The Windward Passage is a strait that runs between the islands of Cuba and Hispaniola. It connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Caribbean Sea, and is in the direct shipping path between the Panama Canal and the eastern seaboard of the US. If by chance some diver were to sift through the sand, he or she might find sharks’ excrement. And if he or she were to examine these droppings, one would find a dislodged artificial eye with a white serpent slithering around. Only a few knew how it ended up there.
“My feet are cold.”
“I will get you some socks,” the nurse said. “Is that all?”
“More Percocet please.”
“You have already taken your prescribed dose.”
“Do you want me to participate in this damn thing or not?”
“My apologies Mr. Webley. Give me a minute please.
She left the patio where he was seated in an easy chair. It was late in the afternoon, according to his adjustments, when a cool breeze rolled across the landscape, the rustling sound of the bamboo leaves seemed more soothing than those coming from the others. At least he thought so, for the sounds were not easy to distinguish. His was a crowded back yard—mango trees, otahetie apple trees, avocado trees, tropical cherries and banana suckling. There were many others, all beautiful in their inimitable way, but there was something about the bamboo that always captivated him. Maybe it was because it took so long to shoot, but when it finally did, the tree spread like a virus. Five years of watering, and he saw little to nothing of it, but then, a few weeks after the rainy season arrived, it burst from its subterranean cocoon like a pubescent erection. Within several weeks it had outgrown most of the trees, providing the shade he so longed for now that he had resigned himself to the truth of his mortality. He tried to keep everything as close to nature as he could have. This was the best he could do in those final days. For a long time, he had convinced himself that it would come at least when he was in his middle age. Fifty-five would have been acceptable. Or maybe sixty, but he was hoping for seventy. He could not tell why. Maybe it was because it sounded somewhat divine, as if it were at that threshold where one came as close to immortality as one could. For after that, he surmised, there is only decay. At forty, he hated where his life had ended up, he suspected it would not get better, and so a part of him was happy to see death. He made another adjustment to the mask, and there, through a stroke of twenty-first century alchemy, conjured up something with which to converse.
“What are you doing?” Stephen asked his younger brother.
“Thinking.” Devon replied.
“About?”
“It is so funny, you spend your entire life hoping this day wouldn’t come, but now that it is here you get this sense of relief or might I daresay, happiness. Who would have thought that the Grim Reaper rubbing at your soles could feel so soothing?”
“I can’t wait either.”
“You are too hasty bruv, it is not your time as yet,” Devon said.
“That is so easy for you to say, after all you have already made the transition. Tell me something Devon; how does it feel?”
“Free.”
“Free… such a hackneyed term. It has been used so much that the meaning has been debased. If you ask me, it is no longer worth uttering.
“Well, there is no worrying here… Not needing to worry. Now, that is true freedom.”
“And you don’t think that I want some of that freedom?”
“Just be patient. It will come.” In that moment, Devon likened death unto poetry. Likened it unto a seductive prose that rolls glibly off one’s tongue.
“You telling me to be patient. If you weren’t dead I’d be wondering if you were not feeling well.” His brother did not reply, and for a moment, the silence made him feel as if he were once again talking to himself. Maybe this was what the dying did, whisper to themselves in voices long suppressed. Ridiculous, how can ghosts talk? Despite this, he wanted to hear it though. For a moment, he stood there in his consciousness, floating in and out of his brother’s thoughts. The oscillation made him believe that it was the illness causing him to hallucinate. But now that there was a face there, he was certain that it was real. Everything behind that mask was real. As real as the vomiting he did the morning after his chemotherapy. As real as the exhaustion he felt because of it. Almost two decades; that was how long he had not seen Devon. He returned just as he got ready to puke his last puke. With each purge he thought about the things he wanted to do, which were the things Devon did—indeed, he saw all the places his brother had been. Watched all the things he did, hoping that that vicarious feeling would sate his urge to be content with the fact that he chose a different way. But then he realized that he would never do the things he wanted to do; never visit the places he so desired for he had stayed home and lived the life his father said he should. The good son, who secretly admired the prodigal son’s exploits.
“Are you still there?” He called out.
“Yeah, and here also, that is one of the good things about being in this state. You can be anywhere you want to be, here, there and everywhere. It’s not that bad at all. Has life behind a mask not taught you anything?”
“Yes, it has.”
“What? Please. Pontificate.”
“I dream. A lot. In my dreams I fly, well not really. I only flap my hands like a chicken flaps its wings and so as soon as I lift up, my feet are back on the ground; so I don’t really fly, not in the way I would like. Like an eagle. It’s always dark and maybe that’s the reason each time I lift up I feel as if I am being sucked back into a void and then my feet touch the ground once more and I wake up.”
“Is that supposed to mean something?”
“Maybe. Who knows?”
“My body looks so wrong.”
“Wrong? How so?”
“It is grotesque. I honestly don’t know why we place so much value in it.”
“If it is such an awful thing then why are you asking me to stay in mine?”
“I said be patient. You staying in it is quite frankly neither here nor there to me… My reward for giving advice.”
“Oh, quit it.”
“Look at them. Disgusting animals.”
“Sharks?”
“Yeah. And crabs. And crawfish. And some other foul bitches.” The creatures were trying to access more of his petrified flesh. In fact, they were trying to eat it long before he realized that he was dead. The knowledge of his flesh, or of what was his flesh being consumed gave him time for introspection. He looked with disgust at the filthy crustaceans crawling over his body. His eye with the white serpent for a cornea glistened in the dark. For a while he thought that the fire would act as a deterrent, but no; the crustaceans waded through the blaze and found their way in and started eating him. Right then, sharks—grey and menacing started to emerge. They sniffed where he was trapped then nudged it with their noses. Some ways off he saw a school of snapper, yellow tails, moving as if they were replicating a tornado, where the ebb and flow of the ocean was the conductor. Shock was not something he experienced, at least not from that; it only came from the momentary disorientation he felt when he was trying to locate his eyes despite being able to see. Realizing that he was dead but somehow his senses were enhanced felt queer. “How absurd the dead looked,” he whispered now that he moved closer to examine his corpse; blue from the business of soaking for too long. Gnawed up from being eaten. Then he chuckled. Great bouts of laughter followed. Puzzlement, then laughter. In just that order.
His body was still trapped there. It was a still quiet evening except for the water beating gently against the floating hull in which he was imprisoned. It happened when the engine blew up and tore the vessel apart. He had sought refuge in that part of the yacht to escape the flames. There was a trap door of sorts there, he thought it would be an ephemeral ordeal when it smashed against the reefs and cracked open the section of the hull where he was trapped.
It wasn’t the blast which killed him. In fact, he was hardly even burned. The debris floating around him burned though, and he merely looked at it. What killed him was the water which flooded the air pocket after the explosion. He was expecting death to be more dramatic, but then the prolongation took something from it; and so, dying became rather exhausting. This stood in contrast to his life. At one point, as the waves hit against his prison; he asked himself if it would not come when he saw the sun rise another day. It was the afternoon that ushered him away. No, there was no page turning story of the sun setting and his life blood ebbing away. Sure, he had spent the two days trapped at sea reflecting and reminiscing on the things that were. For one, he did not make enough money. And for that he mourned. How much was enough. Well, he had never put a value on it except that it was never enough. It was enough though to purchase a mansion in Bel Air, but he had not found a way to make his money ‘clean’. Not that he tried very hard, and hence he lived vicariously watching reruns of MTV cribs.
“You… regrets? I didn’t know that was possible.”
“Yeah, we all have them. Even after we are dead.”
“Oh, well.”
“Stephen?”
“What?”
“Let’s take a stroll.”
“Are you mocking me?”
“Just be quiet for once please.”
And now they were back to those long summer days at his uncle’s; the one who worked for the sugar company. That first summer when he was nine and Stephen was about to turn twelve; he received a promotion and was given a house in the middle of a vast plantation where he was farm manager for several thousand hectares. That first summer they spent the entire two months with him, his wife, and their three children. They passed the days with their cousins catching crabs and tadpoles. On rainy afternoons they would bathe outside and eat fruits and shit in the bushes and wipe their asses with damp leaves. When it was dry they threw rocks at the wasps’ nests. Once they were swarmed and got stung so badly that their aunt had to rub them with calamine lotion. There were also the fortnights when the cane cutters descended on the regional office to get paid. All that fun and frolicking soon ended when sugar prices plummeted and his uncle was laid off. They allowed him to remain on the abandoned estate though where he hired out plots to the former workers who now embraced the label sharecropper. That last summer with him, about two summers after the first. They made friends with some of the sharecroppers’ children. Many of whom started drinking and smoking as minors to pass the days of waiting on crops to become mature. Then there were those who killed the boredom through exercise and the rest through whoring. And some through whoring and exercise. Stephen never stayed around them for too long. Devon, however, knew their perks, quirks and idiosyncrasies. He liked them and he knew them all by name. They were all poor. Affectionate though, but then their warmth could turn to sheer savagery in a minute—in the way it turned on a goat thief they caught one night. The larcenist was chopped to death. After that they returned the kid to the owner; an old lady pensioner.
They were keenly aware of the technocrats who killed the sugar industry. They knew that there was no hope of selling the stuff they grew to the local vendors who bought the cheap sub-standard foreign goods that were dumped on the local market. And so they learned to plant ganja. And after that they learned how to ship it overseas. And with that came the guns. Devon now realized that that was where he was initiated. Sort of. These were the things he recalled as he watched Stephen become bored with the slow approach of death. Just as he was when the waves rolling in put him on edge. That almost dying state made him want to live. When the struggle ended, he prayed that things would be expedited. And it also happened when the horror had returned in those last moments as the waters finally rose to his nostrils. Right then he asked for a little more time. Just a few more moments to earn just a little more to procure his mansion in Bel Air after he had made his money clean.
“What was your destination?”
“Why are you asking me that? Can’t you see everything?”
“It is a bit fuzzy now. I am seeing several places.”
“Ortuga.”
“Oh, I was going to guess the mainland.”
“Please, I was done with that godforsaken place the minute I left Hooverville.”
“It was your new country.”
“For a while, but then it didn’t deliver what it promised.”
“Who or what ever does?”
“Well, you got a point.”
Devon took some blame too, for he did not deliver all he could to himself. The great tragedy of his life was not earning enough. He counted every minute he idled. Whether through smoking, drinking or whoring after every shipment was delivered. Those nights when he splurged on strippers and crystal with his entourage behind.
“Ten thousand over a weekend Devon?”
“That’s my business.”
“Your parents would be oh so proud.”
“You know what they say about hot things.”
“You can’t hold on to them for too long.”
“Exactly.”
It happened fast. Life. He thought he was always in control, which is why what happened to him on that yacht, seemed so anachronistic. Reminiscing was his torture and he wanted it to end.
“I thought you said you were free?”
“Sometimes you feel that way. But then his feelings see-sawed and at points he was not certain what he was feeling. He gave it a name though, emptiness, yes that is how the see-saw felt when between swings. But there were times he hoped he would be on a ship or some other floating vessel. Saved. Rescued. So he could go back to life and living it.
“They haven’t eaten you yet? No pun intended.”
“I thank this state for wresting petty thoughts and feelings from me. To think that not so long ago I would have been hurt by such an utterance.”
“What the fuck you know about hurt. You were always the one running off when everything was falling apart. Don’t talk about hurt.”
“Whatever, at least I was man enough to do what I wanted while you stayed here. It wasn’t because you thought it was the right thing to do. It was because you were afraid. You fucker. You wimp. You bitch.”
The waters were calm and the sun was making its descent. Violet; the waters, another day, were being transformed into violet as the sun’s rays were disappearing from the sea whose ripples did a bit to calm the dead man’s nerves. The coming absence of light made it all look so serene. And now, the weightlessness Devon felt made him look at the ocean as he never had. It was as if it were something to be seen just because it should be, just because it was so beautiful, so majestic, so vast. All his life, Devon had seen nothing in it except survival and profit. And so, those ripples on the water never seemed majestic, nor did the horizon seem as enchanting as it did when he left his body. In fact, nothing in life was worthy of his admiration. It was just another way of delivering that next shipment of narcotic. Therefore, everything was something to be suffered until he could possess something green.
“Imagine. It took dying to appreciate life. How absurd we humans are.” Now, he could not touch anything; could no longer feel the warmth of the sea. In his previous form, he managed to be touched by it only when he had to be touched by it.
“I can hear your thoughts clearly once again,” said Stephen, ignoring what he was saying. “It sounds so strange.”
“You hear them only because you want to hear them.”
“And what about those people? I hear them? I know you hear them also. I know you remember what they did to us? I am looking, but I cannot see any sign of them. They are whispering our names though. Why are you trying to shut it all out? You know it is not possible.”
“It’s hard. This time it really is. Don’t get me wrong when it just happens you remember everything. It all comes back to you like a rush. But they no longer hurt. Not unless you make them. It’s just a game. That is what dying has taught me.”
“Game?”
“Life… Dying showed me that there is no need to regret. Just reflections on the things that were. Now, I have chosen to leave the undesirable thoughts out and I feel alright.”
“Then why the fuck are you still bitching?”
“I am still in transition you know. I am not certain what to make of all this. Forgive me, I am a bit confused.”
“So you are only half dead?”
“I am not sure. Something like that. But who knows what death is, or when it really comes anyway.”
“So my brother Devon Webley has become a philosopher now?”
“If Stephen Webley wants to call it that. Then so let it be.”
“And you have developed a sense of humor also.”
“I guess it takes a tragedy to reach this exalted state. Although I would not necessarily call it that. If I might say so myself. I am not certain if I can find the words to say what it is. All I know is that it is none of the things you claim it to be.”
“It sounds good. I can’t wait to join you.”
“I don’t think you can. After all, we were always on two different sides of the quadrant.”
“Or maybe you do not want to touch base with me?”
“What do you think?”
“I think that perhaps you are right.”
“Right. Wrong. That shit is all a matter of perspective.”
“How original can you get?”
“Don’t scorn me for repeating a maxim.”
“And what are you seeing through your perspective now?”
“Things floating on the water.”
“Good for you. I can’t see anything… So you have taken the power of seeing away from me.”
“No, it’s not me. I think you are just getting closer. Things are also bit hazy during transition.”
“So this is how death works. First as cold feet. Then as heightened senses, which comes in waves.” Right then, Stephen felt death tickle his feet. It was like a razor scraping his soles. He shuddered.
“Yeah, and then you see things for yourself. As clearly as you never have, or could ever see in that low vibration. One thing I can tell you though my brother is that this thing we call life is the real nightmare and dying is the alarm clock that awakens us.”
“Thanks Confucius.”
Stephen felt drained, it was as if he had spent all his life running. Odd, that staying in one place could make you so tired, he thought. It was the brain he realized. That’s what was exhausted. He wanted out of that routine. And even though he could see the end. He could not cross. This was the last stage he thought. And through Devon’s eyes he saw one of the scavenger crawl into the section of the hull where his body was trapped. It moved slowly along the hollowed-out edges of what was left of him. And for a while they were silent, staring into one another’s consciousness, wondering what to say now that they no longer had to wonder what the other thought. When the transition was not fuzzy at least. Right then the sharks began to swell around him. The rays which managed to penetrate the deep made stripe marks on them as they sniffed at his water soaked flesh. Not far off, a sand snake revealed its camouflage as it slithered towards a lobster which broke from the shell it had grown too large for.
Most of the yacht was out of sight. At the bottom of the passage where many bodies were; lost and forgotten. Devon wondered how many men had watched their bodies floating amidst debris or thrashed in fear when they were trapped within a cocoon like space; counting the seconds as the water inched its way slowly towards their nostrils. Many, he surmised, had given thanks that they had shed the mantle of their oppressive flesh. His body would be at the bottom of the passage too. In the form of excrement. There were still pieces of debris floating nearby. When he realized that the explosion had not killed him, he cried out the names of his associates. But the only answer which came was the agony which rippled through his person. Trapped within the debris, he saw, through his peripheral gaze, gulls circling overhead. And their noises, which in that previous state made him shudder, now, moved over him without registering a beat. He tried to move, but his side ached so much. Then it went numb, and so he decided to remain still. He wiggled his toes and was surprisingly relieved that they moved. All this happened before his final breath. Happened, when he was hoping that some vessel would pass and rescue him. The fear, maybe, he thought that was what was conjuring up the sharks. Now, there was a potpourri of aquatic creatures, jostling for a meal. Up to his final breath they swam around him. Slowly. Gracefully. Sometimes, in a circle, in unison, as if directed by the smell of his death. The circling seemed trancelike; doubly benign and ravenous. Sometimes when one of them got frustrated, the beast would ram itself against the hull trying to make a breach so it could reach him. Despite the smell of his passing, there was no frenzy. Devon could not tell why exactly. Perhaps it was the hand of the currents guiding their moves. The creatures moved with the waves and every time one approached to burst through his aquatic prison, they failed. All the time Devon wondered when they would break through.
“Have they started eating you yet?”
“Just the crustaceans. But they have a long way to go. I wish you were here so they could eat you too.”
“Here I am taking my last breath and this is all you can say to me.”
“What do you expect?”
“A little compassion would be appreciated.”
“You expect too much of me.”
“We are brothers.”
“Were.”
“Plus, you know that if you don’t think about it, it can’t come for you. That’s the golden rule.”
“Seriously, where the hell did you learn that crap?”
“I don’t remember. Sunday school maybe. It must be. Few places have such a stranglehold on bullshit.”
“Hallelujah.”
“Amen… You have come a long way my brother from church to where you are now swimming off the coast of that godforsaken land.”
“We both have. Our parents must be smiling down from heaven. Well, not we, only you. They would not shit on me if I paid them to.”
“Do you miss them?”
“Please.” In that moment, a baby snapper found its way into the prison that was now his tomb and started pecking at his eye. His corporeal one. He wished someone was there to close them. The early stages after dying were so topsy turvy. First you don’t care, then you do, then your thoughts become preoccupied with other things. In some ways, it was no different from dying. Everything was a wave, for life, just like death, ebbed and flowed… Why do you hold on, I thought you were ready to transition?”
“Hope.”
“You are such a fool.”
“No, just human. Humans hope Devon, but the likes of you have never understood that.”
“More BS, how far you have come from Sunday school.”
“Not as far as you though.”
“Finally you start to make sense, just when I am not there to pat you on the back.”
It seemed so anti-climactic. To think that it would all end when the tangible separated from the intangible. He was never sure what to expect when finally, he saw death rushing through his nostrils. If he were to guess, arguing with his dying brother would not have been something he envisioned. Not while he remembered gargling as the water slowly inched its way into him. Dying away from the reefs would have made it swift. Just like the life he led. But he was trapped within a large part of that aquatic forest. The waves that beat against and rocked his little prison made it the more torturous. And when the water that came in flowed out as fast as it came, he hollered even more. This is the real torture he conveyed to his brother, begging for death when your hands are caught between iron bars. If only the creatures which came to peck at him could have found a way to slash his throat in those early moments, how grateful he would be, but all he could do was wait in torment off Ortuga’s coast.
Now, he too would never do many of the things he wanted to do. A life spent dodging bullets and the police always made for an adventure though. He had thought of going bungee jumping. There was something about it which kept popping up in front of him. He did not regret it though, but he still thought he should have done it before the emergence of that weightless state.
“Bungee jumping. That is what you are thinking about right?”
“How do you know?”
“Didn’t I tell you things were no longer fuzzy. Plus, you were never good at hiding things.”
“How interesting.” In that moment, he realized how much of their lives people spent erecting borders and boundaries only to learn that they are mere illusions projected by one’s mind in a state that was only intent on circumscribing one’s way of seeing.
“Seriously though. How does it feel? You said free, but I don’t understand what you mean by free.”
“You will know when you get here.”
“Devon, I am going to leave all this. Imagine.”
“Lucky me. I was never attached to any of that shit. Even the money I did not care for. It was just to keep me occupied. The more money I made, the less likely I would need to return to see you or anyone else.”
“I really hate talking to you.”
“We are not talking. We are projecting.”
“What’s the difference?”
“There is never any confusion here.”
“I wished that you had disappeared without me knowing what happened to you.”
“I am sorry to disappoint you one more time but remember that I am only here because you want me here.”
“I guess I was giving you too much credit. It’s not you. It’s the confirmation that already I am parting with these things.”
“They were never ours Stephen. These are just things we borrow.”
“So, you insist on depressing me? If you don’t mind, I would just like to enjoy these things for a little while longer.”
“What a fool you are.”
Devon treated his family the way he treated everything else. An instrument of gain. His gain. When there was nothing else to gain, he left. When there was something that tried to gain from him, he became terrified of it. Reciprocity was moderately tolerable. He got a lot of this at the swingers’ retreats he attended with Candy, his lover of two years. He only learnt her name after they met on a Tinder date. She operated under the moniker, PANSEXUAL. After a Wikipedia search of the word he swiped right. A clean STI test later and they were in bed with a couple; one a hermaphrodite name Peggy Me. The partner was an industrialist known only as Joe. That was at a resort in SOCAL. For Peggy Me, having a straight interracial couple was as different as the midgets they hired sometimes.
“See, look close,” Peggy Me said while opening his/her legs. “This is what Joe pays me for. Two for the price of one.” A huge laugh followed as Peggy Me took Candy’s hand; and as Candy took Devon’s hand and went to bathe in ace rose. Joe the industrialist watched. In the middle of their love making a midget walked in with a bottle of crystal and poured it into his ass before spraying it out. That was a month before a New Year’s Eve celebration in Calabasas at an old mansion where everyone wore masks and watched FEMDOM on stage. Live. And the host walked around naked except for the piercings on her nipples that shook as she gyrated to the sound of Prince’s Get Off. It played all night, and all night all bodies gyrated on that New Year’s Eve in that mansion in Calabasas where the atmosphere fell somewhere between hedonism and Circe du Solei. Sometimes it was like a Pygmalion dream, inverted. Candy, he came close to loving her. Whatever that was. She never clung to him. There was something wonderful about the freedom she gave him. Sometimes it bordered on deference. Other times he was reduced to something that should be played with; and he did not protest to being that toy. But then she wore him down with outrageous requests. He fled when she died from whisky and Ambien.
“Tinsel Town? Wow.”
“No, just the outskirts. I managed to see a few minor celebs though. I think I shook an A-lister’s hand once. But that was it.”
Walking away from the debauchery was easy. He discovered how anything could become boring. And in some cases, when one pushed beyond the boundaries of what was deemed acceptable, “you knew it was time to go”.
That was perhaps the only thing he had the opportunity to do but did not do. Now, he wondered if he should have. The portent of an early death would have been enough to embolden him. “Perhaps not,” he whispered.
The morning before Candy died he asked what the rationale for her lifestyle was.
“I just love the edge.”
When the nurse finally brought the socks and the pills and the comforter; Stephen, in a weak cracking voice, asked for his wheel chair, “Take me to the study,” he commanded. And she used it to wheel him through the mansion—past the great mahogany and cedar furniture his grandfather had built while he was custos of the parish. There were also the bizarre paintings on the wall. The one with the nappy head nymph at the top of a huge stairway pissing on a group of white peasants. It looked rather queer. Quite prominent. But he passed it with merely a glance. There was also the Igbo statue his father had carved when he re-discovered his Africaness. Past the painting which could be describe as something that lacked subtlety. Represented on the canvas was a land of blood and beauty. Beauty and bloodshed, where, at the roots of a tree, shadows gathered to hum morose hymns. Sad songs, yes, even those on the canvass had songs. Songs of struggles. Of hunger. Of hardships. Of love and love lost. And of the living who yearned for death. And then there were the chants and the wails, and the stories of men talking blues. The bodies swinging from the nooses gave credence to this interpretation. At the corner of the painting was an abstract sun. Smiling. The people on whom it shone did not though. Those on the rock so long wore perpetual scowls, but they did not cry. They did not mourn. Not on the outside at least. And they died in the prison of that small space called anguish.
“You painted that. And I, being the fool that I am had it framed and mounted on such a prominent space.”
Devon’s time in a tent city called Hooverville inspired him to paint that scene. It was on the outskirts of San Francisco, its city proper at least, under a bridge peopled by his fellow homeless Iraqi and Afghan vets. The city’s shame assembled beneath that thin structure that slithered over the penury, unseen by the high-priced automobiles driving to and from their gentrified abodes. Close, yet these two worlds seldom met. Just across the road a provocative neon light blinked Ladies! Ladies! Ladies! Just adjacent to a dirty bookstore, and opposite the laundromat with its own plain neon sign announcing half off Sundays.
In Hooverville, Devon’s best friend was John Dee. Not his real name, but one he gave himself when he decided that he could cast spells during blood moons, that is if he could see it; the problem, however, was that he became color blind from a concussion he suffered while his platoon came under-siege during his second tour of duty in Fallujah. Devon was at his side when they invaded. For five days they asked the civilians to leave so they could ferret out the resistance. No male of military age could leave though. Military age meant anyone deemed able to hold a gun. Many were sent back. To escape, some cross-dressed. When the invaders got wind of what was happening, they made them strip off all their clothes and had them spread their legs so they could see their genitalia. As punishment, transgressors were ‘disciplined’. You dress like a woman; you get what women get. The screams which curdled from behind the trucks did little to deter those who knew that soon, the city would be under siege. It would all lay waste and surviving was not something they would be certain of. Or even that they would want to live through. It did not work. On the last day, when they announced that no one else would be let out, many retreated into the city with tears welling up in their eyes. Women and girls too.
“It is strange, but initially I did not feel empathy towards them. In my eyes, they were merely two-legged beasts.” After the city was cordoned off we drenched it with white phosphorus and then moved in to take what was left. The resistance had different plans though. “Opposing us to the death was the main one. But we were hell bent on taking the place. I don’t know what was stronger, our weapons or their resolve. We bombed the shit out of those sand-niggers. When we finally broke into the city center, we found horror. It was then that the term shake n’ bake started to make sense.” Parched bodies, with skin flaking littered the land. In the buildings where many sought refuge, Devon tried counting the corpses, but stopped when he saw a child—a boy of no more than fourteen huddled over a toilet with what seemed to be his little sister clutching at his arm. Their clothes unburnt. It was not even certain if rigor mortise had set in, for their skin appeared like leather. Yes, he stopped counting there and sat in the corner of that bombed out lavatory and wept.
“Look at the boy. All he was trying to do was quench the flames.”
It was while squatting that John Dee came for him and brought him to the medics who gave him a psychiatric evaluation. That, and having his status upgraded from permanent resident to citizen was what he got. After being discharged he went to the West Coast. Hollywood should have been his stop, but Devon could not get past Hooverville. He made this decision sometime between popping Zoloft and OxyContin; at least as far as he could remember. For after three months of swallowing pill after pill, everything became a blur. And in that blur he felt like a lobotomized cockroach, trudging through a city that flaunted obscenely, the different gradations of wealth in the face of those who sacrificed to make it possible. Even the email he sent to John Dee, telling him where he was, was sent in a stupor. He was not certain when, but he learnt he was only half an hour away by bus.
Devon packed his only knapsack and moved in with his friend in his tent, just outside the city proper, where the vets and the junkies and the junkies who were vets huddled together and snorted and shot up in the tent city affectionately called Hooverville. There was a silence there—not a deathly one, but a swooning mum interrupted every so often by the tying of wrists, by the tapping of veins and by the inhales of people drowning their pain—a mass hypnosis that seemed to perpetually enclose the camp. Even those, like Devon, who steered clear of the needle seemed infected by the hush of those people who were high, getting high or refusing to recover from a high by getting high.
“This is the part they don’t tell you about. The part where the streets are littered with insulin syringe and the vomit of junkies suffering from withdrawal.” Theirs too was a noise which broke the silence. To hear them retching up the slime from an empty stomach went virtually unnoticed in a place where people killed their anguish with pills and white powder. Hooverville had a smell. It was the stench of surrender; and at times an abandoned baby’s cries, or the groans of a junkie exchanging sex for a fix. But none could smell it, no more than they could smell the defeat. In Hooverville, nothing mattered at all, and all things did not matter or mattered little.
In the tent beside him one addict played his harmonica before and after every hit. It was always the same song. For many weeks Devon tried to decipher the tune. It was John Dee who made him know that it was Stevie Wonder’s My Love.
“It’s his anthem for humanity,” John Dee informed Devon. “A waste of time if you ask me,” said the weary ex-soldier.
Sometime afterwards another junkie moved in with the junkie who played the harmonica. They were always doing one of three things. Getting high, arguing, or playing that Stevie Wonder song. Eventually a fourth was added to the daily routine. Beatings, from her to him and from him to her. Every two or three nights, he or she could be heard screaming from behind the tent. An addition to the sleepless nights. Then, the fighting started happening every day. Then one Good Friday, his second and last Good Friday there, Devon heard sirens. But it couldn’t be, he whispered to himself. The cops came there only to evict. It was the police though and an ambulance. It all made sense now that they were there; it had been two days since he heard any screaming coming from the tent. He had slept soundly for the first time in a while. Thus, the silencer, and the accompanying thud did not wake him. The cries coming from a lone mourner did though. That the police came late was an improvement. Normally they just sent a hearse. That morning, just before dawn the wails that chilled his soul called him to a torn section of his tent. A makeshift window through which he peeked. There was a crowd and an area was cordoned off. Between the wails, the police assured everyone he was there to keep the peace.
“No peace Mr. Officer,” one man shouted. “Peace ain’t fool around them here parts. Only pieces.”
Then the ambulance left. Then the police left. Then the crowd dispersed. And those who were not shooting up when the police were around, went to shoot up after they left. Went back to that torpor from which they could not shake themselves.
That was until the next week when they returned. More of them this time. Many more. It was on one clear evening, sometime after nine when a posse of policemen in military gear surrounded the slum. All decked in black except for the police sign written on their bulletproof vests—white, all caps. There was also a light shining on their helmets and their war tanks which they used to blind the people they told to leave. On the thirty first minute, they called for the solid waste management to come in and level Hooverville. The next day Devon followed a group of protestors who marched toward City Hall with placards made of ply and cardboard they salvaged from the dump. He found the same riot gear wearing police officers. They cordoned off an area thirteen blocks from their destination. When they refused to disperse, they used water cannons and ultrasonic weapons to disorient them. John Dee’s left eardrum burst open. Devon held him close as the blood started flowing down the side of his face. He died in his arms in an alley, beside a receptacle, where oversized rats gorged on the city’s refuse.
Now, in his mind, Devon was back at the pier, loading a boat with his business partners. Earlier on they had stopped briefly to smoke so they could conjure up the temerity to transport the contraband across the turbulent waters. Half way through packing it was twilight and they used lanterns to guide them through the thick darkness. Then there was a flash of lightening, thunder followed. Then he asked one of his associates if it was going to rain. The man said no, so they resumed packing the boat after a brief pause. But it rained alright. A rain of bullets that took down his three associates. Reaching for his gun, he heard a voice shout:
“Fucker stay still.”
Startled, he raised his hands. He felt a blow to the back of his head. When he awoke, he was lying face down on the sand with the waves lapping at his feet. It took him almost a year to recover from losing one hundred kilos of coke.
It was raining too one summer. A day after his twelfth birthday. Real rain this time. There was flooding too. Muddy water ran through the two-bedroom house he shared with his parents and older brother. That was the first apartment they rented after the eviction. There was nothing much to salvage except their clothes, a few pieces of furniture and a kerosene oil stove. They slept on beds raised on blocks that night. In the morning, they swept the house clean of mud and debris.
“I was trying to forget that one.”
“You remember what our father did when he found out that his copy of Think and Grow Rich had gotten wet in the flood?”
“Yeah.”
“Ok. I will leave it at that.”
“Good.”
Stephen sobbed when he saw these ineffable things. Not that he was sorry for all the sorrow. Instead, it was at the life he did not live. The one his brother lived. A mask was all he had left—that, a wheelchair and the illusion of a house filled with expensive things. And there was his nurse who continued wheeling him through the foyer. He wanted to see no more, but he could not remove it to look away. A vicarious experience should provide comfort for someone in his state. But the things he did not do and the things he saw that his brother had done made his trudge towards the exit sadder than he intended it to be. It got sadder still when the images of Devon whoring in the Big Apple came rolling towards him. He was somewhere in Queen’s borough. Rosedale. Probably. What was certain was that he was outside a bar exchanging blows with a marine whose partner he was trying to seduce. He had approached her after he dumped a contortionist he met in Las Vegas the week before. They fucked every day and slept and ate at precarious hours. It was a few more days before he would be deployed, but she had run out of contortions so he left her for a waitress at Ruby Tuesdays with whom he danced all night.
The next night at a pub the marine’s fiancé caught his attention. He approached her while she was having rum and coke with the man—a burly Hispanic whose steroid induced acne glowed in the LED lights under which he sat. It could scarce be called a brawl though, for it took three punches to knock him out. The raucous crowd which gathered around for a battle royal quickly stopped cheering and started to jeer. When they realized that he was not moving they called for an ambulance.
“Just douse that mo’fucka with some water,” one vagrant called out from across the street. “You a’int want no po po to be coming up in this here bitch... Dumb ass negroes.”
Those were the days before he was deployed. When the army was having trouble filling its ranks and so promised undocumented immigrants the chance to fight for a green card—a green card before basic training, a citizenship in the case of an honorable discharge. Squatting on a friend’s air mattress, and going to the food bank every Wednesday made the decision very easy. He scoffed at the demonstrators who came marching with their placards shouting:
“Hell no we won’t go! We won’t go for Texaco!” He wasn’t the only one who scoffed. The recruits from rural towns with flags tattooed on their left breasts did also. They went further, saying how good it would be to fuck those libtards up the ass with bayonets. They were rusty, hardened men who could hardly see beyond the tip of a gun. They clung slavishly to their religions but not once during recruitment or while in the war theatre did he see any of them reading his bible. They kept it close though, and the only time they cared to open it was to look at a picture of a wife or a girlfriend. At nights with it at their sides they climbed into the bunk with their lovers. The subdued moans went unheard. The movement under the sheets went unseen in a place where no one asked and no one told.
Right then, another shark rammed itself into Devon’s prison as the crustaceans continued slicing off pieces of him. A famished crab clawed at the artificial eye with the white serpent for a cornea that, in the dark, seemed to slither all around. Soon, what was his good eye would be gone. Just like the sun that was making its descent. Soon the violet which so characterized these waters would return. The sharks made small gentle ripples. Surrounding his corpse. Contemplating it seemed, how they would get in. Stephen would never feel these things—terror and excitement caressing his skin. Devon felt it though. Felt it though he never thought much of it. He left the cradle. He had been to so many places. Had seen so many things Stephen would never see.
Even before the wheelchair, Stephen’s legs had gotten tired. Tired of sitting behind a desk to balance books. Debit or credit were the only things he ever got to know. Sitting in his drawing room, he wished he had used his feet more. To think that he had forgotten what it was like to walk barefoot. And no, he was not romanticizing, he loathed that very word. He was just wondering what it would have felt like again. To remind himself of what it meant to be like ordinary people.
“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” said Devon. “Remember you lost your shoes once.”
When he got another, he could not take them off. It was the summer just before he turned ten. When his family’s hardware stores went into bankruptcy. All five of them were closed and the stock sold to repay their debt. It happened when the interest rates on the bank loans became too high for his father to repay. There was also the recession that came the year before that, when his father was rebuilding when the government finally decided to lower the interest rates. The next thing he saw was their possessions being auctioned off. Despite this, his father still worked to revive his business. And then he died. A bullet through the ear two Christmases after the auctioning, when he realized that he could not settle his debts.
“You remember don’t you? His blood was on your shoes. You did not wash them. Why?”
“I don’t know. Maybe I was too busy taking care of mommy. You remember her?”
“Piss off motherfucker.”
“She said he died because he had been knocked so many times. Even when he was on the ground… You could have called you know Devon.”
“Yeah, I guess I could have.”
“She waited for you. I waited for you. The two of us could have done so much together, but then you left. Did you ever think of coming back?”
“Maybe, but not long enough to convince myself to.”
“You callous piece of shit.”
“Because of your selective blindness you did not see me, but I came to look for you. I saw when the twins were born. Joanna and Michael.”
“Who told you their names?”
“Spare me the fuckery sir, can’t you see that I can see everything.”
“Sorry.”
“And you wonder why I didn’t call? Listen. Please. Just for once, please listen.”
“Okay, sorry, continue.”
“Here I am projecting and still you cannot see… Dude I was there at their conception. Their birthday, everything.”
“How was I supposed to know. I just put these on. And remember you are holding back stuff. This is all new to me so please forgive me for not being able to see much.”
“I tried to tell you. I did; but from here I can’t affect your world. I am only a passive observer. I saw when your tumor started to grow. I tried to tell you, god knows I did, but there isn’t much I could have done.”
“Not even a dream.”
“You were never receptive to them.”
“But you were still alive, so how was it possible?”
“Take off those linear lenses bruv. The rules are very different here.”
“How so?”
“It’s hard to say. When you get here you will understand.”
In that very moment, he was in upstate New York. There was snow on the ground. He could tell it was spring though, for that single lily that bloomed at the side of the road in a suburb where the white picket fences coruscated in the sun which shone on that cold day in early spring, late one morning as he crossed a red brick road to deliver a stash of heroin to a middle-aged ophthalmologist who was finding it hard to get his regular dose of oxycodone. All the lawns were well manicured and every house had electric eyes.
“Dress like the gardener,” the doctor instructed.
He entered through the backdoor where the man and his wife were waiting at the dining room table. He watched them snort.
“At this rate I think we will have to invite you up to the Hamptons this summer. I know a few people who might require your services,” the husband told him. Suddenly, one of the sharks slapped its tailfin against the hull in frustration. The cadaver rocked, startling the crustacean that had burrowed inside of him.
“She waited for you Devon.”
“Yeah.”
“By the telephone.”
“Yeah.”
“In her final days she waited by the window. We couldn’t close it. Even at nights. We had to give her comforters and fall clothes. When the rains came, we covered it with transparent plastic bags. She waited for you Devon.”
He left silently one clear afternoon under the pretext of going to the store to buy sugar. They had not seen each other since. They both shunned social media, and exchanged email correspondence several times. One was when their mother passed. Devon’s reply on hearing the news was ‘ok’. Lower caps. Stephen never told him when she was to be buried. He never asked. By then he had managed to bring the business back. He had rebuilt the family house. Partially. Then he found a forger who downloaded replicas of his family’s art collection and did an awful job at remaking them; the nappy headed nymph came close though. It rolled along with him to his room. He absorbed the image of the thing he viewed as being so queer. He saw all this while he sifted through the documents he held dearest to his heart. All his titles. His deeds of ownership. His diplomas. His bank accounts. Most precious among them was the photograph of his family. His son and daughter and his diminutive wife. All of whom he molded in his ways. They would all be around him, in about six months when the cancer would have eaten up both his lungs. They would be there to mourn his passing. He had written the script.
“So this is what it is all about?” Devon asked.
“Explain.”
“A brief life, lived so that you do not have to die in a ditch somewhere? Alone.”
“Or at sea for sharks to eat you.”
“But what kind of a life was it though? You poor thing.” There was a pause. A silence which stood between them like an empty space.
“You closed the window, but you did not draw the curtains,” Devon finally said.
“She told me not to.”
"Sure.”
“Well, I guess I can draw them now.”
“They are not coming, are they?”
“No.”
“I thought you had it scripted.”
“I was trying to keep that one from you. Angie calls every day but I tell her not to bother. I don’t even speak to the kids… I keep seeing her Devon. In the way I don’t want to see her. I don’t want that for my family.”
“We have been here before Devon.”
“I know.”
“And we survived.”
“Yes. I know.”
“And, we will meet again. Soon.”
“How will you know it’s me?”
“By the white serpent swimming in your eyes.”
An angry bull shark rammed itself into a broken part of the hull, ripping it open. Quickly wasting no time, he grabbed hold of the corpse’s leg and dragged it out. The frenzy began as the sharks wrestled for his flesh. None saw the eye that dislodged and fell to the bottom of the seafloor. Not even the petrified crustaceans which fled as the sharks devoured Devon’s corpse. Camouflaged between some rocks was a conger eel. Its eyes glistened where the last rays of sunlight danced as Devon began to take his leave. In the distance a cruise ship made a V as it cut through the water where films of oil mixed with the foam it made as it shipped first world visitors to watch third world minstrels perform.
“Just one more life. I would like to do this again. Differently next time… Devon… Devon. Can you hear me?”
“Yes, but I have to leave.”
“Please stay with me for a while longer. Don’t go. Please. Not again.”
“I can’t stay. Remember you will see me again. Just look for the white serpent dancing in my eye.”
Stephen thrashed about in his chair, shouting out his brother’s name. “Devon… Devon.” But he did not hear for the mask was now coming off.
“Mr. Webley… Mr. Webley,” a nebulous voice called out to him. With each call it got clearer. “The session is over now sir.”
“Please just a little more time doc.”
“I am sorry, but we cannot go over the allotted time. We are still figuring out how these things work,” he said while removing the mask. Stephen for his part would have struggled, except that his hands were bound.
“I know, but I don’t have much time left anyway, please just a few more minutes.”
“Next Wednesday… Nurse,” he called out.
“Yes doctor.”
“Take him to his room. And give him a double dose of oxycodone. He has been working really hard.”
“Yes doctor,” she said, bowing obsequiously. He bawled out his brother’s name as she pushed him through the staid white sterile hallway. And brought him to his white staid sterile room and lay him in his white staid sterile bed. Then she gave him white pills from a white plastic container and gave him water from a white Styrofoam cup to drink. And he went to sleep amidst the steady beeping of hospice machines.