by Kola Boof
I jolted my body toward the little boy’s chest, alarmed at seeing the deep drop-off to the faraway canyon below us, and because I was afraid, I did not hear the humming of the woman waiting in the jungle mist on the other side of the valley.
“I am Jesus Christ,” the boy told me as he gently placed me in standing position on the ground next to him. “You have heard of me, but have not believed in me—I need you to believe that I would never harm you. Everything I’ve ever done …”
Sparrows black and shiny as molten tar gathered around our feet, and the boy was taller, suddenly, and then moments later taller still—until he was a fully grown man standing next to me. His charcoal skin glistened like oiled vanilla stalks and his black onyx eyes riveted me to outer space. It was Sea Horse’s face that I saw in his, and I began to weep with longing. I felt the most intense love, I felt cherished and truly free now.
“… is so that you would reach this moment of flight.”
He pushed me!
Over the cliff Jesus pushed me, and then I was in a free fall. I kicked and screamed and flung my arms in a desperate horrid plunge—but then … I was the one.
I was flying. Coasting my body into an upward suspension, controlling and arching my muscles as though I were a trained gymnast. Escorted by a cape of sparrows, their glass eyes and crowing beaks directing me to the other side—and when we got there, the naked charcoal man calling himself Jesus Christ appraised me with a smile, his hands on his hips, the thickest, most pendulous penis hanging betwixt his mighty legs, and his boyish stare imbuing me with a father’s approval.
I leaned forward as though standing upright on air, no waving of the arms, just sheer willpower, and then I landed on the cliff beside Jesus in a sort of floating bounce. I didn’t want to stop! I loved flying, and he laughed, telling me, “Go ahead … fly to your heart’s content.”
And I did. I flew everywhere, nervously urinating in midair and doing twirls and psych-outs of the birds while shadow-flying against the surface of crystal waters and even into the warmth of an orange sun that invited me to touch it, only to discover that it was cake—the sun orange and spongy, delicious as daybreak. I came through clouds that coated my lips, tasting like cream and sugar, and floated serenely over the jungle night, and then, finally … my feet touched earth.
A woman called to me, “I am here, Orisha …”
The name gave me goose bumps, but then, peering into the clearing, my eyes searching for the woman, I instead saw Stevedore, my dead father. He was tall and pale as ever, his blue eyes lit by the glowing twin moons that hung over the jungle. Standing next to him was the Christ bearing Sea Horse’s face. From Stevedore’s freckled white throat came the voice of an African woman, admonishing me, “Fear not … mother of Christ; wife of Christ; blood of Christ … Love is the resurrection, immortal, timeless—the best place.”
All-consuming and breathless, I felt the tongue of Jesus Christ enter my vagina and my throat at the same time. I felt the burning reach of my nipples; the sheer perfect nothingness of everything. I was the best place, and I was filled with his penis. I was resurrected.
The Heart
(Will Kill You)
CHAPTER ONE
Atiny lizard hangs from the cracked white ceiling, which is lit by a single yellow lightbulb. Three days after waking from her coma, Eternity’s retinas follow the lizard on its trek across the plastered tundra, the bulb’s glow burning across the supermodel’s mind so that while submerged in anesthesia, it’s all she sees.
“She won’t have brain damage, right?”
“The coma was only nineteen hours.”
Though the tips of Eternity’s toes tingle beneath their stiffness, it’s in her buttocks, her neck, ears, and heart that the crashing sound of the sea bounces and reverberates like oxygen igniting blood cells. She’s an earthling again.
Nineteen hours.
The surgeon’s powerful black hands grip her face like a steering wheel, bending bone and suctioning blood until the reconstruction of her countenance becomes a symphonic process at odds with the gut-bucket soul song that in another life accompanied the boxerlike fists as they’d beaten and smashed her heart away. At times, under heavy sedation, Eternity thinks she hears a drumroll or a skateboard, but no—it’s Sea Horse’s heartbeat.
“Now and forever,” he calls. This man has the face of Jesus Christ, and yet he is the one who killed her. His eyes lick and caress her with a childish hopefulness, his heartbeat thumping like a prayer beneath her consciousness, but still, the thing about beat-up women and the men who beat the shit out of them is that only they can interpret the sounds; and just as one can never set eyes on the same river twice, a reconfigured face has new expressions too.
“Young lady, do you recall what your name is?”
“Eternity?”
“Yes, very good. What is your tribe?”
“Ajowan?”
“Yes. What did the nurses feed you this morning?”
“Stock fish and sweet milk?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t feel she’s back,” whines the one who looks like Jesus Christ but killed her.
After a little more than a week, as the bandages come off and the swelling subsides (she is too dark to show bruising), Sea Horse grows more and more despondent and the men argue.
“She looks just like her magazine covers from before,” the plastic surgeon insists, but tears fill the eyes of Sea Horse Twee.
“No, she was a mermaid when I found her. That’s not her face. It’s not the same!”
“Look, I’ve done everything possible—”
“But something’s different!”
“Well, it wasn’t me who bashed her face in!”
“It wasn’t me either!” Sea Horse lies.
“The patient vanished for more than half a day— nobody comes back from that the same.”
“But I paid a fortune to fix her face!”
“She looks beautiful. I don’t know what you expect.”
“It’s my love … but it’s not her!” Sea Horse breaks into sobs like a child.
“My dear God, Brother Twee, keep your wits about you …”
Sea Horse falls to his knees, proclaiming, “I killed her! It’s my love, but it’s not her—I killed her!”
CHAPTER TWO
An appeaser is one who feeds a crocodile, hoping it will eat him last, goes the popular saying in West Cassavaland. Now, like light breaking through a doorway, Tasso Twee, with her hands soaking wet from having just bathed the wooden doll she’d made to protect Eternity, stood at the top of the stairs and watched as the foyer of her home upended like a landmine. Eternity’s body was draped by sheets of white-paper hospital gowns, her feet dangling as Sea Horse carried her over the threshold.“Eternity’s home!” the children cheered. But between Tasso and Sea Horse, there was no smiling. The doll was all they contemplated. In fact, down the hall in Tasso’s bathroom, the doll sat in a tub of bluish bathwater, its wooden lips creasing from absorption as the wetness on Tasso’s hands dried by air.
“The nurse here yet?” Sea Horse asked.
Tasso nodded.
“Biapa nuli tafa” (Be a good wife), Sea Horse commanded.
“I’ll prepare your bedroom,” Tasso answered obediently, floating away with her head held as high as she could possibly hold it.
IT HAS TO BE DONE
Almost everyone at the compound noticed a change in Sea Horse—a paradigm shift, in fact—in both his mental and emotional range since the beating, temporary death, coma, and hospitalization of Eternity Frankenheimer. But as sensitive and soft-footed as he’d suddenly become, Tasso also knew that her husband’s time for bringing the message of the Twee-Sankofa Madal paradise was quite short.
God Sakhr (Satan) had appeared to Tasso during a nap, barefoot in the field of all the harvests she’d ever had with Sea Horse. In the fog of that same field she had seen Allah, the Holy Father, but with His back to them, as God will do when He leaves animals to
the earth. Although Tasso herself was a powerful witch possessing the will of Sanna (the virtue of all the dead wives of her tribe) and had only taken on the title of Muslim at her husband’s behest, there was nothing she could do to stop the devil.
People by the thousands—for instance, the Pogo Metis Signare and the corporate politicians of Europe and America who stood to lose power with Sea Horse as president—had put the will of their hatred into the universe with great intensity. Just as a powerful hostility had become telepathic enough to mow down Malcolm X, the American Kennedys, and Lumumba, the same thoughts and feelings were now aimed at smiting Tasso’s husband.
Sea Horse Twee was going to die, and all she had hoped was that there would be a final son born through Eternity’s fresh young womb. And for that reason, she moved everything in the universe to protect whatever seed might arise from God’s closing of one door and opening of another. Nothing that Tasso did was about herself.
Carefully, she fluffed the pillows and fitted the sheets on her marriage bed—a bed that had abided so many more women than just herself.
It hurt all through her—but like the African clanswomen who had taught her the art of being a wife, Tasso set aside her own wants in order to serve that which she thought was natural order for the village, the people. Sea Horse, a great and important leader, was going to die— but perhaps through her efforts neither his vision nor his message for West Cassavaland would die with him.
“Even in death, a son who is a gift to his people must never perish,” Tasso muttered as Sea Horse entered the room carrying Eternity to the bed.
It has to be done, Tasso thought, nervously. Wait till he leaves the room … then do it.
“Tasso, can you get her some fresh water?”
“It’s there already, by the bed.”
“You think of everything,” he said, pleased.
Like a hawk, Tasso studied the way Eternity’s dull, dark eyes bore into Sea Horse’s face, the way her body stiffened with fear; while in Eternity’s mind, she was wondering how God could be so cruel as to put the same face on Jesus Christ and Sea Horse Twee.
“Pace yourself,” Tasso whispered, spying the devastation in Sea Horse’s misty eyes. “The heart will kill you.”
She pulled him back from the bed and forced a glass of tamarind juice into his hands. Though he couldn’t dare take his eyes off Eternity, at least he drank the juice, thought Tasso.
Wearily, she persuaded Sea Horse to review the white notebooks that covered his bureau, each one open to pages where Tasso had been diligently composing his upcoming political speeches.
Africa has been cloned! he read on one page.
Sea Horse blinked to comprehend, but he liked the concept, finding it powerful and evocative of many rebellious plans simmering in his mind.
Yes, thought Sea Horse, fuck the G8 with their welfare checks and slave loans, breaking into a mild sweat. He planned to cut off from the G8, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund.
“Come back to us, Africa,” he muttered.
JESUS AND MARY
Later that night, the wooden doll stood fully dressed in the mansion’s hallway as if preparing for a night out.
“There’s a light missing from her eyes now,” Tasso told Sea Horse. “If I hadn’t carved that doll to protect her from the blows, her spirit would be separated from the flesh and bones as well.”
Sea Horse, who was high and steadily smoking a pile of the best marijuana in DakCrete, glanced at the doll standing in the hallway before responding, “You little African witch—you saw what I did to her, didn’t you? You saw me beat her to death, didn’t you?”
Tasso nodded.
“What were you doing there?”
“I went to bathe in the shallow pond with the silver minnows, but when I peered at the bottom, the ancestors showed me everything.”
“Then why have you said nothing?”
“Because I knew I could save her for you,” Tasso replied. “I will stand for you.”
“But I killed her. She has a body now, but I smothered her spirit.”
“You can bring it back,” Tasso said. “God has promised that your erection is our resurrection, enshalla— woman is man’s church. That is how you will bring her back to us.”
“She won’t even look me in the eye or talk to me, let alone—”
“If it be done with love, the penetration—the African way, sweet King, your purest, purest love—it will bring her back. Man’s erection is the resurrection.”
Tasso then retrieved the large doll and showed Sea Horse the new carving she’d made, a slit and a hole in its crotch.
“I used a little blood from my own vagina and a little fish oil to humanize the bark,” she explained.
Sea Horse touched his fingertips to the opening of the doll’s wooden vagina, then observed, “There’s a human part to it now.”
“The force of life is everywhere,” Tasso replied. “Woman is man’s church, Sea Horse. Man’s erection is our resurrection. You were made to love her, to heal her.”
Just then, Garvey stormed into the room. “Father, come quickly! The nurse told me to tell you that Eternity’s run away—”
CHAPTER THREE
Eternity Frankenheimer didn’t want to model or be around people that year. She rented a lavish apartment in DakCrete and floated about its rooms consumed by a deadbolt silence. She surfed idly online, typing LOL in place of actually laughing. This was the new world order and she was sedated to it.
But one day, when she was sitting with the old Oluchi women at the river near her mother’s clinic, they took pity on her and inadvertently set in motion the rebirth of her spirit. They showed her a photograph of her dead daughter, Hope, amazingly back alive and sporting a sagging diaper and a pacifier as she grinned, waving from Dr. Juliet’s arms in the marijuana field behind the clinic.
It shocked Eternity into a different type of sedation. Back at her apartment, she couldn’t stop staring at the photo.
Soon, reading a New York Times article about cloned pigs, Eternity was absolutely floored by the revelation that Harvard Medical School, the University of Missouri, and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center were all experimenting with the process of cloning animal parts to modify food sources. Scientists explained how they had taken enzymes from microorganisms like plankton and algae and introduced them into the body structures of mice, pigs, and rabbits.
The words reminded Eternity of dinner table conversations from her childhood at Africa Farms AIDS Clinic; now the language had spread to the rest of the world.
Yet Eternity remained despondent with the knowledge that Juliet had cloned her daughter. Eventually, she’d gotten in touch with the maid Fergie and paid her to keep tabs and report back to her.
“There’s something I haven’t told you, Eternity,” Fergie admitted over the phone one evening.
“What is it, Fergie?”
“I don’t want you to take this too hard, but there’s not just one baby.”
“What!”
“There are two.”
“That sick bitch!” Eternity hissed. “This is exactly what they did to me—they made multiple Orishas.”
Fergie corrected her: “No, there are two babies, Eternity, but they are not both from your daughter Hope. The other infant is a boy with red hair, freckles …”
OhmyGod!
Father.
In slow-motion, Eternity saw her father, Stevedore, gulping down the toxic Wife of Tarzan that had killed him.
She’s cloned Father.
CIGARETTE
Sex calmed her.
James Lord had been begging to see her, so she invited him to spend a few days at her apartment in DakCrete.
Her tongue dueled against his tongue; his firm hairy chest pressed down against her feverish charcoal breasts, his mouth and his crotch consuming both openings like a blanket of comfort while his white buttocks bounced joyfully between her long, licorice-black legs; and in a way that reminded he
r of her father, James’s hard, passionate penetration thrilled her with the masculinity that she loved, craved, and was always soothed by.
This, along with sleep and a good meal, she thought, was the best part of life. James Lord banged her with a final gallop—his face twisting into a moaning growl as he ejaculated deep within her.
The next morning in bed Eternity admitted, “I’m not interested in being in love.”
“We’ve just been reunited, and before I can order up roses you’re traipsing back to Sea Horse … Eternity, I need you to be up front—how do you feel about us?”
“How do you feel about your goddamned cryptids, James? You’re the one dredging some lake in the Congo looking for a mythical water monster that you believe the capturing and documenting of will somehow make you into a real man! You white men are all alike—always searching the fucking universe for something to unearth that’s none of your business! What is this God complex that white men have?”
James Lord laughed. “You’re the only mythical monster I’m interested in proving my manhood to, Eternity. And don’t think I don’t know about your birth control. You’ve been skipping it.”
Eternity froze. Yes, they had been fucking like bunnies for three days and she had been skipping it.
“You planning on being knocked up?” James smiled. “I personally wouldn’t mind a pregnant supermodel keeping me company on that lake in the Congo.”
“Is that the story this year, James?”
“I’ve offered to marry you before.”
BOX OF BALLOTS
Word quickly swept across the planet that Sea Horse Twee had won the election in West Cassavaland.
They elected him king!
In stunned silence and staring at the television news coverage, Eternity watched as the handsome rapperturned-politician shocked the world by shaking his fist before a roaring crowd and shouting, “To hell with globalization! Africa is a clone, nothing but a clone of itself—but, great ancestors, I promise you: no more!”
Nearly a million Cassavans were gathered outside the White House cheering and screaming to his every admonition. Women in labor all over Africa were naming their newborn children Sea Horse—whether they were boys or girls, it didn’t matter.
