The Marvellous Equations of the Dread

by Marcia Douglas

  DUB-SIDE CHANTING

  Track 17. Dis Appointment

  Already three days have passed and Bob is not back yet. Fall-down kicks at a stone. He is ready to return to Half Way Tree. He has left his staff there and his canvas bag with his ledger of happen-tings. He misses the dust and the grime of Kingston. The smell of urine and rotting fruit behind the bus stop, the john crows overhead searching for dead prey. He misses the traffic and the heat so thick he can swallow it like mucus. He misses Delroy with his playplay guitar and dutty mouth. The women across the street with their cut-eye and slow walk. He misses macca and orange love bush and pink coral vine. And what wouldn’t he give for two patty and a box drink?

  But more than all this, he wants Leenah. To climb on her windowsill, the way he did in her dream. This time, she will wake up; no true? If you fall, you should at least enjoy the thing you have fallen for.

  But this. This place is like getting caught stealing a mango, and not able to eat it. Leenah is somewhere in Kingston, he is sure. And sooner or later, all roads lead to Half Way Tree. He needs to get back there. This place with its ganja fog and trees breathing in and out makes him feverish. And where is Bob?

  STUDIO Z HECTOR

  Track 18.5: What the Pulse Knows

  There in his little house, Hector has moved his sewing machine out to the veranda. Cerulean blue suits bulge through the windows now. He waves to no one in particular and takes a sip of the coconut water in his cup, a huge smile on his face. The little tags on his suits read, “Made in Zion.”

  FROM THE ANGEL’S LEDGER BOOK

  [cathedral of gongs]

  February 6, 1978 –The ring Bob wears is the same one that was worn by the Emperor. It was the Emperor’s favourite, given to him by his father, Makonnen.

  June 26, 1934 – The Emperor has made 77 exact copies of the ring to protect from thieves and confuse the plots of the unrighteous. The original is kept in Axum.

  July 23, 1906 – It is Tafari’s fourteenth birthday. His father gives him a scroll of twenty-one poems, Les Vingt et Un. The poems are written in black ink in the poet, Rimbaud’s, own hand. The youth copies the words to improve his French. He makes twenty-one copies of the twenty-one poems. The original he tucks into the beams of the ceiling where he keeps a milk tooth and a letter he wrote to a girl, but did not dare deliver.

  Tafari likes the last poem of Les Vingt et Un best. It is reckless with desire, written for Rimbaud’s Ethiopian mistress. Tafari commits the words to memory and recites them late night as he fondles himself beneath the covers.

  The mistress’s name is Mariam. The angel, Negus, knows her well. He counts thirteen moles on her skin – three on her belly, five on her thighs, four across her shoulders and one on the back of her heel.

  April 2, 1895 – The angel is there when Rimbaud interprets the constellation of Mariam’s skin. After the revelation of her heel, Rimbaud forgets why he ever needed to be a poet. And in the forgetting, becomes a truer poet.

  Rimbaud gives Les Vingt et Un to his friend, Ras Makonnen, like giving away old clothes.

  Recitation Day, 1906 – In Tafari’s dream, Rimbaud’s misress is a young girl of seventeen. He stands before her and recites the poem with such passion it is as if he wrote it himself. Mariam sits with her face in her hand, and listens. “Do not forget this dream,” she says. “Mark it with your eyelid. From now on, the only copy of Les Vingt et Un exists here, in sleep.” She kisses him on his mouth, takes the poems and puts them beneath her shawl.

  When Tafari awakes he remembers the dream but can no longer recite the poem. He searches the beams, but the poems are not there; neither is the letter to the nobleman’s daughter; only the tooth remains.

  It has been raining all day in Harar. Tafari is too embarrassed to inquire of the letter, and dares not unleash his father’s anger at his carelessness with Les Vingt et Un.

  Each night the boy searches the archives of his sleep.

  February 6, 1978 – It is said that bits of gold from King Solomon’s ring exist in the Emperor’s Judah Lion.

  If this is so, then the Emperor’s ring is the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandchild of King Solomon’s.

  But not even the angel knows if this is true.

  Can truth be both created and destroyed?

  HERE-SO; HALF WAY TREE

  Back in Town

  Middle of the night and Bob awakes in the clock tower to a foot tapping. He gets up and lights a candle – only a spider works in the corner. She is black and long-legged and ropes revolution. But it is not her foot he hears. A man leans against the locked door. He is short and stout; his face in shadow, watching the spider.

  “My wife – the second one – she was an industrious woman, just like that spider.” The voice is low, with no bottom. “Her name was Amy. I married two times, two women both with the same name. Amy and Amy. My, my.”

  The candle catches the lines of the man’s face; the big cheeks, the moustach, the neck thick in the tight collar.

  “My father was a mason and knew how to build a good house,” he says. “But that spider, she builds with eaves and buttresses like a cathedral.”

  His jacket is buttoned neat over a fat tummy.

  “What if she could build us a ship like that, back to Africa?”

  The spider shivers, and keeps on going.

  “You talk like a book what me read already. Like me know you.” Bob holds the candle closer to the man’s face.

  “My name is Marcus,” the man says. “Garvey. I wish I had not died in England, but see me here, back where I began. This time, we must call on the past to move us forward, rally the ancestors if we need to.”

  Meanwhile, Outside the Clock Tower

  JAHJAH JAHJAH JAHJAH JAHJAH. Two aluminum cans knock up in the breeze. The prayers of a woman crossing the street: My daughter in the mouth of the dragon, America. What kinda Babylon. Fallingfalling; I see it in a dream. Children laugh at two dogs in heat in the park across the street. Gun shot in the distance. A woman spray paints NOIZ on concrete. A baby in a trashcan sneezes.

  Bob Marley and Marcus Garvey in the Clock Tower

  “The people have summoned us back.” Marcus takes off his jacket. Underneath he wears a velvet vest and white shirt. He takes off the vest and rolls up the sleeves of the shirt. “They must have called us with every last fibre of their being. Sometimes rockbottom will do that to a people.”

  “Music is how me stir up the people. But my voice scratch now, and no one know I&I name.”

  “Brother, let us do as the spirit moves. I too am limited in my ways. Each time I leave the clock tower, I become as a pea dove. Who would believe it? Marcus Garvey, a pea dove.”

  “Jah call the humble of the earth to confound the mighty. Even a bird shall lead them.”

  “Yesterday I preached fire and brimstone from a government rooftop, blazed a cry of liberation with my beak. Yes, I flew into the middle of high-noon court session and upset the corrupt from their seats. A pea dove can peck out the eyes of the unrighteous; guide the weary home.”

  “But can it build a ship to take the people to Africa?”

  “This is what I know now. The people need a different fleet.”

  FROM THE ANGEL’S LEDGER BOOK

  [priest’s bells]

  February 15, 1962 – Queen Menen has passed. Her pale hands are fragile as moth wings.

  His wife gone, at night the Conquering Lion is alone in bed; the Angel sends the woman, Mariam, to his dream. It has been 56 years since they last met, but in dreams time makes no haste. She takes the poem from under her shawl; the paper perfumed with ylang ylang. The emperor reads it and becomes as a young boy. Mariam smiles and rises from the rattan chair.

  In the morning the Emperor remembers only one word: rouge.

  And rouge is everywhere – roadside hibiscus, the seeds of a pomegranate, a piece of velvet – such obsessions are a distraction. The Emperor is annoyed at himself for being so taken by the poem of a f
erenji. What is the lesson to be learned here?

  October, 1935 – Italian troops loot Ethiopia. Mussolini takes the obelisk from Axum; many treasures are stolen. This Mussolini means to find the Ark of the Covenant. The pope wants it.

  There are 100 exact copies of the Ark of the Covenant. The original is behind a red curtain. Somewhere.

  There are 33 red curtains of the same sort.

  October 4, 1963 – The Emperor speaks to the United Nations. “We Africans will fight, if necessary, and we know that we shall win, as we are confident in the victory of good over evil.” Africa will not be shaken.

  Bass Day, 1976 – Bob Marley turns the Emperor’s speech into a song. The women who love him see the way he closes his eyes when he sings it. The angel watches the women watch Bob.

  When he sings, Bob feels everything. And the angel sees everything.

  HERE-SO; HALF WAY TREE

  From the Mouth of a Pea Dove

  “Give thanks and praise for the great-man who school I&I in the history of I&I people.”

  There is a woosh of wind outside. Something crashes against the door. A string of wailing and car horns wraps around the clock. The voices fast forward to an old woman: Weevils take up the shop flour. And then there is a mighty singing, a seven-layered chorus of many people. The voices shake the foundations, and at the tail end of it, a small child hums. Bob pushes against the door to open it, but the chorus begins again and his arms are not strong enough against the breath of so many. He must wait until the years pass over.

  “Emancipate yourself from mental slavery,” Garvey says to no one in particular.

  “Your words, Uncle.”

  “When we do this, Africa will be united.”

  The air outside is filled with reverb. AFRICA-RICA RICA-RICA.

  “Me have a bone to pick with you still.” Bob lights a spliff and passes it to Garvey. Garvey shakes his head, No thanks; no thanks. He looks Garvey in the eyes, prophet to prophet, his head is filled with lambsbread. “You prophesy of a black king and when he come, you call him coward.”

  “I did say that.”

  “Reason with me.”

  “The Italians invaded Ethiopia and the big-man fled to England, like a sissy. An emperor should hold fast with his people. All Africa was watching.”

  “But you find yourself in England too; and same time as His Majesty. Don’t is England you dead?”

  “I died before I could see the end from the beginning. Before I could witness victory in the lion’s return. Death robs us that way.” Garvey looks up at the rafters; the spider is busy. “He was positioned to unite all of Africa, that man. I was angry with him. And I admit, just between the two of us, there had been times when a part of me envied him even. Oh to be emperor of all Africa.”

  Yes-I, flies a voice outside.

  “Yes-I,” says Bob.

  “But let us not bicker. The people have not called us back to wallow in smallness; they have called us because of our greatness. Let us hold together and let us not disappoint.”

  “Me always only have one goal, to see everybody live-up, together. Is for that me sing.”

  “Go out and sing then; sing the message with your scratched voice. Sing from the rooftops, sing from the gullies, just sing. The people have called you back with their music and tears. Do you know what it takes to call a spirit home?”

  SPIRITHOME-SPIRITHOME-SPIRITHOME goes the dub reverb outside.

  Garvey’s eyes are red, and moist.

  “Our people are magicians,” he says.

  The ancestor roots of the old cotton tree shift underground, reaching for water, for the roots of such a tree do not die easily. They stretch downward and across, under the street, all the way to Mandela Park. Lizards feel the roots move and so do soldier ants and mice. There is a small twelve-plait girl who stands across the street, facing the clock; she feels it too.

  All night Bob and Marcus Mosiah Garvey chant nyahbinghi.

  “Tonight, I am a Rastaman,” Garvey says, and they chant for the old women crossing the street/ for the schoolchildren with no lunch money/ for the pregnant dawta holding her belly/ the youth leaning gainst the clock tower/for the man on his way home from burying his children/ the mangy dog in the road/ the woman with a gun in her brassiere/ the muddy feet in the betting shop/ the son with a bees in his lung/ and the girl in York Pharmacy, looking bleach-cream for mahogany/ the woman on the bus with cocaine in her vagina/ the child with no daddy/ the grandmother at the stop-light with the spoiled milk/ the baby blown from his mother’s arms by hurricane/by hurricane/ by hurricane/for murdered trees and maimed birds/ for fish in the sea, and the firmanent under the sea/ and for fiah-fiah catching the heart of the firmament/ for Xaymaca, this land of wood and sweet riva-wata.

  They chant.

  HERE-SO; HALF WAY TREE

  Next Day: Year of Rain and Wind [200_?]

  Next morning there is a black and green bird with a red beak in the lignum vitae tree across from the square. When Bob slips out the door, it takes off and marks a circle in the sky. He follows the bird all the way to Maxfield Ave.; it criss-crosses gulley and lane; love-bush and barbed wire. He is glad his legs are long and quick.

  At Three Miles, the bird perches on the back of a red pick-up truck; Bob hops a ride too. The driver – an old man – hums redemption hymns and drops Bob in front of a racehorse betting shop. The bird squawks up above and Bob steps up his stride. He passes a corner which he recognizes as a place he used to sit and play guitar. People stopped, and put down their bags, and listened there.

  And little ways down – the gate where he would stand and sweet-talk Rita; she was young then, and had eyes like his mother’s. There was kindness on her face, and sufferation too, and strength. For a moment now, he misses her; she was the one who knew him the most. She hummed back-up; and she watched his back and washed it too. He pauses at the gate, remembrance flooding down – the children, the tours, the bad feelings, the fighting. Forward to that day when he pressed his palms against her windshield, and she screamed and did not know him. Maybe he should have recite their palangpang in the street, shout it out to rhaatid. Things only him and she woulda know. She would have recognize him then, no-true? But really, you want to know Bob vice?

  The bird squawks again, leading Bob deeper into concrete and zinc, to places unfamiliar. They pass a yard where a group of children poke a dead dog with a stick. Down a lane of zinc, a woman throws dirty dishwater over a fence, a lizard in the water. Road block. A youth with a rifle stands in the middle of the road. Across the street, a goat roped to a tree, bleats with no sound. At the opposite corner a girl sits on a stool reading a book. Bob stops and she looks up, as if expecting him. Duppy, she says; and the iris in her left eye strays to one side. Bob reaches for the book; the words inside hum, but the girl pulls it back; her eyes say, Not now.

  “I want to know mi true name,” he says. “You find I&I name yet? It written down in the book? The girl spits out her gum, keeps on reading and does not look up.

  There is a breeze coming up from the south. The bird waits on an electric wire, preening the green of its belly. It takes off and Bob has to run to keep up as the youth with the rifle takes a gangster pose, spreads his legs and shoots – the bullet ricochets off the radio in Bob’s satchel, sound busting out big-so. The reverb sends people to their windows, some in the street. Wha dis? They stand and watch the madman run.

  No one notices the bird in the whirlwind; they think the madman running from gunshot. Someone’s salt-fish and onion burns in hot oil. The Africas at Bob’s ears jingle ting&ting; the red scarf on his head is wet around the edges. He longs for a drink of water, the sort that has its source in deepness. He runs without seeing, sweat in his eyes, guided only by the bird call.

  LEENAH

  Bone

  Five years to the day, I wait for Bob in front of the clock, but do not see him. I stand with my back against the door, watching the street. No Bob. I go the next day too, but then after that I feel
like a fool. Still, I know I saw what I saw. It was Bob in the mad man’s skin. I will return in five more years.

  Tonight, the lions in my dream are old; their manes are grey like Rasta elders and their roar holds the history and herstory of everything; I wallow in the wild of it, criss-crossing salt and sugar islands, riding seas, walking the perimeter of Africa. When we get to the Red Sea, I traverse easily for I recognize it as woman’s blood. We cross Eritrea and the border to Ethiopia, spanning centuries. I roar with the lions and we awake every living creature in livity and oneness, all of them in all of me, right here-so. This is how I learn the true meaning of I&I. And then there is laughter and I turn to see a young girl skipping in a field of blue flowers. One day your bones will be discovered, she says. She speaks a strange language, which I find I understand. It is filled with innuendo and physical sensations; the word for bone so strong that the sound of it reverbs through the dream to my shin and into my foot-bottom. I wake up laughing, the syllable of bone echoing way-way out to the future.

  Anjahla is at the door in her pajamas; come to see what’s so funny.

  “What I sound like when I laugh?” I ask.

  “You sound like an old hige at the beginning of time,” she says.

  “Time don’t have no beginning and don’t put any years on me,” I say.

  Anjahla rolls her eyes. “Go back to sleep, Mama,” she says.

  I sink in the pillow of blue flowers and wait for another dream. I want to hear Anjahla. I want to hear her say, Mama.

  ANJAHLA

  When I Call Your Name

  Mama. Mama, can you hear me? At what speed does love travel underwater?