“Babylon the great is fallen!” the grandfather shouted. “It is fallen and is become the habitation of devils, and the hold of every foul spirit, and a cage for every unclean and hateful bird! Come out of her, my people, that ye be not partakers of her sins, and that ye receive not of her plagues.”
No one appeared to be listening. After a moment of looking around, the grandfather shrugged. He pulled a small glass vial from his pocket. He unstopped it and appeared to drink. He took the lamp from the hands of the younger man and blew the alcohol across the flame in a whooshing cloud of fire. People whooped and clapped.
“Babylon is fallen,” the grandfather said more softly. “Seal not these sayings, for the time is at hand.”
The younger man helped the grandfather down from the crate. Suddenly the small child leapt from my lap and ran away. Another song started up and a roar from the men across the gallery flowed over us.
I was sorry to hear someone call my name. I did not want to rise up. Ana! I did not recognize the voice. Where is she? She must be here. I was hidden. What a blessed, blessed thing to be. I relished it for whole minutes. I savored each moment until they found me.
“We need you.” It was the Esquimaux, or maybe it was the Yamabushi. I could not tell but I rose up and glided behind the man as he hurried between dancers, across the gallery floor to the beluga tank.
The whale’s viewing platform was crowded but they made room for me. Something was wrong. The whale was not singing.
The red-bearded voyageur stood at the edge of the platform. “It swallowed my bottle,” he said softly. I could see in his eyes he did not mean for it to happen.
“A bottle,” I repeated. The whale hung just under the surface of the water. I had never seen it motionless. It had always whistled and chirped in circles, endless circles.
“And it was a big bottle. And then it stopped swimming.”
The whale rose to the surface, exposing its blowhole. A puff of droplets and air issued forth.
“The bottle’s probably stuck in its throat,” I said. The people on the platform nodded and looked up at me expectantly.
I thought the water would be putrid but it was not, just cold. It was also deeper than I expected; I could not reach the bottom and had to swim. The sounds of the carnival faded. My dress billowed out from my body as I pushed off from the wall. The tank felt much bigger now that I was in it. I remembered They Are Afraid of Her gliding in circles, one arm thrown over the creature’s back. I drifted toward the whale. At first it backed slowly away from me. I slowed down, and I crooned to it in soft words. I even whistled.
The whale raised its head and turned so that it could see me with one of its small eyes. Someone lit another torch on the viewing platform. The whale blinked and lowered its bulbous, milk-white face. When I came close again, it did not move away. I reached out an arm and stroked the silk-smooth skin of its back. I positioned myself in front of it and gave both of us a few seconds to get used to our proximity. The whale had many small scars across its forehead. I did not want to wait too long. I put my hands on either side of its head. A firm touch would ease its nervousness, I hoped. I was not rough. I told the creature I would do it no harm and then I pried open its mouth. It must have let me inside, because I know it could have thrashed me away with one quick motion. It must have braced itself against the side of the tank, then, because when I slipped my arm into its mouth it held steady so I could do my work.
I reached inside, past its rough tongue and the corrugations of its upper throat. By the time my elbow was at the threshold of its mouth, my fingers had reached a taut, ribbed chamber. Another few inches and they pushed into a soft cavity. I explored, feeling the pillowy flesh pulse and quiver. I felt the bottle’s neck just as the whale’s teeth brushed my shoulder. I tried to grasp it, but it slipped away. I found the bottle again and thrust one finger into it to hold it. I tugged. The whale breathed shallowly through its blowhole, but I held my breath. I pulled the bottle gently up. The whale’s body constricted around it, I felt the creature gagging but it did not dart away. I pulled the glass free. It was covered in foul-smelling bile and it took some strength to disengage it from my finger. The whale remained with me, again raising its head to look at the terrestrial world.
I shivered, filled with sudden happiness as the beluga gently swam around me and began to trill.
The Titans were put on the earth to fight the Olympian gods. The words from the old book came back to me from Pictou. They were put on the earth to fight, but I had never had a purpose here, so the whole world became my adversary, until some opportunity for good work, like this, arose. The realization did not upset me as I bobbed in the water. On the contrary, I felt a great burden sloughing away. It was a pure, fleeting sensation and I could recall no other like it. The whale swam. It whistled. It resumed its circles. When I turned back to the people on the platform, they saw something radiant on my face. I could tell it was something they’d never seen before. Among them was Tai Shan. When I reached out he pulled me from the water.
Tai Shan took off his dragon robe. Beneath it he wore loose white trousers and a white tunic. He draped the silk robe over my shoulders and gave me the sash. He waited until I had it tied and then he bowed to me, from the waist and with his palms together at his chest.
“Thank you, Ana.” He held this posture for a few more moments and then he went, ghostlike in his pure white, away from me among the revelers. I watched him walk across the whole gallery and disappear through the door to the stairs that led out of our world.
The tribesman looks out the window of his room and sees lanterns swinging from carriages. He hears hooves and the murmurs of invisible drivers on their way to or from some nocturnal errand. Music and shouts from the fifth-floor gallery reach his ears in waves. Occasionally he hears a splash from the whale in its tank.
It is because of the keeper that the tribesman is here, standing in this building, in a night that is just about to fade to morning. The keeper strayed from his duty; his heart strayed from the heart of the people. For the tribesman, this moment at the window is the betrayal’s terrible consequence.
The tribesman’s nostrils fill with stinging salt air and his ears fill with the suffocating sound of waves hissing over the sand. He was back there, at the end of the journey. He was finally climbing over slick tangles of mangrove roots, up to his thighs in water that felt as if it were erasing his legs. He would not look at this water as he walked. He pushed his way through the dense branches, his brother’s lean figure disappearing ahead of him and then reappearing. His brother called out: Higher ground. They reached a sandbar and stopped. His brother pointed. A black ship lay at anchor in the distance. And then the tribesman saw five men sitting in the shade of the mangroves near them on the sand. The men were resting, some lying on the ground near a campfire. Their small vessel lay in the shallows. In a moment, they rose and came toward the brothers, speaking in a hollow, high-pitched language that raised the tribesman’s hackles like the voice of an owl. Immediately the men killed the keeper using a blast from a stick and smoke. That stopped the song.
The first thing the tribesman did as the men walked toward him across the white sand was disentangle the bundled mulga root from his brother’s body. He strapped it to himself and then the men were there, foul-smelling and dirty. He kept his arm over the bundle while the men chained him by the neck and wrists. Even if he died in a moment, at least he would have done everything he could to protect the hollow root and its contents. But he survived, first the men, then the ocean’s terrible expanse. He had emerged in an ominous country and followed an angry man through crowds, walking upon unnatural stone surfaces and seeing people dressed in strange garments all walking the same direction. Now he had not-quite-lived in this place for countless days, and finally the song had consumed him. It was only through this song that he remained with the people, no matter how far away they were from him. He knew when they made camp in the stone country and when the floodwaters dried, and when, finally,
it was the season for fires.
He turned from the window. He became the keeper. He had absorbed the song into his body and finally understood what it had been showing him. It was his. There was no fear in his mind anymore, no doubt.
In the home place, the winds lifted dust from the floodplain and whipped it into whirling spirals. Any moisture on the ground had evaporated. The waters had disappeared and the geese flown away to the coast. The people made their way down from the cliffs holding cloths over their noses and mouths, heads bowed. They moved camp to the leeward side of the monolith that they had come to for centuries during Yegge, the season of wind.
In the evening, the men gathered to scrape red ocher from the rock. They stored this red dust until the next morning, when they rose before dawn to verify that the wind was right. They mixed the dust with spittle. They painted one another with it, drawing fingerwide vertical lines straight down their faces, forehead to chin. They hand-printed their chests and strapped their lighting-sticks to their backs. They asked the home place to understand their actions, to understand that their intention had always been and would always be to assist, to cleanse the land in preparation for Wurrgeng. The men walked in a single-file line away from the monolith, asking for guidance as they carried out their task.
The men stopped in a stand of pandanus palm and formed a circle. In the museum, every bone in the tribesman’s body aches with longing to be with them during the cleansing time, a time when the people directly serve their home place. They serve as heralds of seasons, their actions helping the land to its most abundant flow. The men’s voices are low reverberations of sound. They sing in layers of vibration that the tribesman hears clearly from the dim room above the museum. Now one man kneels in the center of the circle, with flint and a hearthboard. He shaves bark into a nest and spins alight an ember, blowing deep breaths into the bark nest until flame comes and the men raise their voices. They each dip their lighting-stick into the flame and move slowly away from one another to light the land on fire.
The tribesman walks to the door, his eyes wide open and the song suspended in his mouth. He hears whooping and music from the others and he does not know if the sounds come from his people or the beings inhabiting the museum. He does not know why these creatures would celebrate, but he smiles, already smelling the eucalyptine smoke of the home place.
Sixty-five
Was that the wind or shouting? Was it the last of the revelers? Slowly, I spiraled up from sleep, considering these sounds from a great distance. Were they fighting? Bidding each other farewell? The sounds became urgent; they seemed to be pulling me toward a foreign country that existed outside these museum walls. Surfacing now, emerging into my room and the waking life, I was delivered into the knowledge that something terrible was happening. Someone ran down the corridor outside my door in heavy shoes. Opening my eyes I could tell by the quality of the darkness that dawn was coming.
“Bring buckets!” It was a voice I did not recognize. Who was that? I sat up. Close by, I smelled smoke.
Black clouds seethed from the windows below mine and drifted up, fragrant and sinister. I peered down but the ground wasn’t visible. I heard more shouting, the sounds of a crowd, of horses snorting, people hurrying and moving things. I turned from the window and saw the distant, appalling reflection of my disheveled self across the room in the mirror. A pale face above a tapestry of dragons. I’m so tired of this, Mother. I will need a new booth, a new Life History. A new body. This one is finished. Nothing lasts. Only ten more years, and I die. I see death in every shadow, behind every door. What had Tai Shan said? It’s the same with the sages. That’s what gives them a sense of humor. Who needs a sense of humor, though, when your life is the joke?
“If we don’t get down there, we can’t get out!” It was Maud. She was running. My body followed her voice, dumbly, like an animal. In the corridor I saw the ruffled hem of her dress disappear around the corner into the gallery.
I hadn’t run in years and it rattled every bone as if the whole blasted thing would come flying apart, a pile of sticks. Fuel. The gallery was filling with stinging smoke. People emerged from the haze, changed directions uncertainly, and disappeared. I passed the beluga tank where people were crowded on the platform, dipping ceramic pitchers while the whale trilled and splashed. There were voices all around me but I recognized no one.
“Get to the third floor!” someone shouted. “The whole museum’s going up!” I heard a dozen sets of feet change direction.
“Maud?” I shouted. I wanted to say good-bye before this scattering. But it was the tribesman who emerged from the haze. He wore a wool jacket buttoned all the way up to his neck and a strange knapsack of bundled rags and rope. He walked swiftly past me, looking straight ahead, his eye on some distant, invisible target. He was singing and maybe smiling. He disappeared. I reached the stairwell and descended into the heat.
On the fourth floor, people were running in all directions, some screaming, some silent, some dragging others by the hand. Most were making their way toward the stairway and I descended among them.
Along the Broadway side of the third floor, people were climbing out the windows into the arms of men standing on the ends of ladders. The heat was intense, and the sounds of roiling fire menaced us from below, and yet the crowd was orderly around these windows. The people knew they would get out. I moved away from them.
I heard a woman wailing. Unlike the others, she had gone to the east side of the building. Maybe she had not seen the windows, the easier escape. I followed her voice and found a black-haired girl, one of the Esquimaux, perhaps. She was howling and jumping up toward a very high window, where I could see the outstretched arms of a fireman. He could not reach her.
“Here.” I offered her my arms and lifted her to the man.
“Do not try to go to the lower floors,” the fireman shouted as he enfolded the girl. “It’s too hot.”
Below me, another child appeared, his arms reaching up. When the fireman reappeared I lifted this one, too. “Here. Come.”
More appeared. Another child, then the Haitian sisters, each a delicate crane in my arms. Others arrived, more and more. My body creaked and heaved, doing the kind of work it was made for. I took in their different hefts and scents, all the world’s people made into children in my arms. Then Maud was standing below me.
I smiled. “Here,” I told her. “Come on.”
She shook her head.
“Don’t be ridiculous, come on.” I bent my knees and lifted her by the waist.
She clung to my neck for a moment. “You are magnificent,” she whispered. “How will you get out?”
I shook my head as I lifted her higher. “I don’t need to.”
I handed her to the fireman and watched the trailing hem of her Spanish dress slip over the threshold.
There was no one else in the room with me. The fireman shouted something after me but I would not hear.
I went to the roof, emerging into the lightening layers of dawn and soft columns of smoke pouring upward. The restaurant chairs were tucked in tight to the clothless tables and I passed silently among them. I heard the squeals of the Happy Family and went to the cage, bending the flimsy bars easily. Whether they would escape the flames was not my burden. As I walked toward the edge of the roof, I examined my arms. Whether I lived to eat a thousand more meals, or whether I had eaten my last did not matter. My legs moved mechanically, but not without pain. Whether I walked a hundred miles before I die, or twenty feet, there is no difference.
I can see you, Mother, even from this great distance. You come to my bedside when you think I am asleep. You cover my legs, which have outgrown these flimsy beds. You cover me and then you sit by the window and cry. When you muffle your face with your hands I open my eyes and see you mourning for my life. I always thought you were crying because of my body, but you wept for this moment. You knew one day it would come to this, that I would either live obsessed by death, or choose to die. I am not angry, M
other. I can see the brightening lines of dawn. Here are flags whipping in the wind, and rows of daffodils only just starting to scum with smoke.
But at the edge of the roof I looked down onto a sea of upturned faces and the wrongness of it pushed me back. A crowd, no different from standing in my booth or walking in the galleries. Would I give them the biggest spectacle of all? Would I give them this gift? For a moment I felt myself dangling by a filament: Would I falter? Would I leave no trace that I had ever been? It was the vain clinging of the polar explorer that reminded me of the True Life History on my desk, its pages already starting to curl and blacken. I whirled around and ran toward the stairs.
In my room one edge of the curtain had caught fire. Everything else was perfectly intact. A dent in the pillow where I’d lain, the quilt mussed from my rising. Look at my ill-fitting bed, still ridiculously propped on its crates. I gave it a kick. It wobbled. I kicked it again and the whole thing fell to the floor. I pushed it to the center of the room, quilt and all. The headboard snapped away from the frame under my hands and I threw it down. I went to the window and ripped the curtain from its rod and threw it on the pile. The edge of the quilt began to curl and smoke. Not the first bed I’ve burned, Mother. I can still hear you, your words coming out in a rush, crowded by laughing. Use it for kindling!
At my desk, I turned the pages of the True Life History until I reached the end of the scrawl. From the drawer I lifted my pencil. While the bed burned in the burning building, I made an entry: The fighters’ bright blood. The children’s faces the skulls of the dead. Grizzly Adams’ arms folded across his chest in the torchlight, standing on the smooth back of his mare. The beluga eyeing me as I reached down its throat. I wrote until the smoke stung my eyes to tears. Then I took up the History in my arms.
I heard a voice in the gallery near the beluga’s tank and I walked there with one arm extended in front of me and my eyes half closed against the smoke.
Among the Wonderful Page 41