Once, he wanted to cut his hair, but she wouldn’t let him, said she’d never speak to him again if he did. She likes it when the bouncers grab him by his hair and drag him to the exploratory table in the centre of the room. She says she likes the way it veils his face when he’s kneeling.
In the playroom though, she changes. He can’t hurt her the way she wants him to; she is tiring of him. He whips her half-heartedly until she tells the bouncer to do it properly.
A man walked in one day, in a robin’s egg blue uniform, and Wil froze. When he could breathe again, when he could think, he found her watching him, thoughtful.
She borrowed the man’s uniform and lay on the table, her face blank and smooth and round as a basketball under the visor. He put a painstick against the left nipple. It darkened and bruised. Her screams were muffled by the helmet. Her bouncers whispered things to her as they pinned her to the table, and he hurt her. When she begged him to stop, he moved the painstick to her right nipple.
He kept going until he was shaking so hard he had to stop.
That’s enough for tonight, she said, breathless, wrapping her arms around him, telling the bouncers to leave when he started to cry. My poor virgin. It’s not pain so much as it is a cleansing.
Is it, he asked her, one of those whiteguilt things?
She laughed, kissed him. Rocked him and forgave him, on the evening he discovered that it wasn’t just easy to do terrible things to another person: it could give pleasure. It could give power.
She said she’d kill him if he told anyone what happened in the playroom. She has a reputation and is vaguely ashamed of her secret weakness. He wouldn’t tell, not ever. He is addicted to her pain.
To distinguish it from real uniforms, hers has an inverted black triangle on the left side, just over her heart: asocialism, she says with a laugh, and he doesn’t get it. She won’t explain it, her blue eyes black with desire as her pupils widened suddenly like a cat’s.
The uniforms advancing on him, however, are clean and pure and real.
Wil wanted to be an astronaut. He bought the books, he watched the movies and he dreamed. He did well in Physics, Math, and Sciences, and his mother bragged, He’s got my brains.
He was so dedicated, he would test himself, just like the astronauts on TV. He locked himself in his closet once with nothing but a bag of potato chips and a bottle of pop. He wanted to see if he could spend time in a small space, alone and deprived. It was July and they had no air conditioning. He fainted in the heat, dreamed that he was floating over the Earth on his way to Mars, weightless.
Kevin found him, dragged him from the closet, and laughed at him.
You stupid shit, he said. Don’t you know anything?
When his father slid off the hood leaving a snail’s trail of blood, Kevin ran out of the car.
Stop it! Kevin screamed, his face contorted in the headlight’s beam. Shadows loomed over him, but he was undaunted. Stop it!
Kevin threw himself on their dad and saved his life.
Wil stayed with their father in the hospital, never left his side. He was there when the Peace Officers came and took their father’s statement. When they closed the door in his face and he heard his father screaming. The nurses took him away and he let them. Wil watched his father withdraw into himself after that, never quite healing.
He knew the names of all the constellations, the distances of the stars, the equations that would launch a ship to reach them. He knew how to stay alive in any conditions, except when someone didn’t want to stay alive.
No one was surprised when his father shot himself.
At the funeral potlatch, his mother split his father’s ceremonial regalia between Wil and Kevin. She gave Kevin his father’s frontlet. He placed it immediately on his head and danced. The room became still, the family shocked at his lack of tact. When Kevin stopped dancing, she gave Wil his father’s button blanket. The dark wool held his smell. Wil knew then that he would never be an astronaut. He didn’t have a backup dream and drifted through school, coasting on a reputation of Brain he’d stopped trying to earn.
Kevin, on the other hand, ran away and joined the Mohawk Warriors. He was at Oka on August 16 when the bombs rained down and the last Canadian reserve was Adjusted.
Wil expected him to come back broken. He was ready with patience, with forgiveness. Kevin came back a Peace Officer.
Why? his aunts, his uncles, cousins, and friends asked.
How could you? his mother asked.
Wil said nothing. When his brother looked up, Wil knew the truth, even if Kevin didn’t. There were things that adjusted to rapid change – pigeons, dogs, rats, cockroaches. Then there were things that didn’t – panda bears, whales, flamingos, Atlantic cod, salmon, owls.
Kevin would survive the Adjustment. Kevin had found a way to come through it and be better for it. He instinctively felt the changes coming and adapted. I, on the other hand, he thought, am going the way of the dodo bird.
There are rumours in the neighbourhood. No one from the Vancouver Urban Reserve #2 can get into Terminal Avenue. They don’t have the money or the connections. Whispers follow him, anyway, but no one will ask him to his face. He suspects that his mother suspects. He has been careful, but he sees the questions in her eyes when he leaves for work. Someday she’ll ask him what he really does and he’ll lie to her.
To allay suspicion, he smuggles cigarettes and sweetgrass from the downtown core to Surreycentral. This is useful, makes him friends, adds a kick to his evening train ride. He finds that he needs these kicks. Has a morbid fear of becoming dead like his father, talking and breathing and eating, but frightened into vacancy, a living blankness.
His identity card that gets him to the downtown core says Occupation: Waiter. He pins it to his jacket so that no one will mistake him for a terrorist and shoot him.
He is not really alive until he steps past the industrial black doors of his lover’s club. Until that moment, he is living inside his head, lost in memories. He knows that he is a novelty item, a real living Indian: that is why his prices are so inflated. He knows there will come a time when he is yesterday’s condom.
He walks past the club’s façade, the elegant dining rooms filled with the glittering people who watch the screens or dance across the dimly-lit ballroom-sized floor. He descends the stairs where his lover waits for him with her games and her toys, where they do things that aren’t sanctioned by the Purity laws, where he gets hurt and gives hurt.
He is greeted by his high priestess. He enters her temple of discipline and submits. When the pain becomes too much, he hallucinates. There is no preparing for that moment when reality shifts and he is free.
They have formed a circle around him. Another standard intimidation tactic. The Peace Officer facing him is waiting for him to talk. He stares up at it. This will be different from the club. He is about to become an example.
Wilson Wilson? the Officer says. The voice sounds male but is altered by computers so it won’t be recognizable.
He smiles. The name is one of his mother’s little jokes, a little defiance. He has hated her for it all his life, but now he doesn’t mind. He is in a forgiving mood. Yes, that’s me.
In the silence that stretches, Wil realizes that he always believed this moment would come. That he has been preparing himself for it. The smiling-faced lies from the TV haven’t fooled him, or anyone else. After the Uprisings, it was only a matter of time before someone decided to solve the Indian problem once and for all.
The Peace Officer raises his club and brings it down.
His father held a potlatch before they left Kitamaat, before they came to Vancouver to earn a living, after the aluminum smelter closed.
They had to hold it in secret, so they hired three large seiners for the family and rode to Monkey Beach. They left in their old beat-up speedboat, early in the morning, when the Douglas Channel was calm and flat, before the winds blew in from the ocean, turning the water choppy. The seine boats fell f
ar behind them, heavy with people. Kevin begged and begged to steer and his father laughingly gave in.
Wil knelt on the bow and held his arms open, wishing he could take off his lifejacket. In four hours they will land on Monkey Beach and will set up for the potlatch where they will dance and sing and say goodbye. His father will cook salmon around fires, roasted the old-fashioned way: split down the centre and splayed open like butterflies, thin sticks of cedar woven through the skin to hold the fish open, the sticks planted in the sand; as the flesh darkens, the juice runs down and hisses on the fire. The smell will permeate the beach. Camouflage nets will be set up all over the beach so they won’t be spotted by planes. Family will lounge under them as if they were beach umbrellas. The more daring of the family will dash into the water, which is still glacier-cold and shocking.
This will happen when they land in four hours, but Wil chooses to remember the boat ride with his mother resting in his father’s arm when Wil comes back from the bow and sits beside them. She is wearing a blue scarf and black sunglasses and red lipstick. She can’t stop smiling even though they are going to leave home soon. She looks like a movie star. His father has his hair slicked back, and it makes him look like an otter. He kisses her, and she kisses him back.
Kevin is so excited that he raises one arm and makes the Mohawk salute they see on TV all the time. He loses control of the boat, and they swerve violently. His father cuffs Kevin and takes the wheel.
The sun rises as they pass Costi Island, and the water sparkles and shifts. The sky hardens into a deep summer blue.
The wind and the noise of the engine prevent them from talking. His father begins to sing. Wil doesn’t understand the words, couldn’t pronounce them if he tried. He can see that his father is happy. Maybe he’s drunk on the excitement of the day, on the way that his wife touches him, tenderly. He gives Wil the wheel.
His father puts on his button blanket, rests it solemnly on his shoulders. He balances on the boat with the ease of someone who’s spent all his life on the water. He does a twirl, when he reaches the bow of the speedboat and the button blanket opens, a navy lotus. The abalone buttons sparkle when they catch the light. She’s laughing as he poses. He dances, suddenly inspired, exuberant.
Later he will understand what his father is doing, the rules he is breaking, the risks he is taking, and the price he will pay on a deserted road, when the siren goes off and the lights flash and they are pulled over.
At the time, though, Wil is white-knuckled, afraid to move the boat in a wrong way and toss his father overboard. He is also embarrassed, wishing his father were more reserved. Wishing he was being normal instead of dancing, a whirling shadow against the sun, blocking his view of the Channel.
This is the moment he chooses to be in, the place he goes to when the club flattens him to the Surreycentral tiles. He holds himself there, in the boat with his brother, his father, his mother. The sun on the water makes pale northern lights flicker against everyone’s faces, and the smell of the water is clean and salty, and the boat’s spray is cool against his skin.
Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu is a writer and journalist from Chicago. Her novel, Zahrah the Windseeker (Houghton Mifflin), is scheduled for release in late 2004. Her short story “The Magical Negro” and her essay “Her Pen Could Fly: A Tribute to Virginia Hamilton” were published in Dark Matter II: Reading the Bones (Warner Aspect), and her short story “Asuquo” was published in Mojo: Conjure Stories (Warner Aspect). In 2004, her short story “The Ghastly Bird” will be published in the Other Half Literary Magazine. She is currently working on her PhD in English at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
When Scarabs Multiply
Nnedi Okorafor-Mbachu
I was only twelve years old when Sarauniya Jaa, the Red Queen of Niger, returned to my town wanting to cut off my father’s head. But I don’t hate her. I don’t fear her either. But I feel . . . something. Something strong. And that’s why I plan to do this.
Kwàmfà was a great town because of Jaa. It was she who came and organized it, and then ran it. Though she’d left Kwàmfà a year before I was born, I’d been hearing about her all my life. From my mother I had always heard about how good life was because of her, before she left.
“It was relaxed here,” my mother said. “Even after the bombs fell and everything changed.”
Jaa came decades ago with her nomads, when Kwàmfà was just a tiny dying village. Under Jaa’s guidance, Kwàmfà became a booming town of palm and monkey bread trees, old but still useful satellite dishes, and neatly built mud brick houses with colourful, Zulu-style geometric designs and conical thatch roofs. The streets filled up with cars, motorbikes, and camels. Kwàmfà became known for its exquisite carpets and after the great change, also for its flying carpets.
But after Jaa hopped onto her camel and rode into the Sahara, my mother said, things changed yet again. And it was all due to my father.
My father was wealthy, influential, and highly respected. When he spoke, people listened. My mother said he was born with a sugared tongue. And also he had always been quite popular amongst the women because he was very lovely.
“When we were younger, I didn’t mind,” my mother said. “Your father was strikingly beautiful. How could I expect others not to notice? You know, when he was in his twenties, he was the winner three years in a row of the Mr Sahara beauty contest.” She smiled and shook her head. “It was those eyes. He could make them go in two different directions. The judges loved that. It’s a shame that stupidity took over his heart.”
My father did very well selling and buying houses, but he had always been interested in politics. He never missed a town meeting, and he was most attentive when Jaa was speaking. My mother never thought anything of it. Mother was also interested in politics and liked attending the meetings.
Nevertheless, the same day Jaa left, my father did too. And he refused to tell my mother where he was going. He returned a month later riding a bejewelled camel and wearing a golden caftan and turban and an equally golden smile on his handsome face. My father was somewhat light in skin tone, the colour of tea and cream, but Mother said that day he looked much darker, as if he’d been out in the sun for weeks. Probably bargaining for the camels and jewels. Behind him marched more camels, freshly brushed, ridden by several of his close friends. They threw naira notes to the gathering crowd and the crowd gathered faster.
“Jaa is gone, but no need to worry!” he shouted in his booming voice as he smiled and winked at the women in the crowd. “In her absence, I can make sure Kwàmfà remains the great town she built! Make me your chief and there will be no need to worry about greedy shady men destroying her council!”
My father was playing off of people’s fears that without Jaa, our world would crumble back into corruption. They followed him because he promised to keep things as they were.
In a matter of months, Kwàmfà had a chief, my father. And only a few months later, after throwing a lot more money around, flashing his pretty smile, making sure he had the right people on his side, making even more promises, and silencing Jaa’s most devoted devotees with money or indirect threats, my father succeeded in making many changes to Kwàmfà.
My mother said that before, when Kwàmfà was Jaa’s town, everyone learned how to shoot a gun, ride a camel, take apart and rebuild a computer. My father made it so that only the boys got to do these things.
“Women and girls are too beautiful to dirty their hands with such things,” he told the people with a soft chuckle. The women and girls blushed at his words and the men agreed with them. My father also thought us too beautiful to be seen, so he brought back the burka.
He cut off several food and housing programs, which left many starving and destitute.
“Soon we won’t need such programs,” he told the people with a wink. Most people backed him in his iron-fisted fight against even the smallest crime. Kwàmfà was safe, but no place is free of all crime. My father wanted absolute perfection. Soon there were pu
blic whippings, hands cut off, and in the rare cases of murder, public executions. All was in the name of Jaa, he constantly said, although Jaa would never have approved of these things.
He was so confident in himself that he didn’t fear Jaa’s wrath, so sure he was that she would never return. My mother watched him become a different man. It must have been most painful when, to top it all off, he started marrying more wives. The better to look the part of the “big man.”
He was like one of those wild magicians who goes astray in the storyteller’s stories. Talented, self-righteous, and power-drunk. He used the shadowy magic and spells of politics to pull together a mountain of power. But like every magician of this kind, it was all bound to come back to him.
It’s no wonder Sarauniya Jaa wanted to cut off his head.
Even before she returned, everyone knew the legend of Sarauniya Jaa, Princess of the New Sahara. On clear nights when the full moon made streetlights useless, the storyteller would come out of his hut and sit under the ancient monkey bread tree and wait for the children to gather around him. As he waited, that tree would tell him what stories to tell; or so my mother said. He usually recited Jaa’s tale last. And he told it in Hausa, not English, and spoke loud enough for his voice to echo high up into the Aïr Mountains. By this time, I was always tired and the story was like a vivid dream.
So Long Been Dreaming Page 8