The Chaos

by Nalo Hopkinson

  “Is that the same bird?” I asked the old lady.

  She gave a rueful smile. “No one has ever known.”

  “My bio teacher never told us that the Archaeopteryx could do that.”

  “The arka what?” asked the old woman.

  Izbouchka righted herself again. More sounds of china and glass breaking. “I so hate it when she does that,” said the witch. “How would you like to be my next Vassilisa? Just a little light cleaning work.”

  I put my hands on my hips and glared at her. “Tell me you did not just offer me a job as your maid!”

  She shrugged. “Your choice. It would have been a way for you to make up for your offense. But as you wish.” The threat in her voice made me shiver.

  The giant bird turned its eagle gaze on Izbouchka. It hissed. Then it extended its neck, cocked its head sideways, and looked Izbouchka up and down. It made a rumbly inquiring sound in its throat. Izbouchka made her own question sound back. I guess that was the answer the other bird wanted, because it leaned over and nuzzled Izbouchka’s awning with its beak. Izbouchka’s ceiling tiles ruffled up, making a sound almost like a girlish giggle.

  “Well!” said the witch. “Who would have thought?”

  Izbouchka’s chimney was nuzzling the bird back. The bird tried to climb on top of her. I wasn’t sure I was old enough to be watching this, no matter how much porn I’d scoped on gottabejelly.com. The witch yelled something at Izbouchka in Russian. Izbouchka slid out from under the bird and slammed open her front door. The witch said to me, “Maybe luck is with you this time. Perhaps you won’t have to pay the price for presuming to summon me.” Before I could ask her what she meant, she swooped up her stairs and into Izbouchka again. The door slammed shut and disappeared. The stairs rolled themselves back up.

  Izbouchka took a running start, then leapt into the air. The giant bird squawked. That was “Come back, hot thing!” if I’d ever heard it, and I had. A little unsteady on its new feet, it stood. It leapt into the air, too, and flew after Izbouchka. They headed south, in the direction of Animikika. I guess a little molten lava wasn’t the kind of thing those two needed to worry about. Pretty soon, they disappeared into the volcano smog.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  I rode another bicycle I’d found to Aunt Maryssa’s place. People had just abandoned their rides all over the place. The bike was a little short for my long legs, but its gears were sweet smooth. Even though Auntie had my jacket, riding kept me warm. But it didn’t do anything to help the chafing. At least the blemish didn’t seem to have spread much farther. I had a couple of near accidents, because as I rode, I kept peeking down at the leg the fire bird had gouged. I could see the smooth, rubbery skin of the blemish where there should have been an open wound. It didn’t even feel tender anymore. It didn’t feel anything. What was that black gunk that had come out of the cut just before it had healed over? It’d had the same consistency as blood. I touched my forehead. The cut I’d gotten from the piece of flying eggshell was gone. Man, I wished that I had Ben and Gloria to talk to right now! But Gloria was probably never going to talk to me again. I wished I had Tafari to hold me and argue with me until I did something sensible about the weird shit that was happening to my body.

  If only I knew what that sensible thing was. I wished I had Rich to tease me and make fun of me and laugh at Mum and Dad behind their backs with me. Hell, I even wished I had Mum and Dad.

  My life had been so simple. Yesterday, all I’d wanted was to win that street dance battle and make enough cash to put down on an apartment with my big bro. Today, I was dodging boggarts and abominable snowmen in the streets, my missing brother was sending me creepy phone messages, the countries of the world were in chaos, and with every passing hour I turned into more of a tar baby; a freak on the outside as well as on the inside.

  At least I had Aunt Mryss. She was a one-woman Chaos all by herself, but that only meant she was dealing with all this strangeness as though it were a normal day for her. Maybe it was.

  That humongous bird; was it a different one from the one Izbouchka had torched? Or had she just helped the injured one to somehow heal itself?

  I stopped the bike at Aunt Maryssa’s bungalow on the corner of Dufferin and that little side street with the butcher shop. She came out onto her front porch to let me in. She was dressed warmly, and her color was back. Boy, was I glad to see that.

  I didn’t have any way to chain the bike up. “Can I bring it inside?” I shouted to her.

  She replied, “A bird in the hand is better than two in the bush.” I guessed that meant yes. She always talked that way, like a combination between church and a wizard’s prophecy. I went to open the gate. Her hedge rustled, and the two Horseless Head Men popped out of it. I jumped. “Don’t fear them,” Maryssa called out, “for the lion shall lie down with the lamb.”

  All that talk about lambs. She was making me hungry. I opened the gate and wheeled my bike past the Horseless Head Men. One of them burbled at me as I passed. “Nice day,” I said to it.

  When I reached the foot of the short set of stairs up to the porch, Maryssa said, “Bring the bicycle come. Put it inside. But brush off the wheels-them first. Nah want no mud on my nice carpet.”

  I knelt by the bike and started brushing the wheels off. “You’ll never believe what happened to that big weird bird!” I told her.

  “Poor thing. Don’t tell me it dead?” With her strong accent, she sounded so much like my dad that I started to tear up. I’d heard white people ask her where in Ireland she was from, or Spain. Because she was white it never occurred to most of them that what they were hearing was Jamaican.

  “No, it didn’t die. Well, it did and it didn’t.” I stood up. “The thing is, I’m not sure. But it was alive again at the end, and I think it’s okay.”

  She nodded. She seemed satisfied with that. “You hungry?”

  “Like a horse.”

  “Come and eat, then.” She put her two pinkie fingers to her lips and whistled. The Horseless Head Men were there instantly, squabbling with each other. “Behave yourselves,” she said. “Plenty of room for the two of you.” To my surprise, they settled down and shuffled into place on her left shoulder. Not that they actually sat on it. They bobbed in the air just above it.

  “They have to come inside with us, Auntie?”

  “Feeding time.”

  Horseless Head Men ate? This I had to see.

  Auntie Mryss waved me on in ahead of her. Behind me, I heard a sharp knock. Didn’t need to turn around to know what it was; Maryssa, rapping on the doorjamb. “Out, Spot!” she said. Out of habit, I said it along with her. Not as enthusiastically as I used to, though. Now that I knew what Spot was, I wasn’t so keen to have it come out of anywhere. Well, it had seemed to listen to Auntie Mryss. I was going to have to put my trust in that. I leaned the bike up against one wall of the hallway and waited for her to lock the door. She turned toward me, smiled, and opened her arms. I went into them, closed my eyes, and sighed with happy. Someone I knew. Who loved me. Someone solid and familiar, and just a little mad. That was the thing about Mryss; everybody else I knew tried to keep their madness under wraps, to pretend they were normal. Even me. Mryss had never bothered to try. “Auntie Maryssa,” I said, “I’m so glad you’re okay.”

  “I thought I was unlucky because I had no shoes. But then I met a man with no feet.”

  “You betcha,” I responded. I had no clue what she was on about. And what was making that quiet humming sound? I opened my eyes to find myself nose to snouts with the two Horseless Head Men, who were peering curiously at me. They were the ones humming. “Uh.” I stepped out of Maryssa’s arms, away from them. “What smells so good?”

  “For I have prepared a table in the presence of mine enemy,” replied Maryssa, “and killed the fatted calf.” She was walking down the hallway, in the direction of the kitchen. “I know you. You always hungry. Eat more than your brother, even.”

  I scurried after the sound of her voi
ce. I wanted to put off the moment when I told her how badly I’d been messing up. I asked her, “You going to tell me more about Spot?”

  The kitchen was the same old kitchen. Dunno why I’d half-expected it to have changed. Same white walls. Same small Formica table with the brown-on-beige flowers and that silver plastic fake aluminum rim running along the bottom of the tabletop. Same faint smell of the bleach she cleaned everything with. But everything here was the same, as though all the good hadn’t gone out of my world. I sniffed.

  “What you weeping for, girl?” asked Maryssa. She was poking about in one of the cupboards above the sink (same cream-colored, ice-cream-thick enamel paint, same brass handles). She took out a plate and set it on the counter. As she moved around the kitchen, the two Horseless Head Men stayed with her, floating a quarter inch in the air above her shoulder. They were beginning to grow on me.

  I pulled a chair out from the table and sat down (the seats matched the ugly pattern on the table, only in vinyl, half of them torn down the middle). I sat down. “Mum and Dad are going to kill me. Rich is missing, and it’s my fault. One of my best friends isn’t talking to me.” My eyes were welling up for real now.

  Maryssa turned and gave me a measuring look, but she didn’t say anything. She spooned rice onto my plate from one of the two pots on the stove and ackee and saltfish from the other. She plonked the plate down in front of me. “Some have meat, but cannot eat,” she said.

  Was that supposed to mean something? Everything Maryssa said seemed to have another meaning woven into it, like the ribbons Mum used to plait into my hair. The salty smell of the plate of ackee and saltfish in front of me made my mouth water. “My favorite!”

  She went over to the fridge and opened it. “Your favorite food is any food.”

  I picked up the fork she’d put down beside the plate and started shoveling the meal into me. Creamy yellow lumps of ackee, bits of salt cod, tiny green leaves of French thyme, and of course, plenty of pepper. It didn’t taste quite right, though. It needed something else. Maybe I could sneak some plastic wrap when she wasn’t looking.

  Maryssa was slicing into an avocado she’d taken from the fridge; a Jamaican alligator pear, as big as a cantaloupe, with smooth, bright yellow-green skin. Not those tiny, bumpy-skinned avocados from the regular grocery store that barely lasted two bites. She put two huge wedges of it on the side of the plate. I stuffed one of them into my mouth right away, even though I was still working on a mouthful of ackee and saltfish. Through a mouthful of food, I said, “So, like I was telling you—”

  “Manners,” she said, and clucked. “Don’t talk at me with your mouth full like that.”

  “But Rich—”

  “Is a grown man. He can look after himself.”

  “Oh. I guess so. I kind of forgot.” So I continued about the serious business of chewing. God, the taste. I finally got the whole mouthful down, and said, “Ackee is kind of like if scrambled eggs were a vegetable, you know?”

  She snorted. She sat down at the table, across from me. One of the Horseless Head Men floated over to inspect my meal.

  “Shoo. Auntie Mryss, didn’t you say you were going to feed those things?”

  “They been feeding right here sitting on me the whole time.”

  Okay, so they weren’t growing on me after all. “You mean like . . . vampires or something?” Did the nasty little things have fangs?

  She laughed. “In a kind of a way, I am the blood and the life,” she replied, “but these don’t want neither from me.”

  “Well, thank goodness for that.”

  “Though if they wanted it,” she said, her face serious, “I would give it.”

  “Auntie Mryss, don’t. You’re creeping me out.”

  She only smiled and took one of the Horseless Head Men off her shoulder. It sat purring in her palm while she stroked its head. The other went and floated in the sunny window, purring too, like some kind of levitating cat. Hard to believe the two of them had been strong enough to keep her from drowning.

  I kept eating. I wanted to hear about Spot. Plus I was hungry. Plus it was good food, even if a little bit funny-tasting. “I wonder what’s happening with Mum and Dad,” I said to Maryssa. “They must be worried sick.” Maybe if I eased into it. What was happening to me. Rich’s agonized voice on the phone.

  “Mm-hmm,” she said, looking grim. Uh-oh. Bad topic. It really pissed her off that Dad didn’t visit her more often. I came a lot, though. It kinda pissed me off that I wasn’t enough for her.

  “You’re managing okay?” I asked her. “I mean, after being in the lake and everything?”

  “Poco-poco, you know? Poco-poco.”

  She said that a lot. I’d asked my dad what it meant. “So-so” in Spanish, he said. I had a thought. Didn’t know why it hadn’t occurred to me before this. “Hey, Maryssa?”

  She glared at me.

  “I mean, Aunt Mryss? How come you say that? You know, ‘poco-poco.’ How come you say it in Spanish?”

  She kissed her teeth, rolled her eyes. “Pickney-gyal, you nah know that Jamaica was Spanish one time? So what all that book learning you do in school good for?” But I knew what it meant when the corners of her eyes crinkled up like that. She was pleased that I’d asked her.

  “Spanish? When?”

  She shrugged. “Centuries. But never mind that. What is this thing you keep trying to tell me?”

  Oh, bite me. I’d started it. I had to finish it.

  “Auntie, I go places in my dreams. Last night I think I did so for real.” What would she say? It was so hard talking to adults about real shit, important shit.

  “Finish your food. You been finding yourself on sojourn in a strange land.”

  Sojourner. Visitor.

  She looked out the window. “Heaven forgive,” she said, “but I wish it could be me.” She sounded so wistful about it. Then she smiled down at the Horseless Head Man in her hand. “But lo, mine own have come to me.”

  “You don’t want to go where I went, Auntie.” I took a deep breath, put down my fork, pushed the sleeve of my left arm up, and exposed the black, tarry patch. I showed it to her. “And on top of that, look what else is happening to me.”

  Her eyes went wide and she leaned forward to see better. “Holy shit. What the rass that is?”

  Another time, I would have laughed. Aunt Mryss was always saying things you didn’t expect to come out of her sanctified mouth. Instead, I rolled up my left pant leg, showed her my leg. “Remember those spots I was getting? Well, they’re spreading. And then I got Rich to touch that weird light that came out of the ground, and bang! I was dreaming, only awake. And then Rich was gone.” I was blabbering, the words coming faster and faster, the tears starting again. “And when me and Punum woke up, the whole world had changed and all this horrible stuff was happening, and this black stuff is spreading everywhere on me, and people are dying, and Auntie Mryss, suppose it was all my fault? Suppose I made all of this happen by getting Rich to touch that thing? And what am I going to do when I’m one big blemish from head to toe? If the whole world hasn’t blown up by then, or, I dunno, if a big space monster hasn’t gobbled down the whole planet like a muffin?”

  “First of all,” she said, “don’t worry ’bout Rich. He called me just now, before you reach here.”

  My heart did a somersault. “For real? Where is he? Is he okay? Did he report to his parole officer?”

  She frowned. “Though, come to think of it, he sounded strange.”

  My heart crashed back down into my chest. “Strange how?”

  “I don’t exactly know. Like his mind was on something else.” Lightly, she tossed the Horseless Head Man into the air. It chirped happily, took itself on a sail about the room. Auntie pointed a finger at me. “Second thing. You call your parents yet?”

  “Yeah. But we got cut off. My phone ran out of minutes.”

  She nodded. “Awoh. You going to call them when you finish eating.”

  “Yes, Auntie.”
Mom would come and get me in the car. If the car still existed. If the highway still ran in the same direction. I found I was looking forward to sleeping in my own bed, in my own house.

  “Third thing,” said Mryss.

  “Yes?”

  “So you’re changing. You mean to tell me you don’t already change every day?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Everybody change every day. Change is hard.” She put an h in front of each “every,” and took it away from the front of “hard.” “You grow bigger, you grow taller, you get fat, you get maawga, you grow titties, the boys-them start to smell good, maybe even the girls, ee? You young people. In my day, we wouldn’t talk that out loud.”

  I could feel myself blushing. “But not like this! I’m not supposed to change like this!”

  Just then, the house rocked with the force of something outside hitting it. I cried out, “What the hell was that?”

  Auntie Mryss was already up out of her chair, the Horseless Head Men zipping around her. She rushed to the kitchen window, threw it open, and yelled, “Spot! Stop that! Stop it, now!” She turned to me. “Sorry, darling. But now she turn flesh, like she can’t behave herself any at all. She want to go out, she want to come in.” She shook her head, smiled. “She want to see all there is to see, frighten all them that could frighten.”

  Well, that frightening thing was working on me, anyway. I stood up. “She just about killed that huge bird!”

  “Yes, well, me and she had a little talk about that. She going to behave from now on.”

  Right. “All the same, I think I’d better go now. Thanks for the meal, Auntie.”

  She stood up, too. “Well, come and meet her, then, nuh? Now that you don’t have to pretend you can see her?” Her eyes twinkled. Damn. All these years, she’d known I was humoring her.

  “Spot,” said Maryssa, “time for din-dins, sweetie.”

  More banging. Something large in the backyard was throwing itself repeatedly against the kitchen door.

  Auntie called out, “In through the cat flap, Spot! Like I showed you!” Auntie’s old cat, Plato, had died last year.