In Concert

by Melanie Tem

  Danielle is shouting but Jamie can’t….

  Danielle is shouting, “He’s not breathing!” She shouts it, shouts it, whispers it. “He’s not breathing!”

  This may be now. This may not be a memory; this may be now. Or it may already be a memory of now, passed away, passed on, passed over.

  When Danielle rubs his face and chest, there is a painful burst of tiny bright bubbles. Danielle is crying, shouting. Someone else is in the room, in the bed. Jamie’s eyes sting. He can’t feel any part of his body except his eyes, and his penis, which hurts. He feels the…silhouette of her fingers, probing and caressing…spiderweb shockwaves…

  …he is falling asleep…

  …he is waking up.

  “They do that sometimes.”

  Jamie recoils from the voice of Dr. Lezare. He should have known Dr. Lezare was here, but he didn’t. He’s afraid of Dr. Lezare, and he owes him everything.

  Afraid.

  Danielle holds him, won’t let Dr. Lezare hurt him, won’t let him go. “Like some babies,” the doctor says, “nvumbi sometimes forget to breathe.”

  Jamie remembers Dr. Lezare. It is like waking from a long dream.

  He remembers Dr. Lezare in that other life, watching him for a very long time. Watching him for months. Then bringing Claudine and Danielle to watch him as he worked all day in the fields. He remembers his mother taking him into their hut and hiding him, warning him to stay away from Dr. Lezare and the two Miller women, not to do anything Dr. Lezare says, for the man is a sorcerer, a magician, an evil man, and the Miller women were said to pay him well for his services.

  And if you see him riding his horse backwards … run away, my son. Run as far and as fast as you can.

  But Jamie remembers the night Dr. Lezare came to his bed and kissed him, and put his tongue inside Jamie’s mouth, and then he was in the bottle, and somewhere he could hear his mother crying over his empty body.

  He remembers another night, some time later, when Danielle and Claudine came to pick him up from Dr. Lezare. He remembers the way Danielle kissed him and pinched his flesh. He remembers how Claudine caressed him, too.

  He remembers how they placed the black veil over his face and led him away, one on each side of their dark bride, holding his arms tightly as he got used to walking again. Leaning over and kissing, caressing the black veil, giggling like school girls every time he stumbled.

  Jamie remembers these things without curiosity. The dead have no curiosity. You can do anything with the dead you desire and they will never ask you why.

  The dead make the best of friends.

  You can plant them in deep holes or store them in jars. You can stack them like logs in a cave and still they won’t complain. You can pile stones on top of them to keep them in their holes, as if the dead really cared for escape, or if a few stones could stop them anyway.

  You could eat the brains of the dead, and sometimes people did.

  The dead asked for nothing and they permitted everything.

  The small black bird flutters its thin wings, gently rolls to the center of the bed and opens its face to him. It is a veil. Jamie likes to wear this veil, but he doesn’t remember why. He strokes it, treating it like some small animal. His veil, sweet veil: soft and loose like a lover’s lingerie. Its cool embrace is comforting.

  Danielle stands at the door watching him. Then she comes and joins him and his veil.

  His life before was nothing like this. He worked the fields, and he lived with his mother, and he fought no one, and he disrespected no one.

  Now he lives with the Miller women. He works all day. He makes love to Danielle. And he fights no one. He doesn’t even raise his voice.

  Sometimes he remembers his mother, crying over his empty body.

  Sometimes he thinks he may be waking up, but he cannot hold that thought for long.

  Danielle is upstairs in her bedroom playing with Jamie’s black veil. She purrs softly through the ceiling, making coy, ritualistic comments about its properties. “It is thin and yielding, like the moist husk of a spider,” she says. She holds it up to her face like a window to look through. The lines of her face darken, the veins in a leaf just turning brown.

  Jamie stands at the bedroom door, watching Danielle play with his black veil. She pats the flat of the veil, puffs it up with her fist beneath, and moves it from her crotch to her navel. He walks over and sits down in the chair. He sits very still. She giggles and calls him to come look at her. But the dead are poor at feigning interest.

  Danielle looks at Jamie intently and for the first time Jamie sees himself as she must be seeing him: the hard, rough mask of his face, the dry thin lips, the wrinkled eyes. The underlying decay only just showing. That is wrong, he knows. There is no decay but Jamie still insists on feeling it there.

  Waking up is a hard thing.

  Danielle insists that Jamie is darkly beautiful.

  She examines his nose, ears, eyes, and throat. She checks his pulse. She watches his penis for signs of life. She rubs his flesh with creams.

  She asks, “Don’t you love me anymore?”

  “Nvumbi ain’t nothing but old woman jive,” Eliza sneers, but only to him when her mother and grandmother aren’t around. “I’m gonna have me a real live boyfriend, not some fake dead dude like you.”

  “I’m not dead,” he wants suddenly to tell her, and, “Nvumbi are real, and they aren’t dead, either. I am nvumbi.” Then he thinks, with dim horror, that he might have said some of it aloud. He might actually have spoken.

  Apparently not, because Eliza doesn’t react, and surely she’d have noticed something like that, even about him, even though she does her best not to notice him at all. She’s sitting with her back to him, towel bunched in her lap, wet hair dripping and wildly curling. He’s supposed to be putting lotion on her back.

  He has been warming the pink lotion between his pink brown palms before he lets it touch her skin. Danielle taught him that. He has become distracted by the slinky feel of the lotion across his own flesh, something he is not aware of ever having noticed before. He has become distracted by the sudden possibilities of all the things he’d like to say to his daughter.

  “Would you hurry up?” She glares at him over her shoulder, still bony as a child’s. “I ain’t got all day. I got a hot date.”

  All the lotion has vanished through his own pores and he must start over. He squeezes a daub onto his left palm and cups his right palm over it. It is cool. But Eliza is so impatient that he has to put it on her before it is properly warmed. He lays both palms flat on the soft flesh between her shoulder blades and her spine. She yelps and jerks away from him and threatens to tell her mother.

  “You know, someday she’s just gonna get rid of you. She’ll find some cute little stud who’s even more zonked out than you are, and she’ll just throw you to the trash. Or she’ll just get sick of having a man around at all, like Gram did. Then what will you do?”

  Smoothing the lotion into her warm skin, Jamie wants to say, “I’m your father,” but he doesn’t believe he can.

  Jamie goes and stands in his place while Eliza gets ready. Nobody else is home, and he wonders whether Claudine and Danielle know about this date. He wonders if he should go and find them. He wonders if he should try to stop her. He wonders what to do.

  The apartment is so hot, and the evening noises from the street are so loud. He thinks he might faint. He thinks he might run out into the street and make noises of his own.

  Both of these are peculiar thoughts, and he simply stands in his place until his daughter is ready. She is wearing a short tight skirt and a blouse that shows off breasts he didn’t know she had. She hasn’t had him put her hair in braids this time; instead, she’s picked it high and wide. Her face is vivid, masklike, oddly deathlike with makeup.

  She leaves without so much as a glance at him. He stands still in his place until she is out the door, then follows the click of her heels and the clouds of her perfume down the dark
narrow stairs and into the muggy, crowded evening.

  A boy is waiting for her in the middle of the block. A man, really much older than she, much bigger. From a little distance, Jamie watches and listens. The man makes extravagant gestures, and his loud voice swings up and down the register, up and down. He calls her Liza. He kisses her, grabs her buttocks under the skirt. He is high. Eliza giggles and leans herself against him.

  Jamie doesn’t follow them. He doesn’t think he can walk that far or that fast, and he doesn’t think his eyes will focus well enough to keep them in sight. He almost gets lost just going back to the building the Miller women live in, and then he almost can’t climb all the stairs.

  But he is quietly waiting in his place when Danielle comes home and wants him for a while. And he is there, waiting, when Eliza comes home much later, smelling of weed and of sex.

  Her mother and grandmother look at her, look at each other, and together they say, “It’s time,” and Eliza says, “No,” but Jamie knows it is.

  Claudine and Danielle take Jamie with them when they go out hunting a nvumbi for Eliza. A nvumbi for this youngest Miller woman. For granddaughter and daughter. His daughter.

  He doesn’t know why they make him go, and he doesn’t want to. It surprises him to have an opinion, but he definitely doesn’t want to go. For one thing, it seems even hotter to him in the city at night than during the day, even hotter outside in the open streets than inside the cramped and airless apartment. The heat makes him feel ephemeral.

  And, for some reason, he’s afraid to go with them. Afraid they’ll find a nvumbi, afraid they won’t. Afraid he’ll get lost. It took him a while even to recognize what he feels now as fear. It’s been a long time since Jamie felt fear, since Dr. Lezare rode backwards on his horse up to Jamie’s house, and rode forward to take him away. It’s been a long time since Jamie felt anything.

  Now he does. Now he feels a distant call of fear. When he hesitates and Danielle pulls him roughly along, he scrapes his knuckles against a brick wall and it hurts. She pays him no mind. She thinks he doesn’t feel anything. That’s why she keeps him. He and all nvumbi act as if they will never feel anything again.

  It is very hot. The streets teem with heat, and with loud voices and music. So many people congregate on the street corners that the corners have become hard to locate; they seem to have melted in the body heat and vivid clothes and rich flesh of all those people. Jamie tries to stay close to Danielle, to hang onto her, but she brushes him aside, making him trip over a curb and hurt his ankle, and points something out to her mother. “There’s one!”

  Jamie’s gaze follows the line of her extended arm and forefinger and long pink nail. She’s pointing to a conglomeration of young men around the next spilled over corner, but he can’t tell which one she means because four of them are nvumbi.

  Claudine squints, considers, finally decides, “Nope,” and moves on.

  Danielle lingers. “Oooo eee, don’t he have a cute little ass, though?”

  “You want him then?” her mother snaps.

  Danielle laughs throatily. Jamie has heard her laugh like that countless times during his life with her, and now suddenly he doesn’t like the sound of it. “Nah. Ain’t done with this one yet.” She jerks her head toward Jamie without really looking at him, and he feels dimly relieved.

  In this neighborhood there are nvumbi everywhere. The boy who mows the grass for the projects where the Miller women live is nvumbi; Jamie has seen it in the cut of his eyes. The gaunt man who always sits at the back of the church with his womenfolk never any expression on his face no matter how het up the preacher gets, no matter how many times he himself stands up and sits down to pray or sing with the others is nvumbi.

  Here is an impromptu band, impromptu on the part of the young women who circle and clap, since nvumbi don’t make any decisions at all, let alone one on the spur of the moment. The young men on the bongo and harmonica and the child rapper are nvumbi. Their music is technically smooth and rather pleasing, but it has no life, no soul. Jamie feels an astonishing urge to join them. Danielle pauses to consider the harmonica player, who is very tall and dark. Claudine doesn’t even glance their way.

  “Gimme a break,” Danielle protests. “Ma, she ain’t but thirteen. This is her first. Don’t have to be perfect.”

  “Has to be right,” Claudine insists, and keeps going.

  A figure darts out of an alley so full of stink that even Jamie is bothered by the smell. Jamie thinks he hears the old man say, “Claudine,” but there is such a cacophony in the street and Jamie’s ears are so unaccustomed to perceiving sounds not specifically directed at him that he isn’t certain the old nvumbi said anything at all.

  As he has learned so well to do, he looks to his women for clues. Claudine pays no attention to the old man at all, doesn’t even shake his hand off when he clutches at her sleeve. Danielle looks at him, looks away again, but Jamie catches a flicker across her face that might mean something. She knows this man. She has some sort of feeling for him. Jamie wonders if this is how Eliza will look at him when he is of no more use to the Miller women and has been set free.

  For this is Claudine’s nvumbi from a long time ago, and Danielle’s father. Jamie has been shown pictures. The man in the pictures was much younger, of course, far more handsome and far less animated than this one, but it is the same man. Jamie would like to speak his name, but he thinks he has never known it.

  The nvumbi tries to block their path, but is no match for Claudine. Jamie wonders what this nvumbi could possibly want from the Miller women that he didn’t already get. Then Jamie wonders what he himself will someday want from them. The old man says, clearly this time through the din, “Danielle. Daughter.” Danielle stops.

  Jamie doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t know where his place is now. His wife has stopped and is facing the nvumbi, her father, as if she intends to have a conversation with him, while Claudine, small, bent, utterly purposeful, is far enough ahead in the crowds now that Jamie can hardly see her. He doesn’t know what he should do. Unfamiliar anxiety makes him dance, and there are any number of rhythms and tunes in the street to which he might be dancing.

  “What do you want?” Danielle demands. “Thought I’d never see you again.”

  “I know why you’re out here,” the nvumbi tells her. Jamie looks at him, listens to him carefully, his body twitching with the unaccustomed effort of concentrating. Something is wrong. This man is nvumbi, but he is awake. “I know what you’re hunting.”

  Danielle nods. “Ma says it’s time. Eliza’s thirteen and she’s got hormones.”

  “Well, look.”

  The nvumbi gestures, and from out of the stinking alley behind him comes a parade of pretty boys. Dark skinned, fair skinned, tall and small, they all have the slack faces and blank movements of new nvumbi, not long out of the bottles. Steadily more frightened, Jamie glances furtively around for Dr. Lezare. There are so many people he could be anywhere.

  “Ah,” breathes Danielle beside him, and he feels the temperature of her body rise. “Not bad.”

  “Just out, too,” the old man says proudly, reaching out to prod the gleaming buttock of one boy and tug at the curls of another as they go by. “These won’t wake up for a long time.”

  “That one,” Danielle says, pointing. “Let me see that one.”

  The man grasps the arm of the boy Danielle has indicated and pulls him out of line. The next boy closes the gap and the procession continues. The man sets the boy in front of Danielle and steps back. “Pierre. He’s eighteen.”

  “Ain’t no eighteen,” Danielle objects. “Twenty one, maybe.”

  “Pretty, though, don’t you think?”

  Pierre is taller than Jamie and broader shouldered. His skin is truly black, highlighting in blue. He stands so still that Jamie can hardly see him breathing, and he wonders if he has been given back his breath yet. As Danielle slides her hands over the virile body, the boy groans softly, involuntarily. “N
ice,” she murmurs, and the old nvumbi cackles.

  Jamie wants to say something to this sleeping boy, or to the awakened old man. He doesn’t know what he would say. Behind the old nvumbi he catches sight of Claudine. She is watching the transaction intently, but allowing her daughter to handle it. Jamie doesn’t know why, but that makes him shiver.

  “He sings, too,” the old nvumbi declares, and slaps the boy’s bare rump hard, playfully. “Sing, boy!”

  Immediately, with no warm up or pause, the boy hits a perfect high C and takes the melody upward from there. It is a haunting, simple, repeating chant that Jamie knows he has heard before. It makes him remember things he does not want to remember: Heat that shimmered across fields rather than collecting among buildings. Someone he loved, vaguely. Vaguely he remembers love.

  But the song Pierre sings has no soul. He sings it on pitch and with perfect inflection, but his face doesn’t move, his voice doesn’t change, and when he is finished he simply shuts his mouth.

  “How much?” asks Danielle.

  The dead eat very little. But Jamie resents the minuscule nourishment that Pierre requires.

  The dead have no politics. But Jamie looks for things about which to challenge Pierre.

  The dead listen to music even when the radio isn’t on, and watch television for hours without moving. One night the Miller women leave Jamie and Pierre in the room with a television on. Movies play all night long. Bela Lugosi: White Zombie. Lugosi’s staring eyes, dozens of white crosses on a dark hillside, and the pale thirties beauty of the woman Madeline. A large castle on the cliff.

  “Nvumbi make good actors,” he heard the old doctor say once. “I trained one to play a corpse for a director I once knew.”

  The dead trust too easily, and are readily deceived. Jamie will not be deceived by Pierre, nor by Danielle any more.

  Sometimes Jamie watches Danielle as she sleeps. The pale eye of the moon washes her body with its gaze, washes the softness of her body away, leaving sharp angles and leveled out planes. In the heat and yellow darkness she has kicked the covers from the bed. Her flesh is like moist wax, pressed into the recesses of the sheets, the simultaneous motion picture flicker of hundreds of bleached out corpses: pulled out of Belsen, Auschwitz, Nam Penh, Diem Bien Phu.