Time of the Locust (6 page)

And every time Brenda saw a smiling child, she ached to see a smile on Sephiri's face. Not once had it happened. He had been a fussy baby. And as he grew, his face had held three expressions since infancy: rage, agitation, and indifference. She thought of how she had tickled him so many times, desperate to see some flicker of joy, some sign that there was still good in her life. The little smile that said,
I am the reason for all that you endure.
Because if she could just see that smile, that thing that said he was happy, that he loved her back in spite of everything that happened before he was born, in thanks for everything she was trying to provide for him, she felt she could live with it all.

Brenda read all that she could about autism. There was an array of medications, antipsychotics that worked to some degree or made matters worse: Adderall, Dexedrine, Ritalin, Zoloft, Strattera, Metadate, Focalin, Mellaril, Haldol. There were the treatment therapies: speech and language, cognitive and behavioral, visual schedules, live and stem cells, picture exchange and sign language, applied behavior analysis, sensory integration. Under the direction of Sephiri's pediatrician, one combination or another had been tried, with results ranging from ineffectual to disastrous. There were the nutritional therapies. The quest to be gluten- or casein-free. Sephiri wanted only peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and would eat only a handful of other things, which made food therapy nearly impossible. There was the controversy of medical marijuana. There was the hope of pancreatic enzymes, probiotics, DHA oil, vitamin B-12, flowers of sulfur, intramuscular or intravenous magnesium.

There were the suggestions to remove all stimulants from the living space. But that was nearly impossible when anything around Sephiri could be a stimulant at any time and for any reason. The sound of the blender could set him off. Or he grew upset when the washing machine stopped. A light was too bright, or a bulb had blown out. So much to think about. She could never think of everything, and she could not prepare for anything. He drew on the wall with the permanent marker she thought she had locked away. He pulled out the kitchen trash and arranged it on the table and countertops in little piles. He cracked the window with a mug and again with a hammer he somehow found. He chewed and swallowed pieces of plastic. He relieved himself on blankets and rugs. He screamed and shrieked about things she couldn't see or perceive, and he stared at minutiae for hours on end. How could all the stimulants be removed? How could life be removed?

Brenda was sure of one thing: frustration and fear and the long road ahead. She wanted her little boy, wherever he was inside of the impenetrable thing that held him. She thought of the years of groping through the dark to find him. On the many days she had listened to him scream and bang the wall, she wondered what would become of them. What would become of the lost boy and his mother? Or was she the one who was lost, afraid to behold the tangled forest in which her boy lived?

Now Sephiri stood up and was flailing his arms, gesticulating wildly. Brenda had thought about putting him on the van this morning, instead of bringing him herself and risk driving the whole way with him fussing from the backseat. But she decided against it after the scare she had that morning. She had gone into his room to wake him, only to find an empty bed with a large wet spot. She looked everywhere for him. At first, she thought he had launched into some kind of game filled with mysterious, impossible rules again. Like that time when he climbed up on the kitchen table and held his breath. She went through the list of locks in her mind: gas switch, cabinets, back door, front door, windows, medicine cabinet.

At the height of her panic, she thought he'd gotten outside somehow, and she went out into the yard to look in the bushes. She checked the car and under it and came back through the front door in tears, huffing and puffing. That was when it occurred to her to check the one place she had forgotten about: the coat closet. When she opened the door, there Sephiri was, snoring richly. She was too relieved to be angry with him, as was most often the case. When he discovered that she had picked him up from the floor, she had a time getting him out of the closet. He squirmed against the back wall. In his combustive state, he kicked her in the shin and scratched her arm. He let out a scream that might have shattered glass. Who knew what motivated such fury in Sephiri over the simplest of things? She couldn't ask him, and he could not explain the reasons for his distress. In the end, she carried him upstairs in her arms, with his limbs cutting the air like a helicopter. Somehow she got through the rest of the morning routine, with her shin sore, her back killing her, and a migraine pulverizing her head.

Now, as Brenda struggled in front of the Autism Center to keep Sephiri from wiggling away from her, she regretted her decision to bring him along instead of just putting him on the van. The boy snatched his hand away from her firm grip over and over, and she worried that he would run out into the street. He began spinning in circles up and down the sidewalk. She watched him nervously, calling his name to no avail.

From the corner of her eye, Brenda saw Manden walking toward them from across the street. In those first few seconds, the sight of him startled her; he looked so much like Horus. The piercing eyes with bold eyebrows above them. The prominent jaw and broad nose. The dark lips. Whenever she saw him, she was seized by a panic that was like being plunged into freezing-cold water. Horus and his brother were both quite tall, but Manden walked with a slump that made him appear shorter than he actually was. That crooked walk of his. Even when he was sitting in a straight-backed chair with arm rests, he leaned to one side. The imbalance made his long limbs seem clipped or somehow cropped by childhood polio. It was as if his body was always on guard, bracing for something terrible so it could duck down quickly to avoid impact. His head was completely clean-shaven now, which surprised her. The thick black carpet atop his head, so much like his brother's, was gone. Time had cut only a few fine lines into his face. Except for the hair, Manden still looked the same, with his strange handsome-sad demeanor and the lean-to way he moved. They'd had dinner together once, the three of them, an engagement dinner filled with long stares between him and Horus and silence. It was as if walls rose from the ground between them, and they preferred the shadows. She had tried to bring cheer and conversation but felt as if she was talking to herself.

Brenda watched Manden wait for a break in the moving cars so he could cross the street to join her. When Dr. Watson called to tell her about Sephiri, it had taken Brenda all the next day to gather her strength to phone Manden and arrange the meeting on Sephiri's behalf. She had decided before calling that she would ask him only once; she would not press the issue and ring the bell of truth, which was that he did not have to accompany her on business regarding Sephiri. He was not obligated. Like that time when she needed to tell someone about the baby that terrible week when the verdict changed everything. She needed to proclaim Sephiri's existence, but she did not have the courage, the heart, to tell Horus. She thought about ending the pregnancy but could not get past the feeling that in doing so, she would be helping the court to kill Horus. She could not commit two murders. She held her belly, knowing that the child would never know his father. Horus would be a shapeless specter, as the railroad man had been to her. Unable to control her grief, she had reached out to the only person left in the world who might have known something of who Horus was, the man he might have been. She phoned Manden in a fit of tears. She phoned him to say that she did not know what to say.

And now, with Manden approaching the entrance of the Autism Center, Brenda was again at a loss for words. As she watched him come closer, she saw the face of Horus, the face of Sephiri as he might look when he grew up. It reminded her of why she burned all the photo albums, pictures of her and Horus when they were different people among the living. What little that was left now was crowded with the heaviness of what remained unspoken between brothers, of the helplessness in helping Sephiri, of the silence that banged and clanged them deaf. Now she and Manden could only approach each other with ice picks lodged in their hearts. They pulled them out in moments of necessity, to chip at the cracks in a strange relationship, until they were wide enough for matters to squeeze through. Like at meetings such as this, when an odd alliance stood to save the last trace of Horus Thompson.

Marbles

M
anden emerged from the subway stop, three times farther away than necessary for his destination, and began the eight-block walk to the Autism Center. He checked his pocket again to make sure that what he brought for Sephiri was still there. His fingers moved over the smooth glass balls. Real marbles, real toys from a time when his own childhood had been real. He was not sure why he purchased them for the boy, since he could not know what impression they would make on him, if any. But he needed him to have the marbles, for the childhood he might have beneath whatever kept him from interacting with the world, for the childhood he and his brother, Horus, might have had.

As he walked away from the subway, Manden saw a young couple approaching the entrance, clutching a map, looking lost. They were speaking something that sounded Slavic. He half expected them to ask him directions to someplace, which he did not feel like offering. As they approached, the young woman looked at him hopefully, but the young man looked nervous. He took her by the hand, and both moved by quickly. It was then that Manden remembered that he was not wearing his Metro subway employee uniform, the costume, among others, that signaled he was not an assumed threat: policeman, bell hop, chef, fireman.

Manden walked on, trying to clear his mind. He'd had a long night of tossing and turning and had hardly slept. His sparse efficiency apartment on Connecticut Avenue was furnished with only a black-comforter-clad bed, a single lamp with no shade, a metal folding chair, and a refrigerator with nothing but Rock Creek sodas and stale mambo chicken from the Chinese corner store. It was not a home. It was merely the place where he showered and kept his clothes. When his alarm blasted him out of the hazy fog he'd drifted through for most of the wee hours of this morning, all he had been able to do was heave a sigh and head into the kitchen to slump over a cup of bad instant coffee. On so many other mornings, he would stand over the scratched countertop thinking of his Metro job in the subways, where he would soon enter the information booth for another ten to twelve hours, amid the long tubes that emptied into other tubes in a maze of directed indifference. He had dwelled in that tunneled underworld of Washington, D.C., for the last twelve years. And he found an irony in the fact that he had spent more of his time beneath the city's surface in the dimness of those tunnels than above ground. More than that, there was a strange and familiar intimacy about the subways, like a place not visited in years but that called to him even when he was not there. This feeling, which drifted to him every morning, was precisely the sort of thing that he did not like to think about, and that first swallow of hot coffee blotted it out.

Manden turned a corner where a bag lady stood arranging an old tattered hat on her head. “Smile, honey,” she said as he walked by. He nodded back, making a face mixed with faint amusement, dread, and pity. He was halfway to the center, where Brenda would be waiting. He could never get used to these kinds of meetings, nor did his apprehension ever wane in the moments leading up to them. They always gave him the feeling of stepping into a minefield or a forest in the pitch black. Never knowing what was coming. Never knowing what to expect. Yet he was drenched in a sense of necessity, of duty to something he had not been able to name since Brenda called to tell him about her pregnancy. What was he to do about the child? The question remained still. And yet when Brenda called yesterday about the appointment, as she had called about the others, he was unable to refuse her outright. He could have made up a reason he wasn't able to make it. Something related to his shift at the subway or another responsibility that he could have made materialize as the cause for having to pass. But that would have meant that something else was more important than his nephew. Something else was more important than his own brother's child. Every time, just before he fixed his mouth to tell Brenda that he had other plans that could not be altered, he changed his mind.

He walked a line of rowhouses with quaint little English gardens in the front yards. Now he was going to a meeting with the woman his brother had left a widow in nearly every way. Marriage. It was something he had never been able to bring himself to consider. Sensing how much his mother and father loved each other, for the cause, for their civil rights beliefs, and then watching it all be ripped away in gunshots had cooled his blood to marriage long ago. What had led Horus to it? He could still hear the sound of Brenda's cheery giggles in the background when he phoned him to announce the engagement. The absence of any conversation or event to pick up from where they left off made the phone exchange all the more awkward, for they had left off in the ether of angst and rage. Had Horus called to let him know that it was possible? That it was possible to erase the sight of their murdered father in front of them, their mother's screams, her descent into a realm of despair from which she could not find her way back? That he had forgotten about their father's body on the concrete, their mother in white hospital robes, the way they'd had to live in their uncle's basement? Could loving someone heal what lay agape and infected in him to this day?

It was ever fresh in his mind, when at ten years old he sat down on the curb beside his father's body. He listened to his mother scream above the police sirens. Stood in the door while visitor after visitor came to sit with their mother in the living room. Like that old woman called Ms. Pierce, with the sing-song lilt in her voice, her incessant talking bursting forth as if through a broken levee. They all came to give their condolences, to commiserate, to rage about what could be done about it. Which, after the angry talk, cards and flowers, pot pies and cold chicken, head bowing and tears, was nothing. He and Horus were the spectators of a quiet that settled into the house like poured cement, thickening, hardening. Then, slowly, their mother began to slip away. She sat by the kitchen window and did not move again. Manden remembered watching her fly out of that window on the winds of her mind, day after day, soaring above the city and flying all the way to the kingdom of James in her Bible. One day, her eyes emptied out, and she didn't come back from there, that place. There was only a mannequin left sitting in a white robe in their kitchen, its head tilted toward the sky.

That was when they came to get their mother from the apartment in New York. Someone, perhaps one of the neighbors who brought them food, had finally said something about the fact that Maria Thompson, wife of slain civil rights leader Jack Thompson, had forgotten the names and faces of her children (Manden and Horus), forgotten to eat and to bathe, forgotten that the apartment in which she sat by the window for days on end, urinating and defecating on herself, was still her home. Someone paid the rent for a while, and then someone called about Maria Thompson and her empty eyes and the children alone with her. Manden could still hear Horus cry and shriek (his own horror too vast and unspeakable to utter) when the people from the Utica Asylum came to get her. His little arms were wrapped around their mother's leg as he screamed and begged her not to go, as she dragged him across the floor, oblivious. That was the last time either of them ever saw her again. Years later, Manden would come to think that the Bible she clutched had somehow led her through its pages and showed her a way out, away from her pain, away from them.

Someone came with a car and drove him and Horus down to live with Uncle Randy, their mother's brother, who lived on the northeast side of Washington, D.C. They hadn't known they had an uncle before. Uncle Randy, as it turned out, hadn't spoken to his own sister in years, hadn't made any efforts to contact Maria when he heard she married that “radical hooligan” they called Jack Thompson. He didn't know he had nephews, he said. He'd keep them out of trouble. Make men of them.

On the day that he and Horus were delivered to the porch of their uncle's rowhouse, Randy opened the front door, his face as grim as an undertaker. Manden felt as if he were standing at the entrance of some funeral parlor. The caseworker who accompanied them in the car introduced them to their uncle, thanking him for stepping up and taking responsibility for their care. “They've been through so much,” she said, “what with their father's tragic death. Their poor mother.” She told him and Horus to shake Uncle Randy's hand. When Manden looked up at him, there was an echo of familial resemblance to their mother's face, with his yellow skin, high cheekbones, and thick brows. But his eyes were cold and lifeless.

An accountant at a small tax service across the river in Anacos­tia, Uncle Randy lived alone in a three-story rowhouse painted white, the windows framed with black shutters. His wife had left him years before any children could be born between them, and so he had filled his house with antiques picked up from Eastern Market, garage and estate sales, and junkyards. It smelled of mothballs and Jade East cologne, and everything was layered in dust. At the dining-room table, there was one chair, with others stacked in the corner, which he took out when the mailman or his old friend from the Washington Gas Company wanted to stop by for a “little nip” in the middle of his shift.

Looking into Uncle Randy's hard face, clutching a little bag of marbles in his pocket, Manden could not have known that there was such rancidness between his mother and her brother, much of it from the fact that Uncle Randy had not liked Jack Thompson from the start. In the first place, he was dark, an immediate demerit. And although Randy Goodwin was certain their family (the Goodwins) had not carried the preservation of status and skin color (or lack thereof) to the heights of vigilant families like the Proctors of Maryland, he had nevertheless been disappointed when he first laid eyes on Jack Thompson. Although Jack's eyes held the amber light of a lantern behind them, he was as dark as a bitter nut. More than that, Randy knew nothing of his family, these Thompsons. What kind of people were they? When he quizzed Jack Thompson at the first visit with his sister, Maria, he'd said that he came from a family of old farmers and dog breeders in Louisiana. That most of them were gone now, and he came up North to start fresh. That was all.

But Randy thought that there was something in the hoods of Jack's eyes, which made him uneasy. Later, he and Jack had words when he pressed the issue about Jack's background again. “There ain't nothin' virtuous about wanting to be the white man's pet,” Jack Thompson had said. “See, I look at you, Randy Goodwin, with your high-riding ways and your high-yellow skin. You think it's the most precious thing you have. And I seen millions before you, all of you mimes to who always hated you and always will. I know you think I ain't nothin', but you're wrong. Your sister knows that. Maria's got a good mind and a good heart, you know. But then, it don't look like you ever noticed that.” Then, after a silence: “A man's will can't go but one way. Let it be of your own choosin'.”

That was the last straw for Randy Goodwin from his sister's beau. But most worrisome of all, even after they quarreled, was what he believed to be the slow, wholesale theft of his sister's mind by Jack Thompson. She had stopped going to the family church and switched to another that was, according to her, more “progressive.” She was forever spewing commentary about what was in the papers. The racial mayhem in the South seemed to consume her, and there came about her a graveness that never subsided. All of this, Randy Goodwin felt, betrayed his unspoken belief that he alone was responsible for his sister's safe delivery to a reputable family and life through marriage. He knew that their parents would have seen to her having a different life, if they had not been in the bus accident that had killed them both. The hooligan, Randy Goodwin surmised, had poisoned his sister's mind, already bursting with wild dabbles into the political escapades of the Delta Sigma Theta sorority at Howard University where she was a student, where she'd met Jack Thompson at some rally he'd come down from New York to stir up.

And Randy had been proud of his sister until that point, his ward, whom he alone had been responsible for, even though they were both young adults when they lost their parents. With her fine features and good education, he had hoped—no, expected—that she would marry one of his accountant colleagues and move into a quiet house somewhere as a Goodwin should. They would carry on, he and his sister, as the good family their parents had forged, in their clear diction, culture and manners, and the high-yellow pallor of their skin.

But all of this Maria had thrown away on Jack Thompson, a man from Nowhere, Louisiana. A man with no past and no future, who would lead his sister into the destitution that his sort of social protest guaranteed. It was not that Randy Goodwin was blind to the turmoil of events. Rather, it was that he was incapable of looking beyond the colored glass of his upbringing, where Goodwins were favored by the gods and by the status and connections that years of guarding their lightness and brightness had wrought. He couldn't let his sister throw it all away in a temporary passion of the heart. He forbade her to marry in an explosive argument that would be the last time they saw or spoke to each other again. She had shouted back that she and Jack Thompson were marrying, that she was going back to New York with him. And if she were to strike out on her own, if she were to make a decision that was entirely hers, then what business of her brother's was that? In any case, he was not her father, and she didn't care how dark Jack Thompson was or what kind of family he came from, he was more of a man than her own brother would ever be.

So no one knew that Uncle Randy felt all of this at the doorstep years later, when the caseworker came with Manden and Horus. He first noticed the darkness of his nephews, then looked into their faces and saw Jack Thompson living there still—him, the reason for his sister's demise, the end of his parents' muted hopes, the dilution of the family line that had taken generations to build, now changed forever. And in the two boys, Manden and Horus, he did not see his sister or the Goodwins at all and only saw the dark unknown of their father. And thinking of this in those seconds when he shook his nephews' hands was much easier than thinking of his own empty life, which, save for his tax-accountant job, had been unremarkable, a failure in some ways, even, in its ordinariness. And that was when he had the thought that at last, he would have the chance to stomp out what was left of that black hooligan.