Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  I don’t turn around but keep walking. Slow going; I never realized that it’s about a quarter of a mile from Polly’s house to the garage. The path is closing in: rattan palms rattle and brush my arms, acacias, and locust bean, and all the dry spiky shrubs of the Sahel. My feet sink into the warm sand. A figure looms ahead, blocking my way. It’s my brother. He is naked. He has an erection, which he strokes. Janey, honey, let’s do it in the weeds. Janey, come on like we used to do in the boathouse, come on, Janey, his voice is sweet, low, insistent, come on, Janey, you know Mary and I used to do it all the time. Take off your clothes, Janey, let’s see if you got any tits yet. I raise my pistol and shoot him in the chest. Screaming and crashing in the brush, and laughter, not human, like a hyena. I stagger.

  There’s hot breath in my ear, stinking breath, booze and decay. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you, says Mom, why do you have to be such a pain in the ass? Look at your sister, just look at her! And there she is, right in front of me now, white and lovely in her little scoop-neck blue linen maternity top and white shorts. She smiles her cover girl smile. She opens the top and her insides fall out of her ripped belly as she smiles on. There is shrill howling, like a dog hit by a car.

  Something grabs my left arm, hard. I raise the gun, but it is batted away and I am hauled up off my feet, an arm around my waist. I feel stair treads under my zoris. Detective Paz is heaving me up the stairs and into my apartment.

  I collapse inside the door, my head against the cool porcelain of the stove.

  “I heard the shot,” he says. “I think you popped one of those … those guys. You were turning in a circle and screaming, about ten feet from the stairs.”

  “Yeah. It’s not so good out there right now.” I crawl on hands and knees to the bathroom. I lay my cheek on the rim of the toilet and retch up a little yellow slime. I hear the snap of a pop-top and the gurgling sound of a man knocking down most of a twelve-ounce in one slug.

  “Feeling better?” he asks when I totter back and collapse into a chair next to him.

  “Much. If I were a bell, I’d be ringing. Thank you for coming out there after me.”

  “You had the beer. What was going on?”

  “Just paging through the family album. Look, I think we’re stuck here for a while. We’ll be okay here unless he decides to come in person.”

  “In which case, you’ll waste him with that funny gun. Or I will.”

  “No,” I snap, “if he comes here, I’ll probably shoot you, and maybe my daughter, too, or you us. Surely it has finally sunk in that he can control what we see? If I think he’s approaching in person, we unload the firearms and put them out of reach. We can’t fight him in m’fa; I have to stop him in m’doli . If I can.”

  He drains his beer and pops another. “Want one?” he asks, offering. I drink a sip. I can feel it trickle all the way down into what feels like an empty fifty-five-gallon drum. Paz is fingering my journal. He says, “Would there be a part here that explains how a bunch of highly trained cops got into a gunfight with people who weren’t there and then started shooting one another?” He shudders. “And how somebody else, some fucking Ku Klux Klan bastard, is living in my partner’s body? In small words.”

  “Small words? You’ve seen a grel . That makes it easier. Sorry, grel ? greletis the plural. Mind demons. The Chenka call them ogga . Okay, the short version: One, the psyche is real, like metal and electricity. It’s its own thing. Psyches live in complex brains like ours, but they’re not strictly speaking products of our brains. And they can live outside of brains too.” I tell him in plain language what the Olo make of the mental phenomena that still baffle Western science?manic-depression, schizophrenia, mass hysteria, intuition, sexual attraction …

  “I thought that was all chemicals?the mental disease business,” he says.

  “Yes, right. But that view of the mind ignores tens of thousands of personal accounts of psychic experiences?falling in love with unsuitable people, premonitions, significant dreams, spirit possession, ghostly apparitions, religious ecstasies. Inexplicable behavior, we like to call it. The regular joe who every so often just has to rape and strangle a little girl. Afterward, he feels better. Of course he feels better; his grel is well fed, like a leopard after a nice haunch of antelope. Or the well-brought-up kid with no obvious symptoms who one day murders his parents and starts shooting everyone in school, or on a slightly grander scale, the fact that the most civilized and technically advanced nation in Europe once decided to put itself totally in the hands of an uneducated wacko with a funny mustache and a hypnotic stare. Yeah, it’s all so-called chemistry, but since we don’t know squat about how it works, calling it chemistry is just another kind of incantation. It’s not science.”

  And more of this. I haven’t talked with anyone for longer than necessary for a couple of years and so it comes out in a rush, all of Marcel’s theorizing, the stuff even he was nervous about placing before the scientific community, my own compulsive thoughts about the stuff I’d experienced, plus a good deal of speculative ontology, what I used to keep myself sane among the Olo, assuming for the moment that I succeeded in that. He listens, hardly interrupting, for which I am grateful. Detective Paz is a good listener; perhaps it is a professional requirement. Perhaps, also, he is exhausted into passivity, psychically spent, and, as his fourth tallboy goes down the hatch, a little drunk.

  “So let’s for the moment accept the reality of psychic entities,” I say, “and that they are natural beings whose existence lies outside the scope of modern physics, not necessarily and forever outside the scope, because we can conceive, if only with difficulty, of a psychophysics that includes the phenomenology of consciousness and disembodied psyches. Like I said, physics has expanded to cover stuff like action at a distance, radio waves, radioactivity, quantum weirdness. The point is, there’s no supernatural. It is all part of the universe, although the universe is queerer than we suppose. Now, the grelet, the ogga, are destructive psychic particles. They’re everywhere, like bacteria. Why are they destructive? Because they feed on the psychic breakdown products of a collapsing human psyche. They eat anguish and pain and heartbreak, and so they attempt to control their hosts so as to cause these states. Naturally, like any parasitic entity, they camouflage themselves as natives of the psychic ecology. You say your partner was never foulmouthed or racist before this?”

  “Never. And he comes from a long line of nasty racists. He’s a hard-rock born-again Christian.”

  “But inside him was all the shit he heard when he was a kid, suppressed, under control. I take it he’s a tightly wrapped guy?”

  “Very.”

  “Right, so Witt releases an aerosol that stuns what’s his name’s …”

  “Barlow. Cletis Barlow.”

  “Yes, it stuns Barlow’s consciousness. That consciousness is asleep, or helpless. Into the driver’s seat comes something wearing the sensory experience of his childhood, the material put there by his father. We all carry powerful bits of our parents’ psyches in us, what the Jungians call introjects. That’s how our psyches are formed in the first place, but even when we’re adults, there’s a little Mom and a little Dad still sitting in there, and God knows, even in so-called normal people, what we see in daily behavior is largely those introjects in action.”

  That was interesting, that flicker of pain at the line about parental psyches. Could this be the ally? I am dying to know about this guy’s daddy. But I have to be careful, or he’ll bolt. “What happened to your partner happens all the time in other cultures. It’s a regular thing in Southeast Asia, like headache or the flu. They call it amok or matagalp . And dreams?these other psyches really boogie out in dreamland. The Olo believe that’s why we sleep in the first place?so we can listen to and deal with the other folks who’re living in our heads. That’s one reason why extreme sleep deprivation leads invariably to psychosis.”

  Yes, Jane, and look who’s talking. He gets up, paces in silence to the end of the room,
and comes back again. “Say I buy all this. What’s the fix? What do we do?”

  A wail comes from upstairs. I am up the ladder in a flash. She’s sitting up in bed, crying. I hold her, I rock her; she calms after a while, and I ask her what’s wrong. Monsters. My heart freezes. But I don’t smell anything, and the charm is still in place over her bed. Just a regular nightmare, then, thank God, just wonderful ordinary hideous childhood terrors. We talk about monsters a little. Your regular mom can tell her child that monsters are imaginary and can’t hurt you. This is, however, not an option for me. I indicate the tetechinté over her bed, I explain what it is for and that it will keep the monsters from getting in.

  Something heavy lands on the roof and makes a scratching sound, like long claws drawing over shingles. Luz shrieks again, and buries her face in my bathrobe. I say it’s trying to get in and it can’t, and in fact, it can’t. She does not, however, want to sleep alone, she wants to sleep in the big hammock, with me. I think that’s a reasonable request. I say, “Listen, honey, you remember that policeman who was here today, this morning?” She nods. “Well, he’s downstairs. Mommy is helping him catch the bad people.”

  “Can I help, too?”

  “Of course,” I say. She doesn’t want to be left out of anything, even death. “We’ll all help together.”

  I grasp her hot, damp little hand and we go to the ladder together. Suddenly, she gives a little shriek. “I forgot. I have a note.”

  She runs back to her book bag and trots back with a square of paper. It says Dear Ms. Tuoey: Luz needs her decorations attached to her costume. Everything is in the bag. Use your imagination!! It’s signed Sheila Lomax . “What is it?” Luz asks.

  “I’m supposed to fix your costume for the Noah’s ark play.”

  “My Mary Mary all contrary costume. It has fluffy things, and little shiny things like little tiny mirrors.”

  “Sequins.”

  “Uh-huh. I have a lot and a lot of them.”

  Oh, good! Thank you, Miss Lomax!

  We descend. Detective Paz is crouching in firing position between the refrigerator and the bathroom door. He has the grace to blush, and shoves his pistol hurriedly back into its holster, like a man caught pissing, zipping it away.

  Something has changed in the atmosphere, a lightening of pressure, in the last few seconds, like a fresh breeze through your window on a sultry night. My wall clock says midnight. I go to the window. The shapes in the garden are gone. Detective Paz stands next to me.

  “They’re gone,” he says.

  “Not for nothing are you a detective,” I say, and he laughs.

  “Maybe they’re on shift work. Who do you think’s going to cover the graveyard shift? So to speak.”

  He seems to be returning to his cheeky ways. Good. Resilience is good. Luz sees us looking at each other and does not like it.

  “I’m hungry,” she declares, pouting. “I’m starving to death!”

  “Luz, honey, it’s twelve midnight,” I say. “Have a banana and you can go into the hammock.”

  “I don’t want a banana. I want dinner.”

  “You had dinner, dear. At Eleanor’s. Remember?”

  “No I didn’t. Eleanor had a yucky dinner, and I didn’t eat it.”

  Oh, Christ. And of course, Dawn was too frazzled to inform me. Luz is getting ready to wail, when, remarkably, Detective Paz kneels down next to her. “You know, I’m starving to death, too. What do you say we go out to a restaurant? I bet you have a pretty dress you can put on. And your mom can put on a pretty dress, and we’ll go out to a fancy restaurant. It has tropical fish tanks and a cage full of parrots.”

  “A restaurant?” says The Mom doubtfully. “It’s past midnight.”

  “I mean a Cuban restaurant,” he says. “Cuban restaurants are just getting in gear at midnight.”

  I look at him and at Luz. They’re both grinning at me, white teeth against brown. This is interesting. The world as we know it may end fairly soon, and here we are getting ready for a date. But what else should we do? Call in air strikes? Run around like chickens with their heads off? This seems right, and as I think this, suddenly my appetite comes back in a rush. I am starving. I find I am ridiculously pleased that, whatever happens afterward, at least I’ll get one decent meal.

  I say, “Okay, but I have to get dolled up. You could skim through that while I’m doing it.”

  He stops smiling and sits down at the table. He opens the journal.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Day 40, Danolo

  Fortieth day in the whale’s belly, although I feel more as if for the first time I am on the outside of the whale. I am not talking to rocks yet, but it is quite something to feel at least some intimations of what original participation is like. I got up this morning, for example, and was well into the day before I “came to myself” as they say. What a great deal we have traded for our power over nature! This is what happened to M., I imagine, this total unity with the environment and the culture. I never understood that, I was too young.

  But this isn’t Shangri-la, the worm in the apple is sorcery, the same thing that protects us here. These are the healthiest people I have ever seen in Africa?virtually free of the usual tropical maladies & they are well fed. But there are not many of them, and there are fewer kids than you would expect. Everyone in Africa believes that sorcery is the major cause of death and misfortune. Here, it may even be true. There is a kind of cloud over everyone’s psyche, and I occasionally catch on people’s faces the expression one sees in shots from the Depression or war zones?helplessness, fear. But the rule is a remarkable cheerfulness and calm, especially among the ordinary townspeople, who are kind and generous.

  There is the horrible business with the dontzeh children, although in balance, I have also never seen children treated better (certainly not in traditional Africa) once they have formed that mystical sefuné bond with an adult.

  Reality of the spirits. Of course I don’t believe in them … but they’re there: not so amusing here, dear M.! In Danolo, one feels unaccountable chills, breezes that touch the cheek but don’t stir the leaves, that sense, familiar in public places in the West, too, that one is being observed, things seen in the peripheral vision that don’t come into focus when you try to see them plain. Again, maybe it is the drugs.

  Another unaccountable event. U. demonstrated faila’olo today, disappearing from my sight and reappearing behind me as I sat at the door to my bon . Of course, he doesn’t actually disappear. He throws a brief trance on the subject, walks around her, and wakes her out of it when in the right position. I got some monofilament from my bag and tied a cat’s cradle barrier across the door, but that didn’t slow him down at all. He thought it was very funny. Would it work with an objective observer? Is there such a thing? Clearly, there must be some lost time involved and, in my increasingly infrequent fits of science, I wish for automatic timers, infrared beams, movie cameras, and all the other objectifying impedimenta of my culture.

  After the demo, we mixed up kadoul, sorcerous compounds, a very Julia Child sort of afternoon. U. is very strict about spells. The word makes the power?the kadoul is worthless without it, so says my master. I have to memorize them; it ruins the spell if it’s written down. It has to be burned into the soul, says U. I can’t do it, I screw up the chinté, in both substance and word. U. is patient and forgiving, although some of the stuff is rare and valuable. Little steps, Jeanne, little steps, he says. I always say, Yes, Owadeb. It means good father, an honorific.

  Training in attention, staring at a pebble for hours. Essential. The worst thing you can do, apparently, is lose attention. You might pick the wrong mouse or frog to be your magical ally, for example, and that would never do.

  Day 42, Danolo

  A ceremony tonight, dancing and drums. As a good anthropologist I should be taking notes but can’t seem to generate the distance. Inside it too deep, a danger as M. said. U. says the ceremony is asking the orishas for forgiveness, some kind of anniv
ersary of their exile from Ifé. Asked, forgiveness for what? Wouldn’t say. Talking in riddles again. At height of craziness, dancing myself (and I can’t dance), W. appeared, smiling, face shining with sweat. Said to call him Mebembé, now. Little helper? Asked him what it meant, but he just shrugged. Brief conversation before Tourma pulled me away. She seemed upset but wouldn’t tell me why. Was he really there, or yet another Olo weirdness? If real, he seems happier than he’s been in a while. Writing is going well, he says.

  Day 46, Malinou

  I see I have been neglecting this journal.

  We have been making house calls, U. and I. We paddled his pirogue downriver and visited a string of villages on the borders of the park, where U. did oracles and a little witch-doctoring. He is famous here and greatly feared. The people are totally whacked out by his performance, although the issues they bring to him are mainly just the petty decisions of agricultural life. Sell the cow? Plant another field of yams? There’s occasionally a heavier one?am I being hexed? Should the second son marry that girl? I haven’t seen a customer go off unsatisfied. There’s also private consultation with the witch-afflicted, but I don’t get to see that, not yet. I asked him if I could do an oracle and he said yes, when I am ready, but I must be perfect in my verses.

  Watched U. take grel out of a man. It was quite dramatic and New Testament. He put it into a chicken, which was then killed and thrown into a fire. Stench! An interesting ritual, I took careful notes. The patient seemed totally exhausted, but a lot better off than the chicken. Or the grel, according to U. He says you can extract a grel into yourself and then spit it out and burn it, but it is disgusting and fairly dangerous. A chicken is better.