Interior Design (11 page)

Then the diviner moved among the initiates, murmuring words Barbara couldn't make out. Slowly, the girls began pointing with trembling hands to this itching spot, that one, and Mokla marked the points with a piece of charcoal. When those asymmetrical, elegant patterns were done, Mokla pinched the first girl's skin between thumb and forefinger, slit it, and applied ash to make the wound pucker and darken. None of the girls screamed despite the pain on their faces, the blood dribbling down their sides, and soon Mokla's white gown was stained with red streaks. Without her notebook Barbara had to watch carefully, but it was hard, so hard.

After the ritual, Barbara stayed in their hut for days, dizzy at the thought of that bloodletting. Martin sweetly stayed with her and claimed she had malaria, thanking all the villagers who wished her good health. But she knew her husband was anxious to return to the fields. He wanted to puzzle out a recent mystery: even though the corn crop had suddenly become infested with caterpillars, the elders declared that no one could kill them.

Finally one morning Martin said, “The Isono may not have a word for privacy, but I'll bet before long they'll have one because of us.”

Ashamed of her weakness, she told herself the ritual wasn't mutilation—no, not at all—it was art. In a culture where the women improvised patterns on manioc cakes before baking them, and even children sliced designs into orange rinds, the diviners were the supreme artists. When Barbara finally left the hut, determined to overcome her squeamishness, she began to ask villagers if she could draw their scarred designs.

Now Barbara leans back from the computer and peers out the window, hoping to see Martin. He's left her alone again, off on another errand. Why don't
I
go out? she wonders—It's not as if I'm confined to an Isono compound. Sighing, she rests her hands on the keys, then types, “The scars are maps of the interior: the body is a spirit's abode, and a spirit is a guest each Isono must accommodate.” She glances down at her drawing of one of the designs, can almost see blood flow out from the scarred points.

*

Martin sets the bags of groceries down on the counter. Barbara's sketches of Isono body decorations are everywhere, littering the walls, the refrigerator, the kitchen cabinets—they're even taped up on the backs of the chairs. I suppose I deserve this, he thinks. Pulling cheese and packaged tomatoes from a bag, he wishes that he had the luxury of using his maps of the Isono farm plots. But how could he ever explain to Barbara why he's kept them from her?

She walks in and without a word helps carry bottles of juice to the refrigerator. Martin approaches one of her sketches threateningly. “Where's my pen?” he asks. “I have a sudden urge to play connect-the-dots.”

“C'mon, stop. They're for inspiration,” she says.

“Oh really? Are you thinking about starting up an Isono beauty parlor?” And now he just can't help himself, he searches through a drawer and says, “Let me get the knife sharpener….

Barbara slams shut the refrigerator and leaves the room.

“Hey, only kidding,” he says, shaken, his voice small.

Frustrated that he can't use what he's not supposed to know, Martin pushes pork cutlets into the oven, chops away at vegetables, and then stirs and stirs them in a pan. If only he hadn't lingered behind at the end of that workday, at the edge of the already damaged fields. Because of the sparse rain the corn was barely waist high, the yam vines were just beginning to poke up from the dirt mounds, and everywhere were signs of the caterpillars' hunger. Martin watched one of those voracious creatures efficiently chew a path through a corn leaf. Fascinated, he drew closer, and the caterpillar, at the end of the leaf, reared up briefly. Along its pale underbelly were dark, convoluted patterns, and then Martin finally knew why no Isono would dare touch one.

“You're lucky you were born with those beauty marks, bub,” he whispered. He took out his notebook, listened to the distant cries of a flock of birds, the flutter of corn leaves in the wind—no, it sounded like something was creeping through the stalks. Martin crouched down: maybe this was some foraging animal he should warn the Isono about. He peered in.

Kwamla, hunched down, was crawling along with a sharpened stick. He flicked a caterpillar from a corn leaf and then impaled it against the ground. When he turned to slip the crushed insect into a cloth bag he saw Martin.

Kwamla sat up, the broad green leaves waving in the wind around his shoulders, his face filled with something like terror. “No one must know,” he said, “no one must know.”

Martin almost whispered back, “No one will,” but instead he waited, curious how Kwamla would react to his silence.

A few long moments passed, and then quietly, with a resigned gesture of his hand, Kwamla said, “Come.” He motioned to his fields, to those private, winding paths, and Martin understood this was a gift for his silence.

Martin hesitated, accepted. He took out his notebook and, carefully counting the number of steps he took along each little trail, quickly roughed out the arrangement of crops. But he needed two, maybe three more maps for a decent comparative study. So when he finished his map he stared off at Goli's neighboring farm, turned to Kwamla and said, “No one will know.” Kwamla winced at this echo of his words, then took a few steps into Goli's field, and Martin followed, his shame rising.

“What's that burning?” Barbara shouts from the living room. Martin looks down—the vegetables are scorched in the pan. He hurries the mess over to the sink, leaving a trail of smoke behind him.

They eat what's left of dinner in silence—Barbara must still be annoyed at him for his nasty little joke. By way of apology, knowing she hasn't been out of the apartment for days, he asks, “Hey, you want to catch a movie tonight?”

“No,” she says, barely looking up, “I have to work. I'm in the middle of something right now.” And you're not, he imagines her thinking.

While she washes the dishes he slips out for another of his nightly tours. He walks faster now through the cold air, ranging from street to street, but when he skirts a small lot he stops, surprised to see two bundled figures—a man, a woman—crouching against a fence, beside a shopping cart stuffed with clothes. Why aren't they at the shelter? He imagines a large room, rows and rows of cots: maybe it's not quite cold enough to venture to the common misery, the lack of privacy.

Martin would like to talk to them, even offer some help, but he's also afraid somehow, and he marches off in another direction. Curious to see if he can actually become lost, he wanders down one street after another, through neighborhoods he's never seen, until he approaches a busy bar, a line of motorcycles parked beneath the neon signs advertising different brands of beer. A rough crowd lounges by the door: leather jackets with sewn patches of skulls, sharks, lightning. Interesting iconography, Martin thinks, but such a limited repertoire of acceptable images. He slowly passes by a man with long dark hair framing a pockmarked face: on his leather jacket are pictures of two bloody fists, and there's a tattoo on one of his wrists—the end of a snake's tail, perhaps, or a dragon's.

The man grins at him. “Hey, you staring at me?”

Martin tries to smile back. “No, not at all.”

“The hell you're not.” He flicks out a knife.

Martin runs away from the sudden laughter behind him and turns swiftly down one side-street, then another. But he's not sure if the steps he hears are merely the echoes of his own. Looking back, Martin sees nothing, but it's dark—Who can tell, he thinks, who can tell? He stops short and crouches beside a mailbox, waiting for the sound of pursuing footsteps.

*

Barbara listens to Martin close the door behind him, his faint steps down the stairs—every night now he goes out, sometimes for hours. Why won't he tell her where he's off to, why can't she simply ask him? Maybe she should follow along, take a break and not work so hard. But Barbara hesitates, remembering ruefully the Isono's two phrases for marriage that Yani taught her: the men's phrase, “To offer a road,” and the women's, “To follow behind.”

Yani's soft face had been pinched that day with anxiety over Kwamla. “What can I do?” she said. “He eats almost nothing, he refuses to see a diviner. I know he's being bewitched, because our farm has done so well while others have done so poorly.”

Barbara murmured sympathy—the poor man looked so thin and haunted. Suddenly there arose in a nearby compound the usual angry hubbub of Yao and Sunu, a newly married couple.

Yani clicked her tongue, continued nursing Amwe. “Those two—their scars don't match. The paths of their spirits rarely touch.” Barbara slipped a piece of paper into the typewriter and tapped away while Yani said, “In the best marriages the scarification designs become full during lovemaking, when the scars rub and fit together.” As if ashamed of her words, Yani stopped.

“But you,” she said suddenly, staring hard at Barbara's face, “how can you know your husband if you don't know the movements of his spirit?”

“Good question,” Barbara says now to the empty room. She rubs her back against the chair, imagining an Isono couple making love with those curving ridges of skin: their dark bodies elaborate mazes leading to each other, nipples rubbing against chest scars, fingers following the raised marks, the patterns channels for sweat.

Barbara pushes away from the computer and stands up: after burrowing for so long into their culture, now the Isono are burrowing into her. Her back itches, just beneath her left shoulder blade where she can't reach. She grabs a pen, bends her arm back awkwardly, and rubs until the tingling is satisfied.

There's a slight tickle just below her ribs, and before she scratches that too she imagines a design of ridges tingling her entire body—smooth, hairless nobs of skin hidden beneath her clothes. Why not turn the pen's felt tip around and mark the itch? Barbara laughs nervously, but she pulls up her blouse and draws a nice, dark dot. Another itch rises up, just below her left breast, and she marks that spot with a deft touch of the pen. Then she strips off her blouse and bra and continues a careful catalogue of sudden itches that seem to have no relation to thought or intention.

Barbara stares down at her torso, foolishly inked all over. Beauty marks indeed. The points scattered below her breasts and the wavering line leading across her stomach aren't beautiful at all—merely signs of a lopsided and aimless spirit. What if we returned to the Isono with our bodies speckled with pen marks? We could tell them that in our country initiations are performed after marriage, that we only
draw
our spirits' travels and then chart new paths once the old ones wear off. But Barbara imagines an elder asking, “Why do your spirits change their paths so often—why are they so restless?”

The radiator begins to clank—it's cold outside, and Martin could come home any moment. What would he say if he saw her like this? She pads to the bathroom and takes a shower. Dark inky stains slip down her body like bloody trails, and Barbara shudders. She scrubs and scrubs until it hurts.

*

Martin makes himself sit at his damned desk and tries to rework another sentence: “Isono farms are exclusionary space that admit no strangers. Here, apparently, is where one truly becomes Isono.” He puts down the pen. Kwamla would have felt guilty whether I found him killing those bugs or not, Martin tells himself, and I did keep my promise—I didn't tell anyone, not even my wife. What more could I have done? On his last day in the village Martin spent hours at Kwamla's compound. Sitting beside his friend and trying not to stare at his wasted body, Martin waited for a brief moment when they would be alone. “Please don't die, please,” he'd finally whispered. “I'll never tell anyone.” Stretched out on a palm frond chair, Kwamla merely offered a wan smile, his thin face a mask Martin couldn't read.

He stirs his coffee until it's tepid. Behind him, Barbara clatters away at the computer—all day she's been stuck to the chair. Martin sighs and puts on his heavy coat, though he doesn't want to go out, afraid of where he'll find himself this time. He walks to the door, sure that Barbara is watching him.

“Where are you going?”

His hand grips the doorknob but he doesn't turn around. “Nowhere in particular—just a walk.”

He hears her press the Save button. The computer's contented grunting starts up.

“Please don't go.”

“I'll be back soon.”

“Please don't go.”

Though Martin doesn't reply, he doesn't move either. “Do you want to come along?”

“Why don't you stay and work?”

He turns and strides toward her, anger rising up from who knows where. “Just what makes you think I'm
not
working when I walk?”

Barbara hesitates. “Your desk. When you're gone I don't see any writing being done.”

“It's in
here,”
he says, pointing at his head.

“Oh, very good.” Barbara mimics his gesture and taps at her forehead. “Is this what you'll do at your thesis defense? Think you'll pass?”

“Shut up. Worry about
yourself
. Keep pecking, pecking,
pecking
away!” His rage is a thing that must be shaken loose, and he sweeps stacks of papers from his desk. They scatter on the floor and Martin, so embarrassed, wants to escape the apartment even more. He slams the door behind him.

It's so cold outside—he can't take these walks much longer, and he paces himself as if trying to hurry away from his unfairness to Barbara, breath fanning out and dissipating before him as he huffs down avenues and short alleys. No homeless people out tonight, thank God.

Passing through a neighborhood of single-story boxes he hears the distant blare of a bell, an alarm, perhaps. Martin crosses a main road and follows the noise down a long stretch of small stores to a hat shop at the end of the block. It
is
an alarm—someone tried to break in.