Tides From the New Worlds

by Tobias S. Buckell

  “Who you talking too?” Manny asked, because Jimiti spoke to the water.

  “You see duppy often?”

  Manny hesitated.

  “Never mind.” Jimiti took one more step towards the water. The steady roll of waves against the beach began to slow, almost to a crawl, and then died away. The wind dropped, the air hushed.

  One lone rogue wave washed towards them. It broke, a miniature froth of salty mist spinning off from it’s top. And from that, Manny saw it wash against a form.

  “You see her?” Jimiti asked.

  Manny blinked. The wave died, but a lady stood out of the water. Her skin glistened with rivulets of water that dripped down between her breasts, her stomach, her inner thighs, and then back into the ocean. Her features never stayed in focus, but wavered like a reflection in windy puddle.

  “Yes,” Manny breathed.

  “This La Llorona,” Jimiti said. “We meet often at places like these: beaches, rivers, small ponds in parks with ducks paddling around the middle.”

  “Who is she?” Manny stood frozen in place.

  “My spirit guide.” Jimiti nodded. “You won’t find her on any Vodou altar. And until a year ago, I never seen her. I think all the believing Latinos in Miami that make her strong. Or maybe the world changing this year. I don’t know.” Jimiti chuckled. “I once tell her she ain’t even the right mythology for me to see. And she had ask me ‘what the right mythology, Jimiti? You a two hundred-year-old blend of cultural mess! What in you vein? Kikiyu? Ashanti? Grandmammy rock you to sleep talking ’bout Ananzi, or Brer Rabbit? It don’t matter where I come from, only that I exist to you.’ ”

  Jimiti stepped forward again.

  “I old La Llorona. You tell me everyone here lose they culture. You right. Look this one here. Don’t self even know what a duppy is. My coming back useless. You hear?”

  The watery figure spoke. It sent shivers down Manny’s back. He had never heard a ghost speak.

  “So because they don’t know, you won’t try bringing it back to them.”

  Jimiti sucked his teeth. “They young. They don’t care. Too busy with they nice car, big building, money, technology. I don’t have nothing to share with them. The world change past me, and I don’t understand them.”

  La Llorona looked at Manny. Her eyes cleared with a ripple.

  “You are right. The world has passed you. But they still need understanding. Compassion.”

  Jimiti spat. He looked at the amazed look on Manny’s face and pursed his lips.

  “Compassion. What you know of compassion?” He looked angry, and hurt. “Let me help you understand this spirit here,” he told Manny. “La Llorona… better known as Bloody Mary.”

  “Please don’t,” La Llorona asked.

  “Haunting, crying, river spirit,” Jimiti continued. “At the youngest age she had take her two children to the river. She grabbed them by they little young neck and pushed them both under river, and hold the both of them there until their palms stop hitting the water. Then she let go and watch them still body float away.”

  La Llorona looked down at the water by her waist.

  “And after she killed herself,” she whispered, “she searched the edges of waters everywhere, hoping to find her two lost children.” Her voice hardened. “Thank you for telling him this Jimiti. You are such a kind old man.”

  Manny felt the water around him vibrate and surge against his legs.

  “Please,” La Llorona asked him. “Don’t think those things about me.” Silent tears rolled down her face. They mingled with drops of water hovering on the edge of her chin and fell down into the ocean.

  “I’m sorry,” Jimiti apologized. He had tears of his own.

  La Llorona shook her head.

  “Take care of yourself, Jimiti,” she said, putting a wet hand to his chest. “I will see you again, soon enough. You know this. Go do what you have to do.”

  A wave broke against La Llorona’s legs. She dissolved into the water with a sigh. A single strand of seaweed that had been wrapped around her small breasts floated free and grounded itself on the sand in front of Manny.

  Out past the small reef he could hear her calling for her children, a small plaintive voice lost in the rustle of coconut palms.

  Jimiti put a hand on Manny’s shoulder.

  “You know what they does call the men that could see duppy?”

  Manny shook his head.

  “Four eye,” Jimiti said. “Not hardly any four eye anymore. Just you and me.” They began to walk back up the beach. The mosquitos and no-see-ums returned and started biting. Manny hadn’t noticed they had stopped.

  “I will come to your house tomorrow,” Jimiti said sadly. “We take care of things then.”

  He left Manny looking out at the sea, puzzled.

  • • •

  It rained the next day. Manny didn’t drive anywhere, but waited in the kitchen for the obeah man to show up.

  Jimiti came to the door well after lunch. His soaked shirt clung to his thin chest and he looked far older than he had last night. He opened a case on the table and pulled out a laptop.

  He took a bracelet of rope knots and hung it off his wrist.

  “What that?” G.D asked, watching the process from his wheelchair. “That thing on you hand?”

  “Celtic knotwork,” Jimiti said.

  “Don’t sound like no obeah I ever see.”

  “It a form of white man magic. From the English. And my spirit guide is Latino.” He looked at Manny. “What the duppy doing? Raising cain?”

  Manny shook his head. “Just sitting there.”

  Jimiti made a note on his laptop, carefully pecking at the keys.

  “That a computer?” G.D asked. “How come you need a computer?”

  Jimiti sighed and turned to the old man.

  “I could leave, you know? I could leave you to deal with the Duppy you self. Then what? How many obeah-man you know? Where is you respect?”

  G.D wheeled backwards.

  “Sorry. I just... I just a little crazy right now.”

  Jimiti handed the old man a knotted bracelet.

  “Maybe that go ease you some…”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “…because you a little stress out with the Duppy…”

  “Right,” Manny said.

  “… and you go need to be calm, seen? We almost there.”

  Then Jimiti pulled a small bag out of the case and started walking around the house carefully. He stopped in front the guest room.

  “The duppy here, right?” Jimiti asked.

  Manny looked at G.D

  “No,” they lied together.

  “Nothing in there,” Manny said. “Nothing?”

  Jimiti looked at the door and nodded. “Okay.”

  They opened the door to Manny’s room. Jimiti looked at the girl by the bed. She hadn’t moved. She still sat exactly as Manny had first found her. G.D’s left the room, chair whining.

  Jimiti began to poke and prod at the apparition. He sat and studied it. Then he finished and stood up.

  “I need a second,” he said. He sounded tired. “Hold this, it will calm you.”

  Manny took the piece of rope. He sat and stared at the girl’s pale skin for as long as he could. Where had G.D gone? With Jimiti? Suddenly worried he got off his bed and walked into the hallway.

  Jimiti stood there waiting for him.

  “You tried to keep me from that other room,” he said. “I ain’t stupid, you know. I could sense you had more than one duppy.”

  Manny looked at the guestroom door. It was ajar.

  “That Caroline,” he said, slowly. “My grandmother.”

  “She waiting for you grandfather.” Jimiti put a hand on Manny’s shoulder. “She there to help him die. I explain that to them.”

  “Die?” Manny shoved Jimiti aside and ran into the guestroom. “What you do? You and you stupid spirit stuff. You kill him!” He wailed.

  The last outline of a dress faded
from beside the curtains as he ran inside. The only body in the room was G.D’s small frame lying peacefully on the bed.

  “What you do?” Manny cried out. “What you do!” He grabbed G.D’s hand, pushed his face into the sheets, and wept.

  Jimiti knelt by him.

  “For some, is time we pass on,” he explained. Manny leapt up and raced into the kitchen. He called an ambulance. When he put down the phone Jimiti stood in front of him.

  “I can’t make you duppy leave,” he said. “Only you can do this now. I am old, failing. I don’t have the strength. I can barely even see her.”

  “Then what you even doing here? You useless,” Manny snapped.

  “I here to offer it to you, Manny. I know it a hard time, but I have a diary and notes. They all on that machine,” Jimiti pointed at the laptop. “All my knowledge I spoke into the laptop these last few years. I hear my guides, and my gods, and they are calling for me one last time.

  “Everything I have, everything I am, is now yours.”

  Jimiti walked out the door. He turned into Manny’s garden and headed out in the rain. He walked into the bushes past a tree.

  “You go catch a death of cold,” Manny shouted. He got no response.

  He ran out into the rain after Jimiti. But Jimiti had disappeared. His footsteps ended by a large puddle of pooling water.

  “Jimiti left, gone for good,” said a man from Manny’s side. Manny spun around. A tall thin man in tails, cigar lighted despite the rain, smiled at him.

  Manny heard the ambulance coming up the hill and ran back up his yard towards the house. Nothing today made sense. He was beginning to fall apart. It was as if he were standing at some sort of crossroads.

  • • •

  After the paramedics came and left, Manny threw the laptop into his car. He left the house resolving not to ever go back. And he left the van in the driveway, telling himself he would never drive it again.

  He drove all the way to a point where the rocky edge of the island butted out against the ocean, not far from Magen’s Bay. Here water hurled itself against the rocks, shaking the ground with booming explosions of salt water spray that perpetually hung in the air.

  “I want nothing to do with spirits, or ghosts, or witch-doctors,” Manny muttered.

  He walked as near to the edges of the wet rocks as he dared, and flung the laptop out into the air. It arced slowly down into the foaming water and sunk.

  “Please,” a voice implored. “You must help.”

  Manny looked down at the rocks beneath him. Massive waves roiled up, swept over the boulders, and retreated. A man sat on the top of a dripping rock, the water passing right through him. He wore a suit, and glasses, and held his shoes in his right hand.

  “I think I slip down into the rocks. But my son still here. Help me find him?” The man stood up and began to look around.

  The next wave crested the boiling waters around the rocks, reached up into the crags, and the man disappeared. A spirit, Manny thought. Another duppy only he could see.

  For a moment he stood still, then he sighed and cupped his ears to see if he could hear a child calling for help.

  He heard the child crying behind him. It took only a few seconds for Manny to search through the rocks and find him. A small child, his hands cut, crying for his dad. Manny picked him up and took him back to the car.

  “Where you live?” Manny asked, leaning over the back door. The child wouldn’t say anything, and kept sobbing.

  Manny got in the front seat. He almost jumped out of his skin to see the tall man with the cigar sitting across from him. Somehow the smoke failed to fill the inside of the car.

  With a deep breath Manny started the car and turned around. He would take the child to the hospital.

  As he drove he ignored the apparition in the other seat. He would not speak to it. He would not acknowledge it. He would give it no control over him.

  But finally the man spoke.

  “The child name Timothy. He mother waiting for him and she husband. She real anxious, you know. You won’t do them no good if you take him to the hospital, because tonight all the doctor there from stateside. They won’t hardly understand her when she call, and they go treat her like she dumb. You would make an easier messenger. You like to know where they live?”

  Manny drove on, clenching the steering wheel. He bit his lip. Still not willing to speak, he nodded.

  The tall man smiled and gave him directions, and fifteen minutes of tense silence later they pulled into a sloping concrete drive lined with palms. Manny pulled the parking brake up, and Timothy in the back seat stopped crying.

  “Okay, what is it you want from me?” He asked the man next to him.

  “To do things like this for me.” The cigar was waved in a long gesture. “Some things little, some things big. Sometimes you go like it, other times you go hate it. But you always guiding people in this world.”

  A screen door banged. A thin, worried looking women peered hopefully around the edge of it at the car.

  “I can’t,” Manny said. “I ain’t right for this. What I know about helping people? Plus, I throw away that laptop already.”

  The man shook his head. The top of his hat poked through the ceiling of the Acura.

  “Look under you seat,” he said.

  Manny felt around and grabbed the edge of something plastic. He pulled the laptop out and set it on his lap.

  “Okay,” he said. “Okay. But only because I want help people.” He looked over the man, who was fading away. “But who you is?” he demanded.

  The thin man smiled again.

  “Most call me Eshu.”

  Then he was gone. And Timothy’s mother was walking up to the car. From the look on her face Manny could tell she suspected something was wrong.

  He took a deep breath and opened the door.

  • • •

  Later that night Manny returned to the house. Inside he wandered around, laptop in his hands.

  There was no girl sitting next to his bed, or any other ghosts in his house.

  Outside the crickets made their song. The wind rustled the leaves outside, and cars passed by his house on the nearby road. Manny closed the window and turned out the light in his room.

  Tonight he would start to become more than just four eyes. Tonight he would become obeah.

  He sat at his desk and lit a single candle.

  Then he carefully cracked the laptop open and turned it on.

  Spurn Babylon

  This was the first story I ever wrote featuring St. Thomas, and it was thanks to Nalo Hopkinson. At the time I’d never heard of or met another writer involved in science fiction and fantasy and also from the Caribbean. But when reading the title of Nalo’s first novel, I realized she had to be either really familiar with the islands or from the islands herself. I emailed her to introduce myself, and she mentioned that she was putting together an anthology of Caribbean ‘fabulist fiction’ and asked if I had a piece I could show her for consideration. But, Nalo warned, it needed to be in final shape, as she was putting the anthology to bed on Wednesday. Sure, I replied, I had a story ready, but I needed to give a once over, could I email it to her the next morning? She gave the go ahead.

  So that Sunday night I sat down in front of a computer with several large bottles of my favorite caffeinated beverage and set about writing the darn story! I mainly had SF stories around, and what Caribbean or fabulist pieces I had were out on submission, and I didn’t feel right about ignoring editors rules about double submitting stories. When Nalo got the story that Monday, she liked it, but asked if I’d be willing to edit it a bit, as she felt it had a couple rough patches.

  This was my third story sale ever. I fessed up to Nalo about my rapid draft, thanks to my painful compulsion towards honesty. She was amused. We’ve been emailing back and forth about the islands and our fiction ever since.

  Easing back on the throttle of company’s yellow Scarab powerboat, just clearing the rocky point o
f Hassel Island, I found myself stunned by the lack of yachts. Usually St. Thomas’s Charlotte Amalie harbor was a forest of masts and a rainbow of hull colors. Now only two ships sat at anchor, looking lonely and out of place. The recent hurricane that had closed down the islands airport, forcing my company to send me here by boat rather than plane, had swept this anchorage clean.

  Even more incredibly, a three-masted square-rigger lay lopsided on the waterfront’s concrete shoreline.

  “Where’d that come from,“ I wondered aloud.

  I shook my head, wishing I had a camera.

  • • •

  It didn’t seem like things were all that bad, I thought later, sipping a Red Stripe and relaxing underneath the flapping awning of the Greenhouse Restaurant. Even only two weeks after the worst hurricane in the Virgin Island’s recorded history, things looked okay. Maybe even ‘irie,’ as my supervisor seemed to glory in saying, trying to imitate local dialect. I distantly understood that half the houses on the island were uninhabitable, and I could smell seaweed no matter where I walked. But these islands were well known for recovering quickly.

  I let the condensation roll off the side of the brown bottle and down the back of my hand, a cold contrast to the heat shimmering off of the concrete all around me. In the distance a generator hummed, keeping even more beer cold. Life went on.

  “Evening,” someone said.

  J. Ottley sat down into the seat across from me. The plastic hinges squeaked. He removed a well-worn straw hat and set it on the table. His long sleeved shirt was soaked under the armpits. He ran the St. Thomas cell of B.E. aerospace division, one of three sections.

  “Evening to you.” I replied, handing Ottley the keys to the Scarab. Sombrero Island held our main launch pad complex, weathering the storm with minimal damage. St. Croix supported additional docking and shipping facilities for our sea-launch sections and shipping for the launch complex. St. Thomas housed even more shipping facilities. I’d spent the last week running around St. Croix helping rebuild damage to the sterile clean-rooms that prepared satellites for launch. Cutting edge. Now it was time to check in and make sure our warehouses here in St. Thomas were okay. “Ottley, what is that?” I pointed at the ship across the street from us. Now I could see a thick patina of silt hung to its sides.