My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) (23 page)

Greece was winding down. He stood in the center of the circular theatre at Epidauros with raised arms—hearing the cheering of thousands seated on the stone benches. They loved him. That love became his bridge. It nourished him. Blackface Hermes the clown was happy! Celt CuRoi should see him now! A group of American tourists arrived and jolted him out of his itinerant glory. He then jogged around the place. He
bought a basket of figs from a peasant and drove on. . . . At the walled city of Tiryns, the one Homer wrote about, he met a stone worker who was hiding in the shadow of an archway. Mason squatted with him and chewed the fat. They agreed that there were thirty-three million, three-hundred-and-forty-thousand people in Thailand and eight million, eight-hundred-and-sixty thousand in Ghana. They agreed on many other important points. The guy had stone dust in his woolly red hair. Mason liked his leathery skin and sharp rat-eyes. But agreeable masons and the ruins of walled cities had their limits. . . . As Mason drove toward Corinth he remembered that that old stone cutter back there in Tiryns indeed had connections back in Twenty-five hundred B.C. . . . On the way back to Athens, Blackface Hermes stopped at Sounion. The sky was ice. He climbed a path to the Temple to Poseidon. Vanity. All was vanity. Tourists since way-back-when had chiseled their “glorious” names into the stone foundation of the restored structure. The
insistence
of it! (bringing one's own chisel and mallet up was a bit much)! And wouldn't you know it: Byron too had left a sign of his own desperate arrogance and insecurity. Graffito was a chisel. . . . 

In no time he was back in Athens. The minute after he checked into the King George he was out exploring. At a cafe, workers were singing rebetika songs. A couple of tough young men started dancing. Beer was spilled. Mason finished his Robola and squeezed out just as a table loaded with octopus, macaroni, keftedes, souvlaki, pastitsio, mousaka and fetta was accidentally knocked over. The bartender got his hatchet. . . . At a sidewalk cafe, in shadows, he heard a violent argument: The Greek War of Independence was not over! Yes, yes it was! Ecclesiastical hymns somewhere in the dense background chopped by traffic noise. . . . Mason restlessly moved on.
He became a dolphin in the sea of Greece. What bullshit! Yes—Mason reached out now to the Hellenistic Koine and felt the click of the testament inside his own mouth: one exslave knew another exslave. Stress was right. The Benaki? It was the next morning—and he hadn't understood what'd happened to the night. He got the drift of ancient wealth—before the Akritic cycle. Turk rule. Then in the park he was dazed by a man balancing chairs and bottles in a high fortress on his own head. Nothing toppled. . . . A snatch of conversation: “My cousin in Chicago got the niggers to hassle. We still got the Turks. It's all the same.” His erection woke him—when he didn't even know he was asleep. He opened the anthology. George Seferis: “The stranger and the enemy, we have seen him in the mirror.” Mason wandered the night market around Sofokleous and Klistohenous and Athinas: veal was glossy, so was lamb; whole skinned pigs hung upside-down from iron hooks. Tripe bloomed under glass. Each black olive emitted one glowing cuticle. Plush tomatoes winked their red lights. Dates in brown profusion, soft as plastic wood. Then the dried fish with its salt-covered skin. Crates. Boxes. Cries. Crowds under electric bulbs. While asleep—again—Mason was in great distress. There was no place to sleep. Dream within a dream? He entered a furniture store to buy a bed. Decided to test the mattress on one. It was comfortable. He slept. Then something woke him. He jumped up, greatly alarmed: he'd to get to the party. Everybody was surely already there. He'd probably missed everything. Painted Turtle would be there. He knew if he tried to penetrate her his thing would turn to paper, fold up. It was raining. Where was Athens? Which city was this? . . . He got in his rented car. He had to decide between driving up a washed out dirt road and getting stuck or missing the party.

Word came from Signard in Paris that Africa was all set but Mason wasn't. He was caught in a Nice maze: he'd gone again for guilt-treatments to Doctor Wongo. While enduring the Saint Sabastian Redemption Method his mudfrog had gotten ruptured. It was like this: Mason saw the arrow coming. It was coming for a long, long time. He knew where it would hit. It was the kind of experience seemingly without end that suddenly ended with flash and shock and pain between his eyes. Then Mason found himself chewing on some woman's ear till the cows came home to roost. Life these days was crazy and rough. With some of his Arab friends he went to a party in the foreigners' ghetto, L'Ariane, east of Nice, where pretty sober-looking dudes were into some terrible actions and plots. Lights were blue and low. The music was out of Cairo then Syria then Algeria. Mason loved the strangeness of it, the smell of yellow candles and green incense. Conversation? Not heavy: “ . . . and it's like zat nowadays, I tell you. . . . ” “Z places ’ere ’ave changed! . . . ” This was the night Mason met Habib Imed Maherssi, the gentleman who decided to get all of Mason's books published in Arabic. First, Maherssi would urge a friend of his in Morocco to write a big story about him for the biggest newspaper in the country. Then,
hey
, look out . . . ! Mason was eating dinner with Habib and Hassan and Baraka at a couscous joint in Old Nice when the kitchen blew up. They were lucky. They got out with only their hair, faces and mouths filled with plaster and smoke and ash and dust from the ceiling—which was falling down around them. . . . Then there was the trip to Musee National to see the Chagalls with Chantal and Monique. The guards (according to Chantal) thought Mason was Arab. Mason joked about it: “Should've brought my Arab friends with me . . . ” But Chantal wasn't amused. Mason went away from Chantal here, lost himself in the museum: it became a place of unfolding possibility. Moons and cows and plush pink underwater plants and shimmering fabrics and trembling virginal couples floating near the edge of space turned him around, pulled him under their spell. Put him on an insane spin up through mountain roads of
canvas, down through sea-level pathways of suicide-fears. A mermaid's scaly skin rubbed against his naked arm. Mason stepped up into the canvas and entered the home of an old rabbi. The rabbi's daughter was a plump girl in a flaky strawberry red nightgown with plump virginal breasts and hips. Her bridegroom waited in the doorway, trembling with expectation. “Who are you?” asked the rabbi. “I am Haze, I am.” An alarmed group of monks entered the cottage. They too wanted to know what the hell this
devil
wanted. Why was he here? They threatened to send a messenger to the king if he didn't spill. Moon-eyed cows gazed in through the windows. “I am here,” Mason said, “because I feel a sense of
kinship:
which I suspect you deny.” “He's an impostor!” shouted one of the monks. The others raised voices of agreement. The rabbi's daughter bravely went to Mason's side. She leaned against him. Everyone in the room was horrified. The virgin spoke: “You all know me as Edith. I welcome this stranger to my father's house. He will break bread with us. Are
we
not
all
the children of the same plant shoot, the same husk?” Before they could answer, bells (with an inner echo of water-music) sounded from the nearby cathedral. Shooing the monks out, Edith left Mason and embraced her father, saying, “Time is a river without banks.” It was late when Mason left, a bit dazed from sweet red wine but feeling as energetic as a licensed jester. He flew up into night blackness with its purple doorways dislodged from houses too soggy to stay hinged to the earth. When he tried to hold a bridge down, he discovered the weight of his body wasn't sufficient: it floated up, carrying with it smelly and hazy, gray green pink blue farm animals; and escapees from carousels and classified catalogues. He found himself on the banks of the Seine. The Eiffel Tower had fallen into the river. But this wasn't Nice! A fisherman came along and offered to share a bowl of red fish with him. They sat together, legs dangling over the edge of the embankment, and ate together in silence. Their images were reflected in the gray water. Then suddenly there was Chantal shaking him.
“Hay!”
he said.
“Okay!”
Was he trying to
avoid
Africa? Naw. Leaving Chantal to her own flight, her own
wedding of separate words, he went to be alone: at Bar de la Degustation. Free here in his world of silence, he brooded. White and blue emergency van shot by with the half dead body of yet another old person. Mason's own soul was wrapped so thinly in wax paper he was sorta glad this S.O.S. amities was available. Maybe he'd have one day to thank his lucky moons and the nuns of the infirmiers. A man walked by carrying a crucifixion with a black bird nailed to it. But this whole moment was still some kinda circus: and Mason was diving, diving, diving straight down into a blue
depth
without a net. . . . Well, cheer up, buddy. Life is full of vivid harmony, jagged lines, forebodings, floats and twisted fiddles. Rereading the letter from Signard, Mason drained the last bitter drop of coffee from his cup. So, what the hell, he'd go to Africa! He sat there watching the people go by: Daphnis and Chloe, girls in jeans and red French cowgirl boots and those ones in black stockings and mid-thigh long skirts, boys in too-large punk double-breasted plaid suits, old ladies with humped backs, little blue-clad men carrying shopping bags. Yes, in Africa he'd be able to climb onto the back of a butterfly and fly to larva heaven. Or turn himself into a desert spiny swift and dart across the rock of the universe! or get involved with a revolutionary group and become an international hero. He could
surely
find Tarzan and wipe
him
out for ever; feed him fruit flies and spray his tree-house with the processed blood of a dimetrodon. Africa's insistent sun would include Mason soon, as wind moving along city pavement includes all the shadows and leaves and cigarette butts, as it whips the debris into a haystack between two buildings. He'd be a gray-eyed crow in Africa: He'd keep his wings clean and he'd fly! . . . The day before he left, a manila envelope arrived from Signard. It contained a brief note and a sealed envelope addressed to somebody called Chief Q. Tee. Mason read the note: “Please kindly deliver this when you arrive in Monrovia. Be careful with it: if its contents leak you may find your health in danger. Your tour in Africa is dependent on your carrying this envelope safely to its addressee. Thank you. Have a safe and rewarding trip!”

Had Mason lost something in Ghana? Myth and mystery loomed in the drums, pots, musical instruments, terracotta heads, funeral relics, linguists staffs. Mason looked at a figurine with large eyes, thick nose, wide mouth: in each eye: motion of cow and countdown. A whip-lash little man with a fixed grin, Makola drove Mason through unfocused shanty town: rows of bleak, unpainted huts along the restless coast. Lean women with fat babies on their long hips; others with huge bundles on their heads, grandmothers tending community fires dancing in beds of rock. May winds came in from the Sea of Guinea bringing with them the sea-side smell of garbage. They parked. Went into a hut. This was the home of the poet, Amos Achimota. He was expecting them. Achimota led them outside. The three sat with their backs to the wall, facing the sea. The poet was an old man who began by reminding Professor Kwame Makola that his father and forefathers had been chiefs. Mason's eye was snagged several times by the up-turned tits of some young woman walking by. Usually carrying something on head-top. The poet talked of his meetings with Langston Hughes in the fifties. Was Mason impressed? Was Mason familiar with the works of Awooner, Soyinka, Senghor, Achebe, Ben-Gurion, Camera Laye, Mphahlele, Fanon? Mason lied—said yes. What did Mason think of Ghana? Did he know anything about its history? Well, yes: he
had
read Richard Wright's book:
Black Power
years before. Achimota spoke with gentle fervency. Two soldiers armed to the teeth strolled by giving them the once over. As Achimota spoke of the difficulty Ghanians had had since the fifties and before under colonialism, Mason remembered yesterday—his arrival at battered Kotoka Airport. Place filled with armed soldiers and police. Security check-points every five steps. Shirts and a suit stolen from his luggage before it even reached the baggage pick-up. Boys hassling him for money. Cab drivers—despite Professor Kwame Makola's presence—fighting over his luggage. Pathetic Makola, waving his sensitive hands in gestures of punctuation as he talked, trying to make the airport officials treat Mason as an “official visitor” and getting nowhere . . . and
that so-called security-check just down the road from the airport where his luggage was searched again and where, finally, he and Makola were passed (and Makola saying, “Of course that was
not
an official security check. Outside Accra men often set up road-blocks just to, how do you say, rip off people . . . I hope your opinion of Ghana hasn't set yet. . . . ”) . . . And now Achimota—with yellowed rotten teeth—was laughing as he reminded Makola (with his frozen grin) that he, Makola, had spent nearly two years in prison during the regime of Akuffo. “And just for having certain friends. Hey?” “That's right, Old Man.” And was not the young Rawlings doing the best he could with an impossible situation? “Surely.” Nobody questioned the integrity of the leader of the Provisional National Defense Council. Achimota looked directly at Mason. “Are you a political poet?” Of course. But the question left Mason feeling like somebody was about to throw a ball for him to go and fetch. The old poet was happy with the response then spoke again of Langston Hughes. Hughes, he said, understood how profoundly political the life of an individual in society was. Achimota hadn't met any Afro-American poets since Hughes but considered all of them his brothers. “Welcome home, Brother.” “Thank you.” But did Mason feel at home? How black was Blackface Hermes? The old man suddenly broke open a strange piece of red fruit Mason had never seen before and passed a piece of it to Makola and the other third to Mason. The three men chewed for a few minutes in silence. It was Achimota who spoke first. “I suppose you'll be having dinner with the American ambassador?” Mason shrugged. Said he knew nothing about such a proposal. “Well, it'd be unusual if you didn't.” Achimota spat a couple of seeds into the dust. Two sullen policemen passed before them, followed by a pretty girl carrying a broken basket of rotten potatoes. Mason noticed a big man approaching. He was black. “This man you see,” said Achimota, “is the Ambassador from Nigeria. Be careful what you say. He will not be your friend.” After formalities the big man refocused on Mason. “Why are you in Ghana?” “To lecture on Monday at the University of Legon.” “And your
thesis?” Was this the third degree? The thesis was art. The Nigerian Ambassador did not squat down with them in the polite manner. He said a few hesitant words to Achimota about some meeting of the cultural body then excused himself. Three little girls dressed in white dresses with white ribbons on their hair went by. Mason remembered it was Sunday. Christians? Why had the ambassador been so hostile? Had he, like the airport officials, suspected Mason of being less than straightforward? Perhaps a pusher of seedless sinsemilla or a bringer of dangerous messages? (He did not know what was in that note for Q. Tee—but, well, that was for another country.) Professor Makola stood and their host got the message. He too stood. The three men shook. “Do not judge Ghana too quickly, young man. Your ancestors came from West Africa. . . . ” As Mason and Makola approached the car a loud cracking sound and a scream, a cry, behind them broke across their necks. Whirling around, they saw a cop beating a young man. Even now Makola's smile did not vanish; it changed content though. It said: I trust. And in an urgent effort to distract, Makola asked, “How'd you like France? You know French people think you're stupid if you don't speak French.” Mason chuckled. They got into the old battered car and Makola drove Mason back to the American Club. “Sorry you're staying here. You won't meet
the people
this way. But I guess you have no choice. IHICE, right?” “Right.” Inside, the Housekeeper had a message for Professor Kwame Makola. The American Embassy's Cultural Director, Robert Astor, wanted him and Makola to come to dinner. Mason didn't know how to respond. Makola told him he'd like Astor: “He's a good man.” A nerve-winged insect buzzed around Mason's head. The lobby was cool. “I'll fetch you at four. Curfew, you know. Everything starts early.” A gust of heat came in as Makola left. Mason went to the bar. Americans were watching a variety show video-taped on the screen above the bar. The Ghanaian bartender had the inscrutable face of a chaff sifter in a harvest sacrifice. Mason shifted to the screen. There, Painted Turtle hung from the mouth of an elephant. Then Edith appeared dancing with a snake curled
around her hips. An earwig crawled in beer on the bar. After a couple of shots, Mason's legs turned to spiracles. As he walked to his room, his breathing was a parachute flapping in the wind. What'd that lice-faced sifter
put
in that drink? A maid was making the bed. He went in the toilet and threw up dragonflies and liquified antennas. In what seemed no time at all the maid finished, he slept and woke and Makola was there. They shot a game of intense pool in the rec room before rumbling away to the party. Death bones danced on the roadside. As they arrived in the driveway, a barrage of bullets swept the facade of the house, the cars, the stone steps. Mason and Makola hit the ground. Two other cars came into the driveway. A woman screamed. Mason looked out and up and saw eight or nine fatigue-clad soldiers crouched on the ledge of the front stone wall, aiming their machine-guns at the house next door. The heat of Makola's car poured its oil and gas smells down into Mason's face. The gravel beneath his belly had the pointed sharpness of a bed of nails. His knuckles bled. A jeep came into the driveway. The man next to the driver looked official as the keeper of Solomon's stables at Megiddo. He jutted a grim jaw. He was decorated. “
Halt your fire!”
he shouted to the soldiers on the wall. Risking the loss of his dignity, the official squatted a bit and beckoned to Mason and Makola. “Do come out! All is well!” He chuckled. “My men get carried away.” They crawled out. As Mason and Makola beat dust from their clothes, a white man (Astor?) opened the big door and came onto the grand porch of the mansion, and down the marble stairway. The late afternoon smelled of gunsmoke and spurge blossoms. Mason had the vague feeling he'd reached some magical frontier. The official introduced himself as General somebody. His smile was full of humidity. The white man came and shook hands with the General. They obviously knew each other. He apologized to Astor for the stray bullets. “We have the house next door surrounded. An enemy of the people, this Major Okike! My advice to you, Mister Astor, is: You and your friends stay in your big fine house. It's safe!” Another car arrived. The Africans who'd gotten out of the other two were now walking up
the driveway toward them. The General shook with everybody again then leaped back into his jeep. He went away in a cloud of dust, his helmet bouncing on his big head. . . . The dinner-party got on: Mason was soon cornered, with scotch in hand, by Kalmoni who invited him to dinner “tomorrow night.” Mason mingled: Hourari, a silent young man who'd spent time in the states, gave him a secret handshake: it was more a slash than a thrust. Quickly, this place'd become a dungeon, hewn out of blood-slick walls. As the second round of drinks came, while the novelist, James Aburi, spoke to Mason of his two years as a political prisoner, a new round of gunfire rang out. A torpedo exploded. Janet Bu Karle, a dance teacher, joined Mason and Aburi. “Just remember we're getting there!” Mason laughed with them. Something beneath the nerve-bed and gymnastics of his sound echoed the little screech of the guinea fowl. It was not till one of the grand windows (through which the driveway could be seen) flew apart that Astor and his wife and twelve-year-old daughter quickly ushered Mason and the others down into the impenetrable coldness of their basement. It stank of fine wine and reptile skin. In the narrow passageway, the poet Jomo Danqueah joked: “All this for OAU!” On a dimly lighted wall, in passing, Mason saw this inscription: “This house constructed 1934 by MRF.” What instrument of torture was this journey? Who was Astor—really? And these others? The pellet-like bones in his skin had him now in the grip of a deep chill. At the end of this submerged level, they descended to yet another. Okoto Nsawam, a journalist, was just behind Mason. He tapped Mason's shoulder. “Welcome home, brother!” His cackle was the crunch of a fish-eating gavial.