Mothership

by Bill Campbell

  We never all ate off Chris at the same time.

  We had a business to run and didn’t want anybody finding us all in some compromised, high-out-our-minds state on the locker room floor. It was still winter, and baseball season hadn’t started in earnest yet. There was still plenty to do, and some of our bodies still had to mind the store and our baseball season profit margin.

  In comparing notes we realized none of us transmigrated to the same altered state/fever dream while eating off Chris. Mojo Raj Raj, for example, was the only one who got straight flesh-on-flesh sex in the bargain. Mojo Donnie said his hallucinations generally involved visiting a space that resembled the chalky, luminous blues and reds of a Chagall painting. Mojo Cornbread said there were always lots of guns floating around his Chris-activated fever dreams. This he found quite comforting. He also spoke of running, flying, and shooting all wild at shit like he had been carried through the looking glass into a hyperviolent video game.

  (The Chagall reference by Donnie floored us most of all, strangely enough. Scarcely any surprised in learning that Cornbread got no further outside himself than his grubby Xbox console during the most mind-blowing flesh-induced transdimensional ride in human history. What we never knew or hadn’t imagined was that Mojo Donnie had ever seen the inside of a museum before then.)

  We all ended up sharing loads of personal revelations thanks to what we took from Chris. Some of it mind-shattering, some of it TMI.

  I, Mojo Bon Bon, routinely found myself visiting Chris on the angeloid homeworld, where I unfathomably took on the body of an angeloid man, recurrently fell in love, and sired a large angeloid family—albeit a different family with a different wife every time. Each time I allowed myself a bite or two from Chris’ body, it took me there. Unrepentant sinner woman that I was, even I became an angel under the spell of my lovingly masticated Chris, much to devilish chagrin.

  The multiple-child-bearing parts of my transmigrations might lead one to think I was getting some on the other side of the galaxy, too, but alas, no. You see, in my fantasy angeloids mated by a kind of genital telepathy I still can’t explain, no matter how much ill-gotten knowledge I’ve gained about angeloids from feeding upon Chris. (Angeloids appear to touch each other down there and engage in reproduction by some form of osmosis that’s generally over in the time it’d take you or I to pop an aspirin.) I did learn what happened to bad angeloids when they abused their bodies too much: Like Lucifer, those who decided to be so bold got booted out of heaven for coming out of the light.

  Ba-dum.

  Very bad, tacky, borderline tasteless angeloid jokes aside, I do feel a need to mention that angeloids need to be eaten as much as we desire to eat from them. For them, our eating is their feeding. They are, however, supposed to spread around that love they have for being consumed—to way more folk than just seven guys (and one quite stunning gal) nicknamed Mojo in a sub-basement locker room deep in the dungeon keep of Yankee Stadium.

  Our day of reckoning was a-coming. Judgment was at hand, and it would not be merciful.

  We didn’t need to be told or warned of this. We already just knew from the jump—from the friggin’ giddy-up!—that one day there might be—hell, there was going to be hell to pay for us holding an angel hostage and selfishly milking its form and substance for its hallucinogenic properties.

  Like no good deed going unpunished, nothing that felt so good could be good forever without the wages of sin extracting a bitter price. This was one of the immutable laws of the cruel, diabolical, and hypocritical universe we’ve all been born into. And not even the angels will save you once your dirty stinking rotten reprobate devil-worshipping temptation-driven ass has gotten on the bad side of the angels, let alone some extraterrestrial angeloids.

  The baseball season came and went, but we could not be satisfied. We made our money at Yankee Stadium, and from the Mojo Raj and His VooDoo Vindaloo food trucks we had distributed throughout the five boroughs. All the same we could not be satisfied. Our wives, lovers, and partners knew this better than most.

  Our months of feasting off the angeloid had renewed my colleagues as men and as sexual beings in ways their beloveds could not explain but enjoyed immensely. After Chris was gone everything became duller in the realms of our senses. The days of our lives became a patchwork of downcast grays; dour blues; surly blacks; and sullen, fatigued whites. Even the Christmas season, when we shared a big dinner at Raj’s ranch house in Massapequa, barely produced a perceptible lift to our spirits.

  Then came February, and with it a change.

  The first sign was the appearance of tiny dark and mottled feathers all around our lips.

  We began, on the same Saturday, to spit them from our mouths in a burst that filled the air around each of us for a good hour. A day later, while we compared notes, prickly bone-white stems popped out of our jaws; our chins became lined with spindly whiskers. Pains shot up in our rib cages and clavicles. These bones seemed to be swelling and tightening at the same time. We began to have waking dreams of becoming angels. We began flapping our wings like giant earthbound birds in the hopes something aerodynamic would happen. We left our wives and homes and children for long stretches of wintry days and gathered around the mound at Yankee stadium and became a flock of humans dreaming of angels who flapped their arms madly in a delusional delirium of achieving liftoff. When all that subsided we found ourselves puffed more about the chest than we had been before and left with a permanent stubble of protruding feather stems along our jaws and above our upper lips. We had to confess to our wives and families what had happened, and much familial disruption and abandonment followed. We drifted apart socially, some into a fugue of isolation, depression, and reckless behavior.

  Some of us had more loyal partners than others.

  I was one of them. My wife loved the most outlandish Tolkienesque fantasy and sci-fi yarns; my tales of dining from the body of an alien angel brought us closer together. Even if she couldn’t stop teasing me for being such a greedy woman and “just like a man,” never once thinking of sharing my darkling angel chile with her (“Guess I couldn’t have none while you and your homies were getting some, huh?’’ was one snap she shot my way).

  After the hardly unforeseen but still shocking suicides, in rapid succession, of Mojo Donnie, Mojo Byron, and Mojo Hadji, we pulled together again and became our own best support/suicide watch group. This weekly gathering of lost souls initiated its own descent into group madness and nearly murder when various unconscionable confessions began pouring out over who had zoomed whose beloved before, during, and after the body of Chris (not my boo of course, because my one and only doesn’t swing the other way, and never in the wind, and I have gotten nary a complaint about how I keep the home fires burning, but hey, that’s just lizzy old moi).

  Then, out of seemingly nowhere no-way no-how, when all seemed lost, the very thing happened that we had all been hoping, praying, dreaming for and yet none dared even mumble. One evening around six, when we were all down in the stadium on cooking break, we heard some radio newscaster going bonkers cray-cray, telling all the world about something truly, frighteningly miraculous that was happening on 42nd Street. That bright snowy night in March some sixteen black angels with red faces fell from the sky and grace and were hovering in Times Square, just below where the New Year’s ball was sent to plummet. They kept themselves afloat for hours while the area below was cleared and quarantined. The military arrived, of course, and though these repulsive, dark energy-sheathed angeloids could not be killed or captured or swabbed or scraped by grubby genetic researchers, they did later that same night begin sobbing and weeping and choking with grief. And then, one by one, the angels began to consume themselves during their display of unconsolable mourning.

  As we all listened to this news, we began grinning like loons—knowing as we did that the angeloids would soon be renewed, their devoured body parts restored and generously offered to the first humans who would dare to follow these acts of self-cannib
alism with carnivorous longings of their own. Thus did the surviving collective members of the Mojo Raj VooDoo Vindaloo Food Services crew decide to find our way to Times Square, to lead by example, to show the rest of humanity The Way. As in how to harvest glory from the delectable bodies of renewable angels; as in how to feast angelically upon that too tender angeloid flesh, which tasted of njeri and nirvana. To feast, perchance to dream: of angeloid homeworlds, and homegirls, and the dearly departed ascendant body of our beloved tenderloin savior, darkling angel child Chris.

  A Fine Specimen

  Lisa Allen-Agostini

  Hear nah, when I tell you that man was nice! I don’t mean joke nice, eh. Real nice. Skin like butter, soft soft, and smooth. Even under all the paint, that skin was soft and smooth and you could of see that from far. Even in the dark of a J’Ouvert morning before the sun come up. A whitish fellah, but kind of brown— it look like he make two-three days in Tobago before J’Ouvert and come back tan like how alyuh white people does be in magazine and thing. He had blonde hair, like yours. And how alyuh American does say? “Built like a Tonka truck”? As if he well like he gym. Muscles for so! Hard, but not magga, not bony, just them muscles in he back bunching and rippling when he move. That was man. Is no wonder I end up in this predicament. And when he wine so, girl …!

  Is the wine that first catch me, eh. I ain’t go lie. It was the wine. He had a funny kind of wine. Music going tang-tang ka-tang-ka-tang-ka-tang-ka-tang and he wining to a whole next beat. He had the moves correct—knees bent, hips dip down low and he bottom cock back, like this, and he waist rolling like waves in Maracas Beach—but the timing was wrong. As if he learn to wine on the Internet from watching a YouTube video but didn’t realize it have plenty different beat in soca and he only learn one. It wasn’t like a Jamaican daggering—like this—or like a Bajan wukking up—you ever see that? Is something like this—or even like one of them small islander, a Vincie or a Grenadian, who does wine a little bit different from how a Trini does wine. He wasn’t wining like a tourist, really—alyuh doesn’t get it at all—I think is because alyuh does wine on the wip and we does wine on the wap, if you know what I mean; they doesn’t syncopate the wine, that is what I hear a man say on TV once about a tourist wine. My boy now was wining correct, but just a little … off.

  When we eye make four in that darkness I wasn’t sure it was really me he was watching. I is just a ordinary girl, nothing special, even in my piece-of-pants and my vest tie up under my breast. It had plenty woman in the band. Tall woman, short woman, thick woman, thin woman, but I was just a ordinary brown skin girl. Not too fat, not too slim, all right breast and bambam and my face not too bad but me ain’t no beauty queen. A man like that, I expect he wining on a Anya or a Wendy—you know them Miss Universe type?—some celebrity with a bess body and pretty pretty face. When I turn around and see is really me he eyeing up, I feel kind of surprise but I didn’t ‘fraid. It was J’Ouvert, my time, and although the band didn’t even start moving yet all of we was around the big truck in we scraps and nightie and gorilla mask and what have you, wetting each other down with body paint from the bottle what they give we with we costume. I saying costume but it wasn’t like a real Carnival costume with feathers and glitter like you must be see on TV; it was just a vest or a jersey and a bottle of paint and instructions for how to tie the piece of cloth they give we. I put my cloth on my head so my hair wouldn’t get paint on it; that body paint is hell to wash out of your hair, you know.

  You looking confused. I forget; you never was in a J’Ouvert, so you wouldn’t know. Is Kansas you say you from? Let me go back a little and tell you about J’Ouvert.

  J’Ouvert does happen on Carnival Monday, before the sun come up. Long time it used to start all two o’clock in the morning and thing but nowadays it does start from four. Still dark, and you could get in a good three hours of wining down the road behind a truck or pushing a steelband before it get hot and you want to crawl back in your bed before the pretty mas come out for their day in the sun. J’Ouvert morning, people like me does put on old clothes, or make a ridiculous costume—this year a see a woman dress up in a high-neck lace gown with two big, big horn on she head, and a sign in she hand saying “Colonialist Devil”—and plenty man does come out in their mother nightie and duster, their granny old wig, and a enamel posie—what you mean you don’t what is that? A posie is a chamber pot—posie in their hand to hold the mud or the paint or whatever the band sharing to put on your body. I for one was in a scandalous short pants and the vest the band give me. I did done put on some paint—it was red this year, because the band was name “Red Madness”—and some strangers pass and wipe me down with other color paint, white and green and neon pink, I think. Well that is what I could see. God alone know what was on my backside.

  People was wining already, warming up for when the truck start to roll down Ariapita Avenue toward town. Some of we done drunk, either from the night before or from the flask of red rum we had chook in we back pocket. Okay, that was me. Every J’Ouvert I does buy a hip flask of Old Oak, even though I doesn’t normally drink. I hitting that since three o’clock when I meet the band, chasing the rum with water I had in a wineskin on a string around my neck. Fire in my throat and fire in my belly, a J’Ouvert warrior ready to chip along the cold pitch of the road to wine, jam and generally behave like I never christen. You have to understand that J’Ouvert is the time for that. You could do what, nobody not watching you, nobody not judging you. Everybody in a glass house when it come to J’Ouvert and bad behavior, so nobody not pelting no stone. All of we come out with one thing in mind: to behave wuthless and to have a time; we leave we good behavior home, whether we is banker, maid or businessman. That same fellah on TV say how J’Ouvert is the great equalizer.

  I hear a story a time about a German woman who pick up a vagrant in J’Ouvert, yes. He wine on she and she wine back and next thing you know she clean him up when Carnival done and carry he with she on a plane back to Munich or Berlin or wherever it was. That might be just a story, but I could believe it. When I look around that morning, I couldn’t tell who was vagrant, who was decent father of three with a house in West Moorings. All of we nasty alike and have no behavior whatsoever.

  I did drink about a quarter of my flask when I spot my boy with he off-key wine. I was mad to go and show him how to do it properly, but like I say, man like that I expecting have a bess ting with him, and a ordinary woman like me ain’t even on he radar. But next thing you know my boy turn around and I feel them eyes on me. Eyes blacker than the midnight sky, strange in that whitish face. I accustom to white people with blue eyes, like yours, but he own was pitch black. I look around to see who he watching so but it didn’t have nobody behind me. Was me he staring down, like if he feel me staring he down and badtalking he wine, and he want to challenge me. Next thing you know he right in my face, doing a little wine and jook and nearly touching me with them smooth, bronze color legs. I take a little step forward and we hips meet and that was it. I could of been that German woman wining on a vagrant, for all I know—except it doesn’t have no white vagrant in Trinidad. But he could of been anything. A drugs man, a murderer, a thief. I didn’t care. It was J’Ouvert, my head was bad and this nice nice man was wining on me. Not Anya or Wendy. Me.

  That is how we pair off. My friends who I come with watch the play and ain’t say boo, they just leave the two of we.

  How you mean if they was worried? I’s a big woman and I could handle my stories. Plus too we in a band with a couple thousand people so they figure safety in numbers, nah. Me and the man like we hips glue together and he hypnotizing me with them black black eyes, them midnight sky eyes, and I couldn’t look away.

  The band start to move and he come behind me, hands gripping my hips and he keep grinding up on me in that off-key rhythm until I come to a full stop as if to tell him, “Wait.” I start to wine slow and deliberate, reaching behind me to hold he bottom and force him to match my beat. I nearly hear the click w
hen it fall in place for him, and he finally get it right. After that was clockwork. He wine like a born Trini, and I wine right back. We start to move down the road just behind the truck, in a thick grap of people who doing just like we. Under the heavy pumping beat of the soca music you could hear we foot chipping as one, thousands of sneakers and slippers and shoes shuffling on the road, that shh-shh-shh-shh that is the sound of a Carnival band on the move. We was in the belly of J’Ouvert.

  Past French Street, past Lapeyrouse Cemetery, past the ice factory; we on Park Street now, heading for Green Corner, and every now and again I taking a shot from my flask and a sip of water to chase the rum. By Frederick Street I was good drunk on the rum and the music and the winery and the sky start to get light, that hazy glow you does see just before the sun come up. All this time we never say a word, but we bodies communicating with every slow grind of we waist. We was chipping in time and we never miss a beat. Even when we meet up another band on the route and all kind of frowsy strangers try and thief a wine on we, we hold on tight and come through it still join up like Siamese twins. One band was “Cocoa Devils,” and them paint we down with sweet-smelling brown cocoa; another was “Pure Mud” and they give we a good bath with this yellowy-brown wet clay, slippery and cold like ice in the morning air.

  Paint and mud starting to dry on my skin and I getting chilly; goose bumps raise up on my skin and my boy pass he hands on my arms to warm me up. He had big hands, warm and smooth smooth like the rest of he body; he skin like a baby, soft soft and not a hair, not a button on it. I turn to face him and put my hand on he chest. He had a jewel in he chest; I say is a piercing—you know how everybody and their mother have some kind of piercing now. It was a dark green stone, shining even in that half-light. As my palm touch it I feel a strange sensation, as if for a second a electric shock run up my arm and straight to my brain. I see stars. Stars swirling around in a blackness that didn’t have no end. Easy easy he move my hand from the stone and I come back to myself and see the crowd sweeping past we on all sides and we stand up like a rock in the middle of a river. He turn me around and we start to wine again.