Tropic of Night

by Unknown

  I say, “He’s coming. He’s coming through the city. People are going mad.”

  She strokes my arm, speaks soothingly in Spanish. Her eyes are without fear. Ignorance, or maybe she has something I don’t have. I make myself look at Paz. He’s confused, but I see that under the shell of cop-toughness there is a lovely innocence, a look my Witt had once.

  Sirens are calling again. Mrs. Paz says, “If you’re going to do this, you should start now.”

  So we begin. There is a little ritual with rum and chant that seals them to me in the m’doli and we move right into that. Mrs. Paz looks at me with awe, surely not a familiar experience with respect to the women her son has brought around; Paz seems a little wooden, overly precise, the response of a brave man frightened. My dad was like that in the storm at sea. And the chick? It tweets and hops and flutters wildly when I blow rum at it. Then I drink the drink.

  The kadoul is bitter; most sorcerous stuff is bitter, because most of it contains alkaloids and things that were evolved by plants to keep us warm-blooded creatures from dining on them. I sit down. Mrs. Paz sits next to me at the table, and Jimmy goes and flops into my raggedy lounger. She takes my hand, strokes it. It comes on fast. I have nothing in my stomach to slow it down except a half slice of pizza and some banana daiquiri. In five minutes I shuck off my body.

  The wonders of m’doli are difficult to describe. A savage spot, as lonely and enchanted as ere beneath the waning moon was haunted by a woman wailing for her demon lover. A little like that. You experience it in poetry, uncanny, but recall it in prose. Multiple levels of awareness, too. I’m conscious of my body, slumped in its chair, and Paz and his mother and the little bird, my allies, I can feel them, as we feel a chair, or a bed, or water around us in a pool, supporting, a circle of protection, connecting back to m’fa . I detect … what’s that? Something a little off, an imbalance there, an absence, like running on a loose heel. The wobble of a bike when you haven’t been on one for years. Too late, now, so I ignore it and float out of the apartment to the landing.

  Which seems to be larger, much larger than it is in m’fa, more of a broad veranda, a little like the back deck of Lou Nearing’s place in Hyde Park where I met my husband, and a little like a set for the last scene in Tosca, a fortress tower. It is indistinct. A breeze brings the odors of summer in the city, traffic fumes and the smoke from barbecues. There is a party going on, with music, not Motown this time, but an Olo song, a song about the exile from Ilé-Ifé, full of their peculiar grating harmonics and insistent rhythms. I can’t make out the words, but I’m dying to because it’s the whole story of the Olo’s expulsion and hegira, the Ilidoni, which I’ve never heard before, and for some reason it is enormously important. But it seems like the more I strain to hear, the fainter the music grows.

  I know a lot of the people here. I see my sister and my mother, and Marcel and some of the Chenka, and Lou Nearing and the old guy, George Dorman, who used to clean out our furnace at Sionnet when I was a little girl. He died when I was eight. I once asked Uluné whether the dead people we met in m’doli were real or created by our minds, like the figures in dreams. He laughed at me. How silly to imagine that the people in dreams were not real. How silly to have such a term as real .

  My husband is here, dressed in white Olo clothes, carrying the corkscrew thornwood cane that marks the Olo witch. He opens his arms to embrace me, like he did at the tent rock, the bone place, at Danolo, when I failed Uluné. I feel myself drawn to him. This is the first little skirmish.

  I can resist. I walk away; that is, the deck we are on becomes larger, the party recedes. I feel a touch at my elbow. My mother, looking gorgeous, in a tiny evening sheath, black, with her neck and hands heavy with diamonds. Have a drink, Jane, you’re old enough. She holds out a blender pitcher, and I smell the sweet, cloying scent of bananas and rum. I refuse. Jane, you’re such a drip. You’re no fun, Jane, that’s your problem. You’re a drip like your father. Not words, but the feeling I had when she used to say stuff like that.

  I ignore her and focus my attention on Witt. I say, I want to speak to Witt. Amusement. Talk to me, I’m here. I say, No, you’re not. You’re Durakné Den. I want Witt. It’s not really talking we’re doing, it’s the meaning under language.

  His teeth are filed in the manner of witches and he has the zigzag cheek and temple scars. You mean Mebembé. His witch name. The figure is getting taller now, changing. The scene is changing, too, and the odors are dust, and dung, and millet cooking, and the rank sharp scent of bruised African vegetation, and, permeating all, the not-stink of dulfana, intolerably strong, and of a peculiar decayed flavor. We are in an Olo bon, the one outside Danolo, where the witch lived. I never saw Durakné close-up, back then, except that one occasion at night. He is a tall, well-fed man, very dark, with his head shaved except for a long braided topknot. I look into his face.

  Uluné always told me that the first rule of ndol, the work in the magical realm, was never to be afraid. Fear takes away the legs and the arms and the eyes, he said. It is what the witches use to destroy you there, to render you helpless and … I forget the rest. I actually forget everything, just now, what I am doing here, what I am. I’m drowned in fear.

  Not like looking into the eyes of an animal, because there you understand it is an animal, you have no expectations, and there is a certain mindless dignity in its glance. These eyes, however, shine with intelligence, intelligence made hideous by the utter absence of any empathy, eyes as void of love as the black dots that rim the head of a spider. Inhuman is a word we use, in our false pride, to describe people who participate in behavior that is characteristically human?murder, torture, rape?but here for once it is apposite. Now I comprehend that I am not looking into the eyes of a person at all but at a writhing mass of grelet, the beings who colonized Durakné Den as a child and have grown fat in him, far fatter than these psychic parasites normally get, thick greasy maggots a foot long, eating, always hungry, reaching out for me. I dreamed him once, I recall, when I was with Uluné. Worms in the eyes. It, not him. I move away, slowly, as in a dream, I hear myself screaming, but there are no doors. I batter at the mud walls.

  Witt’s voice comes from It: Do you really want to see me? I’m right here. It takes a little carved wooden box off a shelf, places it on the floor. It lifts the lid. In the box is a doll of some kind, no, or a small animal, it’s moving. My dream again. I get down on my hands and knees and peer in. It’s Witt, six inches high, at a desk, with the white lined pads he favored stacked around him, writing away. I feel a pang of sympathy for him, he’s working so hard, and I reach out a hand to touch him. My hand and my whole arm and shoulder go into the box. I rub his back, as I used to when he was at his desk. But I am off balance, and so I place one foot in the box and then the other. There is plenty of room, and it’s an escape from the witch.

  I’m standing next to Witt. We are in a little room, the apartment over the boathouse at Sionnet. There is no door where there should be one, but otherwise it’s the same: a maple desk, an old wooden swivel chair, a somewhat ratty couch, bookshelves, a mini-stereo set, and the windows, to one side opening on the terrace and to the harbor on the other. I’m so glad to be home. I see my reflection in this window. I’m wearing a piece of patterned cloth around my waist; my breasts jut out like dark shiny plums. I am black. Oh, good, I think, now we will be happy. I go to him. He is writing away. I ask him how he is doing, how’s the Captain? He smiles, fine, great, it’s flowing good; he does not stop writing. I look over his shoulder. He writes: over the breasts of the spring, the land, amid cities, amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peeped from the ground spotting the gray debris … The writing fades, however, as he writes it. The pile of finished pages is quite blank. But he seems happy and so what if he’s writing Whitman, the important thing is … I have forgotten what the important thing is.

  Suddenly, I am terrifically horny. My groin tingles and grows damp. I am dying for it. I tug at his arm, wh
isper endearments, salacious suggestions. I drop my cloth wrap, I tear at his clothes, I drag him naked into the little bedroom, and oh, good, he has a huge hard-on, far bigger than Witt’s actual thing, parodically immense, black as obsidian glass, shiny wet. There is no room on the bed, for the bedroom is full of naked women. They are all playing with babies, newborns, crooning, tickling, nursing. Most of the women are black, but there are several with blond hair, one of whom looks Cuban. All the babies are dead, though, because the tops of all their heads have been sliced neatly off and their brains are missing; the tiny empty skulls gape like fledglings, but the women don’t seem to notice, or to notice that their own bellies have been sliced open, and that everything in the room is coated with, gelid with, slick, dark blood. I am insane with frustration, the desire is intolerable, I rub at my genitals. I shout at the women, I shoulder them aside, pushing them off the bed.

  One is my sister. She looks me in the face, such a look as I cannot recall my sister ever giving me, full of love and compassion. I lie on my back and raise my knees and he falls on me and shoves it in, huge, impossible, I am being ripped apart, but the pleasure is so overwhelming that I don’t care if I die. Then my sister says, into my ear, “Forgive me.”

  It is like an electric shock. Someone is holding me from behind, there is motion, we are on a boat, there’s a cheek pressed against mine, my hands are on a tiller. He’s guiding my hands, my father’s big freckled hands on mine. I can smell him. It’s dark, we’re sailing through the dark, through black water. A voice in my ear, warm breath. It’s a sad voice, disappointed. I know I’ve screwed up badly. The unevenness I felt earlier is explained. The wrong ally. There’s a hole in the circle of protection. The son and the mother are solid, but the yellow bird is wrong. The wrong yellow bird. I didn’t pay enough attention . I was distracted by fear.

  The hands on mine turn stringy and black-skinned.

  Now Uluné is sitting in front of me and the boat has turned into the landscape around Danolo, still moving, a heavy nauseating roll. Glowing lines radiate out from Uluné’s head, a thick meshwork that envelopes me, too, and everything else. I see the net of fate, and I understand that my whole life? my whole life?was for this purpose, my family, my childhood, my education. Marcel, the Chenka, Witt, Africa, all has been arranged so that I would be in a position to be where I am now, to function as a weapon in the jiladoul .

  Shooting blanks, as it turns out, a broken blade. I’ve failed.

  Sadness is flowing out of Uluné’s face. I see it as a colored mist, taste it as bitter, smell it as blood, earth, damp cloth. He is fading. I am still enclosed by arms, still feel breath on my cheek, but the arms and hands are turning into the limbs of a beast, the breath is rank and too hot.

  Uluné wait! One question.

  His face flows back into focus; an interested look appears on it. This is a tradition. The teacher always waits for one last question, but only one.

  I say, now tell me about the Ilidoni . Where did that come from? Stupid! I have wasted my one question on a historical detail, but Uluné seems pleased by it. The net lines flowing from his breast become brighter. I hear his voice. Knowledge flows into me.

  In Ifé, long ago, the orishas were not yet divided from the ajogun; all were the same, all were honored. The orishas walked the streets of Ifé alongside the Olo people. But then some of the Olo became proud, for although they had much, they desired more. These people said, Why must we dwell here in m’fa, where we must labor for our food, where we sicken and die like the animals? In m’arun the orishas live forever, and have nothing but pleasure. Let us conquer m’arun, and make it our own. These people were great sorcerers and with gifts, magic, and clever talk they corrupted half of the number of the gods. These became the ajogun . The evil ajogun showed the Olo sorcerers the way of great power, the okunikua . They tore the babies from the wombs of women, and ate their parts, and became strong as the gods. They assaulted m’arun and there was a great war. Now Olodumare was angered and showed his face. Ifé was brought to ruin, and the Olo sent on their wandering, and many of the ajogun were destroyed, too, which is why there are now four hundred and one orishas, but only two hundred ajogun, and why the orishas are always vigilant, to this day, and the Olo honor them and walk in their paths. The ajogun are like rats in the house, allowed to eat a little grain; yes, the orishas will not tear down the house for that, but if they bite the baby, then they tear down the house.

  That was a good question, Jeanne. You are a brave little goat.

  He smiles, and waves his cane and walks off, and he drags the world along with him, the heaving landscape sky air and sound, leaving me alone in the quivering darkness between the worlds. Why was it a good question? Goat? What did he mean by … the thought flies out of my mind. There is a pulling. I am being pulled home like a naughty child. It is a torment, it is like being jerked through a keyhole by a meathook. And oddly enough, through the pain, I understand that this is necessary, too, this is what, in a way, the Chenka would have done to me had I the courage then, the death of all the ogga and of old Jane. In m’doli there is no time of the sort we are used to in m’fa, so this flensing goes on for quite a while, and is quite inexplicable. A log being lathed down to the size of a toothpick. Somehow in the middle of it, I become a Catholic again, my faith restored. What is pulling at me can’t possibly understand this part. It merely wants me back in my body. It’s focused on the fact that I am no danger to him now, that my circle of protection is broken, that my stool rests on two legs. The wrong yellow bird. I feel the flesh of m’fa grow around me again. A little ray of hope here. I am helpless, yes, but I am also quite a different sort of being from what It thinks I am. They will tear down the house if the rat bites the baby. And the goat. That’s important, too, I think, as I open my eyes and see my apartment again.

  THIRTY-TWO

  Paz felt his neck jerk up, felt the cords of the chair under him pressing on the backs of his knees. He was stiff. I must have dozed off, he thought. He looked around. The candles his mother had lit were dim in the bottoms of their glass cylinders. That was crazy: he couldn’t have been out that long. His mother was sitting at the table, with Jane, who was still slumped with her head hanging over her shoulder, eyes shut. His mother was singing something, not in Spanish or English, low, a chant. He barely recognized her face. The lines drawn by tyranny, pride, and suffering appeared to have melted away, bird tracks on the beach, leaving a fine, dense surface that glowed like an old piano. He felt a pang of resentment; I could have used some of this, if this was peace, you could have shared it … anyway, what was he doing here with this mumbo-jumbo. He said it to himself, Mumbo-jumbo, and then out loud, Mumbo-jumbo. He stood up. The hell with this shit.

  Jane’s head snapped up and she looked at him. “Hold still. He’s coming here.” Her voice sounded deeper than it had before.

  “Who, Moore?”

  “No. Yes. Look, can you pray? I mean literally. Do you know any prayers?”

  “You mean like Hail Mary?”

  “Yes, that’s fine. He’s trying to get to you, he’s planting those thoughts, he wants you knocked out. Your mom’s like a rock, he can’t touch her, she’s Yemaya now. But he can get you. Pray, and don’t stop for anything. Oh, and say ‘Star of the Sea,’ add it to the prayer, it’ll link you up to Yemaya.”

  “This is ridiculous, Jane, I don’t even believe in that shit anymore, and even if I did …”

  There was a sound, a fluttering, clattering sound. They looked at the chick in its cage. It was battering itself against the mesh frantically, smashing its head, over and over, shattering its beak. It fell at last to the floor of its cage, vibrated briefly, and was still. A thread of blood came from its gaping mouth and formed a glistening droplet on the tip of its broken bill. The candles grew dim. The air in the room changed subtly, objects appearing as if seen through filthy glass.

  Paz said, “HailMarystaroftheseafullofgracetheLordiswiththeeblessed-artthouamongwomenandblessedisthefru
itofthywombJesus …” and continued in a low voice, concentrating on the words, fighting the thoughts that came bubbling up like foul oils in a well.

  Then Witt Moore was in the room, no sound on the stairs, no opening of the door, he was just there, looking about the same as he had looked the other night during the supposed arrest, the same clothes, the same half-smile on his face. Standing next to him was Dawn Slotsky, wearing a man’s shirt over her great belly. Her legs were bare, her eyes shut, an expression of beatific calm on her face.

  Moore said, “Well, Janey, what are we going to do with you?”

  Paz wanted to stand up but found he had forgotten how to send messages to his arms and legs. The chair was far too deep to get out of without help. He would wait for backup. Meanwhile, he would say the prayer and watch.

  “What do you want?” she asked. Her voice was cold.

  “What do I want? I want you, Jane. You’re my wife.”

  “I’m not your wife. You’re a grel .”

  “Everyone’s a grel, dear. You don’t believe I’m Witt Moore? Ask me anything. Social Security number, our address in the city, anything. You have a little round brown birthmark about the size of a nailhead on your inner thigh about a half inch below your pussy. See?”

  “How’s the Captain?”

  Paz saw a little frown start, just a flicker, before he put on the confident smile again. “The Captain’s fine, Jane. Writing’s going great.”

  “Yeah, real great; you’re copying Whitman in a little box back in Danolo, with all the women you killed.”

  He laughed. “Oh, Jane, you always look on the negative side. And you seemed to like it pretty well, me and my big black cock. You seemed to like it just fine.”

  “I got out of it, though, unlike Witt. You screwed up. You never should have allowed my sister’s ghost in there. She forgave me and that broke me out. A miracle in hell. You don’t understand love, is your problem.”