So Long Been Dreaming

by Nalo Hopkinson

  I stumbled, and the deep memory scattered. My brain was frying and so were my feet. The swampy smell was gone, and the sun blasted the blank earth from a white sky. Behind me the jungle was a thin swatch of black on the horizon. I pulled out the crushed sunglasses and cursed my laughing Gods. Not a sight, sound, or scent of life ahead of me. My nose and throat ached in the hot, dry air, and I could have used six bottles of Recharge. I scooped up a mound of white dirt, not sand. It blew away in my hands. A row of signs planted fifty feet apart warned me to turn around: “Biohazard! No Trespassing!” Still in English, but this time with an atomic symbol at the center. I wondered how contaminated I was.

  To the west, where the jungle reached a claw into the white desert, an exploded van still smoldered. Déjà vu brought me up short. The person, the body I’d been before my current terrorist self couldn’t be far, couldn’t be long dead. Sifting through the fragments of my mind, I didn’t find an Edge with an exploding van story. When very full, body historians remembered distant Edges better than one or two lives ago. I made a Mission detour to check out the site anyhow. Pieces of the driver and melted gear spiraled out from the wreck. Naked dog prints crisscrossed human boot shapes. Half of a purple beanbag lizard stared up at me with empty eye sockets. I stuffed the blind survivor in a pocket with the unscathed one. My lips trembled. Rescuing a half-dead toy made no sense.

  A coconut-sized ball of mahogany fur tugged a chunk of human gore toward the trees. It paused to gnaw and chew. I didn’t want to watch this meal, so I consulted the map. According to it, this expanse of white dirt should have been rainforest for many more miles. Not a root, bone, or fragment of life – whatever happened since the map was drawn had killed even the soil. Using the compass, I got myself back on the map’s green path, moving across dead earth toward the ‘forest of the ancestors.’ I slipped a cough drop in my mouth and took a swig of Recharge. In the whiteness, I thought I would go blind.

  The cell phone jangled in my breast pocket. When it hadn’t stopped after ten chimes, I pulled it out and answered. “What’s up?” I whispered, like somebody was spying on me.

  “Renee, I got a message for you from deep time.” A female answered, American contralto with inner city chop. She was breathless and hoarse. “Are you ready?”

  So maybe I was Renee. “Who is this?”

  “If you’re alive again.” She talked on top of me in a gurgling voice.

  “What?” I walked faster. This barren landscape made me an easy target.

  “Don’t answer, just watch out for the landmines at the Edges of things.”

  “I think you’ve got the wrong. . . .”

  “Two, three, five, seven, eleven, and thirteen. Memories spilling out? Are you tired of dropping into lives and not committing to them? It’s our choice, you know.” She talked on top of me again, wheezing and chasing her words like they’d get away from her before she got everything said. “You’re bouncing across the desert, a baby in your mother’s arms, reaching for her breast, when she thought her little boy was already dead from whatever war does to babies. She couldn’t bear to leave your tiny body behind and now you’re alive again, a miracle in her arms. You feel her joy spurt hot milk onto your tongue. A taste you’ll never forget.”

  Indeed I remembered a stream of sweetness and salty sweat from under her breasts, mixed with the tangy thrill of being a miracle in someone’s arms.

  “Of course you drop into the mother, she’s so close, so deliciously complex. What griot could resist her story? The drop-in heals her shattered flesh and then you’re running again, clutching a dead miracle against throbbing breasts.” She paused. “You’re a terrorist now, Axala.”

  “Axala?” I stopped so quickly, my muscles cramped. How could she know me when I didn’t?

  “A righteous murderer in a war that never makes the news. Griots of the galaxy dance in the dark. How long can we run around with dead miracles and do nothing? Amnesiacs – most of who we are, we don’t even know. What good is the story behind all the stories if you never really get to live fully? Never your story. . . .” The woman struggled for breath. “What am I saying? Look, I’ve gathered the griots in the forest for the rendezvous with the mother ship. . . . Follow the signs and don’t get blown up by mines. Across the water and you’re home.” She’d talked herself out of a voice, just a gurgling wheeze.

  “Who are you?” I walked a circle in white dirt. “How do you know. . . .” A single note droned in my ear. A dead line. “Shit!” I said to the phone and turned it off. Rendezvous with the mother ship meant life on Earth was almost over.

  My body didn’t know enough to be scared of a voice from deep time, praise singing my former lives, questioning my future ones. For the Mission, my muscles ignored the weighty backpack and wounded leg, and shifted to top speed – as if racing through clouds of white dust would save me from a fucking griot minefield or human bombs buried in the ground. Part of me was dead certain there was nowhere to run except into a trap, but I ran until. . . .

  Crouching on the white expanse, sparkling like dragons with diamond-crusted backs, I saw purple bean bag lizards, red felt tongues dragging in the dust. Hundreds of them, a stop-action collage, crawling in my direction. Was this toy parade a joke? I considered stepping on one, but couldn’t bring myself to crush its cheery face into the white dust. Moving carefully through them, nothing exploded under my feet. Markers. In a minefield, what more could you ask?

  The barren plain slipped into a valley. I ran down to a skinny stream. Fractals of white dust swirled out from crumbling banks, occasionally clouding the middle. The opposite shore of the fast-moving water was brilliant green. In one bound, I crossed out of the circle of death back into jungle. Standing under a tiny waterfall tributary, I swallowed a stream. As I shook the water out of my ears, I thought I heard panting and footsteps behind me, but of course when I turned to look, nada. Somebody chasing me in the white waste land would have been visible for miles. Fear made phantoms of wind and dust. I walked on.

  Under the trees, I closed my eyes and savoured the cool darkness, the pungent odours of life and decay, the branches and vines drumming with the breeze. It felt like family gathering me into her bosom. After wandering for millennia, I was home. When I opened my eyes, a lanky man with a shaved head and a few days growth on chiseled cheeks stepped out of a vine-covered hole in an enormous trunk. Without a word, he yanked me inside the tree cave, put his rough hands over my lips, and nodded toward the direction I’d been heading. Squinting through a hole in an abandoned nest, I saw a squad of soldiers hacking through dense new growth 100 yards away. Somebody’s private army and I knew they were gunning for us.

  My companion and I crouched in the dark of the tree trunk and watched the squad cross the stream and walk up the side of the hill toward the minefield. We sat cramped against one another for several minutes, sweat and breath mingling, then explosions from the minefield knocked us on our faces.

  “Dead,” he sighed, “And we didn’t even have to kill them.” I recognized his voice, the dinner-rendezvous man. He patted the knapsack. “You’re packing a lot of heat. Perez made the transfer. She give you the map, the code?”

  I nodded, looking at myself in his deep-set eyes.

  My mind flashed on another woman warrior blowing up her lover and herself in a tight spot like the tree cave, only outside was white hot, not cool green. She’d sacrificed herself to save her community from. . . .

  “Hey, don’t worry!”

  I’d mumbled something upsetting. His hands hovered close to my cheeks. They exuded a damp heat and made the hair on my face stand on end. I closed my eyes, relaxed into his caress, feeling myself under his rough fingers. He jerked away from me.

  “What’s the matter?” I said without opening my eyes, pressing my face into his hand, my body against his.

  “What are you doing?” He tried to pull away from me, but I sensed he didn’t want to.

  And I wouldn’t let him go. “What do you think I’m do
ing?”

  “It’s been . . . a long time.” He was trembling.

  I slid my hands along his smooth scalp. “Too long.” The whisper of growth on his head made my finger tips ache. I sucked in a breath of him through nostrils burned and blistered from the white heat and chemicals. Even that didn’t dampen the flow of passion.

  “You miss my hair?” His voice tickled the inside of my thighs.

  “I miss all of you.” I undid his shirt to feel my face against the wiry hairs on his chest. His skin shivered and puckered under my lips.

  He lifted my face toward his. “Look at me, Renee.” I felt the words more than heard them, his chest vibrating mine, notes so low as to resonate backbone and heart. “Look at me.”

  A deep ache I didn’t understand, something from his and Renee’s past threatened to override my passion before I felt it. I opened my eyes slowly, not wanting to blur this moment with tears, Renee’s tears or twice ten thousand years of. . . . “We don’t have time for. . . .” He trailed off.

  “I am looking at you.” A weathered, moody face with high cheekbones, full lips, and prominent chin. For an instant, Renee’s memories came so vividly to me.

  The smell of jasmine incense filled a cramped apartment. An elevated train smashed through the night just beyond the window, shaking the floorboards under our naked bodies. Before the disaster in Juba . . . I ran my fingers through thick black hair that fell below his shoulders. Sharp brown eyes smiled at me from under bushy brows raised in question.

  “Is this what you like? Tell me. I want you to feel happy.”

  And Renee could say nothing to him. Too shy, too uncertain for words.

  “You can still see all that?” he said, holding back tears.

  I’d been talking again, without knowing what I was saying. “Of course.”

  “Is this what you want?” His words moved through my skin and opened me up, like a voice from deep time singing my code. I was flooded with ancient memories.

  I had a horse’s head, feet of a jaguar, leaves sprouted from my fingers, wings broke across my back, my mouth was in bloom, the kick of a machine gun bruised my ribs, I swallowed a harpoon, and sang with elephants on the stage of a great hall.

  “I want your best self,” I said and fell into him. Delicious images exploded across my body, yet I wasn’t overwhelmed. He didn’t mean to set me off. I was not who he expected at all, not his Renee. I was Axala, a griot from the stars, come for the story of life, now in the body of a dead terrorist. And who was he? What was his story? A new beard covered his coppery skin like morning frost. My fingers slid through the hard little hairs up to the lines that broke apart the edges of his eyes. I didn’t care if this moment was a lie.

  “Are you sure?” he murmured. “You’re hurt.” His fingers were tentative, careful. “There’s no time. . . .”

  “We’ll steal the time. This is what I want.”

  His lips nudged mine open. My body knew exactly what to do.

  We snatched long moments out of nowhere and then –

  “I’m not your Renee.” He was still inside me when I said this. I felt his shock and embraced it. “I only remember bits and pieces of your Renee.”

  I flashed on Renee and her man, his long hair pulled tight against the skull, his face smooth. They were flattened against a rough wall, waiting for a blast in the village beyond, then they ran along a broken walkway.

  “Blowing up shit . . . the only thing I ever got a chance to get good at,” Renee shouted.

  “Not the only thing,” he argued.

  “And I was gonna do something noble. . . .” Renee muttered as they dropped into dung and mud for a second explosion. She closed her eyes on a stream of blood.

  “Are you having one of your episodes?” He tried to pull away from me. I was stronger than he expected. “We don’t have time for you to snap out.”

  What did he mean? He had offered me his best self. I wanted him to know my story. Body historians didn’t usually reveal themselves or get involved, certainly not with pure natives. Just grab the dead miracles and run. Well, not any more.

  “My name is Axala.” I released him. “I’m from. . . .” I didn’t remember my specific griot life, before Earth. Damn serial amnesia. “Light-years from here. . . .”

  “Stop it!”

  We stuck together where I had started bleeding again. I winced as he moved out of my body and rolled against a tree root arching up at the entranceway.

  “You can’t snap on me, not now, not on this job.” He jerked his sweaty clothes back on his body. Clots of dirt clung to the hairs on his chest. “We could retire after this job.”

  “I’d like that.” I wanted to wipe my blood off his stomach, do something, anything, instead of waiting for him to curse me out for playing games, going insane, fucking with him.

  “You’d consider retiring, just living our lives, putting the shit behind us?” He sounded desperate.

  “Look, I don’t know how to be straight with you.” I pulled on clothes. Cool, slimy bugs crawled across my ribs. “Some of Renee is still in me. She loves you.” Stalling for time, I brushed away the bugs. They made Renee’s skin crawl. “Despite . . . whatever . . . has happened between you.”

  “What hasn’t happened? I don’t know how much more I can take.” He pressed himself further into the darkness of the tree, but I could still see his eyes, like the husky’s eyes watching the wounds on my neck heal. A freak-show glare, foam at the corners of his mouth. I turned away, before he started howling.

  “What I’m saying is . . . I know I can handle the memories. Everything I’ve been.”

  He shook his head. “But I can’t handle all that.”

  “What do you mean?” I dug my fingers into the dirt. The head of a whale breaching on a rocky beach, the hands of a samurai clutching a sword, the feet of a Maasai cow herd running from demons, the oxygen breath of an orange tree. . . . I was lost.

  “We don’t have time for this.” His voice found me. “Cut it!”

  I moved close to him, felt his breath on my cheeks, smelled his sweat. We had the same smell now. That brought me back for a moment. “What’s your name, tell me your name,” I pleaded, wiping my blood off his stomach.

  A stream of gibberish, a hundred tangled languages, gestures from around the world, from sequoias, bald eagles, deep-sea divers, hostages, and nuns, all broke out of me and I was nobody, flailing inside a tree. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me like an hysterical woman who could be jerked back to reality.

  “We have a job to do, remember?”

  I found Renee and held on. Twice ten thousand years of history wouldn’t swallow me.

  “I didn’t screw myself.” He stopped shaking me. Even in my anger, I could taste his best self. “I want to hear your name.”

  “All the fucked up things that happened to you aren’t my fault, Renee.”

  “I know that.”

  “For years, you don’t even let me touch you.” His grip on my shoulder softened. “And now in the middle of a job . . . you come on so strong. . . .”

  I dragged him down in the dirt. It smelled of us, of lovemaking. “I just want to know your name, hear you say it.”

  “I lost my name after Juba . . . somewhere in the goddamned desert.” He rubbed his hands against sweaty pants. “We don’t have names, causes, just a price tag. We’re gig sluts now. Not freedom fighters like in Juba, just terrorists for hire.”

  “Gig sluts?” I got a face full of sticky spider web and clawed it away. “Are you saying we’re not committed to anything?”

  “For a long time now.” He spit web from his lips also. “From the Juba fiasco on, I did every crazy revenge thing you wanted.”

  “You don’t think we’re going to make it today, do you?” Inside the tree was getting claustrophobic.

  “What difference if we do?” He stood up. “It just goes on and on. . . .”

  “Yes, yes, but it doesn’t have to.” I crawled over to my knapsack, to the griot Miss
ion, a praise song to life. “You may be pointless. I am not.”

  “Oh, yeah? You’re fine now?”

  “On top of the world.” I couldn’t tell who was talking anymore. Axala, Renee, an angry tree. . . .

  “When you lost yourself before. . . .” He picked up his bag. “The amnesia thing after Juba, after they . . . after they. . . .” He couldn’t say what they had done to me in Juba.

  “It’s not your fault,” I murmured, sucking mucous down my throat and scratching my nose. “Let’s get out of this hole. Do the job. I can’t breathe.”

  He blocked my way. “In Juba when they jumped you, I hid in the back of the plant, where they’d stashed the stolen weapons. Listening. I didn’t do anything!”

  “What could you do?”

  “They had guns, six of them. But I didn’t even. . . .”

  I tried to wriggle past him. “So?”

  “Don’t interrupt me, let me say this!”

  My mouth clamped shut.

  “You never let me say this.” He clutched at several stringy vines.

  “Say it.” I set my face hard to listen to what Renee didn’t want to hear from him.

  He was spread-eagled against the vine mass, silhouetted by pink twilight. “They had you. I was afraid. I should have done . . . anything. But I didn’t want them on me too. I thought, please god, don’t let her tell them I’m here, don’t let them find me. You were screaming and screaming, but you told them nothing, then they gagged you, and I prayed, don’t let them hurt me. Praying not for you, still just about me.”

  The scars on my breasts and thighs throbbed with old pain, but I couldn’t see Juba, the story he told. Renee was suddenly desperate. She wanted to know. I balled up my fist and pounded his chest. “Tell me what I forgot.”

  “I can’t,” he whispered, fighting tears.

  “You’re all the memory I’ve got.”