Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  I lived in the presbytery learning about reading, Father Philips’ god and my new self by day. At night I went out.

  One word I learned was “cicatrix,” which is what happens to me after sun exposure. I grow one hundred and twenty days worth of protective cicatrix. Most of the time. I think the sun can kill me if I stay in it too long.

  First, the learning.

  The first thing Father Philips taught me was that I didn’t even know my own mother tongue. Yoruba was my first language but I couldn’t write it or understand its structure.

  “Illiterate,” he would say. “I have to teach you Yoruba first.”

  “Your Yoruba sounds like a wild boar giving birth,” I would counter. And this was true, he didn’t have the tongue for it.

  Using a stick in the sand he first taught me the Yoruba alphabet, then nouns, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, clauses, metaphors and more. Then we did it all over again in English.

  The first sentence I read without help from Father Philips was this: “Son of man, I have broken the arm of Pharaoh king of Egypt.” 1

  At night I went out.

  In early evening I listened to my village people tell tales by moonlight.

  Alo. Fable.

  I listened from a roof. Hidden. Lying in thatch. Unaffected by mosquitoes. I ate an agama lizard while listening.

  “Alo, o,” said the storyteller.

  “Alo!” said the crowd.

  Sweet-tongued yarn spinners. They told stories while Kemi rotted. Kemi’s body, that is.

  They didn’t care. I wanted to kill them all sometimes. I missed them sometimes.

  I didn’t kill them. I watched them, I learned from Father Philip, I washed by the river in which I almost drowned.

  My village was called Arodan.

  The name was a joke. Arodan is an imaginary object that is used on restless children. The parent asks the child to go to a friend and retrieve some borrowed arodan. All Yoruba adults are in on this joke. The friend would invariably have given it to someone else and so the child would have to go to the next friend and so on till the last friend in the chain who would give the child a stool and the waiting would begin. Hours later the penny would drop and the child would return home, by which time the parent, usually a mother, would have enjoyed a well-deserved respite.

  Though they have the same spelling the name of my village is pronounced differently. This has never stopped people from the surrounding villages from joking that our village does not exist.

  I found I didn’t miss my parents.

  I spied on my mother dispassionately. I was waiting to feel a pang, some heartache, a pull from myself to her. There was only vague intellectual curiosity.

  I ate one of her cockerels, feathers, blood, flesh, bones. Except for the feet. Chicken feet are disgusting.

  Six

  I have never been to the desert, but I have tasted its sand.

  Late in the year a trade wind blows over the Sahara, gathers dusty particles and settles southward covering us in a hazy, foglike cloud known as Harmattan.

  The morning after the field commander’s men shot me the Harmattan fell like a malignant red curtain. I was at the base of a palm tree feeling the bullet craters on my cicatrix, working each bullet loose. Not really, though, because I liked the idea of carrying lead around with me. I was stroking the bullets and the deformity in my leather shell. I was not dead.

  Embedded bullets are like extra nipples.

  I left the one that smacked into my collarbone so that I could fondle it when bored. I started back toward the war zone, seeking amusement, not revenge. The trees looked like indistinct lumps until they were very near. There was no color but red-brown. The sun was a dirty kerosene lantern struggling to shine through. It was a burnt umber world. The undergrowth I walked through held moisture and my body was soon wet. When one of the brown lumps moved I stopped and crouched low.

  Soldiers. Uniforms slightly different from those of my favorite field commander. About four lookouts and a dozen bent over … digging the soil? No, they were planting. In a straight line, progressing backwards.

  I blinked and three hours passed—time means nothing to me. They slinked away into the miasma. I waited another hour just to be sure; then I went to investigate.

  And exploded.

  At first I thought I was being shot at with more powerful weapons. There was light and heat and clumps of earth in the air. Malicious strips of metal latched on to me, cut into me. I thought the opposition had laid a trap for me. I staggered to a tree, but the ground erupted again, throwing me high. This time when the smoke cleared I examined the ground I trod on. The men had been planting landmines. I heard shouts, boots thumping, random gunshots.

  Then I passed out.

  When I came to the field commander was standing over me.

  When landmines detonate the shockwave pushes the Harmattan back and the air clears for some seconds. Then the haze rushes back in. The leaves on the trees are cut to ribbons before they curl from the heat.

  It was not the field commander standing over me. I must have been confused. A mangy wild dog was gnawing at my leg, the same one that I injured when the witch doctor dug me out of the ground. Smoke still rose around me. There were gunshots and muzzle flashes disturbing the serenity of the haze. I shook my leg out of the dog’s mouth and broke some of its teeth in the process. It whimpered; I growled. It slinked away.

  Activating the mines had triggered a new battle, one I wouldn’t be able to watch because of the poor visibility. Cordite, sulphur and burning vegetation ticked my nose. When I stood my vision doubled, so I leaned against a tree until all was unitary again. I had never stepped on a landmine before. I decided I did not like the experience. I climbed the tree I was bent over and left in my usual way.

  It was clear that I needed to heal. I went to the abandoned Portuguese Christian Mission. Overgrown, crumbled and decrepit, it was my refuge when I wanted solitude.

  I wiggled my way inside and slept for seven months.

  “You are not immortal,” Father Phillips used to say. “Everything that lives must die.”

  I thought maybe I was already dead and all of this was a dream, the dream of a ghost.—

  Seven

  A loud thought woke me.

  —?—

  —other—

  —in here—

  —stinky—

  I thought I was trapped at first. I was encased in a cocoon, even my head. I could not open my eyes initially, until I raised my arms and lifted the helmet off my head.

  Even with my eyes open I could not see. I touched my eyelids. Wet, slimy and sinuous. There were leeches inside both of my eye sockets. As I roused myself I realized there were leeches all over my skin, and the cocoon was all that remained of my cicatrix. I had shed it while sleeping. I felt around me; I was in water. The rains must have started while I slept, filled the room I was in, brought the leeches with it.

  There were two parasites on my tongue, one an impressive way down my throat. I bit down, started to chew and at the same time rose from the water. Some had made it into my lungs as usual, and I could feel the drag of it weighing me down. I coughed and sputtered and hawked a long sanguineous trail of phlegm.

  —down this way, I think—

  —arsefuckshithunger—

  —why do we want to know—

  —our kind; kinsman—

  There were loud random thoughts invading my head. I wondered if the long sleep had made me mad. I felt my way around the mossy room. I was sure I had hundreds of wounds all over my body, but I couldn’t see. I ate as many leeches as I could to get some strength, but it looked as if they had destroyed my eyes. If I could get to Lei she would help me.

  “Who is Lei?” said a voice, echoing in the room.

  I backed against the nearest wall, ready to fight, but delicate fingers of rumination caressed my mind.

  —friend, kinsman, blood sister—

  —who—

  —Nene. Wit
h friends. Looking for you. Heard your sleep—

  —blinded. Leeches. Not mad? —

  —see from my eyes—

  Light flooded my head, but not from my eyes. It was disconcerting and momentarily dizzying. I was looking at myself from Nene’s eyes. I was taking the thoughts from her head, sharing her sight.

  I did not like what I saw.

  Me, from Nene’s eyes: filthy, bleeding, crouched like an ape, black eye sockets, bared dirty teeth, muscular but short, penis hanging limply between my legs and made longer by a leech that I had missed, hair matted, feet in water.

  It took getting used to.

  There were others like me, and we all shared our thoughts. Thoughts flowed freely, uncensored, unbidden, loud like an elephant’s trumpet. Including me there were five of us. Kinsmen. I shared the vision of four.

  It took getting used to.

  My kinsmen had clothes. They were fashioned out of old cicatrices.

  My kinsmen and I, we had a den. They looked after me and teased my lack of eyeballs, my prudish adherence to the privacy of my own thoughts while others’ were free to the hive. They had travelled far and planned to keep moving. I recalled something I had read: The great affair is to move.

  It was strange: again I was in a group or a village and yet I still felt apart. I felt drawn to Nene but that was to be expected. She was the only female and wielded enormous power over the rest of us.

  Names were a problem. Thoughts had an individual flavor—each as distinct as a face or scent. When you live in the thoughtspace of others conventional identity tends to fall away.

  I teased them for the convention of wearing clothing, albeit cicatrix formed.

  Nene watched me. I could see myself in her gaze. She did not hide her curiosity about me. She knew I knew. It amused her how much it affected me.

  Nene looked like this: tall, lithe, with long limbs and an almost careless manner of walking, short spiky hair caked with some berry paste she made, eyes that were permanently half-shut but that, if her thoughts were to be believed, missed nothing. Her skin was black, not brown. It shone.

  She was our queen.

  I gave the other three males names in order to keep them straight in my mind.

  D’Artagnan. Reckless. Sloth.

  D’Artagnan I got from Dumas. He had migrated from a Francophone country somewhere and spent his life enjoying all things around him. He smiled easily and looked like a wrestler—fat, massive belly, powerful arms.

  Gentle, though. Playful. Loved to tackle me when it caught his fancy.

  “Little brother,” he would say, “you need more flesh on those bones. You will disappear.”

  He had children somewhere from various women, and in the day when we all lay next to each other he would let loose an image of a little girl with buck teeth who sucked her thumb constantly, or male twins jumping off a rise into a river.

  Reckless was a tiny bundle of supercharged instinct. He did whatever came into his mind with very little delay. He was thinner than me, with flat though well-defined muscles. He was fair-skinned and the others thought he had some white blood mixed up in his. D’Artagnan affectionately called him half-breed at times.

  He truly was reckless. He once got it into his head to eat a lion cub. He walked right into the den to pick one, but the lionesses had other ideas.

  Nene held the rest of us back. He wasn’t in any real danger, but the pain made him squeal in a way that amused us all for weeks.

  Sloth was the most quiet. He wasn’t lazy—he just liked being still. They found him in Dahomey taking his time to systematically destroy a village because the inhabitants had tried to burn him. He was unfeeling, blank, uncaring. But he wanted to be kin to us.

  After many moons I began to sense light. In my own head. Nene examined my sockets.

  “Hmm. Your eyes are growing back.” She laughed with delight. “Have you ever been across?”

  We were on a beach. Moonlight bounced off the waves and hit me in my new eyes. My vision was blurry, but improving daily. Reckless had walked into the sea, and after some hours we could not feel his mind anymore. D’Artagnan and Sloth had gone in to look for him.

  “No,” I said.

  “I don’t think any of our kind has ever been,” said Nene. “To where the white folk come from.”

  “At least one has,” I said. I told her about the Tecoraz. Evocative as the story was for me, she caught other impressions from my leaky mind.

  “You miss your village,” she said.

  “Sometimes.” I turned to her. “How do we do this? How is it that we can know each other’s thoughts?”

  “Do you know what Yage is?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a drug. South American’s prepare it. Used in Shamanic rituals, said to induce telepathy. I think we have glands that produce a natural form of Yage.”

  I was tired. I longed for a unique connection to Nene, but it seemed I was like the others to her. I could not speak much because I was used to being alone. I could not share my thoughts much because I did not know my kinsmen well enough.

  “Your Tecoraz passenger,” said Nene. “He didn’t really make it across.”

  D’Artagnan dragged Reckless out of the water by the scruff of the neck. Sloth walked behind them.

  “No,” I said. I pulled her to me and tried to kiss her lips, but she turned at the last minute so that I brushed the side of her neck. I felt brief disappointment, but then I read from her that she found this more intimate.

  It continued until an image of Lei splashed into my mind, and Nene pushed me away. She leapt up and went to where Reckless and D’Artagnan were having a rough-and-tumble. She piled on with a whoop.

  I was apart again.

  Eight

  Dawn.

  I left my tribe and scampered quietly through the forest. I caught and ate a small, furry mammal that I could not name. I chewed it while I moved, blood dripping against my cheeks and smearing leaves I passed. I measured the distance from my kinsfolk by the faintness of the thoughts from them, the dreams and random mentations of sleep. I kept myself inward, thought of nothing, moved on instinct.

  I did not know why I ran or where I was going until I found myself at Lei’s hut. I waited to calm myself at the edge of her clearing, allowed my breathing to slow. It was not as clean or neat as I had remembered. There were no animals in wire cages, no sounds of bickering from turkeys. The wood of her home looked decrepit and the roof needed repair. Dead leaves and grass were all over the ground. I made the customary noises and walked toward the entrance. My chest actually itched from the memory of being shot. The door was ajar and I was walking in dust. A monitor lizard looked up at me lazily from her front room, but I let it leave. There were animal droppings everywhere, but the smell was old. No tallow candles. I entered the room.

  She had been dead a long time. The flesh had dried up and she was mummified. Her limbs were flexed and held close to her chest. She was on the floor, in some tattered clothes. Insects crawled around her, uninterested in what was left. I sat down next to her, stroked her hair, but I must have misjudged my strength because her head snapped off and rolled away. It sounded dry and brittle. There was nothing of Lei here, but I still sat for a time. I could not quite feel anything.

  Lei died as I would die: alone and unmissed. My entire escape from existence would go unnoticed. I would not be buried.

  Without any real emotion or compulsion I picked up her corpse along with the head and leapt into the bush. I found a space where the humans did not frequent and dug. The sun was coming out, but the canopy was thick and I felt no tingling. By midmorning I had a large enough pit and I lay beside the body and buried myself and Lei. I cradled her in the dark warm earth, rested my forehead against hers. Things moved against me in the soil, but left after a few investigatory stings.

  I felt calm. Lei always calmed me.

  I slept.

  I woke up three weeks later. There were people above me, talking, moving around.
Humans generally meant sunlight, and I decided to stay where I was.

  “—clear orders.”

  “How do we know it’s not a trap?”

  “We don’t, but it does not make sense for them to trap us this way.”

  “Who’s in charge?”

  “Nobody is sure, but Central came to an agreement with the new government.”

  “‘New government?” The coup is only hours old. They can’t have a government. They’ll be busy with summary executions and stuff.”

  “What do you say, Sarge?”

  A brief pause. “I think we should stay in the bush for now. Things could change and we have to be ready for that. Let’s find a place and lie low.”

  There was general assent and footsteps moved off. The sun fell and I emerged, leaving Lei in place.

  I followed the spoor of the human soldiers. I had no specific reason. It was becoming difficult to move myself to action. I could not find compulsion to do anything and I borrowed the motivation of the humans as I had borrowed the sight of my tribe in the past. I soon caught up and observed them at a distance from the tree tops. I remembered the tall commander from previous encounters. They slogged through the night, weary and quiet. There was a footpath through the jungle and twice one of the soldiers had to kill snakes which they stripped of the skin, cut off the heads and stored to eat later. I saw them bicker, fight each other, ferment overripe papaya for crude alcohol, sleep, shit and on one occasion, have sex with each other.

  A dozen monkeys attacked me at once. They fell on me from above. So intent was I on the humans that I hadn’t noticed the ambush. They were no threat to me and I killed three of them before they knew to leave me alone and howl from safe positions out of reach of my arms. They hurled shit at me as an insult and I did not begrudge them their small victories. I was not hungry.

  The humans came across a crater where a bomb had gone off. There were parts of a blasted truck in evidence as well as rocks and trees radiating away in stellate fashion. I watched from a bamboo cove. The soldiers looked for parts to scavenge. I was bored with this so I leapt ahead along their vector. There was something familiar about the placement of the trees. I had been here before ….