Blue Bottle Tree

by Beaird Glover

  I should have fought Hoof more. After I hit him I should have hit him again.

  I regret the time I jumped on that car and ripped off its license plate. I don’t know why I did that. I was with Mad Dog and we were running through town at dusk. Being dangerous. Being wild. Breaking all the rules but not knowing what rules to break. There was a car, a new and very expensive car with a temporary license plate. I wanted to destroy it. I jumped on the hood and bounced. I tore off the temporary license and scattered it to the wind. Then we ran like hell. It all happened in a second. Afterward I hated myself for doing that. What a stupid, mean thing to do.

  And the toad I ripped open. I stunned it with a thump and tore its skin to watch its beating heart. Did not even give it the respect of waiting for it to die. Just threw it in the lake. That’s the sort of thing Mad Dog would do. I did stuff like that to impress him, and to impress anyone. Doing stupid stuff to impress other people. People not even worth impressing. People who did not care about me. And then I died. Was murdered. Killed!

  Everything dies. Everything is made to die. It’s a wonder anything was ever made at all. It’s cold in here. Hypothermia is when ice crystals form in your vessels, clogging the blood flow and causing distal tissues to die. My blood may be turning to ice. Penny Longstocking read that in National Geographic. I don’t think it’s that cold in here. It must be close. Very close.

  Wrong place at the wrong time. Could have been at the cave. Could have kept Hoof out of the house. “No. You can’t come in.” Slam.

  Should have given something to Penny for her birthday. We were almost a couple then, for the ten days it lasted. I counted every one. She ate lunch with me, I walked her to class. She told me her birthday was coming in a week. But I didn’t have the money. I didn’t know what to get. I could have made her something. Could have drawn a heart on a piece of paper and colored it in with red. You saved me, Penny. You’re the only one who could… I could have said something, done anything. But her birthday came and went, and she didn’t have lunch with me after that.

  I should have made her a bandage when that clodhopper shoe wore a blister on her heel. “Here, Penny, this might help.” I should have been there for her at the fair. Too late, always too late. Never in the right place. Could have fought for her. Didn’t know what to say. Never knew what to say. She bit the guy! Penny Longstocking doesn’t need me anyway.

  If there was circulation in my hands and feet, I think it’s gone now. They feel more like dead weight than they did before. I can imagine my vessels shrinking, drawing up so blood only flows to the most vital parts before the whole thing shuts down. This has got to be the end.

  14 Under The Dome of a Blue Kiddie Pool

  Whistling, he entered the morgue. I heard him. Clearly. I knew it was him. I knew it was night and he was not supposed to be there. Hoof rolled my box out of the wall, unzipped my plastic bag. He said, “I’ve got your soul, if you were wondering.”

  No, I was wondering how we could change places.

  “You look so peaceful. Better than you did when you were alive. Penny would like you like this. But I had to take her, too. Some people are too good for this life, you know? Not her. Obviously. Or you.” He whistled again and it echoed. I imagined he was looking the place over. “You’re going to pretend to die,” he said. “And I’m going to pretend to bury you.”

  I smelled something pungent, something rich. He was passing it under my nose. He said my name and I garbled out an answer, unable to make a word. “That’s your soul,” he said, and I felt a finger twitch. My first sign of life. “Very good of you to answer, Seven. Did you know that in Haiti, some people sew up the lips of their dearly departed? No? Your grandmother should have told you. She should have, well, she should have done it. Because they might not really be dead. And if they’re not, and they respond to their name like you did, well, they would not want to do that. A corpse cannot be raised if it does not answer to its name.” My blood was pumping again. From the back, dark recesses of my mind, thoughts took shape. Words formed that had been lost. Ideas made sense and I knew exactly where I was. And it was Hoof standing over me in the morgue, in the night, in the pitch-dark room.

  “I’m going to tell you only because it will help you come back. Then you’ll go away again, and this life will be done.” He walked away and returned with a chair. “Tetrodotoxin is in those fish in your cave. Puffer fish, famous Voodoo stuff. They’re not only in the waters around Japan, of course. They’re in the Caribbean, too. And someone, sometime back, brought a few of them to that cave. They’ve done surprisingly well. That’s what’s got your nervous system and everything else shut down. The venom of the bufo toad irritated your hands so the digoxin and tetrodotoxin could get in. I extracted the digoxin—expertly and with only one hand, I might add, from the foxglove plant. This improved your cardiac contractility and situated the tetrodotoxin in the basal ganglia. Your collapse came soon afterward.

  “Of course they don’t know how it happened. But it did. Dead is dead. The doctor said so. And I’ll tell you another thing, to ease your stupefied mind. Pitiful Bellin has no funeral home. Many churches, yes. But no transitional place where souls may take leave. An atrocity really, in a town where so many bizarre deaths go unresolved. Autopsies aren’t really our thing. And it occurs to me that there was a little boy from Bellin who was lost and never found. A couple of years ago, remember? My first foray into the arts. He should not have jeered at my anomaly, and …he proved to be a miserable pet. But ho hum, but let’s not dwell on that. I have a family friend in that noble service of caring for the dead. And this man, of chilling good humor and taste, has given me license to embalm you. Imagine how easy it was, to stamp papers with his authenticated seal and deliver them to the coroner, just today. Your mortal toil on Earth has ceased to be, Seven LaVey. But tonight, your past life begins.” He passed something under my nose again and my nostrils flared. I was coming back.

  “I saw that,” he said. He seemed pleased with himself. “It won’t be long now.” He opened my mouth and I offered a feeble resistance, but it was not enough. He tilted my head and poked a capsule down my throat. “Swallow this,” he said. He slapped my face. I was not expecting the instinct to be there, but I swallowed it. He was giving me Datura stramonium. In Haiti, they call it zombie cucumber. My hands were tied and I was blindfolded before the effects took hold. Then my mind exploded with accelerated thoughts, all the tissues in my body awoke at once. The flood gates blew open. The main circuit breaker came on.

  Hoof scooped me out of my coffin and dropped me sprawling on the floor. He kicked my abdomen and legs. He had a whip, turned me over, and cracked it on my back from head to toe, bringing every muscle to life with spasms of pain. I was clenched in the fetal position and he kept lashing me. When I began to gag, he stuffed a sock down my throat. There was nothing to throw up anyway—nothing but the one pill—and he was going to be certain it stayed down.

  From locked-in near-death to excruciating pain. What thoughts I had were shattering, stabbing, and terrifying. The ideas were death. The ideas were horror. Suffering encompassed me. I had the sensation that I was falling. It was similar to the dream when I could no longer fly, but worse—falling from a cliff, falling through a cavern, falling into heat, into hell. Weightless and nauseated again, the whip tore my back and I passed out. When I came around we were in his little sports car. I was in the passenger seat and Hoof was driving. My hands were tied but the blindfold was off. The top was down and the air smelled sweet. Oxygen surged through my brain. We were on Jack Rabbit Lane, not far from my home. My mind fluttered and reeled with electrical explosions. I hallucinated ghosts in the trees, scampering rats and spiders in his car.

  “This is the last time you’ll ever see it,” he said. “It’s burning. Your house is burning to the ground.” Before he spoke I had registered the soft glow of a lamp behind the curtain, but when he described the carnival of flames, I saw that more. He was in his Baron Samedi costume—a black
tuxedo with tails and a top hat. His face was painted white like a skull, eyes blackened and teeth bared. “The blazes are twice as high as the roof,” he said, and it was not the power of suggestion. It was power of conviction. I was scatterbrained beyond confusion, confused by ten blaring screams at once and all of them vying for most attention. I could not focus without his guidance. What he said was true. “I know what you’re thinking. I control your thoughts.” He was smug and certain. I could only nod. “The heat is burning you.” It did. “You’re choking from the smoke.” I was. “Marie’s altar is consumed. The picture of you as a kid has melted. The roof has fallen on your mother. Your poor, poor mother.” I was hypnotized or mesmerized or whatever it was. I saw it. I believed him.

  My heart beat like a gun—papapapapa. “Nooo! Momma, no.” I sobbed and tugged against the rope, but my wrists were bound.

  “Your mother is dead. Your grandmother is dead. Penny is dead. Everyone you know is gone.” My face burned. Tears ran down my cheeks. He repeated himself and I perceived it deeply, from a place where understandings are not questioned. I was not hearing his voice as much as knowing it. It was a hallucination more real than my previous daily life. It was happening now and in a deeper way than I had ever experienced the present moment. There was no other time and no other place. I witnessed the conflagration, felt my ears roasting and I coughed from the smoke. My house was gone and I knew it was true. Everything he said was true. I had lost it all.

  Watching it go—the house destroyed, knowing my mother and grandmother were in there and had died, and somehow, Penny too—I was haunted by a memory. I never learned the Voodoo tricks, but I learned the history. I knew about the bitterness that went back between my family and the Radcliffes for more than two hundred years. That was supposed to be over. The part about not teaching me or bringing me into a power of my own, that was because my grandmother had agreed to end it and let the curse be done. They agreed when Hoof was born. I gathered now that he did not concede. And as my fate became clear to me, as clear as my mind could make of anything, I remembered a story about a guy in Haiti named Clairvius Narcisse. It occurred to me that I might be like him—a zombie.

  Clairvius Narcisse was one of the best documented Voodoo zombies and he brought a lot of attention to Haiti. In 1962, he showed up at a hospital there with weakness and generalized pain. The doctors did not know what was wrong with him. He got worse and died the next day. His two attending physicians had both been trained in America. They pronounced him dead and his sister was there. She affixed her thumbprint to the death certificate. The next day he was buried.

  Then, eighteen years later, Clairvius Narcisse found his sister again. Two hundred people in the village agreed that it really was the same guy—even though they all knew he had died. There was documented evidence of his death by medical professionals and his burial was logged in public records.

  What happened was this: his skin had come in contact with tetrodotoxin—like through the genius trickery of Hoof when he had sprinkled it into my soap—and Narcisse appeared to die. Then the guy who dosed him came around to the graveyard and exhumed him. It was a ritual, a Voodoo thing, a fate worse than death.

  Zombie cucumber is the next step. In Bellin we call it jimson weed and it grows everywhere. The seed pod is like a prickly pear about the size of a chicken’s egg with thorns. The seeds inside are particularly toxic and the results are erratic—they can be anywhere from manic delirium and hallucinations to suffocation and death. This is the tool that keeps a zombie a zombie. As long as the victim’s diet consistently has datura, the person will never recognize reality the way the rest of us do. And the time spent oxygen deprived—due to tetrodotoxin—has killed brain cells in the frontal lobe and affected the limbic system, damaging personality and the ability to manage higher functioning. It achieves the same zombie-like results as lobotomies did. Narcisse was left with the most primitive functions, the reptilian brain, the deepest instinctual will to survive, and he was kept at the zombie maker’s will. He was drugged to delirium and he remained so, chained and enslaved to work in the fields until his maker died. Then he escaped and found his sister. Zombies were so prevalent they had to make an actual law about it:

  * * *

  HAITIAN PENAL CODE ARTICLE 246

  Also to be termed intention to kill, by poisoning, is that use of substances whereby a person is not killed but reduced to a state of lethargy, more or less prolonged, and this without regard to the manner in which the substances were administered or what were their later consequences.

  If, following the state of lethargy the person is buried, then the attempt will be termed murder.

  * * *

  Hoof knew what he was doing. After he led me to believe my house had burned and everyone was dead, he took me to Cat Shit City. He had dug out a burrow under a kiddie pool. The blue plastic dome was situated and secured over the hole, and this was to be my new home.

  My sleep was fitful on the damp ground and I was weak. In the distance I heard drumming. A pan of water had been provided and I lapped it like a dog. My hands shook too much to hold it up to drink. There was a plastic tube positioned over the bowl, occasionally replenishing it with green liquid. Not enough to quench thirst but enough for sublingual absorption. It was bitter, like fresh leaves and pith. I got used to it and no doubt all my water was infused with datura. I had to choose between dehydration and the unpredictable effects of drinking. Occasionally there was a feeling not too far from euphoria, but it was followed by a crushing dread and paranoia. Hoof showered rocks on the plastic pool dome whenever I relaxed. They cracked on the plastic, amplified like shots, and any of them might have been an actual bullet piercing the thin blue mold, or I thought so. He may have been shooting a gun, too.

  Dehydration, on the other hand, was excruciating and brought its own delirium. My craving for water intensified by a new sip appearing whenever I wanted it most.

  Bowls of cold mush and grits appeared from time to time. Unflavored, unsalted, no more than wet corn meal. My thoughts were reeling and unconnected, disjointed and tending toward terror. I was afraid of every new thing, every sound shattered the reality of what had gone before. Crickets and cicadas, sounds of the night elicited yelps and panting, some of which I observed from outside myself. Aches and cramps receded into themselves and became the status quo.

  The ants and mosquitos were real, and incessant. I slapped my face and made my ears ring over and over in frustrated sleep until I was too numb to acknowledge the bites.

  Rays of sun streamed through the plastic, tinting kaleidoscopic, making all the light in my hole a brittle and blue refracted glare. I tested the edges to see if I were truly imprisoned. It was anchored down and situated behind the tree line. I could expect to be in shade at least part of the day. My pinhole-sized view afforded a glimpse of one side of the garbage mound, from which several cats were also casually observing me. One was mottled with a patchwork of black, orange, and white fur. Another was solid black except for a brilliant orange streak between its eyes like the nose guard of a medieval helmet. I was a curiosity to them, entertainment, as if they were waiting to see if I could figure my way out. They stared from black crescent pupils on pools of gold. The hole was too deep to climb. The dome was several feet above me and I could not jump high enough to reach the top.

  Day came and went twice with no intervention from Hoof or anyone else. There was incessant drumming. Sometimes close, sometimes far away. I occasionally heard additions of garbage dumped from the cliff onto the mound, creating avalanches of varying force. Sips of zombie water trickled into my bowl at irregular intervals, but even that was hard to tell. Time slowed considerably after drinking it. It made me nauseous so I did not mind the lack of food. I studied the mosquitos as they bit, watched the ants traveling in miraculous lines from the last of my pasty mush. Very industrious those ants, and then I realized I could pack dirt a little better around the edges of the pool, and thereby keep the mosquitos out. It worked!
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  I stretched, almost able to lie flat. I was a foot from the ants, and the mosquitos had been conquered. The nausea abated and I was developing a tolerance to the zombie water. At least it seemed I was thinking more clearly than I had before. It was like my earlier status as locked-in but uncomfortable in a different way. The horror of paralysis now gone, and sensory deprivation improved, I could almost imagine I was holding up pretty well. Penny Longstocking would be impressed by my endurance. Anyone would. I ransacked my mind for happy thoughts. There were flecks of dust illuminated in a cobalt ray of light and it reminded me of snow. It was snowing after a party last year. Penny and I were there. I could not trust my memory but I knew how it felt. For a few minutes I had been more than myself. With her I was better than my best self. I concentrated all my energy until the scene congealed and I was there again.

  As the party was winding down, we went outside to wait for her ride. I kissed her and the first snow of the year started just then, and it was beautiful and light. We stood there in the yard and caught flakes on our tongues. She said, “Frostbite is when ice crystals form in your blood vessels. Can you imagine? Actual ice in your veins! Like all the way to the tips of your fingers.” She held up her hand and her fingers were pallid and bloodless at the tips. “I think this is how it starts.”

  I held her fingers and blew on them. It was silly. But her fingertips really were cold. “Wow,” I said. “This could be serious. You can put your hands in here.” I opened the middle buttons of my coat and pulled her arms around me. She did the same so our arms were locked around each other inside each other’s coats. By the time her friend’s car pulled up, a thin blanket of snow had covered the ground. We had been kissing the whole time and not even noticed.