by Lucie Wilk
And then she hears her name. Iris. Iris. They are chanting it, sing-song. Iris. She looks up and the women are looking at her. They are smiling.
“How about you, Iris?”
“Do you have a story? Tell us something about the city. Tell us about the people there.”
“What about the hospital? I hear it is so big, so big, you can’t know everyone. Is this true?”
Iris looks at them all, paused in their chores. They keep smiling. They want to hear.
“The hospital is so big that you can’t see across it. There are walls everywhere. Tall ones. And doors that block everything—noise, people—everything. There are many different rooms for all the different patients. There are beds for some patients, but many people lie on the floor. The floor is cold and hard like stone. There are more patients than you can count in each room. None of the patients know each other. It is a place full of strangers.”
The women watch her for a moment. Their smiles falter as they absorb it all.
“And this doctor—Bryce? What is he like? Is he as strange as he seems?”
Iris finds herself smiling. “Yes. And no.” She pauses. “He is strange in his ways, he makes strange decisions, but when you understand why, then he is the only one that isn’t strange.”
“So you understand him?” The women watch her face.
“No. Only once in awhile I understand. I understood the painting.” This last statement she says quietly while looking down at her boiling pot, and she realizes the cassava are probably overcooked. She pokes at them with a spoon. Yes, it pushes through the roots too easily.
“Is he a good man?” One of the women asks this and the group becomes more quiet, as though they know the answer.
“Yes,” says Iris. “He is good. I wouldn’t let him into the village, otherwise.”
The women remain quiet.
Iris adds, “He means well. He wants to help.” She knows this is still not enough. But she can’t think of anything else to say. She gets up and goes to pour out the boiling water. It is thick and white with the starch of the cassava. She returns to the group with her pot of overcooked cassava and they have already moved on, they are singing a song. It is an old song, a fable about a lion and a monkey and how the lion tricks the monkey. Iris can’t remember the words.
*
Henry has been climbing uphill for hours. The sun has tracked across the sky a considerable distance, or is his perspective changing? Is he cutting across the mountain more than he thought? He stops and looks out from the mountain. He can only see the far-off horizon, now, and he tries to gauge where the sun is in relation to it. It has moved across the sky, but has it begun its downward arch yet? He can’t tell. It still sits high up, a bright white affront that makes his vision spotty and his head feel like it moves even when it is still.
He is so goddamn thirsty. He hasn’t found a single stream yet. When he came with Ellison, it seemed they traversed several different streams as they climbed, or were they just switchbacking across the same one? He remembers the appearance of the streams on the mountain from a distance—silver threads stitched into the rock.
He still hasn’t found a path and has been contending with scratchy, low-lying brush. Keeping his trousers unrolled to his shoes, although hot, at least protects his legs from the scratches of the small, sharp branches of the bushes that he must step through. His progress has certainly been slowed by the bushwhacking, but he has moved above the treeline, so the going has become a little easier. Some of the shrubs have berries on them and he has sat down, picked a few and looked at them in his palm for a long time before deciding the risk was too great. He let the firm, red fruit roll off his palm. He pressed his shoe onto them and then removed it to see the red stain on the soil.
Henry reaches a plateau—the first yet—and he finds that the high subalpine plain is almost a desert. Sparse patches of low grass wave in the welcome breeze. The air feels light and de-oxygenated. He folds his knees and rests on the ground, first kneeling, then he rolls over and lies in the grass. Odd that his legs don’t ache. They feel light, barely touching the scratchy grass beneath him. He rolls his head to the side and watches a small spider pick its way up a strand of grass, then cross over to a neighbouring strand where it moves its legs in a mysterious pattern, rubbing them together then feeling down the blade, plotting its next move. There is plenty of insect life here; he has seen beetles, ants, spiders, mosquitos. But little else. No rodents. Not even a bird has flitted overhead. And it is so quiet. If he strains, he can hear the wind passing through the grass, but even this is a softer sound than usual, almost muffled.
Henry looks across the plain, between blades of grass. He sees the yellow of the grass and the blue of the sky. Why can’t he see Sapitwa yet? He knows it is there. He can feel it watching him. He tries to recall Iris’s warnings. What was it that she warned him against? Only fools climb the mountain. She’d been particularly concerned about Sapitwa. Ellison had mentioned bad spirits. Henry looks up at the sky. The only bad spirit here is him. A dark stain on the mountain, lying here seeping into the soil like the juice from the berries.
He feels the sting of a mosquito on his arm and reaches across to slap at it. He looks at his fingers—they are red with his blood. That’s it, he thinks. Now the mountain will smell my blood. Now it will come after me. He closes his eyes and waits. He sleeps.
*
A crowd gathers near the prayer tree. Offerings are placed around it. Most are food—millet flour—or beer. Some are personal, handmade. Something for the ancestors who are buried beneath. Something that will please the eye or the palate.
Iris watches the villagers approach the kachisi, kneel down, place their offering nearby, back away from it. One final admiring glance back and then they depart, satisfied with their work. She considers what she should offer. And then she knows what she will do. She returns to her aunt’s hut, anxious to begin.
Searching through her aunt’s belongings, Iris finds what she is looking for: a pair of scissors, their blades kept sharp with a stone. She removes her clothing.
When her aunt returns to the hut, Iris is crouching inside it, naked except for her underwear, looking at something, turning it over in her hands.
“Iris!” Her aunt stands in the doorway.
Iris stands up straight, looks at her aunt, and smiles. “Hi Auntie,” she says. “I have my nsembe.” She holds up the piece of cloth. It is a flower, a large, bulky flower with many petals. Blue in colour. The petals have been sewn together in the centre. “It’s my uniform.”
Her aunt stares at the remains of the dress on the floor of the hut—messy bits of cloth. Her nurse’s pin gleams where it lies, still attached to an unused scrap. Her hat, remarkably white, thrown overtop.
“It was a nice dress,” she says. She stays in the doorway, blocks the light. “So you’ve made your decision. You won’t be returning.”
Iris looks at the flower in her hands. “I don’t know.” She walks to the doorway, looks out on the yard. “It seems right. To be here now.”
“Don’t be rash, Iris.” She looks at the flower in Iris’s hand. It is large and bulky and droops sadly. “Will you get in trouble for ruining that?”
Iris tightens her jaw. “It’s mine. I paid for it. I earned it.”
Her aunt sighs. “See? You talk like a city girl now. Maybe it is too hard. Too hard to come back.” She reaches out for Iris’s face but doesn’t touch it. She drops her hand. “You are so closed, now.”
Iris moves away. She steps out of the hut and into the yard. The sun on her skin feels warm and reassuring. She can see Mulanje from here. It is bare and bald and hard as a diamond. It is angry. That much she can feel. Ever since they catapulted toward it in Ellison’s car. It remains angry. But tonight, she thinks. Tonight is her chance to offer something. To offer what is left of herself, and to see what the spirits wish to giv
e back.
She reaches to the nape of her neck for her hair and grasps it. She turns back to her aunt.
“Will you help me with this?”
Her aunt nods, and they re-enter the darkness of the hut together.
Chapter 18
When Henry wakes, it has cooled off and the sun is low. The sky has taken on a darker hue and he can see the moon, a thin crescent hanging up in the blue. Henry rolls over in the grass and feels the ache in his muscles, the emptiness in his stomach, and the dryness in his mouth. There are a few large welts on his neck and arms that itch. He suppresses the desire to scratch at them. The itch is almost worse than the hunger and the thirst.
He sits up. There is Sapitwa, the peak is just visible across the plain and under the moon. It has been there all along, watching him sleep. He stands up and faces it as he struggles to find his balance. He starts to walk.
If Sapitwa is there, within such an easy reach, then there must be a rest hut somewhere nearby. His pace quickens at the thought. He sniffs the air for cedar wood smoke but smells only the clean mountain air, empty of fragrance. He stares at the peak, tries to determine whether this is the face that he had seen when he stayed in the hut with Ellison.
His body moves amazingly well without interference from himself. The orchestra plays on without the conductor. But with each hour that passes his effort rises, and his body tells him increasingly of the dwindling reserves. Warning signals are being sent up from below and he is suppressing them all, exerting his autocratic power. Like a war-primed youth, he is blind with a desire to carry on, to fight, to win.
Kumwembe’s words: if you are not able to fight you will struggle. There is wisdom in this advice. Being bloodthirsty but satiated was infinitely better than the alternative. To struggle is to be weak. To struggle is to be overcome.
He should know. He has struggled with and lost to his memory—a terrifying opponent. He can restrain, repress, stifle, smother, submerge, but it is there, it is all there. Of course it is there, how could he think it is somehow separate from him, it is what makes him who he is. Memory is him and he is memory, an overlapping Venn diagram of consciousness, trick rings that never separate.
And now, as he walks up here so close to the sky, that slice of moon must be tugging on them because they rise inside him again, flood his arid mind.
Emma stomps after the mouse that had just made him jump. It had appeared suddenly, it bolted from behind a garbage can outside the restaurant where they had just eaten sandwiches. They were hearty sandwiches with thick, crusty bread, and she’d struggled to bite into them with her front tooth missing.
The creature has scurried back behind the can and Emma turns to him and smiles. A stark cut-out on the wilderness of the graffiti-decorated brick wall: her wide pale face, brown eyes, freckled cheeks, skinny legs under baggy shorts, looking over at him with that child-adult look.
You were afraid of that little mouse? Daddy! Her tone is scolding but she runs on those gangly legs from the mouse and into him with a fierce hug. I’ll protect you. Her breath on his chest is humid and smells like mustard. She lets go and he lets her go and watches her run over to where Sarah is sitting to tell her, no doubt, of his cowardice.
Now she lies at the foot of the stairs. Her head on her arms, her body spilling over the steps, white skin between strands of sweat-darkened hair. I can’t climb them Daddy. My legs won’t go. He hurries over to her and touches her shoulder. Heat flares from her, burns his skin.
Sarah is here. They are here together; they continue to have a common purpose, a thread of love still stitches them together. She sits across the bed from him, silent. Emma sleeps fitfully between them. Beside him, plastic tubing climbs to the bag of medication.
He knows he should speak but he has already said too much. He already told Sarah what he did earlier in the day. He told her that he signed the consent form but he did not tell her how fear drew those lines—the thin, spidery script. He did not tell her that his scrawl on the page looked careless but when he handed the form over to the oncologist the page was buckled from the sweat of his palm.
He wants to tell her all this but he won’t. He won’t because it is his job to know what to do, his job to understand the drugs, the treatment options, the evidence. But even though he knows it, every last word of it, he has a sick, sinking feeling that it is all meaningless.
He lifts his eyes and sees Sarah watching the drip of fluid, falling one sphere at a time into the reservoir and then down the line and into their daughter’s hand. From there her body will welcome it, allow it into her marrow where it will methodically and dispassionately destroy her blood cells, line by line. From this wreckage, it is hoped, she will replace them all. Flowers from a wand. Something out of nothing.
It’ll be okay.
Sarah looks over at him and knows that he is lying.
And then, with the spin of himself on his own axis away from this, the memories recede.
Fight or flight. Along with food and sex these are the basic survival responses. For the last few months he has not lifted himself from the lowest levels of human experience but sure as hell he has secured his own survival. Obscurely driven, plunging forward. If he wasn’t so afraid of what he has done, he would laugh.
Why did you have to be so aggressive? You can’t always win. You can’t control the world.
And her eyes when she said it: dry and hopeless and hard.
God Sarah, I wanted to cure her. It was our only chance.
Chance? You left it up to chance?
He hears the sobs as though they are coming from out there, and if he walks on he will stumble across the creature responsible for them—half man, half beast, staring into a pond of his own tears.
For a while after the sun has sunk below the horizon, the sky remains lit with a colourless glow, enough to see by. He finds a narrow footpath and joins it as it crosses the plain, but when he realizes it is taking him away from Sapitwa, he leaves the path and crosses through the grass again. Once the sunlight goes altogether, he relies on the meagre light from the thin sliver of moon and the stars.
He looks up at the night sky and does not recognize it. Of course there is no North Star to find. But maybe something else to grab hold of: the Big Dipper, or Cassiopeia. But there is nothing familiar about this sky. The stars gather in patterns that are mysterious to him. Everything here evades him. Everything remains beyond his reach.
And then he receives a gift. He hears a rushing sound, the sound of movement. He stands and listens. It is beneath him, this sound, this movement. He crouches down and puts all he has into the listening. He feels the funnelling of sound to his ear, the fine-tuning of his attention to this, just to this. He places his hand on the ground and feels it. There is movement under him and it is the movement of water.
Henry scrambles along the ground, feeling in front of him, looking for it. And then he sees it and feels it all at once. Cold and wet on his hands. Bright in his eyes, moonlight coming up at him from the ground. A mountain stream.
He dips his hands into it, between the rocks and pebbles. It is shallow, maybe two inches deep. He scoops at it, brings it to his mouth. He wets his lips in it, lets it slide over his tongue and down the back of his throat. My God, it is a gift. A miraculous gift. He splashes it on his face, scoops handfuls of it into his mouth, feels himself return.
Crouching down, something presses against his thigh. He stands up, reaches into the pocket of his trousers and finds it. It is still there. The old man’s shell. Did it find the water for him? Did it guide him to it? Or was it Sapitwa? Was the mountain tossing him one last scrap? Or Emma? God, Emma, is her sweet soul up there warming that strange sky, blowing kisses, fulfilling wishes? Regardless of who or what or how, he is grateful and he says so out loud: thank you. He kneels down, dips his forehead in the stream and says it again.
*
The villag
e darkens with the setting sun and Iris joins the throng of people moving downstream to the centre of the village. The celebrations have been ongoing for hours, and now the firelight is visible from where she is, still many huts away. She can see the glow cast on everything around it and the village shrinks and grows in the changing light. Iris allows the crowd to move her along, closer to the ceremonial fire. She feels the heat from the bodies around her and, as she gets closer, feels the heat from the fire itself. There is a drumbeat; at first it is outside of her, a regular pulse, and as she gets closer the pulse becomes indistinguishable from her own, the one inside her, the one she can’t stop.
She goes first to the prayer tree and places her flower just in front of it, along with all the other offerings and kneels down in front of the tree. Her throat tightens with each beat of the drums. She bows her head and tries to think of something to say to the ancestors. Something honest—there is no use lying to them.
She comes up with nothing so straightens and looks at the shrine, at the offerings people have left here. A bowl of millet flour. A rough wooden carving of some animal with a large snout and teeth. A piece of cloth, rolled up and tied with a piece of string. A bundle of hair.
As she looks at the offerings, she cannot ignore the fear, the grief, the anger and the powerlessness. This is the other side of the spirit. This is the side that her mother feared but did not discuss. Iris saw it in the way she looked at Mulanje Mountain, where the dark spirits were felt to roam free and were not bound to the rules of village life, and in the way she eyed the sing’anga in her village.