What made my conversations with Garth different this time was that I had done the thing we’d all shaped our lives in preparation for. I’d gone to America. I no longer had to make strong arguments or defend my positions. I’d also achieved a personal goal in that I’d come back as a Black American, not the African I was when I left. Every other word out of my mouth was “man” or “cool,” and I bobbed my head when I walked. I slapped everyone’s palm, giving them “five,” which they all gathered to receive as if something were being passed from hand to hand.
Garth had said something, jealous of the attention I was getting. I said something back too loudly and probably too proudly. In a flash, he’d crossed the wall from his yard and was in my face. I had him down before he could hurt me. When he got up and went back over the wall, I continued posing for the girls at the front gate, ramping up the Yankee accent until I heard Cousin Dale calling my name and raising his finger.
* * *
Gollum from The Lord of the Rings was hovering over me, dripping saliva. One set of fingers was in his mouth and he bobbed from side to side. I jerked my body when my eyes opened to him. He pulled back and crouched down, displaying an unhealthy-looking grin. I made to lean up but my body barely responded. The pain in my head was too great, and it made better sense just to shake my body vigorously.
My nurse eventually came and looked at me with professional warmth. I wanted to tell her about the creature next to me. My mouth was full of honey.
“You wake?”
Trying to answer her made what I’d imagined as honey pour slowly out the sides of my mouth. Gollum smiled and crawled into the bed next to mine. He lay on his side and soon seemed to be asleep, though his eyes remained halfway open and his mouth twitched like that of a dog dreaming.
She gave me medicine for the pain and checked the state of my bed. Whenever that happened, I tried to teach myself how to make my mind go bright white and shut down everything around me. She expertly cleaned me and changed the bed. I’d forgotten why she was there.
“You will sleep good now.”
Another nurse entered my field of vision with what I learned was a catheter. It was as if I were watching the procedure on TV. Better still, there was no embarrassment even when the other nurse began to tug at my penis and laugh so that my nurse had to slap her shoulder and hiss her teeth the way market women did.
At the foot of my bed was a young boy peering through the aluminum bars of the footboard. He had reddish skin and a broad smile, and seemed too short for his features and the size of his hands. He waved like he was welcoming me at the airport as I went unconscious again.
* * *
Somebody’s transistor radio was on, crackly in the courtyard that separated the private rooms from the general wards. I felt the familiar rush in my chest when the strings of “Space Oddity” rose. I counted down from ten with the singer and shut my eyes tightly as he belted out the chorus. The dots of light behind my eyelids moved with the bleeps and whooshes at the fadeout.
“Phosphene.” From the Greek phos (light) and phene (to show). It was one of the words my mother collected. The experience of light entering the eye, often due to head injuries or pressure or a sudden closing of the eyes leaving traces of light behind the lids. It usually appears in patterns and diagrams, sometimes kaleidoscopic or just bursts of color.
My song had come on right after ABBA’s “Fernando,” which had been on regular play on Jamaican radio all that summer. ABBA made me think of Boney M., also big that summer, with “Rivers of Babylon,” the only reggae song allowed in Big Auntie and Uncle Daddy’s house. I always confused Boney M. with ABBA, and in remembering this detail, I became buoyant because every act of remembering felt like new skin growing over an open wound.
The boy from the foot of my bed was Paul. He’d heard an American near his age was in the general ward. I was fourteen and he must have been ten or eleven. I didn’t have the strength to explain that I wasn’t actually an American. Also, it didn’t take long to realize, even in my condition, that not to be American would mean that I was just like everybody else. This was not a place where you wanted to be just like everybody else. And it was nice having Paul run errands for me, give me information on the people in the other beds, and keep me company.
Paul didn’t know my neighbor’s real name and began calling him Gollum as well. He’d never heard of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings, but when I told him the story, he began to bob up and down like a grasshopper on his unnaturally bent legs.
Paul said Gollum had been a farmer, one of those old men always cutting with a machete at the roots of something. In a cane field one evening, he—bent over and chopping in a blind line through the sugar cane—leaned head first into a country road just as a car sped by. Gollum’s senses were severely addled. Though he never spoke, there were times when he made drawling sounds as if he were sipping hot soup, or expelled hoarse, brittle expulsions of breath. His eyes gaped as if in permanent surprise, and his face was split by a grin too wide to suggest laughter. He’d been in the wards for some time, and people wondered why he wasn’t in Bellevue where mad people went.
Paul’s story was sadder in the way that violence done to children always is. He seemed almost a dwarf, but when I was able to sit up, I noticed his legs, bent permanently, and although he walked in a crouch, he shuffled as fast as anyone could walk. He looked like a grasshopper at first but then, I thought, like a satyr from Greek mythology. Unlike the other patients, he never answered any questions about his injuries. No one ever came to visit him.
I learned his story from a tall, very dark man in the wards who also wanted to spend time with the American. The fact that I was a boy meant nothing to him. Being American implied a knowledge of a range of topics and concerns. He spoke with the kind of Jamaican English that had a recognizably British lilt. He spoke like my mother.
This man was always on the patio outside the nurses’ station. It was a popular spot for patients because it had a vista of a city, albeit of cardboard, that stretched as far as the eye could see. Though the cardboard city was more than enough to capture attention, his face was equally brutal and fascinating. It had been burned with acid, through the skin in places, by someone he referred to as a business partner. His cheeks and lips looked like a candle melting. There was only one eyebrow and the opposite eye drooped low. He reminded me of the comic-book hero Jonah Hex, whose face had been half melted off.
When I introduced myself, he made a gesture that I eventually learned was a smile. I tried to tell him that I wasn’t actually American but that I wasn’t Jamaican either. He made that strange twisted gesture with his face again and began laughing.
“You don’t know where you come from, boy? Then you are the luckiest person in this place.” He laughed so much that he seemed to cause himself pain.
The man told me that Paul had been hamstrung by his own father. I didn’t know what that meant. The boy’s father had cut his son’s hamstring muscles with a kitchen knife and left him on the floor to bleed.
Because no one ever visited Paul, it was assumed that his mother was not around or not interested. This was why, even though there was nothing more they could do for him at the hospital, they let him stay. Jonah Hex thought that someone in Paul’s family was paying the hospital to keep him or maybe it was the nurses in the ward. Some of them took payments from people for all kinds of things. If it hadn’t been for his business partner who’d stolen all of his money, he himself would be in a private room.
“Why aren’t you in a private room?” he asked. “You are an American.”
This as we watched near-naked women stepping over mounds of garbage as they bathed in the heat of morning. I remember their children playing with those mounds and competing with dogs for things I couldn’t make out from the patio. Shirtless men would stalk by, some with radios, some with machetes. What surprised me more than their indifference toward the naked women was their general lack of interest in us on the patio. Even the near-n
aked women paid us no mind. I felt embarrassed for spying into their lives and hoped one would catch me. I couldn’t decide what was the greater insult, their refusal to be pitied or their indifference to my desire for attention.
* * *
I woke to warm droplets of rain on my face. Maybe I was back where I’d come from. I was sure it was warm there, not humid like the hospital but with a softer heat that made things heal fast. I remembered that I was on summer vacation instead. This brought back images of school, boom boxes, and long smooth streets—America. I felt ready to remember everything, like I was about to break the surface of water from below or, better yet, like a sailor lost at sea who finally sees the water itself as land and has just hurled himself into it only to be awakened by the absence of ground. Just as I hit the water, there came the familiar sounds of Gollum now louder than the burn victim across the way. I turned my head to see Gollum pulling at his groin. He was grinning but he was in pain. He was pulling out his catheter. Urine was spraying all around him. I could see nurses running toward him. Paul rushed to my side and took off his shirt. He wiped my face with it.
* * *
When you lose your memory, your mind works to rebuild itself, offering flashes and glimpses of events and faces, sounds and echoes of words and ideas. These eventually repeat until they seem not to repeat at all. That’s what we call knowledge, endless repetition, the illusion of continuity.
But when you lose your memory, there is nothing but space between those images and sounds and echoes. The rewarding part is that when those bits and pieces start reappearing you get to choose which you want to keep and which you don’t. You can teach yourself to forget—at least for a while. You feel better than you’ve ever felt because you’re choosing only the memories you like. The empty spaces aren’t threatening because they are where the unpleasant memories go when you scream out or do anything to trigger the pain in your head that brings back the flashing lights behind your eyelids. Also perfect is the fact that you don’t realize this is temporary. Not only are you your own creation, you are eternal.
* * *
This I know for certain.
One day Paul took me careening through the hospital courtyard out onto the slanted walkways that led to the building’s front gate. I know it happened because I remember the blue-green walls giving way to pure gray concrete and the moment when I suddenly saw the throng of higglers and market people gathered and pulsing like a singular octopus. More than likely, Paul was moving much slower than I experienced it. I would have had to be on a gurney. I don’t remember any wheelchairs in that place, at least not in the general wards. Maybe in the private rooms.
I don’t know how or why he wheeled me outside. Maybe the nurses had asked him to move me to or from a doctor’s office, or maybe they wanted me to have some sun. Maybe I asked him, or maybe he just stole me for a few minutes and used the gurney to move as fast as he no longer could on his own, thanks to his father.
The hospital was an island of calm compared to all I could see now mottled and bright and spreading so far that just to look at it was enough to make me feel like sleeping again. What really scared me was Paul’s idea to introduce me to the stall owners and itinerant sellers who sent comic books and mangos, coconut candy, gifts, notes, and questions to my bedside. They’d been waiting for me to confirm our intimacy.
Paul couldn’t understand my anxiety or why I told him to stop. He kept moving, his face joyous and laughing. I screamed out and he finally halted. Paul was frightened now, thinking I was hurt and that maybe it was his fault for taking me so far outside when I wasn’t healthy enough. I let him think that, twisting my face and panting even more. I also let him think that he could get into serious trouble for wheeling a bedridden patient into the market. He began crying as he pushed me up the rise back into the hospital.
I was in tears too. I’d conjured phantom pains in my head that became real enough to induce vertigo. When the pure gray concrete became blue-green again, I relaxed my face and stopped groaning and panting. Paul was still terrified, pushing the gurney as fast as those forever-bent legs could manage through the outer ward, across the courtyard, and toward the nurses’ station. I was back in bed faster than I could process it. When I looked for Paul, he was gone. He was gone for days. When he returned, it was with a letter for me from someone at the gate. Paul hadn’t opened it, but if he had, he wouldn’t have been able to read it because he was illiterate.
The letter said:
“My friend, I am not happy you have not come to see me after all this time. You have been here for weeks now, and I sent word through the nurses and this crippled boy who I know is your friend and loyal. They say you are not remembering well, but you must know me because I have sent you some things. We are going to be great friends. We have much to discuss before you leave to America. It would be rude of you to leave before that, my good friend. Do not forget me.”
I was angry because of the letter’s intimacy. My return to the island had already taught me that sometimes people claim to be hurt by you as a way to claim you.
* * *
Jonah Hex sat down next to me on the patio. There was enough of a breeze for his sheets to make a slight noise when they moved around his body. I may have forgotten his real name but I remember his smell. Paul had bought me some biscuits from the market. I offered one to Jonah Hex even though watching him chew was enough to keep me from eating. Mercifully, he declined.
Another patient was on the patio, paying no attention to the beehive of the cardboard city across the road. Through the corner of my eye, I saw him use his shoulders against the wall to stand up and do an odd and prolonged shuffle that set him by my side. I assumed it was my Americanized accent that brought him. He smiled broadly in my face, smelling much stronger than Jonah Hex. His visible foot was so dirty that there was no distinction in color between the sole and dark brown flesh, but the other was just a bandaged stump. As he smiled at me up close, I saw that his tongue had been cut out too. The restless mound of remaindered flesh moved when he tried to speak.
He quickly became hard to ignore. The more I smiled patiently at his grunts, the more emphatic he became. I began to talk to Jonah Hex about America, hoping this man would go away. The more I tried to keep up the conversation, the more physical the man became, his hands on my shoulders, his breath now moist on my skin. He was trying to communicate but I was too afraid to be patient.
He soon put both hands on me. He grabbed my head and turned my face toward his, grunting louder and louder.
Jonah Hex jumped off his stoop and gathered up the excess fabric like a Nigerian uncle. With one long, muscled arm, he hit the man across the face hard enough that there was no mistaking the sound. The man fell on the ground in front of me and Jonah Hex leaned over him, pummeling his face with the same arm while the other held his robes and sheets out of the way. There was blood from either the man’s mouth or nose or both. Jonah Hex stopped when two nurses reached the patio.
“This fool was attacking our American. And nothing nah go so. You hear?”
The nurses seemed to understand immediately. Without words, they picked up the man with no tongue. His whole body shuddered the way that left-behind piece of severed tongue did when he spoke. They took him into the ward.
“Go on, boy, keep talking. Tell me some more.”
I owed it to him but also to the people across the road who were watching now and were gathered at the edge of the fence. I kept talking, louder and louder. They could finally hear me.
* * *
On the day my mother was coming, I woke up early. She would have reached the island by breakfast. She would have flown directly into Kingston, not Montego Bay, and taken a taxi straight to the hospital. Paul was on the lookout. He was as excited as I was and had begun telling stories about what she would do when she arrived that were more colorful than my own. What woke me was the very memory that she would be arriving. I’d held the memory for days. I was getting better. Things were staying
with me longer. I no longer feared memories dissipating like the sounds of the ward that I made sure to forget before I’d healed enough to lose control over my ability to make my mind turn bright white and shut down.
I’d slept the whole night through for the first time since my surgery. It was a strange sensation, uneasy. Gollum was sleeping with his eyes open as usual yet something was different. The ward was the same, the nurses, the smell of full bedpans and disinfectant and the shuffling sound of Paul doing his rounds. It took some time to realize what had changed. The bed across the way from me was empty. The bed was made and turned down expectantly for someone else. The bandaged man or woman had died in the night. Though I witnessed him or her so long in so much pain, it never occurred to me that he or she would die. At a certain point, the bandaged patient had become merely a reminder that pain was permanent and that we would all simply continue this way.
Whoever came for the dead had come while I slept. It had been the first night of real silence. The only noise now was the righteous bangarang of the Kingston morning.
8
This Is Not America
I came back from Jamaica scarred and scared, done with the island because it seemed done with me. During my absence that summer before starting high school, I’d lost a friend to gun violence and two others to prison. And while I was away, my mother had decided to send me to a Catholic high school in a white neighborhood near the airport.
Floating in a Most Peculiar Way Page 9