One day Thomas thinks if he hadn't been born black maybe a good second choice would be French, then realizes what a stupid thought he's entertaining. Plenty of French people are blacker than he is, or so it seems anyway, so his choice of French not a choice of an alternate color, and since toying with the idea of changing who he is by erasing his color and trying on another color was the intent of his thought experiment in the first place, he's getting everything assbackwards, because French not a color and he's not a color. His thought no thought at all, just daydreaming, just remembering he loved Curtis Mayfield singing "If you had a choice of color, which one would you choose my brothers" but could never decide what the words meant.
We some mean animals, man, my brother said. Mean. Just plain mean. Don't know about women—my woman tells me women just as mean in their different way—but guys, I know guys is just plain mean. A guy needs somebody he can fuck wit. Look around here. Inmates punking inmates. And the guards got us to fuck wit. A few good guards but plenty go out their way to be evil and mean. Hard to believe sometimes. Like the way they teased Goines the day he was screaming and begging to go to clinic. Everybody knew Goines got AIDS. Everybody knew measles going around and Goines shoulda been taken out the population. Huh-uh. Measles got in his sores and they just let him rot in his cell. Laughed at him flopping around. Shit. All us got good days and bad days but how come guards make it their business to aggravate inmates. Answer is they mean. Answer is they miserable unless they hurting somebody. Ain't that the reason generals let soldiers tear up a town after they capture it. The reason some nothing dude with a nothing job and a nowhere life brings home the shit people dump on him all day and beats on his wife and kids. Little king. Lil motherfuckering tyrant at home so he can go on back to his job next day feeling like he's somebody. Way the whole world works, my brother. Here in the joint. Everywhere. Cause men deep down in they hearts and souls is mean. Mean. Like that evil, grinning president we got, man. Got the whole world under his thumb but his cowboy ass ain't satisfied unless he's fucking with somebody.
Mom,
I am entrusting this information to you, these stories some people might call an unauthorized version of your life because once upon a time you were entrusted with me and here I am today still alive and paddling around in the greater sea I passed into by passing through you, through a storm of beans and farts, passing through the sea within you that was also my island, as I am yours, Mom. You didn't choose me, no more than I chose you, but when I consider the possibility of you being other than you are, I understand I could not have chosen anyone not you, so in that sense of being fated, married to one another in a sense, I guess we're stuck with each other always for better or worse since that's the way it's been for as long as I can remember and is now, no other options possible, yet it's also true that the alternatives—what we could have been, the different people, maybe—are part of us too, the unborn children of ourselves, my lost brothers and sisters, your lost daughters and sons, my son in prison like yours, my son, your grandson I haven't mentioned till now, though every word present and the words unspeakable are addressed to him, to those others not chosen, not here because instead we chose what we did. Those different stories exist too, buried in the stories we remember and tell, unspoken parts, unseen parts like the shape of a room we're not aware we hold in our memory unless the lights go out suddenly and we have to negotiate the room in total darkness.
Last night in a Q and A following my reading from work-in-progress called Fanon, a young woman with cropped, very black hair, maybe twenty-five or thirty, definitely intense I could tell from her eyes, her posture, how she thrust up out of her seat, out of herself when she began to speak, reminding me, reminding herself that the person I saw, the place where I saw her sitting and she found herself, the body, the seat that seemed to contain her, would never be more than a thrust of her shoulders, a rearrangement of the weight of her ass from losing their hold on her. She could snap her chains with a question. Why do you write. Though I'd answered that question in public many times, in various settings, last night I said something I'd never said aloud. I write because I'm lonely. Exactly those words. No hesitation, not skipping a beat, almost as if I'd conspired with the young woman earlier and knew what was coming.
THOMAS DISPOSES OF THE HEAD
Whatever happened to the head—the next question asked the evening of my reading. A question Thomas had posed to himself countless times. A question I'd asked myself at least as often. And even if no one asks that question the night the black-haired, intense girl asks hers, I owe an answer. Owe it to myself. To any good soul who stays the course this far. My reader. My fan. Fellow traveler. I owe it. Because yes. This is a story intended to save a life, and people (including me) want to know what happens at the end.
One morning, on one of his walk/runs along the East River, Thomas recalled the ending of a story he'd written many years before whose title, "Damballah," he had bestowed on the collection of short stories in which it had been published. At the end of that story a slave boy on a plantation in the American South rescues the severed head of a murdered fellow slave, carries the head to a river, and tosses it in. A kind of burial. A kind of grim wish for more life. The ending had worked once. Reviewers had praised "Damballah" and the collection it named. Why not recycle a good thing. Thomas had invented the ending, the boy, the head. They belonged to him. Couldn't he do with them as he pleased. Off with the head.
No one paid any attention to the droopy black garbage bag, its twisted neck wrapped in his fist, along for the walk, along for the ride one morning beside the East River. Black plastic garbage bags a common sight on the riverwalk Thomas plied. Fishermen employed them. The homeless who slept beside the river stuffed their belongings in black plastic sacks they piled on shopping carts. Senegalese vendors on their way to fleece tourists in Battery Park rolled their bulging cardboard boxes on dollies and like black Santa Clauses toted black plastic sacks slung over their shoulders. Black garbage bags, some tied, some spilling their guts, are parked beside the metal trash cans they'd once lined, cans chained to a steel fence bordering a long straight stretch of the walkway at the foot of Chinatown where ancient, bony men and women exercise slow-motion at dawn, and later, on steel benches riveted into a concrete deck at the river's edge, just beyond the shadow cast by the noisy FDR parkway, people browse newspapers printed in Asian alphabets, copping sun when the sun's out. Too early for sun, for witnesses the morning he said Sayonara and watched his handful, head full of black bag splash into the water and sink without a trace. No halo of ripples spreading as far as Africa, no shivering crown like he'd imagined around the old African's head after the boy had heaved it as far as he could, farther than he'd guessed he'd be able, out into a lazy southern river, a river broad, as cloaked in mist at daybreak as the reach of Joseph Conrad's fabled Thames.
No problem. Splish-splash. The water always there, always running to the sea, to the ends of the earth. Always patient and available. For a head. A body of any size shape color gender. The river absolute. Indiscriminate. He smiles, wondering a second if such is really the case. What he'd just thought. That simple thought about a river. Didn't this river ebb and flow and change with the tide. Run two directions at once sometimes—upstream, downstream—between its twisting banks. Never the same river twice. Falling. Rising. No. Keep it simple. Heave-ho. Splash. That's what happened to the head.
Writing "Damballah" he'd found it easy to identify with the slave boy. Liked him. Likes him again now that he proves to be a useful fiction for disposing of the head. A kind of avuncular fondness for the young man/boy and for the story in which he'd discovered him. The last time Thomas read "Damballah" aloud it had sounded okay, maybe a bit better than okay, given the audience's respectful, attentive silence. A simple story. Old story. Father/son/ghost story. Playing to simple emotions and expectations of his readers. A boy performing a simple act of devotion. A slave boy believing he could help an old, dead African's spirit find its way back
home.
He envies the boy's belief in home. His youth. His credibility in general. Believing scary, funny stories told by other slaves on the plantation. Believing he'd caught a glimpse of freedom in the old man's strange ways and strange talk despite the fact that those ways and talk had gotten the man killed by white folks. Believing he could spy on the old fellow and learn how to escape from the chains of color, the drab, smothered lives the others around him endured. Believing an ancient African could catch fish by coaxing them from the river with song. He admires the boy's courage, how he steeled himself to toe the head gently away from a bloody mess murderers had made of the troublesome old slave's scrawny, naked body. The boy scooping the drippy head up in his shirt, fleeing from a barn thick with droning flies. Those were the good ole days. He'd been young and daring. Almost as naive, as innocent as the boy. Intoxicated by possibility, drunk on his talent like those fat, buzzing, blue-black flies drunk and surly on blood when the boy shooed them from the mutilated corpse.
Much easier back then to be sure of himself, easier to imagine it would never end. Easier in those days to fabricate endings and tack them wherever an ending seemed necessary or natural or expected or shapely or portentous. He handled that part of storytelling as he had believed he'd be able to handle whatever else came along in life. Deftly. No looking back. No second guessing. Charmed.
Ah, youth, Thomas sighs. Yours till you desire it and then it's gone. You know. Like you are who you are, Thomas, until you think you're not. So what. Let it go. Heave-ho. Splash. That's what happens to the head. An ending, if an ending's needed. As good as any other.
In Lyon pacing up and down the cage of his mind, like a lion in Lyon pacing up and back, he listens to her pounding nails into his book, pounding nails into his cross, his coffin. Fanon's voice rises and falls, louder, softer as he tells his wife his book, his thoughts flying almost, but since he doesn't possess the skill of typing, this dictation as close to flying as he can manage, his wings nailed to a noisy machine. He writes by speaking and trying to listen to himself think aloud, his voice—is it truly his voice he hears—propelled by various tides of confidence, presumption, sadness, anger, imitating other voices, or recalling them, conversing with them, challenging them, this voice he wants to save, that voice he needs to forget, or his voice solo, trying to hear itself weaving something from nothing in the air, his words now floating, now bouncing off the walls of the small apartment with almost a view of the Rhone River from one of its tiny windows, then his voice still, swallowed by the silence that comes before and after and during every word, or stopping because he reaches the peak of a promontory he's been struggling up for an hour and now on the summit, swaying, dizzy almost in the thin air, he surveys a white sea of snow-packed ridges and valleys spread out below him tame as a postcard, not daring to raise his eyes to the heights still to scale, catching a deep breath, gathering his strength, waiting for his legs to stop trembling, his eyes to unmist, content to absorb the wonder of a moment so high and precarious, the reward for an arduous journey, a multitude of doubts surmounted, his professors shamelessly airing their doubts in public, and worse, the unspoken private knot inside him, his color, his origins, a dark pinpoint of doubt, a single pebble which if kicked loose has the power to precipitate a rockslide, a pebble picking up speed and mass, tumbling into the abyss, his body tumbling after it, huge boulders splitting, splintering, explosions that hammer the stillness, blow after blow, her fingers on the typewriter shattering his complacencies, his spidery web of convictions and hunches, the typewriter clattering to keep pace, tumbling down after him as he flees the thunderbolt of each stroke, the nails, nails, nail after nail puncturing his skin, pinning him down, nailing down his words in black and white, white and black, sentences pounding one after another, her fingers chasing him, gaining on him while he sucks in a deep breath, his legs quivering from exhaustion, from the suppressed sprint in them as he resists the urge to escape, gallop, jump, fly, and instead pauses, paces the room in measured strides, cool in a crisp white shirt, dark tie, his style, his rhythm professorial, reserved, precise, counterpoint to the machine's sprawling, lunging, jackhammer yammering.
What rough message is she fashioning over there behind his back, sawing, chiseling, drilling, driving nails, that racket, that chaos, that cage erected bar by bar for his words. Whatever his mood, the speed of his thoughts, he must remember to pause regularly so she can catch up, let her join him in the silence. Silence. If he stops dictating once and for all, the book not completed just finished because he refuses to utter another word, will the machine die too. Or will he always hear it, awake or asleep, working on the book or not, hear the clacks and clicks, the bells and banging of it, the shattering, smacking shift of the carriage, a crash then slide that's also a knife honed on a whetstone, a blade sharp as a razor slices through your neck before you feel the cut, only hear the bump of the bloody head that's yours, hear it rolling unhinged across the floorboards, faster and faster, hurrying out of the apartment, out of Lyon on little chicken feet it's grown, high-stepping, splashing in blood from itself gushing everywhere.
Just talk your book to me Josie had offered. Trust me. Say your book aloud the way you talk it to yourself inside your head. I'm a good listener and you know I'm a very good typist. It might be fun to work together. Even though what you're writing can't be fun for you. Or me. I'm more than pleased to type your book, fun or not. Your book means so much. You mustn't say no. I'll stay quiet as a mouse. Pretend I'm your pen. Forget another person's in the room. Read from drafts or dictate your thoughts. Either way, any way you wish. I only want to help. I promise I won't miss a single word.
Do you know your mouth twists up sometimes when you're writing. As if you taste the bitterness of what you're thinking. I can almost hear your eyes moan. You're so close, yet so far away. I really believe I feel what you're thinking. Sometimes you look like a person struggling with a foreign language, as if you're watching a word being spoken, then you carefully work your lips, saying the word silently to yourself, getting it right before you're ready to try it aloud. I don't hear them, but I see words taking shape. If you speak your book to me, I'll learn to listen without listening. I'll be too busy typing to spy on you. I promise I won't disturb you or distract you. Probably couldn't if I tried. If I step one inch closer than I should, I'm sure your eyes will freeze me in my tracks, won't they, my love.
He stops. Arches his spine. Lets the weight slide from his shoulders, ripple down through his flexed buttocks. Relaxes the tension that had pumped him up on his toes, moulet de coq trotting back and forth across the apartment's ancient floorboards. He envisions himself as he must have appeared to her just moments before, hears again the words he was speaking and they close over his head like the sea undeceiving a drowning swimmer. He must have sounded ridiculous. Full of assurance and pleased with himself. His muscles remember how they'd performed the classic puffed-up rooster strut of island men, men who practice swelling and preening, pleasing themselves when no one else is around to please, admiring themselves if no one available to admire them.
Remembers and continues anyway: This new section will be titled "Colonial War and Mental Disorder." We have brought together certain cases or groups of cases in which the event giving rise to the illness is in the first place the atmosphere of total war which reigns . . .the bloodthirsty and pitiless atmosphere, the generalization of inhuman practices, and the firm impression that people have of being caught up in a veritable Apocalypse.
Case Number Five: European police inspector and torturer—thirty years old—married—three children—came to clinic on his own accord—stated that for several weeks "things weren't working out"—loss of appetite—insomnia—nightmares—smokes three packs a day—what bothers him most are fits of madness. [I quote the patient] As soon as someone goes against me I want to hit him. Even outside my job. I feel I want to settle the fellows who get in my way, even for nothing at all. Look here, for example, suppose I go to the kiosk to buy
the papers. There's a lot of people. Of course you have to wait. The chap who keeps the kiosk is a pal of mine. I hold out my hand to take my papers. Someone in the line gives me a challenging look and says "Wait your turn." Well, I want to beat him up and say to myself, "If I had you for a few hours my fine friend you wouldn't look so clever afterwards" [end quote].
The particular incident that precipitated the patient's visit to the clinic happened in his home. He dislikes noise. His children were squabbling and he started hitting them. His wife screamed at him and tried to separate him from the children. He recalls saying to himself, "I'll teach her once and for all that I'm master in this house." He tied her to a chair and began to beat her. Fortunately, the children's wailing and tugging brought him to his senses. He realized the madness of what he'd done and the next day decided to consult a nerve specialist.
Stop a moment, Fanon says. "Nerve specialist" is the patient's way of saying psychiatrist. Be certain the text distinguishes the patient's voice from mine. When I quote him I'm reading from notes transcribed during interviews. I'm quite scrupulous about the accuracy of my transcriptions so that consulting physicians have access to a reliable record. In this book I want readers to hear precisely the language with which a patient describes his or her situation. Perhaps you could insert an extra space to separate blocks of text when one voice gives way to another. Perhaps the patient's voice typed single-spaced to contrast with the normally double-spaced format of the narrative. Underscoring or brackets or quotation marks perhaps around short phrases of the patient's I include in my summaries of their cases. The business about "master of this house..."etc., for instance, or "nerve specialist." I don't want to fall into the trap of treating my patients as the beke treat me. Never letting me speak for myself. Or turning my words into evidence against me. The proper representation of these cases is immensely complicated. Perhaps hopelessly compromised by any form of writing. I suppose in some sense I'm always speaking for my patients. Though, in fairness to myself, I often feel the patients speak for me. Not only do I quote them at considerable length. I also find myself splicing into my accounts their exact words or words not exactly theirs not mine either, words I try to imagine the patient might employ in a particular situation. An odd, secondhand, alienated structure's being formed as we proceed in these book sessions. A process that controls me as much as I control it. A sort of bricolage of free-floating fragments whose authorship is unsettlingly ambiguous. Two men or perhaps several attempting to go about their business, each with a leg in the same pair of baggy trousers.
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