Dr. King's Refrigerator

by Charles Johnson

  He granted his sorcerers’ an audience. “But speak quickly,” sighed the king. “I am old, have no children, and verily I am married to a crone. Men such as I have little time for trifles.”

  Mahdi, brittle and serious in his leather cap and robe, was as bald as a stone, having around his head a few puffballs of gray hair like pothers of smoke. He said, “King, it seems to me that in disputes about the superiority of Mind and Matter, we must choose Matter because, as any clearheaded man will tell you, Matter is the only reality—hugely here, recalcitrant, resisting our desires, indifferent to what we think about it; here even, O King, when we cease to think and change our houses.” He looked up from beneath a brow that beetled out over his tiny eyes. “What say you, King? Do I speak well?”

  Shabaka squeezed the bridge of his nose with two fingers, a sign that he was thinking. These arrogant wizards, these vain grammarians often seemed as mad to him as the full moon. They studied the bezoar stones in the numbles of oxen and preached cracked doctrines that, unchecked, might unleash mischief in the world. The king thought slowly, and said, “Mahdi, you are right.”

  “That’s not it at all,” said Kangabar, who was bearded and stared straight ahead at Shabaka, unblinking, like a fish. “Mind is primary, O King,” he said, puffing breath scented with porridgy millet beer at Shabaka. “For what can we know that is not, first and foremost, filtered—do you follow me?—through the sieve of the Mind.” So he spoke.

  Shabaka listened, pulling at his fingers. His thoughts lazed in the room, alighting on a huge jug of zythum. “That too sounds pretty good.”

  “King,” objected Mahdi, a little miffed. He was staring at the bulbous knot of Shabaka’s navel. “You must choose between these antinomies!”

  Kangabar added, “Yes, a world view is at stake. These things can’t be—you’re not listening again—taken lightly. If I am right, then all I see has a smattering of me in it. But if Mahdi is right”—he shot the other a slow, sideways look—“then all is lost, King—we sojourn in a soulless world of pure mechanics: click, click, click!”

  “Horrible!” The king rubbed his chin. “Give me a second to think.”

  Because Shabaka was a good king, which merely means that he sought the glue that from olden times had held things together among the Allmuseri, he took both their hands and said, “You are both right. Without Matter, my dear friend Mahdi, surely there is no Mind; the I would be an empty mirror. But you, Kangabar, are also right, for without Mind, there is no sensible world. We see our human reflection, flawed as it is, echoed back in every spear of grass and baobob tree. We are informed and give form at the same time.” King Shabaka found his speech, one of the longest he’d given, so sweet when he’d finished (he had, it’s true, been groping for an answer, afraid he’d fail or waffle the issue, when—revelation!—the sounds strung themselves together nicely on their own natural rhythms, creating sense where he’d expected none) that he smiled and said, “So I conclude that thought and things originally are of the same species.”

  The sorcerers were delighted with this democratic solution. So delighted, in fact, that from the folds of his fusty robe Mahdi’s fingers withdrew a length of charcoal as thick as three fingers. This he handed to the king. “To show our appreciation,” he said, “we offer you this gift to please your nieces and nephews. This chalk is ten years older than Allah himself. Whatever you sketch with this shall leap hugely to life.”

  “Inshallah!” Shabaka took the chalk tentatively, as though it might sting him. “Anything, I heard you say?”

  Mahdi and Kangabar smiled exactly like twin chimpanzees. They bowed, promised to remember Shabaka in their prayers, and, arguing again, scuffed back outside. As for King Shabaka, he stared and stared at the strip of charcoal, sputtered, “Ridiculous! Am I a child to believe in enchanted chalk?” Then he chortled and made answer, “Perhaps . . .” With torturously slow motion, for King Shabaka was no artist, he squatted on his hams, stuck his tongue between his brown teeth, and traced on the southern wall of his hut an eleven-cubit-long, golden-shafted spear with a head of silver—a spear such as only lives in legends and old hero myths, and, lo, his crude ideogram thickened, filled out like a blowfish, and fell clattering from the wall to his dirt floor, leaving where it had been a slight burn that smelled of sulphur mingled with cork. “There is no Majesty and there is no Might,” bellowed the king, trembling, “save in Allah, the Great, the Glorious!” He shut his eyes. He looked again. It was still there. King Shabaka weighed the spear in his hand, shouldered it, then squeezed the charcoal in his pudgy fist, laughing nervously now, for he was not perfectly sober at the sight of such wizardry. “Truly,” he thought, “this is no toy for my nieces and nephews.”

  At once the unhappy king shut himself away in his hut, where no women and only a few advisors were admitted, and spent his whole day drawing the impala and zebra skins prized by his people; he sketched smooth-muscled horses with frothy sweat on their withers and finely dight in heavy saddles, blood dromedaries, and trumpeting she elephants, herds of blorting cattle, cows with full udders splashing milk to the ground, ya-honking birds, and other creatures of the animal and spirit worlds—elementals and ifrits—which, when he left his hut that evening, followed boldly out behind the king like beasts fleeing a flood. All these Shabaka gave to his people. But, mind you, there was no mimesis here: Shabaka’s animals resembled not the Real, but the Real transfigured (which is the origin of all beauty, all art).

  As the night drew on, King Shabaka doodled by the flimmer of a palm-oil lamp the elder gods and goddesses worshiped by his people before Islam swept across the African continent; he drew shades not seen on earth since the beginning of time. They talked with Shabaka, chided him for falling short of the greatness of his grandfathers, and, at last bored with the king’s goggling at them, went visibly into the world. (Shabaka, to speak truly, was relieved to see them go.) He drew battalions of men with bark shields, which all came to life and saluted him. “Hail! Hail to the king!” Shabaka cackled like a child. He drew three musicians with neginoths and marimbas who played for him, but as they made music the melancholy strains suggested to the unhappy king—as well you might imagine—the dead girl Noi, whose memory grew like a knot at the front of Shabaka’s brow, where the humors for imagination lie. Glum, chewing his gums, the king sniffled and, as his musicians played, sketched her likeness on his plastered wall.

  Miraculously, Noi stepped naked as a Shami apple from the wall, emerging like a figure entering the world through a magic mirror.

  “Oh, my goodness!” cried the king. He came to his feet clapping his hands and blowing spittle. Noi stood with her hands shielding her breasts. King Shabaka knuckled his eyes. “Surely,” he said, “I am dead or dreaming!”

  “I am Noi,” said this vision. She bowed, then added, “To hear is to obey.”

  The musicians stopped playing. One of them said—a sigh—“Inshallah!”

  “Get out! Get out!” Shabaka dismissed his musicians, blew out the light, and looked at the smooth molding of Noi’s back and shoulders. She had been carried, long ago, sheathed in an animal skin on a wooden stretcher to a beehive behind the village, where the dead were eaten—King Shabaka remembered that clearly. Even so, she stood here now. And in all the world, there was not a more beautiful woman than Noi. She had eyes black as obsidian, and features like those of an Ur figure poised at the misty, mythical beginnings of the race before the earth and sea were separated. The king clamped shut his eyes. He would have given her a goodly stroke right then if, from outside, he had not heard the queen’s rattling voice call his name.

  “Shabaka? Sha-ba-kaaa!” (Her voice made the air around his head jump.) “Shabaka Malik al Muhammad, is that you in there?” (The king sat hunched in the corner as though waiting for a tree to fall.) “Shabaka, who’s talking to you?”

  Now it ill-befits a king to curse, but Shabaka did so. Then he scrawled an ugly cartoon of the queen, all nose and kneecaps, and after that one of Noi’s
husband, then he x-ed them out, which snapped off Queen Melle’s shrill warbling as though she’d been strangled. He dusted off his hands. His head was light. Placing the chalk aside, he took Noi by the hand, drew her to him, gave her as good a stroke as possible for a man of advanced middle age, then, dismounting from her bosom, slept and snored and snarked. Noi’s head pillowed on his arm as he lay tangled in nightmares that he had killed the queen, the village blacksmith, conjured up the dead, and slept with a corpse.

  Came hazy daylight and King Shabaka, sore and ashy, muzzy with sleep, saw Noi sitting cross-legged, finger-feeding herself stewed roots covered with sauce from a smooth-grained bowl. By her side lay his chalk.

  “Good morning, King Shabaka.”

  “What’s good about it?” He was a crocodile awakening, was the king.

  “It’s this,” asked Noi, “that brings things to life?”

  King Shabaka scratched the side of his neck. He stretched his legs to start blood circulating again, and nodded. “A gift from the wizards.”

  “It makes you the most powerful man in all Africa, King, if you can turn the fruits of Mind into Matter like that!” She snapped her fingers. “And though I’m no one to tell a mighty king his business, I think you should put this in the service of the Allmuseri—heal the sick, feed the poor. That sort of thing.”

  “You speak obscurely,” said the king, although the truth was that he had earth wax clogging the cartilage in his ears this morning. “Explain what you mean.”

  “The Allmuseri are, will always be, a poor village.” She became formal, like a wizard leaning on his wand, lecturing. “Our fields where the old women and small boys work are stingy. Our hunters return home empty-handed. There is never enough meat, or—or—or anything, O King.”

  “I shall draw it,” Shabaka said. “Mountains of meat. No one shall go hungry.”

  “And when the chalk is gone?”

  “I’ll draw more chalk.” He cackled. But when he tried to draw more chalk, nothing happened. “Always a catch to these things.” Shabaka scowled and pursed his lips. “Poo!”

  Noi continued, her nose twitching. “With the magic that remains, the Allmuseri could control lands and forests and rivers from the sea to the desert. They could increase in size, add colonies, King—are you listening? You could conquer the outlying cannibal Wazimba, who from old have held a grudge against us—as fierce as the Hutu have for the Tutsi—and carve from a handful of scattered, starving villages a single empire.”

  She stopped, her flat stomach pumping in, out, and gently blew a bad poem in his ear:

  Chiefs and kings all bend to age,

  Sneezed kicking to the afterworld;

  But those chieftains truly sage,

  Leave their tribes great treasure.

  “Terrible!” The king frowned. “You didn’t rhyme. Only once! And then poorly!”

  “I know,” Noi said sadly. “We are all frail, King. All systems collapse.”

  Still piqued, for truly he liked poems that rhymed, the king reached into the hindmost corner of his mind and found his boyhood of futile hoeing, his time of scouring forests where he hunted for food and brought home—after tramping all day in fumets aged to dry ash—only a handful of speckled bird eggs. His people farmed maize and millet, watoto and viazi, storing it in the walls of their huts before they were plastered over, the way a swallow builds her nest; but lately the stores were slight and from the hole at each hut’s bottom there trickled only gray powder. The king considered his chalk. Then the girl. Then his own ashy foot. “Yes,” he said, “one must will goodness and prosperity for others.”

  • • •

  In the seventeenth century, owing to the furious sketching of King Shabaka, through three days and nights, the villages of the Allmuseri ballooned until they covered the area between Setti-Carnuna in the north and Benguella in the south. His pen pushed his people inland as far as the upper Zambezi, and he relocated the capital at Banya. And never have you seen such a palisaded capital as this—there were, not mud huts, but suspended gardens, high white walls, storied palaces shaped from orichalc and bdellium, pools inlaid with gold, arenas for sport, paved streets down which merchant caravans clattered from all the Four Corners and, for King Shabaka and Queen Noi, lodgings heavily upholstered with luxury. True, all this looked—well, a little weird, like the sketch of a child who places two eyes on one side of a head, for the capital was filtered through King Shabaka’s flagging imagination. It was like living inside the canvas of a Chagall. Painters do not put every hair on a goatskin, nor every vein in a leaf, so King Shabaka’s capital had large pieces missing (the main road ended, along with Shabaka’s wit, halfway through the city; decorative trees in the plaza appeared without bark, dogs without tails, trees without perspective). Yet and still, the capital was dreamlike, reality transmogrified; even if it was physically wrong, it was poetically right.

  He drew Noi quick with child, and from her issued a boy as beautiful as his queen. Flowing out onto the ground, steaming like a boiled egg, for it was in the coolness of the night when Noi gave birth, the baby’s legs were entangled in his stringy umbilicus. The midwife—Shabaka’s sister—ululated twice (meaning, “It’s a boy!”), and the king hurried into the room, scooped up his child, and roared in his loudest voice, “All praise to Allah!”

  Shabaka buried the placenta in the Descendent’s Nest, a hole in the floor by his child’s bed, to keep the newborn baby in the house. This child, Shabaka knew, was enchanted. “See his eyes?” said the king to Noi. “Mine! See his mouth? Also mine! See his brow? Hah! That is his grandfather’s ponderous brow!” The queen wondered, “Nothing from me?” Shabaka reconsidered, “He has your—eh—grace.” Above all else, King Shabaka loved his son, whom he named Asoka, after his own father. Long hours he spent tickling his ribs and asking—before Asoka could speak and only splashed playfully in language—“Will you be a credit to your ancestors?” Chirping, Asoka rolled his eyes and squeezed Shabaka’s fingers. He clapped his hands when Shabaka drew for his pleasure miniature armies and camels, and a tiny court that came to life shouting, “Long live the prince!”

  It came to pass that the home of the Allmuseri became known as the “Empire of the Congo.” It bordered on the south what is now known as the city of Massammedes, and its population mushroomed, taking in Hottentots, Damara, Bechuana, Bastudo, and Zulu peoples. The capital buzzed with commerce, the cant of merchants, the whine of beggars pleading for leftovers from sacrificial offerings at the cemeteries. And it also fortuned that Shabaka, as the years passed, prospered; he was in a paradise of pleasure—Asoka grew up gentle, pious, and scholarly, the sort of boy who cried when he saw a dead bird, or covered his eyes when clan cattle were butchered; but he was gifted too with a quicksilver wit that outdid Shabaka’s fey wizards. He would be a hafiz and osuo both, that Asoka, because at fifteen he was already acquainted with the arcane charms of the Ekpe cults in the Cameroons and the curious arts of the Konkombe tribes of the Oti Plain. Yes, the boy pleased Shabaka who, with the growth of his villages into a kingdom, found his days taken up more and more by meetings, hollow ceremonies, disputes with the impossible Wazimba (as he called them) who were buying rifles and rum from ghostlike mariners who prowled the west coast of Africa. Added to that, there was now not enough of his omnifix chalk left to draw your attention. Shabaka never quite got over his astonishment that it was gone. But, all in all, he was the wealthiest, the happiest, the most loved man in this, a Golden Age, of ancient Africa.

  • • •

  Well might we leave our king here, for these were happy times, at least until the morning Nduku appeared at his door.

  “King,” said Nduku, “I have hard news.”

  Shabaka braced himself, balling his fists. “Tell of it.”

  “You must stop the Wazimba. They buy goods from the colorless men who come in great ships, paying them in slaves—debtors from their tribe at first, but now we have reports that the Wazimba have raided other villages. If they
are not stopped, they will come here.”

  Asoka, now eighteen, sat nearby studying a scroll. He looked up and, before his father could speak, said, “Let me meet them in counsel.”

  “No!” said Shabaka. “I will go—”

  Nduku raised one hand, lowering his eyes at the same time. “King, I think the prince speaks well. You have angered the Wazimba more than once. But Asoka’s manner is pleasing, his words persuasive. I would trust him to lead a delegation, and if he is successful, he will return home a hero.”

  Not because he wanted to did Shabaka agree, but because he knew that someday his son would have to assume the duties of the throne. When Nduku left, he gave his son the silver-headed spear. He kissed his forehead, and said, “I would shield you forever from pain and suffering. I would keep you innocent, but if I did so, you would never grow strong enough to be a king.”

  The next morning Shabaka watched Asoka, two of his advisors, and twenty warriors leave the capital to convince the Wazimba to cease their trade in human flesh. Remembering his old hut, kept under constant guard inside his palace because he had a fetish feeling about the place, King Shabaka went thitherward, then sat alone in this dream theater amidst the malodorous images of all he had wished for and willed in his lifetime. These drawings, he reasoned, were his deeds—the icons of palaces, of prosperity, of pleasure—and they were now like crustaceans that he could not brush away; they were his children and his father simultaneously, more his father than the late Asoka, as if his every word, gesture, idea had been recorded on an enormous tablet, objectified, and unfurled before him like a merchant’s tacky cloth, so that Shabaka, breathing unsteadily, fingers snarled in his linty beard, could hear (click!) an inexorable machinery (click!) grinding away between all his earlier cravings (click!) and this awful awareness of Asoka’s absence. Whoever is wise and will observe these things will see that it was too late for King Shabaka to have such thoughts. That night he slept, keeled over against the wall in his old plastered hut.