Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  “Oh God!” cried a visitor on the day of Radwa’s death. “She’s smiling! Is she alive?”

  “Who’s smiling?” Khayriyyeh snapped. “Radwa or the lips of Radwa?”

  “Radwa or the Lips of Radwa” became the rallying-cry of the Eastern School, while the Western School, building on the cryptic love lyrics of Deng Machar Deng, burst into life simultaneously in Dakar and Dar al-Baydaa, which would be known ever afterward as the Twin Cities. (“These are the Twin Cities too,” you muttered the night we met. Muffled in greatcoats and scarves, we flipped through albums in a near-defunct record store. “Who the hell listens to records anyway?” you said, accusing.

  “You’re here too,” I said.

  You didn’t blink. “I just like the pictures.”)

  A golden age. And the King of Mali in his gold bracelets observed, among the venerable trees of his courtyard, the shades of unknown philosophers. “I know not whether they are living or dead,” he said, according to Seti’s Lives of the Saints, “but they are my kindred. For this reason I fear neither knife nor poison.” Two minutes later he was, in fact, poisoned to death. I told you this as if it was a funny story, but you didn’t laugh. Ashamed, I offered to buy you a hamburger at a nearby restaurant or, if you were a vegetarian, some French fries.

  That was afterward—after the record store. In the record store, where through a mysterious legal oversight one could still smoke cigarettes, I asked you: “Why did you say ‘too’?”

  “I didn’t; you did.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “You did,” you insisted in some irritation. “You said: ‘You’re here too.’”

  I was already talking more softly, as if dreams, like the smaller animals, could be frightened away. “You said, ‘These are the Twin Cities too.’ What are the other ones?”

  In Assyrian sculpture, eyes like yours, with the white showing all the way around the iris, connote mystic vision. “Dakar and Dar al-Baydaa, of course,” you said.

  Having stumbled onto such a revelation, how could I let you go? I wheedled you into the restaurant’s glare and drank you with my eyes. You licked each of your fingers with equal deliberation. I asked who your teacher was; you claimed to have none. I have no way of knowing if this is true.

  “Who’s yours?” you asked with a guarded look.

  “Sylvia Fazakas. You must come to her lectures.” (In the Abyssinian highlands, Azazet the Hesitant, one of our discipline’s splendid cranks, greeted her students: “Good-not-meaning-opposed-to-bad, morning-not-meaning-opposed-to-evening ….”)

  Sylvia, looking half-drowned as always, trailing hair and skirts, welcomed you with a languid gesture. Unaware of her own perfection, she wore high heels because she thought she was too short. You squirmed uneasily onto the bench beside me, chin sunk deep in the lumps of your homemade scarf. The other members of what I cheerfully referred to as the Minnesota School—a medical student and a reformed gangster called Forehead—blew on their hands and slurped hot tea to prepare for the cold night ahead while a fuzzy Qur’anic recitation blared from the speakers of the café.

  Sylvia rested her cheek on her hand. “Why are you here?”

  “It’s a free country,” you said.

  Sylvia waited.

  “All right,” you admitted. “I want to see God.”

  “That has been deemed impossible.”

  “Is she really the teacher?” you asked me. The medical student snickered; Forehead examined the tabletop graffiti.

  “You will agree that you can only see what you are not.”

  “I can see myself in a mirror.”

  “Precisely.”

  “All right. Show me God’s reflection.”

  “God’s reflection is not God,” said Sylvia, with what you would later call her Queen-of-the-Fairies smile.

  “Christ, lady,” you said. “It’s better than nothing.”

  (“To see God,” sang the great San philosopher known as the Child of Moonrise, while the Blue Scribe of Timbuktu transcribed the words with a reed pen, “one would need eyes, but one has no eyes, for one is not a thing, but an act. For we are not the knowledge of God, but the Knowing.” Crickets studded the grass; the Blue Scribe wept indigo tears and dipped her pen in them. In truth, our theory is nothing more than the history of sadness. “We might have eyes, if we were the Nouns of God,” sang the Child. “Perhaps the Nouns are the angels. We are among the Verbs.”)

  I never thought you’d follow me home. I talked the whole way, hoping, but I didn’t believe it until your sneakers were trudging up my stairs. Panic struck: the apartment was hardly neat. Later, after you disappeared, it was worse: blood and ashes everywhere.

  You threw down your bag in a corner. Of course, I thought, gleeful: That bag. It’s a homeless bag. And it was, shapeless and mended with silver tape. You sat on the couch and picked your chapped lip. “It’s freezing in here.” I clashed about in the kitchen, in plain view of the couch, sweeping the counter clean.

  When I turned around, you had fallen asleep.

  (A brief flowering in Moorish Spain. Gone in an instant, like the apricot harvest. Ibn Zahir said: “If creation is time, then creation is a constant. The world is re-created every day.”)

  Every day you awoke on my couch, miraculous. Re-created. Would it have been so hard to go on repeating this? Cabdi Xasan, jailed by the British, held that we reassemble ourselves every day from the stuff of nonduality, until our strength runs out. I thought this a beautiful idea; you said it was depressing. You seemed to disagree with me whenever you could. Unlike most people, you never asked where I was from. In an inexplicable lapse of intuition, you thought I was in love with Sylvia.

  “And that is where we stand now,” Sylvia said, having skipped over the decline of Nonduality Studies as she had elided its heyday, to arrive at our present moment when the investigation of unity is stifled and decayed, a theory in exile. Strands of mouse-gray hair, escaped from her hat, blew about her cheeks. She was lecturing on Ramadhani’s concept of the Transcendental No. “What he saw,” she said, “as the school at Malindi burned, and nonduality scholars were hounded out of their profession, was that the profession itself was an error. In constructing these schools, we were guilty of separation. The events of history, to his mind, constituted a No spoken by nonduality itself. Recall his prophecy: From now on it will be our destiny to arrive everywhere, only one step behind our enemies.”

  “What are we doing here then?” you said.

  “We are seekers,” Sylvia answered.

  Later you said: “She never misses a beat, does she?” But I saw that although she could answer all your questions, she was disturbed, her eyes shifting toward the traffic beyond the graveyard’s blackened fence. When she picked up her snow-damp bag—which was very nearly a homeless bag—settled the strap on her shoulder, and trotted off between the icy gravestones, headed for the home she shared with her daughter, a brusque dog-beautician burdened by the duty of “watching Mom,” my heart ached.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this,” you said.

  Your eyes startled me. Enraged.

  Our fellow students had left us. The wind sang in the trees.

  “We can do more,” you said, and there was an echo of Radwa’s lyrics in my head, and then your kiss like a window breaking.

  Who were you? You never wanted to know what I had left behind, and you never told me anything about your former life. I wanted to search your bag, but I was afraid, afraid I’d find something there, conclusive evidence that you would not stay. The scholar Lukhele, known to the history books as “Crazy Niklaas,” lectured from the edge of a bore-hole in a country that was now called South Africa, but his words were not collected, only his story, the image of madness like a closed door or a Transcendental No. What might we have learned from him? What might he have given us? Could he, or one of the countless practitioners of our shattered philosophy, have passed on a word that would turn you from your path?

  “I’m the next
level,” you said, tapping your chest. I have no way of knowing that this is not true.

  You didn’t work. When I was out you practiced boxing and Tae Kwon Do. You kicked a hole in one of my living-room chairs. As for me, I changed for work in the restroom of the convenience store, not wanting you to see me in the hideous red shirt.

  I brought you pretzels. You ate them from the bag, staring at the wall. You cried one tear for the fate of Ibn Barzakh.

  “If we can close the distance between the two of us,” you said, “then we can close the distance between ourselves and God.”

  Ghada Mallasi, known as “the Ibis,” was stopped on the way to Qena. She had no pass. She sat by the road for two days, hoping the guards would have mercy. In her bag were a dozen layers of peanut candy and the manuscript of her masterpiece, The Meadows of Happenstance. When she understood that she would never get through, she put her bag on her head and returned to Omdurman. “Roads, roads!” she wrote in her little apartment, which was sinking deeper into the sand each year. “The more there are, the more beautifully kept they are, the harder it is to go anywhere.”

  You sat on the broken chair, and I stood before you. The room was dark, but the glow of the kitchen in the next apartment fell on your upturned face. Your look of appeal went through me, not like an icicle or a blade but like the memory of the past, terrible and swift.

  I knelt and kissed your smooth cold hands. “Tell me what to do.”

  Your courage was boundless. We tried everything: meditation, hunger, dance. Forehead obliged us with a supply of qaat: under its influence we stayed awake for three days, chewing mindlessly. On the last day I saw an angel fluttering on the wall. “Look,” I said, “it’s one of the Nouns of God.” We experimented with matches, bleach fumes, buckets of icy water. The staple-gun, I now see, represented a turning point.

  “We’re almost there,” you insisted every time. You could feel it hovering just beyond the pain, a clear space, like the sea.

  Onesimo Bondo, attempting to get to Abidjan, where he hoped to perform his verse meditation, What the Thunder Knows, was seized for the mines.

  I wish to be fair. I will not omit the contributions of the wider world to our philosophy: the Shoemaker of Bali whose shoes could be worn on either foot, the punk rock band in 1970s Prague who were called “The Lips of Radwa.” I will not omit your orange laughter after consuming a Slushie. Once you showed me some grainy old-fashioned photographs from your bag: “That’s me,” you said, pointing to an iridescence seated on a tricycle. The closer I looked, the more the dots that formed you drifted apart, dissolving into a vast and alien constellation.

  Nonduality Studies, it must be admitted, is largely a hidden field, a discipline discredited and in mourning, practiced in graveyards, airports, alleys smelling of “ethnic” foods, video arcades. For a moment, I thought this was going to change.

  Then you stood before me, gasping, blood streaming from the cut on your head.

  “Did you feel it?”

  “Yes,” I sobbed.

  “You’re lying.”

  You raised the iron again.

  “Stop! Stop! I feel it!”

  You brought the heavy iron down, this time on your hand … but it is not my habit to dwell on evil memories.

  Afterward, the medical student visited my apartment. She brought food and injections, and made a splint for my hand. “Don’t cry,” she said in our mutual, rarely-spoken language, as she completed the sutures. “You’re better off this way.”

  She was right, of course. I should have rejoiced when I saw your bag was missing. You were dangerous, toxic. Your presence in the city was like a plague. You wrecked my apartment and nearly killed me. You made me lose my job. You stole my electric razor. When are you coming back?

  I wrote these notes only for Sylvia, and she asked me to write them, I think, only for me, in the hope that they would lead me back into the world. “It will help you to dream of the future,” she said, but I don’t. I dream of the present, of the now. Otherwise, what’s the point of being a nondualist? I open the window and press my nose to the screen and smell the spring, exhaust and magnolia trees, and I never dream about you. Like the King of Mali I dream of others, beloved unknown colleagues, a twelve-year-old girl from Rambling, Michigan called Eugenia Czechowicz.

  Eugenia is a family name; she dislikes it. She goes by Jenny. She has just understood, in a radiant whoosh of cognitive effervescence, that her best friend forever, a gifted ice-skater, both is and is not herself. In defiance of her parents’ rules, she is riding her ten-speed bicycle over the bridge.

  Protected Entity

  Daniel José Older

  Short, sullen-faced child ghosts are hovering around my legs. They don’t speak, just stare through wide, horrified eyes at the misty warehouse around us. I don’t like kids that much, especially not dead ones, but I still have to force back the urge to just wrap my living arms around them and tell ’em it’s gonna be all right. It’s not. They’re dead; prematurely, horrifically dead, murdered probably. What do you say to a murdered child? I just stay quiet; try to ignore those questioning eyes.

  “Carlos,” Bartholomew Arsten floats toward me from one of the offices. Bart’s one of the Council’s more reconciliatory ghosts upstairs, always trying to make like he’s doing his best to work things out for us soulcatchers in the field. I don’t trust him. “Thanks so much for coming down, we really appreciate it.” He looks nervous, skirting carefully through the crowd of youngins like he might catch something if he touches one.

  “Whassup?” I say as if the answer weren’t hovering all around me. It’s more fun to make him explain.

  “Well,” says Bart, “it seems there’s been some kind of incident, er, spiritual incident, you know, of some kind, in the African American community.”

  “What makes you think so?”

  You’d think we were playing tennis, the way those wide eyes bounce back and forth between me and Bart.

  “Well, all these ….” He gestures helplessly at the air, “children. These bla— African American … children.”

  “Looks like someone having a damn celebrity adoption auction down here.”

  Bart laughs, but only for show. He’s too busy being uncomfortable to really pay mind to what I’m saying. “Of course, yes. Yes. Anyway, Agent Delacruz, that’s why we brought you in, as you can see. And Agent Washington, of course, is on this too, he’s just otherwise occupied right now, but he’ll meet you at the scene.”

  “Buncha black kids get offed so you bring in the only two minorities you got, huh?”

  “Yes! No! Well, of course I mean, because … no. No.”

  “Whenever you’re ready, Bart.”

  “We don’t know what to do, Carlos, they won’t even speak! And they keep showing up, there’re what, seven, eight now? It’s crazy. We just want to help them, but you can see how the situation’s getting, er, unbearable …. It’s horrible really, whatever’s going on. And we don’t know their names, where they’re from …. Nothing.”

  I wrap my hands around one of those little cloudy waists and lift up the child to my eye level. He squirms, tiny arms waving in the air, and lets out a few pathetic chirps. The others get quiet and watch to see what I’ll do. “What’s your name, kid?”

  The boy lets out a heartbreaking sob, his little icy body trembling in my hands. I close my eyes, blocking everything but the gentle vibrations radiating back from my hands. It’s mostly emotion coming through, all that brand new fear, but there’s relief there too. Seems like all the boys know each other somehow, besides having died together.

  “God, I just want to do something for them, you know, like, start a program or something, you know?”

  I put the kid down and grab another, ignoring Bart so as not to encourage him. This one’s a little more together. Perfectly twisted ghost locks dangle from his round head. He doesn’t cry, just glares back at me like I had something to do with this mess. But when I close my eyes, it’s like looki
ng through a slightly smudged window into him. It’s a block, a pretty damn fancy one; gorgeous brownstones stand proudly on either side. BMWs, SUVs and Mercedes are parked along the grassy, tree-lined curbs.

  “I mean, like, a program for the underprivileged, you know? Like, for ghosts who were poverty stricken in life? A way to, like, help them to help themselves.” Bart’s words flutter around me like a stupid moth—one I can ignore for now. Might be in Harlem, this block, maybe up by 125th, on the West Side. I squinch up my closed eyes, trying to clear up the image enough to make out a street sign but it’s still pretty murky.

  “They’re not poor, Bart.”

  “Huh?”

  “Here.” I extend little man to Bart. He looks pleadingly at me for a second and then grudgingly reaches for the child. “I gotta go. Tell Riley to meet me uptown.”

  “Come back soon,” Bart says, trying to keep the desperation from his voice.

  This part of Harlem’s mostly white now. Homeless black guys wander aimlessly, pretending they didn’t get the memo to clear the fuck out. Cops wear vindicated grins as they stroll triumphantly up and down the quiet, sunshiny blocks. Comfortable young white people flutter around in sandals and shorts, doing little chores, heading to outdoor cafes, staying casually but carefully within the designated borders of their territory.

  “Malcolm X Towers?” Riley scoffs. “Luxury apartments? Are you serious?” We’re standing at the foot of a monstrous glass fortress on Fifth Ave.

  “You know ghost Malcolm’s ready to fuck a tower up,” I say.

  “If only ….”