Tropic of Night jp-1

by Michael Gruber

  I notice that a tape on one of the records has come loose. I leave it alone. Once I forgot myself so far as to replace some tapes myself and inspired Mrs. Waley to wrath. College graduate and can’t even put on tapes right. I hadn’t realized the importance of the three-quarter-inch clearance between each tape strip. No one can say that I don’t learn from my mistakes. I finish a cart for the medical ward and go back to my desk to get more request forms. There is a note on my desk from Mrs. Waley on top of a box full of files. It says Take these files to Billing stat.

  This is messenger’s work and I am not supposed to do it, but I suspect Mrs. Waley thinks I can be spared for this because of the efficiencies I generate. Mrs. Waley is in something of a bind, since if everyone worked as quickly as I do, she could run the place with half the people, and such diminution of her empire would never do. So she does not compliment me but sends me out on errands; it’s a creative solution.

  I stuff the box under my arm and go off to Billing, which is on the ground floor. Other than menial visits, such as this one, an excursion to Billing, for a meeting, say, is a rare and valuable prize. The hearts of all medical records clerks yearn toward Billing, as the Christian’s toward heaven and the Olo’s toward Ife the Golden, where the gods walked. For Billing is the heart of the hospital. Without Billing, how could the nurses care, the surgeons cut, the internists ponder, the psychiatrists push dope? They could not; people would die in the streets.

  Billing is light and airy and has a carpet on the floor, unlike our green linoleum. The blessed who reside there tap on computers. Their desks are decorated with pictures of family and little furry toys and plaques with amusing sayings. We are not allowed these in medical records, since we must keep our desks clear to arrange the files. On the way back to my post, I take a small detour through the ER suite. I do this as often as I can. It adds interest to the day. Many of the people in the ER are there because of emergencies, but during the daytime the majority are there because the ER is where we have decided that poor people are to obtain medical help. They sit in colorful plastic chairs if they are older or race about if they are younger, sharing whatever viruses and bacteria they have with their socioeconomic compadres.

  An elderly lady in black attracts my attention. She is prostrate and moaning softly, attended by two younger women. They are speaking to her in Spanish. I catch my breath and feel tightness in my belly. Dulfana is pouring out of her like smoke and I can smell it. Not smell it, exactly, but that is what it feels like, an insidious quasi-olfactory sensation. Someone has witched the old lady. I turn and quickly walk away. Early in my apprenticeship, Ulune made me eat a kadoul, or magical compound, a green paste that he said would enable me to sense when witches were at work. He was always feeding me stuff, or blowing stuff up my nose or rubbing it on my skin. Much of this applied biochemistry was to enable me to interpret the condition of the fana, the magical body. Everything alive has a fana. As physical bodies are to the m’fa, so is fana to the m’doli, the unseen world. I was sick for two days, which amused and encouraged Ulune, since by this he knew the compound was efficacious. Thereafter, to my immense surprise, I could actually pick up dulfana, which is the characteristic effect of sorcery upon the fana. Back then, I interpreted these sensations as the aftereffects of the compounds Ulune made me consume. I can no longer entertain this theory, as it’s been well over four years, and I sense dulfana often in the streets of Miami. It is nearly as common in certain quarters as the scent of Cuban coffee.

  I feel a vague shame and suppress it. I could have helped that woman, who surely won’t receive what she needs from the exhausted intern who will shortly examine her, but countersorcery generates something like a tornado in the m’doli, and the narrow end of that tornado would point directly at me. Sex strengthens the fana, as does happiness and contentment, and joy and anger, which is why I’m careful not to indulge in those things now. There is the child, and my love for her, of course, which must be generating a hot little blip in the old m’doli, if anyone’s looking, but I can’t do anything about that. Everyone’s fana is slightly different, like everyone’s smell. I never learned to distinguish at a grain that fine, but Ulune could, and I expect that nowadays my husband can too. Is he actively looking for me? My constant thought. I know he’d like to find me. He wanted us to be together, or so he said, the night before I sailed away. He wants me to watch him do his stuff.

  I make my escape, find I’m trembling, and pause at the elevator to lean my forehead against the cool stainless steel of its door. Oh, the physical body, full of meat and juice, in this place regarded as merely a soup, requiring only a balancing of the ingredients and the stoppage of leaks to restore it to good order. The m’fon, as the Olo call this body, is the only one officially recognized by Jackson Memorial and the Western World, of which it is an atom. I want to believe in that pleasant notion: it’s just a soup of proteins and water and metallic compounds, and each of these is merely a soup of electrons and other subatomics, and those in turn, merely a soup of quarks. Oh, merely! How I wish, wish, wish, I could get back to merely! The Olo have no word for merely. They never learned the trick of dividing the world into the significant and the insignificant, which is one reason why there are only about twelve hundred of them left in the world and what they know will shortly vanish from the memory of mankind.

  So nobody will ever go up to the intern who is perhaps now puzzling over that old Cuban lady’s symptoms and tell him his EKGs, and EEGs, and chem-sevens, and cancer panels, and sphygmomanometer readings, and tox screens are mere objectivity. In fact, the m’fon of the Cuban lady is more or less fine, except where it is destroying itself at the subtle urgings of her fana, which is not at all well.

  I have to stop at the ladies’ room because of the Cuban woman. I have a sensitive digestion nowadays, another thing that keeps me cadaverous. When I was a kid, I ate like a wolverine; it was my sister who was the delicate eater. She used to pass me stuff she didn’t like at the dinner table, and sometimes we would switch plates when the parents weren’t watching, and I would get to eat her dinner too. I believe Mary was an anorexic in fact, rather than in fancy, as I am. A willowy beauty, often so described, often by my mother, also thin, who I believe was disappointed in me. I was more like my father, inheriting the long heavy bones, broad shoulders, and big hands and feet of the Doe family, a reversion to the original doughty fisherfolk stock. I had at one time photos of the two of us on our boat, dressed in slickers, grinning like fools as green water comes over the gunwales. Aside from our relative sizes, it’s hard to tell me from him. I guess my brother must have snapped them; he took all the family photographs, which is why there are almost no photographs of him. Yes, it would have been Josey, because I don’t recall my mom ever going out in weather, or Mary. That damn boat, Mom called it, although it was Kite, officially.

  Mary took after our mother in a number of other ways, as well. The red-gold hair. The heart-shaped face. The thins. When I was small and just learning go fish, I thought the queen of diamonds in a deck of cards was a portrait of my mother. I had a photograph of Mary, she must have been nineteen or so, when she was being a model in New York, a candid shot, not professional, and in it she has a look on her face that I don’t imagine has ever been on mine, a look that says Oh, I’m so fucking terrific, don’t you wish you were me and doesn’t it just kill you that you’re not? The eyes are void of any inner life at all. She was calling herself Mariah Do then and was extremely hot. When I was in Paris, I once saw her picture on the cover of French Vogue. I told no one at the museum. There was no danger of anyone commenting that I resembled her.

  Her mother’s girl, certainly, as I was Daddy’s. Families do split that way, although around the dinner table we were cordial enough, good manners being a family value at the Does’. Josey, being the child of Mom’s previous and never-to-be-mentioned marriage, did not have a horse in this race. Oddly, although he was a Mount, too, he looked rather more like us than he did like his mother or Mary
. My dad tried to reach out to him, decent guy that he was, but Josey wasn’t buying it. Pride, I think. He had a terror of being beholden, something he certainly didn’t share with his mother, or other half sister. He wanted to be the one giving the gifts. Also, it was probably not much fun being Lily Mount Doe’s son. He left home early, which broke my heart. In my girlish dreams it was always the three of us, out on the boat, having adventures, learning stuff. Boy stuff, naturally. My mother gave up early trying to teach me girl stuff, especially as she had such an expert and willing pupil in Mary.

  I am a little shaky in the pins on the way back to my post. Mrs. Waley looks meaningfully at her watch as I enter and exchanges some words with the filers. Smirks all around. It does Mrs. Waley good to note the deficiencies of her one white subordinate, and I don’t begrudge her that pleasure. I continue pulling files until lunchtime, which for me is one o’clock. Then I travel down dingy corridors to the cafeteria. Most of the time I go outside and find a patch of shade somewhere and eat alone, but today I am feeling too exhausted to make the trip. A spasm of nausea when the institutional food smell hits me. I pull a vanilla yogurt out of the cooler box.

  I wish to be alone, but I’m spotted by two other medical recorders. Lulu waves me over to a table where she is sitting with Cleo. Dead Dolores, were she here, would be glad of company, and so I go also, doing this in her memory. They’re both eating salads from the bar, where you make them up and buy them by the ounce. They are both sturdy, round-bottomed and — breasted dark women with straightened hair, looking very much alike, although I do not think they are related. Both of them are American African Non-Americans, being naturalized immigrants from the island of Barbados.

  Cleo makes a comment about my yogurt and they both chuckle engagingly. Both of them have acquired along with their citizenship the American body thing and wish to keep their size under control. They know that only the thin rise in America. They’re better educated than Mrs. Waley, and speak a more precise English. Both are enrolled at Miami-Dade, and will get their degrees and will ride their clipped imperial accents beyond even Billing, perhaps as far as Administration itself. Mrs. Waley regards them with suspicion; how can they, four shades darker than she, talk and act so white?

  Lulu and Cleo feel sorry for me. Lulu is always giving me grooming tips. Dolores, child, that is not the right style for your hair, I must tell you that, no. Cleo, tell her, she should wear it pulled back, away from the face. And she has such pretty eyes, see it, girl! Dolores, you should get you some contacts, like me. They don’t cost that much.

  And so on, in that musical voice. I bob my head, grin, and make excuses. I like them both and wish often that I were again myself so that we could be friends. I eat my yogurt slowly, willing my stomach to accept its bland nourishment. Cleo and Lulu are chattering about some neighborhood event. They live in the Grove, too, in the large island community there. They are always complaining about the Bahamians and Jamaicans, and explaining to each other and to me why these are both lesser breeds without the law. And, my word, the Haitians! I allow their talk to soothe me, like the sound of a brook, without much attention to content. Nor is it much expected. Now some remarks about their Episcopal church, their minister. I am consulted here, being a Catholic, and the arbiter of doctrine therefore. I make a mumbling reply. It has been thirteen years and seven months since my last confession. I am badly lapsed but persist in a fragment of belief. Now that I have Luz, I will probably start church again. I wish to bring her up in the faith of my father.

  I’m thinking vaguely about finding a church when Lulu says, “The police are not saying anything, but I heard from my cousin Margaret, she lives in Opa-Locka and she knows the family of that poor girl. Margaret heard that she was cut wide open down her middle and the baby was stolen away.”

  “Not true!” exclaims Cleo, her eyes wide with horror. My eyes too.

  “True, very true!” Lulu affirms. “But, what you can expect, them in Overtown!”

  “Terrible, them, but …” Here Cleo lowers her voice and looks dramatically past her shoulder, then confides, ” Youknow what they want with that baby, heh? Haitians.”

  “What?” Lulu put her hand to her mouth. “Jesus save us! You think for human sacrifices?”

  “What else for? What I think is they should have a care, the authorities, before they allow some of these people in the country. I don’t say all of them by any means, but …” Here she stopped and I felt her stare. “Why, my girl, what is the matter with you now? You look like you are about to be sick.”

  I let my spoon fall to the table, mutter something, grab up my cheapo bag, and dash to the toilet. Out of both ends this time, top first, then the other, although I can’t imagine there was much to purge, maybe old rubber bands, pieces of spleen. Another zero-calorie day for Dolores.

  After, I find myself at the sink, washing, washing, mindlessly washing my hands until they are red and wrinkled. Am I developing an obsession now? That’s all I need, paranoid delusions, obsessional syndrome, this is what the intern will say when he admits me to Neuropsychiatric. I wish.

  Oh, Cleo, it’s not Haitians, no, this is far beyond Haitians. Haiti is strictly minor league for this kind of thing: the most extreme voudoun, done by the most power-crazed bokor in that whole wretched island, is like an amateur company stumbling through The Iceman Cometh in Kankakee. What we have here, Cleo, in comparison, is Broadway, the ultimate source and font and center of all that, the pure neolithic technology, unadulterated by transportation and slavery, barely touched by the colonialists.

  Has he found me? I recall once, when we were first in love, idly speculating on where we might live, as couples do, running through the cities, the countries, totting up the pros and cons. San Francisco? Pretty, nice climate, but everyone wanted to live there. Chicago, where we met, good school, teaching opportunities, terrible climate. New York, if you can make it there you can make it anywhere, blah, blah, and I’d said, Miami, and we both blew raspberries and laughed. Which is why I’m here, naturally. The last place we’d choose.

  But now he’s here and he’s hungry, he’s building up his ch’andouli, his sorcerer’s power, using stuff that even Olo sorcerers don’t use anymore, that no respectable Olo sorcerer will teach. But he didn’t learn this from a respectable Olo sorcerer. He learned it from Durakne Den, the dontzeh, the abandoned, the witch of Danolo. Oh, yes, Cleo, I know just what happened to that baby. I’ve even seen it done, God forgive me.

  I still, stupidly, think of him as he was at the beginning, the way we were together, or how I thought we were together. God alone knows how much of that was real. What above all blasts your confidence, makes you weak and small, poisons the past, erases the memory of joy, cripples even the possibility of joy to come? The betrayal of the deepest heart, that’s what, which is always self-betrayal. No one can do you like you do yourself. The other day, when I was in Kmart with Luz, we passed the candy counter and there they had a display of caramels, a whole glass-fronted case full of caramel cubes, and I swear the color knocked me back, and out of nowhere came the memory of the color of his skin, and synesthetically, its smell. My gosh, how I loved him! And, you know, even after he changed, even after what happened in Africa, I still thought that someday we would get back together. I thought it, actually, right up to the day he murdered my sister.

  FIVE

  9/6 Air France 852 en route Paris-Lagos

  Left Paris at ten-thirty in the morning after flying all night and will arrive in Lagos at four or so. I should sleep to avoid jet lag, but am too worked up.

  Fellow first-class passengers are Nigerian kleptocrats, their wives returning from shopping expeditions, plus UN or NGO types, paler than the former group, less expensive wristwatches. Also two drunk Texans, in the all bidnis, lots of all in Nigeria so they tell me. Pronounce the name of the country Nigger-rhea. In Charles de Gaulle before flight, W. away buying duty-free, made themselves at home, heard I was going to Africa for the first time, regaled me with al
l sorts of useful information about the country. Should’ve told them to fuck off, I am too polite. W. came back and I introduced him as my husband?expression on their faces worth the first-class ticket. W. said I leave you alone for ten minutes and you’re practically joining the Nazi party? This is the last time I’m taking you to Africa! W. not particularly bothered by old-fashioned naked racism of the good ol’ boy type, hates cryptic racism of chattering classes a lot more, his worst hate = unacknowledged skin-tone racism of African-Americans.

  Later. The Mediterranean is gone and we are over land again, over Africa. Reading Yoruba cosmology. It is a lot to take in. Yoruba cosmos divided into aye, the tangible world, and orun, the world of the spirits. At top of orun is Olodumare, creator god, but He’s really too high up there to pay attention to the small stuff. Orun is thickly inhabited by a variety of spirits, plus orishas?deities or deified ancestors. Much of their religion = communication with orishas, divination or spirit possession, the orishas come down into aye and speak to their devotees. Key here = two orishas, Eshu, gatekeeper between worlds, also cosmic trickster; and Orunmila, aka Ifa, the orisha of prophecy. Whole thing runs on ashe, kind of spiritual gasoline. Every created thing has ashe?rocks, trees, animals, people? asheboth ground of existence and power to make stuff happen and change. Social relationships determined by flow of ashe, also one’s personal fate and achievements. (Note X-cultural, how different peoples imagine some unseen, yet controllable force underlying life: ashe in Yoruba, ki or qi in the Chinese culture zone, cheg in Siberia. Westerners don’t believe?? Did we never or did we once and lost it. If so, why? Industry? Xtianity?)