by Eugen Bacon
Without a word he peeled my fingers from his body and rose, crystal eyes avoiding mine. Like my own ice, his touch was frosty on my skin. My mouth opened and closed; no words could bridge what had just happened. First I saw a blur, thought I might faint. Might? Like it was a choice! I didn’t faint. Then the dusting cloth I had moments ago flung onto the floor so I could cradle my boy—my boy?—grew visible until its brightness hurt my eyes.
For want of activity, seeking something to clutch in the place within my arms where I had held Odysseus, I lifted the dusting cloth, embraced it. Odysseus stood. The blade sticking from his thigh came into view. The penknife had stabbed him. He followed the horror in my eyes to the blade in his flesh and the first sound, a rasping sound, escaped his lips. It was a sound of annoyance, not pain. “The hell,” tongue click. The casual way he pulled out the blade strengthened my concern.
No blood oozed from the gap. Not a drop of blood anywhere.
I gazed at my hands still holding the dusting cloth. My eyes ran along the lines of its pattern, noticing where threads intersected in a crisscross of white on yellow, noticing where they fell apart. With a cry, I stumbled to the bathroom and retched and retched until I could more calmly breathe, and my impulses were more controlled. That was the last time I dared put a finger on Odysseus.
• • •
I roused to find myself in dawn. Bad thoughts had lurked through my sleep and now tangled my mind with the completeness of the child’s rejection—set in stone in a way that physically hurt. Rejection was rejection. Full stop. You couldn’t garnish it. I slapped myself to whip it out, that demon of a past taunting me with memories of the day I took an estranged child in my arms.
No rain had fallen.
An arrow of light guided my eye toward morning—shy, uncertain and wooing the sky. I looked down the plain and found in my line of sight a hut full of shadows. I blinked. The hut moved. I blinked again. The hut had moved, the distance surely wrong; far closer this time. As I stared, it vanished. I blinked and there it was again. Even nearer.
I climbed down the tree, kissed her trunk, thanked her for showing me kindness. I did not think Weed’s plant whispering had followed me all this way.
As I walked into dawn a cloud churned with malevolence above the plains. The land still fought, shifting its stomach to conflict my tread. So precise the malice of its reasoning, it knew exactly where to find my next step and a calculated hump would upset my foothold. I mislaid my heel and hit the ground. Glimmers on my head just then falling from the sky affirmed the ungodliness of this world.
Rain. Omen or blessing? The glimmers gained fury and madly poured.
The hut was waiting for me. It held no entry and disappeared like a challenge. I realized that I was undrenched in the downpour, water touching everything but me. The hut was now behind me, a sudden door open.
Right on its threshold lay a grumpy tail-wagger, long-furred. A fringe of shiny hair fell across one yellow eye. The beast rose on its paws, snarled. Without moving my face, I returned a throat growl. The animal primed itself to lunge but my second growl found its thoughts.
“I’m not here to harm,” I said.
“Not afraid, are we?” it said.
“You have a beard and a mustache but, no. I am not afraid. Where’s your companion?”
“You are . . .?” It came close to sniff me. I scratched its neck.
“A friend.” She spoke as quietly behind me as she had arrived. She was of fair build, her hair short and receding. Her face . . . I noticed her face the most: the length of it, the brooding in her eyes, the downturn at the corners of her lips. Hers was a kind of face that depressed you to look at.
“Such misery in so youthful a face,” she said, mirroring my thoughts of her. You looked at her and you felt sad, old. She walked in a forward slant like she was about to topple. Life sat heavy on her shoulders.
“Here, Ball,” she said to the tail-wagger in a sound that was song not misery. The sadness was an illusion, unhurried in its unveiling.
“You are . . .” I said.
“Eccentric, my dear. Completely potty, yeah. My whole family is bonkers.” She wore an amulet on her wrist.
We laughed, easy laughter, hers the bring-the-hut-down kind.
She was bare-chested, unashamed of her nakedness. Shells dangled from strings of her sisal skirt.
“It’s a bit—” I said.
“Rude barging in like this? Yeah. I got food going,” she said.
“What-am-a—?”
“Say? Thanks.”
“Giving food to—”
“Strangers? No. Then you must be a friend, yeah.” She turned and entered the hut where she stirred stirred a pot on a three-stone-hearth fire that contained sootless smoke. Bark dolls with straw hair hung at a window. I watched them dance upon a creep of wind. A bottle full of pendants stood on the mud floor. Another jar held little turtles, floating upside down and dead in water.
I listened to the silence of the ladle on clay, spoke: “What if I broke this—?”
“Silence? Whatever’s comfortable. Talk. Touch. You want a hug?”
We laughed.
The leg of a dead turtle kicked in the jar. The creature came to life, flipped. It dove to the bottom. The other turtles danced alive. A jingle turned my eye to the bark dolls jigging in the wind. One winked at me, another smiled in its sleep—it was the smile of a baby. Another stared at me with the pupil-less eyes of death.
This world meant me no malice but it meant to test me.
Without prodding, over wild boar soup and roots of turtle grass with their transparent membrane, I told Potty about Novic and Odysseus. I spoke of how they always shared something between them: a glance across a room, a brush of cloak past a corridor. I spoke of the heat of Novic’s desire, the lightning and primitive kind. I spoke of a visiting high priest from 180C—a land of such beauty it confused the boundaries of propriety and a man could take liberty to covet his neighbor’s wife. He was a thoughtless priest whose gaze lingered a moment too long on my face, whose envy sent Novic’s mood to scarlet. His rage took out my eye with a scorching poker rod. I spoke of what I had left behind: two little persons—same but different.
She slept on the hard floor, leaving her straw bed for my head. In the morning, she baked river crab.
“But where is—” I said.
“The river? My mother taught me to smell for crab.”
When she wasn’t swallowed in enfolding laughter, I found dignity in her speech, always finishing my sentences.
“I was a silly little—” I said.
“Thing fascinated with grandeur, yeah. Novic knows how to get into someone’s head.”
“I never knew—”
“What kind of Sayneth priesting he did. What you came to know was the chaos he bade when he introduced a notion.”
“Will it hurt—”
“Every time. Every time you think of T-Mo it will hurt. Until you learn to remember that pain, my dear, is a state of mind.”
Although her hospitality had no time attached to it, I knew in the morning that I must leave, that my destiny was elsewhere. I also knew that when I left, time would grow between us for a while.
She gave me an amulet before we parted. It held the face of a rook. “Give you comfort with the shadow self, yours and that of the other,” she said. “No ghosts you never want to meet. You can sit in the shadows until you seek to be seen.”
Back on guard, Ball the shiny coated tail-wagger lay with a lugubrious sigh by the hut’s threshold. He smelt like old ladies. He opened a yellow eye as I passed, like he half-remembered me. A wild wind got up and teased his beard and mustache.
The same wind shoved me as I walked. The hut vanished soon as I reached my friend, the black-stemmed and wispy-leafed tree. I turned and walked toward the rising sun, parallel to the edge of the world. Wi
nd pushed into my face. She whipped at the rest of me, blew at shrubbery until it bent. I staggered. This time the live ground was innocent at my feet, having long determined that my examination was complete. No more humps, or collapses, displaced my tread. A cloud of flat leaves fleeing the wind strayed into my face. I peeled away their frantic kiss and they trembled at the seams but surrendered. I watched them chase away, the wind ardent and close behind.
An eagle called overhead, his high-pitched scream finishing with layered notes. I was no longer hollow inside—thank you Miss Potty—just perplexed about living. And I still questioned: where-am-a-go? Nettles spoke at my feet, told me I was barefoot. I clutched the amulet to my breast, decided to wear it. Lifting my eyes to the now turquoise skyline, I willed myself to levitate.
• 14 •
I found Miss Potty in every world.
When I set out hunting T-Mo after he went roaming, there she was, Miss Potty, in the lands I visited.
I found her on Earth. She was unmistakable. Always there: her quiet appearance, the life-is-too-heavy walk, the fair build with receding hair. Her face . . . always her face I noticed the most: the length of it, the brood in her eyes, the downturn in those lips. But I already knew the moroseness was an illusion; staring at it, I did not feel gloomy or ancient. I also knew that the bring-the-hut-down laughter was close.
I stayed long enough to learn this world, and its fascinating creatures. Always Miss Potty had a companion: there was one called a jaguar, another a lynx, then a turtle, an owl, a crow, a mustang, a spider, a raccoon, a turtle, a bat. Once she was at sea, riding an orca.
“Tell me—” I started to ask, leaning across the rail of the ship that sailed me.
“About the companions?” she finished. “They bring wisdom. They see roads within chaos. They bring sight that is psychic. They guide you to the unseen. Soul memory—they have it in different forms, depends on the animal. The jaguar is a shape-shifter, he brings no fear within darkness. The orca frees the soul from the body, he controls rainfall on earth. The crow guards a place before it exists, he brings light to dark souls. You, my dear, need a mountain lion to balance your power, your intention, your strength. Most of all, you need him to free you from guilt.”
We had an air of ease between us, always, Miss Potty finishing my conversation. Once I saw her in an open-air restaurant in Delhi; she was dressed in an orange sari. Bhangra Kitchen. That was the plaque on the stall. Miss Potty sat on the pavement dipping roti into a tin plate that held something the color and texture of mud.
“What’s—” I began to ask.
“This that I am eating?”
“Perhaps now I am afraid to know.”
“Fear is an art—it is enhanced and holds meaning. Only fools are afraid of curry, vindaloo or chick pea gravy. One of these is what I am eating.”
Swinging a playful trunk beside her was a baby elephant.
“Tell me about—”
“This companion? He moves heavy objects,” she said. Bring-the-hut-down laughter. She sobered, adjusted her sari. “He understands complexity.”
“And the mayfly?” when I met her in Macedonia garbed in an embroidered dress, fully national it included a vest, a collar, a headscarf, red socks and blue shoes. “What about—”
“Him as a companion? He is intense; he lives in the moment.”
Of the dingo in the Australian outback, she spoke about loyalty, about understanding silence. Of the goat in South Africa’s Jericho, she spoke about sure-footedness, about a quest for new heights. Once I saw her driving a tuk-tuk in Phuket, riding free with her companion: a cock. Or was the cock dinner and the raven soaring behind the tuk-tuk just outside its exposed back the companion?
“No sign—” I shouted as I waved.
“Of T-Mo in this world? Not the tuk-tuk kind, I don’t think,” she yelled back.
“See you—”
“Again? I hope not,” she said, laugh laugh laughing.
Miss Potty. P, P, a voiceless sound. Lips together, try to blow air through the mouth, a surge of pressure and the sound explodes.
She was my soundness, my reasoning. She poured on me her wisdom. In her presence my heart calmed.
“Go further,” she would say when I was fretful, giving up on finding T-Mo.
“What if I—”
“Find him?”
“What if he—”
“Does not recognize you with that new hair? He is your son. Unless you hoodwinked yourself.”
By this time, my hair had turned, the dinosaur on my skin had intensified; and my broken eye had sunk into itself.
“Believe in success,” said Miss Potty.
“What does—”
“Success look like?” Bring-the-hut-down laughter. “You will know when you see it.”
When I left Novic, inspired by Miss Potty and the exotic worlds she visited, I learnt exploit. I hiked an iced mountain in Siberia, trekked a rain forest in the Congo, strode barefoot across planets like Bianca, Lithium, Tharsus, Nexus, Sic’bel, Sic’defi, Haabains, Fosoids. Even Tiptirons, Solobs, Tafou, the Nether Realms, Hibar, Thierrie, Toguls, Pabs, Pifsers and the Moorlands. T-Mo never forsook my mind through all these escapades. Friends I made new, never found old—nobody I knew or remembered from Grovea came to these lands.
I found my friend Moth in the land of Sic’bel. He scarcely conversed, felt no incline to chit chat. I use “he” to circumvent a “he/she”—Moth was sexless. His voice was sometimes velvet, sometimes full of husk. Freckles, as did baby-soft fur that caught light, peppered ashy skin that matched his eyes, his hair. In a moment of fondness, he caressed the back of your hand and you squirmed—his palms were sandpaper. Moth opened me to the diversity of species. His raised ears resembled clubbed antennae, parted wide to allow a flourishing comb. It was gelatinous, lined with zigzags and swirls. Slender feet supported a sturdy upper body, like the rest of his kind. Moth was a typical Sic’belai—extremely shy, socially unskilled, unable to handle stress and then suddenly affectionate. When I cajoled him from reticence, he would speak of the cousin planet, Sic’defi. Moth shyly described it in his limited language: “Far more than Earth is and sun is and wide cloud is.” My description of Grovea left him unmoved.
I found Tambo in the Moorlands when my eyes snapped open to a night as timeless as it was unsociable. The Moorlands were barren, inhospitable, motion in them—let alone barefoot—near impossible. Several times I found a need to levitate. My first sighting of Tambo was all eyes in the black night. When dawn filtered, I discovered her lips were a little rose. Very young looking, she wore a short crop that resembled tea leaves on her head. Her toes she must have stolen from toadstools but they did not deter her athletic sprint. It was Tambo who told me of a place called No Good in the land of Hibaar, where the ground was tough as a whore and filled with a peculiar shimmer of light that came from the north-east.
I found Nuntin at Hibaar, a humpbacked galactic island, its vast ocean of rocky ground speckled with black mountains in the horizon. Nuntin’s eyes, white as pearls, sat on the back of her head. Her hair was surely borrowed from steel shavings, pulled forward to make those eyes big, eyes she did not appear to use because she looked by touch. I do not mean to say she could not see; her large fingers probed you feeling (your mouth, your face, your chest), always feeling to know you, fingers clearly shaped in a sausage factory. She took me to the Nether Realms where a neon fire in the sky gobbled the moon.
I found Hunt—his pupils woven from gold dust, hair the color of sunflowers and cut in a helmet—in Fosoids, neighboring the Nether Realms. At first I was convinced that no life forms could flourish in that derelict place, and no wonder—not with the barking wind that felt our approach before it died. But we came across a knot of trees, clustered round like a fence, something of an enclosure, and saw three toddlers in loincloths and legs that waddled. Honey-yellow tufts of hair soft as fa
iry grass moved with their eyes when they saw us. They were pale, almond-skinned babies, moonstone eyes round as saucers.
“Ma’amm! Ma’amm!” they cried softly.
I gazed at the younglings, endearing and helpless, alone in this place of what-knows, and my heart skipped.
“Ma’amm! Ma’amm!”
I thought of T-Mo who once toddled arms spread, how seeing him opened my heart so he could closet in it.
“Ma’amm! Ma’amm!”
I dropped to my knees and the younglings fell into my arms. Up close, the babies’ angelic smiles revealed dimples along tribal grooves on scored faces. The almond skin was not as powder-soft as I had imagined and I was astonished to notice not a set of perfect baby teeth but rows of fangs.
“Ma’amm! Ma’amm!” and the first youngling pulled out claws.
I staggered back, levitated, blended with the shadows long before claws were out for the other two. All three younglings loped (no longer toddled), softly chuckling as they leapt, toward Hunt. From the labyrinths of vagueness, something Ma Space—quite a historian—had told, I understood. Those beatific blue-eyeds were not magnificent babies but Tot’lins, a tribe lost to history.
Centuries since any of that race had been seen.
• • •
The Land of Fosoids was once coveted for its peridot stars, particles of which fell as objects from the sky and fetched money as jewelry. Scholars never understood the phenomenon of falling stars; nor could fathom the vanishing of the Tot’lins, fast, powerful and ruthless, a vanishing that journeyed to the shadowlands of myth. It became a rumor, often contested, that Tot’lins were an evolutionary breed of Moorlanders originally from the land of Solobs—or was it Sepples?—or some other planet that started with S. They colonized lands, annihilated citizens of Breathing Rock, of Random Rock, of the Land of Many Waters, until abruptly the peridot stars stopped falling and the Tot’lins went extinct. Or so history has it.
