Time of the Locust

by Morowa Yejidé

  “Is everything OK with Sephiri?” Brenda asked again, louder.

  “It’s nothing bad. As a matter of fact—”

  “In what ways is he different now, Dr. Watson?”

  “Well, he’s drawing, which is something he’s been known to do before. But not like this. Nothing like this. What he did today . . . It’s just better discussed in person, Mrs. Thompson. I’d like to set something up with both of you as soon as possible. Today, if you can.”

  Brenda’s throat was dry, and she struggled to control her nerves. She wasn’t ready for more issues with Sephiri. She was already overwhelmed by the state he was in now. She could not do any of the things that mothers were normally compelled to do with their children in tow without grave consequences. Simple things like trips to the aquarium or the petting zoo. Even the parks held myriad challenges. She could not take Sephiri grocery shopping with her. All the smells and crowds at supermarkets seemed to trigger his mania. The beeps of the scan machines, the opening and slamming of cash registers, the incessant bell of the sliding automatic doors as customers came in and out seemed to disorient him, so that he became quickly agitated and broke into high-pitched keening, spinning, and knocking things over.

  If she attempted to troll the aisles, Sephiri would fixate on a row of something on a shelf, becoming as immobile as a statue, staring and staring, while she tried to pull him away. It took nearly an hour to put ten things into the shopping cart. Other times, he would take the melons, tomatoes, and green apples—always something round, anything round—from the produce bins and arrange them in a long line on the floor down the center of the aisle. If Brenda tried to stop him, he would rage and thrash around on the linoleum, with the old women shaking their heads in disgust and the young mothers looking on with thinly veiled arrogance and pity in their eyes. If one thing changed even slightly in her routine of getting him out of the house and in front of the stop where the van from the center came to pick him up, all efforts were lost to wild tantrums or “accidents” in his pants. What else could it be now? Brenda wondered. Weren’t the daily chases, the screams, the silence enough? She was already overwhelmed. There wasn’t room for more.

  “Mrs. Thompson? When do you think would be a good time?” the doctor asked.

  “I’ll call you back in a bit to arrange something,” Brenda said. Before the doctor could say another word, she hung up the phone.

  Brenda heard someone come into the large department space and settle in another cubicle somewhere beyond the view of her own. There was the sound of a photocopying machine sputtering to life. The doctor’s request for a meeting churned in her mind. What was to be arranged now?

  And his father . . .

  She thought of the day she’d received a petition for divorce from Horus’s attorney, thirty days after he had been interred at Black Plains Correctional Institute. “No contact from family.” That was what the note read that the attorney attached to the divorce papers according to Horus Thompson’s request. The attorney urged her to grant it, saying that it had been his “final wish.” She had not wanted to believe that the black ink on that line was his signature, the letters slanted and curled in that familiar way. But what was left to believe? Everything they did and planned together was swept aside in one day. The future of the child that was growing inside of her was doused by his father even before birth.

  She kept the divorce papers under her mattress for another six months before she was able to open the envelope and read the words, to stare at his signature again. She signed on the line and went to the bathroom to vomit. She signed the papers and screamed and cried in the shower, with Sephiri bawling in his crib in the next room, with the scalding water raining down on her scalp. Since then, her rage had burned down and was molten now. She was too tired, too weighted with unhappiness, to fuel a bonfire of hate anymore. She thought of her signed copy of the divorce papers, buried still in the basement, under the tiles she had ripped up with the end of a hammer, yellowing on the concrete foundation.

  Your son did something today . . .

  Brenda sank back in her office chair, her face newly coated with sweat. Sephiri. His very name meant “secret place.” And that had been true since his conception. She did not have the chance or the heart to tell Horus she was pregnant. After the verdict, after the devastation, Brenda spent days wandering the city and the grounds of the national monuments, haunting the botanical gardens and the corridors of art galleries. She stood in front of a hanging tapestry for hours at a museum, a sprawling emerald world of rolling hills and valleys of flowers, the Indian Ocean crashing on the shores of the South African coast. “They call it Sephiri,” a voice said from behind Brenda that day. A museum guide smiled at her when she turned around. “It means the hidden place that exists in your heart,” he said.

  And Brenda stared at the green tapestry and rubbed her pregnant belly for a long time after the guide had said this. In her mind, she walked into that tapestry, into the downy valley of tender grass and through the meadow of white arum lilies. She knelt at the foothills of Outeniqua and dug a hole with her hands. There she laid the life she was never to have with Horus to rest and covered it over with dark soil. For his body was laid in state someplace else. He was now buried beneath the barren, rocky soil of the Black Plains Correctional Institute, to asphyxiate slowly on what he had done, to starve from what he had left undone.

  These were things she once thought happened only to other men and women. And every time she looked at Sephiri’s face, the guilt of what she kept from Horus cut into her like bits of glass. Should she have told Horus about his son? As he was led away to face the beginning of the end of his life, should she have told him that a part of him would still linger among the living? Would that have offered him a final psalm to carry through the gates of oblivion? Or would telling him have quickened his death, killed him twice over with the knowledge of something that was evidence of both his power and his powerlessness? She didn’t know. She had never been able to understand which would have been better, and now she could only mourn what could never be salvaged.

  “Your boy, Horus,” Brenda whispered, looking at the calendar tacked to the wall of her cubicle, her tears blurring the date, her body numb. “What about Sephiri?”

  Night

  Sephiri awoke. He could hear the wail of a cargo train whistle in the night and the rhythm of its movement over the tracks. Hypnotic. Predictable. Soothing. He rolled over without opening his eyes and listened for something breathing, for he wanted to be certain that there was no creature hiding under the bed. Satisfied that he was safe, he opened his eyes and turned over onto his side and was startled by an ice-cold patch on the sheet. He had wet himself again. He tried to think about the steps. But he sometimes got it mixed up. Even after all this time, it was still like a puzzle: release, find toilet, urge. Or was it urge, find toilet, release? These were the kinds of things that didn’t order themselves, that did not have a place. They weren’t like the blocks or the green apples down the aisle. The steps couldn’t be touched. They couldn’t be handled. They weren’t like the medicine cabinet.

  The train horn sounded again, and Sephiri sat up. The train was going to the edges of green mountains, snaking through the plains of tall grass and brush, sliding by mirrored lakes. Sephiri stood up. There was position and sanctity at stake. There were things that needed his help, his facilitation in getting them back to where they needed to be in the world. The sodiums and the phosphates. The melons and the apples. The jars in the pantry. If he couldn’t keep them in order, he worried that he wouldn’t be able to manage the order of anything else. The things he could grasp and handle, at least. The rest was enigma. He took a step forward and smelled his reek, felt the clamminess of his wet pajamas against his skin. Should he try to change his clothes? He remembered then that there was a different lock on the medicine cabinet. Something shiny. He noticed it yesterday morning as his mother held him still and brushed his teeth in the mirror. There was something with a big
ring and a black wheel with numbers on the front, stabbed into something on the side. He remembered watching his mother spin that wheel thing. Was that how it worked? He hadn’t been able to concentrate with the fluoride froth in his mouth and the sound of the water running down the sink hole he wanted to explore. He was too distracted by the bottle of mouthwash and its emerald majesty, its greenish gleam against the white porcelain.

  He regretted all of that now. He could feel the tension rising in his head, the nausea in his stomach. He spun around until he was dizzy enough to calm down. He would have to pay close attention the next time. He would concentrate on the wheel and what was to be done with it. He would make sure to understand.

  Sephiri padded out to the dimly lit hallway. Silence. He liked it when the house was asleep, when all things were motionless with the night. He could enjoy the stillness of things that understood their place when it was not day. At night, there were fewer sights and sounds to take in. But he always found it difficult to sleep, and for as long as he could remember, the Land of Air filled him with so much when he was awake that when he tried to sleep, he could not hold it all. It overflowed and spilled out, and then he had to get up and find a way to clear and reorder his mind. He thought about his mother’s perfume bottles, amber everlasting. They were in her room, on the dresser, which was their correct plain of existence, and he headed toward his mother’s door. Not so long ago, he held them, caressed them, looked into their incandescent light in the rays of so many dawns. He lined them up along the dresser, atop the white lace, and lined them up again. The last time he was in his mother’s room, he thought to check if the amber was the same color as her skin. But in the moonlight coming through the windows, he could not be sure.

  So on that other night, Sephiri went over to his mother’s bed. He stood over her as she slept and struggled to see her eyebrows, the rounded chin, the twin pillows of her cheeks, the markers he had memorized. He was about to put the perfume bottle on the little soft mound of one of her cheeks, to match the color, as one might match paint to a section of canvas. But his mother woke up wide-eyed, and her face had shifted into something. He thought it looked something like the look she had when he mixed up the steps and urinated on the carpet. Or the times he wanted to feel physics by tossing ceramic plates across the room. But he couldn’t be sure.

  And he couldn’t tell if the look meant something bad or something good. It made him sad that he didn’t understand the faces the people made in the Land of Air. He wanted to feel good when he was with his mother, like the feeling he had when he was eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Satisfaction and bliss. He wanted to crawl inside the quiet she always seemed to have at the kitchen table, the humming sound she made when he sat in the tub as she washed him. The humming sound took away the feeling of touch. It gave the soap and water frequency and order. He wanted to find a way to conjure the seconds of that warm sun feeling that sometimes moved through him when she held him on her lap. When he could keep still. When he was able to block everything else out and let the warmth sheath him like a blanket. But he didn’t know how. They spoke different languages, he and his mother. And sometimes when he thought of this unfortunate situation, it made him want to cry.

  Sephiri took a few more steps in the dim hallway and looked down at the patterns in the Persian rug runner to make sure that they were where he had left them. He thought of that time he had hidden in the crook of a tree trunk in the woods of a park for a few hours. He needed to get away from the playground confusion, from the moving colors and the talking sounds. When his mother came with the men and the dogs to find him, he was counting the grooves in the wood and the termites. Someone pulled him out, and he screamed and kicked and rolled on the ground to tell them he wanted to stay there.

  After that, there were special meetings at the Autism Center, more talking. There was that Dr. Watson lady who spoke more to him while he colored. Requests to draw pictures. Requests to listen to sounds. To look at something. To listen to something. To touch swatches of brown fur and palm bunches of white cotton. There were pictures held up to him: butterflies, oranges, balls, chickens, rabbits. He banged his forehead on the table when he tired of the exercises. They tried to stop him but he banged anyway. Then he picked up the chair and threw it to make his point. He screeched and flailed. He jumped up and down. When that wasn’t comprehended, he stood immobile, statue-like, to get them to stop the chaos of the Land of Air.

  In the hallway, Sephiri paused at his mother’s bedroom door and walked on. He would leave the perfume bottles for now. He would not risk changing his sleeping mother’s face. His reek grew stronger and wafted up his legs, past his big-boy spot, where it was the most pungent. It filled his nose and the air around him. To distract himself from the smell, he thought of the grandfather clock at the end of the hallway just before the stairs and moved toward it. He loved to watch the pendulum swing and listen to the tick tock tick tock in the quiet of the night. The ticks and tocks knew their order. They understood their place. He pressed his ear to its mechanics, its genius and symmetry. The sound was like his favorite shape: a cube. A shape of perfection, with its height width depth balanced against itself, whole and complete. Like the night in the coat closet. When he was able to enter and close the door, before his mother could catch him, he was encased. He was protected by the sublimity of height width depth. That was how everything should be.

  When he had his fill of flawlessness, Sephiri turned from the clock and went to the stairs. One, two, three, four . . . He walked back up to the top to enjoy the start of the count, the repetition, the timing. Five, six, seven . . . It was then that the place he’d drawn on the piece of construction paper reappeared in his mind, the giant box like the coat closet. The flying creatures had been there, too, swarming in the sky above it. And there was the matter of the voice he’d heard that day. If he went back inside the coat closet, would he hear the voice again? Would he have more time to figure out whether the voice was really there and whether the voice knew anything about the place he drew in the picture? Maybe if he got close enough to it, he’d be able to understand. “Come here,” the voice had said. What did that mean?

  Air had limitations. Like the frozen things in the refrigerator that were too hard and stuck together to take apart. The extra peanut butter he wanted but couldn’t have. The milk he wasn’t allowed to drink because of the craze that came over him when he did so. The dancing blue flame that lived on top of the kitchen stove he was not permitted to touch, to play with. The static in the television he couldn’t pick up and hold (the screen kept getting in the way). Then there was the matter of the holes that he would never be able to explore because they were too small to fit him: the garbage disposal, the sink drain, the washing machine, that tunnel at the bottom of the toilet bowl, the air-duct vent, the little place where the pencils went into the sharpener. And worst of all, the locks on the medicine cabinet that kept trying to stop him from rescuing the boxes. There was always something standing in his way in the Land of Air. And now there was this voice in the clutter of this world to also decipher.

  Sephiri finished with the step counting and headed downstairs to the living room. A nightlight extended from an electrical socket. It looked like the flashlight of the anglerfish in the depths of Water, only dimmer. The curtains were drawn like huge blankets over the windows. He avoided the sofa, because to sit on it was to be enveloped, pulled down to the unknown depths of its brownish bulkiness to be caught by some long-fingered monster that lived inside. The man called Manden sat on the sofa a few times, and the sofa never got him. Nor did it ever bother his mother. Why? Sephiri wondered.

  He didn’t linger on the thought, because now the green carpet looked different without the lights on. He became frightened, and in his excitement, he couldn’t remember where the light switch was. It wasn’t the dark that worried him. It was the fear that something was different in the dark. In his mind, day things needed to stay day things and not change in the night. They oug
ht not try to become something else. Without the lights, he couldn’t see the legions of carpet fibers waving, a comforting reminder of the seaweed that grew where his friends lived.

  In the dark, the carpet looked like that enormous bog with the bestial amphibians—just like the ones in his picture books—waiting in the murk to grab him, beings that didn’t seem to belong to the Land of Air or the World of Water. In those first minutes when he was climbing into his boat to sail away from his troubles, they would watch him float off with ominous eyes. “Where do you think you’re going?” the cricket frogs would say. The mudpuppies and hellbender salamanders crowded around his boat, staring and hissing, so that his departure was slowed for having to shoo them out of the way. The newts and the dart frogs sat around smirking and laughing, and he could hear them for several hundred feet. Amphibians were ambiguous, Sephiri thought, shaking his head. Traitorous. Whose side were they on, anyway? His Water friends? The Air people? He had never been able to figure it out.

  But he had to be brave this time in the living room. He had to remember that this was the carpet, even in the night. It was his mother’s carpet, where he shouldn’t have an “accident.” To get to the cube-shaped black, he would have to overcome his fear and keep moving. He scaled the streaks along the wall cast by the nightlight, past the blankets in the windows and the boy-eating sofa, until he reached the coat closet by the front door. It was not locked, to his delight. There was a pile of coats and sweaters on the floor that had been there since the morning he’d lunged inside and pulled them from their hangers. He went in and closed the door behind him.