Lovedeath

by Dan Simmons

  In my room I bathe, treat the lesions with a special salve I have brought, inject myself with a coagulant, bathe again, and pull on fresh pajamas before crawling into bed. It will be light in a few minutes. In fourteen hours, darkness will fall again and I will return to Mara and her daughter.

  In Chiang Mai, where the whores are cheap and the young men celebrate entry into manhood by buying a fuck, 72 percent of the city’s poorest prostitutes tested positive for HIV in 1989.

  In the bars and sex clubs along Patpong, condoms are handed out free by a man in a red, blue, and gold superhero suit. He is named Captain Condom and he is employed by the PDA, the Population and Community Development Association. The PDA is the brainchild of Senator Mechai Viravaidya, an economist and member of the WHO Global Commission on AIDS. Mechai has spent so much of his own time, energy, and money promoting condoms that rubbers are called mechais by everyone in Bangkok.

  Almost no one uses them. The men refuse to and the women do not force the issue.

  One out of every fifty people in Thailand makes his or her living selling sex.

  I think that the computer projections for the year 2000 are wrong. I think that far more than five million Thais will be infected and many more than one million will have died. I think that the corpses will fill the klongs and lie along the gutters of the soi. I think that only the very rich and the very, very careful will avoid this plague.

  Mara and Tanha were—until very recently—very rich. And they have been very careful. Only their need to be very rich again has led them to be careless.

  My HIV-negative documents are, of course, falsified. It was not difficult. The lab reports are real, only the dates and name were changed prior to my photocopying them onto official stationery and adding the seals. I serve on the faculty of all three of the institutions whose seals and forms I borrowed.

  In the six months since I tested HIV positive, the plan grew from a scheme to an inevitability.

  They are monsters, Mara and her child, but even monsters grow careless. Even monsters can be killed.

  There is no fan on the ceiling of my expensive air-conditioned suite at the Oriental Hotel. As the first pale gleamings of the dawn creep across the teak and plaster ceiling of my room, I content myself with imagining that there is a fan slowly turning there as I lull myself to sleep with the image.

  I smile when I imagine the coming night’s activity and the night that will follow this one. I can see the older woman licking the younger woman’s lips, and then opening wide her maw for the cascade of blood. My blood. Death’s blood.

  Before dropping off to sleep, lulled by the medication I have taken and by the final turn of things, I summon the image that has sustained me through all these years and through these final months.

  I imagine Tres removing his glasses and squinting at me, his face as vulnerable as a boy’s, his cheek as soft as only a lover’s cheek can be. And he says to me, “I’m going back, Johnny. I’m going back tonight.”

  And I take his hand in mine. And I say, with the absolute certainty of conviction, “I’m going, too.”

  Smiling now, having found the place I have sought so long to return to, I release myself to sleep and forgiveness.

  SLEEPING WITH

  TEETH WOMEN

  Listen to me. I am going to tell you something important.

  I have not told this story before. I do not think that I will have the time or energy to tell it again before I die. So listen to me if you want to hear it.

  First, I must unwrap this bundle. I have seen you glance at it as I have spoken into your machine these last few weeks. You have been polite and not asked me what it is, although the canvas bundle must have aroused your curiosity. It is, after all, the size of a man. I saw you look at it while I was describing how a wičaśa wakan such as myself is wrapped up like a mummy in a yuwipi ceremony, and I know you must have wondered if maybe this crazy old man has a corpse of another wičaśa wakan sitting in the corner of his shack.

  No, it is not a man. Watch now as I unwrap it.

  Underneath the canvas you see there are seven rawhides lashed just so. I will remove the rawhides.

  Underneath the rawhides there is this wrapping of buffalo skin.

  Underneath the buffalo skin, there is this wrapping of deer skin. Do you feel how supple it is despite its age? It was moistened to such softness in the mouth of my great-grandmother. Now, take these thongs as I unwrap the deer skin.

  Underneath the deer skin there is this red flannel.

  Underneath the red flannel is this blue flannel. This is the last layer. Sit down now as I turn out all of the lights except the candle on the table. I will remove the blue flannel.

  I see your disappointment. Two old pipes, you are thinking. You are wrong to be disappointed.

  Members of my tribe of the Lakota Sioux may wait an entire lifetime to see either of these pipes and even then they may be disappointed. They may be removed only at the most holy and important of times. You may wonder why I am unwrapping them now, in front of a Wasicun such as yourself…and an ignorant Wasicun at that.

  The answer is that you are ignorant, but as with most Wasicun you are not stupid. You have a secretary who will take the words I say into your tape recorder and will type them exactly as I say them. This is important. I would tell this tale to my takoja—my fat and pampered great-grandson—but his eyes and ears have been stuffed by the excrement of the Wasicun television he watches six hours every day. My other takoja, my true grandson, is in jail in Rapid City. Even if he were not, his mind and nagi—his spirit—have been destroyed by alcohol.

  So there is no one here on the reservation who has the patience, brains, or wisdom to hear this tale and to understand it and use it to become a wičaśa wakan—a holy man—or a waayatan, a man of vision who can see the future. Not now. Not in these bad times the Wasicun have offered us to eat and we have swallowed, like a stupid horse swallowing nettles that will tear its stomach until it dies.

  But someday someone from the Lakota may read of this from your ignorant repetition. And maybe they will understand. So shut up and listen.

  This pipe you are looking at is the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa—the Buffalo Calf Bone Pipe. It has been in my family of the Itazipcho tribe of the Sioux nation for fifteen generations. These red things hanging from the pipe are eagle feathers; these are bird skins and small scalps. I see your reaction. Yes, perhaps these are scalps of Wasicun children, but I suspect they are simply the scalps of Pawnee men. The Pawnee always had small heads because they had tiny brains.

  It is said that the pipe keepers always live to be almost a hundred years old, and you know that I was born before this century began.

  This other pipe is our sacred tribal pipe. You see the red bowl? It is made of a pipestone that comes from only one quarry in one place in the world. Buffalo were driven over cliffs where this pipestone was quarried. The blood of the buffalo is in this stone. But it is not the buffalo blood which makes this sacred to our people.

  The pipestone is the flesh of the Sioux people. I do not mean this as what you call a metaphor. The red pipestone in this bowl is the flesh of the Sioux people.

  Almost eighty-five years ago I entered my first Catholic church—a small mission chapel on the plains, it has been gone since before the great Depression—and I remember my shock at hearing the priest explain to us the idea of the Eucharist. “This is the body of Christ,” he said through the converted Brulé Sioux who spoke his words to us. “This is his actual flesh, of which we partake.”

  I remember my family’s shock as we discussed this in our lodge that night. We had known the Wasicun to be greedy—the very word for white man means “fat takers”—but we had not known them to be cannibals. We had not known that they ate the blood and flesh of their God.

  But then my tunkashila spoke up. My grandfather was very old and very wise, he was both wičaśa wakan and a waayatan, and some say that besides being a medicine man and vision man he was also a wapiya, a
conjurer. I remember that he had a long pale birthmark on his scalp and forehead, almost like a scar, and that this birthmark was part of his wakan, his holy power. When he spoke we listened. I listened that night.

  “This thing the Wasicun priest has said is not bad,” said my tunkashila. “Perhaps the flesh of their God is turned into bread the way the flesh of our people is turned into pipestone. Perhaps the blood of their God is turned into wine the way the blood of our people flows into us through the tribal pipe and the Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa. These things are not bad. This is not cannibalism as in the stories my grandmother told me about the Kangi Wicasha, the Crows. We will not judge this thing.”

  And that night the old men nodded and spat and I did likewise.

  But I hold these pipes before you now and tell you that in touching these stone bowls I am touching the flesh of my people. In smoking this tribal pipe, I am mingling my blood with the blood of all Sioux who came before me.

  And there is another thing. I will be smoking this pipe while I tell this story. It is a fact that if I were to lie while smoking this pipe, I would die. Think of this while I tell you this story.

  Now listen to me. Do not speak. Do not ask questions. Just listen.

  First, I must tell you why I am telling this story after so many years of not telling it.

  Last month, my grandson—not the grandson in jail in Rapid City but my dead third wife’s daughter’s son—invited me to his trailer over near Deadwood to see a movie on videotape. It was a big deal. Several of his daughters and his half-sister and five of my other relatives were there. All of them wanted to see how their old tunkashila reacted to the movie. It was like they were giving me a big present for still being alive when I should be dead.

  The movie we watched that night was called Dances with Wolves. It had come out sometime earlier and there had been a big premiere over in Rapid City to which many people had driven from the res, but I was in the hospital then with pneumonia and missed all the fuss. So my grandson Leonard Sweetwater had thrown this Dances with Wolves party so that I would not die without seeing this wonderful thing that had been done for our people.

  Well, I left halfway through the videotape. Leonard and the others thought I was just going out to urinate in the bushes—which I still prefer to using outhouses and closed-in toilets—but actually I was walking toward my home some forty miles away.

  The movie made me want to throw up. I did throw up, although that may have been from the rotten burritos that Leonard had served before putting in the tape.

  My grandchildren had made a big deal out of much of the dialogue in the movie being in actual Lakota, although when I heard them speak it was terrible—exactly the way English sounds so stupid when someone from a foreign country has memorized the words without knowing the meaning of them or understanding when to emphasize one syllable over another. It reminded me of Bela Lugosi speaking English by rote in the old Dracula movie. Only Lugosi was supposed to be a foreigner; these people were supposed to be Lakota speaking their own language!

  But it was not the language idiocy that made me leave. It was the contempt.

  After throwing up, I wept that evening during my long walk before Leonard and the others realized that I was going home and came to find me in their pickups. I wept because my own descendants would think that such a movie showed our people as they were. I think that anyone who would make such a movie is a weasel and that the movie should be called Dances with Weasels. The movie star who made it and directed it and starred in it is a weasel. I think that he acted slow and stupid and weasel-like in the movie and rather than fawning over him and giving him a home and a good name such as Dances with Wolves and a woman, even a captured Wasicun woman, my ancestors would have ignored him. Or, if he had persisted in coming around, they would have cut his balls off.

  No, what made me throw up and then weep was that my own people could not see the contempt in the movie. It is a contempt that only a total conqueror can show toward the totally conquered.

  At first the Wasicun feared the Plains Indian. They were at our mercy in the earliest days of our contact. Then, when the numbers of the Wasicun increased and their fear was balanced by their greed for our land, they hated us. But at least it was a hatred reinforced by respect.

  The simpering, peace-loving, ecologically perfect idiots I saw portrayed as Lakota Sioux in this abortion of a movie could exist only in the mind of a California-surfer Wasicun such as the one who made the movie. It was condescending. It was filled with the contempt that can come from having no fear or respect whatsoever for a people who had once happily cut the balls off your own ancestors. It was the condescending arrogance of one who can offer only pity because it costs nothing.

  Walking home that night, I was reminded of a game I played as a child. It was called isto kicicastakapi and it consisted of chewing rosebush berries, spitting the pits into your hands, and then tossing them into someone’s face. Usually there was a lot of spit there with the pits.

  This movie was a Wasicun isto kicicastakapi. It was only spit and fruit pits in the face. There was nothing real there, nothing of substance.

  So again—listen. There are no stupid, grinning, Wasicun blond surfer heroes in this story; all of the characters are of the Ikče Wičaśa—pronounced Ik-che Wi-cha-sha, the natural, free human beings—the people you call the Sioux.

  But listen anyway.

  Long ago there was a boy born to our tribe and his name was Hoka Ushte, which meant Lame Badger. He was named that because the night the boy was born a badger had come limping into the camp and had left his dung outside the tipi where Lame Badger’s mother was beginning to wrestle with the birthing stick.

  Now you have to understand that the badger is an animal that is considered very wakan, sacred…filled with mysterious force. A badger’s bone pizzle, his penis, was used as a sewing awl, which is a bit ironic given the problems that Hoka Ushte’s own pizzle would lead him into when he grew older. Also, a badger is a powerful animal, especially once it gets in its hole. Once it is in its hole, not even three men can drag it out. My grandfather told me the story of how three young men of our tribe were returning to their winter camp near the Mini Sose, the Mud Water River which the Wasicun called the Missouri, near where the Spotted Tail Agency and Pine Ridge Reservation would someday be, when they spotted a badger fleeing for its hole. The young brave named Spotted Tail, later known as Broken Arm, gave chase because he had just traded one of his brother’s ponies for a brand-new Wasicun rope and he wanted to test it. Spotted Tail roped the badger just before it jumped in its hole. Both of Spotted Tail’s friends helped pull, but the badger just kept going deeper, breaking Spotted Tail’s arm in three places and pulling his shoulder out of its socket. Somehow in the struggle, the treacherous Wasicun rope became tangled around the three braves’ horses, and although Spotted Tail and his friends managed to let go of the rope, all three of the horses were pulled into the badger hole. To the braves’ horror, they could hear the screams of the horses for an hour or more as that badger clamped onto each of the horses’ snouts in turn, smothering it with the force of its jaws.

  On that day Spotted Tail lost his name, for he was forever after known as Broken Arm—because Lost His Rope and Horses to a Badger was too long to say in Lakota—but no one in the tribe ever forgot that Spotted Tail had lost those horses and his new rope. This is the truth, and I tell it only because you should know why we respect both the wakan power and the animal power of the badger.

  A badger also has one other interesting fact about it. If you cut open a dead badger and look at your reflection in a pool of the animal’s blood, you will see yourself as you will look when you die. A friend of mine tried this when I was a boy and saw only his own boyish reflection. He said that the magic had not worked, but less than a month later he was kicked in the head by a horse and died the same day. I have never wanted to look at my reflection in badger’s blood, but if I had then, I would have seen the old face you see before you now a
nd could have become a brave warrior or an astronaut or something—knowing that; I would not die until I was ancient—rather than the timid wičaśa wakan I chose to become.

  Anyway, Hoka Ushte—Lame Badger—had a powerful name from birth, but there seemed nothing special about the boy. He grew up as only a boy and showed no special abilities. He was, like most boys, a takoja, a pampered grandson, and showed much more interest in playing than in doing the few chores asked of our boys in the days before schools and the reservation. His favorite games were mato kiciyapi in the spring, where the boys threw sharp grass stems at each other until someone bled, and pre-hes-te in the winter where a feathered stick was slid along the ice, and the team game of Grab-Them-by-the-Hair-and-Kick-Them in the summer. No, Hoka Ushte showed no special powers or abilities when he was a boy.

  You have to remember that all the things I tell you of here occurred in the golden days after the Buffalo Woman had given us the sacred pipe and after Wakan Tanka had gifted us with the horse, but before the Wasicun began to outnumber the buffalo on the plains that were our home.

  It was before the Pehin Hanska Kasata—the rubbing out of Long Hair at Greasy Grass, that is, the killing of Custer at the Little Big Horn in 1876.

  It was before the terrible Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868 which made it illegal for the Ikče Wičaśa—the natural free human—to be free anymore. That is, it was before the year the Wasicun told us to live on a reservation.

  It was, I think, the year When They Brought in the Captives, or 1843 in Wasicun time. I know this because Hoka Ushte’s father was an old man of forty-four when the boy was born. Hoka Ushte’s father was named Sleeps by the Creek and was born in the year When Many Pregnant Women Died, which corresponds to your year of 1799. More amazing was the advanced age of Hoka Ushte’s mother, Three Clouds Woman, at the time of his birth: it is said that she had been born in either the year They Made the Hair on the Horses Curly, 1804, or the year When They Waved Horse Tails Over Each Other, 1805, and was a crone of thirty-eight or thirty-nine winters when the boy was born.