Modern Gods

by Nick Laird

  “You think he took it from your bag?”

  “Those were his eyes under the floor.”

  “The little shit.”

  “I told Margo I was going to give him some more just so Belef could whip him again.”

  They watched Namor take the pig’s cheeks in both his hands, almost lovingly, and then slap it on the face. It squealed and went chuntering off into the forest.

  —

  Margo pulled the Paul Smith bag from her pink rucksack and handed it to Belef: she took it, peered in it, and set it by her feet.

  “Say ‘Liklik samting tasol,’” Stan prompted Margo, and she tried it.

  And Belef said, “It’s very fine.”

  She picked it back up and tore away the blue tissue paper.

  She looked at the multicolored, striped dressing gown and held it up this way and that and pushed her face into it and decided to put it on there and then.

  Napasio and the other women came across to see what was happening, and one by one they came forward to feel the hem of the garment. A young girl smelled it. Belef let them, then drew apart and gave a little twirl to many encouraging sighs.

  “Joseph and his Technicolor dreamcoat,” Liz said.

  “Can you ask her if she’ll take it off now? I don’t think we should film her in it,” whispered Margo. “Looks a bit . . . artificial.”

  “You’re not getting that off her now,” said Liz, as Belef tied the dressing gown cord in a bow around her waist.

  —

  They were setting up to film Leftie when Stan arrived. He shook Liz’s hand and looked away towards the fire pit. One of the women cooking waved at him and he waved back.

  “Have you been here before?

  “Never, but I’ve heard of it. Kirlassa. This is all sacred space to Belef’s clan. I understand they had quite a haus tambaran here. You should film in there, Paolo, if it’s still standing. It would give you guys a really good idea of the culture here. Benches where the men just slept all day while their wives worked. The garamut drums and the secret pipes they played in the roof—they’d tell the women and children it was the spirits coming back.”

  Paolo gave a small Italian shrug and reattached his eye to the camera.

  “How was your afternoon?” Liz asked briskly and Stan took his glasses off and wiped them on his T-shirt in his customarily apologetic manner.

  “I went to the tractor pool with the Werner kids actually, to look for you.”

  “I’m sorry about that.”

  “Shall we film?” Margo asked.

  “Oh it was fine. They had a swim and I found this banded weevil. Fascinating. It was pale blue with black stripes, but a kind of lighter iridescent blue I hadn’t seen before—”

  “Liz,” Margo said firmly, indicating Leftie, who sat on the log bench, waiting.

  “Sorry, yes. Have you seen his twin, Alan? He’s over there.”

  —

  Leftie’s eyes, deep-set and black and sad, flicked to either side, as if they couldn’t quite bear to land on her.

  “Before,” he began, “we did not live good. We stayed in the men’s house and ate the animals we hunted and told the women and the children all the meat was eaten by the spirits. We fought with other tribes and beat the women.”

  All the time he spoke his hands twisted round and round, a pair of snakes trying to get the better of each other.

  “What did you fight over, with the other tribes?”

  Leftie stilled his hands and gave a rueful smile, but still he didn’t make eye contact.

  “Everything. When I was a boy, everything. When the rains did not come. When the food was short. We fought the Lusi for two years over baibai nuts. We fought with Nainal over a woman. Twenty-three men got killed. We used bows and arrows. We would wait for them and—”

  He stopped, aware that he had grown enthusiastic. The hand-twisting resumed.

  “They were very bad times.”

  “And what happened with the mission?”

  “When Mista Josh came he wanted to know everything. We storied him on Titikolo and Amulmul and Black Moses. He visited and wrote the stories down in books. And we were pleased because there are many hills in New Ulster and they had come to ours.”

  “He was learning about your history.”

  “It happened like this. He took all the stories and told us, ‘You must all now follow me, and I will work this.’”

  “What did he mean?”

  “All these other stories that youse are working, these are not real, these are not true, they are Satan tricking you all. These are the lies and the longlong tricks of your ancestors, the law of darkness.”

  “And did you know who Satan was?”

  Leftie shrugged.

  “He said Satan is the baddest of all spirits, the most bikhet. He is not masalai. Satan is more strong than that. And he will come to get you. Satan will pull you down to the belowground and keep you there and burn you every day. Mister Josh stood up in this church and made fire of all these papers, of the stories of Amulmul. He burned them in front of everyone.” Leftie waggled his fingers in the air, imitating the fire. “And he said, ‘You cannot live with this anymore. You cannot live in darkness. All of your ancestors died in sin because they did not know the real God. They are all in hell burning and crying forever. This is a fact. They are calling out to you. And that is how he turned our thinking.”

  “And what about Belef? How did you come to follow her?”

  Leftie shrugged again.

  “They are keeping secrets from us.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Belef saw the truth. They say we are rubbish, that we are nothingmen, but they put our gods in a big house in Sydney in glass cages. They steal our gods and give nothing back. They live in a house with plenty food and plenty water and give us nothing. We follow them and our children die. It’s same same.”

  Margo nodded.

  “That’s great. That’s more than enough.”

  —

  Belef led them around, resplendent in her Paul Smith dressing gown. Paolo walked behind, filming everything, scanning the cleared earth, the women cooking, the church, the controller’s hut. Stan and Margo followed. Margo held her trusty clipboard across her chest like a breastplate against the world. Liz and Posingen were the beast’s straggly tail. As they set off, Posingen produced a stick of sugarcane from his pocket and broke it in half, offering it to her. Like chewing a twig, but delicious.

  “I’m fine,” she said when he produced another one.

  “No, no,” he said. “Look.”

  “What is it?”

  “From the leg of the cassowary.”

  It was a small bone flute, seven or eight holes roughly carved into it.

  Posingen placed it in his mouth and played, unmistakably, the opening notes of “Danny Boy.”

  “That’s an Irish song.”

  “I know,” he said, and smiled. His handsome face looked goofy.

  “The ‘Londonderry Air.’ How do you know it?” Liz asked.

  “My school in Wapini was St. Ignatius mission school, run by Irish nuns. An Irish priest. Father McNally.”

  “How was it?”

  Posingen gave his massive shoulders a small shiver, and allowed himself a wry smile.

  “I learned to read some and write some. And some songs. But the nuns were very angry. They were cross patches. They did not want to be there.”

  “How angry?” Liz asked.

  Posingen held out his forearm—a crisscross pattern of welts stretched from the wrist to the elbow.

  —

  Stan stopped Belef by an okari tree at the edge of the runway. A bulbous blister the size of a football erupted from the trunk at head height, a few bright heart-shaped leaves sprouting from it, in contrast to the oka
ri’s darker foliage. The carbuncle looked like a frog’s vocal sac, smooth and swollen. Stan pointed.

  “What do you call this in Koriam?”

  “Bomba.”

  “Bomba,” he repeated. “We call it an ant plant in English.”

  “Bomba,” Belef declared again and tapped it with her stick. In response ants swarmed from it down the trunk and Liz saw the underside was honeycombed with galleries, ant real estate. Belef hit the plant again and another wave of émigrés erupted. “It takes from the tree, the bomba, and gives nothing back.”

  Kirlassa had succumbed to forest, been swallowed by it, and they walked through the ruination. Nature had paraphrased each hut into a mockery, a prototype of hut. The idea of a wall might appear, but rotted, mossy, subsided at an angle, and now a platform for a roost of saplings, underpinning for a bank of dank ferns. A center post stood sentry oddly by itself, robed in white-flowering clematis. The ardency of the greenery cast a spell of silence over the group as they walked among the dereliction.

  Hundreds of years might have passed—these ruins could be Mayan, Aztec, Khmer—but it was only a decade. Nothing really. Cities dealt exclusively in human time: working hours, last minute, the final call. But out here one encountered other kinds: insect time, bird time, grass time, fern time, the time it took a river to erode a hole in a rock so it looked like a seat of a tractor, the time it took a cloud to pass across the blue roof of a clearing . . .

  “What are they doing?” Liz asked, pointing. One woman sat near a little stepped stream that came down through the trees and then disappeared into the ground. Her lowered head was very still, as if in prayer. She was staring at the hole where the water disappeared.

  “Ah this is Mupil, a holy place. The river is called Power. Come.”

  As the procession came towards her, the woman stopped her earth vigil and looked up. One of her eyes followed them and the other did not. Belef pointed at the hole in the limestone where the water disappeared. The falling water made a low-pitched, repetitive rushing sound, and Belef cupped one hand to her ear—another inauthentic gesture, Liz thought. Belef was also a “presenter.”

  “Do you hear the noise?” she said. “It is our generator. This place belongs to Michael Ross and Johnson and Bullet.”

  “What is she looking for?” Liz asked.

  “Pikchas of the cargo.”

  There was a brief exchange in Koriam between Belef and the woman, and Belef knelt.

  “These ones—”

  A column of ants—little ebony centaurs—passed over the edge of the limestone. With their raised front legs, they carried tiny white specks.

  “Are they eggs, the little white things?”

  “These ones make a pikcha of what is coming. They carry rice to show us rice is coming. And this one—”

  A beetle—testaceous, thuggish, low-slung—plodded across another part of the rock.

  “This one is a truck going in, and look . . .”

  Another ant walked towards it, and then round it.

  “There is a car, avoiding it. It is a mark, it is a sign, and now we must get up the songs.”

  —

  “That was pretty good, but let’s try it again.”

  “Give me a minute.”

  There was just Margo and Paolo and Liz left by the stream now. Liz leaned back on her hunkers. Her thighs ached but the shot looked good and she had to hold the pose. She repeated the same spontaneous gestures at the limestone rock, the little river.

  “This is a culture that strives to re-present reality through metaphor. From Anglo-Saxon to Native American cultures, traditional magic focuses on miming the object you want to capture or create. Charms, spells, poetry—they’re incanatory; they call forth what they desire. And wanting something badly enough makes you see it everywhere. Religions involve mapping our desires onto objects. Christians see the body of Christ in bread or his blood in wine. And as we’ve seen with this stream, whose rushing and falling, to followers of the Story, sounds like the generators they hear at the white men’s houses, and these insects they liken to cars and trucks, everything is proof, everything is evidence that they are right, and that some God—their God—is sending them signs to tell them so.”

  —

  Belef sat on a tree stump carved into a seat. She was shaking in time with the drumming; her eyes were closed. The dancers faced her and took small rhythmic steps back and forth, chanting, “Amulmul, Amulmul.” Some had adorned themselves with small headdresses of foliage or entwined leaves, but they wore their usual mix of Western and native clothes.

  Belef raised both hands and the crowd responded as if on invisible strings, letting themselves be jerked upwards and upwards. Her eyes were closed. She conducted the mass around her. Suddenly one of the men began hooting, high pitched and eerie.

  At the call, the people parted and a conga line, a snake of six figures appeared, shuffling from foot to foot, hands on the hips of the one in front. The leader—Alan—had the face of a snake drawn in white on his bare chest. The rest had painted bones onto their bodies, as if the skeleton showed through. They were animalized—some wore headdresses of cuscus or tree kangaroo, others sported the fantastical plumes of paradise birds.

  Stones, shells, bottle caps adorned their ears, their necks, their fingers. One had a nest of broken twigs in his hair, and one wore a cape made of matted reeds, held with a clasp fashioned from a pig tusk. They wore anklets and wristlets of dried grass. They carried spears and chanted, “Mon-eee Mon-eee Mon-eee,” as they circled the central fire. They were go-betweens, Liz thought—offering a lesson about life and death. The rainbows of feathers, the mother-of-pearl, the adornments spoke to vitality, but the skeleton beneath had been made visible, and it said, What you are, we once were. What we are, you will be.

  The men separated to rush an invisible enemy, hooting and brandishing their spears.

  Liz asked Belef, as she sat on her makeshift throne, “What is this?”

  “The dead will repay us with cargo. We show how much we do for them. We give everything away so they will help us.”

  She gave a loud sniff and spat some scarlet betel juice on the grass.

  —

  Liz stood a few feet in front of the skeleton men—they wheeled behind her with their arms out, like kids pretending to be planes. The chanting was so loud she had to shout into her mic. “This dancing is to please the dead. Belef and her followers don’t want the dead to be banished, or be invisible, or to be sectioned off in a graveyard. The whole point of tonight’s ceremony is to indebt the dead, to make the dead owe them something, to oblige them to deliver the cargo, to send the living their reward. The Story wants to make a future by entering into ethical relations with the past.”

  —

  Napasio led Namor’s huge pig to the clearing. Several men descended on it and the squealing started. When they drew back it lay on its side with its legs trussed, a block of wood tied in its mouth. So much living poundage of pork and salt and fat. It strained and jerked and threw its head back to moan. Namor watched from the edge of the group, chewing a fingernail. Leftie knelt beside it, whispered to it, and with a quick twitch of a blade slit the pig’s throat. Blood came in blackish spurts, a curtain of it falling from the pink gape of flesh, darkening the grass. Even with the wood wedged in its mouth the pig didn’t stop squealing. Paolo went in close on its eyes; they were clouding over. Namor moved beside it and stroked its broad shuddering flank. When it stopped moving and was silent, he disappeared at a run into the forest.

  “I was instructed by Michael Ross. We work it like this so the tumbuna are close and the tumbuna want to come up now and they have sorrow for us. They are moved, we give worry to them.”

  She adjusted her cap and walked back across the front of the fire, pausing to point at the pig already being roasted on a spit over the flames.

  “We kill t
he pigs and we abandon our gardens and we march and go hungry and we stay awake. They will help us for this. When they see how much we do, they will give us the cargo they have. The living need cargo more than the dead. Who would deny it?

  She turned and looked around at her listeners. A few nodded agreement. Some were talking among themselves and she raised her voice.

  “It is like this: The men kill the women. The men kill the dongen. My own mother screams from underground. And the women want to send the cargo to us, but the men say no, they cannot have it. The men stop it. The mission men want to keep it all to themselves. I have some knowledge to pass on. Michael Ross told me this last night.”

  Belef waited until the entire group was silent. Only the fire sizzled and cracked as fat from the pig dripped on it. She spoke softly again, imparting a secret.

  “I have told you before that Jesus is a prophet of Amulmul and wanted to help us. He wanted to come back to us, but the white men stopped him. I have new knowledge. The truth is this: Jesus is a woman. They have lied to us about it! She has no penis! In all the pictures, what is there? Just”—she rubbed her thumb and fingers together—“a little hair. They know the female is powerful—they try to stop it. They are fooling youse. Before they told us we were free we had a queen. I saw this queen again on the secret medal Lizbet gave Namor this afternoon—”

  Belef pulled a coin from the pocket of the meri skirt and held it up. It was the fifty-pence piece Liz had given Namor. She waved it towards Liz.

  “I know this pikcha. She is Queen, Queen Elissabet. You wear her name. You work for her. And the woman is the most powerful, but men have placed themselves between us and the queen; if they were not there we would be fine. And the white men know it, for they do not hit their wives or cross them. The whites put a silasila around the cargo. They stopped us with a fence. They buried it underground. They burnt it. They made it disappear. But we will find it. Elissabet will lead us to it.”

  —

  Maybe a dozen fires were lit across the runway now, and they sat in a circle around the fire nearest the church. Margo had brought spare clothing for Liz, and she put on her North Face jacket and a woolly hat. Belef stepped from person to person and held a battered tin bowl of warm cloudy liquid up to their mouths. She said, “Take, drink, do this in remembrance of me.”