Iron Balloons

by Channer, Colin

  So he stopped going to funerals. He stopped lingering around the places of the dead. He never carried a coffin, never drove behind a hearse, never went into a church to give last rites to the dead.

  11.

  A sick man is in a studio playing his guitar. This narrative is more than a fiction, it is a dream that Joseph has had for years. It is a dream that has consumed him ever since he felt he could fly. When he felt the pressure of his sickness coming on him, he found comfort in the willingness of his mind to dream. And with each dream he would add to the story. The plot was familiar to him. It was a legend. The legend came to be his own narrative. It was a narrative that usurped his history every time.

  He would allow his mind to travel on airplanes, to drive through quaint German villages, to mingle with the ganja smoke and roots talk of great Rasta singers and players of instruments. He would sit on his porch and look out into the open sky and find himself thinking about what dying would mean. In this way death slipped into his body.

  The story was the same every time. He would make that great song, that stunning song, and the whole gathering would weep when he played it, and as they did, his hair would start to fall out in clumps. His locks would fall to the ground. And all the characters that had crowded his head would come crawling out to see the tragedy of his passing. They would hold his body, lift him, carry him to a bed, and he would rest his head on the lap of Rhea and say to her, “I am going,” and she would sing “Fly Away Home.” And in that moment his arms would fall away, and the three women would come and hover over him and pray for him and plant more dreams of home in his head, and slowly, ever so slowly, he would fade away. It was heroic, in full color, and gloriously holy.

  12.

  He has lived in this state long enough to know that he has been away too long. For years, the thoughts of home have been a physical thing to him. They have a smell, a taste, the feel of a landscape, the scent of a moment. In the mornings he would feel that strange nausea of excitement and unease that he used to feel before facing the day. But now it was a comforting feeling—the feeling of home with all its strange anxieties.

  His mother had been absent. He had not understood this then, for he had never stopped regarding her as a victim of his father’s strange silences, his father’s capacity to withdraw into the inscrutable density of his books or his cigarettes, sucked on with a sweet passion that was hard to describe. His mother would walk through the house singing of how much she had lost. And she had lost much. His mother had one day come into the living room with the stoic, dull quality of a woman unfamiliar with the ritual histrionics of selfpity, she had come into the living room and said with such sincerity, such pained honesty: “You don’t even touch me. It has been months since you have touched me.”

  This is the same face he saw when Melanie came to ask him, “Why don’t you talk to me, tell me what is going on?” The same pitiful look. “You don’t even touch me. Why has it been months since you have touched me?”

  He had found this American woman, loved her and lost her. She connected always in his mind with home. He missed home. He missed the rituals of being a hero. He did not think he could give it up so easily. Yet he was sure that after the withdrawal of his illness, after the falling away of his locks in clumps, after the anticlimax of his survival, and after his plans for exile to Ethiopia had ended with the defeat of that land, the death of utopia, even after coming to settle in this simple town, a place completely unsuited to his own sense of reality; he was sure that, after all this, he would find peace, find some quiet, and learn resignation to his new existence.

  But it has not worked.

  Here, lying in this room, the tape player repeating Exodus until the lyrics become one song, he is still alive and she is still gone. He is washing himself with music that will purge the memory of blues and country music that the woman brought into his house, the music she heard all her childhood. Lying there, he wonders how he will get to touch her again, how he will get her to come back, where he will find her—if he can find her—before everything falls apart. He feels as if he is going to have to make decisions.

  He is tasting, again, the metaphor of home. Jamaica was what he needed, he knows that. He knows he had to come home to live, just as many travellers know they have to come home to die, even though he feared it, feared the violence, the madness on the streets. In the months since he has been back he has felt the fear fading. He can feel his body shaping itself around the comforts of the familiar.

  He had wanted to find a woman in Jamaica, someone who would understand him after his years away, someone who he could be with, someone who would want to be with him, want to make love with him, to make certain that if it was anyone, he would be the one to say no. It would be the woman, a Jamaican woman, who would be saying to him, as his mother had said to his father, “You don’t touch me—you have not touched me in months. I want you to touch me.” Such a woman would feed him, would wait for him, would make him feel like a man—a woman who understood the way a man’s body needs to be touched. A woman who spoke his language. A woman who understood that in his silences there is some dignity—some quest for dignity. That is what he missed.

  He had planned to come back to Jamaica to find this, but instead he brought an American woman home with him, a woman who made each morning seem like an unknown space. She made his tongue feel heavy with its inability to make sense, to make her understand.

  Now she has left him, walked away from him, and here he is, trying to think of whether he should go and find her, or whether he should stay in this room and let his dreams consume him.

  The country is as old as he is. He has grown up with the country, and now he knows just how that island feels. He feels like the island. He had promise, but now he feels old. He feels used up. When he contemplates the forty years that he will have lived, when he contemplates what he will do at the stroke of midnight on the fortieth year of his life, he has a sense of what people in Jamaica must be feeling right now. They are waiting to see if something, someone will come and rescue the country, but are wondering if death will come before that rescue. He looks at the forty years of his life with sadness, a strange weariness. It depresses him.

  13.

  Coming out of sleep, it takes awhile for Joseph to understand that his weakness may have had something to do with his hunger. The tape is still going. The world outside is defined by the radio. Voices chattering, images of faces looming over him. Then they disappear. He keeps returning to his dream that is no longer a dream but a narrative with sequence and meaning. He has to return to it because it gives him a sense of grounding. But the narrative is being interrupted by voices, by the sound of the telephone that has been ringing for a while now, after a long silence.

  Joseph is hungry. He feels the hollow inside him. It no longer hurts. It is a dull pain. He is not dry. He has been drinking water from the tap, walking to the toilet, cupping his hand under the tap, and drinking until his stomach hurts with the pain. Then he goes back and lies down and waits.

  He is dreaming of Melanie. Melanie is lying on a table, her legs apart, and a man in a mask, a man with tendril hands that look uncannily like the hands of The God, is leaning down between her open legs and doing something to her. Joseph can tell that the man is feeling deep inside her for something, and when he seems to have it in hand, he is grimacing with the effort of moving it, pulling at it. Melanie is in pain, howling, twisting. There is blood underneath her, spreading. The light in the room is blue.

  Joseph opens his eyes. Perhaps she has had an abortion. He struggles to grasp the idea. He closes his eyes again.

  Like the fragmented samplings of a surreal dub track, the voices of the world, the sounds of the radio enter Joseph’s mind and slip out again, bubbling behind his dreams and over them. The distant sounds of an argument down the street between a man and a woman, the yell of the kisko and ice cream seller on his scooter, the tinkle of the postman’s bell, the dogs’ sharp bark, the twisted paths of his
dreams, all gather in his head.

  “This country gwine to hell, Mr. Brown. It gwine to hell …”

  Movement of Jah people!

  “Why yuh say that, sir?”

  Rest on your conscience, oh yeah, oh yeah!

  “We selling the land, selling the land to tourist, to white people.”

  And move your window curtain …

  “It’s a old habit, my friend, but what to do?

  Good, good, good loving …

  “Revolution, Mr. Brown …”

  This could be the first trumpet, might as well be the last …

  “You mean political revolution?”

  Cause every lickle t’ing …

  “Yes, Mr. Brown.”

  “My God, my good man. I think somebody should get your address and put you in a museum. You’re a relic, man. Don’t tell me, sir, but are you a Marxist?”

  Open your eyes …

  “Yes, Mr. Brown. Revolution is what we need. We want to nationalize everything, Mr. Brown. And we execute all corrupt officials … and t’iefs and robbers must be whipped in public.”

  Woe to the downpressors …

  “My friend, I am afraid you’re mad. You must have fallen asleep twenty years ago, man. Manley is not Prime Minister again, you know, fellow? The Berlin Wall is history.”

  Let’s get together and feel alright!

  “Yes, an’ damn fool people like you will burn too. Yes. You t’ink I don’t know how much coffee land you own up in dem hills? You t’ink the people don’t know what a capitalist exploiter …”

  Exodus!

  “Sorry, got to go. Next. People’s Voice, what’s on your mind?”

  Exodus!“Mr. Brown?”

  Yeah, yeah, yeah!

  “Yes, ma’am, you are on the air.”

  Rule equality …

  “Mr. Brown, I believe is oral sex killing our nation today …”

  Set, set, set, set, set!

  The voices come in and out. His mind catches a phrase and follows its meandering way into chaos, then everything slips away. The music blankets him, and he wakes to the sound of voices, the litany of blood, the litany of corruption, the litany of scandal, the litany of fear.

  When he opens his eyes he is on the stage, sees the silver glare of the lights above him. He sees the fluttering of the canvas cover that is stretched over the stage, sees the labyrinth of scaffolding, sees two white boys dangling from the scaffolding, staring down at him in shock, then he sees Melanie’s face. He sees the fear in her eyes. Then he closes his eyes again as he feels them lifting him.

  Someone was arguing with his woman, Melanie, the American woman, the one who left him. She used to be Rhea. But Rhea does not have her swampy, low-country Southern accent. This is Melanie. This is the woman who wrapped herself around him in their small bed, the woman he screamed at, told her she was so typically Yankee, so bloody self-righteous, and no different from the pigs from that country. The woman whose face crumbled with sadness at the flash of his words, at the fact that there was no way he could take them back. This is the woman who left him. Packed her bags and left him. The one who, when he asked her, “Are you going to leave me here to die?” had said, “You would be happier dead. You know that.” And she had left with that. Left on a plane and gone far away.

  She laughs and throws herself against him, embraces him, touches him like she has not touched him in a long time. All around them, people are leaving. They are going away from them—going away from the dream. She is laughing and asking him if he wants something to drink, some iced tea or lemonade; offers him rum in a white and blue enamel cup. She asks him if he has taken his medication. She asks him if he needs a bath—a warm bath to cleanse his soul. He has dreamt this before. He can tell that he’s going to keep dreaming this as long as no one comes for him, comes to rescue him.

  14.

  He wakes to find himself where he has always been, in his apartment in Ensom City, sweating and frightened by the dream. Yet the dream is not complete. It is never complete. These vivid snippets are all he can remember—the laughter, the feel of her body against his, the sense that she is somewhere waiting, the heavy ganja-tinged presence of the roots man in his skin, and the hurtling departures of all the people he knows.

  15.

  No one comes to rescue him. Time is no longer clear. Perhaps days have passed. Perhaps some hours, but long enough for the room to smell like a tomb—a tomb with a freshly buried body. The rot is thick in his nostrils. He wants to fly. He wants to fly so much. But he is anchored. The anchor holds him in the room, in the heat, in the smell of his body decaying.

  But he does manage to climb through the thick citrus grove, long neglected and cluttered with intense brush and the tangle of twigs and limbs from the prickly trees. As he walks, he makes a song for the names of home in his head. The heat is steady, though a soft breeze dances around him. He breathes. He keeps wiping the sweat from his hand, switching the brown paper bag from one hand to the other. He tastes the salt dripping from his moustache into his mouth.

  He finds her sitting beneath a flowering poui tree at the far end of the pimento barbecue. The wash of orange light from the fading sun and the spread of petals on the floor around her make her white dress golden, tender, and graceful. Her face is lined with the markings of her years—her cheeks sharp, her lips still full but wrinkled. Her head is bandannaed and her white scarf moves with the leaves’ shadows. Her feet are bare, resting on the soft petals.

  But he knows it is she. Years later, beyond forty, beyond fifty. He has lived to see her and he recognizes her.

  He catches her eyes. They brighten. He waves and lifts the bag up to her. The brown bag weighted with his offering.

  The last fifty yards fill his head with the pounding of blood, the wheeze of his chest, the grunt of each effort to move, to reach her.

  He feels love seeing her there, feels tenderness for the woman who smiles at him. When she speaks, the rich earthiness of piedmont soil falls from her lips. Her voice carries him to swamps that seem to belong to another country—somewhere hot and dense, somewhere gummy with its humidity. The trees there are alien things, grotesque, bearded, dark green trees that give off smells as intoxicating as liquor.

  He lays the bag in her lap, and she opens it while looking at him.

  “Are you taking medication?” she asks, or seems to ask, but it is like wind. The voice does not stay long. It leaves her face, and her mouth does not move. She is smiling a simple closed-lip smile as the voice fades.

  “You sure you alright?” the voice says.

  He can see a tangerine-colored face looking back at him, but that too fades. Then it is Melanie sitting there patiently, her stomach distended, her dark mahogany arms roped with muscles, her hair dangling in long tight braids down her face, and her eyes glowing with recognition—those black eyes, those deep black eyes.

  She bends over the bag and opens it slowly. Her hand reaches in and extracts the damp balls of rolled tamarind flesh spotted with the sparkle of brown sugar. She nibbles the fruit with her lips and holds her body as the flare shivers through her. She holds the sticky fruit out to him and he bites into the gummy flesh, the crunch of sugar against his teeth.

  The music keeps coming back to him through the haze. What he wants is the woman who has left him. And maybe this is what love means: the capacity to imagine love far into the future. An impossible place where the paths are not charted and are cluttered with prickly bramble.

  “It is my birthday,” he says to her.

  “How old are you, baby?” she asks.

  “Forty,” he says.

  “Forty? But you died at thirty-six.” She is sucking the tamarind balls.

  “No, I didn’t,” he says. “I …”

  He cannot speak anymore. The music fills the room and then suddenly stops.

  He wakes to hear the tape player clicking. The tape has stuck. He is forty. He is not thirty-six.

  He reaches to touch her. She is not there.
She has gone.

  He sits up and stares at the walls—the newspapers. He feels the dust under his feet. He is not dead. He is forty. It occurs to him that were he to stand, were he to walk to the door, were he to step into the streets, were he to travel the miles, he would come to this swampland and find something like love. And he will find a new name, and perhaps he will work out another dream, another legend of love. It comes to him quietly like a memory.

  He stands.

  The room spins slowly. He takes a step forward and feels the lurching of his insides. The tape clicks on, the sound growing louder until it fills the room with its echoing.

  ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTORS

  ALWIN BULLY began writing poetry, plays, and short stories in his homeland of Dominica, the Nature Island of the Caribbean. He is a graphic artist, set and costume designer, theater director, and composer. A graduate of the University of the West Indies, he now lives in Kingston, Jamaica, where he manages the UNESCO regional program for culture. He is a student in the Calabash Writer’s Workshop.

  COLIN CHANNER is an assistant professor of English and the Coordinator of the Creative Writing Program at Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn, New York. He is the author of two novels, a novella, and a collection of stories. His first novel, Waiting in Vain (One World/Ballantine), was selected as a 1998 Critic’s Choice by the Washington Post Book World. His most recent work is the story collection Passing Through (One World/Ballantine, 2004), which Junot Díaz described as “a splendid collection by one of the Caribbean Diaspora’s finest writers.” Channer is the Houston International Festival’s first Artistic Director for Literature and the Founder and Artistic Director of the Calabash International Literacy Festival Trust. For more info visit colinchanner.com.

  KWAME DAWES is an award-winning Ghanian-born Jamaican author of twenty books of poetry, plays, nonfiction, and fiction. He teaches at the University of South Carolina, where he is Distinguished Poet in Residence and Director of both the USC Arts Institute and the South Carolina Poetry Initiative. Dawes is the programmer for the Calabash International Literary Festival.