Iron Balloons

by Channer, Colin

  But he does not want to move.

  He wants to die.

  But he wants to die in a narrative of his own making. He understands that the narrative given to him is empty. In that narrative he would die for a woman. He would die because he cannot convince her to overlook his madness, overlook his cruelty, overlook his inertia, overlook his history, and simply love him. He is dying the kind of death that will warrant a brief note in the newspapers—nothing dramatic. Forty-year-old man found dead in Ensom City home. He does not want that kind of death.

  Stretched out on the bed, allowing the delirium of his hunger to carry his mind far from this place, letting the sound of reggae blanket him—Exodus playing again and again—he will find better meaning for himself, for his path. He will travel into his own myth. Willing himself to dream his own narrative is becoming painful but necessary. Yet he can also tell that what he is dreaming is not entirely myth. He is remembering, too. Remembering the twisted way in which his life is changing into a legend. He expects to wake up at the end of this, at the end of staying in this room full of voices, memories, colors, textures, tastes, smells, with enough in him to make his passing a wonderfully meaningful thing. He closes his eyes.

  He was born in 1962. The year the nation was born. When he was born, ska was jumping around the city. In that year, someone said that he was a child of the future. An old man touched his forehead and said, “As your fortune go, so go the nation.” He would be told this so many times that he was sure he had heard the words of the old man himself—and he would live his life wondering whether he was guiding the fate of the nation or whether he was simply reflecting a nation bent on its own self-destruction.

  His journey passed through the fearful, hopeful millenarian years of the 1970s, the years when everyone knew that some dread apocalypse was to come. Then he entered the chaos and sexual wildness of those 1980s, when he discovered that women loved him, when he walked from woman to woman, searching for meaning deep in their flesh. In the 1990s, he was trying to beat back the gruff voice of Capleton, chanting another apocalypse, but this time with blood in his eyes. With it came the frenzy of cars crashing, bodies mutilated, flesh exposed—the coked-up madness of a city coming of age, hungry to remind itself of its own strength. This was a country in trauma as it struggled to show that it still had possibilities, a country caught up in a midlife crisis, looking back at the hopeful years, the years of promise and prophecy and asking, What is left, what is left, what do I have to show for it all? Am I still sharp looking? Do women dem still go for me?

  Every narrative that enters his mind is a narrative in search of meaning. He is not sleeping when he concludes that were he to travel into the soul of Bob Marley, he would find his true self.

  They were both born on February 6. But one day, in 1981, when Bob Marley expired, one sunny day in May when he breathed out his last, something left that emaciated body and travelled across the Caribbean Sea and found its way into him in Kingston. It was the morning he stepped out of the Psychiatric Ward of the University Hospital into a brilliant day. His body, after the discarding of its fat, was a taut muscular thing, his eyes finally clear and his mind ticking with the promise of better days ahead. He had a paper bag filled with pills and, though no one was waiting for him, he was unperturbed. He was going to go up to Papine, catch a bus down to Half Way Tree, and then another that would take him to Ensom City, where he would clean his small house and begin to live again. In that moment, still standing out on the concrete walkway, having shaken the hand of the doctor on duty who kept asking, “Yuh sure you alright? Yuh don’ wan’ me call anyone?”; after smiling wryly at his favorite nurse, the one who kept saying to him, as if to convince herself that she was not mad to have had an affair with an inmate, “You are different. You so intelligent. We gwine to hear about you. Don’t forget me, yuh hear?”; after waving to her and smiling at the gap in her teeth, and the bigness of her muscular body that contrasted with the delicate fragility of her pale skin: After doing all this, he stood alone, breathed deeply, and was about to walk, when it came upon him.

  It came not like wind or tongues of fire, but like a blanket. A heavy blanket that gathered around him and kept wrapping about his face, making it hard for him to breathe. He was gasping and wrestling, trying to fight it off. But the more he fought, the more the cloud spoke, the more the cloud carried into him the words of all the Bob Marley songs he knew. More than that, it carried the words of a man asking, Oh Jah, oh Jah, why has thou abandoned I and I to the four winds—I’s Ethiopia, I wan’ res’. Why yuh bring me back to Babylon?

  He knew that it was the spirit of Bob Marley consuming him. So he breathed. As he breathed deeply, he began to feel the cloud coming into him. When it did so, he began to cry, to weep uncontrollably. He felt his body fall to the ground. Then he felt the strong hand of his nurse around him.

  “I tell you, him not ready yet … The man not ready yet … Jesus …”

  “Is the heat, man. Jus’ the heat. Him discharge already. Steady him there …”

  “Take him inside. Help me …”

  “No, him alright. The doctor sign him out.”

  “Why unoo so wicked. The man need to come back inside …”

  “See. See, him look better already. Hey, bossy, bossy, yuh alright?”

  By then he was standing on his own again—and he felt stronger. He felt parts of himself taking on new shapes. He did not have to ask any questions about what had happened. In his head two different languages spoke, two different memories. They were wrestling with each other, trying to find meaning. Then, quite suddenly, sadness filled his chest again. He turned to the light-skinned nurse with her long eyelashes and her freckled face, her dark brown eyebrows wrinkled with worry, and he spoke as if to comfort her.

  “Bob dead,” he said.

  “Who?” she asked, as she touched his wet face.

  “Bob, Bob Marley dead …”

  “Yes,” she said. “It just come on de radio …”

  He had calmed down. He was not crying. He felt his face tightening into a scowl, that familiar brooding scowl. When he spoke again, it felt like his voice was coming from somewhere else.

  “Bob cyaan dead, dawta. Nuh fret.” He touched her hand. She seemed to know he was fine. He walked away from the clinic, and as he passed a rusty garbage drum, he tossed the bag of pills into it.

  That was twenty years ago. Twenty years of dreams, of memories, of trying to chart a path that a living Bob would take. Twenty years of realizing that he is going to die without any glory or fanfare. Twenty years later, he realizes that a woman has brought him down—not some cancer, not some diabolic sickness, but a woman. It has taken twenty years for him to find out that he cannot be Bob Marley with this woman, cannot call her one of many queens, cannot adopt the tough inviolable pose, twenty years to know that he wants her to mother him. And in this interim, he is trying to dream himself to a meaningful death.

  The fact is, his world is crumbling around him. Everything is falling apart. Everything is uncertain.

  4.

  He felt the pressure in his head grow. The plane rose steeply. His head pressed hard against the back of the seat; the lumps of his locks hurt his scalp now. He could feel the slow decay of the sores in his scalp despite the ointment that smelled of mint and aloe. His eyes were closed. Nausea filled his mouth with a bitter taste. He counted in his head, then began to mouth Psalm 91, his fingers tapping the rhythm on the seat handle. The climb continued, and he felt the weight of pressure on his body. For the first time he began to think of the pleasures of death.

  He leaned his head toward Rhea, who stared in front of her until she felt his eyes on her. She looked at him, her face still smooth with the dark St. Thomas soil, the brown loam of ancient volcanoes that fed the banana trees rioting through that parish. The African wrap on her head was skyblue. She would wrap yards of cloth around her head to give the suggestion of locks. Few people knew that Rhea did not have locks. Her hair was thick and
he was always laughing at her, telling her that she would not have to do anything to have locks—serious locks. She had thick Maroon hair, black, so dense with fertility that it shone.

  Each night, when they lived in the one-room shack on the hills of St. Ann, she would sit there and rub sweet-smelling blue hair oil into her scalp, and then she would yank at the hair until her comb could run through it without hindrance. She didn’t cut it, but it never seemed to grow long, it just got denser and denser, the curls tightening with each inch added. He teased her a lot. She was still the church girl he had met on a dusty street in Jones Town, walking to the missionary congregation with her Bible in hand, her white dress stretched tightly around her hips. Her knees knocked slightly and he could not take his eyes off the way the strange stutter of her stride made her bottom roll. She had remained serious about her God. She spoke of Jesus as a friend. No, not a friend, but like a spirit child, someone she had birthed from her own womb. There was something so deeply intimate about their friendship. He had no reason to doubt her Jesus’ existence and he accepted him in the same way that he accepted that she had brothers and sisters—they were part of who she was and he understood that. She spoke of all of them in the same way—Jesus, too—as people in her life.

  Now her eyes stretched Chinese-like in her face, the black depth of her irises stark against the surrounding whiteness. She was worried about him, but tried to smile. He saw too a sense of triumph in her look, and he found comfort in it. She had won. He was comfortable with that. At last, he did not have to think, he did not have to consider, to read into the motives of the people around them. He simply relaxed and let her take over. It was as simple as that. It was part of his acceptance of something larger—he knew he was going die. This was now quite clear. Jamaica was far away. He had told her that Jamaica was where he wanted to go. But she said she had other plans—they would go to Jamaica after he felt better. First they would go to Miami. There was a specialist there who would help him. Then he would go to Jamaica to recover. He would be incognito. They would stay in St. Ann, far from the madness of Kingston. It would be like those years they had spent as farmers eking a modest living from the fertile soil of those mountains.

  They would then spend a year getting his strength back. He would work in the small studio that she was going to set up in the house, and they would have easy access to Miami for medical checkups. The next tour would be to the Far East. First there would be a triumphant week performing in Jamaica—a stadium concert—then another Babylon by Bus through major U.S. cities, including a major show in New York’s Irving Plaza where he collapsed and the nightmare began; then the Far East, then Ethiopia, where they would settle.

  That is what he wanted, she said. He nodded, but felt deep fatigue hearing it all again—the concerts, the touring, the hangers-on, the band, trying to hold it together, trying to keep the discipline, trying to deal with the weakness he felt.

  But he knew what was really coming, so he relaxed, stopped fighting. She would be in charge. He would let her do what had to be done. There she was, sitting beside him as she always did eventually. Even after her face wailed with the imprint of his flat palm, she still ran her fingers through his locks, massaged his scalp until he fell asleep with her. When he had fought with one of his other women, she was always there, her room smelling of sweet hair oil, always there to comfort him. It was her duty. She accepted it. He used to feel guilty about putting her through it, but her stoic acceptance left him incapable of even that. This was what they were. Now she was rescuing him again.

  Germany had been a painful time. He had never walked so much. For the first time ever, he liked the cold, the way it seemed to clear the dizziness and clamminess from the fevers. They warned him about going out, but he would walk into the streets, limp his way through the crowds, breathe in the cold air, feel his body coming back to him, feel the sickness of an ague crawling through his system, while enjoying the pleasure of sudden freedom. He walked along the streets staring at faces. He kept his head covered, not in a tam, but with the hood of a jacket; he wore dark glasses and he walked with his head down. He could feel the heat leaving his body through his bare scalp. He started to stuff the hood with rags to keep the heat in. Sometimes he felt as if his life was seeping out the top of his skull. He felt his songs were leaving his brain and floating uselessly in the German air.

  Nobody recognized him. Not in that small town. He was just another black man, another alien coming to take people’s jobs. The way he walked, the way his body seemed not to understand itself, assured them that he was just another confused, mixed-race drug addict.

  He took in the town like a travel book—the quaint cobblestones, the fairy-tale facades, the snow-topped mountains, the tidily cropped trees, everything in order, in careful symmetry. The German talk he heard bounced off him like all the other sounds—alien, strange, and surreal. He knew that he was on the surface of things here, but what was below he did not want to think about. He had enough to contend with.

  He walked through the town for days. In the room, he was always thinking that the next dose of medication, the next concoction he had to force down his throat, would break the hold this disease had on him—and if not that, then the compresses, the incense, the diet, the crystals, the shark cartilage, the chanting of dreads in the room—or even the constant piping of “Three Little Birds,” his most positive song, the doctor said, according to karmic scrutiny. He let it all happen because he wanted to live. He could not die. Joseph cyaan dead inna Babylon. He believed this with such force, such total conviction, that it made everyone around him believe, too.

  The moments of clarity came in the streets. There he thought about dying, thought about the end of it all. Thirtyfive years old, and he was watching time slipping by. How could it be? No. T’ings not going to be alright. His skin still bloomed with sores, his blood staggered through his veins; he could feel the poison running through him. The thing was destroying him, making him weak, making him talk foolish all the time. But he also knew that he was a dread and that in his heart he could conquer all things.

  This was before Rhea came. The chaos was a buffer of faith. The order she brought killed hope.

  Rhea came from Jamaica and saw what chaos he was living in. She looked at him lying in bed with a haze of incense around him. She looked at him and began to cry. He had not even glanced in the mirror in weeks and suddenly saw in her face what he must look like. He saw in her eyes what a pathetic sight he must seem. He knew at once how she would appear at his funeral, knew what her eyes would say. Her shock and pain lasted no more than a few seconds, but it was enough. She smiled at him, and then exploded in anger at everyone else. She opened the windows, grabbed the waste-paper basket, and threw candles, incense, pills, needles, crystals, concoctions, and various warming cauldrons into it.

  She would have picked him up and carried him down to the waiting car by herself, but she had help. She had brought with her three other women, friends of hers he instantly recognized. These three women came in distinct shades. There was Bessie, a deep and mellow woman, her black skin regal in its unequivocal purity. She always wore red and seemed always to be smiling, even when you could see flame in her eyes. Blossom was sepia-colored, her hair limp, seemingly wanting for life. She carried herself with the aloof diffidence of light-skinned people in a dark-skinned world. Her kerchief was blue—the color of the sea. The third, Barbara, appeared chameleon-like, matching always the mercurial patterns of her personality to the seeming changes in the shade of her skin. Everybody liked her, but no one could figure her out. They assumed it had to do with a beauty that was constructed from the contradictory qualities of symmetry and ambivalence. She was the spokesperson in times of conflict. She was able to calm things. Her color was pale green. These women were consistent about their colors—combs, scarves, broaches, bracelets, and necklaces—always something in their color.

  They all lived in England, big-bosomed Jamaican women who thought very little of what he d
id, what she did, but they were old friends, her sisters, and they would be her sisters for life. They worked as nurses in London and were the only people she could depend on. They had the stern pragmatism of nurses, women who understood what it was like to help people who hated them, to clean up the shit and piss of people who could not stand them because of their skin color. These women were the ones who came to help her move him out. They looked disgusted as they walked through the rooms. They shook their heads and moaned deep inside their chests as if they had just witnessed the most tragic of moments.

  He wanted to tell them to get the hell out of the place, wanted to call them whores of Babylon, heathens. He wanted to tell them not to look down on him and his locks and his Rasta truth. He wanted to cuss them, turn them out, bring down fire and brimstone on them. He knew their type. He knew the way they looked at him. He could feel their condemnation, their righteous sense of triumph. Not just because it was clear that his Jah was not doing much for him now, but because Rhea was the one rescuing him. She was the one they had comforted during all those years when he was showing little regard for her; she was the one who had suffered and complained to them about him; she was the one whom they had told to leave his wutliss self and move on to something better. She had left the church and turned to this Rasta foolishness because of him, over this reggae music. Now Rhea was going to rescue him.

  They carried themselves with the stoic pride of women who could take anything, take everything, and then be there to punish their wayward men by loving them, by feeding them in their time of weakness. For some, it was their final and only revenge, their one moment of power. Rhea was enacting this power and they were there to help her. It had nothing to do with love. They knew that Rhea loved this man. They too loved their men. They loved the men who had done them wrong, who had left them saddled with children, who had left them for other women. That was never an issue. Their power was not in their capacity to love but in their capacity to be needed, in their capacity to forgive these men with the weight of their ancient memories, their ability to hold each detail, each betrayal, each abuse, each act of brutality, to hold it as an investment, a kind of loan to be paid back in full. This was the rite they arrived in Germany to enact with Rhea. They paid their own fares. They did not ask her to pay even though she could. They did not argue with her. They did not like the man, but they knew what had to be done.