by John Keene
Yes, every scent, through glass or concrete. Months.
Because of all the engines, the gunfire, all those explosions, not to mention the music and noise in my childhood compound, I’ll probably have to wear a hearing aid too when the time comes, glasses instead of these contact lenses for my eyes, and. . . . But I can still sniff a rose out of an open gravesite, or a shallow grave in an overgrown garden. A rose in a cemetery, a grave in a garden, there’s a bit of poetry for you.
Blooms in graveyards in bloom, quite lyrical. Months.
I have no gift for poetry, like you, never did, but I sponsor a contest for our youngsters, ten categories, including rap and traditional epic. Some even recite that famous speech, or the revised variation I approved. They’re very good. It’s even televised and broadcast via satellite all over the continent, though the part about the Quislings I had to alter. Not so poetic that cut.
Our youth, Quislings. Months.
In our youth we were something, facing each like this in that ditch in the midnight clearing, your ears pricked and that invisible antenna, maybe it was other senses too, not just hearing but vibrations you picked up from the air and ground, and me, my nose like an elephant’s or bloodhound’s back then, us two boys from opposite ends of the country, you from the city and I from the bush, sitting and waiting, biding and plotting.
Months.
Months? Sitting and waiting? Planning, yes. Before that night—was it months?
Four. Waiting, requesting.
We weren’t—you mean yourself, here. I admit to not having kept count. It could have been a month, or four, or four years. Not that I let problems fester that long. But as I said, I have been very busy.
I kept count. Four months since the last time.
So I wasn’t so busy that a year passed. But I wasn’t here the last time.
No. But I still kept count.
Still kept count, kept still, counting. How did you do that? A mental map? No access to a calendar, your schedule is staggered, and your placement in this room is regulated in an untimely fashion. No light or darkness, nothing to create a clock. I have gone to inestimable lengths to keep you out of time . . . and on this earth.
By sound.
Ah. Because I had to address of the problem of . . . toes or fingers.
You had to, no counting.
And sight, that light and dark. But I wanted you to talk to me, talk now, so I didn’t order . . . everything.
To be able to talk, say everything, and nothing.
You see, you used to say I was inattentive, too lost in my own time. But I followed you like a scent every day for all those years, until you scrubbed me clean of you. I loved to hear you talk, do you remember? We would sit for hours, you talking, me all ears. I am a man of few words. You could spin vast webs of them, of numbers. Stories, plans, plots, systems. Nets, traps: I had to work my way out of all of them.
Nests of words and figures, which snared me.
First feet so that they will never run away. Then hands, so not even the simplest tools. Then eyes, so no recall of a single place you stash them. But keep the tongue and vocal cords until the end because they may have something else to surprise you with.
My later approach, almost to the letter. How I will surprise you.
You will.
Tell you something.
The baobab tree lives forever and offers shade, but not cassava fruit. Today smells like that evening in the clearing, you know.
I can’t smell it.
It does. The stink of oblivion. Its anticipation. The smell that lies outside the smell. Fumes beyond and beneath it. Something worse, don’t you agree, lurking there? You still have your nose.
Yes, no, nothing like that evening. I can’t.
You can probably hear it in your voice, and mine. In the silence before I entered.
No, fumes, no sounds.
You probably cannot just hear it but taste it. That’s how the oracle described it, no? A feeling so strong the ear tastes its contours? All that poetry like a radar. We survived but not the victims of that ambush. An open field, though, for you.
Yes, but no, it was an ordeal after that.
Every such situation presented itself as an ordeal, but you saw the window before you. You leapt right through. I followed you.
Windows, yes. Now, no.
It wasn’t supposed to stay open for me. Yet every time when you tried with me you failed. After the first time, the failed assassination at the market, I realized I had to place my steps inside and then ahead of yours. Enter your frequency. The truth that I was next, your truth. That’s how I knew. The acid in the tap. The radioactive isotopes those painters painted all throughout the house. Survival is a great motivator. Somehow you missed that.
I missed.
You did and didn’t. You were watching but you couldn’t see past your ken. The untimely horizon. I won’t even use the metaphor of chess, which you banned, remember? Recall how you always beat me back then? Then you contrived to let me win, until I got the gist. You hated that you could imagine what the person next door or across the street was thinking but you couldn’t figure out a winning strategy against your former protegé on that board. How many did you tear up or burn? It fascinated me that the king was so powerless, waiting to be taken. He should have been able to control his fate and the throne.
Powerless, and taken.
Terrified of knights—and pawns. A bishop, how ridiculous. The queen is the one who never gave a damn. I was the queen, then. But yoté, choko, checkers, backgammon, cribbage, senterej, go, poker, 21, roulette, I laugh at all those metaphors today because they point to chance and I don’t take any.
No chance, no time.
Out of time. Except now.
No, I can’t believe it.
That your clock is running out? That you will surprise me? Before it’s too late. There was that class we took together while in exile, the philosophy of military strategy, or political philosophy, or philosophy of politics itself, something enthrallingly useless.
Yes. Plato, Machiavelli, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Schmitt—
All those damned Europeans, all that claptrap.
Emperor Frederick the Great, Teddy Roosevelt, Franco, Mussolini, Stalin, then a week for Mao, Trujillo, Amin, Pinochet, Bokassa . . . I imagined they’ve added Saddam, Cheney, Ghaddafi, the rest.
To what end? Our ancestors had more wisdom in their little toes.
My avatars, my favorite monsters.
At first I thought that was when you began formulating your schemes. But no, it was earlier. Before the philosophers, always political. You always had such ambition, foresight. Even in childhood, I envision, since I didn’t know you then. Those stories about your youth, on the other side of the country, how you organized the local children, drawing maps in the sand, compelling them to strangle animals, memorize secret words. It took me a while to catch on, and up.
Then you were behind me.
Fully. Behind, until I passed you. Surpassed you.
Past me.
I want to say that I remember the exact moment but that would be too cinematic, too perfect. Like a still from a movie, or a literary scene. Is there a computer code for that? A simulation I can view on the nearest screen. I don’t recall it. No need now to say I did. I was carrying out all of your plans, to the letter. Rewriting maps, strangling opponents, devising secret languages.
All my plans, opponents, letters.
I would say to myself, he foresees everything, moves men around like figurines. Without ever consulting the spirits, the oracle, those magical books from
the Middle East and East and elsewhere. He has the insight of a seer and the might of a deity. That’s why I called you, we all called you The Prophet.
The Prophet, men like figurines.
Because you knew how everything would unfold, how you would unfold it. No instructions needed. The Prophet foresaw the complex mathematics of circumstance and how his actions would affect them.
Prediction, or statistics, or complex systems analysis.
I never studied any of that in school. Perhaps military colleges should teach it.
Poetry, history, psychology, ban all of it.
You banned most of it. I thought you had a hologram of the world, of everyone else’s head, in yours, a cybernetic game turning it every which way, the dates, the days, the figures, the complicated transactional interplay of everything materializing in its array, with the will to realize it. Even if that’s not what it was like the metaphor works. You with your all your thinkers and dreamers, those bards, black, brown, yellow, white, whatever the color, that cannot save a single soul, including you.
Yes, my avatars, my monsters, I can hear their words right now.
You even wrote your thesis on Amilcar Cabral, another poet, one of ours.
No, Frantz Fanon. On the justification and cleansing power of violence, in the service of revolution.
Blood for the stanzas, odes to gore. That brain, so sharp, cutting even now like a well-honed trap, correcting me. I did say I want to be surprised, though the squeak, as you liked to say, cries out to be silenced.
Yes, that insistent noise. It became habit, the algorithms of reason, action, circumstance. I could place myself in the minds of others, their bodies, and view the world through their eyes, step where they stepped before they knew they would. What they would do I could always counter it. Equations for such things, code, scripts, texts, written or sung a thousand years ago, last decade, but something finer, more subtle too, that could not be written down, though I did.
Lyric poems, oral stories, short stories. You banned them all. I initially followed your lead, all of it except the most inane trash, though some of that can provoke enough sympathy to start people thinking. I realized that I would just have to tinker a bit.
That’s dangerous too, I learned soon enough.
If you don’t tinker, and control it. Yourself. I give them a steady diet of garbage, music videos from Rio, US reality shows, K-Pop, Mexican telenovelas, Bollywood gangster tales, Nollywood films about witches, fads, diet shows, hair shows, dubbed and scrubbed. Patriotic dramas, documentaries on the colonial wars. You can never go wrong denouncing the British and French. Louis XIV, King Leopold. Dead kings. You. Even a trickle of attenuated religion now and then, nothing to give them any hope or ideas. Thin as wartime broth.
One minute everyone is equal and the next minute they see that they’re not, or they’re appealing for help to a higher power. A god takes the shape of a man.
Mysticism, ritual, pageantry, emptied of content, Prophet. Rules to follow, without being told. The American evangelicals even endow some of it with a veneer of legitimacy.
Soon they start to see themselves as one in the same, all believing in that same figurehead.
None except that nation, and you know who that is now. We’ve always had more than enough minor engines of resentment among the ones who might do some damage, so I remove them, finding multiple other ways of pacifying the rest. Then it’s South vs. North, East vs. West, this tribal yawping vs. that tribal yawping, the lighter ones vs. the blacker ones, but with something to placate them all at the end. Nothing like a forgiving mirror.
A nation of narcissists, knowing nothing. You still have to be vigilant. I wasn’t.
Is this what you screamed your lungs out for? Was that your story about reality? What do you hear right now?
Your voice.
With those ears? I should not have to waste a breath asking anything twice. What do you hear?
I hear your body ever so slightly shift in your chair, your thick buttocks cushioned by a very soft pillow, softer than a calf’s sack. Though you love handmade suits from Italy and the UK in private, and your Nehru collars, African printed cloth and kufis in public, you have on a uniform, a plain one of ours of which you have many, a castle’s worth, I can hear the faintest rustle of the duck, it’s immaculately starched and pressed and hasn’t lost its crispness because of this heat. You have on a black beret, fabricated and blocked in the Basque region of Spain, not the Chinese kind, though you have been to Shanghai alone several times within the last six months. That hat sits easily on your shaved head, smooth as an egg, though sometimes when you touch it the rougher, gray hairs that you didn’t completely remove softly scratch against its inner lining. Instead of your usual patent leather driving loafers, you are wearing black steel-toe boots, thick soled, polished by peasants’ tongues as I used to say, so shiny you could scorch the sun with them. You don’t have on any medals, any jewelry, any makeup, any cologne, except a very mild deodorant manufactured in Cape Town whose combined fragrances my ears, let alone my nose, cannot make out.
I knew you had it in you.
You knew.
Can you hear how aroused your skill has made me?
Please.
Can you hear that?
Yes, I can hear your . . . pressing against the fabric of your. . . . Please don’t.
Don’t what?
You know. Please. I don’t. . . .
Have these months not taught you anything? Have you completely lost the ability to see into the future? Put yourself inside my head like you used to. Your little hologram or code or poem or statistical algorithm or whatever it was.
Yes. No.
If I wanted I would have done that straightaway. If I wanted your wife, your mother, your father, your children, your grandchildren, the grandchild living in the penthouse condo in Abu Dhabi and the one working for the Royal Bank of Sweden in Stockholm and the ones cavorting like princes in their chateaus in Atlanta and Los Angeles, if I wanted your entire native ancestral village to lie prone before me as I entered them one by one, if I wanted to raze the entire village and rape all the crushed and dismembered and burnt bodies, if I wanted to destroy every vestige of every single soul that spoke the same language as you and rape their ghosts, rape your ancestors who were my ancestors, if I want to rape the vestigial mother and fathers of us all, if I wanted to rape the last embers of your existence and memory and then what wasn’t even left after that, I would have done so. I can write the story of reality however I see fit. At any time.
No. Yes.
And if I instead wanted it to be as it was when we sat facing each other in the darkness in that clearing, when binding ourselves to each other not just to overthrow our supposed liberator, the tribune of the people, our leader with his bloodshot eyes and blood-drenched hands and blood-drained soul, if I wanted it as it was when we devoured each other that night, like lions, though we were both still cubs, when I shared everything of myself with you and you with me, or at least I thought you did, though you were even holding something back then. Admit a sick man into your home, but not your bed.
No. I was looking ahead. Yes.
You were looking ahead to the bead on my throat.
No, I was . . . looking back—
And as you entered me you were thinking instead of my bond, this will be a dagger, or a bayonet, or a Kaleshnikov butt. . . . You were thinking of terrors that would send the most extreme dystopian writers into paroxysms, that would make our ancestral spirits and the griots who have shared with us their stories shudder with envy and horror, and you wo
uld start as soon as you could.
No, not that night. I waited, until the time was right.
In time, then. With that burst of fear you feasted on your second chance. Try harder. I do want you to surprise me. How can you do that? If you don’t do that . . . what else?
Do I hear?
Do you?
Yes. I hear your dyed black mustache curling upwards at the corners of your full lips as they bow into a grin, I hear those lips brushing against your teeth whiter than Kibo snow, I hear your pleasure at how this is going, how things have unfolded over these last few years. I also hear the sweat trickling down into the open placket of your uniform shirt because even though they have turned up the air and opened the vents this cell is still a dutch oven, I hear your flaring nostrils, flecked with the residue of an early morning snort of cocaine as you were listening to your favorite rap artist whom you flew in to perform at your daughter’s 13th birthday party and who also put on a private show for you, your nose which is now smeared with some sort of paste made of Noxzema and miracle fruit, nevertheless periodically wrinkling at the stench, though they cleaned me up, several times this morning, they scrubbed me and this room up and down, every corner as well as the ceiling, before you would set foot in here.
The time had come.
I hear that you want to tell me what you are going to do to me but you want to draw it out on the one hand, but you are also ready to get back to all the things you had planned for today, beyond this. I hear that you are going to kill me, and take great pleasure in it.
I would never take pleasure in such things, certainly not with you, you know better than that, but you need to listen more closely. The man who listens to the wind hears nothing of life. Prophet, have you not been listening to me? To my words. To all these years? Or only to your own internal, empty silence?
Yes, this terrible silence.