by M. C. Norris
“They’re using some system of communication, and the Green Man seems to be at the hub. Our path seems pretty clear. It’s become the IDC’s top priority to find the Green Man, and to kill him.”
“Tunnel vision.”
“Pardon me?”
Cecile cocked her head, narrowing her eyes in the flickering gaslight. “Linear thinking. It’s a male trait. When it works, the male mind works well, but you realize it’s also what got us into this mess.”
She laid the photograph back on the table, and placed her palm over the Green Man’s distorted face, lowering her eyelids. “Those things came from beneath the pyramids. They were all down there inside their eggs for five thousand years, hidden beneath pyramids that were scattered all over the earth, thousands of them. There were pyramids we didn’t even know about. Pyramids buried in the deserts, lost in the jungles. Pyramids hidden under the goddamned sea.” Cecile reopened her eyes, and scowled at the agent. “Did you know that the appearance of pyramids marked the beginning of our decline, under a new patriarchal culture that appeared at that exact same time, one that persisted right up until Z-Day? It’s true, but for better or for worse, it’s all over now, Honey. This big mess, it’s all nothing but a reboot. Your time has passed.”
“Our time?” The agent raised his eyebrows. “Meaning, men?”
“Mm-hm.” Cecile tapped her fingernail against the surface of the table. “This world was all out of balance. It was being utterly disrespected. There wasn’t no other direction but down. Our time as a people was running out, and you know it. If it hadn’t been for Z-Day, our end would’ve come by war, starvation, disease, or just by poisoning from our own polluted lands and water. We had it coming, Honey. We sure enough did, and there ain’t no man left on this ruined world who’s ever going to tell me any different. You did this. You menfolk, with your brutal, linear-thinking minds. You brought our Mother Earth down to her knees in five-thousand years, when women had been ruling this world just fine for twenty-thousand years before that. That’s right, we did, and you’d better believe that I know what I’m talking about.” Cecile flared her eyes at the agent. “I got some very old friends on the other side who remember a balanced and peaceful world when we had it pretty good before y’all took over. Shame on you, Honey. Shame on all of you.”
The agent leaned back in his seat, hands in his lap. “I’m not sure where all of this is coming from, or why you’re directing it at me, but I’m open to suggestion, Ms. Raquet.”
“Cecile,” she said, with a wink, “and I’m not trying to give you a hard time.”
“It kind of feels like it.”
“I just want all menfolk to know that if humanity has a chance, if we can somehow overcome this situation that we find ourselves in, then it’s only going to happen by starting things off on the right foot. Accept where we went wrong. Put the female back in her rightful place, and maybe, just maybe, we can put this poor ruined world back into some kind of balance that we once strived to keep. Maleness is an offshoot of femaleness. Remember that. All life is female, from the get-go. The earth is female. God is most definitely female. Respect the mother, respect the earth, and one day our sins just might be forgiven.”
“With all due respect, Cecile,” the agent said, rubbing his face, “in what direction, then, would you suggest we proceed?”
“There ain’t no directions in the Land of Nod. There are only voices, and you need to shush now, so I can try to hear them.”
Almost at once, Cecile could feel them pressing in. Not yet discernable, but palpable, like rows of caged animals in a darkened zoo. She could feel their desperation, their longing, but she wouldn’t let them overwhelm her. That sort of behavior was not allowed. The dead would love to talk the ears right off anyone able to hear them, because all things that speak want to be heard. Get enough of them jabbering all at once, and you’d no doubt lose your mind. Her Nana Hess had taught her that.
Nana Hess used to say that the living mind wasn’t made to visit Nod. The minds of most folks, anyway. Kind of like being underwater, way down at the bottom of a lake, where you can hear things, but you can’t tell which way they’re coming from, and you can see things, but it’s hard to tell just what you’re seeing. Some of them might once have been people, but most are other kinds of things, things that ain’t got no name, and probably ain’t up to no good. Maybe they were things once lived, maybe not, and God willing, never will.
“Ain’t no Heaven or Hell,” Nana had said, “just Nod, where you’ll find your good and evil, beauty and danger, predator and prey, just as you see in any direction you turn your head. Anywhere in creation is the same as any other in that way. Don’t you ever cross that stream thinking there’s going to be a land of milk and honey just awaiting you on the other side. Mm-mm. You got to watch out for yourself, C.C., same as you got to watch out in the living world. If you don’t, then you’re just a little bug, kicking around atop the water. Soon enough, there’s going to be something coming on up to get you.”
Her Nana Hess taught her to turn them all away, every one of them. Taught her that hers was the only voice in Nod that she ever needed to hear. “You tell them to move on back, C.C.,” Nana said, on the morning poor old Slim met with a terrible end, and the gates to Nod blew wide in Cecile’s fragile, young mind. “You turn them back with this here gris-gris,” Nana placed a leather pouch filled with gunpowder, metal shavings, and Lord knew what else, onto Cecile’s sweaty forehead. “If they got something worth saying, then you make them find a way to show you instead of all that telling. Turn off your ears. Turn your back on them. Don’t think for a minute they’re special just because they’re dead. You make them work for it. Love yourself, C.C. Don’t ever let no one, living or dead, come and step all over you like a doormat. My Grandbaby is worth so much more than that.”
Old Slim got bound forever to Nana Hess that day, whether he much liked it or not. Weren’t too many indignities left that he might’ve thought were left to suffer, after those devilish nigger boys got through with him, but Cecile’s favorite cat had one more indignity coming. Long as Slim’s dried balls hung in that pouch around her Nana’s neck, he couldn’t ever wander too far, not in this world or the next. Just to be sure, Nana Hess made sure that poor cat’s manhood went with her, right down into her grave.
“A day might come when you decide to come and find me,” Nana had whispered to Cecile, a day before she passed, “and when you do, I may look something different than what you’d like to remember, but old Slim, he’ll look just the same.” She smiled, and patted the pouch of gris-gris upon her withered breast. “When you ready, you come on over to Nod, and when you do, you call for that cat just the way I taught you. He’ll come a-running, just the same as he always done, and he’ll lead you right to me.” She winked. “That’s how you’ll know your Nana Hess, over there on the other side.”
The vibrations flowed through Cecile’s body, until it felt like she was about to fall to pieces. Time slowed and stood still as she slipped between moments, into a place where she could move while the agent sitting across the table stayed frozen. It was a powerful sensation, drifting between moments. That’s why the Styx appealed so well to men, with all their dark designs. You could travel the world in an instant, pay some nasty little visits to folks too, if that’s what suited you. That’s why no goodness ever came from the Styx. Only devilishness. It could get ahold of a man’s mind, take him away in its current, and drift him so far away there wasn’t no chance of him ever getting back. Women didn’t have a place there, at all. It took a man’s sort of magic to fool around in that realm, where the worst sorts of witch men still wandered, but Cecile wasn’t too worried about them. She was set on going deeper, across the stream of collective consciousness to a world where not even the worst witch man could follow.
The last veil was a jarring transition, where something thin and connective had to be pulled and stretched, darned near yanked loose from her body until she worried every time that wh
atever it was could snap and set her drifting for all eternity. A lost balloon between moments, with her empty husk of a body left behind, pampered for years by folks in white suits who didn’t mind getting their hands dirty. She could feel that stretching clear down inside her womb, as she bucked loose of that fleshy anchor, wriggling like a tadpole toward the light, toward the misty realm that Nana Hess called the Land of Nod.
They rushed in from all directions, smothering her with their yearning. There were so many nowadays that she could hardly move. Nod was overrun with the restless souls of billions lost that hadn’t yet found their places in the shades. Cecile held tight to that satchel of gris-gris, clenching it hard in the grip of her mind’s eye. None could speak. She would not hear them. Only one was allowed near her bubble, the one she called to her side by buzzing her lips like jimson moth’s wings.
Old Slim rubbed his sleek cheeks against her bubble. He knew who she was, straight away and every time. Cecile couldn’t tell for all the earth what she must look like, but somehow that old cat always knew her for who she was. She longed to pet him, to stroke her fingers over his head and arched back in the same old way that she’d always liked to love on him, in life. Such was Nod, where nothing was quite the same. She floated around Slim, giving her cat a playful bump now and then, as she followed him through the shades to the place where Nana Hess rested.
Hers was a world within worlds, where clustered and colorful avenues wound in dreamlike whorls through what must’ve been Nana’s memories, all twisted into convoluted niches sometimes inhabited by interpretations of the souls she’s known and loved. Cecile even caught glimpses of herself here occasionally, portrayed as the shy ghost of a child who never remained in sight for long before darting from one shade into another.
She followed the black cat along its meandering path, where it paused to mark the threshold of every nook with a good rub from the side of its face. Nana Hess used to describe the effort to get all of her grandbabies off to church as, “herding cats.” Cecile liked that expression, but it was tiresome enough to imagine herding any more cats than just one. She guessed it was peculiar that a voodoo queen like Nana Hess would even think to take her grandbabies into a church house, but she supposed that like most everything else Nana did, it was more for the effect of her actions on the ever-watchful people, rather than for any real purpose. Voodoo was complex. It was a lifestyle, a religion, an artistic expression, and of course, a great big show, all designed to transfer what was sometimes money, and sometimes some element of control, from the hands of the more powerful to those who were less so, in a manner so deft that the victims never felt a thing. That bamboozled element was not something that could be measured, or even defined, but any three-toed fool could see its effects. You could see it in the way that folks turned their heads to stare whenever Nana Hess walked through the door. You knew something was off-kilter by the way those white folks were always coming and going from her house. People admired her, and they needed her, inasmuch as they feared whatever it was that they perceived her to be. Not even the police would dare cross her. After so many years trying to discern exactly what her Nana Hess was, Cecile decided that it was easier simply to become it.
“Communing with the dead ain’t voodoo,” Nana said, “it’s a gift, runs in the blood of our women, but ain’t nobody but me and you ever needs to know that. You hear? We keep that a family secret. We let them think our gift is voodoo,” she said, with a smile and a wink, “’cause that just gives voodoo some more power.”
The voodoo died with Nana Hess. It was her life and her livelihood, just like her mam, and her mam’s mam, before that. It had offered those women a chance for hope and respect, back when it seemed there was no other way of having those things. Times had changed. Cecile’s mama went a very different path, one that took her straight to the grave, and delivered her baby into the care of Nana Hess. Never a day went by that Cecile wasn’t grateful for those formative years with her Nana. Lord only knew what might’ve become of her had she been raised by her mama, spending her whole childhood in Storyville, a pit of madness and depravation that swallowed people whole.
“Your mama had the gift, same as the both of us, but she couldn’t handle it. That girl could listen to all the dead in the world jabbering in her head at once, but she would never once listen to me.”
“How’d you know I was thinking about my mama?” Cecile asked, floating toward the shifting heap of red yarn that was her Nana, in the Land of Nod. “Were you smoking me?”
“You know I was smoking you, C.C. I like the flavor of my Grandbaby’s smoke.”
Slim sauntered over to his master, sniffed the threads, and stepped delicately but purposefully into the pile. The cat turned three times, pressing its paws luxuriously into the soft bed of crimson fibers, before curling into the slight depression, purring and squinting his yellow eyes. Truly a cat in Heaven.
The collective light of a hundred candles, inset into every recess of Nana’s collection of African artwork, cast flickering shadows of her innumerable keepsakes and dried articles that hung stiff and strange from the billowed upholstery of her ceiling. The place smelled of incense, cocoa butter, and the savory aroma from those pots of food forever simmering on her stove. Every piece of Nana’s eclectic trappings was representative of something from her former life. Each item had a special place, and a deeper meaning. Some, she would explain. Others, she would not.
“That man you’re looking for ain’t got no place here. Not yet, anyhow.”
Cecile floated toward the pile of red yarn as it rose, twisting itself into what was at first a column, before taking the form of a plush interpretation of Nana Hess’s old face. She did this for Cecile’s benefit. Nana preferred formlessness, but she knew that it brought her Grandbaby happiness to see something of the woman she’d known and loved in the living world.
“He’s still alive, Nana?”
“Yes, he sure enough is.”
“Can you tell me where to find him?”
“You know I can’t do that, C.C. Not from here. I ain’t got no connection to that side, anymore.”
“How can I find him, Nana? Ain’t there some way?”
The fibrous face stretched into a wide smile. The twin holes in the yarn that represented her eyes gave a slow, incredulous blink, just as they would have in life. Cecile floated around her Nana’s form, which twisted at the base to maintain their eye contact.
“You going to wind your Nana up into a knot.”
“I’m sorry.” Cecile reversed directions until her Nana settled back down. “Didn’t you ever try to use your gift to track down folks in the living world, back when you were still connected to it?”
“Hmm, won’t say if I did and won’t say if I didn’t, but I’ll say this much—there ain’t usually no goodness coming from those kinds of tricks. We’ve been down this road before, you and me. What devilishness are you up to, child?” The fibers of Nana’s brow folded into a frown. “Why are you trying to bother that poor man?”
“He’s a bad man, Nana. Real bad.”
“So you think he needs killing to fix what he done? That’s what you’re up to, ain’t it?”
Cecile knew all too well that there was never any sense in trying to lie to her Nana Hess. The woman could smoke you right down to your last ember. “Yes’m.”
“Child, that’s a man’s way of thinking. Ain’t no problem so simple that it can be fixed by killing folks. Now, I know you know better after all we went through over that damned cat. Somebody put you up to this? You tell your Nana the truth.”
“I’m working with someone.”
“Some man.”
“Yes, Nana. He’s a man.”
“Women in our family don’t need no men. We make them to need us. Nana thought she taught you that. You’re getting me riled, Cecile.”
“You did teach me that, Nana, and that’s just what I’m doing. He came to me, Nana, just like men would always come to you when they were helpless. The man
I’m speaking with ain’t got a prayer of catching this devil without me.”
“You expect to be paid, don’t you?” The column of yarn leaned close, until Cecile was staring down into those glowering poke-holes for eyes.
“Yes, Nana.”
“You don’t ever help no man for free.”
“No, Nana.” It was a bit of a half-truth. She and the agent had not yet discussed any terms of payment for her involvement in the Green Man’s case, but collecting some form of payment for her assistance didn’t seem too very outlandish.
“Well then,” Nana said, relaxing back into her amorphous, crimson heap, “that maybe changes things.”
“How do I find him, Nana?”
“Just like I taught you. With a personal object. You bring that with you, back to Nod, holding it tight in your mind’s eye, like you hold them gris-gris, and you and I will just take it from there. Don’t necessarily have to be something of his. Could be something belonging to someone close to him, someone who’s already over on this side. See what I’m getting at?”
“Yes, Nana, but I don’t have a personal object. I don’t even have nobody close to him. We got nothing but a photograph.”
“That might not be enough,” Nana replied.
“No. It isn’t. Not usually.”
“Hmm. You think about the man in that photo, real hard, put him right there in your mind’s eye. Let your Nana Hess just see what she can do.”