Drafts of a Suicide Note
Page 11
I looked at Aetna’s cottage. Small and fragile in the armpit of Myrtle’s hedged-in property.
There wasn’t any space in that cottage for rare books. Her equipment alone; she must’ve gone around tripping over it. The place should’ve been a storage shed.
What happened there? Would your Momma get involved with criminals? Why in hell did you have to throw away that cat? Couldn’t ask Doreen that stuff without giving too much away. She aimed point-blank, but she was sensitive to subtlety. Subtlety, I thought, was my way in.
I was wrong about that. I was wrong about a lot of things.
“Can’t wait to get out of here,” Doreen muttered.
“And go where? The States?”
“Well, yeah. Civilization.”
I figured she’d been back and forth a lot, possibly for college, and willed our dialect away. She looked around with the wide eyes and gritted teeth that can afflict expats who fail to adapt to life on a rock in the middle of the ocean. Rock Fever, we call it. So I said I’d spent however long in Massachusetts. It turned out she’d visited Boston. She preferred New York. One thing and another, Patriots and Jets, next thing I know I’m pontificating on literary scholarship, throwing out the name of my ill-fated dissertation, Phenomenologies and Ontologies in Thomas Hardy’s Novels.
“Who’s Thomas Hardy?”
“Late nineteenth-century English—”
“Wait, a white guy?” She gave me the kind of sneer that connoisseurs reserve for sellouts.
“He was a damn good novelist.”
“Meaning you’d never get a job if you researched…name some African female who’s never been on Oprah.”
“That’s not true,” I said, with no evidence whatsoever and considerable evidence to the contrary. The professorial life I described to Doreen was the dream-life of books. A creative life, a pensive life where thought and prestige went hand in hand.
“Go on,” she said during a pause. The more I talked, the more thoughtful she became, studying my face like she’d suspected all along a Harvard don lay hidden there. I expected her to jeer at my idealistic visions which, knowing me, I probably didn’t believe in even as I uttered them. But she didn’t jeer. She said, “That’s really what you want?”
I couldn’t answer that. Maybe I’d said too much already. But what did any of it matter, I thought, since none of it was real? The problem was I thought I had the measure of her, lonely and tough, wishing she were even tougher; but neither of us was sure of me. What was I doing there? I didn’t know what I wanted. I wasn’t sure how far I’d be able to go. I never knew what I was going to say until I said it, and I had no idea what Doreen saw. It was obvious she was probing me for weak spots. She wanted to know the worst of me without having to earn it, and that meant she had an agenda. Either that or she was a subtle kind of sicko, which couldn’t be ruled out. Maybe I didn’t have the measure of her.
The bigger problem was, I let her do it. Even though I’d sworn eternal enmity, sworn not to let her get the upper hand, and promised myself all this not twenty-four hours before because I’d already let her poke a historical nerve. Why? Because she knew exactly which nerves respond to poking. She’d guessed. Like a seasoned con artist. Which was no excuse for letting her. And every time I tried blaming Nabi for it, I felt like I was the one playing myself for a chump.
“If that’s the case,” Doreen said, “being marooned on this island is a far cry from a dream come true for you.”
That depends on whether it’s Monday or Saturday, but I couldn’t get into that. I found myself looking into an empty plastic cup. Doreen took it.
She wore the same high-cut shorts she’d worn the day before. I watched them as she went into the house to fill the cups. She leaned against the stoop as she drank.
“So what’re you working on now?”
“Well, nothing. I mean, I work for CAM. Marooned just like you said.”
In my student days, when I told people I was in Comparative Literature emphasizing English classics and new metaphysics, Bermudians would respond along the following lines: Bye, why you gotta write somethin tired? That kinda stuff been dead. A Jamaican client: What bad man got to say bout white man’s book?
Well, books are very hard to kill, and they’re not just for white people, but there’s little use in arguing. For one thing, you won’t get any help from your colleagues. They’ll assume all you’re good for are postcolonial studies, ethnic studies, or Caribbean studies, never mind that Bermuda’s still a colony and isn’t in the Caribbean. I’ve even been told that people from the Commonwealth are too polite to argue big ideas.
Well, I know de deal, I’m heard every iggrunt remark there is to hear under de sun and therefore, however, in conclusion, did it anyway. It wasn’t worth the pain, but in a way that’s why I had to do it. Or so I thought, you know. Smooth out the road for others. I was young then. Doreen knew better.
We went in after four martinis. Might as well have been lemonade for me, that’s how I am. But it made Doreen talkative.
She didn’t say anything useful. I gathered Bingo cards. She talked about New York. Best city in the world, blah blah; and even there, she said, a black person could find themselves shoved against a police car for walking down the street. To this day discrimination soured every industry from politics to opera.
I listened for a while. There was something about her voice. I wouldn’t call it musical, not like Nabi’s. Nikkou’s voice is melody, made for mellisma and soul. Doreen’s didn’t have soul, but it had depth. And a weird lack of depth. Low in pitch but also low in tonal variety. It was creepy and off-putting. And dampening, sort of. It made me want to sit there and not move and not say anything. A hypnotist’s voice, that’s what it was. A voice for chants and incantations. If there was such a thing as a dark sound it was this: Doreen’s Obeah-woman voice.
And you know, everything she said was quite correct. So is some, not all but some, of what Barrington says. White guys do get all the breaks. But because he’s Barrington and I’m traumatized-mongrel me, I can only take so much one-sided sermonizing. Even from preternaturally alluring women. I prepared the rant that undergraduate-me would use to shut Barrington up. In rare moments when he deigned to take the phone from Masami so he could deliver a brief on curbing my foolish ambitions.
“Well, look, you’re right,” I ranted. “Discrimination’s rampant. But it’s not just about black people or women or New York. Right here in Bermuda, Philippine people, male and female, are treated like second-class outcasts. You want to talk racism, gotta talk about that. Want to talk about sexual discrimination, talk about dubbing same-sex marriages a threat to safe parenting. That’s one step shy of calling gay people child murderers. Talk about Bermuda-born kids of Portuguese parents—these are white people now—being ineligible for either Bermudian or Portuguese citizenship. Some MP wanting to stop a qualified Bermudian from becoming a magistrate because the brethren was of Indian descent.”
At this point, Barrington would say, Bye, I can’t talk to you, your problem is you never had it hard enough; wanna learn the hard way, go on, knock yourself out.
Doreen said, “Why anybody needs used-up Bingo cards is beyond me.”
“And, yes, talk about black Bermudians being underpaid and passed over for big jobs at Bermuda-based exempt companies. Then talk about worldwide fear of immigrants. Point is you can’t just worry about your own demographics. Or pretend this foolishness only happens someplace else. What about people who don’t fit any of the boxes?”
“You could just ignore it all and think about Thomas Hardy.”
“Or build a house of Bingo cards.”
“Or religious pamphlets,” Doreen grumbled.
She relocated a tower of pamphlets to a garbage bag. Besides the Bingo cards I’d spilled, there were more inside the bin. I shoveled them into the garbage bag with uncalled-for aggression.
“So he’d be mightily impressed with somebody using his novels to screen themselves from contemporary social problems,” said the offspring of a cleaning lady obsessed with taxidermied cats. “To top it off, you’re practically handed everything you need to become a college professor, a cultural force—”
“Cultural force.”
“—that helps disseminate new perspectives. But instead of doing anything with what you’re given, you slouch back to this piece of rock—”
“Excuse me, multiple joined-up and very pretty pieces of rock.”
“—and laze around as what, CAM’s errand boy?”
“Let me ask you something,” I said. “How many activist organizations do you belong to? Be honest.”
“Not the point.” Doreen shrugged. “Anytime a marginalized—is that inclusive enough for you?—a marginalized person succeeds, despite all social prejudices, in whatever they set out to do, that’s a victory for everyone.”
“I’m not so sure that follows.”
A more seductive shrug you’ve never seen and never will. And the smile to go with it? The knowing grimace of a thing biding its time like a lobster trap? For what? To rile me up? What could she have to gain by riling me up?
I said, “So what’re you doing unemployed instead of getting back on the horse and fighting the good fight? Why dig around for your inheritance when you could struggle for every penny?”
“Every little bit helps.” I almost thought she’d wink.
No other woman on this planet is less likely to wink. But do you know, in all her too-personal digging and political going-on, Doreen’s tone of voice never altered even a little? She wasn’t robotic, but I mean she didn’t get loud, her voice never hardened as voices do when they’re excited. There was no lightness in it either, not at all. Yet I found myself wondering if she took everything she said as a joke. This riled me even more. I’m far from averse to a little haha, but what kind? To what purpose? How could it be that I was uncertain how I’d feel if she was joking?
It was a good thing I found the pillowcase just then. Frustration and I tend to egg each other on.
At the bottom of the bin, now empty of Bingo cards, I found a green pillowcase. And it wasn’t the bottom.
Under the pillowcase was a long, flat box of reddish-gold Bermuda cedar. It had an ornate locking mechanism of tarnished brass. Not something you could jimmy with a paperclip. We tried.
This box was the reason we’d spent hours wheezing among moldy shopping lists. Doreen was convinced. I was dubious. To me the box looked like a fancy carry-case for poker chips.
But with Czarina gone, what else was there? We wrestled that box till we’d snapped a butter knife, chipped a screwdriver, and exhausted all the expletives in the dictionary. I persuaded Doreen to take the fackin thing to a locksmith on Monday and in the interim take a break from Myrtle’s dust. Start on the cottage, I suggested.
“Long as you come lend a hand.”
Did yours truly do the smart thing and reply, Not on your life, you bitch? Of course not. I said, “All right.” I returned her slinky grin, poison for poison. Doreen waited for me to say something more. I said, “Guess I’d better say goodnight.” Like I regretted it.
Truth is, it was getting late; I was having thoughts of ramming Bingo cards down someone’s deadly throat; I had the long, empty-handed drive ahead of me; and by the time I got home I was mad enough to throw a punch at one of my bookcases.
I didn’t hit any books. I missed. Just left a little skin on the near edge of a shelf. Go figure.
But before that. All right.
Myrtle’s dining table. Cedar box and broken tools scattered over the tablecloth. Doreen and I looked at each other. She said, “Want to stay?”
I was having thoughts of ramming, etc., as above. I knew the wisest course was to never see that woman again, never again expose myself to that creeping, probing voice of hers. But, the devil take me, I did want to stay.
And I really didn’t.
I said, “Not tonight.”
Around three in the morning, I got fed up with longing. I let Zohytin draw a blind over the empty side of solitude.
The Middle Passage. Belowdecks my father’s ancestors were stuffed and crushed as so much cargo like iwashi in a can, like cows in an industrial slaughterhouse. Cars on a car carrier have more personal space than the slaves kidnapped from Africa and shipped across the Atlantic. They made the whole journey flattened. Literally stacked on top of each other. In his speech as Guest of Honor at the Warwick Academy Prizegiving, Barrington said that to get into your “berth”—which was never wide enough for any breathing human, never deep enough either, so you sailed three thousand miles with the berth above you practically up your nose—you had to bend over backwards and wriggle in headfirst so you could land on your feet when you wriggled out again, provided your legs hadn’t atrophied. To move even an inch, you had to become a spider.
“This wasn’t living,” Barrington said. And still says year after year. He’s never not a Guest of Honor someplace. And he’s not one to overvalue originality. “It was limbo.”
Between life and death. Between earth and hell. Limbo was where Christians said non-Christians had to go instead of heaven. So if you were Igbo or M’pongwe, if you believed in juju instead of Jesus, you never actually finished dying when you quit breathing. Your shiryou got stuck between opportunity and damnation. You carried on undead but without hope. Trapped in the Middle Passage for all eternity.
Barrington’s overcoming-slavery speech was the most he ever said to me in one sitting. Well, you know, I was sitting. He was at the podium. I sat stiffly among my classmates (arranged in order of height, so Nabi was far away) till they announced the recipient of the Academic Achievement Award. Then I had to go onstage and shake my father’s hand for the first time. He gave me the silver trophy which I could only keep for the summer. I had to return it to the school so someone in the next class could win. That idgit shook hands with my father too.
Caribbean slaves made a dance called the limbo, having no idea that people would one day consider it a rational way to party. The limboist bends over backwards and tries to wriggle forwards beneath a horizontal stick while it gets lower and lower. Sometimes they set the stick on fire. After they put the fire out, they let inebriated tourists have a go.
I make a point of leaving parties before the limbo starts. The idea of the ceiling getting lower and lower is too much for my nerves. When I shook Barrington’s hand, I looked up at him and found him grinning at the audience. We were up there together all of five seconds, and ya boy never looked me in the eye. Whatever, this was no surprise, not even then. Barrington is never more than beside the point.
The point is, every time I let myself think through certain existential questions, I have to think about limbo. Because that’s where I exist.
Stuck in a middle passage. Neither here nor there nor gone. And if I didn’t know Nabi, I’d think she got a kick out of it.
On Sundays Nabi and I make codfish and potatoes on the stove of my imagination. Truth be told, I’ve never seen Mrs. Furbert on a Sunday. Church takes up most of her day and her husband takes the rest. If it hadn’t been for him, I’d have gone to hear her sing. Mount Olive AME is just down the road from me. I saw their car in the parking lot as I slipped past on my way to St. George’s.
Doreen had on a tank top and fresh pair of diminutive shorts. I said, “Good morning. No politics.”
Her smile wasn’t a smile. It was bored. Some little rage simmered below it. And perhaps some faint repulsion. Or I’m projecting the repulsion. The varnish on her rapacious look seemed less voluptuous than the opposite. I thought of a fish. A cold, slimy, hard-eyed
bottom-feeder. I allowed myself a smirk and said, “Girl, let’s don’t waste each other’s time.” She pushed past me; I stepped back to avoid touching her.
In my embittered mood, I thought uncharitably of amemasu: that obese, ugly fish that gobbles everything it finds. At night it climbs ashore. It turns into a woman. A hot and hard-eyed woman with cold and slimy skin. She awakens people’s hunger. And once they’ve spent themselves with her, she eats them. Then I thought I was too charitable. Doreen’s boldness of the day before wasn’t a demon’s preternatural energy but a delusion of a helpless, frustrated human who couldn’t shame CAM’s errand boy into groveling at her feet. I made a point of watching her from behind as she unlocked Aetna’s cottage.
And I let my chance to escape flutter off into the hedge.
To say Aetna Simmons’ cottage wasn’t what I expected would be an understatement.
In Europe, certain buildings have plaques on their outer walls. Here Ludwig van Beethoven Scrawled the Pseudo-Suicide Note known as the Heiligenstadt Testament. This tiny pink cottage, far from anywhere, deserved such commemoration.
“Not much to do here. Don’t think Momma would’ve given any valuables to a tenant.” Yet Doreen opened the nearest drawer and peered inside.
No luxury townhouse. Fine. I still expected the tools of a modern forger. I’d formed an image of Mission Control: Printers of every make and model whirring on a metallic, floor-to-ceiling grid. On another wall, typewriters. On a third, pens and inks, the Mont Blancs and the Bics. International copybooks, manuals of handwriting analysis, paper of every sort. Such things were the masks under her masks, the baroque carnival masks she wore under her noumen.
Her words were her noumen, her operatic outer masks. She had to make sure someone would authenticate them before anybody thought to check for graphological anomalies. Or watermarks that could identify her printer. Authentication hung on her skill as an author, not as a mere forger.