My son Tommy what is happening is he dying oh my god call 911 call 911!
“Call an ambulance!” Thomas and Mom screamed in unison. In the ambulance, a needle jabbed into his arm and the explosion cracked and fizzled, pushing Thomas into sleep.
For a long time after that, sleep was when this terrible new world stopped. Thomas knew that no matter how many voices he heard in his head or how many memories forced their way into his own, sleeping would make it end for a precious few hours. He kept others from touching him or his belongings, kept their thoughts from flooding his brain and sending him into an episode of seizure followed by catatonia.
Emergency room doctors eventually referred him to a psych ward, where drugs flowed. Benzodiazepines for catatonia, antipsychotics for schizophrenia, and mood stabilizers for bipolar disorder. Mom didn’t want it, but what could she do? She wasn’t a professional, just Mom. To doctors and therapists and friendly Miss Brooks who came to their house one day and asked Thomas questions alone with him in his bedroom she was just a single mother, maybe not smart enough to use birth control or have a job with better insurance. They knew what they knew and trusted other doctors and other therapists and other Miss Brookses more than they trusted her. Thomas could never conceive of a scenario where the truth would keep him from being permanently institutionalized. Since the glass of water and until the accident, Thomas’s mind and free will belonged to other people, to strangers.
• • •
The upstairs hallway was dark, and Ange’s noises from the kitchen downstairs gave Thomas the courage to walk into the hallway and reach the light switch. His bedroom door was open still. Just minutes had passed, but the nightmare was already a distant memory. The world was quiet, and he was grateful for that right now. He needed a bath. He wanted to float in the water, no, go beneath the surface and disappear. Next to bed, the bathtub was the best place for him. Submerged in water he felt like the little brown mouse, except he knew what water meant and felt like. He never fought it, he floated, the lip of water clinging to his cheeks.
Thomas went to the bathroom, closing the door behind him. After starting the water, he quickly peeled off his jeans, T-shirt, and underwear. He normally took a bath in the dark to try to further disconnect, but tonight was not a night for darkness. He needed to see clearly into the corners of the bathroom, the hallway, his bedroom. Rushing hot water released steam into the air, coating the windows, walls, and mirror. Thomas took a deep breath and slid into the tub, lowered his head back to submerge his ears.
He just wanted to forget the accident. He wanted to forget the little brown mouse, forget hurting Ange when he wouldn’t even let her hug him at Mom’s funeral. Then she’d called him a monster for not letting anyone touch him. At that point they hadn’t had an actual conversation in almost a year. His body was the monster, not him.
Thomas reached up to turn off the faucet. The water pooled into his ears, and he floated in silence. The bathtub felt endlessly deep.
What is it?
Thomas’s eyes snapped back open when he heard her voice. His vision was cloudy, and he realized that the air above the water was frozen. A milky layer of water trapped him in the tub. Instinctively he pushed against it, which thrust him deeper into the water. Not water, though. It had been replaced with the blue liquid which now rushed to fill his lungs. Thomas coughed, and it splattered from his mouth onto the frozen air above him.
What is it? Her voice whispered next to him.
He screamed and pushed away from the sound, slamming his shoulder against the side of the tub, thrashing and kicking at the solid layer trapping him.
You know we always gotta leave something behind.
Thomas couldn’t breathe. The blue liquid in his throat and nostrils was thickening. Now he was little brown mouse that didn’t understand what was happening was inevitable, that he couldn’t escape. For the first time, Thomas understood little brown mouse’s struggle. No struggle feels futile to the one struggling. He had fantasized about trading places with the mouse, but now he didn’t want that. He just wanted to be alive, pawing at the lid even as something watched him, knowing the outcome. And this was drowning. This was drowning. His limbs slowed their movement.
“Tommy? Are you okay?” Ange’s voice had concern creeping back in as she banged on the bathroom door with her open palm.
“Tommy! I’m coming, I’m right here!” She sounded just like Mom.
Ange slammed her body into the door, forcing it open. Once she entered the room. Thomas could move and breathe again. He lurched forward and gripped the sides of the bathtub, his breaths ragged and broken, greedy for air.
“Jesus, Tommy. Are you all right?”
Ange took a step back as Thomas climbed out of the tub and unsteadily approached her. He knew it would be painful to touch someone, but he didn’t care. He hugged his sister, his wet naked body shamelessly exposed and pressed against her. Thomas clenched his jaw, preparing to keep Ange’s thoughts at bay.
There were none. Wait. None. His hands gripping too much fabric, Thomas opened his eyes. In the steam-streaked mirror, he saw himself hugging the woman, her trembling spines reaching for the ceiling.
You made it out, little brown mouse.
Thomas’s throat tightened in fear, his eyes pressed shut. He felt his nakedness now. His grip loosened, and he lurched back, sucking in too much air. Her face, always hidden before in shadow, was fully visible. It wasn’t terrible. Her face was serene and plain, round with large eyes and calm lips. The tub faucet was dripping.
“What do you want?” Thomas’s voice was a raspy whisper. Did he really want to know?
She smiled. Little brown mouse. You know me. Her voice was in his head, but it wasn’t a voice. It was his thoughts, but they weren’t his thoughts. His eyes grazed the towel rack, but the idea of being wrapped in a towel didn’t make him feel less exposed.
“Are you—?” She frowned, suddenly looking more human. Stop speaking. I’m here. Thomas swallowed, then closed his eyes.
Are you real? Is this real?
I’m real, little brown mouse. I have been waiting for you to see me.
Stop calling me that. My name is Tommy.
You don’t think you deserve that. I’m calling you what you call yourself.
I just want you to leave me alone.
You’ve been alone. That’s over. We have too much to do.
What do you want?
I want you to look at me. Little brown mouse, I know you think you’re alone, but we’re the same. We don’t have to be alone.
She took a step toward Thomas.
We aren’t alone. We are hundreds. I’ve been waiting for you to be open enough to talk with me. For some reason, you responded to fear, to the idea of dying. You were open to it, and it made you open to me.
Thomas wiped damp hair from his forehead. You aren’t here? Where are you?
I’m here. Just a here that’s to the side. We all live here. It’s a place we half-discovered, half-built. We’re preparing, learning, unlearning.
I don’t understand.
You think the life you’ve been leading is some kind of punishment for your mother’s death, but it’s not. You are here to help us change the future. I need you to come with me, but it’s dangerous if you don’t want to live. Where I’d take you is a lot like here, where our thoughts have power. Only there, because of your abilities, the power is much stronger.
A faint humming, and the lights flickered and dimmed in the bathroom. The woman reached out her hand.
For this to work, you have to be calm. I know you’re afraid. Everyone is afraid. But your fear will keep you from shifting to there from here.
Thomas clenched and opened his hands, trying to steady his breathing. This had to be a psychotic break, some insanity. If I come with you, will I come back?
We have to come back. You always leave something behind. This is the first step.
This moment felt like it was stretching back in time. Her hand wa
s reaching into the past, through the darkness of the early morning. It reached through the shattered window of the gold Cavalier, past Mom’s hair, caked with the same blood that was smeared across the windshield. It touched Thomas’s heaving shoulder, traveled down to loosen his grip on his mother’s limp right arm. He let go of Mom’s arm and his guilt unfurled. An intense light shone through the cracked windshield, past the jutting tree branch that had abruptly ended Thomas’s argument with his mother, broken the connection he’d somehow forced her to create when he grabbed her arm.
Thomas reached out and took the woman’s hand. Insanity. The water was still.
Get in.
I’m going to die, aren’t I?
I know you want to, but you have too much to do.
Thomas stared at her hard. Her face was expressionless: no lines, no movement. He wasn’t completely sure that he no longer wanted to die, but he felt ambivalent enough to see what would happen if he didn’t fight whatever came next. He stepped into the tub and allowed her hand to rest on his back as he lowered himself down. The water begin to boil, but it still felt cool. He wasn’t afraid. He wanted to reach the end of whatever this was, to look back from the other side. His hands pressed against the sides of the tub, and he waited. Suddenly she pulled him up and held his face in her hands.
“We’re here.”
Thomas was still in the bathroom, in the bathtub. In his home. The woman was wearing a long gray dress, her headdress gone, her hair short and curly, a shiny black.
“Nothing happened.”
The woman just smiled. “You’re here.”
“What are you talking about? This is my house. We didn’t go anywhere.” He looked down at her clothes, then up at her mouth. “You’re talking.”
“I wasn’t really there. I was here. I can use my voice here.”
Thomas stood up again and stepped out of the tub, which was now completely dry. The woman took a step back as he turned to face the bathroom mirror. He squinted at his face, leaning closer to examine something strange, a flash of ice blue cutting across his left eye, which was usually deep brown. Thomas turned his head from left to right, watching the sliver of blue vanish and reappear.
The woman smiled. “That’s one physical manifestation of your abilities.” Her voice was a rich, calm rasp. “You’ll see more as we work together.”
He looked down and saw simple, earth-toned shoes on his feet. He was dressed in a loose white shirt and gray pants. His body felt charged. Not tense and raw like before, but humming, tingling.
“What is the work? I still don’t understand.”
“The work is you. The reason you lived in so much pain is because you weren’t meant to survive. There were many of us who have been looking for you, hoping that you were somehow alive. This is hard to explain, but someone from the—from our future put you there, expecting you to die with your mother. I brought you here because you are one of only a few people who can help stop something from happening that eventually kills almost everyone that—”
“Wait,” Thomas cut her off. “This still sounds—I don’t even know. Can you just start with where we are? Where these clothes came from, where the water went, where my sister is?”
“One of your abilities is to travel between pockets of reality. We are in a universe that is on the periphery of dozens of worlds. Pretty soon you’ll be able to not only see into all those pockets, but step in and out of them.”
For several seconds, Thomas just stared at her. Her expression was patient, half-illuminated on the side facing the window. The light from the shuttered glass seemed bright. Not sunlight but too strong for the middle of the night, even if it was from street lights. The woman watched Thomas as he walked over and opened the blinds. There was his street. No cars, which was strange, but everything else was there. The big tree he read under, the McCray’s dented mailbox. Thomas looked up and gasped. There were five moons in the sky. He snapped the blinds shut and stared at the ground for several seconds with his back to her. Then slowly he turned to face her.
“Tell me what I’m meant to do.”
Sanford and Sun
Dawolu Jabari Anderson
Scene 1
Lamont and Rollo with their three visiting guests from out of town walk through the door.
Pause for audience applause.
LAMONT: Sistas, that was one baaaaad show!
ROLLO: Told you, Jack, three celestial bodies in perfect alignment with each other: the sun, the moon, and q star.
LAMONT: Right on!
Lamont and Rollo give each other congratulatory fives.
Mild laughter.
CHINA: Thank you, bruthas. Like we said before, “It’s our invitation for you to be of our space world.”
LAMONT: But dig, you all say you’re not professional dancers, but what you’re doing is just as good as any dance choreography I’ve ever seen.
ETHIOPIA: Thanks for the compliment, but think of it as kata in karate. They are choreographed movements, dance movements, but the actual application is for self-defense. Well, we’re stellar cartographers. My profession is astrobiology. China and Jette are stellar astrophysicists. The application of our fieldwork becomes choreographed configurations. So they are dance moves in the sense that kata employs a series of dance moves but more specifically they are ancient ceremonial movements charting the constellations or star chart rituals.
JETTE: These rituals unlock inner space chambers, unlocking us from conformity, so later for the stars and bars, dig? We salvage the stars as we liberate sistas and bruthas from their cultural bars.
Applause.
CHINA: Basically, it breaks you out of your House Negro training. [laughter]
ROLLO: Yeah, what if your audience is all white?
ETHIOPIA: Then we break’m out of their house Anglo training. [laughter]
ROLLO: Star chart rituals, that’s solid.
ETHIOPIA: Dig, brutha, you have to internalize the stars and planets. SPI stands for Stars and Planets Internal. Take that spi and place it at the beginning of ritual, ’cause everything we do is spiritual. The spiritual obtainment is through the performance of ritual. To perform a ritual is to internalize patterns and cycles of celestial bodies that unlock our inner space.
LAMONT: So why not do these rituals anytime? Why only do it to music?
ETHIOPIA: Our sun emits vibrations just as the other billions of stars do. We are a billion-year-old species made of stardust. If the sun’s composition is vibratory, then so are we. The sun rises in the east, so we face east.
LAMONT: That’s some heavy stuff. How ’bout we chart some constellations as I place some vibrations in rotation? [laughter]
JETTE: We call nights like this Saturn.
LAMONT: Saturn?
JETTE: Dig. It’s a Saturday night for the records to turn! [laughter]
LAMONT: Right on! Look here, this is not exactly the Taj Mahal when it comes to space but, Rollo, if you help me slide this couch over we can have a bit more “get down” space.
FRED, walking out the kitchen, eating crackers: Yeah, but it’s my Taj Mahal, and if any of my treasures end up in Rollo’s pocket, Ali Baba is going to find himself a thief short. [applause and laughter]
LAMONT: Awww, Pop, what are you doing here?
FRED: I got home early.
LAMONT: I can see that! I mean, I thought you were going to catch the late feature with Grady.
FRED: We did, son. It started off real good. The Wolfman Meets the Creature from the Black Lagoon [laughter]—it was supposed to be the scariest movie of the year, but I couldn’t make myself stay and finish it.
LAMONT: Don’t tell me it was too scary for Fright Film Fanatic Fred.
FRED: No, that’s just it, son. See, I’ve become immune to all kinds of fear after years of overexposure to your Aunt Esther’s radioactive face [laughter]—so we left early.
LAMONT: Look, Pop, we’re trying to get educated by some heavy sistas. You can’t go over to Grady’s place to watch
TV or something?
FRED: The picture on Grady’s TV roll too much.
LAMONT: What? You were just over there yesterday watching the baseball game.
FRED: Yeah, but the picture rolled so much, we couldn’t tell if Doc Ellis was trying to pitch the ball or bowl it. [laughter]
LAMONT: Ha ha. Very funny.
FRED: Look here, why don’t you introduce me to your lovely friends?
LAMONT, reluctantly: Sistas, this is my father. Pop this is China, Jette, and Ethiopia.
FRED: That’s Fred G. Sanford.
CHINA: It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Sanford.
ETHIOPIA: I detect some heavy wit in this house.
FRED: Oh, that’ll be the “wit” I had in the leftovers.
ETHIOPIA: Leftovers?
FRED: Yeah, salt bacon wit’ collards, oxtails wit’ mash potatoes, and fried okra wit’ hog snout. [laughter]
LAMONT, with a smirk: Pop.
FRED: I know, I know. I’m only kidding. It’s good to meet you, ladies.
LAMONT: Say, Pop, they’re here to perform with the jazz musician Sun Ra at the Watts Towers. China, Jette, and Ethiopia are all a part of his Arkestra.
FRED: Arkestra?
LAMONT: Yeah. Dig, Pop, an ark and an orchestra as one. Music that takes people high up to the outer reaches of new gardens.
FRED: I don’t think it’s the music that’s getting them high. It’s probably something growing in those new gardens. [laughter] Sun Raw might be Sun Rotten. [laughter]
JETTE: No, Mr. Sanford. It’s Sun Ra. It’s part of our heritage. Ra is the sun god in African Egyptian culture. Surely you know of the pyramids and the ancient Egyptian mummies.
FRED: All I know is the ghetto and the ancient Watts auntie named Aunt Esther. [laughter]
LAMONT: Would you stop it? Just stop it! You’re hopeless. You always have to go and make fun of things you don’t understand. You don’t know anything about African culture.
Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories From Social Justice Movements Page 15