by Kyle Minor
The old man leaned on his cane and shook. He waved us near him and spoke. He had the breath of brown death. After he said half a sentence, he paused to catch his breath, and Sebastian translated. “I saw you in a dream,” he said. “Bondye sent you from America. Your journey took you over the sea. You are estranged from your mother. You are wearing glasses and you have beautiful shoes.” Most of these things were true. “Bondye said this man will come,” he said. “You will show him your wound. He will lay hands on your wound, and your wound will be healed.”
He pushed on his cane. With some effort, he sat upright in his chair. With his shaking hand, he handed the cane to his son. With great effort, he reached both hands to his pants button and his zipper. He said, “I will show you.” He unbuttoned his pants, and he unfastened his zipper. With both hands, as if presenting a bouquet of flowers, he held himself out to us. What he showed was mostly tumor. His penis and his testicles had shriveled to a flaccid tininess. Most of his hair had fallen away. Only a slight smear of peach fuzz remained, and it was slick with a yellowish-white discharge from a suppurating wound that was on the tumor but not of the tumor.
“Bondye said,” the old man said again, “this man will come. You will show him your wound. He will lay hands on your wound, and your wound will be healed.”
Everyone was looking at me. Sebastian, with his good eyes. The man’s son, with his cataracting, failing eyes. The old man, with his blind eyes. Even the tumor seemed like a giant dying eye. The man’s son was nodding, as if to say: Go ahead. Sebastian was watching, as if to see what kind of man I was after all our time together.
I held out my hands. I cupped them as if I were preparing to draw water from the river. I put them on either side of the tumor. My right wrist grazed the old man’s tiny penis, and my left wrist grazed his testicles. The skin swollen by the tumor was hot, and the skin covering the genitals was as cold as a slab at the morgue. “You must pray,” the son said. “Our Father, who art in heaven,” I said. It wasn’t a prayer to the sky. It was a prayer to the people in the room. If there was any belief to borrow, it was all theirs.
Then I couldn’t remember the rest of the words to the prayer, even though it was the most famous prayer in the world. In my mind, it had become conflated with a less famous poem, by an American who had once been my teacher at the university. Our Father who art in heaven, I am drunk. Again. Red wine. For which I offer thanks. I ought to start with praise, but praise comes hard to me. I stutter . . .
I had not memorized the whole poem, but I did remember the ending, the beautiful ending. The drunk, praying, thinks of himself as an old-time cartoon character, a poor jerk who wanders out on air and then looks down. Below his feet, he sees eternity, and suddenly his shoes no longer work on nothingness, and down he goes. The drunk prays: As I fall past, remember me.
It seemed as fitting a prayer as the one I had forgotten. I cobbled together bits and pieces of both, and drew on the language of special pleading I remembered from all those dreary years at the Cherry Road Baptist Church. I used the words suppurating, and grapefruit, and hot and cold, and shrivel and shrink.
When I was done, nothing happened. Everyone was as blind or cataracted or tumored or lying or despicable as we had been before we prayed, and my hands were wet with white and yellow pus. I told the old man I was sorry. Nothing happened. He had not been healed. I must not be the man Bondye had sent from over the sea. He said, “We must wait. Bondye’s time is not our time.”
Outside, I asked Sebastian, “How much is the surgery.”
Sebastian said, “All surgeries are three hundred dollars.”
I said, “I have four hundred dollars in my pocket. I’m going to give all of it to him.”
Sebastian said, “If you give him four hundred dollars for his surgery, they will use it to buy sand and Portland. Or they will use it to buy a window. Or they will use it to buy corrugated aluminum for a roof. The old man will die soon no matter what you do.”
“What can I do?” I said.
“You can give the money to me,” Sebastian said. “I will take it to pay the doctor, and I will pay the tap-tap to take him to the doctor.”
I looked at him, and I knew. He would take the money and put it in his pocket, and I would never see him again. Or I would see him again the next time he wanted some money.
“No,” I said, quietly. “No, no.”
I put the money back in my pocket and vowed to return after we did the count in Mirebalais—in three weeks. Pick up the old man myself. Take him to the hospital myself. Pay for the surgery myself.
In later years, a woman told me: Who do you think you are, to play God? Who do you think you are, the savior of the world? I said: I only wanted to save this one man for a little while. I knew he was going to die soon.
Three weeks passed. We returned to the village. Another casket, a cheap one, was marching up the street. So many of the pall-bearers were blind. “Don’t worry,” Sebastian said. “You took his tumor in your hands.” “But I didn’t cut it out,” I said. “You should have given me the money,” he said.
7. At the Marché
A few days later we went to the Marché en Fer to buy fruits and vegetables. The whole market had fallen down in the earthquake, but now an Irishman had rebuilt the clock tower and the minarets, restored the masonry, and reinforced the iron columns. The Irishman said the new walls were earthquake-proof, and the roof was covered with solar panels.
These were the days when it was hard to walk into a building and not be afraid the walls and the roof might fall on you and crush your head. You looked for a space beside a sturdy piece of furniture, and traced an invisible line at a forty-five degree angle, which you’d dive beneath for shelter at the first shake. Every so often, continuing to this day, another building would fall in an aftershock. All over the country we saw three-story buildings pancaked to one story, and lo these years later, the bodies still inside. They didn’t even stink anymore. Almost for certain, the bacteria and the worms and the rodents had picked them to bones.
But it wasn’t like the early days. People were moving. Children in uniforms walked to school in the mornings. The tap-taps were full of men carrying their work tools in canvas bags. In the city, the cell phone vendors walked the streets in their red smocks and carrying their red phones, selling rechoj cards, and soda and water vendors walked through the traffic jams, carrying on their heads cardboard boxes full of plastic sugar-and-caffeine concoctions and vacuum-sealed plastic bags of water.
In the Marché, I bought two bottles of Atomic Energy Drink, one for me and one for Sebastian, and he bought me a styrofoam container full of griot and fried plantains and pikliz. I bought him a pizza from a vendor billing herself as the Walt Disney Pizza Company. Famous mice and dogs and ducks decorated the sign behind her.
We took our food outside and crouched in the shade of the nearest wall. While we were eating, Sebastian said, “When you leave, will you come back?”
I stopped eating for a moment. An uncharacteristic sincerity was in his eyes. I didn’t trust it.
“You are my good friend,” he said.
But that’s what everyone said. Everyone who wanted something. I could see myself, in a few weeks, sitting on my couch in Florida, watching football. The job was over. There was no reason for me to stay. “What will you do,” I said, “after I leave.”
He patted his wallet, where he kept some of his walking-around money, and he patted his shoe, where he kept the rest. “I have met some important people,” he said. He pointed at every ten degrees of the sky around us. “I’m going to buy a new suit. The future is big.”
Already he had gathered ten of the best English speakers in Koulèv-Ville. He planned to drill them six days a week, in the mornings, when the mind is still fresh. He planned to lease them by the day, to journalists and tourists and aid organizations of every stripe, with special rates for weekly or monthly hires. He would take twenty percent, as his fee. No longer would he be the wage worker. Now
he would be the collector of the real money, the wage-giver, the big boss.
“When you get home,” Sebastian said, “you will not remember me.”
Within six months, he would be dead. The rally at the Palace. The fires. The burning tires. The gunshots, two to the head.
That day at the Marché, he said, “It’s going to be the most beautiful suit. It’s going to be linen. It’s going to be chalk-striped, double-breasted. It’s going to have a notched lapel. I’m going to get it tailored.”
Q & A
Q: Do you think you can resurrect the dead?
A: I am the fiery angel. I can run time backward. I can speed it up and dance babies back into the womb.
Q: Do our thoughts betray us?
A: Scientists are perfecting a brain scanner that can already show distorted images of your dreams. Then they’ll just stick you in an MRI machine and ask the questions you don’t want to answer, and your thoughts will betray you. Until then, other people can only guess.
Q: On the cover of this book, it says “Fiction.”
A: That’s what people write when they want to get away with telling the truth. When they want to convince you of a lie, they dress up some facts and call it “Nonfiction.” Either way, people from the past send angry emails.
Q: Did the things in this book actually happen in the unvirtual world, what the kids call meat space?
A: It’s like Kazuo Ishiguro said: “I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.”
Q: Don’t hide behind Kazuo Ishiguro.
A: I remember the bully who beat me up almost every day in junior high school. I remember the sweet odor of those red mesh equipment bags that held body armor and hung from meat hooks. I remember the puke-green walls of the locker room. I remember the special orange-brown of the rust on the edges of the lockers. I remember the shape of my own hairless testicles, how they seemed to retreat in fear when it was time to take a shower among a bunch of kids my own age or a little older who looked like full-grown men and had a foot or more of height on me. But were they as big as I remember, or was my idea of their height exaggerated because of my smallness and the smallness of my idea of myself and the bigness of my idea of them? And did they beat me up almost every day, or did they just beat me up a few times, but I responded so strongly and fearfully that in my memory it became almost every day? Why am I calling the football pads “body armor”? Had I ever seen a meat hook? Did I think of those red mesh bags as hanging from meat hooks back then, or is that something that I used later, to gild the story—or, no, to uglify the story. Because they’re conveniently dramatic words, aren’t they? Meat, and hook? They open up associations. The body as meat, the cheapness of meat, the animality of meat. The hook, which pierces and controls.
Q: Who sends the angry emails?
A: People from the Christian school. People from the churches where I was raised and where I worked as a pastor. They follow a form. The first thing the email writer does is to assure me that he or she is reaching out in love to offer correction. Correction is the price of love.
Q: Do you think that’s true?
A: If it is, then these awful stories I’m writing are also an expression of love.
Q: How?
A: Because I see them as a correction of the untruths I was told as a child about how the world works.
Q: Are you saying that the adults in your life were liars?
A: No. I think they were mostly good and decent people. I just think that it is inconvenient and possibly destructive, for some people, to closely examine your own life, or to have a reckoning with your past, your family history, your community of origin, your own choices.
Q: Unintentional liars, then?
A: I knew a woman, my teacher. A mentor in many ways. She said the most useful thing: Our job is to identify the distance between the story we’ve been telling ourselves about our lives—the received story, or the romantic story, or the wishful thinking—and replace it with the story that experience is revealing about our lives, the story that is more true.
Q: The facts are the same in both versions of the story.
A: It’s the reckoning that changes. The narrative itself is the reckoning. The choices you make about what is or isn’t significant, and what it all comes to mean.
Q: Why do you often tell the same story two or three different ways?
A: It’s not done with me yet. I forgot something important, or I hadn’t learned it yet.
Q: You still believe in something as old-fashioned as meaning-making?
A: Maybe the biggest fiction I want to create is that it all matters. It matters so much. It matters and matters.
Q: Contrary to the evidence.
A: This is the only life I have. This is the only life you have unless you’re lucky enough to die and be resurrected as the fiery angel.
Q: Why do you have the robot in the story about the suicide?
A: It was a mistake. That story needed seventy-three robots, twelve pirates, three Vikings, three zombies, seven murders in polygamist cults, two slow trains to Bangkok, three bejeweled elephants in the court of Catherine the Great, six scarlet-threaded elevators to space, fourteen backlit liquor bars in Amsterdam, five bearded men spinning plates on top of thirty-foot poles in Central Park, four mechanical rabbits, three alarm clocks, two magic tricks, twenty-four test tubes, the Brooklyn Bridge, the London Bridge, the boob doctor’s daughter. . . .
Q: Whatever it takes to get your attention?
A: Whatever it takes to cover all the hurt.
Q: Are there any stories you want to try again?
A: Turn the page and see.
THE SWEET LIFE
THE BOY IN THE CASKET was my wife’s nephew.
“I want to talk about biscuits,” the preacher said.
We were all of us sweating. The sanctuary doubled as a gymnasium.
The preacher took the store-bought biscuits from their wrapping. He put a piece in his mouth and ate. “Mmm, mmm,” he said. “Biscuits is one of the sweetest things in the world.”
The boy’s mother and father sat apart. Soon they would no longer be married.
“Life can be sweet,” the preacher said. “Like these buttermilk biscuits. Yes, sir.” He took another bite. He wiped his forehead with a white handkerchief.
My wife was holding my hand. My wife’s hand was shaking.
“The sweet life,” the preacher said. “Is made of bitter parts.”
Like the biscuits, he was saying. He seemed as far away as the planet Jupiter. Everything in the sanctuary gymnasium seemed out of proportion. The basketball hoops were flying saucers.
“Two cups all purpose flour,” he said. He poured from a paper bag into a Tupperware cup. He licked his finger and put it to the flour and took it to his lips and tongue. He made a sour face. “It’s bitter, flour,” he said.
A single drop of sweat rolled down my wife’s arm and landed on my hand. It felt wet on my hand. I could see the veins. They seemed so large, bulging there like an old person’s veins, like my grandmother’s. I had a vision of her, in her red housedress, sweating in her trailer, even though she could well afford to run the air conditioner.
“Baking powder,” the preacher said. “One tablespoon.” He ate and made his cartoon face.
Some people were laughing. Laughing!
“Three quarters of a teaspoon of salt.”
My wife was not crying. Maybe her mouth, like mine, was dry. If you suck on the insides of your dry cheeks you can hold the crying in.
“Baking soda. Vegetable shortening. One cup buttermilk.” He tasted the buttermilk. Some things, he said, are sweet, even in the time of bitterness.
Amen, somebody was saying. Were they saying Amen? Was it someone, the mother or the father, who had the right to say Amen? Or was it someone else, anyone else in the room—someone who did not have the right to say Amen.
The preacher poured the buttermilk into a glass bowl, and mixed it
with the flour, the baking powder and the baking soda and salt and all.
I looked around to see who was saying Amen.
There was a small oven on the stage. A theater prop, not a working oven. The preacher poured the biscuit batter into a silver biscuit tray and pretended to set it baking. Then he moved from sermon to eulogy.
Somehow the smell of biscuits filled the sanctuary gymnasium.
“No one knows why these things happen, but everything happens for a reason. All things work together for good, to them that love God, to them who are called according to His righteousness.”
On the front row, the mother sat beside her mother. They were weeping. Perhaps they were finding comfort in the preacher’s words. Perhaps everyone but me and my wife were finding comfort in the preacher’s words.
“And God, in His good time. . . .”
The boy was dead in the box.
On the stage, the oven timer dinged. A helper delivered a foil wrapped basket of biscuits. The biscuits were warm, brown. Done. The preacher bit into one. His testimony was that the buttermilk was baked well into the biscuit. “A message of hope I have for you,” he said. The biscuit was sweet.
The mother was crying. The father sat with his head in his hands. There were grandparents, cousins. A sister. We all of us must have wanted for hope.
The preacher promised a call to salvation. The musicians took their places on stage to play the music that would make more powerful his talk.
In the moment before the musicians started their music, there was a silence. To me the silence seemed our natural state, bitter and forever. There was a burning smell from the oven. I did not want to give it meaning, but we have been conditioned to give everything meaning. Then we began to sing.
II.
“As I Fall Past, Remember Me”
THERE IS NOTHING BUT SADNESS IN NASHVILLE