Ro Bhavesh led me to its private vehicle. It told the vessel to sit beside me and brought three androgynies to assist in our descent. We plunged away from Sapan and spiraled downward to the red-blue world below.
This place they call the ocean I had never seen before. Yes, I had read that it was a vast expanse of water colored by the photosynthetic vegetation that existed within it, but I did not expect that it made noise. I did not expect it to move. This colored water rippled and thrashed and moaned as if it were a living creature, condemned for all eternity to lap at the sand and feed upon itself.
In truth, I had never wanted to see the ocean. It was here the Kell brought the ripened vessels, and here the vessels produced, bled, and died. It was here Ro Bhavesh told the androgynies to land the vehicle. I stepped out last. We stood somewhere on the coast along a paved walk. In the distance, sitting low and gray along the earth, were the breeding compounds. They stretched out all along the coastline and behind us in precise grid-like patterns. The only place one could look and not see these monstrous blemishes was the ocean. So I gazed out at the ocean, the vast roiling wetness that I knew did not end at the horizon.
“Have you dreamed of this place?” Ro Bhavesh asked the vessel.
The vessel stood beside me, and she, too, gazed not at the compounds but at the ocean. “Oh yes,” the vessel said. “I see this place.” She hesitated. “But when I see it I scream.”
I still could not look at the compounds. I could not look at Ro Bhavesh. In the desert, it is the sun you notice most, that huge orange orb that blankets the world in orange light, but here it is the feel of the wind you come away with; it is the stink of the ocean you remember, the salty wetness that clings to your skin and clothing, a wetness you cannot wash away until you ascend to Sapan.
“And why do you scream?” Ro Bhavesh asked.
The vessel now turned to gaze over at me with eyes so deep and black, like staring into a hole in the sky. I turned to her then, to this thing that had brought me to the desert and the ocean in the same day. I had to look at her now because she knew the truth, and was not afraid to speak it. She was not afraid of the truth because she had nothing to forfeit by its telling.
“I dream that the Kell take me here,” she said. “I dream that they put things inside me, and these things grow, and the Kell rip them out and put in more. And it happens every day. I can smell the ocean but I can’t see it.”
“She has most certainly heard the Kell say something of this place,” I said, but the wind took away the words, and the wind caught at my hair and pulled it loose from the tight, efficient style I had carefully maintained. It is not Kell hair I have, nor Kell hair I ever will have. Ro Bhavesh said, “But you said you dream of women, a base collective term for those of the female sex.”
“That’s a filthy word,” I said, and turned to look at Ro Bhavesh. “Why take her here? Why show her this place? This is an unnecessary measure, and dangerous. If it’s the genetically passed memory the Kell want to replicate, initiate another casting. There is no purpose to bringing her -”
“Do you question the Kell?” Ro Bhavesh said, and I saw more cold Kell calculation behind its blank stare.
“I have never questioned the Kell,” I said.
“You have not yet over-questioned,” Ro Bhavesh said. “That is why you are still living in Sapan. That is why you do not reside here.”
I could offer no reply to those words but silence. To speak more would be to admit truth.
“These are not dreams you tell,” Ro Bhavesh said to the vessel. “These are the memories of a dead casting. How much do you remember?”
The vessel gazed up at Ro Bhavesh, and I saw the wetness in her eyes. “I dream about women and men and things that weren’t people. Things like you that killed all the men. Made women into vessels. The smart women you find, the ones who can lie and dream, you don’t call them women. You can’t call them women because they aren’t, really. They can’t carry anything anymore. You fix that. You use them for cities. And you call them men.”
Ro Bhavesh smiled, turned to me. “You wonder why we have these experiments, Kadru?”
“I do not question the Kell,” I said.
“We bring this vessel to the ocean to empty her of her contents and mix those favorable things we find within her with those favorable things we have extracted from others. That is the nature of the project. They are the vessels that host those perfect biological organisms we employ against our enemies. But of course you understand this, don’t you? You understand what you are?”
“Of course, Ro Bhavesh,” I said, and I began to feel the apprehension again, the hollow stab in my belly of something akin to fear.
“Then the next time we tell you to go to the desert and evaluate vessels we expect that you will remember what you are, what you could be. This vessel holds more useful material for our cause than you do, Kadru. Do not question us. If you forget your place again we will forget it also, and remove you to the other function your people serve.”
Ro Bhavesh stood flanked by its impassive androgynies. As I looked from Ro Bhavesh to the androgynies I felt a deep well of hatred for those things without a clearly defined sex. They were not man or vessel, and stood one step closer to ascendance than I would ever be. They would never fear the ocean.
The Kell would never transport me back to the desert of my youth. If I left the city I would be sent into the gray compounds. I would become a vessel for Kell monstrosities, Kell viruses -- Kell weapons of war. They had altered me, yes, but I could be altered again. I could become one of those base things again, one of those things capable of breeding, of production, a vessel of birthing fluid and death. Here was the truth of my existence. Here it was unfolded before me by a vessel that dreamed and lied and remembered. I hated her for it. I hated her because she told me a truth I had almost succeeded in forgetting.
“Empty her,” Ro Bhavesh said to the androgynies.
I looked away, to the ocean.
“Kadru,” Ro Bhavesh said. “Watch.”
I looked back at the vessel, at Daeva Four, the creature with the brown skin and lanky black hair. I did not want to look into the well of her eyes, but that was where my gaze fell. There are days when I wonder if I ever truly returned from the depths of those black eyes.
They did not kill her. To do so would waste the vessel. The three androgynies extracted small vials of blood from Daeva Four. She began to weep. Tears tumbled down her cheeks and were swept across her face by the wind. I was brought with her inside one of the compounds. I stood and watched as she wept and the screaming began. They immersed her skinny body in an embryonic solution. They inserted the viral organism. They put her in a long, dim room with the others, a room of cells made up of transparent glass. I could not hear the voices of those vessels encased in the glass. But I could see them. I could see their lives stretched out before them, days of birth and blood and death.
The androgynies did not look back at Daeva Four, her skinny body strapped down to the soft silvery table that molded itself to her form. I did look. And I did not forget.
I walked back outside into the salty wind. I did not ask what the Kell would do with Daeva’s fluid, did not ask what plan they had to create a creature that remembered the dead past of others. I did not question the Kell.
Now when they send me into the desert I look for the dreamers. I look for the liars. I look for the ones who remember. I do not question my place. I am a teacher of men and androgynies and Kell progeny. I am a man of wisdom and reason and worth, but my worth is measured by that which I am not, that which I will never be.
Sometimes I remember the lie I am able to live because I am able to dream. Sometimes I dream I am halfway to ascendance, halfway between Kell and vessel. I am a man, I say. There are days when I believe this is true. There are days when I believe the Kell cannot harm me.
There are days when I dream of the ocean.
Holding Onto Ghosts
This story first appeared
in the Summer 2003 issue of Talebones Magazine. I’m told it largely made the cut because it was reasonably put together and just so happened to be about the right length to fill that issue’s word count hole. Yes, publishing is a mystical business.
In February 2003, I moved to South Africa for a year and a half to complete my Master’s in history at the University of Kwa-Zulu Natal. In the U.S., we’re very good at hiding our ghosts. We soak them up with movies and popcorn and iPhones and trips to Costco. South Africa’s ghosts were more real to me, more tangible. In South Africa, they formed the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) at the end of the apartheid era explicitly to talk about these abuses. The purpose of the organization was to allow people to tell their stories of politically motivated violence, including rape and murder; to uncover the truth and get closure for relatives and friends who had lost loved ones to violence. Before you can go forward, you must understand your past, or you are in danger of repeating it. I wish our own country could be so introspective. If you want to read some of the stories from the TRC, they are available for free online at http://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/index.htm.
I remember the day my father came home from Angola. He had gone when I was too young to remember him, and I had only known his face in photographs. The big man who arrived on our stoep, with the bruises beneath his eyes and the red dirt in the seams of his face, did not look like the same man in the photographs.
I remember that he put a big hand on my head in greeting. I clung to my mother’s trousers.
“I wish you were a boy, Aninka,” he said. “I brought ghosts home with me.”
Things were never the same in the house after that.
My father went up to his room and didn’t come out for a month. My mother started throwing plates. I couldn’t sleep at night. And the house began to do odd things. Mother would leave handkerchiefs out on the table, or mismatched earrings on her dresser, and they would disappear. She said Nan stole them, but one time Nan was out picking up groceries in town, and left mother’s silver on the table for polishing, and when Nan came home, the creamer bowl was gone. Mother yelled at Nan and slapped her, and that was the night that Sizwe, the man who helped around the garden and fixed the leaky house pipes, the man who built my tree house and a tea table for my dolls, left. He stole the gun out of my father’s room. Nan said he was going to free her people.
In this house, none of us was free.
After Sizwe left, I met a black woman in the garden. She was very beautiful, and she didn’t dress in the nice clean domestic’s dress like Nan did. She dressed in a big colorful wrap. She had big beaded hoops around her neck and wrists and ankles. She said her name was Nkosi. She said she had come back with my father.
When I told mother about the woman, she said I was a liar. I tried to tell my father, but when I reached the door to his room, Nan found me and said I wasn’t allowed. She said my father was too tired to see anyone.
Nan and I watched television when my mother was at her prayer meetings. One time we watched the news and there was a black man on the steps of a gray building. He wore a suit, and he lifted his fist to the blue, blue sky, and all the people around him, a great mass of black people, more than I had ever seen, cheered and sang.
Nan started crying. She took me into her arms and said, “It’s over, my child. It’s over.”
But it wasn’t over.
I woke up that night to find two little girls playing in my room. At first, I was angry with the girls for coming into my room, but then I saw that they were playing a game with bottle caps, and I wanted to learn how to play, too.
“Where do you live?” I asked the girls.
“Here,” they said.
“No,” I said, “This is my house.”
“Not any more,” the girls said.
Mother gave Nan the day off, and father came down for breakfast. It was the first time I had seen him since he came home. He sat in front of his toast and read the paper. He said, “The blacks are going to overrun this country, force us off our farms. They’ll run us out and the government will go corrupt, you’ll see. They’ll all starve to death. They’ll wish we were still here, then, won’t they? They’ll beg us to come back and feed them.”
“Nan says her people are starving now,” I said, because Nan talked to me about those things whenever we watched television together.
My father looked at me sharply, and his eyes were small and black and angry. “These people are terrorists,” he said. “Mandela is a terrorist. You should see the way they live. What they do to each other. Like animals -”
“Robert,” my mother said.
“No,” my father said. “She has to hear truth.” He waved the paper at me. “We cared for Nan and Sizwe all this time, and all the others we’ve had help us on every year, haven’t we? Where would they be without us? What would they do?”
“There were two black girls playing in my room last night with bottle caps,” I said.
My father’s mouth clacked shut.
“And there’s a black woman who lives in the garden. Her name’s Nkosi. She says she came home with you.”
My mother eyed my father sharply, but said to me, “That will be enough, Aninka.”
When Nan came back, she had me help her with dinner, but only because I asked. I wasn’t supposed to clean the dishes or pick up after myself because that’s what my mother said she paid Nan to do.
Mother sat in the tearoom talking to some old ladies who spoke Afrikaans. Mother said that they were so old that they were already married during the Great War.
They talked about the blacks overrunning the country - our country - I remembered, even though Nan lived there too, and mother laughed and said,
“Nan, my girl, if the revolution came tomorrow, you would stay beside me, wouldn’t you?”
“Like our steady girls in the South African War,” one of the old ladies said. “They marched with us all the way through, they did, right into the concentration camps.”
Nan set down more cucumber sandwiches and walked back into the kitchen. “Ma’am,” Nan said, “if the people came up today, I would be the one to stick the knife into you myself.” And Nan cut through the rind of the butternut squash with a knife so sharp the rind peeled away like butter.
My mother pretended to laugh.
The old ladies left.
That was the night my father started screaming.
I woke to the sound of his cries. I lay in my own bed, silent and still, fists full of my sheets. When he stopped screaming, I heard my mother speaking to him. He shouted back at her. The voices were loud, but I could make out no words.
I noticed the shadows of the little girls playing at the end of my bed.
“Your baba did bad things,” one of the girls said.
“He was saving our country,” I said, “from the blacks.”
“There isn’t anything to save,” the first girl said.
“There’s me,” I said.
In the morning, my mother called the doctor to see my father. I saw Nan bringing bloody sheets from my parents’ room.
“What happened, Nan?” I asked.
“It is the ghosts, my child. They tear your father apart. He is bewitched. Go watch television.”
I was never allowed to watch television by myself, but everyone was busy upstairs, and Nan was soaking the sheets in cold water.
I went down to the living room. Three black boys were already there, staring at the blank television screen. They wore jerseys with holes worn at the elbows, and dirty shorts that showed their skinny knees. I turned on the television. There was a cooking show on, in Afrikaans.
“We were playing football,” one of the boys told me. “Men came in on bakkies and shot at us. They had dogs. And gas.”
“My sisters ran up to the ambulance,” another boy said. He wasn’t wearing shoes. “The paramedics were afraid of what my sisters were going to do. They shot my sisters. Then they threw my sisters into the back with us.”
“Sisi, your baba could not have just come home from Angola. None of your people has been in Angola for a long time. He was in the townships. He was killing our people.”
“You’re all terrorists!” I shouted. I ran to the laundry room where Nan stood over the big washbasin, elbows deep in cold water.
“Nan, the boys say my dad’s a bad man!”
“Get me some ice, my child,” Nan said.
I stomped into the kitchen and opened the freezer underneath the refrigerator. “They had no right to say that, Nan. My dad is saving the country.”
Nan took the ice trays from me and cracked the ice free, into the big basin. “Yes,” she said, “and Sizwe is fighting for his.”
“There’s only one country,” I said.
“One country,” Nan said. “Many people.”
“Your people are supposed to work for our people,” I said. “Mother says God made it so.”
“Your mother, she doesn’t know everything.”
“Did my dad kill all those people?” I asked.
Nan looked down at me and crinkled her brow. “What people?”
“The people in the house.”
“Yes,” Nan said, and she went back to washing my father’s bloody sheets.
I walked upstairs and found my mother in my father’s study. She was sitting at his desk, crying.
“I want to see my dad,” I said.
“Go play, my baby. I don’t have time to -”
“I want to see my dad!” I shouted.
“Where’s Nan? Nan! Get her to play a game with you.”
I ran out of the study, my mother’s familiar call to Nan sounding behind me, long and loud, the way she called the dogs.
I got to the bedroom door. My hands just reached the doorknob. I pushed inside.
My father lay in the middle of his bed, a bulk of a man breathing heavily beneath new bed sheets.
And he was surrounded in people.
Brutal Women: The Short Stuff Page 3
