He paused, swallowing, Adam’s apple bobbing like a trapped bird, which made Laura’s insides clench.
“Have you watched any news this afternoon?” he asked her.
Answering a question with a question. Not a good sign, she thought.
Laura slowly shook her head, dreading what she was about to hear. With what he did for a living, it usually meant she would be alone again for a while.
“Vesuvius just erupted, apparently taking other volcanoes in Italy with it. I’m surprised you didn’t hear the explosion. They’re already saying it’s the loudest in recorded history since…” He stopped. Neither of them spoke of that day, even though they didn’t remember it, each for different reasons. “…since Krakatoa.”
Could it really be coinciding with the anniversary of Pacifica?
“I slept for a while.” Laura gestured to the myriad of prescription bottles on the bedside table.
The pain and possible infection, yes.
Why did she lie about hearing that boom and the house shaking?
Adam gathered his emotions in a box, tightly locked, and bound three inches deep with strapping tape. A C-4 device further protected it against tampering.
He didn’t want to leave. Not for any reason. Out of his love for her, and because she was now frailer than ever.
“I have to go,” Adam admitted. He specialized in epidemiology. And this was the biggest catastrophe in twenty-five years. There would be much to do. “Epidemics often break out after cataclysms like this.”
««—»»
Adam held his wife in his arms for over an hour that evening, then left for the airport.
She’d been given a special gift during their honeymoon in Italy. It was a copy of Petrarch’s poems, written for his great love, Laura. The book was in both English and the original medieval Italian. She put it under her pillow when he was gone.
“He’ll be safe,” she whispered.
Now I lay me down to sleep…and miles to go before I sleep, miles to go… But it was poor Adam who had miles to go before he slept… and the intimate dead he always kept.
Did she believe what the History Channel and the hives of fundamentalist paranoia were saying about the End Times? About the world perpetually poised on the brink? It was the nature and nurture of all nations. The cry of the ‘chosen people’—a title cherished by scared mobs who sought a positive purpose to their suffering— who were every tribe, every race, every creed. Frankly, Laura identified with neither sanctimonious patriotism nor religious ‘les fideles’ who thought the extermination of all creatures was a blessed event, just so they could ascend to a Paradise which discriminated against everyone who didn’t agree 100% with them. That’s the genuine blasphemy, she thought.
Life.
That’s what is sacred. It’s resilience in the face of pain and death, and the passion in the quickening spirit that knowingly and willingly shared its divine spark with all other creatures.
The more she thought about, the more she concluded that this tenet wasn’t, in itself, miraculous. It arose out of an unrivaled fact that the life on this planet was all carbon-based, descended from the few that hadn’t surrendered to annihilation during one of the first great die-offs. It was believed gamma rays from a distant sun, gone nova, destroyed most of the world’s protective magnetic field, frying with lethal radiation the armored species in the ocean. An event and aftermath some 450 million years ago, given the name Late Ordovician Period by scientists. Only those survivors of any mass extinction could be linked to the planet’s current life, for once a species died out, it was gone forever. 99.9% of all that ever lived—beginning billions of years ago with simple organisms (such as bacteria)—were extinct. The remaining 1% joined together by luck or fate, truly the collective lost tribe of the world.
Luck.
Or were they just cursed?
Could ‘lucky’ and ‘cursed’ be the same, despite for all intents and purposes appearing to be opposites? Flip sides of a coin were still only a single coin.
“Does a person have to be special for God to listen,” Laura asked herself, “or can one be a weak, buzzing fly like me?”
Special.
What did that mean? The psychic had called Laura this.
“You have always been special to me.”
Laura gasped. The voice came from within her room.
Mariana’s eyes simply glowed.
There it stood. Almost as high as twelve-foot ceiling in the Grigoris’ old Victorian house. It had stepped out as if from a dream. A shadow/light being of hideousness/beauty, it reached toward Laura, and stroked her cheek with the gentleness of a comforting parent.
It spoke. “Kisses golden with destiny and red with life will be your legacy.”
Laura looked on, confused, what? The creature placed something on the bed, then vanished with a noise of hushed deep waters and booming mountains.
Laura reached out timidly, curiously, and touched the threadbare orange baby blanket.
Part Four
The Myth of Dormancy
(Whatsoever Sleeps, Lifeless, Finds
Its Tragic Dying More Unyielding
Than Death)
“Consider…how deep the abyss between life and death; across this, my power can build a bridge, but it can never fill up the frightful chasm.”
Wake Not the Dead
– Johan Ludwig Tieck
“…I am part of the landscape and the landscape is part of me. And then, when the shrill and pregnant sound pierces the lulling stillness, everything is changed…”
Principles of Gestalt Psychology
– Karl Kafka, 1935
In the early days of quantum physics, Erwin Schrödinger, in a mind experiment to test the ‘fuzzy’ attributes of measuring devices of quanta, imagined a hellish box-shaped device into which the outputs of UP and DOWN detectors are simultaneously triggered by a single photon.
Also in the box is a cat.
If the UP counter fires, the cat lives; if the DOWN count fires, the cat dies. Schrödinger’s assumption that macroscopic objects whose ‘fuzzy’ attribute provides for the photon’s two simultaneous paths to lead to the two counter’s simultaneous triggerings, and being in both UP and DOWN signals, making the cat alive and dead at the same time.
The photon’s realm may be only a single quantum in width, yet a calcite crystal is keen enough to split it, spreading to both the photon detectors and the cat, which—if Schrödinger’s theory is correct—now it exists as a half alive/half dead cat.
– from The Enantiodromia
Narrator
When the physical body and conscious mind had become too damaged in a superlative person, did an innocent unconscious—originally sinless, finally strained to its breaking point—create an outreaching of strength in the dream psyche?
Indigos, blue as the sunset sky their forefathers descended from, were old souls.
(They were the Patriarchs/Prophets/Poets, the Sibyls/Shamans/Sorcerers, the Charmers/Channelers/Chiromancers, the Shapeshifters/Sanguiraires/Saints.)
Unlike pureblooded humans, indigo spirits did not need to advance. Only accept.
Yet breaks occurred between gestalt and resonance. You had lost your ‘self.’ But part of you was always remembered, silhouetted in the stained-glass soul.
Far away my stone face witnessed every split inside the mortal and the mind. To struggle was hell, to forget—effortless. To serve both world and rebellion within or without: that was to be both a redeemer and a dog to the Radiant Invention.
Chapter Eight
————
“The darkness of night cannot stop the light of morning.”
—African Proverb
————
Louise laid upon a stained, stiff mattress. She was in a coma. She didn’t know who had discovered her, lacerated, bruised, almost dead in the bushes where rebels had dragged her, just outside the house she lived in. She didn’t remember much yet. (Did the comatose remember anything?)
Louise.
I am Louise Joto.
Why am I here?
Why am I Louise?
There the rebels kept her five days and four nights, their temporary distraction. She’d heard people on the street just beyond the enclave, hurrying past so they could escape the noises of atrocity and screams. None tried to help.
They were only afraid to get involved, she soothed herself within the cocoon of unnatural sleep.
In this villainous cabal were a mere five mwasis. But there were many members of her immediate community—her neighbors and friends for years—who might have overpowered the mfitinis.
The insurgents carried weapons: AK-47s, pistols, machetes. They had filed their teeth to sharp points so they looked fiercer and could bite like hyenas; her comparison, as she heard how they howled and yipped their drugged and drunken laughter.
My body
shows the fanged moons
of their bites.
Flaring dark stars.
Monstrous flowers.
Even if the people tried to rescue her, the rebel army would have punished them, and everyone around them, for their foolish audacity. A rewarding reign of terror knew how to use every avenue of retribution.
Aziza, Louise’s foster mother, had remarried fifteen years ago. Her husband, Majid Bargash, had come home to find her trying to fight off three mwasis. He had his brothers, Seyyid and Khalid, with him. They had been out hunting for good fresh meat for a friend’s birthday party. Surprising the rebels, they shot them all dead. But they were attacked by at least ten times that number at the party. Aziza barely escaped alive because Majid hid her in the trunk of the car, locking it so she couldn’t get out to help defend her loved ones. Only when the authorities found her there did she discover the guests, her husband, everyone, were all dead.
This had happened about one month before Louise was taken.
She argued with herself, in the inscrutable depths of her subconscious, that her own neighbors could’ve hidden the rebel soldiers’ bodies. They might have buried them, or cut them into tiny pieces, then either burned them to bits or fed them to Nuru’s population of dogs.
There have been wars on top of wars for such a long time that nobody knew when or if there had ever been peace. She used to read the papers and watch the television news, and she knew this went on practically every place in the world. It was the global business-as-usual.
The five mwasis had glimpsed Louise (… I am Louise) on her way home from the market. At thirty, she looked younger, breasts still high and muscles firm. She’d lost none of the beauty she’d possessed since she was sixteen. That was when she married Sam Joto, giving birth a year later to their son, Uwezo. Three years later, their daughter was born. Louise (I am) named her Asali, after Louise’s own mother’s pet name for her.
Uwezo had been kidnapped by insurgents two years ago, only eleven years old. This was a standard recruiting practice for decades. He could be dead now and she wouldn’t…
…know what?
The attackers seemed half her age.
Thank God, that Asali, now ten, was safe. Asali, her sweet little round-headed baby, was at a Catholic school about 20 miles outside of the town of Kimbilio in Kanisa, the tiny nation next to Pakanga where in Nuru, the city of her husband’s birth, Louise had been carried off.
(Please don’t give me to the ngwena manomumes, mama mzazil!)
Eyes shut and bandaged, orbital bone cracked into hairline porcelain fractures, she heard a steady drip drip coming from intravenous tubes. A fluted song informed her in erratic notes that her heart still beat. Her heart itself, now a drum pounding out messages of warning in the jungle her mind had become, teaching her about time out of mind: tangu mazani sana.
Occasionally she heard clips from speech, voices she couldn’t respond to.
Uzazi, mkundu, kova, liokatika, kitokono.
Womb, anus, scar, broken, coccyx.
Uti wa mgongo. Kichwa. Nso. Kibofu. Bukis. Udaktari.
Spine. Skull. Liver. Bladder. Kidneys. Surgery.
Ng’oa.
Gouge out.
Namna ya wazima unaomfanya mtu kuwa mkatili sana.
Sadism.
Kwa vyo vyote, usingizi mzito sana, kwa milele.
Kwa vyo vyote, mauti.
At the worst, coma.
At the best, death.
The doctor may have been talking about someone other than (I am Louise). Languages changed with the times. Swahili had degenerated along with proper English, French, Spanish, lost to the younger generation thanks mostly to television, movies, iPod music or whatever kids used these days. The doctor was probably European because of his accent and in a hurry to attend to as many patients in as brief a time as possible.
At the best, death.
(I am Louise.)
Their prognosis sounded disjointed and incomplete… Am I also incomplete?…and still, it terrified her. They spoke of her as if she weren’t even in the room. As if all her senses had gone the way of beyond.
Several times in the darkness, behind the miles of soiled gauze, Louise felt someone hold her hand. A voice like that belonging to rain falling over orchids told her stories. Louise couldn’t maintain a grasp on the plots nor the teller’s cadence.
“At least she already has a child,” the doctor said one day. “That’s good since, by some great surprise to me, she wakes up with some miracle of functional thought, and come to know she can never have more children. Those bastards really tore her up. There was barely enough left to perform a proper hysterectomy.”
“Mpenzi…”
“Beloved…” Whispered from an instant of rapture in the night. Louise dreamed of someone with moonlight for breath.
“Kaswende, kisonomo.” The doctor’s voice again, coming from the bubble of a parallel universe. He told the staff that the patient had contracted both syphilis and gonorrhea. No HIV, though, relieving the attendants who dealt with her bodily fluids. Still, it was no blessing as the patient would die soon, should in fact have died some time ago.
Except full moons and darkened moons came and went. She suffered nightmares for her brain was not dead.
Five days and four nights. Used in every possible way, by flesh, the barrels of rifles, bayonets, branches where thorns protected by menace their bleeding fruit. She screamed until her throat and tongue were on fire. Somewhere distant screams imitated her own. She was beaten with fists/rocks/gun butts. She was kicked, then stretched again between the crocodile men, twisting her as they took her down to the muddy depths.
(How much pain will you survive? Will you give us the child all of us have together fathered upon you to satisfy our lust and hunger? Then, and only then, may you live, even if it feels like you are inside the very guts of the beast!)
(Please don’t give me to the ngwena manomumes, mama mzazi.)
One of them shouted in her ringing ears as he straddled her, bits she heard in between the roar of pain without borders. Profanity that mixed any corruption with all violence. She slipped from this barbaric assault, this curse on females throughout bloody history, into a secret place every soul took residence in, a place primordial yet pristine. Soft…her prayers whispered in confession and love. Refuge in this misty sanctuary, without the grace of death, was by its very nature…temporary. She returned to another level of delirium.
Grinning mouths of fangs encircled entire heads. Eyes slanted with red vertical pupils that oozed psychedelic water parasites. The monsters stripped off their clothes to smear their fungal sweating scales with her gore.
And when another mwasi came through the bushes to see what was going on—oh, he was so young. Only a boy in the cast-off pieces of uniforms.
His eyes locked with hers and she tried to vomit. She’d been given no food in five days, having had nothing except for the kinyesi, shahwa, and mkojo she’d been forced to swallow. Nothing came up. She prayed that she would faint; she prayed that she would die.
“Nyoka,” they said, heartily greeting him in Sh
ona, when before they’d spoken Swahili so their captive would understand their verbal humiliation of her. Pakanga’s official language was Swahili, yet the country nearest to the south was Zimbabwe, where Shona was the national tongue.
Nyoka meant ‘snake’ in both languages.
“Come have her. She’s worn-out meat. We were just about to cut her in half.”
The boy stared coldly at the naked woman, spread eagled in a mud of her own blood.
Soon, she thought, I will be out of my misery.
Nyoka unslung the AK-47 from his shoulder, declaring, “I will put her scent on it, then add a notch for her.”
On the barrel, many notches. They were only a blur before her bruised, bloodshot eyes. But even those nearly blind can plead with a look. If each notch represented a victim such as she, had this act and feminine faces become a blur to him also?
He stepped toward her, gaze as fixed and unblinking as a snake’s. Suddenly he swung about, firing at the others. They scrambled for their own weapons, but they were naked and their weapons were with the jumble of their clothes. He had the element of surprise. In a few seconds, all five of her captors were dead.
“I will not hurt you, mama mzazi,” he said softly as he quickly stripped off his shirt to cover her, exposing the tattoos the insurgent army had covered him with: symbols of ownership and martial slavery, brutality, bestiality. “Do you not recognize me? How well can you see?”
Louise fought to focus but he was a smeared stain inside bloody tears. She tried to stretch out one hand to him, but she couldn’t move.
Uti wa mgongo.
Spine.
“I am Uwezo, your son,” he told her.
She attempted to speak his name but her mouth was too befouled. As he knelt beside her, she could see more of those notches on his rifle. He was only 13 years old. Look what they had made of her baby.
Containment: The Death of Earth Page 10
