A Plea for Constant Motion

by Paul Carlucci

  In the bedroom, Ms. Bacon lies naked on the mattress, which has been stripped of its sheets. All the newspapers have been pushed to either side of the room, creating a narrow strip of bare floor for Ramona to walk along. Ms. Bacon’s flattened breasts are rising and falling, but erratically as she huffs. Her skin is green and yellow. Her eyes are swollen. The scars on her thighs are bloodless and manifold. They’re like an aerial view of the roads that Rodney lives near, all tangled and full of dead ends. Ramona sees them from the corner of her eye even though she tries to look away from Ms. Bacon’s vagina, except for some reason she can’t, like it’s magnetic somehow, sucking her down, a hole in her godmother’s ground.

  “Another locust, look,” says Ms. Bacon.

  She’s staring at the ceiling, eyelids flapping slowly, but Ramona sees the insect this time perched on the windowsill, completely still, its antennae pointing at the moon.

  “Your mom would get so pissed. She would do crazy things when she was mad, you know, even when she was driving. She didn’t care who got hurt.”

  There’s a muffled shout from down the hall. Ramona hovers over Ms. Bacon, staring at her vagina, something awful coagulating in her imagination.

  “Did so,” she says, her lips barely parting.

  “Not if she had a couple drinks she didn’t. Trust me. You didn’t know her. Your mother and a couple drinks, celebrating your two-month birthday? Not the best time for her to be driving. Not the best time for me to be confessing. But I had to come clean.”

  “Shut up. I hate you. Stop talking and go to sleep.”

  “Do you understand what I’m telling you? Your mom was angry at me. That’s why it happened. I just want to apologize before that thing stings me.”

  “You have a fever. Cindy. You don’t even know what you’re saying because you’re so naked and stupid. Cindy, Cindy, fucking little Cindy.”

  There’s another shout from down the hall, clearer this time. Elijah calling for help. Cindy Bacon’s chest heaves. She extends a hand to Ramona, fingertips trembling.

  But Ramona turns away. “I’ll take you to the hospital in the morning.”

  She steps over Elijah’s cane on the way to his room. Ramona doesn’t knock on his door, just pushes it open, expecting to see more of the extravagant decor that characterizes the rest of the house. But there’s nothing, just a flattened mattress in the centre of a concrete floor, red dust coating everything and Elijah lying there, his concubines gone and his fat body utterly naked. He wriggles, feet pedalling in the air, arms grasping. His flesh is speckled with keloids, fierce knots of skin on his chest and ribs, on his thighs and shoulders. And he has spots all over his body, pale patches where his pigment has flaked away.

  “Who is it?” asks Elijah, frail voice stripped of its arrogance. “Who is there? I need my cane. Please, I beg.”

  “It’s outside,” Ramona lies, trying not to stare at his tiny penis. “Those women you were with carried it away and threw it in the street.”

  He fusses while she dresses him, full of questions about who’s left in the house and has she seen his wallet and where are his birthday balloons and what time is it anyway.

  “It’s ten in the morning.” Ramona buttons his shirt, stares into his blind eyes, and is proud of her deceptions. “Come one. Let’s get your cane.”

  She guides him down the hall, soundlessly bends for his cane as they walk past. Outside, the dark is cool and gusty. They’re the only ones in the street.

  “But where is everyone then?” Elijah keeps stopping, turning his head from side to side, reaching out with his clasping hands. “Why is it so quiet? Why is it so cold?”

  “Look,” says Ramona. “I see your cane just up there.”

  Flowers festoon the rim of the hole in front of Elijah’s compound, offerings of remembrance for the worker whose body is still down there somewhere, buried in the earth. A cool breeze plays along the edge, spinning dirt devils into the street. Ramona stops on the precipice, stares into the inky black bottom.

  “It’s right at your feet. Just bend over and pick it up.”

  He doesn’t trust her. It’s all over his face, a helpless panic, his eyelids twitching, open and closed, open and closed. But he has no choice, and she sees submission wash across his features. He bends over, tentative, but just enough for her to give him a decisive push.

  There’s the sound of his body thumping into the dirt, the sound of wind bursting out of his lungs. Then there’s a moment of silence. Ramona sees his white-pocked eyeballs blinking manically in the gloom. Elijah thrashes the soft, sandy walls of the hole. His first sob is garbled, like he tried to swallow it, to deny her the pleasure. But only the one. The others flow with fear and phlegm and barely intelligible supplications: Please please please please.

  “I have your cane,” she says, lowering it to him. “You just missed it. Here. Feel.”

  Elijah stops moving, tilts his head at her, tears running through the muck of his face. He reaches out, closes his hand around the cane. Ramona plants her feet in the ground and pulls backwards so Elijah can scramble up the side of the hole. It’s hard work, but Elijah is desperate to get out; he lunges and grasps and crawls into the brightening morning.

  “The purple flowers,” he says, kneeling in the dust. “They’re from the jacaranda tree. The colonialists planted them. Is it okay?”

  “I suppose it will be.” She touches his shoulder. “Let’s get back inside. I have to take Cindy to the hospital now.”

  The Black Dogs Are Death

  PROLOGUE

  Whenever you dream, you’re back at home and the weather is nice. RVs crowd the highway, trailing wakes of impatient traffic that trundles up the hills and around the bends. Huge, rust-coloured shards of Canadian Shield loom from the leafy steeps above. The far side of the road spills into Lake Superior, and distant sailboats tip across the flat blue horizon, twinkling in the sun.

  You own a franchise somewhere along Highway 17. You bought it with the inheritance and the place is empty except at lunch, when people give up on passing the RVs and stop to eat. You slump on the counter by the cash register, resting your chin in your palm as you watch the woman climb out of her car, a bouquet of white roses on her dashboard.

  You know that she’s come to put those flowers at a roadside memorial for her late husband. It’s an annual act of remembrance, one day’s drive from the Prairies, and she spends the hours listening to his favourite CDs and radio programs. It’s been five years since he swerved to avoid a cyclist and she’s getting better all the time. You know this with the immediacy of dreams.

  She pushes the door open and holds her left hand out in front of her, wrist limp and fingers short. Her eyes flicker around the franchise and finally settle on your face. She smiles. The woman has short brown hair, and you feel its softness with your eyes. She sniffs the air and says how much she loves the smell of your food, even though the oven has been off since last night. Before she sits down on the stool, you know that hers will be a loyal companionship, ideal, because her husband has been dead for years, and she’s ready to think of someone else.

  Suddenly, in the way of dreams, she’s holding a white rose, her thumb and finger gently pinching the stem, and she offers you the flower slowly, its petals like a passing cloud of grief, and you reach past it to stroke her cheek and dig your fingers into her hair. Only for a split second, just before jolting awake, do you see yourself gnawing at her throat as she whimpers listlessly between your teeth.

  I.

  There are several incidents you strain to forget within the thirty years you’ve lived here. Many times, they seem like the experiences of people other than yourself, of furious men on your flanks, outliers of dark allegiance. Other times, however, the people group into one, and that one is always you. The worst memories are when you wake from the dream, knowing you will soon be staring hungrily at the cooling toast and conge
aling butter, and the incidents are all you can consider, either one at a time, the distance closing rapidly between them, or all at once, the details a painful jumble as stray dogs howl in the dark and dusty laneway outside.

  You remember the lawyer who came down from Lusaka with his young daughter, the pianist, her fingers long and graceful. You were in the stern of the canoe and the muddy Zambezi bubbled lazily around the hull. The girl was in the prow and you told her not to stick her fingers in the water, not to tempt the crocs, whose lizard eyes rose bare inches above the surface of the river. In another boat, not far away, the lawyer paddled with your boss, sun glinting on the gunwales as the two of them spoke in Nyanja. You couldn’t speak it back then and you resented their using it around you, thought it rude, distancing, and whenever you tried to engage the girl, she answered tersely, her perfect English tinged with a European accent.

  Occasionally the lawyer shouted something at his daughter, seemed to gesture to you with his body language, and all three of them would laugh, especially the girl, her paddle drifting in the current and bouncing off the side of the boat. You bit your tongue and clenched your teeth. Blood drained out of your clamped lips. Why were they laughing at you? Just because you were foreign? Why couldn’t they show some respect? You tried to distract yourself by listening to the birds in their hundreds. The girl stopped paddling and leaned back in the canoe, curling her long fingers around the edges of the boat. Under your power alone, you paddled ahead of your boss and drifted along the riverbank, watching the little purple flower petals spin in the current.

  You did not see the hippos in the shallows, their great sodden muzzles in the tall green grass. You heard them sloshing in the water only as your boss called out to you, his voice pulsating with panic. You locked eyes with one, stared into its black and beady orbs lodged in high, pink sockets. You were transfixed, just for a moment, as the animal’s fury propelled it. Then you stabbed your paddle forward, hoping to halt the progress of the canoe, to spin out and leave unblocked a path the hippos could take to deeper water. It was a good idea. You’d done the same manoeuvre a thousand times before in Canada, and right then it probably saved your life, the girl’s too, except that the paddle also struck her hand before it sliced into the water. She shrieked and even through all the commotion of sloshing water and shouting men, you heard the bones in her fingers crunch.

  Back on shore, her father did not thank you. In English, he threatened to sue you, to have your work permit seized, to have you thrown into an overcrowded holding cell from which someday you might be freed, but only after he retired, died, was forgotten by his ancestors. In Nyanja, he jabbered endlessly and made incensed gestures while your boss looked meek and submissive, hands in the pockets of his shorts, chin pressed against his chest through his open shirt. The girl clutched her fingers and bawled. You hated her for the drama, hated every detail of her creation: the frizzy hair in bushy pigtails, the thin and boyish figure, the makeup she wore to go on safari, her silly, hitching shoulders.

  “Munt,” you sneered, drawing your lips back. You’d picked the word up quickly enough. Whites whispered it to you in the bar when they wanted to commiserate over the boorish behaviour of local blacks. Once, in the cool morning, a grey hoodie pulled over your head, you were walking down a red dirt road outside Livingstone, electric fences on either side, and a white man caught up to you with two German Shepherds and said, “You just gave me the scare of my life, mate, could’ve sworn you were one of the munts come at last to rob me.”

  At the sound of this word, the daughter renewed her sobs. The lawyer’s eyes bulged. He stopped talking and leapt at you. Your boss threw a toned arm around his shoulders to hold him back, but then, staring at you with revulsion, let him go again, so that he came tramping forward and you, standing outside yourself now, uncertain how life had once again come to such a fever, punched him in the stomach and doubled him over like a stepladder.

  In the end, you were able to bribe your way out of jail after a night spent listening to filthy men shit in a bucket and beg you for visas to Canada. You did not mind the smell. Not really. In the parking lot outside, people waited for their loved ones to be released. Women sold juices and floral arrangements. You knew you’d lost your job, so you walked to the bus station and waited in the queue for Lusaka. You thought briefly about calling your mother before boarding the bus, but your father, were he somehow to find out, would resent your confiding in her. Thinking of this, you fell asleep on the bus with the river behind you, your teeth grinding like heavy machinery.

  II.

  One night the dream wakes you up differently. It’s an extended version, and the dogs in the alleyway have obviously infiltrated your mind with their constant howling. The woman with the flowers is crawling away from you, blood spraying out of her throat where you bit her, pooling on the floor and staining the petals so that they turn a kind of purple. The look on her face is understanding, but you cannot take back the damage and so you must transcend sleep and arrive on the other side, where the dogs are keening for your untouched toast.

  You remember that your mother died in a car accident only a week after you moved to Lusaka. Her lawyer wired you a large sum of inheritance, none of which you decided to spend on a flight home for the funeral. You did not want to see your father, on the off chance that he would also attend. The two of you would argue, because custom demanded it. Almost certainly, he would be drunk.

  Instead, you scouted property and navigated the country’s venal bureaucracy. You bought a two-storey home with fruit trees in the backyard and electrical wires traversing the tops of the compound walls. You took the room on the bottom floor and leased the two on the top to travellers and volunteers. This was the first of your myriad money-making schemes. There was also a concrete bungalow in the backyard, beneath the branches of the fruit trees, and you hired a maid with the Christian name of Mercy and installed her there.

  Tenants came and went, sometimes because they did not like you, found you too strict about noise and unyielding on price, other times because nothing for them was as permanent as for you, as singular, and so they would return home to the families that loved and missed them and wanted them back. Years passed this way, without major incident, you and Mercy the only constants in the house.

  “Bwanj’,” you said to her one morning as she gathered fruit from beneath the pawpaw tree.

  “Uli bwanj’?” she asked, smirking at your accent, which she’d long ago stopped trying to correct.

  “Bwino.”

  She smoothed her chequered dress over her thin, stocking-clad legs and lifted the basket of fruit onto her head. A gust of dry wind blew at her apron as she crossed the yard. She paused to inspect your hands before entering the house, pursing her lips and sucking them judiciously. There were often scabs on your knuckles. The most recent ones had crumbled away, exposing tender skin beneath. It was pink. It was cracked.

  “Bwela,” she said, and you followed her inside, where she set the pawpaw on the kitchen counter, turned to you with a finger held up, instructing you to wait, and when she came back she had moisturizer and rubbed the scented cream into your parched skin. You stared at the top of her head while she did this, the rows of dark scalp between her tightly bound braids. “It is like I say,” she told you in English, tilting her head as she worked. “You will have to stop this angriness. Otherwise you will scab right down to the bones and no cream will help it.”

  On the fridge above her, you noticed the parcel wrapped in brown paper and frayed string. You frowned, lifting your hands out of her grasp to retrieve it. You registered a tremor of confusion in her tiny frame, saw her stiffen for sure when your fingers closed around the parcel.

  “When did this get here?” you asked, pulling at the string, picking at the corners of the brown paper. Mercy answered you, but you weren’t listening because you recognized the Canadian return address on the package. Because you recognized the handwriting
.

  Beneath the brown paper was a shoebox, which you opened. Inside the shoebox was a nest of white tissue, into which you burrowed your chapped and peeling fingers. Hidden beneath the tissue was a picture frame, which held a candid shot of your father, his hair long and his sideburns bushy, his arm around your mother, who was smiling happily, possibly intoxicated, one hand brushing her blond hair behind her ear as she looked up into his face. In between them, each of your hands held up in theirs, was you, a worried look on your face, your boyish brow creased and your wet lips drawn slightly back, revealing the tips of your white teeth.

  “When the fuck did this get here?” you demanded, your voice like rain-season thunder, and Mercy stepped away from you, hands folded over her chest. “Why did he send it? Why now?”

  Mercy edged back toward the door that leads to the fruit trees and her bungalow. You snapped your wrist and sent the picture at her like a flying disc, just missing her head and striking the doorframe, off of which it shattered. You were suddenly aware of a tenant arriving in the kitchen, an urgent hustle, his German accent laughably absurd, imploring you to remain calm, his hands on your shoulders because you were advancing toward Mercy, your fists clenched. You turned on him, teeth bared, your fists pounding his face and body like a buffeting hail. You overpowered him, but only for a moment, before he kicked you in the stomach. You winced, doubled over in the doorframe, ignored him as he shouted, jabbed his fingers, stomped away. You watched Mercy instead, her hand over her mouth as she studied you on the ground, the knee torn out of your black pants. She retreated to the bungalow, the deadbolt thunking behind her.