What We All Long For

by Dionne Brand

  Oku pointed the Buick south on Oakwood, leaving the Eglinton strip behind. He headed to Queen Street, where Jackie’s store was. He hadn’t heard anything from her. He had to know if she’d heard his music. Maybe it was the way the morning had begun that made him bolder. When he first took the car he had no idea he was heading for Jackie. Nor when he got the haircut, a small vanity that said the idea was lurking in him. But now he was there and certain.

  He parked, and walked a block looking for the store. He saw the sign from across the street, Ab und Zu, and it hit him that Reiner might be there. Just as he thought it, Reiner walked out the door, his black guitar bag on his shoulder. Jackie held the door open for him, then waved as he walked down the street. Oku stood poised, not wanting to be witness to this domestic scene, let alone be caught doing so.

  Jackie retreated inside the doorway, but then she stopped, catching sight of him across the street. She raised her hand in greeting, or was it beckoning him to come? He couldn’t make out the expression on her face. It wasn’t happiness, which he wanted. It wasn’t distaste either, which he dreaded. It was that closed, smoky look she always gave him—half derisive, half curious, as if there was something she was waiting for him to do. Now he followed the invisible string in her hand, crossing the street in the middle of moving traffic. He felt as if he was colliding with something as he entered the doorway.

  “So, hey,” Jackie said, standing close to him.

  “Hey,” he managed to get out of his throat.

  They stood this way for what seemed a long time. Then Jackie moved, going to the back of the store, and then he heard Charlie Rouse playing “When Sunny Gets Blue.” He stood listening, his eyes felt swollen from desire, from recognition, and from a joy. That hoarse muted horn held her as he wanted to hold her. And she stood still, watching him in that smoky, curious way. He wanted to reach out and kiss her throat. He wanted to drop to his knees and kiss her thighs, but he didn’t want to move. He wanted to stay right there in “When Sunny Gets Blue” with her. He wanted all five minutes and forty-eight seconds of it, like this, with both of them in the full and absolute meaning of things between them.

  In the silence after, Jackie slowly brushed a hair from his neck, looked into his eyes as if still trying to find something conclusive there, and said languidly into his ear, “Fuck me, then.”

  He inhaled her skin, held her in all the shocked passion collected in him. He laughed, chuckled in the well of her throat, kissed the smooth cool surface of her neck.

  They were in Reiner’s bed, but he didn’t think of it as Reiner’s bed until after. He only thought of how they were one muscle made out of the same material, how he wanted to be inside her, how he was finally seeing her naked body, its dark brownness, its pitched sinews, its toned angles, how he felt weak and limber at the same time. He thought only of how he pushed and pushed and held her, how her legs framed him, how she bit him on his breast and his shoulder, how her arms were liquid, how she stroked his ass, how she smelled, and how she mounted him, that same cool look behind her half-closed lids; how they turned and turned, never exhausting that rhythm, the wetness between them. How she told him, “Give me your sweet cock. Fuck me.” How he said to her, “Here it is, here it is, take it, fuck me, fuck me.” How slippery he felt and close to crying when she said, “Don’t cry now, eat me, come on, eat me.” How he put his mouth on her, how she held his head, kneaded his shoulders to make his tongue obey her rhythm, and then pulled him up again, guiding his cock into her. How he wanted to come, but he wanted her to come. “I want you to come, I want you to come, I want you …” pressing her, balancing his cock in her, waiting for her. How he felt her muscles contract, her thighs shiver, a long breath in her cresting, how he wanted to scream for the thickness in his cock, how it burst when she put her hands on his ass and pulled him even closer. Then he wept, feeling so come apart. Then he kissed every part of her glistening body. She, still heaving for breath, grabbed him tightly.

  He heard her breathing become steady, felt her arms loosen. He kissed the path between her breasts. She held his head, then let him go, rolling out of the bed and finding her clothing. “Come back,” Oku said softly. Jackie shook herself into her dress, then stooped beside him to run her hand along his back. “We can always fuck, Oku. Fucking’s easy.” He grabbed her, rolling her onto the bed again, lifting her dress. He put his cock inside her again. She was impassive. “Not with me,” he said, and held her face, kissing her lips. Jackie climbed off of him. He let her go. That’s when he became aware that he was in Reiner’s bed. He didn’t care; he would do anything for her. Even lie in Reiner’s spunk. Now Reiner would have to lie in his. He dressed, went to the front to meet a coolly restored Jackie smoking a cigarette.

  “So what does it mean?” he asked.

  “That we fucked.”

  “Okay. If that’s …”

  “And it was good.”

  “Yeah.” He tasted her in his mouth, he smelled her on his face and hands. He reached for her, taking the cigarette away and burying his mouth in hers.

  “It is what it is,” she said, pulling her mouth away, putting her lips in the cavity of his neck near his ear.

  Oku felt charged and useless at the same time. Sure, he wanted Jackie this way. What he had dreamed of since Harbord Collegiate had happened. He was so high, so electric, his legs were trembling. But what was she saying?

  “So that’s all you want from me?” He sounded threatening, as if he had found some leverage with her for the first time. As if he had become irresistible. But beneath that feeling he knew lay all his uncertainty. She was like a thing he did not want to drop and break.

  “No, it’s what I want … all I have to give.”

  That hesitation between “want” and “have” crippled him and gave him hope. He read ambiguity in it a hundred ways, but qualified by “all,” he realized, that hesitation meant nothing. She was just finding a softer way of letting him know where he stood. All these calculations flew through his head. He looked for any weakness in what she said or in her tone and decided that if he hadn’t found it, he would pursue it anyway until he did. He’d followed Jackie a long time, and he’d never been this far. So he would take whatever she gave him, whatever she had, and he would find the rest after.

  He put his hand in his pocket, found the car keys, realized that he was still holding her burning cigarette with the other, and put it out in the ashtray. “And what … what will make you give me more?”

  “More?” The sexual innuendo thick on her tongue at first, then becoming serious, she said, “Hmm, I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” he said and headed for the door.

  Jackie moved ahead of him to unlock the door. So, he thought, she knew this would happen. He hadn’t been aware of Jackie locking the door in the first place. She must have decided when she saw him across the street, she must have decided in that moment she would fuck him. They both smiled cunningly at the door, coming to the same fact together. Oku cupped her breast, pulled her to him, and made a deliberate bite on her shoulder. Jackie laughed, “Be that way, then,” she said, opening the door for him.

  “See you soon, maybe,” he said, lingering on the “maybe.”

  He walked to where he had parked the car. All he could feel was her body, her legs all over him. Her scent was in his nostrils, in his hair, on his face, on his clothing. He pictured himself over and over back there in the bed with her.

  Quy

  I was twelve years old when the monk took me from Pulau Bidong. He was a Hoa Hao monk. He followed the prophet Huynh Phu So. The prophet believed in hard work, and for sure the monk’s hands were rough from something. He was from Saigon, he said. The war churned up everyone. He ended up in Laos and in Kuala Lumpur, and when I met him he’d come to Pulau Bidong to bring the teachings of the prophet to the refugees, not to mention the trade in Thai sticks. He had a scraggly bunch behind him. Two guys and a woman you could only mistake for devotees if you were as desperate as all of us
on Pulau Bidong.

  Pulau Bidong was a thriving place. There were little businesses everywhere. Under the hopeless look of things there was a lot of life going on. I was very enterprising, myself. I washed clothes and dishes for a living, and I did errands. I owned two rafts, and I ferried to the middle of the ocean to get things for the cleft palate Ba Chang. At first I slept outside her place, then I made a lean-to. I must say I was good at making things from nothing. The monk was supposed to teach us how farming the land was practising the way of the prophet. I never saw him farm anything except people’s stupidity. I admit that if by then I could say I loved anything, I guess it would have been him, but look, how was I supposed to understand the Four Debts of Gratitude? Gratitude to your ancestors, your country, the treasures, and mankind. But I played along.

  He was a city monk, but he said his father had studied with the prophet. I don’t believe a word he said now. But he taught me to read. He told me I was good talker. What you need to know is what’s on paper. Talking only gets you so far, it’s on paper you get cheated. He used to be a politician too, he said. He won a seat once in the Constitutional Assembly back in Vietnam. If life were so good with him, I wondered why he was here. Anyway, I took to the reading. Didn’t hurt. A fast learner. On Pulau Bidong you had to learn fast, change quick, or you’re the bottom shit. I broke my head on his letters, then I learned to read the papers and his books and soon any print that came my way. The things that get hidden in paper! The lies! No wonder I never got off that island till the monk. A paper for this and a paper for that, and when I got there I didn’t even know my good name well enough. And papers, of course I didn’t have any. They were all gone with my mother and father.

  Well, after the monk taught me about paper there was no looking back. I read everything I get my hands on up to this day, from the labels on cans to the scratches of birds and monkeys. Don’t you worry, they’ve got their plans too. I read and reread the newspapers that made their way to Pulau Bidong. I chewed up the monk’s book with the verses of the Buddha. My palms sweated the ink off the prophet’s teachings.

  By now you have to realize that the monk was doing more than helping people to free themselves from the cycle of reincarnation. All who ended up on Pulau Bidong knew their past life must have been shit. We must have fucked up in our earlier lives. But a clear mind was one of the gifts of Pulau Bidong. The one goal was to get off of that island. And in the meantime grab all that you could. The monk helped with this. You want anything, you ask the monk. He corkscrewed in on the Ba Chang’s business in cigarettes and condoms and matches and ginger and radios. And moneylending. But the cleft palate Ba Chang didn’t believe in the third debt of gratitude—gratitude to the monks. So a low-level war broke out. I was caught in the middle. One day I said to myself, One day I will own myself and not get caught in other people’s mess. Anyway, I chose the monk’s side because he was a man. Everybody knows women don’t win.

  It started with the fire at the prayer pagoda. That could’ve been anybody—the Christians who wanted to civilize us or the Muslims who wanted to do the same. But then the Ba Chang sent her attackers to say that the monk had better get off of Bidong and go back to where he came from. The monk decided to fight and sent his pack to burn the Ba Chang’s place down, but she caught one of the men and gave him a public beating. Then, of course, the monk was in trouble with the authorities, who told him to fix his business and move on. He protested, but no one believed him. He had to sell all his stock and quit Bidong, complaining that the Ba Chang was a sorceress and that she had bribed the authorities to harass him.

  I went with Loc Tuc—that was the monk’s name—to the mainland as his convert to Hoa Hao. He might have lost everything, but he did not lose his gift with papers. So I was born again as Loc Cuoi. We ended up in Singapore, where Loc Tuc had contacts and where I myself became a monk.

  Singapore is the best city in the world. That is where I discovered Loc Tuc’s real book. Sun Tzu. Though you would think with such a treasure he would have defeated the Ba Chang on Bidong. This book he hid from me. Loc Tuc was a cosmopolitan man. He made me wade through the Tao Te Ching of Lao Tzu, though I admit I like poets; the Analects of Kung Fu Tzu, though I am a practical man myself. Not to mention the verses of the poet emperor Ts’ao Ts’ao. As a matter of fact, Loc Tuc traded in stolen bamboo slips from raided archaeological sites, the graves of the ancient Chinese noblemen, and these were a particular pleasure to me. Of course, what he coveted were the actual words of the Buddha, and he conspired at length trying to acquire the Kangyur in its earliest known form, even though that was not his kind of Buddhism. He said that there was a version written in the hand of the Buddha himself and that he hoped to have it before he died. The tortures he put me through memorizing and memorizing. I ask myself today, Why? What did he see in me? Because he was not a man to do anything for nothing. Of course, I was his lackey, his dog. He was teaching me to bite anyone he didn’t like. But what else? Because you don’t need to teach a dog good manners. But maybe I was his insurance. A dog will bite you too, and if you let go the chain, he will ravage you. So Loc Tuc chained me up with his books and paper. But I was still a dog. He knew. I knew.

  You would say, then, that I was lucky to be taken in by this monk, Loc Tuc. You would say that he saved me from worse things that could have happened to me; that he calmed my life, took my tears away. So why complain about the way the darkness made us all hallucinate, made us all see the water ripple in a certain direction, made my sisters’ hearts quiver, my mother and father think they were each holding my hand? Why quibble about what made the boat lift and pull southeast or southwest, what made me fall asleep thinking of my father’s hand in his pocket or his hat waiting to be touched the next day? Who knows why we left on that particular evening? Perhaps this was my fate. Perhaps you’re right. I didn’t have a hard life. It was simply a life. A life like millions of lives.

  We may pretend to have control of things, but we don’t. It’s up to the heavens, as laid out for us by destiny. Why question the stars? Wars are inevitable and we have to pay the price, human nature can’t be changed, the laws of nature prevail no matter how we fight against them, the strong survive, the weak perish. Blah blah blah blah! Crap, lo dit! Yes, I learned the strong survive, all right, the weak perish. But take it from me, the strong are just strong, not best. The most ruthless, the greediest, but not the best. I know what got killed in me. I know where he is, the weak little shit who kept waiting for goodness, the geum, who wanted to jump up and trust anybody; who was ready any time to forgive.

  So luck had nothing to do with it. I chose the monk. He didn’t choose me. I saw him in his brown hassock with his frigging bells. I knew he wasn’t a good man. Who is? I knew all I had to do was flatter him. Not too big because he would see through that, but small, you know, a look of admiration here, a favour there, get him a little lump of opium. You know, quiet, quiet. He would scold me and tell me it was wrong, but he’d take it, and then I’d find him listless, his body slow as oil, in the prayer pagoda, his eyes filmed over and his fingers burned. I don’t believe in destiny. If you follow the Buddha, you know you have to make your own path. So I made my path by choosing the monk.

  I remembered nothing of Saigon. The shanties of Pulau Bidong had been my city for seven years. By now I had almost forgotten my father and mother. My mother in her red dress, my father in his hat with his hand in his pocket. In the years that passed this is all that remained memorable—the red dress over a fading figure and the hat and the hand in a pocket. When I close my eyes at night, I see the glow of the red dress and this hand reaching into its pocket. And when I open my eyes in the morning at the end of my last dreams, there again is the afterimage of a red dress, a hat, a hand. No matter my dreams, that would be the beginning and end of them. Long after it matters I still see that image like the skin under my eyelids.

  Singapore—when we came to Singapore I knew I would live there for the rest of my life. It was clean like a goo
d glass of water. I had never seen anything like it before—the glass towers, the swept streets, the orderly manner of everything, the birds—I felt like a rough and dirty stone put down in the middle of it all. We left seven months later. Loc Tuc couldn’t get a good foothold there. He said he needed some place more fluid. We backtracked up the testicle of Malaysia to Thailand. It was a raggedy retreat. It took us a year and a half, maybe two, maybe three—I don’t know how many times we were beaten up or jailed. But Loc Tuc would squirm us out of it with the teachings of the prophet, and his pretence of being a devout man and an important man who had suffered under the communists in Vietnam.

  He was from Loc Ninh, so he said, but he had spent the war in Saigon, and when the country boys from the north walked into Saigon his teachings about hard work got a going over. He claimed he was connected by family to a general in the southern army, and though he was questioned and questioned and sent to a camp for re-education, he finally bought his way out with money from the family. One minute he was from Loc Ninh, one minute he was from Khe San, the next time he was from Ha Tien, then from Nha Trang. Sometimes he was a friend of Thieu, the next his cousin’s sister-in-law was General Diem’s mistress. He even claimed to have made a daring escape from Chi Hoa Prison. He even claimed to be a friend of Thich Quang Duc, the monk who had doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire in Saigon. That is when Loc Tuc wanted to seem elegant. That monk, he told me, was protesting the persecution of Buddhists. I don’t know why he told me these stories, they didn’t matter to me. But I suppose I was his only audience, and as meagre as that was, a storyteller always tries to impress. I didn’t have any stories, so what the hell, I listened. I was the wrong person to impress.

  SIXTEEN

  EVERY FOUR YEARS, June in the city is crazy. Cars speed about flying emblems of various nationalities. Resurgent identities are lifted and dashed. Small neighbourhoods that seemed at least slightly reconciled break into sovereign bodies. It’s all because of soccer.