Time of the Locust (5 page)

There were many things he did not understand. And it seemed as if the things he was most certain of had no place in Air. Once when he was urinating (this time into the toilet bowl), he had looked through the small window that was set in the wall above the toilet and out into the driveway of one of the neighbors. This way of observance did not disturb him, since peering through a glass window was the same as looking through the windows of the castle in his snow globe, only the objects were bigger, and he could see them better. A blue car pulled up and stopped. A woman got out, talking and talking, and there was that smile on her face.

Sephiri heard the engine turn off and watched the man come around the side of the car. He let out a bellowing laugh before he opened the rear door. He was fiddling in the backseat with something, and then Sephiri watched him lift out a small child. They'd all broken out into something that sounded like what he had learned the Air people called a song, and even the child—who must have been a boy, because he was wearing pants—seemed to follow along. How did that boy know what the words were? The beat and time that went with the words? How did he know the up-and-down sounds of the melody? Sephiri listened to them make the sounds together in the driveway. Then he watched the three of them disappear inside their house. Into a place behind a door that he knew nothing about. What world was it that they were going to? What worlds were there beyond this one and the Obsidians? He didn't know.

So it was the mysterious nature of things that enticed Sephiri to get up and walk deeper into the soundless sightless jungle of black, into the place of darkness with the faraway sliver of light that lived in the coat closet. The dark path seemed to lengthen with every step, but the remote shaft of light beckoned him. He had come too far to give up now. His fear had long since dissipated, and he was curious about what he would find. But as the hours passed, Sephiri's legs grew tired. He began to long for the ease with which he could move under the sea, how he could float effortlessly, how he could glide through the water to get where he wanted. Here, it was as if the farther he walked, the farther away the sliver of light seemed to be.

Fatigue washed over Sephiri, and his eyes drooped. He grew impatient with the endless, unchanging plain of darkness and the slice of light that wasn't getting any nearer. His legs were rubbery with exhaustion, and he felt he couldn't go any farther. “I'll just have a rest here,” he said to himself, sitting down on the field of black. His eyes were heavy, but he could still see the thin line of light far beyond the miles of nothingness. His feet were aching, and he was yawning deeply. And just before he drifted off, he thought he heard that same voice from before. But in his drowsiness, he couldn't tell if it was from the blade of light or inside his head. “I'm coming,” he mumbled, and fell fast asleep.

Meetings

B
renda stood outside the brick-faced Takoma Park Autism Center, shivering in the morning mist. Sephiri was at her feet, staring at what must have been something embedded in the concrete of the sidewalk. She had been anxious about the meeting with the speech pathology doctors all week, and now her stomach was turning. She took the morning off and cleared her schedule. Longtime coworkers knew of her situation and remained condescendingly silent. They knew her husband killed a retired police officer, that he went to prison, that she was raising a challenged child alone. She now regretted telling Manden that she would meet him at the entrance of the center. She did not like being in front of the brick façade, on display, feeling the eyes of people in cars passing by. Still, she had wanted to avoid the chance that Manden might see her waddling down the platform or struggling up a broken escalator if the elevator was out of service. It was an irrational fear, but she indulged it nonetheless. She also hated standing on empty subway platforms, on crowded elevators, at the entrances of places. She could have easily taken the Metro from the Petworth subway stop just a block away from her house and saved the trouble of time and gas, but she chose to sit in traffic instead. Besides, she was uncomfortable in crowds, in the gumbo of eyes and snickers at her weight.

Or else, she was invisible. No one bothered to open doors for her when she was walking right behind them. No one offered a friendly smile when they met her eyes on the street. They saw, she reasoned, the largeness that framed her. They did not see her. She knew that she was not the only overweight person in the world, but standing alone sometimes made her feel as if she was. Her weight, which had moved in and taken over everything about who she used to be, seemed a thing from which there was no escape. It was a structure she had somehow helped to build in order to house pains she never knew she could have, to press against what was no longer solid ground beneath her feet. Sometimes she felt the weight itself to be a presence, a living barrier to the person she was before, to the person she could have been. Like when she filled the tub and sprinkled talcum powder and bubble bath into the water to hide her body from view, to make sure that the other self she had lost touch with would not rise from the water. Her body had become like a map spread and tacked to a wall. Stretch marks were stenciled in long, meandering lines across her belly, around her ass, along the rolls and folds of her abdomen. Veins swelled to the surface and collapsed back into her tissue. Cellulite and fluid retention made bumps and dunes and mounds around her rotund legs. Her body had become an off-road tract of land, a wilderness where weeds and thorns grew of their own accord, strangling and suffocating it.

Her other self—the self of before—was down there still, beneath the valley of arum lilies, beneath the Outeniqua Mountains and all things still beautiful, a corpse that refused to decompose in spite of the bulwarking weight, her voluntary and involuntary efforts to make it disappear. How had she gotten so far away from herself? She wondered where the person she used to be was. The other Brenda had been eclipsed by her husband's prison sentence, by the enormous block of frosted glass in which her boy was encased.

Not that there hadn't been other things that had draped Brenda's life before. Marriage had been important in her parents' house, for instance. Her mother and father migrated from South Carolina when they were barely out of their teens. For them, the cycle was simple. Marry, start a family, and get old. She was expected to do the same and was told so every Sunday sermon at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in one way or another, sitting alongside her parents. She would watch the ritual of the women serving the men meals at the fish fry in the reception hall afterward and how the men stood up when one of the church “mothers” took her seat at the table, how they looked to their wives before joining in conversations. Like the other women, her mother asked her father how many pieces of whiting or catfish he wanted and whether he would rather have the greens or the potato salad. She'd watched her mother maintain her status of wife for years. Her father did the same as husband. He went to work every day. He was home for dinner. He read the newspaper every morning. He bought his daughter new shoes, his wife new silk stockings. They were married nearly forty years. Whether they were happy together remained a mystery to Brenda long after both of them were gone. What remained was how Brenda found out that she was not her father's daughter.

Her “real father,” as it was gleefully explained to Brenda when she was ten years old by her visiting cousin Pam (in Washington, D.C., for the summer from Saluda, South Carolina), was not the genteel man in the living room. The visit was the first time Brenda met any of her cousins. On their very first day of play, Pam (wearing one of the three raggedy dresses she'd brought with her on the bus) pulled the head from Brenda's favorite doll. A fight ensued, ending with Brenda getting the upper hand. That was when she was told about the “railroad man” who was her “true daddy.” He had left shortly after her mother “got in trouble,” Pam said, sneering. Her father (stepfather), who had been itching to get away from the cotton fields and pine mills, the Klan, and the South, volunteered that he was the father. They married and moved to Washington, D.C. “So don't go actin' like you better than me, just 'cause you got a nice room and a closet full of pretty clothes,” cousin Pam said, blotting the blood where Brenda had scratched her arm. “He ain't your daddy no way. I heard my mama say so.”

What Brenda felt about that bit of news (which she never confirmed or disproved with her mother or anyone else) floated in the back of her mind that whole summer. At the ice cream truck that often stopped in front of their rowhouse, she heard children taunting others, calling them hurtful names. One of the highest insults was to be ridiculed for having an “Uncle Daddy,” a come-around-sometimes man who wasn't your real father, who maybe brought some beer for your mother and candy for you. Silently, Brenda tried to understand how that sort of classification applied to her status. Standing near the window, fanning her face, her mother often made it clear to Brenda, smoothing out her neat hair bun with one hand, that not having an Uncle Daddy meant that she was being raised in a good family. “They livin' different from us. Be thankful you don't have to worry about it, Brenda,” she would say.

And Brenda would try to make what her mother said stand next to her cousin's words. She tried to keep the shadowy image of the “railroad man” from bleeding into the clear image of her father cutting her meat into chewable squares for her at the dinner table every night. She tried to understand and appreciate the family she had. Unable to reconcile the truth (rumor?), she began to look only at the surface of everything. Her father was the father she knew, the one who sprayed away the pigeon shit from the front stoop with a hose every Saturday morning and bought her new shoes every three months. Her mother hadn't lied, Brenda reasoned. Rather, she had made for her an alternative truth, filled with the regularity of oatmeal every morning, bleached dress slips and little patent leather purses, school and summer vacation, Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve. Her parents were the people who made up her family, those she loved and who loved her. And this family was a portrait in her mind in juxtaposition to what cousin Pam unearthed. Every day since getting that bit of news (hearsay?), Brenda worked the portrait over, keeping it pristine, dabbing out free radical thoughts, dusting away confusion, keeping it clear of the stains of doubt.

That was when Brenda got into the business, the habit, of fixing things. She kept the house immaculate without her mother ever having to remind her to do her chores. Every stray dog or kitten had to be saved from destruction and carried to the animal shelter. She never tired of tending, of seeing that things were in place. The lie her mother might have bonded to her since the beginning could be shined to the high gloss of a perfect daughter, Brenda reasoned. She'd gone on from Dunbar High School to start a career in nursing, but this had been supplanted by a scholarship to the University of the District of Columbia (UDC). She majored in sociology and landed a job at the Department of Agriculture handling food nutrition warnings and initiatives.

She knew more about bovine health than her own. She knew of hoof-and-mouth disease, of avian influenza, of soybean rust. There were monthly and quarterly reports. There were Government Accounting Office briefings. There were irregularities and loose ends to be addressed in pending legislation. There were mixers at pubs on Pennsylvania Avenue and the modified schedules for motorcades. There was the D.C. when Congress was in session and the D.C. when it was not. Brenda thrived on the back-and-forth of it all, on the illusion of problem solving, the ease of question-and-answer. She fixed and could keep on fixing. Years later, when she sat through her father's eulogy wondering if he had really been her father, she was stricken by the fact that if Pam's lie was true, it would not change anything about the tears in her eyes or the bitterness of looking into his empty chair. And on the day her mother had the stroke that killed her, Brenda felt a sharp and brief regret that she had never asked her mother about the validity of the railroad man.

So it had been the eternal contradiction of things in Brenda's world that allowed the drift to begin. There were boyfriends, men in her life before Horus, who seemed to enjoy watching her conform to their wants and expectations as they would a chameleon. Never their needs. Those were addressed, Brenda assumed, by someone else, someplace else. With the meatpacking-industry lobbyist, she was the perfect secretary with sleeping privileges. The sanitation department supervisor wanted her to be his mother, whom he had never met since she died in his infancy but of whom he had an image and looked to Brenda to shape-shift into the ideal woman he imagined her to be, pleasant and available. There was the freelance architect who was out of work most of the time. He wanted a wonder woman capable of everything imaginable, including sex at two o'clock in the morning on a work night. Marriage, Brenda discovered, was not on any of their minds. All of that had been when she was a size seven.

Then there was Horus. She saw him going into the Martin Luther King Library at the same time every day when she drove by on her way to work. She could set her clock by him entering the building. She often saw him at a local deli during the lunch hour in his security guard uniform. There was a constancy, a kind of steadiness, about him. He was handsome, and his face held a contemplative look that was neither smile nor scowl. He had a quiet about him, a solitude that reminded Brenda of the father she knew, when he was still in his chair reading or thinking late into Sunday afternoon. One day, Brenda sat down on the stool next to Horus at the long diner counter. He asked her if the roast beef sandwiches were any good. That was their casual start.

They spent a lot of time together: free concerts on the Mall, jazz sessions at Blues Alley, performances at the Kennedy Center, food festivals and museums, trips to the ocean. She told him about her unremarkable upbringing (omitting the part about the railroad man), her stint at UDC, her job at the Department of Agriculture. Horus briefly told her about his family, his face holding an expression she had never seen before, an expression she would learn to recognize later. But he had been warm enough and seemed to bask in her company. He did not balk when she spoke of marriage and family. “Beautiful mysteries,” he'd said.

In Horus, Brenda saw pliability, a malleable shape from which she could fashion the life they would live together. Or, rather, she took his quiet, his amicability, as an invitation to define and shape him into Horus her husband. Horus the father of her children. Not necessarily Horus the man. In spite of all of Brenda's renovation efforts with him, Horus still seemed to need . . . something. It seemed that the rowhouse they had refurbished, the patio garden, the home-cooked meals, the weekend trips, and all the rest of it only filled the corner of something larger that was missing. She spent the years of their marriage trying to uncover what it was, to repair whatever it was, as she had the family portrait of the past in her mind. All to fashion what she wanted her own family to be.

Years later, from the gray felt panels of her USDA cubicle, Brenda would come to understand that everything she did had been in an effort to repair a kind of cosmic cycle started somewhere in the hot, thick woods of Saluda, South Carolina. After Horus was incarcerated, she developed a gradation system, a sort of clock to delineate periods of her life. Sizes eight and nine were the shell-shocked years, when she was operating on autopilot. The job. Day care. Coffee special of the day. Book club selection of the month. Food to quiet the growing silence of the house, to snuff the fog of uncertain days ahead. When Sephiri was diagnosed with autism, she had been a size ten. Sizes eleven, twelve, and thirteen were the contemplative years, when everything seemed to be in slow motion, and she wondered where she was going, the meaning of where she had been. Size fourteen was a fork in the road, where there were two signs:
What are you going to do?
and
Why are you doing what you're doing?
She grew in size from there, in the haze of everything that already happened and continued to unfold, and she could no longer tell which road she was traveling. She couldn't understand where the beginning of it all had been.

The sound of Sephiri shrieking jarred Brenda from her thoughts. A steady flow of cars rolled by, the last of morning rush hour. She looked down to find him staring at something invisible. What were the things he saw? What was it that captivated him so? She had never known and would never have the benefit of him telling her. She watched him stare more intently, his face descending closer and closer to the concrete, until his nose was almost touching it. An old woman walking her toy poodle across the street stopped to stare, then went on, shaking her head. Brenda reached down and took Sephiri by the hand. He snatched it away. She grabbed at it again. He snatched. This was all part of what was called “Sephiri's autism.” Her son's special blend of a mysterious disorder that spanned the galaxy in causes, symptoms, and treatments, with no one being able to put a finger on what the affliction actually was. Autism choked the air she and Sephiri breathed. A substance that loomed always in the sky.