-skinned, and strangely anemic in a baggy navy-blue sweat suit, strolled through the lobby toward them, his locks bobbing behind, his eyes flaming. He had the presence, the kind of confidence that forced people to pay attention to him. The muted sunlight from the wide windows looking out into the cluttered tarmac caught his chains, an array of crudely crafted chunky gold pendants that dangled around his neck.
Behind him hurried Bobo, a short, round man who insisted on wearing clothes that were decidedly too tight, who insisted, despite his copious stomach, on tucking his shirt into his tight black leather trousers. Bobo was out of breath. He wore a pair of dark glasses that wrapped around his face. He would have looked sinister if the rest of his body had not seemed so comical. He could barely keep up with the steady, assured stride of The God.
Joseph looked down when he saw them approaching. He had hoped that they would announce the flight before this confrontation.
Rhea and the three women stood up and moved toward The God and Bobo. Bobo was pointing. The God stared hard, not at Rhea or the women, but at Joseph. Joseph caught his eye and looked down quickly. He did not want to look up. He stared at the ground, then he looked into the sky. He was trying to disappear, to throw himself as far away from this moment as possible.
He was tired. The drive to the airport had worn him out completely and he was not looking forward to the flight. It was going to be painful. The sores on his back and his bottom were weeping that morning, and when one of the women had rubbed them gently with some anti-bacterial ointment, he could hear her muttering at the tragic ugliness of it all. “Why, why, why them let this happen, eh?” She was not expecting an answer. In fact, for the three days they had been in the same room, these women had not spoken to Joseph except to give him simple commands like “Lean back” or “Sip” or “Lift up.” They were working for Rhea, no one else. They simply worked, gave comfort as no one else could.
But that morning, one of them, Barbara, could not help herself. She wondered why anyone would allow this man to go through this, this man with sense, with money, with a name around the world, why they would let him go through this kind of foolishness. She wondered aloud, as if Joseph was not there.
Now, at the airport, Barbara was standing slightly ahead of Rhea, looking at this tall, lanky dread striding toward them. Joseph knew then that it was possible that he would not be on the flight out of Germany. He knew that his broken body might be taken back to another room in the city, another smoke-filled place, for someone else to rescue him, but he did not care anymore. He wanted to have his guitar with him, his Bible, and the Miles Davis tape he had been playing over and over again for weeks. He would go wherever he was taken. It was already over.
The God could bring no magic with him, just the assured look of someone who was born to be in charge. The God would come and argue that they went back too far for him to let this woman come and take over his life. The God would say that he would be better off with friends, real friends, with the bredren. The God would say that he could not die. That Rasta could not die. Rhea would never say that. Rhea knew, like Joseph, that he could die. The God would say that Joseph was a bonafide dread, and a bonafide dread could never die, it was impossible. The God would tell him that all he needed to do was humble himself and look to Jah and he would get a chance to travel to Ethiopia. There he would find the nice plot of land that they had both picked out those many years ago, that spot where Joseph planned to retire, put up his foot and plant, plant, plant, and watch Jah give the increase. The God would remind him of the dream. The God would tell him what to do and how to do it. The God would remind him that he has been with Joseph forever and that Joseph could not turn away from a true bredrin. The God would point out that Rhea was a succubus, a bloodsucking bitch who was looking for revenge on Joseph; that she was a woman, and woman is never to be trusted over a bredrin. The God would say all this and convince Joseph that he should stay.
Joseph would be too feeble to say anything. Joseph would look at Russell and Russell would look back with the dazed eyes of a man in a perpetually “red” state—the look of a dog assuring its master that it will go anywhere the master desires. Russell would have no answers. Russell would feed Joseph no matter what. He would feed Joseph until Joseph could feed no more. Joseph would get no answers from Russell. Joseph would look at The God and say, “God, yuh right.” But Joseph would not be able to move. It would have to be between The God and Rhea and the women.
He watched the confrontation. The God carried himself with the same sly danger that he had brought to the football field. There was nothing physically overbearing about him. He was slight. Fit but slight. His self-assurance lay elsewhere. What he had was a quality of danger, a capacity to believe in his invincibility, in his ability to dramatically change the direction of a game. He always wanted the ball, and when he got the ball things happened. His gift was simple: He was a dreamer with the capacity to dream impossible things and, more importantly, to execute them through his body’s remarkable flexibility. He had found a way to respond physically to the unique rhythms that moved in his head. What onlookers saw was a man with the ability to caress a football, to toy with the intelligence of his opponents, to outthink them to the point of bafflement. This, combined with his total fearlessness, made him a dangerous man.
When he stood beside Pelé in the National Stadium, The God still felt that his title was deserved. Pelé was good, but Pelé was a man like any other. Pelé was from Brazil and he, The God, was from a tiny island with no history of football to talk of, but he was The God, and he could take on any man, any man. And he did. He took on Pelé as if Pelé was a local player, and Pelé smiled at the sheer audacity of the seventeen-year-old. From the earliest days it was his way.
Now here, standing in front of Rhea, he had come to get Joseph. On the surface of things, this was a done thing.
“Bobo, tek Joseph bag and come. Russell, help me wid Joseph.” He brushed past Rhea and pushed his face into Joseph’s face and stared intently into his eyes.
“God,” Joseph said, smiling crookedly and weakly.
“Come, bredrin.” He reached round to gather Joseph up. Rhea dragged him away and he let himself be pulled from Joseph. He was not going to fight. He had come for the dread and that was the bottom line. The ritual was fine. He would play it.
Joseph closed his eyes and tried to listen to the argument. He could not follow anything. His mind was slipping away again. He was drifting beyond this airport, to Ethiopia, the brown and burnt-sienna of the landscape and the rich dark green of the vegetation, to the small plot of land in St. Ann where he found himself hoeing, getting it ready to plant tomatoes and carrots—Rhea was singing hymns in the shack—to a blazing afternoon in New York, the park overflowing with people dressed in red, gold, and green, prancing to the sound.
He stood there feeling the strange weight of his Gibson. His feet felt like clay, locked to the ground, while his head spun as if the weed had twisted itself on him. Everything was floating and his body felt lighter. The trees turned upside down as his voice tried to reach for a sound, a faraway sound. He wanted to shout something to that Yankee guit
arist and his frantic stage antics, kneeling, lifting the head of his guitar in the air, prancing about the stage with a most un-reggae rhythm. Joseph felt both irritation and a deep fear that something was out of his control. Then he felt his body giving way. He was on the ground. The bass was rumbling. He was unconscious, but he could still hear the music in his head, could still see the light blue of the sky, could still feel the way his body was lifted and the music sounding like a reverb, going on and on.
7.
The man wakes and it is still dark. He knows that something has woken him, but he is not sure what. The pain in his stomach comes on him gradually but relentlessly. It is as if he is forcing his way up from deep water, his breath held and all his thoughts focused on the strain in his lungs. He feels the strain to come up for breath—the rush of bubbles, the cool of the water, and the blinding glow of the approaching light. Then he bursts through the surface, his lungs opening to take in air, his body opening to be fed by the food it desperately needs.
In the aftermath, in the calm after knowing he has survived, after finding breath again, his body begins to remind him of the brute beating it has undergone. Then comes the pain, the pain in his head, the pain in his limbs, the pain deep inside his stomach. It is the pain that has awoken him.
Iron Balloons Page 20
