I sifted through Mbuyi’s memories enough to get to the airport, get to Baba’s car, get to Baba’s apartment without him suspecting. It was the second day, the last day I had before Mbuyi’s corpse started rotting like all the others. Baba asked me about my trip and I struggled to find Mbuyi’s memories in time to answer. Twice the cold look returned to Baba’s eyes as we spoke, and he showed me a necklace that made me recoil. I wanted to kill him then, but he wore it and I couldn’t get close, not even with a knife. He cut my hair for me, as he did when I was a child, and tottered off to his office. I was woozy from the necklace brushing against my neck as he cut. I fell asleep in the chair. When I woke, he helped me walk up the stairs, my consciousness reeling with every step. I felt like power had gone out from me, like I was trapped in a cage, someplace dark and small. Somehow, while I slept, he had taken my power. I was a child in a corpse-shell, and Baba my master.
I could not shove him away, down the spindly staircase. I could not reach for his neck to choke the life from it. I could not curse his name with a witch’s power. He dropped me in Mbuyi’s room and he told me, face ugly with rage, “I always knew you were a witch.” He slammed the door shut.
Mbuyi’s corpse didn’t rot after two days, or after seven, or after two years. In that time I learned Baba’s house, walking it in the night when the dark power crests with the chime of the clock. I couldn’t go far into Baba’s office. The necklace was somewhere inside the desk, and it sickened me to get close. He hides my power in there, I am sure. While he slept I paced like an anxious dog. I was tired of waiting. In the third year Mbuyi’s body began to rot, and the girl started visiting Baba. In the fourth year the body grew weak, its stink thick, and the girl settled in to spend the summer with Baba. She slept in the office, Baba’s necklace hanging from the door, warding me away.
But tonight the air is thick with promise. The girl closes her door. Baba starts climbing the stairs—and the clock strikes twelve. I twist the doorknob in my scarred right hand and step into the dark.
I am done waiting.
My spirit surges with the memory of adrenaline as I reach the top of the stairs. Baba puts the necklace at the office door—his only protection besides his locked bedroom door, which can’t help him now. I grin at him stuttering up the stairs, and take a step down.
Baba looks up, eyes wide. His body shakes. I step closer, closer, and his face contorts. He grips his chest. He stumbles down to the landing and sits on the stairs facing the wall.
He cannot face me. He cannot face what he has done. He cannot face the death that is coming. I step beside him and run a loving hand over his shorn hair, the balding crown spattered with gray and white. Baba is old now. He has lived longer than I ever will. His time has come. I step down again and slide my hand, just strong enough, around his throat. I step down onto the landing and bring my face close. I want to watch him die, let him feel the peace it brings me. Baba is panting already, his dark face pale and pained, beginning to sweat. He slaps at my hands, but even against this body he is weak. My thumb presses into his windpipe.
My thumb presses in.
My thumb . . .
Baba huffs and twists his head just enough. He is laughing at me. I cannot press in. I cannot kill him. He still has my power, somehow. I cannot kill him—still! Cannot even shove him into the steps where he slumps. My half-rotted face twists in so violent a snarl a maggot drops from my cheek onto Baba’s heaving lap. I turn in disgust and disappear in the shadows. I need a new plan, but what can I do that I haven’t tried already, many times?
“Uncle?” The girl’s voice quivers through my rage. She opens the door, calls again. “Uncle? Are you all right?”
Is this the answer?
I tear through Mbuyi’s memory, call her to mind. The strongest memory is half rotted, the details corroded. They are in Mbuyi’s room, my prison, but the blinds are open and sunlight gleams on a mancala board. She is much younger than him, but his memory of her is fond, like his memories of me.
Hurry up and go already!
Shut it, Mbuyi, I’m thinking.
You’re gonna think until bedtime. You just don’t want to lose.
I refuse to lose this game.
I know. That’s why you’re my favorite cousin.
Why? Because I always beat you?
You only wish that were true.
So why am I your favorite cousin then?
Because you don’t give up.
Perhaps her mind will think of something I cannot? It is worth a try.
She finds Baba, a brave little mouse until I approach and she screams and she runs. I leave Baba to catch her.
In the dark kitchen I burn through the weak little blessing of Baba’s, buzzing like a busybody on her forehead to keep me out. My power is mostly gone, stolen by Baba, but I have enough left to break this. The blessing’s light crunches and winks out. I push myself from Mbuyi’s corpse into my cousin. Rage and hope propel me. Her spirit leaves like a moan. The corpse smells stronger in my cousin’s body, but I pay little mind, even trailing its juices in my bare feet. My strongest hour is wasting, but this body has been in Baba’s office, has touched the necklace without fear. When I break it with my woman’s bare, weak hand, my new body shivers with triumph.
I tear through the desk, quick and vicious, touching everything in sight. Paperweights, folders, things I have never seen except in Mbuyi’s memory—stapler, computer, tape recorder, cordless phone—I shove my way in and out of Baba’s treasured things, touching and rejecting it all. These things are not mine, not my power that he stole, and so I treat them like trash, I break them on the floor, just as Baba has treated me all of my life. I can feel my energy in the desk, but could never get close before.
When it is not in the drawers, I claw at the walls, the inside of the desk. I may have to break it apart. But on an inner drawer wall I find a hidden compartment. My back hunches and stills: this is mine.
Slowly, reverently, I peel open the compartment. Slide my fingers inside, caress and find and pull out: a homemade brown rag doll. It has a twist of black, curly hair sewn to the top of its head. A black-thread smile and black-thread eyes cut across its rough face. A scrap from Mbuyi’s blue pinstriped dress shirt is sown onto its torso and back.
Baba has trapped my power in a doll of me, an ugly doll tied to Mbuyi’s body and my spirit. For four years I have waited to kill my Baba, thwarted by his chains lashed to me by this doll.
I doubt Baba will handle chains nearly so well.
I take the doll and the knife and some rubber bands into the living room. Baba looks up. “Kanku,” he rasps.
“Witch,” I correct him, bending over him with the knife. Baba strains for me with the hand not clutched to his side, but his arm barely moves. I yank through Baba’s beard, ripping out skin as much as I cut through hair. I slice a patch of Baba’s shirt at the sweat-damp collar.
“Don’t,” he whispers, pleads. His face is a rictus of pain.
“Because of you, I died like a dog,” I snarl.
I’ll make fire on the stove in the kitchen, I decide, and leave him to wait.
“Kanku—don’t . . .”
The clock strikes half past. I turn on the kitchen light, turn the knob of the front burner. The fire lights with a pop. Carefully I pull Mbuyi’s hair from the doll’s head and burn each piece in the fire—just like Mama.
Something in the living room crackles. The house abruptly smells like rot and cooked meat. Baba gurgles like an infant. I ignore him and burn the shirt too.
The rubber bands are not needle and thread, but Baba’s hair and shirt stick to the doll just as well. In the living room, Mbuyi’s body is gone. Only the smells are left. Baba looks pained. I am glad.
Baba’s eyes go wide when he sees I have trapped him. He tries to speak, but only breath sounds come out. His eyes roll to face me, and he grimaces. I savor the moment. I reach for his throat, and my thumb presses in. “Look at me,” I tell him.
For a momen
t Baba does. Then he looks over my shoulder, and his grimace turns up in the corners. It is almost a smile. I push at his windpipe, a warning. He mouths something that I can’t catch. His mouth closes, and he slumps. His eyes lose focus. Baba’s whole body goes still.
I have barely started. I had barely started. I check him for breath, but there is none. This cannot be. Baba is toying with me. He is alive, he will remain alive until I kill him at last.
I shake him and shake him, slam his back into the stairs, but Baba flops like a rag doll until I fling him with a shout.
What right has he to look so peaceful?
I laugh. I laugh like a crazed, bitter thing.
A thing robbed of its prize the moment it was within reach.
My Baba abandoned me in his life. Why should he change in the moments of his death? I waited for him. I hoped, and I waited, and I thought maybe, maybe . . .
But no. I was wrong.
And all I can think of is: I killed my brother for this.
Mbuyi: Whither Thou Goest
Questions Izzy asked me—only once—for which I had no answer:
“Why do you have a twin’s name?”
“Why don’t you celebrate your birthday?”
“How did you get that scar on your hand?”
“Why did your parents only have one kid?”
“Did you ever wish you had a brother? A sister?”
“Did you have a best friend in Congo? Who did you play with every day?”
When I was a child in Kinshasa, I had a brother, a twin. He was my best friend. He told the best stories, after Mama, and after she died, he spoke only to me. He thought she’d get better. I hoped she would too, but I saw Baba’s face every day, and my aunt’s face as she cared for Mama, and somehow I knew Kanku waited for a day no one else believed would come.
I didn’t tell him what I was afraid of—Mama told me to watch out for him, take care of him, protect him. I thought, Maybe I’m wrong. I thought, If I say it, it might come true. And I didn’t say it, but I wasn’t wrong, and Kanku felt betrayed by everyone who had known, and he got quiet and angry and sad, and I couldn’t protect him from Baba.
We were adjusting. A family of three without a woman, without a mother, without Mama. We were adjusting well, I thought.
Then Kanku told me, Baba thinks I’m a witch and that I killed Mama.
Are you a witch, Kanku?
Do you really think I am, brother?
I’ll believe you, whatever you say.
No, I am not a witch! And I did not kill Mama!
I know. You would never hurt Mama.
Baba does not believe me.
He will if you talk to him. If you only talk to me, people will think you’re a witch.
I do not like talking to Baba. He gives me mean looks. They all do.
Baba will change. It hasn’t been long since . . . He won’t always be mad.
But you believe me, right, Mbuyi?
Of course I do. You’ve never lied to me.
I thought as a child thinks: Baba loves us both, and Mama says when people are mad they say things they don’t mean. Baba was angry. He cannot really believe you are a witch.
Then Kanku told me, Baba says he is not taking me with you to America. I thought, Kanku is scared, but Baba would never leave either of us behind.
If I had believed him about Baba, maybe I could’ve changed things. I would’ve prodded him to talk to Baba at dinner, or to play with the kids of the family who visited, or to seek hugs from the women who watched us after school so they’d see his pain.
But I didn’t, and I didn’t, and by the time I believed him, it was done.
I stopped being a child the moment Baba struck my brother—my best friend, my identical twin—in the face, in the street. Kanku fell down. He held Baba’s knees, screaming and whining like a dog, crawling like a wet-faced beggar in the dirt. In the car I looked the same way, held down by Baba’s friend’s flexing arms as I thrashed for the door. I drove my fist through the window trying to get out, to go protect him, to wrap my arms around Kanku and not let go, so Baba would have to take us both. Baba would not abandon me, I knew.
We left Kanku crying in the street.
Baba used one of Kanku’s shirts to bandage my hand while his friend drove. He gave the rest of my brother’s belongings to the friend who was driving, to give to his children. All the belongings I had helped Kanku fold and pack for America. He seemed sure he wasn’t going, but I tried to make him excited for the trip, to ride an airplane, to see yellow hair and learn to talk like cowboys. I couldn’t stop crying, even when Baba threatened to give me a reason to cry and held up the hand that struck Kanku in his face that looked like my face, that felt like my face in those moments. I didn’t want Baba to touch me. He had betrayed me, betrayed us both, betrayed Mama’s love for us both. I wouldn’t speak to him for weeks, even when he hit me or starved me for my silence. In America I had to speak to him—he was the only part of home I had left. But still. I hated Baba for years. I prayed to Mama to take care of Kanku the way I should have. I promised them both I would come back as soon as I could and bring him home.
They arrive, Tonton Badia and Tantine Janet, and her face is like a frail peach, and his is like a sturdy wooden desk, and when they hold hands their skin clashes but their fingers lock perfectly. Tantine Janet is round, and Tonton Badia holds me in his lap while I touch and the baby kicks my hand and I jump back and we laugh.
I watched Izzy grow up in the summers. Sometimes she visited alone while her parents traveled or had busy weeks full of meetings; or I visited her family alone while Baba traveled, collecting histories of other Congolese immigrants. I didn’t like going with him, but Baba took me anyway—until I asked a man in an interview whether he’d cast out his son as a witch.
Baba never took me again.
Izzy was a quiet girl, thoughtful but bright like a dandelion. She smiled much more than she laughed, but seemed to take joy in the world like a child, like Kanku, even when worries weighed her down. I was a big brother to her for years. She wasn’t Kanku, though I feared in loving her I was being unfaithful somehow, replacing Kanku with a cousin. I think she looked up to me. I think she liked my company as much as I liked hers. She was my favorite cousin—I think I even told her once—but as she grew up she grew small, like a mouse; tried to entertain me, keep me happy, as if afraid I’d lose interest in her company, her existence. On a walk with Baba and Tonton Badia, I confessed this with worry—but they approved: it’s good for girls to learn to keep men happy.
Neither Izzy nor Tantine Janet were there when they said that. I thought of Izzy, who laughed at my silly faces for years, who made sassy jokes when adults weren’t around, who complained the boys in her class could do more pull-ups than her, who started wearing skirts even though she hated sitting with feet on the floor.
I didn’t confide in Tonton and Baba about much after that.
At home I dug up an old pair of drawstring sweatpants. They were a little too big, but Izzy wore them when we played in my room that summer, sprawled out on the floor.
Topics Izzy never brought up again—not even to me:
– Why I have a twin’s name
– My birthday
– The scar on my right hand
– Why I have no other siblings
– Siblings I’d wish for
– My best friend in Congo; who I played with every day.
Baba looks at me with pity when I tell him I want to visit the old house. He doesn’t say, He won’t be there. He doesn’t say, I’m sorry. He doesn’t say, I was wrong, and I regret what I did to him, and all of us. He says, Go visit family first. Save sightseeing for the last day. Everyone is excited you are coming.
Baba buys my ticket, arranges for me to stay with relatives, speaks at midnight and 3 a.m. to bridge the time zones with family so I can cross to meet them. I seethe inside but think, Kanku will be there. I wi
ll find him and bring him home.
The day before I leave Congo, the host of family I’ve only just met finally lets me go to see my childhood home. Walking through streets I played in as a boy, I have flashes of recognition: The bus took this street into town from the house. This wall surrounded our house, and the crushed glass cemented on top kept out thieves and soldiers. The house I grew up in is through this new gate.
Baba cast Kanku from our family here, on this torn-up, pockmarked road.
In a car on that corner, I cut my hand trying to escape Baba’s friend so I could protect Kanku—the way Mama couldn’t, the way I promised her I would.
This is the last place I saw Kanku before the car turned and he couldn’t catch up.
That is the house of a woman who helped raise us, who told me—without shame—my twin died in the street not long after.
I can almost feel him here, on this heat-rippled road full of patterned stalls that weren’t here years ago. I tell him I’m sorry and whisper a prayer that he’s safe and happy, is somewhere with Mama.
My skin feels suddenly cold, but the lump in my throat and chest dissolves into a warmth I haven’t felt in fifteen years. I think, Kanku hears me. Somehow, he is here.
I smile. I cry silently in the street, ignoring bystanders and the market’s kaleidoscopic closing bustle.
Then my vision shudders. The Kanku feeling punches in.
I think, Something is wrong.
I think, Somehow, Kanku is alive. He wants my body. Is he a witch?
I think, It should’ve been me.
I think, I promised him we would go to America.
I think, Maybe this way I can finally bring him home.
I don’t fight as he pushes into my skin and my spirit leaks out beside the body I sacrificed. I tell my twin, in bruised Tshiluba, You’re safe now. Let me take care of you.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2018 Page 7