A loud explosion, far off. We all jump. I look at Paz and I see that he’s not Paz, never was Paz, but my husband. He’s reaching out for me, his hand is going inside my head …
My arm is gripped tight, I feel myself shaken. Mrs. Paz is staring me in the face. She says, “Don’t be afraid.”
I say, “He’s coming. He’s coming through the city. People are going mad.”
She strokes my arm, speaks soothingly in Spanish. Her eyes are without fear. Ignorance, or maybe she has something I don’t have. I make myself look at Paz. He’s confused, but I see that under the shell of cop-toughness there is a lovely innocence, a look my Witt had once.
Sirens are calling again. Mrs. Paz says, “If you’re going to do this, you should start now.”
So we begin. There is a little ritual with rum and chant that seals them to me in the m’doli and we move right into that. Mrs. Paz looks at me with awe, surely not a familiar experience with respect to the women her son has brought around; Paz seems a little wooden, overly precise, the response of a brave man frightened. My dad was like that in the storm at sea. And the chick? It tweets and hops and flutters wildly when I blow rum at it. Then I drink the drink.
The kadoul is bitter; most sorcerous stuff is bitter, because most of it contains alkaloids and things that were evolved by plants to keep us warm-blooded creatures from dining on them. I sit down. Mrs. Paz sits next to me at the table, and Jimmy goes and flops into my raggedy lounger. She takes my hand, strokes it. It comes on fast. I have nothing in my stomach to slow it down except a half slice of pizza and some banana daiquiri. In five minutes I shuck off my body.
The wonders of m’doli are difficult to describe. A savage spot, as lonely and enchanted as ere beneath the waning moon was haunted by a woman wailing for her demon lover. A little like that. You experience it in poetry, uncanny, but recall it in prose. Multiple levels of awareness, too. I’m conscious of my body, slumped in its chair, and Paz and his mother and the little bird, my allies, I can feel them, as we feel a chair, or a bed, or water around us in a pool, supporting, a circle of protection, connecting back to m’fa. I detect … what’s that? Something a little off, an imbalance there, an absence, like running on a loose heel. The wobble of a bike when you haven’t been on one for years. Too late, now, so I ignore it and float out of the apartment to the landing.
Which seems to be larger, much larger than it is in m’fa, more of a broad veranda, a little like the back deck of Lou Nearing’s place in Hyde Park where I met my husband, and a little like a set for the last scene in Tosca, a fortress tower. It is indistinct. A breeze brings the odors of summer in the city, traffic fumes and the smoke from barbecues. There is a party going on, with music, not Motown this time, but an Olo song, a song about the exile from Ile-Ife, full of their peculiar grating harmonics and insistent rhythms. I can’t make out the words, but I’m dying to because it’s the whole story of the Olo’s expulsion and hegira, the Ilidoni, which I’ve never heard before, and for some reason it is enormously important. But it seems like the more I strain to hear, the fainter the music grows.
I know a lot of the people here. I see my sister and my mother, and Marcel and some of the Chenka, and Lou Nearing and the old guy, George Dorman, who used to clean out our furnace at Sionnet when I was a little girl. He died when I was eight. I once asked Ulune whether the dead people we met in m’doli were real or created by our minds, like the figures in dreams. He laughed at me. How silly to imagine that the people in dreams were not real. How silly to have such a term as real.
My husband is here, dressed in white Olo clothes, carrying the corkscrew thornwood cane that marks the Olo witch. He opens his arms to embrace me, like he did at the tent rock, the bone place, at Danolo, when I failed Ulune. I feel myself drawn to him. This is the first little skirmish.
I can resist. I walk away; that is, the deck we are on becomes larger, the party recedes. I feel a touch at my elbow. My mother, looking gorgeous, in a tiny evening sheath, black, with her neck and hands heavy with diamonds. Have a drink, Jane, you’re old enough. She holds out a blender pitcher, and I smell the sweet, cloying scent of bananas and rum. I refuse. Jane, you’re such a drip. You’re no fun, Jane, that’s your problem. You’re a drip like your father. Not words, but the feeling I had when she used to say stuff like that.
I ignore her and focus my attention on Witt. I say, I want to speak to Witt. Amusement. Talk to me, I’m here. I say, No, you’re not. You’re Durakne Den. I want Witt. It’s not really talking we’re doing, it’s the meaning under language.
His teeth are filed in the manner of witches and he has the zigzag cheek and temple scars. You mean Mebembe. His witch name. The figure is getting taller now, changing. The scene is changing, too, and the odors are dust, and dung, and millet cooking, and the rank sharp scent of bruised African vegetation, and, permeating all, the not-stink of dulfana, intolerably strong, and of a peculiar decayed flavor. We are in an Olo bon, the one outside Danolo, where the witch lived. I never saw Durakne close-up, back then, except that one occasion at night. He is a tall, well-fed man, very dark, with his head shaved except for a long braided topknot. I look into his face.
Ulune always told me that the first rule of ndol, the work in the magical realm, was never to be afraid. Fear takes away the legs and the arms and the eyes, he said. It is what the witches use to destroy you there, to render you helpless and … I forget the rest. I actually forget everything, just now, what I am doing here, what I am. I’m drowned in fear.
Not like looking into the eyes of an animal, because there you understand it is an animal, you have no expectations, and there is a certain mindless dignity in its glance. These eyes, however, shine with intelligence, intelligence made hideous by the utter absence of any empathy, eyes as void of love as the black dots that rim the head of a spider. Inhuman is a word we use, in our false pride, to describe people who participate in behavior that is characteristically human?murder, torture, rape?but here for once it is apposite. Now I comprehend that I am not looking into the eyes of a person at all but at a writhing mass of grelet, the beings who colonized Durakne Den as a child and have grown fat in him, far fatter than these psychic parasites normally get, thick greasy maggots a foot long, eating, always hungry, reaching out for me. I dreamed him once, I recall, when I was with Ulune. Worms in the eyes. It, not him. I move away, slowly, as in a dream, I hear myself screaming, but there are no doors. I batter at the mud walls.
Witt’s voice comes from It: Do you really want to see me? I’m right here. It takes a little carved wooden box off a shelf, places it on the floor. It lifts the lid. In the box is a doll of some kind, no, or a small animal, it’s moving. My dream again. I get down on my hands and knees and peer in. It’s Witt, six inches high, at a desk, with the white lined pads he favored stacked around him, writing away. I feel a pang of sympathy for him, he’s working so hard, and I reach out a hand to touch him. My hand and my whole arm and shoulder go into the box. I rub his back, as I used to when he was at his desk. But I am off balance, and so I place one foot in the box and then the other. There is plenty of room, and it’s an escape from the witch.
I’m standing next to Witt. We are in a little room, the apartment over the boathouse at Sionnet. There is no door where there should be one, but otherwise it’s the same: a maple desk, an old wooden swivel chair, a somewhat ratty couch, bookshelves, a mini-stereo set, and the windows, to one side opening on the terrace and to the harbor on the other. I’m so glad to be home. I see my reflection in this window. I’m wearing a piece of patterned cloth around my waist; my breasts jut out like dark shiny plums. I am black. Oh, good, I think, now we will be happy. I go to him. He is writing away. I ask him how he is doing, how’s the Captain? He smiles, fine, great, it’s flowing good; he does not stop writing. I look over his shoulder. He writes: over the breasts of the spring, the land, amid cities, amid lanes and through old woods, where lately the violets peeped from the ground spotting the gray debris … The writing fades, however, as he writes it. The pile of finished pages is quite blank. But he seems happy and so what if he’s writing Whitman, the important thing is … I have forgotten what the important thing is.