The Liminal People

by Ayize Jama-everett

  I meet London early morning after a big breakfast of ham, steak, egg and cheese, biscuits, potatoes, toast, coffee, and tea. I’m not hungry. It’s all ammunition. I don’t know what this day will bring, but if it’s lots of metabolic changes in me or lots of healing for someone else, I’ll need energy. I’m in the neighborhood of the fish’n’chips boy before the first commuters wake. I’m wearing a black and red Adidas running suit I picked up yesterday, across the street from the internet café. As I walk I’m stretching my legs like I’m about to go for a major run. Like I need to. My hood is down. I want everyone watching Yasmine to be watching me, seeing this face. I give them five minutes of the bullshit stretches people who run all the time have to do. Normal people. I’m feeling for Yasmine. Her biorhythms are so familiar to me, even now it’s painful. I don’t mean to wake her up, but I flutter her. Then I take off.

  The phone book listed five gyms in the general area of their flat. One is way too grimy to be of use to Yasmine. My run reveals another as being too popular. Who goes to the gym at six in the morning? I narrow it down to three, and pick the one easiest to get to. I throw my senses wide for the woman I love while I ask for a day pass, and as I sit through a pushy offer to join the gym, I luck out. She’s here. There’s a pud in front of me I wouldn’t waste time to smack, babbling away as though he and I were the best of friends while the woman I should be spending the rest of my life with is walking right by me. And she doesn’t even recognize me.

  The years have been more than kind to her. Even the last time I saw her, through the window of our old place, in that black silk dress that looked too good for me to put my hands on, even then she didn’t look as good as she does now. It was like her beauty was waiting until her body grew to an appropriate age to fully manifest. She doesn’t wear a lick of makeup, not even some base-color lipstick. She’s got hips, and enough of a rounded ass to not be confused with a flat-butted Brit chick. Her hair, short-cropped and showing the first signs of gray, is pulled back in a tight bun resting just above the base of her neck. By the time she exits the changing room and climbs on the elliptical machine, she’s sporting a dark green top that holds her small breasts close, and black tights that hold that beautiful ass even closer. I’m visibly distracted. The idiot ranter is finally giving up the ghost and giving me a trial day pass as an endurance prize for putting up with his bullshit. Despite temptation, I do a once-around the gym, targeting anyone that came in after her. Each one could be MI5.

  After a sip of water I’m giving the sixty-five-year-old with carpal tunnel trying to jazzercise his way backward from his next heart attack a dopamine rush he hasn’t felt since he lost his virginity, sometime around when the first Dr. Who came on. He’s stunned—any more of his runner’s high will leave him with stains on his pants. I slide next to Yasmine, who notices nothing with her headphones on.

  I want to apologize for all the things I’ve thought. I want to get down on my knees and beg her to forget about Fish’n’Chips and her missing kid. I want to sell her identity to Nordeen, so she’ll be in the same ambiguous bind as I am. I want her on top of me screaming in my ear to not stop. I want her to never know how to write the word “freak.” My pulse is a speed-metal techno beat. My heart thinks my chest cavity is just a mirage. I’ve forgotten how to swallow. I’ve forgotten which glands will give me saliva. I’m about to speak when she looks at me. We both stop the elliptical machines. There was a better way to do this, other than looking like my twenty-one-year-old self again. But I don’t know how.

  “I’m sorry.” Her voice is the same cayenne-flavored honey. Randomly accented thanks to parents who couldn’t figure out what continent to settle on. “You look like someone I used to know.”

  “It’s me,” is all I can get out.

  “Taggert?”

  “You called. I came.” There’s no lie in it.

  Chapter Seven

  “You look . . .”

  “Yeah, I kn—”

  “You look the same, Tag.”

  “Nobody calls me Tag anymore.”

  “But you look the same!”

  “Keep it down.”

  “Why?”

  “MI5, Scotland Yard, whoever the hell is looking in your direction.”

  “No one is looking at me. I’m a low-level politician’s wife whose daughter ran away.”

  “Ran away? I thought—”

  “You look the same!”

  “It’s part of what I can do. Put it together, Mene! I heal hurts right? What’s aging but protracted hurt done by living?”

  Silence. Then she talks.

  “Why like that?”

  “Like what? This is me.”

  “That’s you from fourteen years ago. Have you not changed since . . . ?”

  “I’ve changed more than you know.”

  Silence again. This time she steps off the elliptical machine before she speaks.

  “We should go somewhere.”

  “I’ll wait outside.”

  I don’t smoke. I drink, because most people I’m around do and it puts them at ease. It takes more effort for me to feel the effects of alcohol than it’s worth, but I put up with it. Point is, I’ve got no vices. They’re important. They give you something to do other than stand around and look nervous while the only woman you’ve ever loved changes into her street clothes inside a gym.

  It’s full morning now. Respectable morning. Seven-thirty in the morning. The streets are bustling. I grab two coffees from a Turkish street vendor. Yasmine exits the gym looking like the most efficient heartbreaker on the planet. Where semi-skintight gear used to hug her, she’s sporting a button-up white silk blouse with blue stripes, and a pumpkin-colored skirt that lies to your eyes when they ask where the cloth ends and the ass begins. Still no makeup. Still no bullshit. As I hand her the coffee, she’s got her professional voice on.

  “I need to know why you’re here.” Dry as a Bedouin’s tongue.

  “You called. I came.” The repetition of my answer startles her.

  “This . . . this isn’t about you and me?”

  “This is about your daughter.”

  “For me.” She nods, searching my face for comprehension. “But what is this for you?”

  “This is me coming because you asked. You want me gone, say go. I’ll leave knowing my word is still good. But it sounds like you need some help. You want it, I’m here. You don’t . . .”

  “Tamara didn’t run away.”

  “Speak on it.” I follow her lead on the mad dash through crowds that seem to part the way for the both of us. Four inches shorter than I am now and she still makes way through the crowd like a linebacker.

  “It’s more convenient for everyone to think that she’s just some brat who wanted more attention and decided taking off for a few weeks was the perfect way to get it. She wouldn’t do that. I know her.” This is all she’ll say until we reach a café by the Thames. I sit down silent, like a good dog, and wait. The waiter gives us menus, but she doesn’t even bother with the pretense of opening hers before ordering pastries and coffee for the both of us.

  “I never lied to Tamara. Never gave her any reason to lie to me. She was a typical teenager, yes. She smoked hash about every other weekend. I wasn’t proud of it, but I didn’t malign her because of it. She had a boyfriend last year, but he broke up with her because she wouldn’t shag him. That wasn’t my direction but her own. You understand, Tag? She has her own principles. . . .”

  “Did you tell her about me?” She’s about to answer when the bloody waiter comes back. She takes spins around the coffee rim with her spoon, then answers in a deliberate voice that lets me know I’ve crossed the line.

  “I told her that I was in love with someone else once. Before her father. But that our lifestyles didn’t coincide.”

  “Makes me sound like a dope fiend.”

  “Better a dope fiend than a—”

  “Don’t say freak!” I’m too loud. It’s a novice mistake of mine, to shape my voca
l cords temporarily for greater volume. Maybe the cooks in the back didn’t hear, but everyone else does. I shake my head slowly, preparing to apologize.

  “I . . . I wasn’t going to use that word,” she says.

  “Stay away from euphemisms as well, if you don’t mind.”

  “I . . . can’t apologize for that, Tag. I was younger then, harsher. I didn’t mean to . . .” She’s expecting me to stop her. I don’t even try. “Was it a mistake to call you?”

  “Depends on why you did in the first place.”

  “My daughter didn’t run away. Someone chased her away, or she’s staying away for a reason. No one else will find her. They think its part of a political ploy ever since Darren took a stand against the sympathy vote in Parliament.”

  “Darren.” I didn’t realize I’d said it until it came out of my mouth.

  “Hey!” She barks at me like I’d just trashed the man’s name. “He is my husband. He is Tamara’s father. And he’s a good man.”

  “If he’s such a good man, then why isn’t he trying to find his daughter right now instead of making speeches to this permanent undersecretary and that budget director? And what the fuck is a permanent undersecretary anyway? And since when did you find politicians so goddamn sexy?” She’s so smart it’s scary. She just sits back and waits until I condense it all down to one question. “Did you cheat on me with him?”

  “By the time I left for Liberia, it was done, Taggert. I was done. You had . . .” She’s calling the waiter over for more coffee. She hasn’t even taken a bite out of her pastry. I check the activity of the acid in her stomach and find its hasn’t broken down anything in over thirty hours. But it’s getting more agitated with every passing second. My fault.

  “Tell me what you know about Tamara disappearing.”

  “No,” she says softly. “This could all be a mistake, Taggert. I was . . . I am desperate. I’m grasping at straws. You’re a straw. That’s it. I’d be a total liar if I said I didn’t think about you all these years. But that was my adolescence. I look back on it fondly, but I don’t miss it. I don’t miss you. I miss . . .” I feel her tear ducts giving before she does. I’m telling myself it’s sympathy pains that cause mine to go when hers do. “I miss my baby. I miss my little girl. I want my little girl. I’ll do whatever I have to do to find her. No one else cares, Tag. Everybody thinks she ran away, but she wouldn’t do that to me. Do you see what I’m saying? She just wouldn’t do that to me.”

  She wipes her face with her sleeve, takes a small napkin and blows her nose briefly but fiercely. The red puffiness about her eyes and cheeks won’t go away for another couple of minutes, but her voice returns to its solid calm in a matter of seconds.

  “I called you because I think you can help find my daughter. I didn’t call you because I love you or I miss you or I need you or anything like that. If that’s your hope, and I contributed to that in any way, then I’m sorry . . . and let’s say good-bye now. I love my family. I love my daughter and I love my husband.” I’m taking the blows like a champ even though each one feels like a wooden stake through my vampiric heart. I feel like an ass for wanting her, pining away for over a decade. I’m feeling like even more of an ass for wanting to run away from the situation. “Prove that you were right.” The thing that lives inside me whispers every time I attempt to leave. It’s the only thing keeping me stuck to my seat.

  I chose my powers. I chose my life, the grime and grit of it. I chose to go where people hurt the most, in order to find the best ways to heal. It was in that choosing that I found Nordeen, and he’s shown me the shadows of the real rulers of the planet. Not politicians and businessmen but gods and powers most people don’t have the concepts, let alone the names, to explain. I can’t remember when I stopped thinking about money as evidence of my self-worth, but it was long before I met the boss. I’ve been removed from the common psychology of men for longer than I can recall. I may be a freak, but unlike you, Yasmine, I embraced my freakiness. And in doing so, in knowing what it meant to be a freak, I’ve turned myself into an invaluable resource to men and demigods alike. You chose a man who hopes to do once what I perform regularly. You rejected your fire only to now call on mine. And I came. Not because it’s the right thing to do. But to prove you wrong. To show you the value of a freak. To prove to you I was right.

  But this is only what I think. I couldn’t ever say such things to her.

  “I’m not a private investigator,” I say slowly so she’ll understand it’s not an attack.

  “But you cut a healing swathe through some of the most diseased and forlorn parts of Africa.”

  “You heard about that?”

  “I’m an international reporter of human-rights cases, Tag. How is some random man walking through Africa ignoring tribal, political, and territorial lines healing the sick not going to come across my radar? People hailed you as a messiah.” She pauses, and I know she’s got more. “Did you know you cured one woman of AIDS?”

  “Yes.” She’s not Nordeen, so I enjoy my ability to lie. I didn’t know. It doesn’t matter. There’s awe in her voice. Eat your heart out, Fish’n’Chips.

  “It’s the only documented case of faith healing of HIV on the books. There’s a two-million-euro live bounty out for your head based on her description alone. . . .”

  “What does this have to do with your daughter?”

  “She’s . . .” Her voice is lower than it’s ever been. Not just since the gym, but since I’ve known her. I don’t know if she’s talking to herself or to me. “She’s like you.”

  “She’s a healer?” Why am I so excited?

  “No. She can move things . . . with her mind.”

  “Telekinetic?”

  “Yes. But she also can hear thoughts . . . telepathic. That’s what it is.”

  I’m angry and don’t bother hiding it.

  “What?” she barks at me from too far of an emotional distance to expect to be heard. “What did I say? What did I do?”

  “Call on a freak to catch a freak?” She slaps me hard enough to break one of her fingers. Other customers react. I don’t.

  “My daughter is not a freak!”

  “But I am?” She has no words for me. Instead she drops a twenty-pound note on the table and walks out the door. I take a second to survey the restaurant, to see if anyone follows her. When no one else does, I do. She’s at a railing overlooking the Thames. After a minute, I join her.

  “This was a mistake,” she says, holding her hands tight below her chin, praying.

  “No. You made the right call. Just to the wrong man. Bigger man, better man, would be able to put the past aside for the sake of an innocent and all that valiant shit. Me? I’m still more like this face than I’d care to admit. A child playing grown-up games.”

  “I need you to be that man now,” she says softly like we’ve never passed a harsh word between us. “You’re the only one I know like her. . . .”

  “Like you.” I’m reminding her.

  “Like me,” she concedes begrudgingly. “Tamara had just come to her . . . skills, power, whatever you call it. She told me about it.”

  “Did you tell her about me and—”

  “I told her that I had something similar.” She truly loved her daughter. Once we moved to London, Yasmine stopped experimenting with her fire totally. Not even to light a candle. Whenever I pushed her on it, we had fights that would wake neighbors. I asked her one time what it felt like to start fires. I wanted to know if it was in the realm of possibilities for me to cauterize a wound instead of making the blood vessels just atrophy. She said starting fires was like dropping acid into her worldview. Now I would see that as a sign of problems to come, but then I was too inexperienced in love, too needy to see it as an indication of anything other than my need to compromise more. “It made her feel . . . better.”

  “Just because she’s like us”—I wait to hear protestations against any type of union involving the two of us, and smile when they don’t come�
��“that doesn’t mean she’d be able to fight off whatever came her way. They could have drugged her. If she’s not very experienced. . . .”

  “That’s not why I think it has to do with the . . .” She stops and looks at me. “Can I just see your face? This is so disconcerting. Can you show me what you look like now?” I relax into my own height, skin tone, weight, and facial features, all of it. It takes less than a minute. Any gawking commuters would get a shock, but they’d have to watch for that full minute. People in cities generally don’t look at each other for over a few seconds.

  The transition makes Yasmine sick. I can feel the bile rising in her throat. She wants to throw up. She just stares at me in fascination. “Thank you.”

  “It’s just practice and precaution.”

  “I understand. Before she left, Tamara began acting secretive. . . .”

  “You said the two of you were tight?”

  “Not with me. With her father. She said things were going on. Things only I would understand, that might hurt him politically if she got involved. I didn’t ask. She’s getting older. I figured she had a right to a certain level of privacy. It’s hard to always be in the public light. If I had known . . .”

  “And so that’s why you think it has to do with what we do?”

  “What we can do, yes. She never displayed her . . . gifts. She was quiet about them. Once I had to chastise her for reading her teacher’s mind during an exam. But she already felt so bad about it. In part because the things in a high school teacher’s mind regarding his students are so depraved. . . .”

  “I can’t promise anything,” I say, stretching my actual body, realizing the clothes I bought fit better on it.

  “I’m not expecting promises. I don’t think this is what you want, but I can give you—”