Whether he got up the next morning or the one after, or for that matter, the one after that, he had no idea. But when he woke, he felt stronger, more buoyant than he could remember feeling before. And he felt also a kind of clear purposefulness, a kind of sharpness that was almost like anger.
He determined to stay where he was.
MINIMAL AWARENESS
The heat of the summer carried itself long into the fall. In all those months Robert Sams remained quiet and virtually unremarked in his ailanthus grove.
Because of the experiences that had come to him, he felt he was being transformed. He felt sure that the constraints and limitations that bound the lives of other people had less and less to do with him. In a way, he was confused. He was filled by a feeling of strength and acuteness, almost a feeling of power, but he had no idea how to exercise or extend such a thing. He was unsure how to proceed. This made him tense, but he felt no need to rush. Whatever was necessary had always come to him in full measure. He had no doubt it would happen so again. He was still shy of presenting himself in the neighbourhood, so he spent his days lying on the mattress or sleeping and would only venture out very late at night to forage for food in the dumpsters by the supermarkets, to get water from a hydrant, and to provide himself with the few things he needed.
It was on one such foray that a young white woman stepped boldly up to him and began to talk almost before she could see how he would respond. He noticed, without making any special effort, her expensive, if filthy, clothes, worn-out shoes, her frazzled hair and her desperate overall disarray. This was a woman whose career as a derelict was just beginning. She spoke rapidly, and her eyes constantly searched in his for something—reassurance, perhaps. She began to cry as she told her story of bad relationships, abortions, temporary jobs. She went on to tell of meeting a high school friend, now married to a successful young lawyer, now pregnant and happily expecting her first child. ‘She’s got the kind of life I should have had,’ she wailed as Robert turned and walked away.
He saw other people flickering around him on the street. ‘What,’ the thought came to him, ‘What is this visiting that fills people full, and what is this departing that empties them out?’ Aunt Carlotta had once told him that in between his older sister’s birth and his own, his mother had given birth prematurely to twins, both born dead. This, she explained, gave him certain powers and obligated him to certain deities since he was the repository of both their souls as well as his own. This statement had made no real impression on him, and he was indifferent to its memory even as it returned.
But there was something in all that, undeniable as the first waking moment every morning when his eyes would pop open and, bam! he would just be there, awake. A moment that divided itself from sleep and dream as clearly as day from night. How quickly then that awakening would ramify into a sense of warmth and brightness, shadow and damp, a certain itching inside his nose, a smell of cooking and the buzz of a mosquito, and a shout of a schoolchild. Still, those things were not to be acted on, but floated around him like an enveloping skin. Just as inevitably, an interior voice arose, going over the conversation with the girl, the memory of his childhood, repeating them as if some meaning had to be teased out. Or it might happen in much the same way, that he would be bidden to go see who was shouting, to yell at a neighbour whose radio was on so loud, to go find some food, or worry about a rash on his skin. Then came the temptation to let himself be guided by outer promptings.
This he resisted most strongly for he knew that, should he give in, he would weaken himself immeasurably. Finally and again, he would become as other men, driven to identify themselves as ‘a hungry man’, ‘a woman who wants a fur coat’, ‘a teenage girl who wanted to impress my boyfriend’. These little soundtracks, these story lines, had a kind of autonomous existence. He could see them leading people around by the ear.
It was at such moments of temptation that he knew he must not move. He lay there on his mattress for hours on end, while day became night and night became day, while people went to work and came home, and while sparrows flickered through the air and clouds passed slowly overhead.
One afternoon he was discovered by a small wild pack of tan and brown children between the ages of eight and ten. He watched as they stalked through the trees and saw that they were imagining themselves a tribe in the jungle. He himself was immersed in the heavy, rank, vegetal aroma that descended from the trees above him. The children saw him lying there, recoiled and vanished. Next day they reappeared, this time accompanied by an older, tougher boy aged perhaps twelve and doubtless the older brother of one of them. They approached Robert more carefully this time, coming in the manner of hunters. He could see that each was armed with a clump of hard clotted earth from the surrounding lot. The children liked to have wars with these dirt bombs because, when they struck, they both stung and exploded in a hail of dust. The elder boy, in a show of bravado, stepped into plain sight and let fly at him with the missile.
Robert didn’t move, but suddenly, far more quickly than anyone could have expected, his left hand shot up and he caught the thing in full flight. Further, he managed to catch the clod in such a way that it did not break. He rolled on his side to look at his assailants. They backed off, afraid that he was about to retaliate in kind. Instead, he merely stared at them, and slowly raised the dirt bomb to his lips. He put it in his mouth. He chewed it deliberately, as all the children watched in amazement, their eyes popping out of their heads, their jaws agape. Then he swallowed the dirt. The children ran away and left him alone.
This performance made a definite impression. Every child recounted it to his disbelieving parents. Thus Robert’s deed made the neighbourhood aware of a new and not entirely ordinary resident.
BLISS
‘They all slidin’ around in his head. He can’t see ’em yet. But they splittin’ him up every way.’ With much shaking of her own head and clucking of tongue, Aunt Carlotta delivered her opinion to Robert’s elder sister, Elmira. Word of the strange occupant in the vacant lot had led to desultory, then quite overt missions of observation by the neighbourhood ladies. It was not long before one of them had figured out who he was, not much longer before others had confirmed her surmise. Soon some moderately well-intentioned soul had conveyed this intelligence to Elmira.
Elmira knew better than to tell her mother. She did not want to cause any trouble, but she felt she had to do something. She went to the vacant lot where she saw her brother rolling on the ground beneath a tree, grunting softly. She knew then that the police would surely lock him up. She called social services. When that didn’t work, she went to Aunt Carlotta, in spite of the fact that she herself was a modern woman, working and taking night-school courses in computer programming and business administration.
‘What will happen to him?’
‘I will have to see.’
Aunt Carlotta’s firmness in this utterance afforded Elmira, if not exactly solace, at least the feeling that she had placed the burden in hands of some competence and that perhaps help was on the way. Since she couldn’t think of anything else she could do, she let the more problematic and peculiar aspects of her brother’s behaviour fade in her mind. However, she was a kind person. She looked in on him a few times a week and brought him food.
Other ladies who had known Robert as a child took pity on him and performed similar mercies and so he didn’t live in want. It was incredible to them that he could live there, with no roof over his head, save the leaves and branches. As they rushed home through the torrential summer rains, they wondered how he could live, hunkered on his feet, his back against a skinny tree trunk, the rain pouring down on his head and through his hair, forming rivulets around the features of his face and washing over him, front and back, through clothes already completely soaked. No more could they imagine, in August’s hard dry heat how he could just lie there on the hard rubble, baking beneath the sun, unmoving as a lizard flung onto the desert and looking, as he lay there, as if sunset
would find him no more than a parched and empty shell.
But Robert was alert as could be. He was just no longer operating with reference to language, much less most other forms of social nicety. Experience did not divide itself for him into the identity of things and their attributes nor kinds of actions and their qualities. Language floated above him like an iridescent oil slick on some distant surface, casting only the faintest and most flickering shadows on the constant movement of sound, sight, touch, smell, taste, awareness, which flowed around him in careless swirls, sometimes combining more or less evenly, sometimes with one sensation standing out from the others.
At the centre of the sound of a bottle breaking—between the first pop, just after the splintering crash, and before the multiple tinkling gritty fall of the shards—there was a large space in the air which opened up for him.
From this, or, rather, through this, some intelligence beyond the senses was announcing itself. He sensed it sometimes as he saw a white curtain, a bedsheet, hung inside a window up in the building at the back of the vacant lot teased out of the window by the faint summer wind, flipping and flapping in the breeze, beckoning, disporting itself erratically like a random prognostication lingering, charming the eye and highlighting the little cooling breeze that caressed the skin so delightfully. In just such a way, arising from some such chance perception, a world of feeling and intuitive knowing would expand around him. Worlds succeeded worlds.
Each sensation presented a crossroads. . . . A sparkling, cool, blue morning when there was salt in the air spoke of boundless energy and the optimism of endeavour, the challenging expanse of clarity. . . . A long, hot lurid sunset told of the slow fall of glorious empires, the splendour seen only in its waning, illuminated only then by the presentiment of loss. . . . Sheets of cold rain conveyed the solitary struggle of man, alone in the forest, and the righteous strength to be derived from purpose tested alone in the boundaries of unobliging elements. Even the eruptions on his skin, rashes and blisters, and the abscesses that once grew along his gums, were portents of a change wrought by the invisible elements which, bit by bit, were transforming him. His senses were unnaturally acute.
So, all without stopping or coalescing or ever becoming rigid, Robert moved in the strong arms of what he sensed as an immense intelligence, and he, the perceiver, was a bubble in that great unfolding being.
AFRICA
As if upon the ever changing surface of a great primordial sea, the light of remote stars, cold and sharp, played and filtered down. A strong, yellow, waxy moon repeated its pull and sway. As if from these or some other vast impersonal attractions, and heaving up slowly, achingly, like a continent rising up from the ocean’s floor, the Dark Continent, Africa arose in Robert’s mind and assumed its central place. Powerful, majestic, imperfectly understood and inexhaustibly fascinating, Africa rose from beneath his mind and became immovable in it. Robert knew that the sight of those children, creeping through his little forest, months earlier, had something to do with this.
For the first time in many months, he stirred himself with purposeful activity. He spent one week, working as much as eighteen hours a day, gathering up all the rocks, bricks, chunks of masonry he needed and piling them into a low wall. The shape of this wall, enclosing as much of the lot as possible, was meant to delineate the shores of Africa as nearly as Robert could remember them from grade school geography lessons. It diverged from that memory only to accommodate necessity and inspiration. Thus the open end of the vacant lot corresponded to the southern tip of Africa and, in a happy accident, his glade of ailanthus trees found itself at what would have been the equator.
When this was completed to his satisfaction, he built a hut for himself in his mini-jungle. He found four large wooden boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, set them like towers at each of the corners of a square, nailed in two-by-fours to connect them and built walls and roof from cardboard and discarded plywood. He found the result quite pleasing, especially after he had painted the outside with various symbols—snakes, rainbows, lightening bolts, palm trees and the like.
Robert’s inspiration coincided with the onset of cold weather. The residents of the neighbourhood were more than a little surprised to see, as the leaves and little branches that supported them fell from the trees, that a small, eccentric domicile, enclosed by a meandering foot-high rubble wall, had sprung up in their environs. The abandoned building on one side of the vacant lot was now being occupied, squatted in, by a gang of dope-smoking, dope-dealing pseudo-Rastafarians who looked on the structure as a far-out and righteous design. Their approval gave to Robert, although unbeknownst to him, a certain protection from random vandalism. The pseudo-Rastas had a reputation for violence.
Robert began taking occasional walks. He liked the feeling of leaving home behind, of walking around knowing it was there, of looking forward to returning, and of the look of it as it came back into view. But mostly he liked to stay in his domain and, while there, to think about Africa in its many aspects.
When he thought about the enormous deserts, he felt that the strength of dryness in him, and when he thought about rainforests, he felt his power of humid fertility; the delicate shorelines brought him beauty. He rose up like a sky-born traveller, through sunrises and sunsets, towers of conch-coloured cumulus clouds, waxing and waning moons. And, as he appropriated the powers of his chosen land, his mind turned to concern with the many tribes of his many people. And not just the living, for had not Aunt Carlotta said that the souls of the dead returned to Africa? Thus Robert began consorting with the past. The gods of his ancestors entered him and took possession of him. He peered out on the world with new eyes.
To complete his Africa, Robert found a bathtub outside a building that was being gutted several blocks away. Working through the night, he dragged it back to his lot. He placed it in the centre of his Africa, plugged it up and filled it with water. This lake shone at the heart of the Dark Continent. Through its waters the ancestral spirits would rise and return to this world, and through it also the gods of that land would make manifest their appearance here.
CROSSROADS
When Robert’s mother, Amalie was apprised of her son’s activities, she was torn between the instinct to recoil from him and the desire not to be, or not be considered, uncharitable to an unfortunate child. Accordingly when she ran into him on the street, she would greet him with civility. She would, from time to time, bring him some food or, as the weather turned cold, some clothes. Her one attempt to engage him in conversation was not, to her mind, a success.
‘You know, Robert, God loves the poor and downtrodden.’ (The Reverend Grove had passed from her life, called to a new flock in Galveston, Texas, but her faith remained strong.)
‘Indeed He must, Momma,’ Robert smiled softly, ‘ ’cause he went out of his way to make an awful lot of ’em.’ From this point on, Amalie armed herself with virtue when she saw her strange son and closed her ears when others began to speak of him.
Winter set in with snowstorms in late November. Robert wandered about the neighbourhood, chanting tunelessly in a high voice that sounded like a ragged wind.
‘First it hovers in a frozen cloud,
White and ghostly kind.
Then, tip, tip, tip; it lets go.
The snowflakes they fall and s-s-s-s they melt.
Where are they hiding
These shadows? These friends?
They touch on the street and the sidewalk and the ground.
They melt, and leave a spot of cold
Till the snow can stick.
It takes our hard world to its own.
Our doings must make pathways to bring us back
To find our shadows, to find our friends.’
He sang this song until the skies cleared, and crisp brilliant days, very cold, succeeded one another for weeks on end. He walked idly through the neighbourhood. He was seen everywhere. Everywhere he was searching until he found an old man who served as a crossing guard f
or the children at the elementary school. Equipped with a fluorescent orange Sam Browne belt and a knapsack in which he evidently kept his lunch, this old man, with his game right leg, gnarled cane and peculiar, whimsical manner, showed up at the corner whenever school was in session. He saw that the children coming to and leaving school came to no harm. No one thought to ask whether this service was paid for by the School Board or was a self-appointed task, but, for whatever reason, the old man hobbled there every day and tended to the children conscientiously.
‘Come little chickens, come. Shoo, shoo, shoo. Quick, now, quick.’ Thus he would ferry them across the street as the more sprightly ones would cluck and hop like chicks or carol ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo’. The older children may have found these ministrations tiresome, but any inclination to sass the old man was stopped by a sharp look so full of menace that having seen it once, none wished to provoke him again.
While school was in session, the old man waited, sitting on the steps of the school, drinking coffee from a paper cup, humming to himself, looking as if those steps were his living room and he was enjoying his leisure. Robert observed him thus for several weeks. One afternoon, just before school was to let out, the old man gave Robert a long look and then slowly moved his eyes in the direction of Robert’s dwelling. Robert knew, though no words were exchanged, that the man would come to visit him that evening. He nodded and went off to prepare for his first visitor.
He got candle ends from the trashcan by the church. He used money he’d begged to buy rum and some day-old cakes. He got orange crates, covered them with an old bed sheet and arranged it all, decked with old plastic flowers, as a kind of altar. He sat on the ground and waited.
Strange Tales V Page 13