by Beth Hersant
Yet as she rode the bus home, she wondered if she’d made a mistake. Her limbs were heavy and she was desperately tired. She was running a fever and each jerk as the bus braked for traffic made her feel sick. And she was inexplicably uneasy. It made no sense. She’d had flu before and had never rushed off to bother her GP with it. She’d just bought some Lemsip Max and let her own body fight it off. Hence, she could not understand why she had gone to A&E this time. She didn’t want the doctors to think of her as some sort of hypochondriac. And they would, you know. Apparently they had little codes that they wrote on your chart and, if you bothered them with trivialities, you could be branded a TBP or ‘total bloody pain.’ And yet, despite her repugnance at making a fuss, she had gone to hospital and that decision was made, not by the sensible part of her brain, but by something nameless, some vague instinct that this illness was different. While her symptoms weren’t exactly new or earth-shattering, she could not shake the feeling that there was something really wrong with her.
For some reason her mind kept going back to little Henry Milne. She looked after the neighbor’s boy twice a week while his mum went to work; and last week the child had not been well.
“He’s been poorly ever since we got back from holiday,” his mother had said. “I don’t know if it’s jet lag or the antibiotics making him queasy or what.” And Claire had launched into a tirade about some nutter at a parade. She showed Janet the boy’s bandaged arm with exclamations of “She bit him! She actually bit him!” Then Claire, who was looking tired and oddly pale beneath her Caribbean tan, quickly ran out of steam.
She left Janet with spare bandages and some Calpol and the rest of that afternoon had been very quiet. Henry was tired and listless and hence very easy to look after. Janet just popped a Thomas the Tank Engine DVD in and curled up with him on the couch.
The trouble arose when she tried to get Henry ready to go home. The boy fussed and kicked his feet obstinately when she tried to put his shoes on him. By the time this task was finally accomplished, Henry had thrown himself on the floor and was mewling at her — a whining cry that grated on her ears.
“That’s enough!” she said sharply and held out her hand to help him up.
And he bit her. Right on the hand. She told him off and marched him home in disgrace.
Days later, as she sat on the bus on the way home from the hospital, she scratched absently at the small wound on her hand and her head thudded in time with the beating of her heart.
Once home she made herself a cup of weak tea, slipped on her pyjamas and went to bed. She drifted in and out of sleep, her fevered dreams populated by monsters and a rolling blackness that kept pulling her under. At one point, Janet opened her eyes, surprised to find that her room was dark. She flicked on the bedside light and checked the clock — four-thirty a.m. She had slept for hours and hours but it hadn’t done her any good; she was still exhausted. The fever burned through her, causing her to kick off her duvet. The next moment she was gripped with a chill so profound that she lay there shivering. And her head, dear God her head, pulsed with such pain she felt like she was being physically hit. She rolled over onto her side and tried to think about something else.
Her mother’s old dresser took up most of the wall in front of her and on it were all of the things that her husband had bought her while away on business trips. It was an eclectic collection of souvenirs, but it was precious to her. Even when they were apart, he’d still been thinking of her. Could it be that now, though cancer had separated them irrevocably, he thought of her still? Was he somehow aware of her, watching over her, waiting for her?
The nearest item on the dresser was a set of five Russian dolls that George had brought back from St. Petersburg. The biggest doll was beautifully, yet subtly painted. Her body was yellow — not overly bright or jarring, but a mellow shade topped with a light brown kerchief. In her hands, she clutched a bouquet of three tulips and her face wore an expression of calm serenity. Janet could see why he bought the set, she was a lovely piece of folk art. However, he had failed to inspect the smaller dolls that nested inside her and these had been painted with a clumsier hand.
The artist had used a completely different pallet for doll number two. Her headscarf was a bright red and her coat was green. It was not a sickly shade — not a pea soup color, but it was not pleasant either. It was a dark and somewhat dirty hue that was only lifted by a yellow flower where each of her arms should have been. The doll’s face had changed too. She still had the same pink bow of a mouth, but her expression was less serene. Her eyebrows had been drawn with a thicker black line that made her look annoyed and maybe even a little afraid.
Doll three was in the same dark outfit, but again her face had changed. The light blush that had been applied to the second doll’s cheeks was absent here, making her look waxy and sallow. She glared at Janet malevolently. The old woman had never noticed before that the doll looked seriously pissed off and just a little bit crazy.
The artist had dabbed pink onto the fourth doll’s cheeks, but instead of a healthy blush, the rough circles of color looked more like fever spots. Her eyes were hooded, sunken and unutterably weary. It was the same look, Janet realized, that she had seen on her mother’s face the day before she died — that “I’m already gone” look of the terminally ill.
Doll five was tiny and her dark green coat was unbroken by any adornment. Her face was all red lips and livid eyes that glared at Janet with strange, demented rage.
Her eyes grew heavy again. She slept and dreamt that the Russian dolls weren’t actually five different girls rendered in painted bits of cheap limewood. Instead they represented five stages of decline in the life of a single woman. And she was that doll. At every step she got smaller, sicker, and darker. And like Alice in Wonderland, she was afraid that soon there would be nothing left of her at all, just a great absence, a candle flame that had been snuffed out.
Chapter Five
New Orleans
“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”
Norman Cousins
Within psychology there is a concept known as “soul murder.” In his book Halo in the Sky, psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold defines this as killing another person’s identity. It is often the result of severe abuse or neglect. Yet there are other things that can smother a human soul. Take New Rabies, for instance. The virus engages in a classic example of soul murder. It abuses its victims with a range of torturous symptoms and then it drives them on — uses them as vectors whose sole purpose is to spread the disease. Meanwhile the needs of the host are wholly neglected. To facilitate its spread, New Rabies damages the memory centers of the brain — the infected forget who they are. The virus also ravages the amygdala (the neural center for emotional processing) and, by destroying a person’s ability to feel, it effectively wipes out his conscience. That is the only way that Otis could have done what he did.
The night he went missing from Whole Foods Market, he wandered aimlessly through the streets of New Orleans. He had forgotten about Nola; he no longer knew his own name. Into the vacuum left when Otis Hudson departed, there settled the Great Need. It took the wheel and steered him in the direction of a barking dog. The animal went crazy when he approached, but the Otis-thing felt nothing for the dog’s distress. The German Shepherd snarled and growled at him and yet Otis came on, heedless of the danger, ignoring the pain as the dog sank its teeth into his arm. He tried to bite the dog, but the animal’s thick fur was an obstacle and before he could tear it away, the creature wriggled out of his grasp and ran off into the night. He did not register the pain of his bleeding arm or any disappointment that his prey had escaped; he merely rose and walked on. That is when he saw the man.
Alan Tisono was tipsy, but not so drunk that all judgment had left him. He knew he shouldn’t drive home from the party and so he pocketed his keys and decided to walk instead. It was
December; the night was chilly but not freezing cold and he liked the streets when they were quiet like this. As he strolled along London Avenue Canal, a man appeared ahead of him on the sidewalk. The stranger padded along in an oddly jerking way, like a marionette having its strings twitched. The two men met under a streetlight and Alan stared at the man’s gaunt face, hollow eyes and the torn, bloody sleeve of his shirt.
“On your way to a zombie walk?” Tisono laughed. “They’re coming to get you, Barbara.”
He’d expected a laugh, a high-five or a good Shaun-of-the-Dead-style zombie impression, but the stranger just looked at him blankly. In another instant, he lunged for Alan, digging his fingernails into the startled man’s arm to get a good grip. Once fastened on, Otis bit and bit him — on the face, on the hands he threw up in defense, on the chest. Alan screamed and writhed until he managed to break free and then he was running. But he was drunk and injured and clumsy and the lunatic was gaining on him. He dove through a gap in the flood wall that lined the canal, hoping to put thick concrete between himself and his attacker.
And that is where Otis caught him. Unmoved by Alan’s pleas, Otis buried his teeth in the man’s throat, relinquishing his grip only after the last feeble twitches of Alan’s legs ceased. For the first time in days and days, Otis Hudson felt good.
The following day he was still on the move. The Otis-thing did not like the heat and glaring light of a New Orleans afternoon. But the Need did not concern itself with Otis’s comfort. It ordered him on, and he robotically obeyed. The next person he zeroed in on was seventy-six-year-old Lance Jessop. The old man was working in his front garden when Hudson approached him and in a fit of unprovoked rage punched him in the side of the head. Jessop staggered backward but Otis closed the gap and sank his teeth into the old man’s liver-spotted arm. He ripped off a chunk of flesh. Lance was screaming now as pain and panic blurred his vision. As he collapsed to the ground, the last thing he saw was a large black man standing over him chewing on the strip of skin (my skin!). He passed out.
Otis never got to finish his meal. Jessop’s neighbor, alerted by the old man’s cries, ran over, picked up a shovel and brought it down hard on Otis’s head. He crumbled to the ground.
“John? What’s going on?”
John lowered the shovel, prodded Otis to make sure he really was out for the count, and called to his wife, “Call the police, Jenny. And tell them to get an ambulance out here.”
She disappeared into their house and John booted Otis one more time and not too gently either. “Sick bastard,” he muttered and then knelt down to help his stricken neighbor.
It was breaking news in New Orleans. As Tammany visited one sick friend after another, she saw the video clip of Otis — covered in blood and screaming from the back of a police cruiser — played again and again on her clients’ TVs. Earnest-faced reporters recounted the details of the horrific attack on Lance Jessop and Tammany kept trying to reach Nola. No answer.
Later though she did receive a text: At hospital. Otis is bad. Can you come? Tammany wrapped up her work as quickly as she could and made a beeline for the University Medical Center. By the time she arrived, Otis was dead.
Tammany was exhausted by the time she got home. By far the worst parts of being a mambo are those moments when there’s nothing at all you can do. Confronted with a suffering she couldn’t fix or even alleviate, she just held Nola and let her weep. When Nola’s daughter arrived, Tammany gave the family their privacy and cried all the way home. She cried for Nola and for Otis and she wept because she was deeply afraid. She did not understand any of this and that ignorance made her feel like a little child again. She sat trembling in her favorite chair and prayed for strength and guidance. And at some point in the midst of her prayer, she fell asleep and began to dream…
Tammany is in St. Louis Cemetery Number One. It is night and somewhere, in this little city of crypts, music is playing. She follows the sound to find a man dancing in the moonlight. He is a couple of years older than her, but still handsome with strong arms and a lithe body.
“Hello Landry,” she says quietly. This is the husband she had loved so dearly, the father of her son Dempsey, and the coward who ran away. Years ago, he convinced himself that she was casting spells on him, using voodoo to control him. He’d become so paranoid about it that he would eat nothing she cooked. For Tammany this was the greatest insult. Only the wicked use magic to harm or manipulate others. But he could not get the idea out of his head and so he abandoned them — her and their child.
“Don’t look so grim, mambo. I am not your no-good husband,” the man says and this is true. Landry is wearing a black undertaker’s coat and matching top hat. Resting on his nose is a pair of dark glasses with the right lens knocked out to reveal one baleful eye. And that voice isn’t the deep, soothing bass that used to sing to her, it is higher and more nasal in quality.
“Greetings, Ghede.”
He is a loa of death, but not a fearsome spirit. Death is a natural part of life and Ghede is there to help souls pass on when their time comes. He is actually quite nice: funny (although a bit crude in his humor), amorous (he loves the ladies), and a great connoisseur of cigars and rum. At the moment he is puffing on a Cohiba cigar with a look of intense satisfaction on his face. Tammany can smell it: the aroma of cedar and spice with a hint of dark chocolate is very pleasant. And the music that’s playing is upbeat, although patently ludicrous.
As the Upperclassmen sing Cha Cha with the Zombies, Ghede puts his cigar down on a nearby tomb and dances toward her. With one hand on his stomach and the other raised by his head, he looks like Ricky Ricardo dancing to Cuban Pete (Boom Chicka Boom). And in another moment he slips a hand around her waist, pulls her close and leads her through the steps.
“So, what’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?” he whispers in her ear.
“Ghede, what happened to Otis?”
He spins away from her, the cha cha steps of his dance becoming more flamboyant. “Why do you want to talk about such depressing things when the night is young, the moon is full and I am so incredibly attractive?” He throws in a little Michael Jackson moonwalk just for the hell of it.
“I need to know.”
“I need to dance.”
“Ghede…” Tammany loves and reveres the loa, but she has had a rotten day and she needs answers.
“Always so serious. Remember all work and no play makes mambo a dull girl.”
“Ghede!”
“What?” The music stops.
“Why won’t you tell me?”
“Because!” he shouts and Tammany is taken aback by the mixture of rage and grief and fear that plays across his face.
“I know that something’s very wrong and you’re upset,” she says gently. “Please, let me help. Just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”
The loa’s expression softens. He picks up his cigar and sinks down onto the weathered old tomb with a heavy sigh. “Otis is here now,” he gestures to the graveyard, “finally.”
“What do you mean: finally?”
“You think he died today. I tell you he died days ago.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Soul death. To obliterate the soul while the body still lives — what does that sound like to you?”
“Zombies.”
He nods, “And slavery. It’s like they all have chains around their ankles. They are no longer fully alive and yet they cannot come to me and cross over. They just continue on … in darkness.”
“B-but,” Tammany was stammering now as her mind tried to wrap itself around all this. “What’s causing it?”
He leans forward and blows smoke in her face. Tammany coughs and splutters. It is different. Gone is the beautiful aroma of a $100 cigar. Now the smoke smells sharp and dark and unhealthy. As she breathes it in, it irritates her nose and seems to suck the moisture
out of the back of her throat. But for all that, the scent is not unfamiliar. She stands there for a moment trying to identify it. There is a hint of licorice and a sweet, yet woody mix of pine and lemon that she eventually realizes is frankincense. Then she picks up the nutty aroma of sweet flag. She has it now and doesn’t have to stand there sniffing to know that there would also be Master Root and Devil’s Shoestring in the mix. It is the smell of Bend Over Oil — one of the most dangerous substances in her world. It is used to bend another person’s will to your own and that is an evil thing. God gave us free will, an absolute essential if our actions are to have any meaning. To strip that away from someone is the ultimate violation.
“Slavery,” she murmurs, then looks again at Ghede. “But what enslaves them?”
He beckons her to lean in as if he is about to share a secret. “You aren’t going to believe this, but —”
The loa’s mouth is still open in speech, but what comes out is a ringing noise.
Tammany’s eyes snapped open. The telephone was ringing on the little table beside her and she glared at it.
“Fuck me,” she hissed. “Of all the fucking, stupid, asinine, fucking luck, I’ve had it … Hello?” She barked this final word into the receiver, ready to tear into whoever the hell interrupted that dream.
“Tam…” The voice was quiet and trembling as if the speaker was crying.
“Who is this?”
“It — It’s Gerry.”
“Geraldine? Are you all right?”
“No, I’m not. Can you come?”
“I’ll be right there.” The tone of that voice was enough. Tammany grabbed her purse, picked up her keys and ran to her car.
Geraldine Navarro was eighteen years old when she first came to Tammany. She’d been having dreams, she said, that the loa were calling and calling her name.
