Pink Mountain on Locust Island

by Jamie Marina Lau

  When I woke up I had to check my computer to see if it was real or not, and I stared at it for hours just in case it came, but it’s now been weeks since he’s spoken to me.

  The desert locust is notorious. Today is a praying mantis voyage with four lighters in my pocket. Future burning like desert locusts sprawling in buzzing masses all over one-fifth of the world’s land surface. Simmering the earth with one species. Newspapers and recyclables to spread contagiousness and fear and confidence, and power and intellect. Recite this in my head.

  An internet page warns: a locust infestation may cause misery.

  I take a train downtown to Sadie and Tre’s. And wonder how it would be if Tre was at home today. A xylophone ball tapping on his skull—would make for a weird conversation.

  I imagine Tre sitting with a crooked back in the messy house on the couch that has waste growing in between the threads. I imagine him there watching a kind of Mark Gonzales on the small television and a barely serious serial drama on his school laptop at the same time. When his ma asks what flavour stew he wants he doesn’t answer. I imagine Tre in that bathroom, wondering what pills will make muscles gurgle in his arms so that Yuya will say wow with her plum lips. I imagine him thinking about how the pretty pink crystals will make him dance loopy to bongos.

  I haven’t talked to Yuya or Tre since the night at Zagame’s like a ditch festival. How angry I got at them, making me unlatch from everybody but Zig, who is still a broken machine, but not more broken than the two of them: Yuya and Tre.

  Back in the day there was bebop, now there’s just forever reverbs of drumming rituals and bad memories of puke in a gutter and one-dollar coins that could only get you 0.6 of a water from the 7-Eleven and finally the bit of sticky in the arc of my back tooth as a guilty reminder.

  I leave the station, walk up the street. Milk cartons with spilt white in the drain and somebody playing a clarinet far away. There are schoolkids on steps eating chewy fruit and they look at me and I can feel a stretchy snarl on my face.

  WHAT’S THE BIG DEAL ABOUT DATES?

  A cleaner state in Sadie’s apartment, at least more than the last time I was here.

  Sadie tells me to tell her about myself. She points her menthol cigarette at me.

  I’m smoothed out onto her itchy couch. Therapy sessions are something so romantic.

  Sadie’s got a skewed glare across her face. She wipes down her cheekbone, ironing it out, but it slowly bounces back to its scowl. She takes a drag. I think of giving her my real name, and then I think about not giving her my name at all.

  Fifteen years old. Got a dad, got a ma too but she’s somewhere else and maybe it’s better that way because of Dad whenever he gets angry. I don’t like many people, they all like stupid things and they all leave me behind. I go to this school. Oh your son goes to school there too? I say I’ve never heard of him, it’s a damn big institution.

  I tell her I’m fifteen years old and I have nightmares about the person I’m in love with, and I’m falling in love with somebody else and have no control over it. I have nightmares that say I’m probably not in love with this first person, that I never have been. Dates, I imagine, are not supposed to be as sickening as the few dates we’ve had.

  What are the sickening dates?

  I say: bathing suit and faces strangulating, close eyes softening, suffocation of air and taking a while to remember to breathe through your nostrils, kissing again, smearing lips. Motel room and Dad with a towel on to kill the mood. A party with a woman painting everything red. Him making out with anything that moves and then trying to kiss me in front of another man’s home videos.

  Sadie’s wearing this face like everything I’ve said is very typical. I swerve the subject, she pushes a glass of water toward me. I stare at her, and then I stare at all the parts of her body I can nudge, the weak spots. Enough to tie her down to a chair. Her stomach, the jiggle in her thighs.

  I tell her I’m fifteen years old and my mother leaving made my dad addicted to Xanax and to binging on the television screens and he always says he’s going to switch from alcohol to fizzy drink but when he buys the fizzy drink he goes back to alcohol after just one night and leaves the fizzy drink until it goes off and then forgets about it ’til it’s about to start going mouldy and then blames me for letting it expire. He gets me to drink it even if it’s expired already and I get sick in the stomach and usually it’s not throwing up, but I’ve thrown up before.

  Sadie says: terrible.

  Yeah, I agree.

  She tells me: I try to get my son to drink tomato juice but he gives me an attitude about it, says it’s too pungent. But then late at night he comes home after smoking weed and he goes straight to the fridge and drinks half the tomato juice before coming in to see me, to say goodnight—he uses it as a sort of mouthwash, thinks weed can be disguised in the smell of it.

  She snaps out of it again, apologises, tells me to continue talking. She laughs nervously and says: isn’t it obvious why I stopped being a school guidance counsellor.

  I ask her what she is now, then.

  She says for a while she’s just been in a phase. She tells me she’s been running short of cash because of it. That she plays a lot of arcade games, sometimes winning a lot of money, and doing so keeps her switched on for a month. Sometimes she still has appointments with her old clients but most of them stop seeing her because she has nothing to offer but her own complaining. Then she got into this new business that makes people want to come see her. She likes when people visit her, she likes being the middle man. She’s become obsessed with making people relieved. It’s why people become doctors, lawyers, pastors, reverends. She says: I want to be the person that sells them hope, make it seem free—make money seem insignificant. You’d do anything for that wouldn’t you.

  She looks at me odd.

  She tells me that she loves this feeling, that she could live off of it forever, but also that it does the opposite sometimes—it fucks people up. She tells me this business of selling powder is different to selling power. She tells me her son is too drugged up, is having trouble waking up. She tells me how she keeps blaming herself. She tells me she’s been wanting to kill those pushers that traded her the drugs that Tre baby took from her cabinet.

  She crunches her hands tight, she says: old triad man and a boy, smug types, desperate types, new bait. Well dressed. The price was good, the portion just as much, I was too confident.

  I swallow an O.

  She frowns and then looks side-to-side really quickly. She’s snapped out of her ramble. I sit up on the couch and look around and ask her what’s with all the stitched dolls.

  She looks around too and says: they’re a fad. They look scary, but probably they do nothing.

  I think about Honey. We both snap out of this real talk. I fix my eyes on all the weak spots on her body.

  I ask her: do you have any friends?

  She names some women’s names. But I’ve learnt in an instant how to muffle Sadie’s voice, to concentrate on the burning process. I imagine taking her wrist, twisting it around—not so much that it snaps, just enough to pull her over to the chair. Grabbing the curtain cord and cutting it off, wrapping it around and around her, squeezing her skin in like a ham—finishing it with a Scout knot learnt from the internet.

  Honey, she says: this session is about you, not about me.

  Honey? I say. Is that a friend of yours?

  Sadie’s face resorts back into its scowl. I think about how tight the knot would have to be. I ask her: is Honey a woman you tried to rip off with dangerous drugs?

  Her face is a fingernail digging into skin. I clutch in my hands the couch cushions.

  I ask her quickly: why do you sabotage her?

  If kicking, kick her in the knee, darling. But she’s seated, she won’t fall.

  She rubs her palms over the sides of her thighs.

  She says quickly: There’s no room to be cordial.

  Dad used to tell me that all women
were batshit crazy—I think this was his way of making himself feel better about my ma, and about himself in a world where he is the smug type, the desperate type, old bait. Sadie breathes in and then out again and when she opens her eyes, it’s a fresh slate. She asks me if I’ve had lunch. I ask her if she often cooks lunches for her friends. She stutters and her lips gobble each other up.

  Tie her to a chair, mention me—tell her how I know that she ripped me off. Let her watch her things burn, put the fire out. If she resists, do something else—something more than fire. I’m doing it all in the wrong order.

  Sadie turns the television on: a documentary about succulents in desert conditions, and insects of deserts and non-wetlands. She tells me that she can’t sustain herself if it’s quiet in here. She says it’s just impossible.

  I stare at things I can burn. Curtains, a box of flour on the bench. Plants? Aloe vera: I wonder if it burns.

  Aloe vera is Mediterranean lily of the desert.

  Aloe vera: part of the burial ritual in Ancient Egypt, giving immortality because of the yoghurts it produces. It’s good for wetness even though the place it grows in is completely dry. I stare at the curtain cord and the chair, in my mind they make weird thuds. Aloe vera has a life expectancy of a hundred years in the wild.

  DYING IN THE SUMMER

  You want to know why I’m in a phase? Sadie asks this all of a sudden. She says it quickly, scratching for me to look at her—so that I’m no longer looking all around the room for war apparatus. Her eyes have gone spritzy. The way her voice sounds makes me jump. When I look at her, her eyelids become hardened straight away—but still something wiggles in them. She has her arms crossed.

  I’ve just realised, she says—her voice is a sort of last resort. Then it settles, like she’s given up. She says: in one way or another everybody I care about is being taken from me because of me. And when you’re hypnotised with being the middle-man, the saviour, you don’t see clearly. Like when something’s unsafe, and you don’t foresee it. Like when the pink rock that two amateur pushers gave you isn’t a mountain, it’s a crater. And your son eats it.

  PINK TOES

  Jeremiah: and behold, it was without form and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light. And all the birds of the air had fled and I looked, and behold, the fruitful land was a desert.

  This has been written on a notepad on the coffee table where a few loose sheets lie and books tremble from being stacked in a rush.

  This room is sweating if you pause and stare for a second.

  Sadie looks at me looking and the way the air comes out her throat is the same way a trumpet doesn’t know how to be played. She’s shifted all of a sudden, and I look at her sadly. I’m about to surrender, my palms emptied canisters on my lap, until the sound of boots thumping down the hallway.

  Santa Coy in the doorway of Sadie’s fat home, like a cowboy, Mother’s Glock 17 in his hand. He aims at Sadie’s brain.

  This is a rodeo and Sadie is overcome with a huge petrified scowl. The choking in her throat finales with one undercooked hack. It swallows her face whole and she grabs me, slams a palm that smells like hot syrup over my lips. She yanks my Supreme jacket close so that I can’t move either of my arms. I squeal through her shut fingers.

  A big round dome stuck in my throat, like writhing and I’m weeping, scared the stuff from my nose will drip onto Sadie’s fingers. She’s reaching over my lap into the space between the cushion and couch. What appears in her hand is a gun that is smaller, like a toy. She points it at Santa Coy and he steps back a second and behind him is Dad in a surgical gown.

  I wonder if this is a showdown, and if it is, whether it’ll be hard to get the blood out.

  Were you there when they crucified my Lord. A particular kind of trembling somebody partakes in before death, maybe—I’d hate to see it. I shut my eyes and then flutter my eyelids so that if anything happens I’ll only see it in strobes.

  Sadie is weeping.

  And you can tell by the way Santa Coy’s clutched the gun, like it’s someone else’s shoe, that Santa Coy has never held this Glock before. I imagine them both shooting and the bullet colliding and forming a goo of my brain.

  Like a home run. I bite Sadie’s hand and she moans, unearthly sounds. Santa Coy jumps forward, his arm quivering.

  Sadie screams: you dirty pushers!

  Her voice is close to my face, her breath like boiled cherries. Santa Coy’s face contorts at the sound. The whole room is shaking. She screams again, veins in her neck popping out. Consecutive screeches until her face reddens and there’s a demon crawling out her lips. Tremble tremble. The whole room trembles like a sort of sex.

  Santa Coy finds a better grip, grasping his fingers over the metal again. It makes a noise and in response Sadie’s body seizes and snaps, she fires, skimming Santa Coy’s shoulders. Hers is like a fire pistol. Santa Coy screams. Nail him to a cross. Wonder if there’s a difference between a false-alarm-scream and a death-scream. Dad snatches the gun from Santa Coy before he falls as a flop on the linoleum. Were you there when the sun refused to shine? He fires at Sadie, hitting her collarbone. His hand looks silly, bubbling from the aftermath. Loose skin hands. Causes me to tremble. I feel the whip and my head drops into my lap and for a moment silk limbs collapse on top of me.

  NINE

  KILL WITH ONE LEAP

  Panthera pardus, leopard, Panthera onca, jaguar, Puma con-colour, cougar. Asia or Africa. Black panthers have spots, you just can’t see them. Blackish panthers—not common, quite rare. Even rarer to be an albino panther. Santa Coy is albino, but not slowing. He’s restless, throwing his arm back and forth despite the wound in his shoulder. Like a broken machine, like a spaghetti being waved in front of a mouth. His body moving, not his brain. The blood is leaving Sadie: the air’s wavelengths stilt and glitch around her. When she sees it she looks horrified, watching it move all on its own.

  The sound of five consecutive flops on the linoleum. Mucus in heavy breath.

  A rose ceremony: to bleed in public is a sort of hunger-arist deed.

  Of all the big cats the panther is the most unpredictable, angry. Flexes its paws, runs them back and forth in the dirt. Maybe because panthers are actually less fertile—this is a whole truth. They call the non-black panthers normal, the darker the panther, the more abnormal. Less fertile, more unpredictable—but there is something about the way a dark panther slinks its legs over a moss surface. Jaw hung open, catching the deer, and the bird. This is the way my father thinks he moves right now; instead he backs into the wall behind him. His limbs catch, and he drops to the ground. I hear him crying.

  This is not the way a showdown should go.

  A paradise for unslinked deadbeats.

  Back to their old ways.

  Fall asleep without goodnight.

  Wake up without looking.

  Sadie breathing only in gasps.

  LOCUST ISLAND

  How this goes: like the last twenty minutes of any desert documentary.

  The way they grab Dad is the way they grab a loose animal: like they’ve been looking for him their whole lives. The way they take Santa Coy is like him being swarmed at exhibition parties: like a silken cub.

  And Sadie curdles.

  Locusts eat furniture in swarms. The way their bodies are built, cut like armour. Strong jaws: their eating can be heard from far away. But if you trick them, catch them, roast them, eat them, they’ll stop. Tribes do this by rubbing sticks together: smoke will confuse them.

  The sound of a body being eaten up.

  Why plagues still exist is a mystery. To love something you must lose it, even if it’s just for a second—something my Aunty Linda would’ve said once. I’m dreading the emergency room, or a funeral, I’ve seen it all too many times on TV.

  A second is a millennia. Wait for the finale. I hear there’s an encore that lasts forever, a perpetual drug trip. A mortal wound is a big fat kiss, no role-play, the real thing. Wonder if it would be okay—a big
fat kiss from a grandma you’ve never met.

  Loner locust, changing from brown to yellow. They change shape and colour only when together. A one, a two. Can go for miles, as long as they’re in unison.

  Downstairs covered in patchwork red. Pink bruising on my T-shirt from Sadie’s.

  Santa Coy tells me: blood is hard to get out.

  Melancholy sirens, kids hanging off the block’s playground. Garbage man watches the stretcher insert a van. I wonder if anybody’s thought of me, that I caused this trouble. I was never the emperor, I’m the voodoo. I’m not the pharaoh, I’m the tomb.

  I’m standing beside a paramedic and the sky is ooze, swishing and switching between pink and baby blues. The paramedic doesn’t say anything to me, nothing like: sorry you had to see all of that. All of it happening right in your lap.

  They just ask how long we’ve been waiting. A ritual on daily. A morning coffee to approach this criminal lair, just before dinner—the last commute for the day. Don’t touch a thing, follow us.

  The last ten minutes of that desert creature documentary was about the Melanoplus spretus, a Rocky Mountain locust. In the nineteenth century they plague the American West and then they disappear permanently.

  KEEP IN HOT, DRY CONDITIONS

  Like this: everybody’s got problems, don’t act like you’re the only one that’s hurt here. Like the infestations of 1856 to 1874. All crop men suffer the plague, you’re not the only crop man. All crops will die, the sheep’s wool eaten off their flesh, the crop man’s clothes off his back. Even on all other corners of the earth. California in the early 1700s. Nebraska—the farm men with gunpowder. Suck these locusts off the earth. Until they completely disappear. Great Plains—they plague you and then never come back. They were sent from God to remind crop men about hospitalisation in the swarming sense. That you are not the only one waiting for hope. This is what it’s like waiting for the man, the woman and the boy in ER.