by Chris Abani
And when Peter was out. At work. The angel came. Sometimes it wore the face of Mary’s dead daughter. Sometimes Mary’s. Told her stories. How Peter had beaten the girl. Just months old. Because she wasn’t a boy. Beaten Mary. Until that night. When he threw her down the stairs. She fell on the baby she was holding. How the child died. Accidental, the coroner ruled.
And she wept as Mary warmed her limbs in the electric blanket. How Abigail would follow the red line in the snow. The electric cord becoming the umbilical for a new birth. A divine birth. And Mary’s tears would melt the snow. And Abigail would nod and whisper: I know. I know. I know.
And the sound of the words was a hoarse rasp. Formless.
And Mary would echo: I know. I know. I know.
And the sound was a woman crying in the snow.
Wrapping her guilt in an electric blanket. Wrapped around a girl slowly becoming a dog.
Now
XXIII
It was all grace.
Jumping down from the sphinx’s back, Abigail picked up the contents of her handbag and stuffed them back in. She paused over the book that lay where it had fallen open and she read:
A human being alone is a thing more sad than any lostanimal and nothing destroys the soul like aloneness.
She traced the words with the tip of her finger, stopping where the rain had smudged the phrase, the soul like, spreading the ink into an angel’s wings. She shut the book and opened it again at random. This was an old game she had played with the Bible as a child. To follow the guidance of whatever passage revealed itself. Fragments opened at the flyleaf, to Derek’s inscription.
Gentle Abigail, This book will show you that even thoughyou come from a dark continent place, you can escape your fate.Derek.
Then
XXIV
Fifteen days, passing in the silence of snow.
And she no longer fought when Peter mounted her.
Wrote his shame and anger in her. Until. The slime of it threatened to obliterate the tattoos that made her.
Abigail.
Then
XXV
One night.
Unable to stand it anymore, she screamed. Invoking the spirit of Abigail.
And with her teeth tore off Peter’s penis.
Then
XXVI
In the ensuing.
There was no panic. Just the angel unlocking her cuffs. And Peter bleeding. Reddening the snow on this dark and rebellious night. Peter dying.
“Go,” the angel said.
“Go,” Mary said.
Abigail ran out, half-naked, the severed penis clutched in her hand. Though the streets were crowded, only a few people noticed this gorgon with bloody mouth and hands, and the grisly prize she held up like a torch as she ran.
Time bled into the cracks on the pavement until a passing police car picked her up.
Now
XXVII
From across the water.
It seemed like an endless train was coming, clattering over the rails of Charing Cross Bridge. Sex. That was what trains and tunnels reminded Abigail of. And lust.
She thought of the Igbo name for train. There wasn’t one. Or maybe she had just forgotten. She had forgotten so much, lost so much. Derek once asked her what the Igbo word for horizon was.
“I can’t remember,” she said, wondering how without a name she could describe its curve and keep from falling off the edge of the world. These are the places where desire collects, she thought, lighting another cigarette. She took a handkerchief out of her pocket and blew her nose. She held it there long after she was done. It smelled good. Smelled of Derek. In that moment she felt him rush into her. Following closely after, the voice of an aunt who once told her she left her husband because of how he smelled.
“You can forgive a man a lot,” she said. “But not how he smells. The moment you can’t stand that, you can’t stand the man.”
So much lost.
Then
XXVIII
Derek was the social worker who came for her the next morning.
Abigail found it hard to believe that this short balding man could help her in any way. But there was a kindness about him that was reassuring. He sat across from her, blinking rapidly behind his glasses as he read her file. She wondered what was written there. Girl found with penis in hand? Claims to have bitten it off? Was silent, withdrawn, malnourished, with the onset of frostbite, otherwise fine?
“What’s your name?” he asked, putting down the file as though he didn’t trust it.
She stared at him. Sullen.
“Do you speak English?”
That stung and there was the brief flare of anger in her eyes. He smiled.
“I’m sorry,” he said. He had seen it. She was impressed.
Most people she knew never really looked at her.
“Are you thirsty?”
She nodded and he got up and left the room, returning with a cold can of Coca-Cola and a KitKat.
“Where are you from?”
She popped the tab and took a deep drink of the cold soda. Then she ripped the chocolate open and ate quickly, ravenously, noisily.
“Where are you from?” he repeated. His voice was kind. Soothing. Showed no impatience. He took off his glasses and polished them as he waited for her to answer. She played with the empty can. He got up. Left the room. Came back. A second can of Coke. Another KitKat.
“What is your name?” he asked as she ripped into the drink and food.
Finishing, she sat back, belched loudly. He laughed. She smiled.
“Hungry?’
She nodded. He got up. Opened the door.
“Come,” he said.
She followed him, through labyrinth corridors, into the belly of the hospital, to a canteen. He gave her a tray and followed with one of his own. He watched her with paternal tenderness as she filled it until there was no more space for food. He paid and followed her lead to a table by a window. Sipping at his tea, his only purchase for himself, he watched her eat. Neither spoke for the half hour it took her to finish the two steak pies, three packets of crisps, a BLT, a plate of French fries, two cupcakes, and a Chelsea bun. Finishing the second of two cans of ginger ale, she sat back and looked at him for a long time. He had been reading a book of poems and he put it down on the table.
“What are you reading?” she asked.
“Dylan Thomas. You want to hear?” Not waiting for a reply, he read a line, his favorite. “And death shall have nodominion.”
She nodded. Not Chinese poetry, but not bad, she thought, but said nothing.
“I’m Derek,” he said, offering her his hand to shake. She took hold of it, noting its softness, the faint smell of soap. She brought it to her cheek. She smiled. Then she put her head down on the canteen table and fell asleep, still holding his hand. He was still there when she woke up four hours later. His hand was numb, but he said nothing. She got up, stretched, yawning loudly. The canteen had closed. Apart from a cleaner pushing a mop reluctantly around the room, they were alone.
“I’m going to my room,” she said, leaning over the table and kissing him lightly on the forehead.
He sat in the gathering darkness, rubbing the spot where she had kissed him.
Now
XXIX
Even for the dead.
Second chances are a fact of life for the Igbo. A person who lived poor and was buried poor can, when a relative makes enough money, receive a second burial. Full of the pomp and grandeur reserved for the rich. So even in death, in Hades, the dead one can get a chance to taste the wealth that eluded him in his previous incarnation, perhaps sweetening the deal for his next one.
Why did these people know nothing of this? Of the complexities of life and how you can never recapture the way a particular shaft of light, falling through a tree, patterned the floor in a shower of shadows. You just opened your heart because you knew tomorrow there would be another shaft of light, another tree, and another rain of shadows. Each par
ticular. Not the same as yesterday’s. Not as beautiful as yesterday’s. Only as beautiful as today’s.
Even the dead knew this.
Then
XXX
The police search of hospitals had so far failed to turn up anyone with a missing penis.
Weeks passed and Derek visited her every day in the hospital where she was being held, although it felt more like a correctional facility. She knew it was his job, but with time she liked to pretend that he was her friend and that he came to see her because he wanted to.
They did become friends and gradually she opened up to him, told him a little about her life. He tried to put the puzzle together. Mother died during childbirth. Child probably abused by successive male relatives, ran away from home one night clutching that terrible legacy. Not uncommon. But no matter how hard he pressed, the memory of Mary’s eyes at the door on the first night of her rape kept Abigail from telling him or the police where to find Peter.
Derek’s colleagues recommended psychiatric treatment in a confined facility, but he fought them. He didn’t believe she was crazy. Meanwhile, the search for her parents turned up nothing. Even the name she gave, Abigail Tansi, drew a blank. It was like she didn’t exist. And she didn’t, because Peter had used a fake passport and a forged visa to bring her into the country and she was registered everywhere under that fake name, a name she had forgotten.
She was a ghost.
Now
XXXI
The comfort of simple things.
Coffee percolating. Cinnamon buns warming oven and home. Anicecold Coca-Cola on a hot day. Licking out the mixing bowl. Chocolate.
Childhood.
It was perhaps the one thing Abigail had never really had, and yet truly needed. Yet somehow, to be nostalgic in this way for a thing never experienced.
Not that anyone was to blame, she thought, blowing smoke rings that dissipated before they were quite formed. These things just happen. Ije uwa, as the Igbos would say. One’s walk in this life. Interesting that the Igbo don’t believe the path to be fixed, or even problematic. Destiny isn’t a deck of cards stacked up against you. It is the particular idiosyncrasies of the player, not the deck or the dealer, that hold the key. Personality always sways the outcome of the game.
She stubbed out the cigarette on the broad concrete balustrade she was leaning on, the ash-heavy tip drawing strange lines and squiggles. Random.
The memory.
Myth, yet still truer than any lie.
An old woman her father took her to. A witch. To exorcize this devil of a longing in her, his daughter. This longing for death and the ways of the dead. A wanton melancholy that was a deep wound keeping her from life. The old woman’s song that day that wasn’t a day but a dream:
The mind is a bag, we each wear it differently. A palm cancontain a star and yet we search for nothing. Here, child. Here.This is the heart.
And then, cutting strange lines and squiggles with a knife tip in the soot-covered earth by her hearth, sang on.
The heart is a cut. If there is only one opening, it grows wideand we die. Here I cut many openings, child. More than fifty.Straight and wavy. You will bleed many joys, child. How do yousay to a bird, there is no more singing? Feed it a peppercorn.
Then plunging the knife into the flames licking the hearth’s edge, she brought it up and cut Abigail twice on the face. On the left side, a straight line. On the right, a wave. Less than an inch long. Enough to break the skin, the hot metal cauterizing. Then laughing, she asked Abigail’s father to buy Abigail some jewelry. A bracelet. Some earrings.
Absently rubbing her finger along the two lines on her face, the only marks on her body she hadn’t cut herself, she wondered what happened to that jewelry.
She thought of her father hanging from a ceiling. The taut rope cutting the world into two: the moment before life and the moment before death. And in that rope, she wondered, was there the memory of her mother?
And what would be the line for her?
Derek?
Abigail?
A line is a lie. Who can tell what it will open onto?
Then
XXXII
It was Molly. It was Derek’s wife.
And how many kingdoms had been lost for sugar? Or taken. The English knew all about that. About the slavery of desire. And so it was that the cocoa that Derek made to help Molly sleep, not sweet enough, led her downstairs.
Before death. And certainly before hell, there is always descent. Going. Down. Then death. And hell. Hardly a breath apart.
Turning the knob, opening. The door, opening. And there was Abigail, rump on the edge of the kitchen table, skirt up around her waist, naked breasts rubbing pert lines of sweat up and down Derek’s chest, ankles locked around his back. Lost in the hot damp of Abigail: Derek. And over his shoulder, the women locked eyes. Abigail smiled.
Then Molly’s scream. The stab. The look. Death. The look and the collapse onto the linoleum floor. Soft. Slow. Just as Abigail would have imagined it. An autumn leaf. Falling. Cocoa, like old blood, spilling down the front of Molly’s pale blue dressing gown. Rusting. Derek. Turning. Seeing his wife falling, even as his hips still jerked their urgent need. Then his mouth opened to call her name, screamed “Abigail!” instead, as he exploded into her.
Before he could pull up his trousers, Molly was gone.
Running down the street. Night. Late. Dressing gown stained with the bleeding of her pain. And then the police later. Derek looked cowed. Molly shamed, perhaps a little regretful. Abigail fought the blanket and the policewoman wrapping it around her. Fought the annihilation she could feel coming. The cold steel around Derek’s wrists wrapping themselves around her heart.
“Hush, my love,” he said. “Hush.”
Then night and rain. And the policewoman soothing her: There, there.
In her room. Back at the hospital. Still raining. In the distance, Nina Simone on some cleaner’s radio. I put a spellon you. In the distance.
Had her mother known this particular pain?
It didn’t seem possible. More likely that she was becoming herself, this Abigail. In this particular moment, in this particular way. As particular as the dots burning across her body, mapping a constellation.
Now
XXXIII
Revenge is a raven.
Feathers blackened from hate. And Molly was relentless in her pursuit. Shame turning to the certainty of faith.
The reprisals were swift.
Derek was fired from his job and brought up on charges for the abuse of a minor. Nothing Abigail did helped. Her impassioned denial. Her letter saying it was her fault. Her choice. But they said they were doing this to protect her. That she didn’t know what choice was. But she did. She who had been taken and taken and taken. And now the one time she took for herself, the one time she had choice in the matter, it was taken away. Maybe, she thought, maybe some of us are just here to feed others.
She struck match after match, watching their brief phosphorous flare. No, she thought, maybe I am not here as food, but to live for one phosphorous moment. No, she thought, bringing the flame of the last match to the tip of a cigarette, maybe I just light the fuse of my own destruction.
Forbidden to see or speak to Derek, she could only watch, heart on fire, as his disgrace was finalized publicly. Unable to comfort him, to take the look from his eyes when she saw him in court. The shame and the blame. No, she wanted to scream, no, my love, my heart. This was my choice. Damn this world, she thought, though she didn’t really blame anyone. Things were just the way they were. Besides, how does a hunter tell a vegetarian lion from the rest? This time a peppercorn will not suffice.
And the social worker who bumped into her in the hallway of the court as she watched Derek dragged away to await sentencing. Guilty. Guilty. Thin-lipped and angry, the woman bumped into her, and looking from Abigail to Derek and back, and mistaking the anguished look on Abigail’s face, said to her: Don’t you worry, sister, that monste
r is going away for a long time. And then the anguished look on the social worker’s face as Abigail’s not inconsiderable right hook connected with her nose.
Looking down at the terrified woman, she licked the blood on her knuckles.
But even that sacrifice hadn’t been enough. It was just like the Igbo said. The sacrifice is always commensurate to the thing wished for. Sometimes a lizard will do, sometimes a goat, or a dog, sometimes a cow or buffalo. Sometimes, a human being.
That day, she knew she would never see Derek again.
But her love was the full measure of her decision.
As she blew smoke into night and the river, she knew, this decision was hard.
Now
XXXIV
A lie always sounds better told in English, her people said.
The heart knows the truth of this betrayal. The wish, the courage, it all falls away before the heart’s lie. The realization that she could not live without Derek was not as sudden and surprising as her difficulty in the face of this task. Here she was trying to find the strength to save him.
She looked down at the river, then at the cigarette. A tug sounded its foghorn and the wind picked up. With a sigh she flicked the stub at the darkness and followed it.
Acknowledgements
Blair Holt, who never lets me be less than the artist I am sometimes afraid to be. Percival Everett, to whom nothing is inconceivable. Cristina Garcia, Aimee Bender, Steve Isoardi and Jeannette Lindsay, Ron Gottesman, PB Rippey, Johnny Temple, Johanna Ingalls, Kate Gale, Andrea Tuch, Parissa Ebrahimzadeh, Peter Orner, Douglas Humble, Johanna Parker, and Kristen Bonkemeyer.
The first finished draft of this book was completed in Marfa, Texas, while on a very generous Lannan Foundation Writers Residency. Thank you for always supporting and believing.
