Filter House

by Nisi Shawl

  “No, I didn’t. Didn’t have to. Door was left open.”

  “I locked it.”

  “Musta been someone else come in after you. Maid.”

  “Annie would never neglect a thing like that.”

  “And your husband wouldn’t never enter this here room less you asked him in. I know. You tooken care a him good as your servants. Wouldn’t never believe he married no colored gal, neither, less you told him so.

  “Or would he?”

  She rose slowly, her hands swinging naturally at her sides. The right one held a gun now, but not as if she planned on doing anything immediate with it. “Why don’t you stop making these threatening remarks and tell me what it is you want?”

  “Honey? Are you coming to bed now?”

  “I’ll be in soon, Chester,” she called back, her voice loose and flowing as her hair.

  “Who’s that I hear talking to you?” The man on the other side of the open door sounded nearer now.

  “It’s only Annie. She’s helping me practice my part for the church play.” She used the gun like a traffic cop’s baton, waving the youth toward another door opposite the one her husband stood behind. It was shut. He opened it on a tiny bathroom, obeyed her gestures, and went inside.

  “I thought you gave her the evening off.”

  “I guess she didn’t have anywhere to go. We’re as good as done, so I’ll be right in, after I use the necessary.” She stepped into the small room and closed the door behind her with a soft click. An overhead light came on as her hand fell from a wall switch.

  The gun’s muzzle pointed at him, almost, it seemed, of its own will. The opening glittered like an animal’s eye. “I asked you before,” she said. “What—?”

  “What I want?” The stories he had heard agreed on one thing: this was no one to trifle with. He hesitated before the truth surged out of him, a wave desperate to reach an unknown shore: “I want to play.”

  “Play what?”

  All the music, the sweetness, sharpness, rolls and riffs and changes he’d ever heard swept through his mind. All the instruments. Choose one. She was waiting. “Piano.”

  She looked at the mirror over the white washstand, smiled at a joke shared with her reflection. “And what present did you bring me?” The gun still pointed in his direction.

  “It—in my coat pocket—I’ll—” He moved to ease open the satin-hemmed slit above his breast, and her eyes were on him again.

  “Hands,” she said. Reluctantly, he started to raise them. “No!” The gun waved impatiently. “Hold them out here, where I can see them!” Barely a tremor showed as he stretched his forearms level with the floor: his fingers, long and thin, black as twigs burnt bare by autumn, nails ridged and trimmed to neat ovals.

  “Turn em over.”

  His palms, rose creased with brown, oblongs seeming small in contrast to the fingers’ spidery length.

  “All right. In the tub. Take your shoes off.”

  He hesitated.

  “Take them off first, then get in.”

  He wore black lace-up Oxfords, ancient but well-polished. He left them on the white tiles, climbed over the tub’s curled porcelain lip, slipping awkwardly in his socks.

  “Now strip.”

  He did nothing, as if unsure he’d heard her right.

  “Off with your clothes. Unless you brought a spare set.”

  He shrugged out of his jacket. A good jacket, dark grey with a faint crosshatching of light blue. Folded it carefully, then looked around to see what to do with it. Balanced it on the tub’s edge, at one tightly curving end. Loosened his tie and slipped it off from under the collar of his pale grey shirt. Unbuttoned that. Stopped. The thin cotton tee he wore beneath it barely veiled the darkness of his chest. “What—”

  “Lie down.” She swept the gun’s muzzle sideways, describing a horizontal line for him to imitate. “You want to keep your clothes on, that’s fine by me. I don’t care about them if you don’t.

  “Me, I like what I’m wearing.” As she said this, she unbelted the kimono and let it slide off her shoulders. Beneath, she was naked. She held herself the way she now held the gun: purposefully. The parchment of her skin glowed like a lampshade, color breaking out where the candle’s flame came too close to it, burning it pink and red and brown and black. Her fingernails, the taut tips of her breasts, her hair—

  “Lie down.”

  Limbs weak, he did as she said. It was easiest that way. He curled up on his right side, the drain gaping at the upper edge of his peripheral vision. He heard a cool, ceramic whisper as she stepped into the tub and slid down beside him. Facing him, lying on her left, looking directly into his eyes. It was a tight fit.

  He regretted every stitch he wore.

  Laughing, she lifted the gun above both their heads, rotating it as if displaying a rare device for his edification. Nickel glinted in the fixture’s light. It seemed to be a perfectly ordinary gun.

  “Where do you want me to put them?” she asked.

  At first he could only gape at her, head empty as the tub’s drain. “You gonna put— Put what?”

  “The bullets. The magic.” She frowned as if trying to remember the answer to a tough question. “You want me to shoot you, right?”

  “No! No! I ain’t said nothin like that—” Sweat slicked his skin, robbing him of traction as he scrabbled at the tub’s sides, trying to get out. He opened his mouth wide, wider, sucking in air for a scream. She filled it with the gun’s muzzle.

  “You want to sing? All right.” The knuckles stood out sharply on her gun hand. The frown deepened, cutting two deep verticals in her low forehead.

  “Wait—”

  The world did as she commanded.

  “My present. I haven’t even seen it, yet; maybe it’s not enough. Not worth what you want. A hero’s death. A musician’s life. Let me have a look first.”

  He lay motionless.

  “Go on, get it out for me.” She pulled the gun’s barrel from his mouth and swung it in a short arc, indicating the youth’s jacket resting on the bathtub’s rim. Then aimed it back at him.

  Cold with drying perspiration, the youth raised one arm and dragged the coat down on top of him. From its inner pocket he removed a posy of pink and yellow rosebuds, their stems arranged in a crystal vial capped with a gold screen. The flowers were in not-quite-pristine condition, a few barely-opened petals crushed and darkened.

  “Oh,” she said. “Well, it is the thought that counts…under these circumstances… And at least you brought something.…” She took the posy with her left hand, inhaling deeply.

  “You—you mean you ain’t gonna shoot me?” He levered himself up on one elbow, shivering slightly.

  “Shhh! Hold still now. I don’t know if I should. Let me think. Lie back down.” Through all this she’d kept the gun trained on him, unwavering.

  He lowered himself to the tub’s floor.

  “I like you,” she said, smiling. “Even if you did lie to me about the door being open—”

  “Might as wella been—”

  “All right. Tell you what.” She cocked the pistol’s hammer, pointed it at the ceiling. The light. “Best I can do—”

  An explosion. Brightness. Blackness.

  Combustion combines opposites: Earth and air. Chemical secrets release the energies held inside dull matter.

  Some fires are fast. Some slow as rust. Consumption. Greed. Fever. Lust.

  As if he can look through himself. As if the flame has licked away what no longer matters. Left only that loud sound, blowing through him. Lines of incandescence leading to and from his heart.

  He’s still in the tub. With her. She still holds the gun. A whiff of powder, the curled question mark of smoke static in the air above them. And how can he tell that? In the dark?

  The radiant dark. Emptiness shining. The shot’s echoes dying down, the light fixture’s glass tinkling into silence. Then the sound of the door opening. The darkness vanishes and everything he i
magined seeing in it: Smoking gun. Naked woman. Tub. Walls, ceiling—he’s in another place. A bed, in another room, illuminated from outside by whatever lies beyond. Only the door remains, and the shadow standing just inside it. A woman’s silhouette.

  “Laura?”

  “That ain’t my name. You feelin any better, Chester?”

  “Yeah. What happened—” He tries to raise his head. Like hoisting a steamroller on pulleys made from putty. Gives it up.

  “Guess you must not be all the way recovered yet, you don’t remember what your wife called.”

  “My—what?” The woman walks toward him and switches on a lamp sitting on a table beside the bed—his bed? His wife? The lamp’s bulb seems too dim, but it glares in his eyes anyway, obscuring her face.

  The mattress tilts, slopping his stomach to one side. She’s sitting on its edge. Now he can see. Her face is—not exactly, no, but a lot like Laura’s. Same skin tone as when she showed up at jam sessions, same general shape. So what’s different? He can’t put his finger on it—brows thicker? Hairline higher? Faint imprints around the mouth and eyes…

  “At least you talkin English again.” The woman presses her lips together. Are they fuller? Thinner? “You shammin? Can’t a forgot. I’m your Annie, and—” with the firmness of a doe licking a newborn fawn into shape “—we married in the eyes of God and the law. Five years now.”

  Five years. He would have been, what, twelve years old? Eleven? Frantically he tries to get up, get out of bed. He has to find a mirror. Hoarse, hacking coughs convulse him, and the woman—Annie—shoves pillows under his back, props him up, holds him like a baby against her rose and coral housecoat. At last he quiets down a bit and she offers him a drink—water, he assumes, and swallows a mouthful of vodka. That sets him off again, though not so bad as before. This time, Annie only watches.

  And when she most likely thinks he isn’t looking, slips something from her pocket, something small and shiny, with a nickel glint to it, and slides it inside the drawer of the table by their bed.

  He gets his voice back. “How long—”

  “You been out two days, Chester. I was all set to take you in the hospital.” She strokes one pajama-clad shoulder in a gesture meant to soothe him. Which is when he realizes his shirt and pants are gone, and the things he’d carried in their pockets. Wallet, keys, money. Gone. Where? His wife will know. With an effort he refocuses on what she’s trying to tell him.

  “—ain’t missed one gig, that’s what you so concerned about. Rehearsals, sure, but you gonna be fine for that agent tomorrow afternoon. He ain’t interested in no one else in the band, anyway, even I figured out that much.”

  The agent from New York. Tomorrow afternoon. How can he have forgotten? He knocks the covers off clumsily, attempts to swing his feet to the carpet. The sheets cling to his nightclothes, charged with electricity from rubbing up against them in the dry air of a Chicago winter. “Help me, Annie.”

  “Chester, you can’t get up now! You a sick man!”

  The wallpaper wobbles, its printed flowers waving in an invisible breeze. “I need to practice. Help me. Gotta get me to the piano. Then I be all right.”

  Slowly, leaning on Annie’s arm, he makes his way to the living room, where the slick, black, baby grand waits. It had cost a lot of money, and it takes up too much space in their little mortgaged-to-the-hilt South Side bungalow.

  In its polished surface he sees himself. Hair dark, chin like a chisel. He is young yet. Yes. Still young, only twenty-five. Why has he been worried?

  Sick, that’s why. Annie uncovers the keys and he lets his hands fall where they want to be. A song based on a nursery rhyme. The music rises up, baking the ache from his bones. “Lavender Blue.” A Latin beat, a rumba, banishing the chill pouring in off the big front window, and his fingers sparkle; they’re laughing, they’re living sunbeams, and all the colors of the spectrum break through him like he was a prism, all the music, the sweetness, sharpness, rolls and riffs and changes, coming out of him. He is the king.

  She leans on the piano’s shining lid, relaxing slowly, melting like wax against her own reflection, arms stretching out softly, head resting on one side, ear to the sounding board, eyes closed, absorbing it. Now she is queen.

  When the song is over, he looks up at her, at the way her lashes flutter open on black depths too profound ever to be filled, and allows himself, for the last time, to remember the way things were before. And just for that final moment, to wonder why she has struck such an uneven bargain with him.

  She was always pretty much a mystery to everyone.

  The Beads of Ku

  There was a woman named Dosi, and she gave birth to twins. At first both were weak and sickly, but the boy died, and then the girl prospered and grew strong. She was a good girl, willing to work hard, and with good sense.

  When she was still very young, Fulla Fulla helped her mother in the market, running messages for her and bringing her the news. “Mother,” she would say, “the women of Dit-ao-lane are over by the baobab, looking for cloth to make beautiful robes. Quick, give me that basket of feathers, that I may tempt them with bright colors.” And Fulla Fulla would run to the river and sell all the feathers very dear. Or she would return from an errand leading a row of porters bearing salt. “Mother,” she would say, “I have traded all our leather for this salt, and I got it very cheap. The merchant did not want to take it on with him and pay another duty. He did not know that in two days the taxes will be lowered because the King himself will be trading his salt for a new shipment of gold from the South.…” And this was when Fulla Fulla was just a little girl.

  As the woman Dosi grew older, she began more and more to stay at home and to leave all the business to Fulla Fulla. At last she became ill, and though Fulla Fulla nursed her mother diligently, she died. Fulla Fulla grieved for her mother, but she did not let grief make her weak or stupid. Those who tried to take advantage of her state soon found that this was so. It was harder than ever to read her face beneath the grey ashes of mourning. And though her eyes were red and filled with tears, they missed nothing. So Fulla Fulla kept her place in the market and did well.

  One day as she walked in the market she passed by the stall of a hunter selling cooked meat. “If I buy all your meat,” she asked him, “will you give it to me for such-and-such a price?” The price she named was very low.

  The hunter was a simple man, not a trader, and he sold the meat to her at the price that she had named. Then she took all that she had bought to the other side of the market and sold it for many times the price she had paid.

  The next market day the hunter was there again, and she did the same thing. But the time after that he was not there. When he came again she asked him why he had not come to the last market. He said, “I hate to come to the city, where there are so many people, and noises, and ugly smells. I knew it was the market day, but I could not bear to leave the savannah. Besides, I was sure that you would buy all my meat, whenever I brought it.” And he shrugged his big strong shoulders.

  This gave Fulla Fulla an idea. “Come to my house,” she said, “and I will fix you a fine meal from your own meat.” The hunter was happy to hear this. He had lost his first wife many years ago, and he had not had a really fine meal since. He ate up everything Fulla Fulla cooked. When they were alone, he made her his wife.

  For a while, the hunter and Fulla Fulla were very happy together. He stayed out on the savannah, hunting as long as he liked. When he wanted to, he came into the city and had a fine meal. He brought her all his meat, and she sold it in the market for a good price, and they prospered and grew very rich. But one market day, the hunter came to the city and Fulla Fulla was not there. He sent messengers all through the market. None found her. Angry and worried, the hunter stayed in the house. He did not know what to do. He felt helpless, and also he did not like to spend so much time cramped up in town. But just as he was getting ready to give up, his wife walked in the door. “Where have you been?” he
started to ask her. Then he noticed that she was wearing at her ears a certain kind of bead, called “the Beads of Ku.” Then he knew that she had been to the Marketplace of Death.

  When she heard that she had missed the market day, Fulla Fulla was upset. “Time has cheated me!” she said. “I spent only a little while there, but you say I have been gone for days. This must not be so.” She frowned in heavy thought. “I will ask my mother what to do.”

  At these words the hunter’s stomach grew cold with fear, and he tried to dissuade his wife from going again to Ku.

  But Fulla Fulla looked at him fondly. “You are a fine, great, man,” she said. “But you have no understanding of business at all. Of course I will go there again.” And she set about planning her next trip.

  The hunter returned to the savannah. He killed an antelope and two duikers. He saw many beautiful and restful sights, but he was ill at ease.

  When he returned to the house he found Fulla Fulla there. Again she had missed a market day, but this time she did not seem so concerned. “It’s easy what we must do,” she said. She handed him a little whistle. “You must always return to town a day before market and blow upon this whistle. Then I will be called back.” Good.

  So the hunter did as Fulla Fulla told him to do, and they were happy. But not so happy as before. Now he could not spend as much time hunting as he wished. He had to come back to the city every three days, to blow the whistle and call his wife from the Market of Death.

  Also, it seemed as if his wife was becoming a little strange. She had strange ideas, and she knew things one should not know, from talking to dead people. Whenever there was no one else around to see, she wore the Beads of Ku.

  She boasted to her husband of her dealings with the dead. “Those of Ku want very simple things,” she said. “For yams and cassava, they will trade ornaments of ivory! If I were a camel, I could carry enough goods to make us richer than the King himself.”

  “Why would a camel want to be rich?” he asked. Fulla Fulla laughed.