All about Skin (20 page)

Outside Father's house, I pick up my nunchucks.

It is the end of spring; the hot wet heat drags me down. I practice the katas, fitting myself into centuries-old patterns of strength and grace. Grandfather has told me how he would practice with his own weapons, a warrior. I do not know how he can be a devil.

I think of China, of the Shaolin monks. How they do not speak but practice, silent and meditative, from sunrise to sundown. I think of the lineage of knowing they pass down, in line with another and the next. I think of the understanding of self, too, they must then possess: the presence and whole consciousness as single mind and body.

While I have been practicing, the light has begun to fade; night is rising. And with it is the faint sounding of Ghost Brother's laughter. But he does not appear; it is not yet his time—the sky has darkened from red to deep purple, but it is not yet night.

I take a breath and bow to the unseen boy body who has partnered me in mirrored movements of parts of body, steel, and wood. A match flares red in the darkness and there is the smell of cigarettes. Older Sister. Father must be gone then.

I walk over to her, sitting down on the damp grass. She is silent, as am I. How strange we have become to each other in this slow, long process toward separation begun with my birth.

I tell her I tried to ask him. I tell her I am sorry.

She doesn't answer me. Her fingers are pushing a tiny hole in the dirt. She drops her finished cigarette inside, covers it with earth.

The light has faded completely now; I know this is her favorite time of the day, this in-between time, neither one thing nor the other. It used to be mine, too, but since Ghost Brother has begun to come and see me, that is no longer the case.

I shiver, waiting for him to appear, as usual, with the rising night. To distract myself from thinking about Ghost Brother, I watch the tiny movements of Older Sister's hands, burying cigarettes. I tell her that Father will find them when he starts to garden in the spring anyway, but Older Sister says it doesn't matter. Then she says she has found out where Mother is. She is going to go see her and she wants me to come.

In remembering the cold light of the morning of the finding, I am scared, and, before I can stop, I have asked Older Sister why I have to come. Why can't she go without me?

Looking down at the ground as I wait for her to speak, I see that Older Sister's boots are digging more tiny holes in the earth, mounds of brown pushed into tiny valleys, tiny rivers: a whole world, complete.

She'll talk to you, Older Sister finally says. Because of who you are.

So we are here again, Older Sister and I—these familiar ending words from her that I can neither negate nor deny. I am never to be able to forget that I am the only son—our parent's desire, their hoarded secret. I am to be molded from unused potential and multiplied by Western advantages; I am to raise up the family, begin again.

Okay, I say. We'll go.

Sometimes I think what happened was that my father has to kill a man.

They are hidden in the back of a truck. It is night. It is the time of the endless changing—the sudden bursting and disappearance of rainstorms, and through the wash of mud raised up by worn and patched wheels on dirt road they cannot see anything through the slats of the truck bed. They are covered in blankets soaked with kerosene to confuse the packs of wolf dogs—hunting cries rising loud outside, to sound—but Mother worries only that my older sister is being choked by the smell.

They come to a checkpoint. The truck stops.

They have bribed the driver. But perhaps, feeling the sudden jarring movement, Father is thinking that he should have given him more money, been somewhat more frightening and intimidating instead. Father will close his eyes and hold his wife's hand tightly within his own. Perhaps he is praying. In any case, he cannot see anything with his eyes open anyway.

Now the soldiers are approaching. Mother and Father can hear the steel-toed black boots pushing heavy through thick mud.

Then silence—it seems as if even the rain has stopped.

And then the sounding of my older sister, crying.

The back of the truck is opened. Here are the two soldiers—their shadows pressing sharp against Father's body in the brief pressing of sun flash through rain, breaking. For some reason, perhaps too cocky, perhaps too impatient, their guns are still strapped across their chests. And as hands move to pull out, unsafety … already Father has shot first one, and then the other with his father's old WWII-issue pistol. Mother is shaking and Older Sister is crying, her screams shattering the darkness.

They take each other's hands and run.

I am called to the office right before lunch. The assistant nods at me in a concerned manner and says she is sorry about my grandmother. For a second, I think, illogically, that this is true—somehow news has been sent from the home we do not know. Then I see my older sister, slouched in one of the plastic chairs by the door.

The car she has borrowed from her friend is a rumbling 1960s mustang. She unlocks the door for me and we merge onto the freeway; it occurs to me that I don't even know if she has her driver's license. But I do not ask her this now; this is neither the time nor place for one of our uncomfortable and increasingly rare conversations.

So, we do not talk during the two-hour ride. Occasionally she lights a cigarette. Occasionally, I mess with the radio.

She does not look at the map.

In front of the hospital, we sit in the car long after my older sister parks, each waiting for the other to move. Finally, she pulls the keys out of the ignition and presses her door open gently.

I follow.

Inside this place, there is only silence, whiteness.

A nurse approaches, her pale blonde hair and pale skin blending so well into the white shirt and pants of her uniform I have trouble seeing where flesh and cloth meet. The nurse speaks quietly to my older sister but I cannot hear. The movement of the black clock hands against each black slash on white background is loud in my ears and the room is fading and shimmering slowly, as is usual when the movement of sound—and other forms of energy—begin to behave oddly, begin to shift into strange wave and light patterns to announce the appearance of Ghost Brother or others from his spirit world. He cannot be here; it is not his time, it is not yet night.

But still, afraid, I cannot move closer.

I watch the nurse leave and my older sister absently pull a cigarette from her new full pack, then put it back. She will sit down, then stand up and take a few steps before turning around, sitting back down. Then she will stand up, repeating the entire process yet again.

She is making me nervous, but I can't stop watching. So I stand and move to the window, my back toward her, and stare out at the tiny, dying patches of grass that stand for outdoor space instead.

This is no better. I am remembering how before this, my mother and my older sister would wake before the sun and go out to work in the garden, their brown fingers dropping round seeds into brown earth, their lips pushing out melodies in the language Older Sister and I do not know, to grow tiny fruit seed, tiny flower—all life—underground.

Here she is, the nurse's perky voice is announcing. There is Older Sister's sharp intake of breath and I turn around.

Our mother sits in a wheelchair—head hung down unseeing, her already thin body become so tiny, too thin, and I wonder why her arms are still pressed down with restraints until with the movement of recycled air from machine her white hospital gown lifts slightly and I see, in line with another and the next, the tiny lines etched upward along arm from wrist, knee to thigh, knee to ankle, faded only a little from that day of red blood on white tile that marked the finding—how some do not appear to be faded at all, but rather recent and deep.

My older sister has begun crying; she lets her body fall to her knees to press arms around our unresponsive mother, holding tight to her body. But I am scared; I cannot move closer. I tell Older Sister that mother cannot hear us. We should go; it is late.

There will be anger now, from Father, when we return to his house.

Older Sister doesn't hear me, but our mother slowly turns her head toward the empty echo of my voice through air. She opens her mouth to speak, but, finding herself unable, closes it and tries again.

The first word she gets out that I can hear is
dead
. Then:
He said you were dead
.

She says nothing else, only these words over and over, her voice rising louder and louder until the nurse, alarmed, hurries over to sedate and tranquilize.

But in the moments before the medicine moves through body to calm, in the darkness of the becoming night, I hear the soft sounding of laughter and I know that if I look I will see—in between Mother's body, my body—the shimmering body of Ghost Brother, his laughter rising louder, then louder still.

Older Sister will be asking what is happening, what is wrong, the first beginnings of panic and alarm rising loud in her voice too. For she is a girl and not the only son; the ancestors do not visit her. She cannot see Ghost Brother; she cannot hear the echoing of Ghost Brother's laughter—cold and harsh throughout the room; she cannot feel the sounding that is pressing through Mother's body and my own—sharp and deep and shining as the razor lines etched into Mother's arms.

I realize, suddenly, that the reason I am having difficulty in seeing Ghost Brother is because he is shimmering harder than I have ever seen him, pulsing so quickly in the rise and fall of his angry light that my eyes cannot hold the brief flashings of his body to register the seeing as sight.

And still, in the echoing of his rising laughter, Ghost Brother is pulsing so quickly in the rise and fall of his angry light the space in between is becoming unrecognizable as well; he looks like he is almost becoming solid flesh. But in the shimmering—faster now, then faster still—the ghost body cannot hold the press of the force, the ghost frame is beginning its breaking apart. First one arm, falling softly to ground. Then the other. One leg, then the other. Then foot, separating from leg, toes from foot. Finger from hand from arm.

Head from neck. Tongue from mouth.

Eye from socket.

And still, the sounding of his laughter. And still the sounding of his voice, telling Mother he will not stop showing her what was done to him, no he won't, haha, won't stop showing Mother what was done to all of the body family before he was Ghost Brother and he was still first-born son of the first-born son left behind to guard the village, the many parts of the body family, as had been done by the first son of the first son in line with another and the next throughout memory while Father—no longer the first son but the first father—was sent with Mother and Older Sister overseas in this place as hope: the fragment of the body family kept secret and kept safe to begin again.

In the car, on the way back, it is an hour before my older sister asks.

In hearing the sounding of my voice telling her what I saw—why she could not see—she says nothing.

But from time to time, in the mirror, I see her wipe her hand across her face.

And sometimes, of course, I wonder if it is just chance.

Father has been in the fields or at the school or at the market with Mother and Older Sister and, when they come back, the village has been disappeared.

In the soft fall of ash and graying smoke, I see Father's arms rise up to hold Mother. Perhaps they can still see the dust of the military transport. Perhaps, in the distance, they hear an echo they try to believe is not gunshots.

Here is Father holding Mother, reasoning with her not to run after them, holding up my older sister as everything that will become.

But if he had known what was to become, would he have released her body, let her run after them?

Would he have rushed after her, holding Older Sister, and let it end there instead?

Perhaps this is what he is already beginning to wonder as they walk for days—hiding, tired, hungry—until reaching the border and wondering if this, too, exists solely inside his head and will upon closer seeing be revealed as nothing more than a sun-crazed hallucination.

But it cannot be a hallucination, he is thinking. Here are Amin's soldiers—marching on the ground and from lookout towers or in trucks shooting at nothing, drunk with revolution, their sudden power and agency.

I see Mother crumple to the ground. I see Father lift her up. I see the three of them take a step.

And another.

And still, no one notices.

I see them cross the border into Kenya, but no one else, not even the soldiers, sees them.

And perhaps, as they walk, the guards looking straight at them and yet through them, my Father sees the towering genesis angels with swords of flame who sent away from the garden the first man, the first wife.

Only this time, the deep echo of winged thunder is the sounding of paradise.

Joshunda Sanders

T
here wasn't enough music in the world to block out those sirens.

I would hear 'em in the middle of the day, a few streets over, rushing past gypsy cabs and Maximas to save somebody else. With my french fry fingers looped in a braid, I wondered how I might get those sirens to come for me.

Maybe I didn't look like I needed help. I kept my braids tight, since Moms had hot dog fingers, short and formless like her waist. She was thick all over from all the eating she'd been doing all my life, trying to get full but only getting fat.

I had only ever known Moms to answer every pain with a bag of chips and all confusion with a fried pie. When she was tired, she ate. When Moms was stressed, in love, broken hearted, angry, happy—whatever. Food was the answer.

She would try to quit food for days and weeks at a time, which was never good for me. That's when her mean side came out. If she was on that Slimfast, she talked down to me like I was a homeless dog that followed her home, talking about how she wished she never had me. I would watch her with the Dexatrim pills, her face in a permanent frown.