Sitting there, and here.
The monsters no longer have to send their mirage planes, vampire jets, canberra bombers and helicopters, purchased from their American and European master devils themselves, to rain down bombs upon us, to stamp out our freedom like a boot heel on a new and fragile bloom. They no longer have to ravenously slaughter our little children, the seeds of our future, in their schoolhouses or their mothers’ wombs. They no longer have to destroy our factories, our banks and bourse, our villages and metropolises, all these the foundations of our freedom, they no longer have to salt our farms, uproot our trees, reduce our harrows and planters, our tractors and transport vehicles, to dust. They no longer have to poison our water engines and wells, these savage beasts who slaveringly covet the earth of our ancestors, these fossils who call us the missing link. They no longer have to take these steps, these demoniacal settler-colonialists, these aliens in our midst, with their cluster bombs and nuclear bombs, their handouts and NGOs and spies posing as missionaries bringing us the anti-salvation of their diabolical savior, their radioactive ideologies of capitalism and liberalism and individualism transmitted over TV sets and in records and books, through fashion and fads that wither our own indigenous culture and traditions like drought, in their pernicious pop culture which like a cancer devours the flesh and souls of our youth. No longer, my countrywomen and men, no longer, no longer. No.
No longer, those monsters.
No longer because they labor from the inside out now, through these Quislings in our midst, these walking tumors, these inhuman viruses, these beasts more depraved than any creature the gods ever bequeathed to us, these idolators among us who pray to the whiteman as their only deity and have pledged their being to sacrifice the black race to appease their abominable god, these psychopaths who have become impervious to reason and immune to the history and ethics and morality of our ancestors, the people, you, our people, more duplicitous and degenerate than the most unspeakable and unimaginable monsters ever placed or dreamt of on this earth, these traitors, these bootlickers, these parasites with their black skin and white hearts, cold empty hearts, lacking souls, these thieves who have conspired with the capitalist thieves in Washington and London, in Berlin and Zurich, in Toronto and Tel Aviv, to empty our pockets, strip our resources, rape our rich soil into a desert and turn our deserts into their tarmacs and derricks, this filth, this rot, this shit festering in our midst, circulating among us, like the air we breathe and the water we drink.
This filth, this rot, this shit, in our water and air.
But, my countrywomen and men, my fellow patriots, my fellow liberators, my fellow warriors, my sisters and brothers, my people, we have identified them and we must stamp them out. We will stamp them out, my people. We will cut them from the body politic, we will hack them out, we will dispatch the remains of their pestilence, ground to ashes and the memory of blood, and remit them and the foul scent that lingers after to those capitals that seek to destroy us, to Washington and London, to Berlin and Zurich, to Toronto and Tel Aviv and Johannesburg and Brussels and the Hague, and I shall be your tribune in returning us to the glories of our people, our past, our first days of freedom, of liberation and independence, but we must join together, hand in hand, arm in arm, armed in mind and body, we must, to wipe this pestilence out.
Hand in hand, arm in arm, this pestilence.
Victory is certain, once we extinguish this plague. Together. We. Will. Wipe. This. Pestilence. Out.
Out, in one draft. My ears had filled with versions of that speech since I was an infant.
Our leader did not believe a single word of it. I did, the rest of the country did, even the Quislings themselves knew what it meant. You did too, but in a different way. It was you speaking, as if with a microphone to your soul. The leader was ventriloquizing you, because you had placed not just him in your crosshairs, but everyone else. Including me.
Not everyone else, and at that moment….
At that moment — me. Brother Quisling. What perfume, my stomach wrenches at the thought, though I would be lying if I said I did not smell it then and suppressed it.
I heard it and like a stylus to wax, a nib to paper, a needle to a groove….
Sound. Your sense was sound, always sound, the most infinitesimal crackle or rustle, and you’d cock your head just so, as if the sound were right beside you, or behind you, or in front of you, just that quick, like a gazelle or a dik-dik, like you had invisible antennae instead of ears, a sonar, so exactingly tuned. The sound of words, of worlds. You could hear my mind’s pulse back then, the beat of my dreams.
Yes, the pulse of everything, and beyond. Months.
Mine, now you can’t have forgotten mine.
I can’t have forgotten.
You have, gods help you.
I can’t.
Mine was smell. Immaturity and ripeness, scents of all kinds, fragrances, stenches, nature’s olfactory artistry and legerdemain, anything created by the hand or mind of a chemist, anything that could be marked by scent, even emotions, usually emotions, I mined them, except when the mephitic truth was right under my nose. Fear sends out a terrible perfume. The worst.
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.