Counternarratives (37 page)

III

COUNTERNARRATIVE

“If there is any genre in which it matters to be sublime,
it is evil, above all.”

Denis Diderot

 

THE LIONS

“If a lion could talk, we would not understand him.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein

G
ood evening.

 

. . . .

Or should I say, Good morning.

. . . .

Of course it could be whatever we want it to be. I
want—

. . . .

Decree. Good morning, good evening, good night.

. . . .

Under the circumstances you could lose sight
—

. . . .

—of such distinctions. Or forget them. Time of day, night time, time
itself
—

. . . .

—slips through your grasp when you're. . . .

. . . .

Preoccupied. Aren't you?

. . . .

I rib you but I can smell it. In my case, I have been, so much to do.
Think about. You think about it, how common it is to say that, so busy. So easy to
lose sight
—

. . . .

Of the mountain for a single peak, too. I, never. Too many do, though.
You
—

. . . .

Want to speak. Your crying request. Here I am. There are some things you
never forget, no matter how hard you try. They root, linger, you'd once have said.
You can't forget them, I'd say.

. . . .

You take time out of the equation, you can't take time out, forget.

. . . .

So much does get lost in the transmission. But I came. On precious
time.

. . . .

I still am a man of few words. I had to learn how to use them from you.
Once upon a time they could hardly understand me. You could. You, wielder of words.
Language welder. Were.

. . . .

There. That should be better. Now's the time to speak. Precious time.
Yours.

M-.

Mmm. I doubt you'd believe it, but I hurried over. Even now, despite
everything, still. You know I've always had an affinity for non-punctuality, all
that messing with time, untimeliness as you used to describe it. Some things can't
be rushed, and yet others can't be postponed. How do you un-time? Slip through its
grasp? I learned from you.

Mmm. . . .

I learned that it's best to keep time itself out of sync. Take its beat,
remake it in your own. Be untimely. The drumbeat always sends a letter to the
future. Say you happened to be the only one to arrive early for a
meeting . . . and a bomb goes off. Wouldn't it have been better to be
late then?

Mmm. . . .

Or the chartered plane that you were to fly to that restive region went
down mysteriously into the river, but if you arrived well in advance and boarded an
earlier flight, you cheated fate, or the person attempting to shape it. All those
other unfortunate people, though.

Mmm. . . .

The hands of fate, I suppose, or fate's handler. Hangman. Honcho. You
know who I mean. All those car crashes, overdoses, bodies found at the bottoms of
drained swimming pools, riverbeds, earthen dams, sudden bathroom electrocutions,
sharp, heavy projectiles flying through windows while people were eating their
morning meals, the staged robberies where the robber always manages to accurately
hit the bull's eye of the heart, kidnappings without ransom notes, bones shattered
into a thousand pieces so that they'll never heal again, disappearances, heads left
in mailboxes, hands and ears and tongues stapled to doors before dawn, such a
remarkable arsenal this particular fate possessed, wouldn't you admit? What I
learned from you: how to glide out of fate's schedule. Un-time oneself.

Mmm.

Mmm. Though before we ever had need to speak of such things I can recall
us sitting facing each other, just like now, what was it, twenty-five years ago?
Just like this, our noses not touching but close enough that we filled each others'
lungs. Do you recall that?

Mmmo. . . .

Sitting like this? Nostrils to nostrils, oily sweat and blood masking
our faces in the sheer black silk of that night, we each could smell the other's
throat exhaling the hours, the years, of endurance, our elation and fear, all
flavored with tobacco and the cheapest palm wine, with every breath. The smell of
death so near too, nearer than the tips of our noses, our lips brushing against each
other, our chests and knees fusing as one, and the smell of life as well,
potentiality, the horizon that we would seize.

Mmmo. . . .

Just like this, in darkness surrounding us like an empty arena, so
dark that even after our eyes had adjusted and we could feel our pulses passing
between us we still had to rely on our other senses to confirm we were still sitting
there. The only sounds the intermittent gunfire, later the mines going off, the
rockets, the ground a rattle beneath our soles, the dirt and grass and plastic we
could not wash off our tongues. There you go.

Much better. . . .

We even kept the radio off because we knew exactly what he would be
saying: I appeal to you, vanguard of our nation's liberation, I appeal to you at
this grave hour.

Grave hour, dire.

We could recite it by heart, with the flourishes and the drumbeats, the
two of us, the emphases and the pauses, I because I had heard it so many times from
his mouth and initially I believed it, as I did you, you because you had written it,
such a way with words, like the griots, the oracles, you and I just like this, the
night so enveloping we had only our senses to ensure we were still sitting
there.

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
NGO
s 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.

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.