Burial (33 page)

On both sides of the fireplace were pinned scores of
postcards and photographs of relatives and friends and grandmama's saints and heroes: St Sebastian, Haile Selassie, Jesse Jackson, Martin Luther King, St Luke, Papa Doc Duvalier, Otis Redding. There were also garish prints of demonic green and blue faces with blotchy scarlet lips. Demons from Haiti and Dominica, hair-raising zombies from the bayous and snarling loogaroos from the swamps and Spanish quarters.

Grandmama sat in her favourite armchair, a little grey stick-insect in a long grey dress, her silver hair brushed back and fastened with combs decorated with shells and beads and knots of twine. Her face was all sunken in these days. She was only seventy-two, but she had always smoked too much and Nann knew that she regularly took something which she called ‘the seeing drink' to induce hallucinogenic trances. Nann had never discovered exactly what ‘the seeing drink' was, but she had heard of Dominican mystics who drank an infusion of yage and human ashes in order to talk to their ancestors.

Nann made a tray of tea and set it down on the table beside her mother's knee. Her mother watched her with filmy eyes. In the opposite corner the television was flickering, but with the volume turned right down. Trixie was standing staring at it — at the jumpy aerial views of the Loop and Lincoln Park and West Wacker — all of them flattened and devastated. It looked as if the Sears Tower were the only major skyscraper left standing. Trixie had tried twenty or thirty times to get in touch with Nat at the hifi store near Normal Park where he worked, but the phones were down. She held her hands clasped over her stomach as if trying to protect her baby from the prospect of being fatherless.

Grandmama watched Nann pouring the tea. The steam from the teapot twisted in the dim afternoon sunlight ‘How did
you
know the time had come?' she asked. Her voice was low and thick and rasping. ‘On the TV, all they said was, earthquake.'

Nann gave the slightest of shrugs. ‘I just
knew
, that's all. You always told me that one day the buildings would disappear. Even when I was small you told me that over and over. “One day, all of the buildings are going to up and disappear, just like they never were.” I couldn't imagine it, I couldn't imagine how it was going to happen. But they did, they disappeared. And they didn't just
fall
. They disappeared. Marshall Field, the whole block, everything, all of my friends, too, everybody who worked there, and customers, and everybody. They went right down into the ground like they never were.'

The terrible elation that she had first felt was beginning to wear off. Her voice trembled erratically and her eyes glistened with tears.

‘My
friends
— I mean, what's happened to them?'

Grandmama reached over and took hold of her hand. ‘Nann child, this was spoke of from mother to daughter for ten generations. Carried down, mouth to mouth, family to family. The time's gonna come, the time's gonna come,” even Martin Luther King understood that the time had to come, and what we meant by “the time.” It never exactly meant free, although free was a part of it. It never exactly meant equal, neither, although equal was part of it, too.

‘It didn't mean sitting in the front of the bus. It didn't mean sitting alone in the bus. It meant no bus at all; because the bus is
their way
, not ours. It meant nothing of theirs, none of their houses, none of their automobiles, none of their technological gimcrackery. It meant the way things were
meant
to be. Slow, true, and back to nature.'

Trixie said, ‘This is all crazy.'

Grandmama turned around, her neck stretching like an egret's. ‘Who are you to say crazy?'

‘It's crazy. It's old women's crazy talk.'

Nann said, ‘Trixie, you listen to me — ' but Grandmama shushed her.

‘It's easy enough for you to say it's crazy, young lady. But this was always meant to be, from way, way back, when the black man and the red man first faced each other and knew what their common destiny was. There was the famous day we still call Soul Day, when a voodoo priest called Doctor Hambone met a Red Indian magic-man called Maccus, and they shared a trance for twenty days and twenty nights and when they came back they was neither of them really human no more, because they'd been to places where only dead men can go, and they'd learned all of the dead men's secrets, and what was going to happen to the world.'

‘Come on, Grandmama,' Trixie protested. ‘This is the twentieth century.'

‘That's right,' Grandmama nodded. ‘This is the twentieth century, and the time has come at last, and I praise God and all of his spirits that I lived to see it.'

Trixie said, ‘I'm going across to West Normal. I have to, Momma. I have to make sure that Nat's okay.'

Nann said, ‘Trixie, you can't. Supposing more of those buildings fall?'

Almost as if the words she had spoken were a spell the television screen suddenly jumped to a long-shot of the Sears Tower. The sound was turned down but they didn't need sound. They could hear the rumbling even from here, on East 83rd Street.

With dreadful majesty, the tower began to slide into the ground. As it slid, it gathered momentum, faster and faster, until it was vanishing into its foundations like a high-speed elevator-one thousand four hundred feet of steel and glass and concrete thundering into the bedrock in an unstoppable rush.

It took less than two minutes to disappear. In Grandmama's apartment, they felt the aftershocks warping and rippling the floor beneath their feet. Grandmama's voodoo bells tinkled and jangled, and her beads swung, and
one of her postcards dropped from the fireplace. It was the ghastly grinning powder-blue face of Chief Lorgnette, one of the most frightening of all of Grandmama's voodoo deities.

‘Hosanna and hallelujah,' said Grandmama. ‘At long last we brung them low.'

We heard the news as we sat in my consulting rooms eating Korean take-away. It was a few minutes after noon, and quite suddenly Amelia lowered her chopsticks and said, ‘Listen!'

I was chasing the world's liveliest dead shrimp around its carton. I was never much of a hand with chopsticks: as far as I was concerned eating with chopsticks was about as sensible as apple-bobbing.

‘
Listen
!' Amelia repeated; and I stopped shrimp-chasing.

‘What is it?'

‘Can't you hear it?'

I listened. There was nothing. ‘I don't hear anything,' I told her.

‘That's the whole point,' she said. ‘It's so quiet. No traffic, no automobile horns, nothing at all.'

I listened again, and frowned. I put down my shrimp and went to the window and opened the blind. Amelia was right. Most of the traffic in the street outside had come to a standstill, even the buses. All around the plaza of the Citicorp building, people were standing like store-window dummies. It was truly weird, like a scene out of one of those 1950s sci-fi movies where the whole population is paralysed by an alien ray.

Amelia came over and stood beside me. ‘Something's
happened,' she said. Turn on the TV.'

‘Maybe somebody's shot the President,' I said. I couldn't think of anything else that could turn midtown Manhattan into a game of statues in the middle of the lunchbreak.

I switched on my Sony portable, and immediately heard ‘
— thirty or forty major buildings have collapsed, and those killed or missing already run into tens of thousands —
'

Amelia and I watched in silence as CBS News brought jagged, jerky aerial pictures of downtown Chicago.

‘
— refugees streaming out of the metropolitan area in all directions — but a strange calm prevailing mainly because people have found this sudden disaster so hard to believe —
'

An ENG picture of a tearful elderly man. ‘
I step from the building into the street … my wife's just behind me in the hallway — then bricks are falling, and I hear this crashing noise — and I turn round and the building is gone, just gone. No rubble, just flat, like it was never there—
'

A serious-faced earthquake expert, speaking by satellite linkup from Santa Cruz, California: ‘ —
most remarkable is the way that the buildings appear to have dropped directly downwards into the bedrock — leaving no mountains of rubble, as I would normally expect, nor semi-collapsed structures — if there were any other possible explanation for what's going on here, I'd say that this wasn't an earthquake at all, but a totally different kind of natural phenomenon
.'

I sat down. ‘Do you see that?' I asked Amelia, at last. ‘Do you see what's happening? The buildings are disappearing into the ground. Disappearing. It's weird.'

She stood behind me, and put her arms around my neck. We watched Marina Towers dropping into the Chicago River. We watched the John G. Shedd Aquarium vanish in front of our eyes.

‘Maybe the lakebed is collapsing, something like that.'

‘God,' I told her. ‘I can't believe this is happening. I can't believe it.'

Like everybody else in America that day, like everybody else throughout the world, we spent the whole of the afternoon and most of the evening in front of the television. Manhattan was a hot, smoggy cemetery. Hardly anybody was out on the streets, except for occasional police cars and firetrucks. It was almost impossible to make a phone call. I was glad that I didn't have any friends or relatives in Chicago; but for those who did, the TV channels regularly reeled off scores of emergency numbers, and numbers of all the Chicago hospitals.

At 3:25 pm the President declared a national emergency. All flights, national and international, had to be rerouted away from O'Hare and Meigs Field, and the whole area within a twenty-five-mile radius was evacuated.

I think the most stunning moment was when the Sears Tower went. The tallest building in the world, the pinnacle of American capitalism. It was like the Eiffel Tower collapsing, or Buckingham Palace being demolished. In some ways, it felt worse than all the hurt that was inflicted by the Vietnam war, and it induced the same helpless anger and frustration.

When it happened, of course, we weren't even aware that it
was
a war. A war of shadows, and of terrible revenge.

At about nine o'clock, I walked down to the drugstore on the corner of 50th and Lex and bought a newspaper. The front page showed the Sears Tower collapsing, and the headline said simply QUAKE. I stopped off at the liquor store on 51st and bought two bottles of cold chardonnay, and walked back to my consulting-rooms feeling as if the world was coming to an end.

I still hadn't come to terms with what had happened to Karen. I had spent all night blaming myself for getting her involved with Misquamacus; for getting
myself
involved. Amelia had tried to rustle up some of her spirit-guides in a vain attempt to find out where she had gone and what had happened to her. But the spirit world had been in turmoil; like listening to a radio disturbed by sunspots; and she had
picked up nothing but blurted messages of panic.

The only clear voice she had heard was that of a previous occupant of my consulting-rooms, who appeared to have been an Armenian tailor. He had lost his seven-year-old daughter and couldn't locate her. Just another tragedy; as painful for him as losing Karen was painful for me. Not helpful, just sad.

In the small hours of this morning Amelia had sat beside me, smoking a cigarette, and said, ‘I don't think she's dead. From what Misquamacus said, I think he'll keep her alive. He needs her. He needs a voice.'

‘Maybe it wasn't Misquamacus at all,' I replied. ‘You know what these spirits are like. Always playing tricks. Maybe he was only pretending to be Misquamacus, just to frighten me.'

‘Harry,' said Amelia, ‘it
was
Misquamacus, believe me. I recognized his aura. I recognized his power. It was the same power he showed me when he came out of that table the very first time we saw him. Overwhelming. Totally overwhelming. He's laughing at us now, playing games with us. But it's him all right, no question about it. I can
smell
him.'

I had nodded. Amelia was right, and I suppose in a way I should have been reassured. Better the supernatural enemy you know than the supernatural enemy you don't. But Misquamacus had always been vicious and cunning and spectacularly cruel, and out of all the clutches in the cosmos, the very last that I would have wanted Karen to have fallen into were his.

Maybe he was right about white men destroying his lodges, but, you know, time marches on, and those Indian lodges weren't exactly Squeaky-Clean Villas. The way Singing Rock had described it to me, those Plains Indians encampments had reeked of woodsmoke, rotting meat, burning fat, human waste and body odour so strong that they didn't need to knock over the buffalo with bows and arrows, all
they had to do was reveal their armpits.

Maybe Misquamacus was right about the Indians' sacred places; maybe he was right about their trees and their grasses and their rivers. But the buffalo-jump wasn't the greatest way to preserve the species, by any means; and some of those south-western tribes could strip forests faster than Agent Orange.

Maybe Misquamacus was right about the spirits, too; the spirits that had haunted rocks and rivers and forests. But there had been just as many malevolent Indian spirits that had brought disease and madness and early death. Every idyll has its downside, just like every one of Mlle Lenormand's cards had its warning as well as its promise.

In a mixed-up way, I had always understood Misquamacus' thirst for revenge. At times I had nearly sympathized. But my sympathy had ended with his taking Karen. Her first experience had nearly driven her over the edge. God alone knew what she was suffering now, or where; or how I was ever going to get her back.