by Ime Atakpa
In stillness, I remain. Intense pressure holds me there. From where it originates, I cannot say for sure, though I would not dispute the legitimacy of its presence. It bears on me with a strange inconsistency, as though it struggles with its own existence. And I can hardly predict the brief windows when it wavers to stand a chance at testing its fallibility.
“Well then, if you have nothing to say, we can begin.”
I search for artifacts that might be used to induce this effect. An airborne toxin seems most likely. However, his house is built entirely of wood. It would not accommodate modern ventilation. And besides, an airborne toxin would affect Rinaldo as well. What, then? My mind flickers to the specter of his wife I glimpsed earlier. Then back to Rinaldo, who paces slowly toward me.
“Maybe there’s a better way to phrase it.” He feigns thoughtfulness, sipping periodically from his cup and stroking the rugged hairs scattered unevenly across his chin. “I’ll be blunt. I need to hear it from your mouth.”
“I don’t quite understand.” That binding force clamps down harder still and the windows of weakness shorten their spans.
“You do.”
“Where’s—”
“Don’t worry about her. Your body. Move it.”
Again, I struggle to move my limbs—to even feel them—or to crane my head away from him. I feel the stress in my…in something, something suspended somewhere. Where, I do not know. I try turning my vision down to discover what holds my limbs fast, but even those attempts are thwarted by the unknown presence.
“What’s happening to me?”
“It has already happened. They said you’d been resisting it, but I didn’t think it’d be so bad after a year.” He finishes the last of his drink and approaches.
“I could move before. No one could see me, but I had strength enough to move.”
“Invisible, yes, I heard.” He laughs. “But now you know yourself for what you really are. Say it.”
“Help me! You can see me! You can help!” I’m embarrassed by the tone of my own voice. It’s high-pitched and feeble and grates against the air. Rinaldo, too, assumes a look of disgust.
“I’ve done what I can. That much has nearly broken me.” He steps closer. “And there’s little more left for me to do. But I cannot save you until you tell me what it is.”
“I don’t know.” I can’t bear to hear that word from my own mouth.
“Say it.” He’s irritable now, and I cannot blame his impatience. Now that I’ve arrived here, I wish only to turn back to before I understood it all.
“I’m invisible.”
“Enough lies, boy.” His voice becomes harsh. It scathes me.
“I don’t know.”
“Say it!” Incredible pressure drives against me from all directions. Initially, the feeling is unfamiliar, but it’s not long before I recognize the sensation for what it is: pain. Not the same pain I felt when passing through time. That had been something entirely different.
“I can’t.” On command, the pain intensifies. Over the past year, I’d forgotten it. Now I succumb to oppression greater than anything I’ve experienced before it. This pain is not of the spirit, but of the body. It courses through phantom limbs, from my fingertips to the top of my skull and all the way down to my toes. I feel my body now having forgotten for the last year that I had no body at all. Only phantoms of sensation, a lie I refused to dismantle.
“Say it!” It nearly breaks me. Under the influence of Rinaldo’s secret power, my essence begins to buckle. Something cracks. From those small breakages, white escapes. My tendrils seep through, wailing and withering. I couldn’t imagine a weakness worse than an inability to control my own body until now; the tendrils abscond with what little remains. Unbearable agony. But I won’t be destroyed here.
“Death!” I feed the tendrils each sound of the word, and I feed them the rage buried within those sounds, and I send them to Rinaldo. “I’m dead.”
“There it is!” Rinaldo claps, backing away from me. As he does so, the pressure lessens. The tendrils withdraw back into me, and the crack—I’m unsure how I know this—seals itself shut. “Death is your invisibility.”
“The mirror never bore my reflection. But I could see myself.” I say this as though it presents some ultimate proof that death is the illusion, but even I am no longer blind to how pitiful it sounds, how drenched in desperation.
“No more lies, Hubert. You thought as much, but only for so long. Six times, the dead came for you. Six times, you wished desperately for death. You would have understood so much sooner. But you kept holding on to your foolish hopes.”
Having regained my composure, some confidence has returned to me. I understood it some time ago, did I not? Yes, I did. I felt my own death and denied it. I needed to believe my parents could still find a happy ending to their loss. Now that unfounded belief whittles away. I look to Rinaldo, smug and self-content. “You must be dead, too.”
“Don’t forget that you saw me in life.” He sits back behind the reception desk. Steam rises from the teacup he left there. Rinaldo lifts it and sips.
“So you died afterward.”
He laughs at this. “You’ve done enough to prove your shoddy aptitude for discernment over the last year, have you not? Let’s not dance around this. Ask the question.”
I tense. “What are you?”
“Death.” He sips his tea.
“You killed me?”
“No. But the one who did, he’s dead too.”
“You killed him?”
“I did.” Another sip of tea.
“Why not save me?”
“Entirely out of my power,” he says tersely and turns to look over his shoulder. These revelations rest uneasily on my mind. Intuition tells me that Rinaldo has every intention of manipulating me.
“If I’m dead, why am I still here? Why can’t I be at peace?”
“Oh, I would have sent you free long ago, except you possess something of mine. I could not safely take it from you until you fully accepted your position.” He’s on his feet now, dallying toward me, a sharpness in his eye indicative of knowledge, of keenness. “And I want it back.”
Too fast. Everything moves too quickly for me to process, not without a moment to think. His hand encroaches on my space. “Wait. I want something first.”
“Speak your mind.”
“If I’m dead, my body, it must be somewhere. Show it to me.”
Rinaldo’s eyes spark. “As you wish.”
Death. Who could have imagined such a detestable thing would be so…peaceful? I use the term lightly, for there’s no describing the agony of separation from my parents all this time, but to think there’s no inherent suffering allows me peace of mind. That peacefulness increases as we step into the forest and I feel the humidity drape over me. The scent of moist bark and leaves returns me to better days, before the absurdity of a living death. Being near Rinaldo, I almost feel alive again. My senses all flood me with information.
We move quickly through the undergrowth, keeping close to the road. Rinaldo coughs uneasily, glances back at me. “Honestly, I hoped you might want to see this. I would have showed you either way, but.” His head tilts to one side. “Not as though it’ll be your first time.”
I don’t answer. Shrouds of fact serve no purpose save to further confuse me. So long as this path leads me toward the truth of this blood curse, it’s irrelevant what secrets Rinaldo keeps. My protector. Had I fists to clench, I’d clench them. The very same man who took me willingly into his home, provided me shelter, nurtured me to health, ensured my safe return home. The very same man now stands in front of me having forsaken humanity for death, and further ahead, more death awaits.
Ten minutes come and go. Rinaldo’s pace slows to a crawl. “Listen,” he instructs, inching forward through the forest, pushing away hanging branches. “Can you hear it?”
“Hear what?” He turns to me. His eye sits wide in that deep socket. Was it always so deep? He appears al
together thinner. But his health is no matter of mine.
“Quiet. Listen.” He crouches down and turns to face several rows of trees separating us from the adjacent road. I follow suit reluctantly, bringing myself as close to him as possible, following every crane of his neck, every twitch of his eye. As instructed, I listen intently for the sounds of the forest. Small animals scamper across the ground, and beads of dew fall from the leaves. Hanging branches sway lightly, side to side, and the sun overhead feeds them its strength.
A single sound reaches me from outside the forest. As though he marks some change in my countenance, Rinaldo faces me and smiles. I turn away, maintaining my focus. Yes, certainly, there’s something out there. A faint hum, a mechanical roar. It screams in the distance, growing louder with each passing second. Closer, closer. Closer until it grows unbearably loud.
“What—” I begin, but Rinaldo silences me, pointing through a small gap in the trees.
“Watch.” And so I watch, and within the next few seconds, I see it rush by. First, its red head comes into view, followed by a lengthy gray body. Something emanates from that truck, something familiar and disturbing. It stings like the weight of Rinaldo’s power over me, except this exertion holds nothing back, regrets none of the pain it inflicts upon me. I wince away, struggling to maintain myself; and again, an aspect of myself cracks open to allow the tendrils to escape.
“Why does—it hurts.”
“Go forth, boy.”
No argument I offer can negate the burning desire within me to follow his command and discover what lies beyond the edge of the forest. My mind runs back to that day a year ago, when I first emerged on the road. What I felt. What I saw. I push through the foliage and move down an incline into the road’s shattered shoulder. There it is, preserved as perfectly as it had been the day I died. Macabre beauty lingers just as long on the mind as beauty of any other sort, perhaps longer. But everything that’s beautiful, by the laws of nature, should eventually age and wither and expire from the world. Not this beauty. Not the hummingbird.
Its flattened eyes look up at me from a skull emptied of its brain, devoid of any of the faculties that enable life.
“You remember this creature?” Rinaldo asks, more on account of formality than necessity.
“I saw it. The day I died.”
“Now look upon it again. Look closer.”
Briefly, that splayed hummingbird begins to shift, but I turn away from the sight of it before it completes its transformation. I needn’t see the change completed to know what form the bird shall take.
“Your family is cursed,” Rinaldo starts, still facing the mess of bones and flesh. “So you think. So they all thought. But it’s not a curse. It’s life.”
I refuse him an answer.
“I can see you for what you were in life, and I can see you for what you are now. There’s nothing to you but a collection of thought and memory, compacted into ethereal dust.”
“What’s going to happen to me?”
“You all thought you were sleepwalking, but no.” He laughs madly, swinging his body around to step deeper into the forest. Both arms clutch at his gut. “You were vessels for life.”
“What are you talking about?” I immediately regret asking the question. Rinaldo’s eyes deepen, madden. He comes close to me—whatever I am—and pries into my soul with those eyes of his, those eyes that can see life and death. Here, his laughing dwindles to silence and his arms settle at his side.
“Let me show you.”
A strong hand pierces me.
There’s pain.
Then quiet.
And finally, the nothing.
Part II
The Mantle of Death
-I-
The Drowned
I’m drowning. I’m not scared of it, and I’m definitely not trying to resist it. Even if I did, the weight of the waves is too much. The water has already soaked into my clothes, and now I take it into my lungs in hearty gulps. There’s no need to resist the inevitable. After everything I’ve been through, I want to let go of everything. That’s just how I feel. This is how things are meant to be.
These are not my feelings. They are but they aren’t. They’re things I’ve felt before, and even though I’m not really feeling them now, I’ve always felt them. I borrowed them. I borrowed most of what I am.
A gunshot sounds off from far away. I don’t see the shooter but I know where he’s perched. Somewhere at the top of that mountain, farther away than I could hope to reach with a child strapped to my back. It’s wrapped twice over in blankets and fastened to me by a thick cord woven through a harness. I gave birth to this child three years ago. He is my pride and joy.
He is not my child.
I’m drowning again, deeper now, and the memories of everything I’ve ever loved come back to me. It’s not much. I’m looking over the edge of a trade ship into the sea below. The waves calm me. The steady bob of the ship calms me. We’re approaching the shore, the pier, the place I call home. Bridgeport. My ladies will be thrilled to hear all the stories I have to tell. But most importantly, there she is. A woman lays out on the beach. The sun is setting on the other side of the ocean. It’s getting cold, but the warmth of her body makes me warm too. We’re tangled together, and her hands reach for my nipples.
This woman is not my lover.
But the happiness I feel now, maybe this is mine. Maybe the sway of the trees and the warm waves of the sun overhead are mine to cherish. I’m almost twenty-five now. That’s why I’m happy. I count down the hours, then the minutes, then the seconds until the exact moment of my birth. Just before that last second ticks away, I close my eyes. In the next moment, I’m free.
I am not free.
I’m still drowning, except now it dawns on me that I don’t want to die. Go figure. I never wanted to die. I just wanted to be free to live my life how I saw fit. Freedom was stolen from me, and he sugared me up with his honey words, and now I’m holding dearly to his artifact while I descend into the depths of the ocean. It’s too late for me now. I won’t resurface. This is my true self, the one who gave up everything for nothing. This is the one who lived out the consequences of her actions like no other could have.
She is not my true self.
This is my true self, the nineteen-year-old boy who awakens in the night and rises from bed. I walk downstairs and outside, eyes wide open. I cross the street to the opposite side where there’s nothing but thick trees and wildlife. Being here makes her feel at peace. She still feels like she’s drowning, but walking this path down to the benches where she last saw the woman she loved is like no other feeling. It’s indescribable. I am just the vessel that carries her along on her night walk. I see the bright of the truck’s lights. She sees them too. She’s sad and tired. She doesn’t care.
I must wonder if she would have done it, if only she knew how much pain I’d live through at the end of that final walk. I think she would have. Because all this time, she’s always been drowning.
I see Dad standing in front of the classroom, presenting his findings in a book I love. He’s smart and funny and energetic. My heart pounds for him and I know, the way he adjusts his glasses and smirks in my direction, that his pounds for me too. I’m walking with him down a sidewalk, across a bridge, down the hall to his room. He whispers sweet things into my ears, and my body melts away.
I am not my mother.
I step out into the street. The truck doesn’t bother to honk. When it hits me, I’m deep in the water again. I’m so far beneath the surface that everything is black. Light can’t reach me this far down. I’m not scared anymore, because by now I’ve accepted that I’m going to die. But I should already be dead. I shouldn’t have made it this far down.
That’s when I start running through a forest, naked and alone, except for branches and vines that lunge at me. They try desperately to trip me, but my desperation is greater than theirs. I run atop the sharp edges of fallen branches, through wet soil, and over r
aised roots, never looking back at the thing that chases me. All I know about it is the sound of its breathing. Heavy hisses echo through the forest. They echo until they can’t echo anymore. I reach the end of it, and there’s nowhere left to run. Those branches and vines that I’d eluded hone in on me and hoist my body into the air. My breasts hang, and my genitals are exposed. I feel nothing at all. Not until the hissing gets louder and the shadow of my pursuer comes into view. But even as it does, the shadow is still just a shadow. The black mass moves toward me. I close my eyes. Water surrounds me once more.
An arm stretches down and pulls me from my body. I stop being cold. I stop drowning.
“You have life,” his voice tells me, but I know he’s lying. I know that this is the moment I stop being alive.
-II-
The Balance of Things
When Rinaldo pulls his hand from me, the deep blue waters recede. The black night bears down and I’m surrounded by trees. Something foul hangs in the air. This odor is familiar, a noxious reminder of a tragedy from some time ago. I can’t recall.
The dream is more vivid, but unlike most dreams, it doesn’t fade with time. Instead, it grows stronger. Everything I felt was so beyond real, I’d be hard pressed to separate myself from those feelings. Sadness that wasn’t my own, fear that wasn’t my own, and times that most certainly weren’t my own…they all converged in that strange dream. Now that reality is starting to sink back in, though, I can’t shake the sensation that it’s—
“Not a dream.” Someone’s voice calls from nearby. Rinaldo’s. A glowing cloud of mist floats just above the palm of his hand. It’s the same hand he punctured me with. The cloud stretches out several times, then settles. Rinaldo twiddles his fingers and it jumps, almost as if it’s being tickled. Then, he clenches his hand into a fist, and the cloud compacts into a tiny bead. He snatches the bead from the air and drops it into his pocket.