She reaches for the light switch, flicks it on.
“Jimmy? Jimmy?” No response. Around him on the floor are shiny blue shards of a broken pottery lamp.
God! What is it that you do for seizures again? A heavy, carved walking stick standing against the wall catches her eye, and she grabs it, resting it on the ground so it won’t fall and hit him. He is biting his tongue, but she knows she shouldn’t do anything about that. As she is pushing the broken pieces of the vase away from his body, she sees pills on the floor and an open vial with a few tablets inside — Diazepam, according to the label. Container in hand, she surveys the room for something to put under his head as a pillow. She puts down the pills and is bunching up the bedspread when she notices that though he is still sweating, the spasms have slowed, so she waits. When the jangling abates and his eyes are back in place, she asks, “Can you hear me?” He nods. She offers her hand, but he hangs on to one of the bedposts and with effort pulls himself to his feet.
“For sure, this is awful. Upsetting for you. I’m fine. Please go back to your room. Thank you so much for your help.”
“How’s your tongue?” She watches as one hand starts to go to his mouth, at the same time as the other begins slipping from the bedpost, as if in slow motion. Then the first one falls to join the second as his face and limbs begin to go slack and crumple.
“Do you need the Diazepam?”
He nods, clutches at the bedpost again, fighting to stay upright, groping his way onto the bed. She takes a pill from the box.
“Water?”
He gestures towards a small glass beside a statue of the Virgin on his bedside table. She wonders if it is holy water, but gives it to him anyway, along with the pill. He swallows it, but too late. His body stiffens as he slides into semi-consciousness again. At least he is on the bed. She doesn’t know what to do. If she leaves him to get help, something worse might happen with no one there. She has CPR training and she’s seen fits before, so she decides to stay.
The colour has leaked out of his skin so that it is the dirty grey-brown of St. Chris river water after heavy rain. This time he lies entirely still. It occurs to her that rousing him might help.
“What can I do, Jimmy? Can I get you anything?”
His pupils swivel and he looks at her goat-eyed, so she wonders if he does indeed see her. Then he is patting the bed for her to sit. She hesitates, but the gesture is insistent, so she eases herself onto the opposite corner near the bed head, all the time looking at him. He pushes himself up, resting against the plain metal headboard and faces her.
“I killed her.” It is barely a whisper, so she has to bend to hear.
“Killed who?”
“I killed Nila.”
“Who’s Nila? Besides, that’s absurd. You couldn’t harm a flea.”
“You want to split hairs? I can do that. I’m a Jesuit. Remember.”
“That isn’t funny.”
“Indeed, it’s not.”
“Like I said, Jimmy, you couldn’t … ”
“Very well. I caused her death. Her name was Nila. She was my wife.”
Another time she may have been surprised, but not now. “I don’t believe that either.”
“You mean that I was married? Lying isn’t one of my sins.”
“I’ve no reason to doubt that you were married. I meant that you caused her death. Didn’t you love her?”
“Very much.”
“Well, it doesn’t make sense. If you loved her, why cause her death?”
“A sin of omission. Not what I did; what I didn’t do.”
“What didn’t you do?” Persistent cokee noises all around in the dark remind her of the tiny tree frogs that used to comfort her in Wentley when she woke from a bad dream.
“You know Descartes, Grace?”
She nods. What has he to do with anything?
“He’s supposed to have made this body/mind dichotomy, echoing the ancients’ flesh and spirit division. These days the fashion is, ‘Forget this mind nonsense. There is only the body, the tangible material thing.’ I’ve always wondered if they never heard of Huxley, hallucinogens, LSD, even good weed.”
She reminds herself that he has just been through something harrowing at the same time as she marvels at this Catholic priest who sounds so accepting of mood-enhancing drugs, psychedelics, marijuana.
“The idea that space-time is a continuum and black holes can double back time on itself is sound science, as any Trekkie can tell you.” He is talking quickly, flecks of spit banking up at his mouth corners. “But any other predicting is suspect. If you’re a scientist forward-seeing from your vantage point on a wormhole and you foresee what I foresee, your foresight is valid but mine isn’t.”
He’s overwrought. Suppose he lapses again? She is unsure about what to do, decides she can’t leave him. “Can’t I get you something?” she interrupts, distracting him.
“It’s all propaganda,” he goes on, ignoring her. “Trouble is, while some people are peddling religion, science, philosophy, and so on, our African Everywoman is having sex with a man whose AIDS-infected penis is going about its traditional, historical, as-by-divine-right man business.” He is gesticulating, his voice rising. She must get him back to talking about his wife.
“We were talking about Nila.”
“We are talking about Nila, about how she died. We’re discussing the fine phenomenon you just witnessed.”
“What exactly is it, Jimmy?”
“I fall into some kind of trance —”
“Seizures aren’t so unusual.”
“It’s not just seizures. Everyone else falls down. Me, I fall down and prophesy.”
She allows a respectful time for that to settle, and then offers, “In our part of the world, seeing the future isn’t so strange, though Ma and Pa didn’t like us fooling with horoscopes, tea leaf reading, and the like.”
“I’m not talking about astral charts and palmistry, Grace. I wish I were. I’ve read all about clairvoyance, sweated on my knees, fasted for days. It’s real. It can run in families. God knows, I do foresee things! I wish I didn’t, but I do.”
“So what has that to do with Nila’s death?”
“The night we were married I went into a trance, before we had sex, before the union was consummated. I could have called it quits and packed her off back to her parents. I didn’t. Even after we’d sealed the deal, in the terms of Holy Church, I could have stopped her when she insisted we go to the Alps. I could have said, ‘Not there. Bad things will happen if we go there.’ ”
“You saw that Nila was going to die, but you didn’t stop it?”
“It would have been easy. This is Africa. I’m her husband. I could have said no, absolutely not, and that would have been that.”
“You may have done that and she might have died anyway, somewhere else, in another way.”
“I’ve told myself that. I’ve told myself many things: that the clairvoyance had happened only once before; that prescience isn’t real, I was imagining things. But I knew I wasn’t. We made love, went to Switzerland on our honeymoon, and she died.”
“What happened?”
He shuts his eyes, presses his fingers against his temples, utters each phrase like an old-fashioned Teletype machine, slowly clacking out data. “We were in Montreux, standing on a hillside, looking down at Lake Geneva. A small avalanche erupted, jumped her from behind, like a giant, leaning down, flicking snow right at her, with his finger. It rolled her down the slope. They rescued her in no time. But she was dead.”
“And you had foreseen that?”
“Clearly.”
“I still don’t think you can blame yourself.”
“I’m long past blame.”
“Oh? What then?”
“I’ve grieved for her every day since she died. I’ve forgiven myself to no avail. I haven’t worked out why I didn’t prevent it. When I contemplate it all, my thoughts end up in bad places.”
“In that case, don�
��t think about it.”
“I have to. For one thing, never mind Diazepam, the seizures haven’t stopped, as you can see.”
“You just now saw stuff that’s going to happen?”
“I just now saw stuff.” He is mimicking her, but he is shaken.
“So what do you do when it happens?”
“When I was a novice, I had an awful premonition during the Ignatian retreat. I reported it to John Kelly, my retreat master, and the novice master, Erasmus Azikiwe. They eventually organized me, sent me to Rome. I saw neurologists, psychologists, psychiatrists. In the end, they arrived at a protocol.”
“What protocol?” Protocols she understands. Maybe she can help.
“I take the pills if I can get to them fast enough. I meditate if I discern up ahead that it’s coming on. I’m supposed to consult my spiritual advisor and my superior, if it happens. And my shrink.”
“Does the protocol work?”
“Well, the pills and meditation haven’t done badly with short-circuiting the clairvoyance. They’ve worked up to now.”
“Can I ask what you saw just now?”
“You can, but I wouldn’t do that to you.”
“Is it always about death?”
“Yes.”
“And the dying is always bad? Death doesn’t have to be, after all.”
“It’s awful every time, in itself, and because I feel trapped, out of control. I can do nothing about what’s going to happen. This one was monstrous.”
“Why?”
“Not just one, but thousands of people, slaughtered, mutilated.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
They sit in silence for a while.
“Here’s the thing. I’m the only son in my family. My father is not without resources. I’m educated, travelled, well read, ostensibly cultured, some would say handsome. I’ve no excuse for being anything other than a well-adjusted fellow with no reason to harm anybody. I didn’t want Nila to die. I loved her. But when it came to choosing, I didn’t choose for her good or even mine.”
“Maybe the Devil made you do it.” It is superficial, trite. She is angry at having said it, for she believes him, wants him to know she isn’t taking his story lightly.
“You’re right,” he says, wryly, sadly. “They say he’s in the details.”
“I’ve seen him there often enough.”
“Me too. At any rate, I’ve figured things out this far. It’s about courage, which we have in different doses, and faith, which we also have in varying amounts. But mostly it’s about ‘man and man,’ as you Christophians say, a concern for others embedded in us, a sense of community, if you want, which is why I’m glad the protocol involves others.”
“That’s good progress, don’t you think?”
“Maybe, but that’s not the details, that’s the very general picture. And we both agree on where the Devil is.”
She knows where the Devil is all right. She hears Charlie’s flip-flops slapping along the dry, impacted earth as he walks away for the last time. Who took his life? Then Charlie is there, saying, “Tell him! Tell him you know about death taking someone you love!” But she shoves him back into his Charliebox, telling herself it is the priest’s troubles that need attention.
“Can I do anything now?”
“What I want most from you, Grace, you’re in no position to give me. Which is just as well.” She takes a while to grasp what he means and doesn’t entirely till he reaches across and pats her stomach. “If there wasn’t a baby in your belly, I’d make love to you with every ounce of strength in my body, long and hard.”
She is mortally ashamed afterwards and begs Charlie, beloved of men, and the child inside her, to forgive her, but she wishes the baby out of her womb right that very minute. She is sure that Jimmy’s arms around her, his mouth on hers, their tongues rolled up into one sweetie ball, his penis stroking her insides, will banish all evil, renew every shrivelled thing, heal the sick, raise the dead, and create enough heat and energy to light his MATE Centre for years. Then she recalls that not six weeks before she was twined around another man, sucking his mouth, behaving like the nasty girls who wait behind Wentley Park Elementary School until games are over, so they can hitch up with sweaty, force-ripe boys, and do it in the cane fields, quick and careless.
43
An Occasion of Sin?
Grace leaves for Geneva two weeks after she arrives. Monique and Ousmain drive her to the airport, where she collects the jacket they’ve been holding for her at the ticket counter. She and Jimmy decide that it is best. She can go to Benke for tests, and the care at MATE is excellent, but she won’t be able to do what she’s come for, and she’ll be an extra responsibility.
Jimmy said that if she wasn’t pregnant, he would make love to her, and he meant it, at that time and moment, although having said it, he knew he wouldn’t do it. But he doesn’t have to take it back, doesn’t want to, because it was true, right then. He isn’t in love with her and he hasn’t known her long enough to love her, except as he loves all of humankind. He is confident the impulse that prompted his wish to be inside her has nothing to do with wanton desire, about which J.J. and he spoke. He wanted to empty everything inside of him into her body in a kind of purgation. What is desperate to come out is a force, a rage, a ferocious resentment at being his own prisoner.
Mapome warned him. “James, they can take everything else from you, but you will always have words to tell your stories.” Except he isn’t looking for words. He wants to get past them, past thought, to where he can fix the thing that possesses him the way a lepidopterist pins an insect, so he can see it for what it is. But he can’t get far enough away to trap it. It traps him, so he has to expel it. He doesn’t fail to notice that the place where he wants to dump his wretchedness is a woman’s body.
He sees Nila, wild, nappy-headed Nila whom the snow ate with his baby in her. He imagines the three of them searching for njamra in the stream by the farmhouse in Oubisi. On their wedding night, Nila didn’t stop nagging until he told her what happened. She’d told him how his body stiffened and battered the bed, how his eyes rolled over, how he bit first his tongue and then her finger till both bled. She’d been afraid he might never return from his mummified condition, bound in sheets like Lazarus.
And now here is Grace. He knows about her work, but not much about her as a person. In some ways she appears distant, dispassionate. But for sure she is worried about the baby, and she’s been open, vulnerable about it, and when she saw him at his worst, she didn’t run. If she’d gone for someone, it would have opened a huge can of worms. He asked her.
“Why did you stay? You could’ve left me, fetched Ousmain or Monique.”
“I wondered if I should do that. But I’d seen seizures before. I decided, all things considered, I ought to stay.”
He said he’d always be grateful. She said she was glad she stayed and then asked if she could do anything for him. And he told her. Why did he, happy in his calling, find himself wanting her then? “Wanting blooms, like a yawn,” J.J. said, He’d wanted her as naturally as that.
For sure it can be argued that he should shun Grace as a likely occasion of sin. For sure he’ll have to keep working with her if the project in the Sahel gets off the ground. For sure he’ll pray about it. But he won’t ask to be sent off anywhere. He lost a woman with a baby in her belly, and now he has one back. And he knows this child is his as surely as if he put it there.
MARK
44
Waiting
Vodka and passion fruit juice is Mark’s end-of-day drink. He lies back on the bed having watched the first few minutes of the seven o’clock news, from which he has learned nothing new. No progress in finding Edwin Langdon’s murderer. Disturbances continue in several coastal towns, and there is now unrest in Halcyon and Stanton, the two largest tourist centres. Extra detachments of police have been dispatched to both places. Speculation is rife about a state of emergency being declare
d in the next twenty-four hours.
Towards the end, a reporter addresses a question about HIV/AIDS in the Caribbean to a Grace Carpenter departing the day before, at which point Mark switches to a program about the migratory habits of whales. The sight of her, skin aglow and hair aflame, burns. Cetacea are easier on the soul.
What had transpired between them had happened five years before. He’d written and then waited and waited to hear from her. He’d left his home number with his personal assistant, to be given to her if she called — something he’d never done before, for, ironically, Mona and he had agreed to keep a distance between work and life.
It upset him when he had no response to the postcard, the one that told her thanks for the advice concerning prowling about. He’d sent it to her at WHO and put it into the postbox himself; he knew the day and time. And then he’d written the first letter, and then the next, both of which he was confident Mona had mailed. At that point, he discovered where she was. Newspapers in D.C. had been running features about impending baseline studies that were to be part of an initiative to retard the spread of HIV/AIDS in Sahelian Africa. One of the articles profiled a controversial Jesuit priest from Mabuli named James Atule. He knows about Mabuli, although he’s never visited. It’s a small, landlocked country, Mali to the west, Burkina Faso to the east, sharing a short border with Côte d’Ivoire in the south.
Once he’d read the Post profile and seen that WHO was setting up something in West Africa, he’d guessed. Thereupon he’d experienced some inner turmoil. He applauds himself for admitting that his reaction was sourness at being rejected and pique at things not going his way. Apart from whatever could be included under the large heading, “Grace,” he is not sure what he wants. At the beginning he’d been glad that, since she had her own life, no untidy repercussions were likely after their couplings in Cambridge. At the airport that ground had shifted, how radically he hadn’t known till he’d written the first letter. By the time he’d written the second one, he’d passed through suspecting, then admitting that he wanted her to be, like some nineteenth-century New Orleans placée woman, not just his, but lodged in close proximity for anything that might strike his fancy, never mind his lawful wife.
Red Jacket Page 27