Iron Balloons

by Channer, Colin

  He lies there breathing hard, trying to work out the source of the pain and its meaning. His head is still stuck in the dream of Melanie standing there arguing with The God. The name won’t leave him. The God. He knows these people. He expects to look up and see them standing in front of him, arguing in the shadows of the room.

  As he lies there, the pain creeping across his ribs, filling his head with an intense pulsing, he begins to think hard about flying away from everything, about going somewhere else. He is willing his mind to focus on the story he wants to take shape in his head. Two people arguing over him, over his body, over his future. Two people. One of them he knows well. It is Melanie. Yet in this incarnation she loves him, she is there for him. He wants to believe in this incarnation.

  8.

  Joseph could see a pattern. There he was, thirty-five, and he could see a pattern. He was young, but he had been around long enough to know a pattern. He had been married for almost twenty years—they had married at seventeen. Now, nearly twenty years later, he was dying. He understood a pattern when he saw one. The pattern was always the same. Rhea was there when things were going wrong. Rhea was the constant in his life. He did not like Rhea. He needed Rhea. He did not love Rhea. Love had fallen away too long ago. But Rhea was constant. The more things began to explode around him, the more Rhea was the constant that he depended upon. There was going to be no death without Rhea. There was going to be no crisis without Rhea. She was like his chi, a force inside him, sometimes dammed or diverted, but immovably there until he died. He would travel all over, screw all around, fall in love, let his body fall into the softness of other women, but they all understood that Rhea was the one he would go to when he was hungry, when he began to suspect that one of his women was trapping him with obeah. Joseph trusted Rhea because he knew that she would never harm him—she needed him. And so he needed her. He spent his life waiting for the inevitable pattern to repeat itself. Rhea was there to make sure that it happened.

  Now they were airborne, the plane heading toward Miami. He thought about how quickly The God had given up. There was that look The God gave him, a look of deep regret. He put up a good front. He argued, he cursed Rhea, he even threatened to have her beaten up. But Joseph could tell that he was going through the motions. He was tired of Joseph now. He, too, had given up. It was clear that Joseph was sick. It was clear that the doctor’s shark cartilage remedy was not going to work. Money wasted, time wasted, deprivations wasted, hope wasted. Joseph was dying. The God had looked defeated. He stared at Joseph, had assured him, “I gwine come a Miami fe you, Joseph. Don’ fret. This bitch naah go control tings,” but Joseph knew that he was saying goodbye when he leaned toward him and touched his head. Joseph stared back. He wanted to say something, but he felt a terrible weight on his mind, on his brain. He had nothing to say. He resorted to a stock phrase, a phrase of deep hopelessness. It made The God’s face crumble. Joseph could tell that The God could not cope with him in this state. All through their time in Germany, Joseph had managed to maintain his brash, stoic front. The front of an orphan child.

  The God had first met this front when they ran into each other on a bottle-strewn street in Trench Town where The God had organized a football match. Joseph watched on the side while The God toyed with the men who sweated around him. He never scored. He always passed the ball with careful precision. But passing was not his most cherished activity. The God was always intent on demonstrating that he was never alone on the field, for when you approached him, there were three spirits with him. They were the ones carrying the ball—he simply stood around while they bounced the ball around from one to the other. They were impish duppies, giggling at each expression of bewilderment that appeared on the faces of the men who came at The God. Joseph could see them, the three spirits. They twisted and turned and leapt up and down. Their task was never to let The God touch the ball himself. The God accepted their role and he merely followed them around. Joseph started to laugh out loud at the spectacle. He could see these things. He had always been able to see into things. He was born, his mother had told him, with an opaque caul over his face. The midwife declared him a dreamer and a visionary. But he understood himself to be something else, a strange boy who was never bothered by the apparitions that clotted the air in rural St. Ann where he was born and where he grew up.

  The God was wearing a yellow and blue shirt with the Brazilian globe emblazoned in the middle. He wore tracksuit bottoms and a pair of sandals. His arms moved as if he was trying to fly—fluid, stretched out, his body pivoting this way and that, his eyes always looking somewhere other than at the ball. Most of the time he was staring into the faces of his opponents with an annoyingly defiant expression in his eyes. They would try and look away, but they would be caught. Their eyes tried to read his eyes, tried to anticipate his next move, but they were always wrong; the spirits were always going somewhere else.

  Joseph pulled the bottom of his T-shirt over his head so that it wrapped around the back of his neck, leaving his chest bare. A fat shirtless player was sitting despondently to the side, trying to get his breath back, his body dripping sweat. Joseph nodded at the fat man and then trotted onto the pavement to take his place.

  The God, who did not have the ball at that point, nodded at Joseph. Joseph nodded back and scowled. The God grinned. He liked this small man, with a body like a tightly wound machine. Joseph’s head was too big for his body, even without the locks. He made this even more apparent by the way he held his head up, his neck stiff, a proud strut in everything that he did. He trotted with the big-chested assurance of a star baller.

  But Joseph was not a star baller, he just liked to kick ball on the streets and, as with everything else, he had learned to do it with a street savvy and aggression that usually took him far. Someone pushed the ball toward The God. Joseph pedalled backwards to face him. He made the mistake of looking at The God’s eyes. The God was smiling. Then Joseph quickly looked away—but too late. In a blur he saw one of the spirits tapping the ball over his head. As Joseph turned, another spirit had gently received the ball and was trotting beside The God toward the two stones laid a couple of feet apart in the middle of the road. The few people looking on were laughing and chanting, “Pile, pile.”

  Joseph was angry. The God was grinning. He was moving swiftly toward the goal, and Joseph was at his back, sprinting and determined to make a major statement with this tackle. He raised his left leg and threw it in front of The God, going after the ball, maybe, but definitely going after The God’s shin. The God was airborne, arms now flapping like wings. He landed evenly, though, the ball still in front of him. He placed a foot on the ball, stopping the play. Then he turned to face Joseph, who was now stretched clumsily on the ground. Then, without saying anything else, The God turned and tapped the ball between the two stones. Joseph was up already. He was furious with himself. The spirits were giggling and running rings around him. The God came toward Joseph and rested an arm on his shoulder.

  “Sorry, yout’. Sorry,” he said. His mockery was palpable. Then he trotted back toward his end of the street, the spirits now leapfrogging and somersaulting all around him.

  Joseph hurried toward a tall, leathery-skinned, grayhaired dread who was looking to make a pass out of defense. With a small gesture and a stare Joseph communicated that he wanted the ball. With it he started to trot toward The God, who was looking away. Joseph could see the spirits coming before he noticed that The God was casually walking toward him, as if to tell him something insignificant like “hello.” Joseph did not repeat his mistake. He kept watching the spirits, dribbling around them, avoiding their playful attempts to get the ball—though they were not restricted by the rules of the game. These spirits used their hands, tugged on garments, and tripped people blatantly, making them look like total buffoons as they appeared to trip over themselves. But Joseph worked his way around them, and before he realized it, he was already past The God and standing face to face with a burly man called Blacka.r />
  Blacka made quick work of Joseph, running into him with terrible ferocity, but not before Joseph tapped the ball toward the two stones behind him. The ball rolled in. Joseph crumbled on the ground, wincing with the sharp pain of asphalt scraping the skin off his knees. He was up and moving toward Blacka, who was walking slowly back to get the ball, his shoulders shaking with his chuckling. The confrontation was too quick to draw any attention until it was over. Joseph picked up a brick from the roadside and smashed it against the side of Blacka’s head. Blacka went down slowly and stayed down. He was bleeding. Joseph tossed the brick aside and pulled his T-shirt back over his chest and walked down the street.

  He walked quickly without looking back. He could hear footsteps behind him, but he did not turn. He calculated that if the person planned to shoot him or throw a rock at him he would have done it already. At the end of the street he turned and was able to look back without seeming to be doing so out of anxiety, though his heart was pounding. It was The God, walking toward Joseph with the three spirits sprinting around him like dervishes. Joseph slowed. The God caught up.

  “Yuh eat ital?” he asked.

  Joseph nodded. He did not eat ital, but he knew that eating ital was cool.

  “Come, mek we eat some ital patty, seen?” The God said.

  “Cool,” Joseph replied.

  “Blacka alright,” The God assured. “’Im head well tough.”

  “Yeah.” Joseph looked down at the spirits. They were staring up at him like children.

  “Dem soon go home. Is football dem come fe play, nutting else,” The God said casually.

  “Oh,” Joseph said. It all seemed to make sense to him. And as they walked, the spirits lingered behind until they had so faded that Joseph could no longer see them.

  The two walked silently for a few minutes. Then The God spoke. “Dem call me The God.” It was not a joke, but Joseph laughed. The God laughed too.

  They never discussed the incident or Joseph’s capacity to see the spirits running around The God. It was understood as something strange that they shared. It was enough to make their friendship happen fast. Its foundation, though, was manly trust, their shared code of manhood, the very basic notion that man-friendship was different from woman-friendship. Man-friendship was quick to forgive, even if volatile. Man-friendship was uncomplicated. Man-friendship understood that women would do anything to conspire against the order of manhood. Man-friendship assumed that women did not truly know themselves. And yet, at a deep, unvoiced level, man-friendship understood that woman-friendship would win in the end. Man-friendship was a charade, really, a vain railing against the inevitability of woman-power, because, at the end of the day, man could not resist the power of woman.

  9.

  It was late afternoon in Miami. There was a wheelchair waiting from him in the jet way. They bundled him in blankets. He felt too hot but he did not know what to say. He was fatigued by his own fatigue. He knew he was in pain, but now there was nothing but pain. He was no longer able to imagine painlessness. It was becoming harder to call this condition painful. His stomach, he imagined, was a perforated bag of sores. The pain was thorough: muscular, relentless. His head throbbed.

  The sun dropped slowly, created shadows on the pink and tangerine walls of the houses tucked in beneath the freeway. The city looked painted, the palm trees opened out sensually in the waning light.

  When he first came to Miami years ago, he expected to find America and found, instead, the Caribbean. This was nothing like the metal and glossy brick of New York, nothing like the decay and aged order of Detroit. When things rotted in Miami, they smelled like the earth, they stunk like the sea. They did not have the restrained smell of colder places. Everything was tangible here. The heat clung to the body, made sweat, the people were alive, open, naked; they had skins and they spoke.

  There were stretches of this city that reminded him of Kingston—avenues that led to overpasses with side guards that were crumbling, roadsides where stones, stretches of sand, and craggy grass infested the modernity of the place. Sometimes he would stand outside and breathe the warmth of the city and smell the stench of the ocean—not just salty, but funky, with the peculiar mugginess of humid sodium. It was like Jamaica.

  Once he had watched crows circling overhead. They were scattered through the open sky with its untidy puffs of clouds moving casually and independently through the blue. He could tell that something had died not too far away. Now, in Miami again, he felt for the connection to home.

  The Ford van that took them through the city was comfortable enough. Rhea sat in the front. Joseph was lying across the backseats with his legs propped up in Russell’s lap. Russell stared out. He was thinking of his village in St. Elizabeth on the south coast of Jamaica. He wanted to return to the familiar musky smell of the sea, the dry red dirt, the scent of rotting oranges in his yard, the graves of so many generations of his family. He had the feeling that taking Joseph to that familiar place, taking him out before the sun came up so he could sit on the edge of the sea and allow the salt to heal his body, would make him better, would change him. He imagined that the sight of the hills rising untidily behind the coast would revive Joseph, take him back to a place where things were simple as a birdcall or the taste of a mango. For all its heat, Miami still seemed like an alien place, and Russell wanted to take Joseph far away. But he knew that he would have to stay with his friend, try and feed him with food that could transport him. A man musn’ dead which part the ancestors’ spirit not living—a man must return to him navel string, Russell thought as the city rushed past—the wide streets, the cluttered houses, and the glint of cars speeding in sharp colors across the world.

  The three women were in the seat in front of them. No one spoke. Joseph looked out of the side window into the sky. He could see the way the sunset was coloring the evening. He felt nauseous. He thought about dying again. He wanted to be back in Jamaica. Back in Kingston, back in the rugged mountain village in St. Ann.

  They arrived at the massive house near the sea at dusk. The streets were empty. No one had announced that the great hero Joseph was passing through. He asked the women to let him walk into the house. It had never been so empty, so orderly, so lacking in life. During the five years he had owned it, he rarely stayed there. Rhea had stayed there for the past two years, after they moved their business due to the problems in Jamaica. He came there to rest in between tours. The house was always full then. It was as if a perpetual party was taking place. People were always stopping there to spend the night, to work in the studio, to just sit in his presence, to come and check out the pretty women who happened to adorn his poolside night and day. The best weed in Miami was available. It was a place of confusion, fights, gun-toting, and deep reasoning about the meaning of Babylon and the dream of returning to Ethiopia. Where the Jamaican house remained rustic, close to the roots, and smelled always of poor people’s dinners, this house revealed the pimper’s paradise of Rasta success. And Joseph would come there, lament the decay of all that was righteous in the world, but be too weary to do a thing about it.

  Now it was empty. The halls were silent. He walked through the wide living area, the orange glow of sunset spilling light on the hardwood floors. Everything was immaculately arranged. He felt as if he was walking into his own mausoleum. He made his way to the room he always used, a small white room in the back of the house that opened out into a bush backyard. From there he could see the sea brimming with color. He imagined Jamaica not too far from there. Sometimes he imagined he could see Jamaica. He opened the French doors and lay on the white sheets, breathing heavily, his body weak with the exertion of this walk.

  The voices of the women moving around him, preparing the room, encouraging him to put both feet on the bed, commenting on the hair he was losing, making plans for meals, all came in a wash of muted sounds. He was drifting again. Travelling.

  10.

  Joseph had seen death. He had seen people killed. He was always startled b
y the simplicity of death. Not that it was easy to kill people. Killing was painful and it took a great deal of effort. The body wanted to live. The body fought to live all the time. Like chickens beheaded. They ran sprinting around the yard, gurgling blood, spilling blood, their muscles flexing, their whole posture erect and almost dainty. People described it as a maddened run, but it was no madder than the average live and head-intact chicken’s wide-eyed sprint. The circling movements, the lifting of the knees and every muscular action were the same, despite the brain being taken away.

  The body did not like to die. The body fought death. He had seen it. In films people took bullets and collapsed, as if accepting death calmly and according to a script. In life he had seen people take bullets and curse about the most insignificant things. Death did not bring profound wisdom. He had watched a friend moan and groan about the pain of a bullet lodged in his head, about the headache he was feeling. He watched his friend grow very angry, saw him get up, about to hit out at somebody who was trying to help him by staunching the blood with a towel. He was not out of his mind. This was how he normally behaved. He was angry and he wanted to do something about it. Just as suddenly, he lost consciousness, fell silent, and never woke up. No last statements, no thoughts about a loved one, nothing like that. All Joseph could remember was his friend’s annoyance at the guy who was trying to help him.

  The death of others was the most normal thing in the world. It was the afterdeath that was extraordinary. He found the missing of people exceptionally difficult. Missing the person, looking out for the person, hoping to see the person in the street, then realizing that the person would not be around again. Gone forever. Thinking that after five years the person would not suddenly return. That after thirty years the person would be thirty years gone. Thirty years out of circulation. Thirty years out of memory. Thirty years faded into something tiny, something insignificant—a moment, a look, a gesture. That would be thirty years of absence. He found this extraordinary.