We are going down West Main, headed toward the highway, and I’m wondering where Vasco da Gama is taking me when his phone starts to ring. He fishes it out of his shirt pocket, glances at the screen, and hands it to me, which means it’s Aunt Fostalina on the phone.
You have to go to Shadybrook right away, she says.
We’re on the road, I don’t know where Vasco da Gama is headed, I say in my language so he doesn’t understand.
Well, tell him to turn around.
But—
Darling, just put him on the phone, she says, and I know from the sound of her voice that it’s serious. I do, and when Vasco da Gama makes a right at the light before the Walgreens, I suck the insides of my mouth, look out the window, and smile because I’ve been saved from another crazy trip.
At Shadybrook, Tshaka Zulu meets us at the door like he is the one who called us here; he steps out, pushes Uncle Kojo aside, hands me a real spear, and says, Be armed, warrior, those white vultures, wretched beaks dripping with blood, must not be allowed to settle on this black land. There is anxiety in his voice. Not knowing what to do or say, I just look at the spear in my hand, then at Uncle Kojo, and smile.
What did he say? What is he actually saying? Uncle Kojo asks, and I start translating Tshaka Zulu’s words inside my head but it’s hard to concentrate because now he is tilting his face toward the sky and uttering this terrible cry that is like nothing I have heard before; long after he has closed his mouth, the air is still ringing. In addition to wearing his dress, Tshaka Zulu has painted his body a bright red color, and his head is all red and black and white feathers. Today, he is awesome—even I have to agree that he looks like something else, which is maybe why I am also feeling this strange stirring inside me, this thing without a name that makes me want to clap my hands and jump and shout and just get crazy with it like I have swallowed electricity.
Where is it, the rest of my impi? We must do a cow horn right now, hurry, Tshaka Zulu says, looking this way and that.
This man is crazy. What is he saying? Uncle Kojo says, standing there like he doesn’t know what to do.
The impi? I say. I am not smiling anymore because I am realizing that I have never seen Tshaka Zulu like this. There is a strange look in his eyes, like they are not eyes but maybe a pit and something fierce is raging inside. I don’t need anyone to tell me that this is proper craziness. He has been getting worse lately—last week, for instance, he walked out of the nursing home when no one was looking and somehow convinced a stranger to take him to the airport. There, he demanded a jet to fly him to Buckingham Palace so he could go and talk to the queen about the things she owes him.
I look at the door and wonder where Claudine is, why she is not trying to do anything.
Tshaka Zulu turns and points in the distance, sweeping the air with his spear. Then I’m aware of the one I’m carrying. It’s slightly heavy, the wood is old, the metal part a little rusty; where did he even get these things?
You see? You see what I’m seeing? he says, turning to look at me.
Yes, I see them, I say, but really all that’s there are houses and trees and mailboxes and cars.
What are you talking about? Uncle Kojo says. He is ringing the bell now and banging the door and peering through the window. I nod vigorously, following where Tshaka Zulu is pointing. At the end of the street, three kids ride their bikes.
Are you seeing them as I am seeing them? What are you seeing? Tshaka Zulu says.
What is happening with this man? And why is that woman in there not doing anything? Uncle Kojo says. You can tell from his voice he is getting frustrated but I’m too worried to answer him so he just looks like another crazy talking to himself.
I said, what do you see, warrior? Tshaka Zulu says.
Vultures, I say with this slight quiver in my voice. I don’t even know what I’m talking about.
If we ever let them settle, then the whole motherland will fall, and we will be ruled by strangers. We will be forced to speak tongues from white lands, worship their wretched gods. They will enslave us on our own soil; we will be their dogs. But no, he says, and here he pauses and laughs. It is a big, big laugh, like it will swallow the sky.
I say no, by my father’s black cow, today it will be death or victory.
When Tshaka Zulu says death or victory, my heart skips. It is the way he says it, says it through gritted teeth like he is hurting, the tendons at the sides of his neck popping. According to him, the white vultures are hovering close; some, he says, are on horseback, and some are crouching in bushes with their evil sticks that spit fire. His language is deepening now and I’m having a hard time understanding everything; it’s like listening to a skipping record.
When he starts down the driveway, I follow at a distance, Uncle Kojo behind me. He is saying things but I’m not listening. Tshaka Zulu is rushing, his animal-skin skirt swooshing, the colorful feathers on his head dancing. Then he breaks into a run, and I notice, with horror, that he is running toward this pizza guy who has just parked at the neighbor’s house and is getting out of his car, a pizza in hand. I’m already seeing a spear ripping the guy’s guts, blood all over. I drop my own spear and look at Uncle Kojo, who is yelling and flailing his arms. The pizza guy looks up just as the sound of sirens fills the air. I don’t know who called the police, or when.
The pizza guy stands frozen for a second, then maybe something clicks in him and he quickly gets in the car and fumbles around. Tshaka Zulu’s spear sails in the air, but it doesn’t go far before falling on the pavement. By the time he bends to pick it up, the police cars have descended. Doors open and bang and I’m seeing guns all over, which is why I turn around and sprint back past Uncle Kojo toward the nursing home, where a face is looking out the window. Behind me I’m hearing: Drop your weapon! Stop! Get on the ground! Show your hands! Drop your weapon. Drop your weapon! Drop your weapon! And I know that Tshaka Zulu will not drop his weapon. When I look over my shoulder, he is lunging skyward like some crazy plane trying to take off.
Writing on the Wall
The night I mess up the wallpaper in my room, I am supposed to be studying wounds for my bio test. I don’t really care a thing about the material I’m reading, or even about bio itself, and besides, I think wounds are just disgusting. Flipping through pages and pages of sickening pics, I feel my heart lurch. I know wounds are not flowers, but this is just too much. When I get to a discolored open mass oozing pus and blood on the side of this girl’s face, I am done. I shut the book, slide it under the bed, and hear it connect with the wall.
I know already that this sciences thing that Aunt Fostalina is pushing me to focus on is just not for me. Now that I’m almost finished with high school, her thing is to go on and on about how I have to get into medicine or some kind of nursing or whatnot when I start college next year, or if that fails, at least do law. These, she says, are the careers that count, and I didn’t come all the way to America to do meaningless stuff and be nothing. What I know, though, is that none of it sounds inspiring to me; I mean, I haven’t figured out exactly what I want to get into, but I have zero passion for what Aunt Fostalina wants me to do.
I am sitting on my bed and staring at the wall, just thinking about how I will begin to tell Aunt Fostalina this, when my new BlackBerry starts to vibrate. I find it under the covers, flip it open, and read Marina’s text.
wt u doin?
nuthin. trynna study stupid bio, I text.
lol, y is it stupid? i kinda lykit, she texts.
thts coz u wanna be a doc. nt feelin it, I text.
wl u know my dad wants me to. n-e- ways, wt u gonn do? she texts.
dunno, I text. Marina doesn’t respond for a while, and I’m not surprised. Ever since she moved to her fancy high school, we don’t communicate like we used to. When she finally responds, I have taken a red marker and written iBio iyirabishi on the wall above my clothes hamper, and I’m drawing a circle around it. I pause to look at the vibrating phone, finish the circle,
then pick it up.
sowwy, Kyle. hd 2 talk 2 him 4 a min, the text reads.
k, I text. On the wall, my letters are large, like how I used to write in grade one. The red looks like blood, and I realize, for the first time, that it will be hard to clean off.
I put on slippers and leave my room. The kitchen is bright from the streetlamps so I don’t bother to turn on the lights. I get a sponge, squeeze a drop of dish soap on it, add a little water. On my way back I hit the side of my pelvic bone against the edge of the kitchen table. I double over in the half dark and quietly cuss. After the pain passes, I proceed to my room.
When I’m done cleaning the wall, it looks worse than before. The red has bled all over, leaving an ugly stain, and the letters have refused to fade. Once, when we hit Budapest, we took with us a bag of black markers we had gotten from the NGO people and we went crazy on the Durawalls. We drew penises, big penises, rows and rows of them, since we didn’t know what vaginas looked like, then we complemented the penises with words like golo, beche, mboro, mhata, svira, ntshompi, bolo, zeka, and every other obscenity we could think of. I guess they tried to clean the mess later, but it wouldn’t come off. There were stains on the walls for days until they painted them over.
When I look at my phone again, Marina has sent another text.
umn, so we did it last night, the text reads.
OMG! I text. Before she responds, I add, did it hurt?
thr ws no blood, she texts.
thn u didn’t (rme), I text. When we gave up watching flicks, because Aunt Fostalina found us at it one day and whupped me and Marina, sparing Kristal because she said she didn’t want to get into trouble since Americans call whupping child abuse, we made a bet to see who would do it first. Kristal is now pregnant, so the bet to see who will be next is between Marina and myself. I reach for the Juicy Fruit gum pack on the nightstand, take two pieces, peel the wrappers. I pop the gum in my mouth and chew slowly, the sweet taste exploding on my tongue.
u weren’t thr, Marina texts.
wtevr. guess wht? I text.
wht? she texts.
i made up w. Tony, I text.
wht? she texts.
out. made out w. Tony, I text.
OMG! she texts, and before I respond, she adds, whr? hw ws it? wait, he’s not gay? I hear voices talking outside my window; it sounds like the people are standing there, so I turn off the light, part the curtain, and look outside. In the dark, I can see the clustered silhouettes near the big tree by the road. My window is pulled up so I can hear the voices, but after listening for a bit, I realize they are talking in a foreign language. I don’t recognize it, maybe a European language or something. I stand there for a while, my face pressing against the screen. When I turn the lights back on and look at the phone Marina has texted, ?????
lol, no. @chick, on wed., I text. On Wednesday, I arranged with Amma to come and pick me up. Aunt Fostalina was working nights. Amma rang the bell and I met her at the door with my book bag in one hand, a big bottle of water in my other. When Uncle Kojo looked at us with bloodshot eyes, because he was already halfway through his bottle of Jack Daniel’s, I said, We’re going to study for a test tomorrow, even though Uncle Kojo’s drunken eyes said You are actually not going anywhere decent dressed like that.
Amma and I were on the dance floor at Chick when Tony and this other dude with dreadlocks came to join us. Amma was busy dancing, because that’s who she is; me, I was just standing around because I think R & B and hip-hop are kaka. Most of it doesn’t make sense; I mean, it’s all about insults—fuck this, bitch this, pussy this, whores that. But when the boys started grinding against us I began swaying to the music so I wasn’t just standing there looking stupid. Tony’s body was pressed tight behind mine like it would take a saw to separate us, his hands up and down my sides, groping my stomach. He was breathing hot air on my neck and I could feel his hard thing on my butt.
I remember the music changing to dancehall, which also has insults but at least its beat is danceable. Once, we had to stop dancing so we could watch this girl with a big weave standing on her head, her legs spread in the air, her yellow skimpy skirt bundled around her butt, white panties showing. Then this skinny boy with green hair just pounced on the girl like they were in a fight or something and grabbed her by the ankles, spread her legs even farther apart like he wanted to split her in half, started gyrating against her before flipping her around so she was bent over, after which he continuously slammed and pounded and just smashed into her like she was a piece of meat.
It was all weird, but everyone just went wild with cheers. I guess it was supposed to be this crazy new dance, daggering is the name of it. I thought it strange and wrong, but after a while I found myself clapping because that’s what everyone was doing. When a new, quieter song came on, Tony turned me around and started kissing me out of nowhere but I thought maybe that’s how it went. I was surprised by how it felt, his cold, awkward tongue like a slab of flesh in my mouth.
so hw ws it lyk? Marina texts.
dunno, cool, I text. I can picture her rolling her large eyes, her round face impatient for details. I toss the phone on the bed, pick up the marker, and start drawing dangling tongues on the wall, and before I know it, the tongues are turning into snakes—short snakes, long snakes, two-headed snakes. The phone vibrates, but I don’t pick it up. When I’d gotten home that night, I went straight to the bathroom, took a brand-new toothbrush from under the sink, squeezed the biggest glob of toothpaste on it, and brushed with hot water and scraped my tongue before getting into the shower.
When I hear the main door opening downstairs I can tell, by how long it takes to close and by how hard it slams, that it’s Vasco da Gama coming back from his travels. I picture him taking measured steps like he is jumping the border, almost tripping on the rows of shoes occupying half of the walkway before plopping on the large couch opposite the TV. I picture him tilting his head to the left and holding still, so still it’s almost as if he is listening to God speak, and then, like one waking up from a brief sleep, jolting to life and reaching out for the remote on the glass coffee table in front of him. I picture him pressing buttons with his large, clumsy fingers, pressing and pressing, leaning forward now, fingers moving faster because he must find a war channel in case he is able to pick out his son from among the other American boys dressed like soldiers.
What is happening is that Vasco da Gama is getting worse. Now his travels are actually out of hand; each time, he goes farther and farther, like maybe he is practicing for driving to Afghanistan to get TK. At first he would stay away for hours, then it was one night, then it was a couple. He would return looking unkempt and fierce, like he’d been to war, murdered bugs and insects caking the hood of his car, the windshield, the grille, and the license plate. Aunt Fostalina, who is always busy with her jobs, isn’t really doing anything about Vasco da Gama’s issue. Maybe she hopes he will get tired of traveling; maybe she thinks it’s the only thing that keeps him going; maybe she doesn’t want to deal with it or just doesn’t know what to do.
But that’s not all: the beer and liquor bottles have begun to show up like they’re produced by a magician. At first they were hidden under the car seat, in the trunk, under the kitchen sink, in the basement, just random places like that. Since I was always home if I wasn’t at school or work, I would gather the bottles and throw them away because I knew it wouldn’t be a good thing if Aunt Fostalina found them. In the end she did; you can’t hide a thing like that forever. She was cleaning the basement one weekend and discovered the stashes and stashes of bottles. They talked about it but then it kept going on. That meant her and Uncle Kojo were done; now they are just living together, like neighboring countries.
Last week, I came home and caught Aunt Fostalina with Eliot. At first I had no idea he was in the house; I came in, made a sandwich, parked on the couch, and started texting Kristal when Eliot just appeared in the living room wearing these white boxers with red kisses, hairy stomach
spilling all over the place, his thing sticking out against his boxers. He took me by surprise and I screamed. A little while later, Aunt Fostalina rushed in to see what was happening, wrapped in her favorite wrap cloth, the one with the little fading flags of our country.
Downstairs, I stand at the entrance of the living room and peek inside. Uncle Kojo sits in half darkness; the living room is lit by the TV, where exhausted-looking soldiers are walking through clouds of smoke, a couple of bombed-out cars burning behind them. It’s afternoon on the TV, but the smoke is painting the day and making it look like night. There is just too much smoke. I think I’m beginning to smell it, beginning to see it seeping through the screen into our living room, covering Uncle Kojo. I leave him like that and go to the kitchen to microwave food for him because otherwise he will forget to eat.
When I get back I clear the bottles of gin from the table, replace them with Uncle Kojo’s jollof rice and curry. He is leaning back on the couch now, his eyes closed; I don’t know if he is sleeping or thinking or what. I watch his face for a while, then without knowing why I do it, I grab one of the gin bottles, take a sip. It’s nasty and it burns; I swallow it only because there is nowhere to spit. It has started to rain on the TV, and a lone soldier is standing under a tree, smoking. I kneel at Uncle Kojo’s feet, untie his shoes, and remove them. I think about shaking him to see if he is awake, but in the end I sit on the sofa and watch the soldier in the rain just standing there like his mother forgot him, like he is Syria and has been counted out of country-game.
The first thing I notice when I wake up in the morning is the mess on my wall. At first I don’t know what happened, but then my thoughts quickly come together and I remember how I went crazy with the marker the night before. The clock on my bedside stand reads 7:15, which means I have less than half an hour to fix the wall before Aunt Fostalina gets back from work. I fly out of bed and rush for the basement.
We Need New Names: A Novel Page 21