“You’ll remember for me, won’t you? The important parts of me. Besides, the only thing left I know that’s real is my voice. And you.”
“Me too. But inside,” said the boy.
“Me too. Deep down inside,” said the man.
“My name is Sephiri.”
“I know.”
“Oh . . . but how?”
The man looked intently at the boy. “I knew you before you were born.”
Sephiri was filled with wonder. He looked back at the shore.
The man pointed to the low, rolling sand mounds. “It’s OK to go back sometimes, you know. Sometimes that’s the way through.”
They floated on and landed in the shallow waters of the shore. They sat together in the boat and looked at the dunes. The tide came in again, and Sephiri knew that the boat would soon float out again. He thought of the warm bed in his room. His stomach churned with hunger at the thought of a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And there was the smell of coconut oil and cinnamon. Always. These were guilty comforts, and Sephiri was not proud that he had stopped to consider them in the midst of such a time of uncertainty. But maybe if he tried . . .
Sephiri got out of the boat and stood in the shallow water. He turned to the man. “But where will you go?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” said the man, and he was not bothered by the thought.
Sephiri looked at the horizon. “There is a line,” he said, pointing to the beyond. “The Great Octopus once told me about it. He said it marks the beginning and ending of all things.”
“What is it like?” asked the man.
Sephiri shrugged. “The anglerfish are the only ones who have gotten close enough to guess. The dolphin told me the others were afraid. They said it’s like a great mirror that goes on forever.”
“A mirror?”
“At least, that’s what they said it looks like. But they didn’t want to get too close.”
“Oh,” said the man, staring at the horizon. There was a distant humming sound. There was a sudden breeze, and the ocean ebbed and flowed.
The waves grew higher and chilled Sephiri’s shins. “Will you go there?” he asked.
“Perhaps,” said the man.
“But what if you can’t find the shore again? This place is a big place.”
“Call to me, and I’ll follow your voice.”
“You’ll hear me?”
“I promise.”
And so the boy turned to go, and the man watched him walk over the sand and disappear.
Promises
The locust eggs continued incubating and birthing, and each new clan tunneled its way to the surface, prepared to live and die in this way, generation after generation . . .
Horus watched his son vanish from his sight, and it was a long time that he sat in the boat staring at the place where the little one had been standing just a moment ago. He was filled with an indescribable joy and longing. He distilled the sound of the boy’s voice and imprinted the little brown eyes, pensive and wide, into his soul. These he would never forget. And he would remember the shore, this shore, always.
The tide rose higher still, and the boat headed out without being directed to do so. The sun once again moved across the sky. Horus sailed out on the water toward the line that the boy spoke of. Time melted into the waves. One moment was a day. One day was a lifetime. He lay down on his back in the little boat and looked up. The billowing sky lowered over him like a veil of chiffon, and it looked as if it was close enough to touch. He reached his hand up and felt the cool slip of atmosphere.
And then from afar, the locusts appeared. Horus heard them first, then he saw them in their countless multitudes roll closer and closer, a swarming, boiling mass. At last, they arrived above his head and hovered there. With their unremitting hum, the locusts spoke to him of the time of change, when today becomes yesterday and tomorrow becomes what is to be. They spoke of a universal law: life is a series of choices, and time is a series of lives. And when Horus had taken in all there was to take, when he absorbed the truth, both a poison and a cure, the locusts dispersed and were gone.
He sailed on.
The rays of the yellow sun warmed his head. He watched it move once more across the sky. One moment was a day. One day was a lifetime. Then he came to a place where the boat stopped of its own accord. Horus inched his head to the lip of the boat’s side and looked down. Bright shimmering light rose from something below, blinding him. He sat up and leaned over the side of the boat for a closer look. There, reflected in a great mirror, he saw his face and his hunched back and his battered head. More of his memory faded, and other things became clear.
Horus looked deeper at his face in the water. “I promise,” he said to the reflection. “I promise to come back again, to start again.” And when he blinked in the awesome gleam, he saw a hawk, magnificent with plumes of black and gold. He would take this form, his heart decided. He would soar the sky. He would land on the shore when called by the boy that is him and not him. He would wait for the time when he could fly again.
Disappearing Acts
Crowded deep in the earth, the locusts rubbed against one another and signaled exodus. And even the dormant incubating nymphs knew that they could no longer remain there . . .
Jimmy Eckert rode the elevator down to his lair. As he descended, the silence poured into him like a thick oil, filling his throat and plugging his ears. The kind of quiet he had grown accustomed to was a salve to the gratings his ears endured on the outside. The special silence in the Secured Housing Unit was something he learned to welcome, even miss, for he had neither patience nor use for the sounds of men outside of Black Plains, busy with futility, loud in nothingness.
The rodents made a special kind of noise that mixed with the silence, which he carefully observed for abnormalities. In fact, it was those times when the rodents were more talkative than usual that concerned him. Sometimes they even talked to themselves in different voices. He’d heard them before, among the sounds of the fallen. It was as if each changed voice was not just another voice but another person. Different personalities inside of a mind. There was this one rodent who spoke anxiously of his family being dead. Of course they were dead. He had killed them all. But the rodent had somehow blocked all of that out and talked only of a man in the shadows who was trying to do him harm, who was responsible for the atrocities to his family.
Jimmy Eckert learned as a boy that so many things happened for so few reasons, too few to matter. It was love, hate, redemption, revenge, or fate. There were infinite combinations, but the ingredients were always the same. Still, this rodent would chant over and over about how he had tried to protect his family, but now the shadow man was after him. The rodent’s “friends” assured him, according to the rants he’d taken to just before they had to use the stun gun on him and put him in restraints, that they would help him, that they wouldn’t let him down. His friends would accompany him when the time came to kill the man in the shadows. They would meet him at his end and help him understand what his life had been. “They haven’t made it yet,” he would say at the end of his ravings. “But they’ll be here.”
One day, when Jimmy Eckert looked through the slot of his door, he smelled something fouler than usual. Something dead. When he opened the door, he found the rodent on the ground next to the toilet. Staring at the body, Eckert wondered if he died in his hallucination, with the different parts of his self, his hated life, bleeding out of him. The inmate had smeared feces all over the cell and all over his body, before whatever happened had happened. This was not too great a shock to Jimmy Eckert, since he had seen more than one phantasm, and the worst that dreams could create. But what sent tremors through him was the look of the dead man. Bluish-gray and mouth agape, he looked like a different person. His hair was blond, not brown. The fingers were long and contorted in the pose of death, not the stubby nubs they had been before. Jimmy Eckert stared at the body, unable to move. And there again came the difficult question
s with difficult answers. Who was this dead rodent on the floor, and whom had he been guarding all of this time? The prisoners could not walk through walls of concrete and doors of steel, he reminded himself. There were coercions and restraints. There were bars and locks. Gravity pulled them toward the core of the earth. Time held their minds in a vise. They were flesh and bone. And yet this dead man was not the man he had been guarding.
Years later, when Jimmy Eckert could stand to go to edges of his mind and think of it, for it frightened him, he wondered if the dead man he saw that day had been the man in the shadows that the inmate spoke about. And he wondered if the rodent had become the shadow man and then killed him or if it was the other way around. And he wondered how many pieces someone could split himself into, if a man could really break apart—one man into many—on and on in infinite patterns, with cells splitting down into more cells, then atoms, then nuclei, then . . . oblivion. These were the peculiar questions, the rare mysteries born of the Black Plains realm. These were the things that none of the guards discussed, that no one dared speak of. Warden Stotsky called such things pure fantasy but never ordered further explanation. The silence and the frost settled over everything once more, and time made it all seem distant and imagined.
Jimmy Eckert was thinking of the shadow man when the elevator touched down on the lower level, like feet on the lush carpet of a funeral parlor. He reminded himself that Black Plains could be like rust on the mind, eating at it slowly. The shadow man was a phantom of what this place could do to both the guarded and the guards. His thoughts were not to be trusted. His eyes were not to be believed.
That was why Eckert liked making up his chants, his special poetry. It kept him anchored to the despair he believed he did control, to that which could never be changed, a liniment for his angst. The small masterpieces described a certain kind of truth, one he alone inflicted on the rodents, one he alone authored. The chants empowered him, and he used the poisonous words to erect a prison within a prison. To remind the rodents that there were levels of existence that they would have to be prepared to deal with at his hands. He had conceived of a new chant for Horus Thompson, something more they could share in the long stretches of time to come. The words appeared to him so clearly when he was driving down the two-lane road to the facility for the day’s shift:
When the sun has stopped burning
When the wind has stopped blowing
When the earth has stopped turning
And the world is dust and ash
I will be there . . .
The elevator doors hissed open, and Jimmy Eckert walked down the corridor. As always, each door of the Secured Housing Unit stood at attention, saluting him. The fluorescent lights were made brighter only by what was hidden in the darkness. The rodents were braced, as usual, for the worst. And the worst would be theirs, forever. Jimmy Eckert walked slowly by each door and listened. He could hear some whimpers, some cries. He could hear whispering, manic rants, and euphoric screams of madness. But he did not hear a sound from behind Horus Thompson’s door, as was most often the case. And Jimmy Eckert relished the thought that the rodent would be in a mood to match his chant, to consider ceaseless misery once again, to partake in the acrimony that Black Plains, that fate, had forced them all to share.
Jimmy Eckert approached Horus Thompson’s door as he had a thousand times, as he would do a thousand more. He opened it and found the cell empty.
The Bath
In the bathroom, Brenda bathed her child in the deep, claw-foot tub. The surrounding white porcelain, the tiles, the chrome, the sound of trickling water were together cathartic, and the bathroom itself, with its buttery lighting and dark blue rugs, was at that moment a sanctuary for them both. Pouring bathwater over Sephiri’s shoulders with the little wooden ladle made each dip seem a libation. On the wall was a framed Kenyan proverb Brenda had purchased from an antiques shop years ago. “Absence makes the heart forget,” it read. She bought it hoping that it was true only in the largest sense, that absence only made the heart forget the sadness that had been there, not the brightness of what was and could have been. In the elegant calm, she forgot her swollen ankles and strained eyes and sat on the ledge of the tub. She lathered the soap into big white puffs and slathered it gently on Sephiri like meringue. He did not balk and was silent, as he sometimes was during this evening ritual. She, too, was quiet, emptying her mind of her troubles.
She had stayed home with Sephiri all this past week. The long sleeping bouts at the center scared her, and she needed to watch him go to sleep and watch him wake up. To her relief, it seemed that over the past few days, the fog that had gripped him lifted, and he returned to his habit of sleeping three or four hours at a time.
Sephiri curled his back, and Brenda again ladled more warm water over his shoulders. He murmured something soft and unintelligible, as he sometimes did. It reminded her of the cooing sounds he made when he was an infant, his head a downy crown, a ball of plump preciousness smelling of fresh cotton and powder. She used to snuggle him close to her, both of them curled together on the bed. That had been a time when they didn’t need words between them. And it struck her that she had been grieving not only for Horus but also for the child she thought Sephiri would be.
Brenda listened to the sound of the slow leak from the tub faucet, the steady metronome of drops into the sudsy water, and let her hand rest in it. She could feel her sugary, pulsing blood, challenging her to live on her own behalf. And she knew at last that it was time to lay it all down. That the sugar had become too heavy a burden even for her to carry any longer.
More than that, she regretted that in her quest to see what might be going on in her boy’s mind, she had set aside the greatest part of the truth. She alone was his mother. No matter what studies were tried or what medications taken, no matter how many articles she read or how much professional advice she received, she alone would be the one to dry Sephiri’s tears. Her son had been the shape and make of her life, and she could not imagine what form it might have taken without him.
And now all Brenda wanted was her baby. To hold him, even if he fretted and hung from her arms like a doll. She wanted to pull him close to her, so close that he might soak up all of the love and comfort she wanted to offer him. Sephiri, the hidden treasure that meant his name, that had always been most precious to her, was in this little boy’s frame, somewhere. And she was ashamed to admit that in the secret garden of her hopes, she had been engaged in this business of trying to fix Sephiri, as if he were a broken toy. And staring into the bathwater, she thought of all the pain and strife that gripped the world, that had befallen herself and all she loved, and she wondered if it was everyone else who was broken, and if children like Sephiri were messengers of the silence that needed to replace the noise. And it was then that she felt it was time to ask God an important question, which was this: If I accept Sephiri as he has been given to me, might we then find our way to each other?
Humming now, Brenda poured more water over Sephiri’s sleek back and watched it run down in smooth rivulets. A mother’s love. It had no limit, a story with no end. This much she knew. She would wait for Sephiri in the labyrinth of their life together. She would listen for him and move ever nearer.
Sephiri listened to his mother hum and cradled his knees in his arms, his bowed head nestled in them. What she could not have known, even if he could find a way to tell her, was that there was a man who rescued him from confusion, who helped him get back to the shelter of this moment with her, the stranger in the World of Water, who was now, for reasons he could not explain, familiar. The man who was at first not there but then there. And Sephiri could not tell his mother that when he was out in the open water, adrift in a world even he no longer recognized, when he bowed his head and cried, he thought of her. Not as a talking person of Air, but as an entity of safeness, a place of harbor, and he had longed for her then, as he longed for her now. He wanted always to know that her presence was near, of which he had been aware sinc
e the day he was born. But there were no words in the Land of Air or the World of Water for such feelings, no vowels or consonants wide enough to hold what she meant to him.
Sephiri lowered his knees into the water and lifted his head to look at the emerald green of the mouthwash bottle sitting on the sink.
Brenda beheld him. Always Horus was there looking back—in Sephiri’s eyes, in the jawline, in the dimpled chin. He was there always in the little face, an echo of the man she wanted to save from the world, from himself. And there was no language for what filled her, for what had grown into fullness since Sephiri’s existence began. And so she let her heart speak, and listened for the slightest sound from his. And when her eyes captured a flitting moment of his direct gaze, her heart said, I love you, Sephiri.
And ever so slightly, so much so that Brenda almost missed it, Sephiri smiled.
Acknowledgments
I’ve learned in writing this book that there is real magic in relentless effort, vision, and people who believe in your work. I would like to acknowledge and thank my husband, who for many years was my only fan, coach, and reader in the world. I thank my three incredibly patient and hopeful children who tolerated the hours and silence it took for me to write this book. I am deeply appreciative of my editor Malaika Adero for hearing me in the dark and understanding much from a great distance. My heartfelt thanks go to Annie Cameron and parents of autistic children everywhere fighting the good fight every day. I am grateful for the support of the wonderful Wilkes University MFA community: Robert Mooney for his literary hawk eyes in reviewing my work in its primordial stages and seeing it through to the end; Nancy McKinley for her priceless encouragement of all my efforts; Norris Church Mailer for that twinkle in her eye when she handed me a scholarship; Kaylie Jones, Jeff Talarigo, Jan Quackenbush, Christine Gelineau, and Ross Klavan for cheering me in the ring; David Poyer and Lenore Hart for their steadfast advice; Bonnie Culver and J. Michael Lennon for opening academic and literary doors on my behalf; and Rashidah Ismaili Abubakr for the living history she shared with me. I greatly appreciate the unwavering international support of Steve Moran of the Willesden Herald in the United Kingdom, Suzanne Kamata of the Yomimono Journal in Japan, David Fraser of Ascent Aspirations Magazine in Canada, Santosh Kumar of the Taj Mahal Review, and Gloria Mindock of The Istanbul Review. I thank the PEN/Bellwether Prize, the Dana Awards, and Johnny Temple of Akashic Books for recognizing the early promise of this work. Finally, I honor those unnamed individuals who have inspired me with their light and refusal to quit.
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