And sight, that light and dark. But I wanted you to talk to me, talk now, so I didn’t order… everything.
To be able to talk, say everything, and nothing.
You see, you used to say I was inattentive, too lost in my own time. But I followed you like a scent every day for all those years, until you scrubbed me clean of you. I loved to hear you talk, do you remember? We would sit for hours, you talking, me all ears. I am a man of few words. You could spin vast webs of them, of numbers. Stories, plans, plots, systems. Nets, traps: I had to work my way out of all of them.
Nests of words and figures, which snared me.
First feet so that they will never run away. Then hands, so not even the simplest tools. Then eyes, so no recall of a single place you stash them. But keep the tongue and vocal cords until the end because they may have something else to surprise you with.
My later approach, almost to the letter. How I will surprise you.
You will.
Tell you something.
The baobab tree lives forever and offers shade, but not cassava fruit. Today smells like that evening in the clearing, you know.
I can’t smell it.
It does. The stink of oblivion. Its anticipation. The smell that lies outside the smell. Fumes beyond and beneath it. Something worse, don’t you agree, lurking there? You still have your nose.
Yes, no, nothing like that evening. I can’t.
You can probably hear it in your voice, and mine. In the silence before I entered.
No, fumes, no sounds.
You probably cannot just hear it but taste it. That’s how the oracle described it, no? A feeling so strong the ear tastes its contours? All that poetry like a radar. We survived but not the victims of that ambush. An open field, though, for you.
Yes, but no, it was an ordeal after that.
Every such situation presented itself as an ordeal, but you saw the window before you. You leapt right through. I followed you.
Windows, yes. Now, no.
It wasn’t supposed to stay open for me. Yet every time when you tried with me you failed. After the first time, the failed assassination at the market, I realized I had to place my steps inside and then ahead of yours. Enter your frequency. The truth that I was next, your truth. That’s how I knew. The acid in the tap. The radioactive isotopes those painters painted all throughout the house. Survival is a great motivator. Somehow you missed that.
I missed.
You did and didn’t. You were watching but you couldn’t see past your ken. The untimely horizon. I won’t even use the metaphor of chess, which you banned, remember? Recall how you always beat me back then? Then you contrived to let me win, until I got the gist. You hated that you could imagine what the person next door or across the street was thinking but you couldn’t figure out a winning strategy against your former protegé on that board. How many did you tear up or burn? It fascinated me that the king was so powerless, waiting to be taken. He should have been able to control his fate and the throne.
Powerless, and taken.
Terrified of knights — and pawns. A bishop, how ridiculous. The queen is the one who never gave a damn. I was the queen, then. But yoté, choko, checkers, backgammon, cribbage, senterej, go, poker, 21, roulette, I laugh at all those metaphors today because they point to chance and I don’t take any.
No chance, no time.
Out of time. Except now.
No, I can’t believe it.
That your clock is running out? That you will surprise me? Before it’s too late. There was that class we took together while in exile, the philosophy of military strategy, or political philosophy, or philosophy of politics itself, something enthrallingly useless.
Yes. Plato, Machiavelli, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Schmitt—
All those damned Europeans, all that claptrap.
Emperor Frederick the Great, Teddy Roosevelt, Franco, Mussolini, Stalin, then a week for Mao, Trujillo, Amin, Pinochet, Bokassa… I imagined they’ve added Saddam, Cheney, Ghaddafi, the rest.
To what end? Our ancestors had more wisdom in their little toes.
My avatars, my favorite monsters.
At first I thought that was when you began formulating your schemes. But no, it was earlier. Before the philosophers, always political. You always had such ambition, foresight. Even in childhood, I envision, since I didn’t know you then. Those stories about your youth, on the other side of the country, how you organized the local children, drawing maps in the sand, compelling them to strangle animals, memorize secret words. It took me a while to catch on, and up.
Then you were behind me.
Fully. Behind, until I passed you. Surpassed you.
Past me.
I want to say that I remember the exact moment but that would be too cinematic, too perfect. Like a still from a movie, or a literary scene. Is there a computer code for that? A simulation I can view on the nearest screen. I don’t recall it. No need now to say I did. I was carrying out all of your plans, to the letter. Rewriting maps, strangling opponents, devising secret languages.
All my plans, opponents, letters.
I would say to myself, he foresees everything, moves men around like figurines. Without ever consulting the spirits, the oracle, those magical books from the Middle East and East and elsewhere. He has the insight of a seer and the might of a deity. That’s why I called you, we all called you The Prophet.
The Prophet, men like figurines.
Because you knew how everything would unfold, how you would unfold it. No instructions needed. The Prophet foresaw the complex mathematics of circumstance and how his actions would affect them.
Prediction, or statistics, or complex systems analysis.
I never studied any of that in school. Perhaps military colleges should teach it.
Poetry, history, psychology, ban all of it.
You banned most of it. I thought you had a hologram of the world, of everyone else’s head, in yours, a cybernetic game turning it every which way, the dates, the days, the figures, the complicated transactional interplay of everything materializing in its array, with the will to realize it. Even if that’s not what it was like the metaphor works. You with your all your thinkers and dreamers, those bards, black, brown, yellow, white, whatever the color, that cannot save a single soul, including you.
Yes, my avatars, my monsters, I can hear their words right now.
You even wrote your thesis on Amilcar Cabral, another poet, one of ours.
No, Frantz Fanon. On the justification and cleansing power of violence, in the service of revolution.
Blood for the stanzas, odes to gore. That brain, so sharp, cutting even now like a well-honed trap, correcting me. I did say I want to be surprised, though the squeak, as you liked to say, cries out to be silenced.
Yes, that insistent noise. It became habit, the algorithms of reason, action, circumstance. I could place myself in the minds of others, their bodies, and view the world through their eyes, step where they stepped before they knew they would. What they would do I could always counter it. Equations for such things, code, scripts, texts, written or sung a thousand years ago, last decade, but something finer, more subtle too, that could not be written down, though I did.
Lyric poems, oral stories, short stories. You banned them all. I initially followed your lead, all of it except the most inane trash, though some of that can provoke enough sympathy to start people thinking. I realized that I would just have to tinker a bit.
That’s dangerous too, I learned soon enough.
If you don’t tinker, and control it. Yourself. I give them a steady diet of garbage, music videos from Rio, US reality shows, K-Pop, Mexican telenovelas, Bollywood gangster tales, Nollywood films about witches, fads, diet shows, hair shows, dubbed and scrubbed. Patriotic dramas, documentaries on the colonial wars. You can never go wrong denouncing the British and French. Louis XIV, King Leopold. Dead kings. You. Even a trickle of attenuated religion now and then, nothing to give them any hope or ideas. Thin as wartime broth.