Time of the Locust (22 page)

Red Folder

A
s the water source beneath the surface slowly shrank and the vegetation soured, the locusts began to feel the pull of time . . .

In the early morning, Warden Stotsky arrived at his office and found a red folder on his desk. He knew a red folder meant that a prisoner, either through formal medical examination or random HIV blood check, had contracted something fatal, something that came to claim his wasted life. On the lip of the folder was a white label with the number 02763 printed in small letters.

Stotsky stared at the folder but did not open it. There were no second chances, only existing conditions. Rehabilitation had never been part of the equation. It was not his business to care whether his prisoners lived or died, only how, and the state of mind they came to hold at the end. For how else was he to measure the success of Black Plains—the measure of his own success—long aligned with life inside the prison? It was will against dominion.

He stood up and went to the cabinet that held all of the prisoner files and extracted the one belonging to Horus Thompson. Stotsky read a list of family members: Brenda Thompson (former wife), Manden Thompson (brother), Maria Thompson (deceased mother), Jack Thompson (deceased father). There were no children listed. There was an old police report from the 28th Precinct in New York, that read, “Jack Thompson: 45-year-old black male shot and killed at political rally. 197 Chester Avenue. Harlem. July 21, 1966.”

The report went on for several pages. The inciting event was an escalating protest rally. Police moved in. A riot ensued. Jack Thompson was shot in the fray. There were no suspects, and no one had been arrested. There was an FBI report detail attached to a photograph of Jack Thompson that listed previous residencies, places of employment, locations frequented, speaking engagements. Under “Special Family History,” it read, “Anti-American activities; Jack Thompson (father) affiliation with Communist groups, militant organizations, and inflammatory statements against the government in New York beginning approximately 1945.”

Stotsky turned back to the front of the paper stack and stared at the mug shot of Horus Thompson. The piercing eyes, the whites looking as if made of alabaster, the pupils of the blackest coal, stared back at him. He had graduated from high school. Following that, he went into security work in the employment of the same company for more than ten years. He lived in a small apartment on Hawaii Avenue in Washington, D.C. There was a copy of a property deed that listed his name and Brenda Thompson. He had no prior police record. Not until he kidnapped and killed a retired police officer, Sam Teak.

So there in print was one life in one file. Now Stotsky felt ready to read about the rest of it. He reached for the red folder and opened it. His eyes raked over a medical report and settled on the summary: “Horus Thompson. Age 34. Male. Black.
Diagnosis
: Possible Advanced Multiple Myeloma, cancer of the blood plasma cells. Aggressive stages. Hypercalcemia detected. Abnormal levels of monoclonal (M) proteins found in blood and urine. High levels of beta-2 microglobulin and lower levels of albumin suggest poor prognosis. Possible accumulation of tumor cells beneath the skin.
Location
: Scalp/back of the head. Possible widespread malignancy in the bone marrow.
Suggested test:
Full pathology with bone-marrow aspiration and biopsy to establish extent of malignancy.
Suggested treatments
: Autologous stem-cell transplants and chemotherapy maintenance thereafter.”

Stotsky closed the folder and leaned back in his chair. There would be no medical assistance or treatment, of course. Nor would 02763 be notified of his condition. He was already a dead man. That much had been certain—had been promised—since the day he entered Black Plains. There was no need to punctuate that knowledge with the contents of the red folder, Stotsky decided, as he had done before with other files, other lives. Horus Thompson's death would not sway the institution one way or another. In any case, there would be more Horus Thompsons, millions more.

But the warden sank deeper in his chair, trying to stem a growing agitation. Because to admit that he was troubled by Horus Thompson's medical report, that it bothered him that death could enable him to escape before he was finished with him, was a disconcerting sensation. He looked around his elegant office and wondered what he was really doing. He was not collecting debts to God, the devil, or society. He was only keeping inventory of the dying and the dead. He was merely the ferryman, trapped on an enormous barge of cement and monitors and steel and fear, floating without end from one current to the next. Each folder in his filing cabinet held a story, each inmate with different beginnings, variant middles, but all with the same end. Sometimes he thought about the finality of this and wondered if he, too, was lost, adrift on the raft. A pain streaked the warden's chest as he stared at the red folder on his desk. And that familiar nameless quandary showed its face to him, as it always did on such occasions as this, when he looked from the windows of his castle and cursed the rule of time.

Strangers

S
ephiri felt as if he hadn't been to the Obsidians, the great black rocks that rose from the ocean, for a long time, and he was distressed by the fact that the route was no longer clear in his mind. How could he lose his way there? And he wondered how it was that he could remember how many seconds it took for the swishing sound in the toilet to stop after flushing or the symbols on the license plates of cars but not this. He was stricken by a panic that he might never see the dolphin or the Great Octopus again. There would be no one to answer his questions. In his usual way (screaming, kicking, biting, flailing, silence), he tried to tell the Air people about his concerns, but they did not understand. They put him in that different room, with the different ceiling and floor and things inside. They changed his space—changed his position on the planet—so that he could no longer remember the exact route to his friends, his world. And if that were possible, then wasn't everything in danger of disappearing? The sanctity of the medicine cabinet, the precision of time, even himself?

All of this plunged Sephiri into a great depression, and sleep lay upon his chest like a heavy stone from under which he could not rise. He thought he heard his mother's voice, that familiar sound in his ears as he lay in a haze of grief for his lost room, his lost place, his lost way, but he could no longer be sure. He lost track of time in the long, drowsy stupors that came one after the other.

Sephiri even lost his boat for a time. He wandered the shore looking for it, until fatigue caused him to sit down, and he fell asleep near a sea turtle's egg nest burrowed in the sand. The eggs hatched and crawled into the crashing waves as he slept. Some survived to meet their destinies. Others were picked off by waiting gulls and folded back into the cycle of birth and destruction. He awoke to find the boat washed up on the shore and was filled with relief. It was just as he'd left it. It had not suffered some happening on the high seas, as he'd feared. And it was a great balm to Sephiri to know that the boat, at least, would never leave him. That even if he were never to find the Obsidians again, the boat, at least, would hold him safe. The World of Water, his world, had righted the axis again.

He longed for the iridescent coral reef, the serenades of the whales, the bright scope of the anglerfish that escorted him through the black water of the deep. He got into the boat and sailed aimlessly out on the surface, looking. But he could find nothing. Worst of all, out there in the lonely expanse, he missed the cheer of his friend the dolphin, who never allowed him to drift into unhappiness. Where could he be? His friend was gone, and he had the sinking feeling that the other inhabitants of the World of Water were somehow gone, since even as he floated in their life force, he could not find a single sign of them. He looked up at the lonely sun. It looked back at him with indifference, with inconsequence, like the beings of Air who were deaf to his language, lost to its meaning.

Meaning and messages. Sephiri wondered what of these the locusts brought. Those mysterious beings that somehow found the way across the two worlds to visit his dreams. He thought of how they swarmed about his head and on the pages of his drawings, their amber bellies glowing in the darkness of incredible landscapes. Where were those places? Sephiri looked over the water, bleak in its everlasting flatness, not a sign of the Obsidians as far as his eyes could see. And he despaired at the thought of never knowing what happened to his world, as he had never known about so many other things. Bitter tears ran down his face.

Sephiri looked over the side of the boat into the water. He saw his shifting face reflected and wondered if it would be better to be absent—not there—like the empty side of his mother's closet. And a longing to be free of the two disconnected worlds grew inside of him. In the Land of Air, he was merely a visitor who could neither speak the language nor understand the customs. In the World of Water, down in the deep, he had neither gills nor buoyancy enough to stay. He slid down into the lap of the boat and cradled his knees to his chest, listening to the tired thump of his heart. The soft slosh of the water against the sides accompanied his whimpers. He sank further still and settled on the bottom, his body pressed against the warm, splintered wood. The cloudless sky lay over him like a billowing sheet, thin and silent.

He felt an urge to cry out to his mother. Could she hear him? More disturbing was the fear that there could be no comfort between them, even if his sorrow could reach through dimension to her. There had never been a common language between them. In those seconds of exhaustion when she clutched him in the coat closet, when he rose and fell with the heaves of her chest and listened to her sob, there was no way to tell her that he did not want her to cry, that it was OK. And she possessed no language to allay his fears. Not like the dolphin or the Great Octopus. Not like the order of the medicine cabinet or the perfection of the grandfather clock. Sephiri looked up at the boundless sky. He had lost the way to the Obsidians. He couldn't find his way back to the shore.

He drifted into whatever stasis exists beyond sleep but before death. Then he awoke to the sound of waves. At once, he was aware that he had been drifting for a very long time, but something felt different. His eyes were crusted over with dried tears and the salt air. Slowly, he opened them.

The sun burned behind a huge white cloud. He sat up and looked around. The little boat that carried him was now beached on the shore. But he did not recognize this one. It was not like the other shore from which he had disembarked so many times before. The sand was not tan but white. There was no trace of the sea turtle nests or the geometric patterns of the sand crabs. But now, incredibly, there was a man standing in the shallow water near the boat. He was tall and lanky. His eyebrows, his lashes, and the tufts of his hair were caked in salt. His dark skin was ashen and hung over his frame as if on a hanger. He wore thin gray clothing that was torn about his arms and ankles. But his eyes were clear and sad and kind. Sephiri stared in confusion and disbelief. What world did this man come from? He was mesmerized but not frightened. And he stared as the man waded toward him in the shallow water, climbed into the boat, and sat down without a word.

The tide came in as if it had been ordered to do so, and the two of them floated out to sea. They sailed in silence for a long time, neither of them saying anything. The man did not look at him and stared out over the water. And when the sun (which never set but moved only across the sky) had repositioned, it began.

“How did you get here?” Sephiri asked.

In the wake of the child's voice, the man thought that there was something familiar about it, like a song heard somewhere before, but he could not identify it with any certainty. “I don't know,” said the man, not taking his eyes off the water. His head, to his surprise and relief, had stopped throbbing. “I followed the light, and here I am.”

Sephiri was shocked that the man could understand him. But he was more shocked at the mention of the light. He thought of the light he knew from the coat closet. “You know about that too?”

“Yes,” said the man, dipping his hand over the side into the water and letting it run through his fingers. He did this over and over. Intermittently, he stopped to look at the sky, then went back to dipping into the water. At last, the man turned and looked at Sephiri. “Yes,” he said again.

Sephiri was thinking that there was something familiar about the man's face. He thought he looked like the man in that picture he'd found in the duct vent. Maybe he had come from the picture world, wherever that was. “In the other world, I saw the light in the coat closet. I tried to follow it, but I got tired. I got lost in the dark.”

The man looked deeper into the boy's face and thought that something was recognizable about it but did not know what it was. “Me too,” he said. “But I kept coming. Now I'm here.”

Sephiri wondered if this man could help him find his way to the Obsidians.

They floated on.

“Do you know about the Obsidians, the three great black mountains in the ocean?” asked Sephiri.

The man shook his head.

Sephiri was disappointed. “Well, my friends are there. It's a wonderful place. I looked and looked, but I can't find them anymore.” And he was newly pained by the possibility that the creatures of the deep and the lair at the bottom of the ocean had somehow vanished. He thought of all the lovely afternoons floating on his back with the dolphin and fought back tears.

After a while, the man said, “Sometimes we lose things we can never get back, and sometimes we find something that we didn't know was there.” The man smiled.

Sephiri shook his head as he stared at the man's smiling mouth, the grayish teeth. “I don't like this place anymore,” he said, his stomach knotting. He looked out at the water. “This was my world. But now there's nothing here.” Sephiri looked back at the man. “Where do you come from?”

“I come from a place where everything is gone,” said the man.

Sephiri warmed to him a little. “Really?”

“Yes. Everything is gone. Color is gone. Light and dark are gone, at different times, but one or the other is always gone. Everyone I loved and hated is gone. The past is gone. The future too.”

Sephiri tried to imagine such a place. In the Land of Air, there was the problem of too much being there.

“Is there anyone you love in the place where you come from?” asked the man, thinking of diamond-encrusted skies and a woman who was chiseled into sculpture. In his mind, he could see her face, the licorice locks that framed doe eyes, the dark berry lips. But he could not remember her name.

“What do you mean?” asked the boy.

“Is there anyone you love there? Anyone who loves you back?” He looked into the boy's tender face.

Sephiri was not sure what that meant. Love. Maybe it was the order of the medicine cabinet, the way the long words on the boxes never changed. He looked out at the empty water and wondered if missing something was love. Sephiri looked at the man, confounded.

The man's mind was a swirl, and some thoughts were vanishing forever, and others were surfacing to stay. He thought of the Mummy who would not go back through the Catacombs.
We ain't going nowhere but in the dirt
. He looked at the moving sea. “You can always go back, you know,” said the man.

Sephiri balked at the idea of going back without finding the Obsidians again. He didn't want to feel as if he was giving up on his friends. But he was not sure if floating around looking for them was better.

The boy and the man sailed on silently.

At length, the man leaned back in the boat. “I've seen and learned a lot of things in the place I was before. And now that I'm here, I know that things can be different. You have to choose the world you want before you can live in it, don't you think?” He looked up at the bright sun.

“I guess so,” said Sephiri.

“Maybe we can get back to the shore,” said the man.

“I don't know the way anymore,” said Sephiri.

“Well, how did you do it before?”

“Do what?”

“When you came out here and went to the Obsidians place, how did you get back?”

Sephiri had never really thought about how he got back to the shore. Or out to the three great black rocks. He just knew the way out to sea, to his friends, and he knew the way back. But just before he did go back, there always seemed to be something from the other world that interrupted him or called him or . . . something. Now everything was quiet.

“I don't want to talk about that right now,” said Sephiri. “Tell me about where you were before this place.”

Thinking of the cell, the man did not want to answer. He did not want to revisit, even for a moment, that place where he once was. That place that wanted to put him to death. There were so many other important things to remember, now that he was free to do so. Now that he had put away the rest. “There's nothing more to say about that other place. But I'll tell you about something else.”

Sephiri listened with great interest. “Yeah?”

“Sure,” said the man. “When I was walking and walking through the path to get here, it was the first time I actually believed that I could see my way through.”

Sephiri thought about the distant light he saw in the long, meandering passages of the coat closet. He had tried so hard to make it to the light. “I was in a dark place like that. There was this light, and I tried to get to it, but I was too tired.”

The man nodded. “I know how you feel. The longer I traveled, the farther away the light was. But after a long, long time, after I couldn't feel my legs hurt or my head pound anymore, I thought only of reaching the light and making my way out of the dark. That's what drove me here. You might have made it, if you had kept going.”

The boy thought about that. This was his greatest fear. Being lost and not finding his way forward or back. When something was moved, like his things in his cubby box in the playroom, like any of the toys beside his bed, or like the room itself as they had done at the center, he felt his path was threatened.

The man sat up and looked closer at the child's face. As he looked into the boy's eyes, something in them spoke to him of a long-ago time. “Do you like marbles?” the man asked suddenly. The question came to him as if he had waited all his life to ask it.

Sephiri was surprised that the man was familiar with such a thing. He thought about the bag of marbles that the man who sat on the dangerous couch had given him. They were a wonder, and he enjoyed them very much. Each a perfect sphere of glass. Each encased with some smidgen of colorful magic in the center. He lined them neatly down the center of the upstairs hallway, then lined them up along his windowsill over and over. In the evening, when they were lit with the last of the day's bluish light, they looked like stars. “I do like marbles,” Sephiri said. “I like to line them up on the windowsill when the sky starts to get dark. They look just like the faraway balls in the sky.”