by Nisi Shawl
“You probably want to make a pit stop. Alley Oop!” He waves his large arms like a conductor raising the dead. He says to my departing back: “I made some lemonade for you.”
◊
I do need to use the bathroom, but the space seems so small with the large Nelson in it. I feel embarrassed. Fuck that!
When I’m done I don’t wash my hands. I’m afraid the water will wash me away.
Nelson, smiling as if he’s the sun itself, stands holding a large glass. Is it only lemonade?
Listen.
I ease past him to the table and finger the chunks of bread. Nelson turns to say, “Don’t eat yet.”
I grasp the paring knife with the glowing fingers that don’t quite belong to me; yet who else will claim them? I feel sluggish as if drugged, yet I know three things: the room is small, he is big and soft, and he is within my reach. I could strike out and through his vein before he speaks again. End it.
Nelson doesn’t smile any longer but his eyes are not fearful.
Listen.
My fingers open and the knife drops back to the table.
◊
“I’ll tell you what happened. Then you have to rest. But first—you’re not going to turn down my mamma’s special recipe lemonade, are you?”
“No.” I am so thirsty I could drink an entire orchard of lemons…if lemons were still grown in orchards. I seem to remember that.
“This will all come back to you, but you need to be ready as soon as the process is complete.”
I stare at him and realize, yes, I do know this man. He is my…my what? My lover? Brother? My betrayer?
“Are you my brother?”
“In a way.”
And he begins a digest of the story which tells me my name and leads me back to now; which is the hour of my death and my birth.
◊
“The art of tattoo is spiritual, inextricably linking the applied art with the individual.”
I want to speak
“Don’t interrupt! Two lovers, forbidden by Society City to bond do so, just as all lovers must be in the fairy tales. One an empath called Lynx; the other an information executive called Strand. Each seeks out in the other that which is missing in herself and finds they’re joyful for the first time in life. “Lynx is in servitude to Society City, which sometimes uses her empathic talents to heal and at other times to punish. Her sensitivity is so acute she can only survive these rigors with the use of deadening drugs. Are you still with me?”
◊
I stare at him unsure who is the lunatic: him or me.
◊
“Strand, on the other hand, seems to have been born with deadening drugs coursing through her veins. No one is immune to her cold wit; nothing breaks through her protective shell except me and then Lynx. But they are two valuable commodities in a culture that gets what it pays for and keeps it.”
Nelson avoids telling her of the cruelty that had become intrinsic to Strand’s survival and the raw pain that had almost killed Lynx. He knows their differing instincts are at war inside her; he needs her to recognize and embrace them both.
◊
“In the de-evolution of the culture outside that narrow window in this dark bedroom, Society City controls all things east of the Appalachians, and most things west of those mountains are forbidden. The tattoo was meant to bond Lynx and Strand together, forever, making it impossible for them to be separated by the power of Society City.” He repeats: “The art of tattoo is spiritual, linking the applied art with the individual inextricably.”
◊
“That’s impossible!”
“And yet here we are.”
◊
I look again at his large brown hands and note the tips of his fingers permanently dark with ink. Ignoring his presence I rip the loose fitting cotton garment up over my head, seeing the dried blood staining it. I rush back to the bathroom mirror. My breasts are familiar and strange at the same time. There’s a vague outline beneath the skin of…something else. My hair does not look familiar at all. When I blink I see a flash of a woman darker than my current skin and who has short, nappy hair. Then I see a smaller, freckled, stockier woman with cascading red and silver hair. The other one? Or am I the other one?
◊
I feel the tiny needle points prickling all over my body. I lean in close to the mirror as if I might still be able to see them on my skin.
The movement just below the surface no longer unnerves me.
◊
“You did this? Experimented?”
“We did. All of us.”
I look back to the mirror just as my dark hair loses all of its color.
“What’s happening!?”
“We agreed this was the only way. Lynx and Strand wanted it, so we worked for many months, sinew by strand by shadow to recreate one on the outside and the inside of the other.”
“But which am I?”
“Another.”
“The two have become one? Inside me?”
“No. That was my error. The two have become a third, who contains both. Three, but none gives way. Here,” Nelson pulls a fresh garment from the stack on top of the duffle.
I pull the soft cotton wrapper back over my head—not through modesty, because I finally understand this man: Nelson knows every inch of my body already.
◊
“And that’s the important thing you must remember.”
“I don’t care for your superior attitude, Mr. Nelson.”
Listen.
“Not mister. Just Nelson, as it has been for generations in my family. The women were all named after the famous…”
“…South African freedom fighter.” I remember that now.
“And then I came along,” Nelson says with an unguarded smile.
“And you collect miniatures of long gone historic monuments. I remember La Tour Eiffel…uh…the Ashanti Stool!”
“Good. We’ll continue down memory lane another time, sister love. I’ve got some tasks to do right now. We don’t have much time; you need to sleep again to finish the annealment.”
I listen.
◊
“There will always be two voices; I didn’t know that at first; I’m sorry. Your work will be to find the balance, to know when to follow which voice. One will be rash, angry, cold, dangerous; the other is sensitive, empathetic, innocent. Both are valid when in balance. But you cannot let go of one and follow only the other. You’ll…you won’t survive.”
She listens but doesn’t understand.
“You won’t survive unless you can carry all the realities! Without them the road will only lead to madness. I know that sounds melodramatic but believe me, please.”
I listen.
◊
“Remember when you first woke up and couldn’t remember anything? Imagine trying to live your life from that moment forward, having no memory at all of what went before. The threads of the past snipped free from the present, no link to the future…with no sense of the ground on which you stand. That old earthquake that ripped through the middle states last century; that cut the east off from the west? That would seem like a bump in the road. You’d always be off-balance.”
◊
“No tabula rasa, then?”
◊
“The weight of emptiness is still a weight. Keeping the balance between the voices—between who they were and who you are—will integrate you all. And remember they are lovers; they want to be in harmony, and you’re the one who does that.”
◊
Nelson unties his cloak, dropping it to a chair in the narrow room. I reach out tentatively to touch the soft edge of the fabric as if I’ve never felt anything like it before. I gaze at him with a look of puzzlement; then tears rise in my eyes.
◊
“Don’t worry, this here queen’s got all bases covered except one, and I’m about to fix that. Lie down one last time.”
◊
I do, because the words are so familiar.
He raises the leg of my pants on the left side and I see one tattoo that remains distinct—an old-fashioned bicycle, a high-wheeled penny-farthing, on my calf.
◊
“The penny-farthing locks you all in place together as you travel out past the mountains to the places Society thinks are too wild to sustain life. Relax! The plan will come back to you when you wake again. But one last thing.”
◊
Nelson pulls a machine from one of the deep pockets of his cloak and a small pot of ink. “Can you lie on your side?”
I turn.
“This will hurt a bit.”
“You never said that before.”
“No. But this is different. I’m layering in a line of communication. We’re not using any relaxant because I don’t want any chemicals to interfere. When we’re done you’ll go back to sleep and wake on your own.
“Here’s a word for you to remember. Did I ever tell you about the time…?” Nelson begins the storytelling path he always travels when inking her body.
◊
“You know how I love to collect historical bits and pieces,” he continues. “So once I stumbled on this picture of the cutest man I ever saw: café au lait skin, dark eyes that were either trouble or were looking for trouble. And he had the most expressive mouth, like cherries I could have sucked through my teeth, pits and all! Turns out he was a queer colored man who wrote books in the 20th century. I tried reading some. Way too smart for me…that’s why Society tracked me into visual—not literary arts!”
Nelson’s laughter dispels any sense that he thinks himself stupid.
He clicks on the power and the buzz of the machine fills my ears. Facing the window, I concentrate on the curtains dancing in the breeze as Nelson moves carefully on the spokes of the penny-farthing’s big front wheel. I feel the needle as if I’m inside that ancient torture machine, its nails digging into me. But now my body opens to it.
◊
“I read an interview with him and he talked about the sensuality of words; I’d never thought about that before. And how he fell in love with a word when he was a kid: Wolverine! He thought it was the most beautiful word in the world. He loved to feel it in his mouth. When I close my eyes I can see his mouth tasting that word. He didn’t know what it meant when he first heard it, but it stuck with him. Later, when I found some pictures of him as an old man,that mouth—it was still tasting that word.
◊
“There, all done.”
“So quickly?”
“Just the single word concealed among the bicycle’s spokes and curves. It changed his life, it changed mine; now it changes yours.”
“How?”
“Magic. Let me finish. You will go west from Society City; maybe you’ll find some Partisans, set up housekeeping in a tree, learn to sew, become a surgeon or carpenter or revolutionary. Who knows.”
“Sounds either ghastly or delightful, depending on who I am at the moment.”
“Ah, finally your sense of humor! I’ll take that as a good sign.”
“All of this simply for two lovers?”
“Two lovers is no small thing. And for the others who’ll foment change.”
◊
“I’m afraid.”
“That’s smart. Society City will not take the disappearances sitting still. When you wake up you’ll remember how vicious it can be, you’ll remember those who’ve disappeared. So follow our plan and go. Quickly.”
◊
Through the curtain I see what was moving: not a tree branch, but a pair of athletic shoes tied together and thrown over a power line. For some reason they make me smile.
“Once you’re past the mountains, remember the word. It’s not one that pops up in common conversation, so it will help you find friends or protect you from danger.”
“Dare I ask how?”
Nelson doesn’t respond because he can see she’s already drowsy.
“‘Wolverine.’ It does taste delicious,” I say, but I can no longer lift my eyelids.
◊
Nelson gently turns her onto her back and drapes a soft cotton sheet over her. He thinks how much he already misses the two women who’ve become his sisters. He wonders how long before he’ll see this new one again. He wants his friends, but he hates to travel.
◊
“Move fast…you listening to me, Tryna West?” Nelson whispers urgently then grabs his cloak and turns to leave.
“Yes, we’re listening, brotherlove.”
We sleep.
Nelson double locks the door when he leaves.
Guerrilla Mural of a Siren’s Song
Ernest Hogan
Like a miniature Jupiter gone insane, the paint-blob hangs in the middle of the room—a Jupiter whose tides and weather and powerful gravity snapped on the strain of the secret of its monstrous microscopic inhabitants so its regular bands are broken up into gaily swirling asymmetrical patterns of mingling paint with color almost computer-exaggerated—like the glorious unholy mother of all cat’s eye marbles, it glares at me.
I try not to see her.
There’s no gravity here, but that floating blob has a pull just the same. I orbit in freefall, make ‘em let me paint in the center of these cans where the spinning doesn’t suck you to the floor—and like the irresistible pull of Jupiter, so big, so bad, so goddam awesome that you feel yourself fall into those convulsive, frenzied clouds, like you’re being sucked up, not pulled down (Jupiter is too big, too gigantic for you to ever be on top of it)—and it still pulls me.
And she pulls me.
I take the stick like an Aztec priest wielding a flint knife, or that cop swinging his baton on that cool, starless night years ago in L.A.—crushing the buckle from my gas mask into my skull, leaving a cute little scar on my scalp that I shaved my head for months to show off.
It exploded—like an amphetamine-choked blob. Amorphous little monsters sailed through the air, some colliding with me and sticking to my naked flesh. One sought my eyes in order to blind me. Lucky I have goggles like Tlaloc, the Rain, Water, and Thunder God…and a breathing mask—that’s all the covering I need! I wipe away the paint, my vision is smeared with color.
The entire little canvas-lined room is exploding with color. Beautiful.
Like her.
Still, the paint has this sickening tendency to settle into little jiggling globes that just sit there like mini-Jupiters, mocking me. I refuse to allow entropy to happen in my presence, so, like a samurai Jackson Pollock, I scream through my mask and thrash the disgusting little buggers into tinier flying sky-serpents that merrily decorate me, and the canvas on the walls.
And the canvas is raw, unprimed, and the paint is mixed with a base that gives it the consistency of water. Splatter marks don’t just sit there looking pretty—no, they grow fur as the canvas absorbs them, thirstily. My work is always wild and woolly.
Soon the colorful swordplay is over and I am victorious. All (except for a few little stubborn, but insignificant B.B.’s) the paint is slapped down to the canvas. I shed my goggles for a while and the furious splatters change into visions.
André Masson, eat your heart out!
Bizarre hieroglyphs materialize in the Jovian storm clouds: Demonic cartoon characters exhaling balloons full of obscenity—hordes of baby godzilloids crawling through vacuum and eating rocks—endless three-D labyrinths of orbital castles complete with living gargoyles and tapestries you can walk into—large, luxuriant cars encrusted with jewels and tail-fins that race the crowded, tangled spaghetti of freeways with off-ramps all over the galaxy—the vegetal love poetry that an intelligent network of vines sings to the jungle it intricately embraces—the ecstatic rush of falling into an ocean of warm mud that tastes delicious and makes you feel so good—pornographic geometries that can only be imagined on a scale more than intergalactic—the Byzantine plots of surrealistic soap operas that take place outside of spacetime, in Omeyocan, the highest heaven—the ballet of subatomic particles smaller than any yet
discovered!
Letting the stick fly, I attack the canvas with paint-covered fingers—desperately trying to record the visions before they fade, but never finishing before they do, so I have to fill many gaps with memory and imagination.
Then I see her face again.
That beautiful, perfect Zulu face, with impossibly intense eyes—beauty that puts the cold, marble-white classicism of dead and buried ancient Greece to shame, causing arrogant statues to crack and crumble to dust—making you see how right the barbarians were in knocking their heads off. A presence that is soft, yet extremely powerful, like the fearful sound of the soft, swishing skirt that reveals that an umkhovu—like a bad memory of apartheid—is roaming the midnight streets of Soweto, making its way past the sleepy suburbs, to the shiny new university, to the Center of Parapsychology….
I find myself drawing that magnificent face. The face of Willa Shembe, a pampered little (she was taller than me, but still, somehow, little) psychic from Zululand, from whom I’ll never be free. The sorcery that caused her “death” has contaminated me, enslaved me. I will see, draw, and paint her forever.
I should have known the first time I saw her—who knows how long after my surprisingly nonfatal encounter with the Sirens….
Whatever made Calvino send her to me? I guess a little inspiration flickers under that pale, bald head, behind those thick, old-fashioned glasses and fat, gray eyebrows on occasion.
I suddenly saw her—clearly and distinctly out of my feverish delirium and telepathic hangover—dancing galaxies and soft, squishy, organic cities faded to let her power through.
Calvino must have been desperate. I, of all people, survived a mind-to-whatever encounter with the Sirens!
Me, Pablo Cortez, infamous guerrilla muralist from the wild, crumbling concrete and stucco overgrowth of L.A.—who refused to be absorbed into the decaying society I satirized in my work long after my fellow wall-defacers were caught, arrested and offered a chance to become honest artists who paint on neat, clean canvases that are displayed in sterile galleries and bought by the affluent to show everybody how sensitive they are by what they choose to decorate their expensive, prestigious apartments with. I, who tattooed the Picasso quote, “PAINTING IS NOT DONE TO DECORATE APARTMENTS. IT IS AN INSTRUMENT OF WAR FOR ATTACK AND DEFENSE AGAINST THE ENEMY” on my own left arm with a felt-tip pen and a safety-pin. The guy who really meant it when he helped paint—fast, so we could get it done and get the hell out of there before getting our heads busted—Quetzalcoatl choking on smog, Uncle Sam holding up the heart of a draftee for the “disturbance” in South Africa (soon to be Zululand—again) to the gaping jaws of a Biomechanoid War God, mutilated/spacesuited corpses and countless mass portraits of the ever-growing throngs of the homeless to decorate the featureless, empty walls of the blank architecture where Mr. and Ms. Los Angeles could see them as they did the freeway boogie to work. Siquerios and Orozco and every spray-can wielding vato would’ve been proud!