The remark stings him. The interviews happen so quickly. He cannot control those who pounce on him after a performance.
Charles is defensive. “Because of my efforts with this company,” he tells her, “you can practise your art again. I am sorry if they want to speak to me but I think I have earned that right.”
“You have earned nothing. You are as self-centred as ever. As self-centred as your holy Robert.”
Charles turns without saying anything and walks away.
During the remaining performances of Namanve — when Makonde calls upon the spirits of the dead — Charles insists only one name be used. Robert’s name. Over and over as the drums thunder. He wants them to feel Robert’s strength. Especially Beth. And to understand that he embodies it.
At every performance, Charles senses him hovering there, just beyond the lights, in the thick darkness, waiting in the wings. They have only to say his name.
Robert.
Charles.
Reporters continue to show up at the hospital seeking “Tornado Man.” Though out of danger, he is too feeble to talk. And still confused.
“How did he survive?” they ask the doctors again and again. They want to see him even if they can’t speak to him. Just one photo. The doctors refuse to allow the circus. “He is too weak.”
The medical glare, however, is relentless. In the searchlight of physical inquiry, Charles is completely exposed. A child again, he now belongs to everyone in white. He worries in his pain. Feels guilty in his memories. Knows there are secrets he must keep but he can’t remember what they are.
Knows they will hunt him down, these jackals who surge back again and again, tenacious, close to their quarry. His rational mind pins them to the ground: they are eager to touch this phenomenon of resurrection, share in the miracle.
But his body rebels, still a wounded flesh full of flaming torches that scorch, waking and sleeping.
Gradually, he begins to recall more and more. Arguments. Bitterness with Beth. What did they fight about? Why?
In the hospital he can only stare at her. She feels affronted, angered by his helplessness, his simple need of her. “One day we will dance together again,” he tells her.
“Impossible, Charles,” she tells him. “You won’t ever dance again. They don’t allow wheelchairs in discos.”
In tears, Beth turns away. Leaving Charles to sleep, to dream.
Sleep is the most dangerous time. Unable to escape his dreams, he is beaten, punched, slapped. Wakes in pain. Cuts and bruises everywhere. Now his accosters descend on him in their white robes, disguising the night’s assault with bandages. But he knows he cannot let his guard down.
They hover close, the nurses, never missing an opportunity. In the small cramped hours, against his struggles to stay awake, they tuck him in. Securely. “Angels all around you,” they murmur. His lacerated, broken body stranded on a strange white shore. Trapped and strapped, hoiked, wrapped and raised, angled to allow close scrutiny.
Some tiny speck of himself, though, hides deep inside. Buried beneath a monster, a wounded animal scraped raw.
Hands slather him thickly with creams, layer him in grease. Relentlessly under bright lights. Cold fingers prodding, arms rocking him slowly on the bed. Rumpled with every physical battle he wages.
“You’re fighting, Charles. It’s good. That’s good.”
Angel voices.
Now slouching in a wheelchair. A rag doll. Once as playful as a feather in air, he has deflated to limp skin and shrunken muscle, his face covered in rough beard. He stares into the blank mirror. Life has almost completely vanished. He is on an empty stage. Deserted. Dark and silent. A tiny light signifying nothing.
Was it for this he survived Amin?
Rubber wheels roll over polished tile, past nursing stations and oblivious clerks, past sinks and waiting rooms where people sit in gowns looking lost, looking like him. He is unseeing and unseen.
Was it for this he endured and overcame and began again in a new world?
Beth urges the clumsy cart of his life along a road full of turns to nowhere. How changed she is from the sweet-faced girl he scooped into his own fine chariot to whip through the streets of the Eternal City. Her face is stoic under big horn-rimmed glasses and close-cropped hair.
She stands unsmiling behind his wheelchair, her eyes gone. Replaced by points of silver light. She is not here either. All mask now, this string of a woman confronts him with her own suffering. Horizontal stripes hold her together like a stick figure in a funeral dance.
Could he stay with her the way she stays with him?
He looks at her and knows his sad answer.
Six months into recovery, he is brought to the Rehabilitation Centre, a cross between Catholic heaven and a torture chamber. A place of misery and humiliation.
Here he must learn how to live again. How to eat — with the left hand now. How to move in a wheelchair.
He relaxes. Eventually he moves to muscular re-training and coordination exercises. Becomes adept at the stacking of small cups. Like a baby playing among Mother’s pots, banging out his first rhythms with a stick. Learning to move all over again.
Natasha is his favourite therapist. She sits with him day after day trying to induce movement in his fingers, the nerves of which have been disconnected from his arm. She pulls on a strap that tells the muscles of his hand to do their job. Up, down. Flex, relax. Make a fist. He cannot. She squeezes his hand for him.
Raises his besieged limb on a pulley. And lowers it again and again until he believes he can fly.
Natasha massages muscle and tendon while his hand rests. It is enough that she is there now. With the raising of an arm, he hears an audience applaud.
Nurse Cynthia is more serious and serene. She is in charge of his lower mobility. With her, he climbs up three wooden steps. Where he stands before her. Holds the balancing belt they have strapped around his waist. She is ready to catch him if he tumbles. With her he moves uncertainly.
After almost forever, his body cast is removed. Relief spreads over him like warm water. Now he must learn control and balance. Remember what it was like to take his first step. A child finally standing on his own. Grinning.
With Cynthia steady beside him, quietly voicing encouragement, he wobbles each day from step to step. Her arm inadvertently strays between his legs and he awkwardly inches forward. They both stop. Discreetly, she ignores his unexpected erection. Slowly, they continue the exercise.
So, he thinks, I am not totally dead.
After a year in hospital, he still never knows which nights will rattle him awake, which storms will assault him all over again. There are no doctors for some of these pains. The blood that is taken cannot reveal all the causes of his suffering.
They encourage him to try living at home for a few days. He is reluctant but Beth is there, mechanically now, yet his constant companion. She nurses him like a professional, doing and saying all the right things. She has been told he requires mostly patience and love, so she rehearses her lines. He sees through her acting though, mocking moments of clarity.
“Beth, you are faking it.”
The days she has off, he stays at her apartment. She sleeps when he sleeps, wakes when he wakes. He is her only life on this strange planet. His eyes search every dark corner for answers.
She studies his body. A lunar landscape, it is skin puckering over flat surfaces cratered from inactivity and reconstruction. No invisible mending here, no seamless repair. She cringes at his skin, squares of pink and red, orange and black. Incongruous. Odd.
He is a broken statue that someone has put back the wrong way. A scrappy patchwork of spare parts. Nothing quite right nor straight, nor fitting exactly. An upper inner thigh with flesh gouged to graft to his leg, now permanently out of alignment.
Saving the leg at all was the miracle, the d
octors tell her, beginning with only bare bone, a crude outline of the man who once danced her through life.
Swaying slightly on the edge of her pull-out couch — a little smile playing at his lips, a crumpled quilt draped casually over his shoulder — he is now her deeply wounded warrior, a carved statue in a book, suddenly come to fractured life. Renga Moi in old age.
Occasionally, Beth brings some of his friends over. When she thinks he is up to it, she calls a football team member or an actor from Makonde. Charles believes they have come to gloat at his misfortune. In his heart, he is not convinced they want to help or sympathize.
At these times, he turns, imperious and angry, a relentless old testament prophet, demanding of one friend whether he is still cheating on his wife.
“I know what went on that night,” he rails, waving an accusing finger wildly, his voice trembling.
“You are a pickpocket and a cheat,” he harangues another.
“And you. You are a murderer,” he declares before a well-wisher from Kenya who knew Robert.
He aims his violence at them all, a spotlight stabbing dark. He is the self-appointed judge and jury of everyone in exile. His brain screams “stop” but his voice rails on.
He has become one man dancing, a puppet, a ventriloquist’s dummy.
He reserves the worst for his Makonde actors. Towards them, he is merciless. He knows that without his guidance, any hope of artistic truth is gone. He is surely Robert’s artistic son, chosen to keep the vision, imbue Makonde with the fervour of the founder. He tosses his fury in their faces like acid.
When finally left alone, he fills with remorse. Cast brutally into his own personal Namanve.
Little rays of hope penetrate the density of his despair. He is finally allowed to stay permanently at Beth’s. She agrees to take him four times each week for physiotherapy and X-rays, treatments, medications, and tests.
But he is also spiteful with her. Beth, his Lady of Perpetual Help; spiteful with the white nurses, his Sisters of Mercy; with the doctors, self-proclaimed Jehovahs, full of anger and jealousy.
He is the star of his own private disability drama, unable to do the simplest things for himself, confined to Beth’s living room with a pull-out bed, an armchair, a television.
Alone in the dark, he watches the weather channel until he falls asleep to the harshness of the flickering screen.
Each new day, he is in the forecaster’s charge. He rises and falls with reports of barometric pressure, with big maps that tell what’s on the way and how long it will stay. With every prediction of rain, he remembers the tornado and closes himself in behind curtains or simply wheels his throbbing body in the “crippled chair” through closet doors so that he can neither see nor hear, staying there until the “weather” is over, groping in an endless stage blackout for the flash of an exit.
The first time Beth sees him shake at the weather forecast, she throws her arms around him and holds on. He vibrates wildly against her, light as dry twigs in windstorm, snapping. On this day, however, he shouts at her. “Let me go,” he begs, tears running down his face.
When she looks at him, she realizes that the trembling has been laughter. “What’s so funny, Charles?”
“Nothing. Nothing,” he assures her. “Everything is quite terrible. But I did this even in hospital. They called it my laughing sickness. There’s no cure.”
“Perhaps you just have no tears left. This is the result.”
“The worst is that it reminds me of him.”
“Who?”
“Amin. Do you remember? They used to call him ‘the laughing one.’ He would hack people to death with a grin on his face. Now I’m becoming like him. I am the destroyer now. And I laugh.”
Charles is also convinced he has become impotent. Feels nothing there. Sees women in his mind, in his memory, but his instincts are now inert. Flaccid flesh in a wheelchair.
Distraught, he reveals his fears to the doctors. They try to explain how much shock his body has received, how the coma and drugs are doing this to him. Then they prescribe more drugs. He refuses the chemicals. A surgical procedure is also possible. But the physical aberrations of his body under siege are what he has left. He needs every one of its pleadings and complaints.
He will not go under again. His must stay awake now.
With what little remaining love she holds for him, Beth tries to fan the sexual flame. But he fails her as well. He is shamed in their room, shamed to be with her, to insult her this way.
“I am a drum without sound,” he tells her.
She tries to console him but she too is drained. Run out of energy for even the simplest rationalization. “Maybe you’re right,” she says dully. “Maybe we should have given up when they killed Robert. Our lives were all but gone then anyway.”
He throws his cane pathetically through the air, missing her by half the room.
She hates his eruptions. She has had enough. “I have as much right to reject this life as you do Charles. As much right to anger. If you want to live, you do it without me from now on. Charles, if we stay together neither of us will survive.”
The next day, Beth packs her bags. And leaves.
He has no choice but to accept, adjust. Burying his anger deep inside — live coals that never stop burning — time drags him, battered in body and spirit, doggedly forward. Though he still cannot work, he is finally able to move without the wheelchair. He visits the rehab clinic once each week, a short taxi ride away.
Welfare now pays for his life.
He frequents a nearby church, its regular invalid. Imploring any force out there for help. Wants to be born again.
With a telephone call from Nairobi, he is. He can barely believe his ears. Samuel is coming to visit. Samuel, now a businessman, is going to be in Europe and then Chicago. He will arrive from Chicago.
“Will you be around?” he asks.
“I am always around,” says Charles.
Three weeks later, Samuel walks in the door. So much older. But now he is important and important people need to look old. He will stay with Charles for three days, wheeling him outside for walks and sweet confections in donut shops and talk.
So much talk between them. Everyone back home has heard. Beth assured them all he was alive. But barely moving.
In the tiny apartment, Samuel sprawls on the scatter mats covering the scuffed parquet floors and talks, perches on collapsible canvas stools propped against the walls and talks, bumps against limp rubber plants and talks. Nothing matters but their being together again.
Charles speaks of former glories on the stages of the world. Aches to show this new city of Edmonton to his childhood friend but loathes being stared at. They study press photos and albums Charles has made of the life he once had.
“You have had many privileges,” Samuel tells him. “God is just testing you one more time.”
“God,” says Charles ruefully. “I am his puppet. But let’s not speak of that. Tell me why you have moved to Nairobi. Why did you leave Uganda?”
“Business was bad in Kampala and hopeless at home. I had to leave. I’ve been in Nairobi nearly ten years now. When I discovered I was coming this way, I knew we would meet. So I went back home. I saw your Mother and Father. And Debra.”
Charles is hungry for details.
“Uganda is sick,” says Samuel. “Everyone was damaged by Amin. He destroyed all the business communities. It will take another decade to heal. And Amin himself is now living in luxury in Saudi Arabia on the money he stole.”
“Kampala? Our village?”
“Everything everywhere is in disrepair. Crime is rampant. Riots always over food or prices or electricity. Wherever you go there are military roadblocks. You don’t know who is real military and who are criminals stopping people to rob them. People are accosted on the streets for hand-outs. These are not Muslims.
These are Christians who are begging. Anyone who looks like they might have money is surrounded. You can’t walk without beggars crawling all over you.”
Charles listens with longing and horror. “And at home?”
“A taxi driver took me to our village from Kampala. I swear he was driving with his eyes shut. He looked like a starved dog and he smelled of liquor.”
“There is a curse on our country, Samuel. Amin set us all against each other.”
“Even the police are corrupt,” Samuel continues. “I was told that they are often threatened at gunpoint until they promise to join the criminals. I knew that I could not go home with anything of value because I would be killed. Or the family would be robbed.”
“So the village is also at the mercy of criminals? And we can do nothing about it.”
“You are better off here, Charles. Believe me. Anyway, in your physical state, how could you possibly help?”
Charles says nothing.
“When I reached the village, I was shocked even more. I could not believe in what poor shape the roads were. Pits and potholes. And lining the roads everywhere, small coffins. God is pulling young people up to heaven each day.”
“Samuel, is that really happening?”
“It is really happening. Chaos. God has punished all of us in Africa. Coffin makers are doing a booming business because of AIDS, Charles. Empty wooden boxes lined up waiting to be bought and filled.”
Somewhere in Samuel’s words Charles senses the emptiness of home.
“Uganda is being tested, Charles. Like Job. Punished like Lot’s wicked wife. Scourged by God. There is no reason to return. Stay in Canada. And I will stay in Nairobi.”
Samuel slowly begins a dirge of sorts, a mournful list of names — friends and family, known to them both — who have died.
“Why do you not speak of my mother?” asks Charles finally. It is for Kekinoni and Debra that he feels most concern.
And most responsible.
“She looks so old, Charles. And her mind is not always clear. But she recognized me. After so long, she recognized me. Jumped up and began to sing. Praising the Lord. You know how she is.”
One Man Dancing Page 25
