I believe there are two states of being: living and living dead. This is the division between moose and taxidermied moose, majestic oaks and the hardwood floors of a Creole cottage, the curious man I was before I found Nigel and the shadowy simulacrum I became thereafter.
The aforementioned minor events from a short period of my insignificant life compelled me to jot down these notes in my Big Chief Bigboote notebook. In retrospect, I realize that like Mary Magdalene and Dante before me, I’ve suffered a kind of social death. I’ve been thrown off the social step stool. I have a name and a country, but I’m no longer a husband or father. And I no longer possess an identity I recognize. My fumbling attempts to make sense of my absurd predicament—the iron bars persist even with my eyes closed—have been less than successful, as you have seen.
After my return to the City, I took a leave of absence from the firm and set out with nothing more than my fedora and a surplus duffel. One day I boarded a bus in Selma. The next, I disembarked from a monorail in Gujarat, India. I rode a seaplane in Sri Lanka, a jitney in Jakarta, and a pedicab in Perth. I lost my money and passport in a nightclub in Antananarivo, Madagascar, so I was forced to stow away on a cargo ship bound for the mainland.
But that vessel was attacked by pirates. The last thing I recall was men, with machine guns on their backs, scampering up the side of the hull. When I came to some days later, I opened my eyes in a hospital bed in a kingdom by the shore. I’d been shot in the back. Or the front. The physicians were unclear about that as the projectile traveled through my body, rendering the point of breach an issue of semantics. I would live, but some nerve was mutilated, making my left foot useless. I also had a deep slash wound on my cheek. Still, I fared better than the half-dozen or so crew whose bodies were never reclaimed from the Indian Ocean. After weeks in that sanatorium, I was given what belongings they had found—notebook, fedora, sun pendant—and pushed out to fend for myself.
The kingdom is an odd place. There’s a battle between civilizations being fought nearby, and it’s caused untold numbers of people to seek refuge here. In the shantytown where I live, we’re all stacked atop each other like kindling, doing our best to survive. Pickpockets and confidence brothers outnumber doctors and schoolmarms on this prairie. A man must keep his head on a swivel if he wants to retain anything of himself. I suppose I could try to make my way to the nearest U.S. consulate, which is in the middle of that war, but I can’t bring myself to do so.
The question I get most often, only slightly more than Say, my friend, what hyena mauled you?, is Why are you here? I don’t look like most of my fellow displaced humans. My living space is a tiny lean-to in a cluster of a thousand similar structures. I have a pot for cooking, a cot for sleeping, and a pillow for my face in case some Othello wanders into my story and wants to put me out of my misery.
One notable development bugs me whenever I happen to glance at the hurt areas of my body. The skin over my wounds came back in my old coloration. The healing slash on my cheek looks like a slowly expanding brown crevasse. I hope Dr. Nzinga is able to correct this hiccup in her otherwise excellent and—dare I say it—godly process. Nobody wants tar babies coming out of the margaritaceous lady parts of recently demelanated ex-welfare queens. But as has been so often the case during my tales of tilting at windmills, I digress.
I mind an outdoor kiosk for a discredited expatriate reporter from Holly Springs, selling old-fashioned newspapers. There are more Americans here than I would have guessed. My boss was stripped of her citizenship and deported to this place a decade ago. I trade shifts with a centenarian moonbat who yammers on about missing his basement full of lights. My neighbors in the flea market are lovely local women who take pity on me and ply me with food and drink. One of them even devised a makeshift brace for my extremity. Another gave me a puppy, an adorable mutt called Laika. The women think I’m a shy, damaged man. I can’t argue. At night, the women return to their families. I spider to my corner. Laika falls asleep in the crook of my arm.
As often as I can, Laika and I hitchhike to the savanna, where we hunt for old coins and other artifacts. Plumes of smoke billow on the horizon, and it’s said that bandits roam the night searching for workers to use in their forced labor camps. We never stay out past sunset.
Still, unrest notwithstanding, this is a beautiful land of swaying grass and pristine watering holes. Giraffes frolic in the distance or nibble on tender high leaves. Some days I lie under the Adansonia, which provide heavenly shade. I jot in my notebook, which I keep on me at all times. Sometimes I sketch. I’m not very good, but something about the movement of my hand across a page tends to lessen the quivering of my fingers.
I’m resigned to the fact that I’ll never see my son again and that he’ll never forgive me for my transgressions. For every practical purpose, I’m dead, by his request, which fits the Oedipal scheme quite nicely. Elsewhere in these scribblings, I believe I apologized. But here at the end of my revels, where you, dear reader, must imagine my presence for me to exist at all, I take it back.
A part of me believes that I wronged Nigel by interfering with his so-called natural development. That I should have left him to his own devices, to play in the killing sun, dally with darkies, and enjoy Nubian culture in all its carcinogenic glory. I should have let my son’s voice merge with the voices of his peers and listened to the harmony from a doting distance. The inference is that I snatched something from the kid. But the truth of the matter is that I was no normal father, Nigel was no normal son, and America was no normal nation.
I sought to arm my boy with magic potions and enchanted swords, or at the very least provide a sturdy wooden shield. I once believed my intent was to never harm him. But that’s not true. I meant to hurt my child from the first day I met him, when I was a giant and he was a papoose. I needed to hurt Nigel the way a physician introduces a junior varsity version of a virus so that the body knows what to do when the all-star team shows up.
In these shabby pages, I’ve obscured and dissembled for Nigel’s sake. I’ve changed names and places. I’ve fiddled with time and space like some punk demigod. Perhaps more than anything, I’ve tried to tell my life as I experienced it at the time, without knowledge of things to come. I couldn’t have known at the beginning of the narrative that I would end up in this state. But it seems inevitable now.
As much as I hate the electronic world gaze that inspects and examines with neither understanding nor empathy, I have placed Jo Jo in possession of this text by sending it to him in the same way that he communicated Nigel’s message to me. Estate lawyers use an old scheme for the distribution of property to heirs. Roughly, for it’s not my specialty, if a person dies, their child inherits the baggage. If the child dies, the grandparents. If dead patriarchs and matriarchs, then distant relations. When all kin have been wiped from the Earth, the People take all. Jo Jo will forward this treatment to my son when I’m dead and gone. But if strangers are reading these words, then neither he nor I remain.
In truth, I have no illusions that these jottings will ever be seen by anyone who would be moved by my ravings, let alone my Nigel. But I can pretend for just a moment, can’t I?
I need you, Nigel, to read this addendum to the foregoing narrative and take some insight. These words are what’s left of my heart, and they’re for your eyes only. Not to save you, because I realized long ago I could never promise such salvation, but to give you access to my fractured psyche to use the information as you will. Perhaps you will know me better than I myself.
I can’t dwell on things over which I have no control. The past is a shipwreck. I can only offer you some fatherly advice from my side of the chasm. Be kind to your Minty. It took me too long to realize what a shining soul she is. Show my granddaughter— Oh! I would give my good foot to know her name, her favorite foods, the color and shape of the monsters under her bed. Show my dear grandbabe how much you love her every day. Shield her from poisonous influences, especially suspect texts. Keep her out of the sun. But above all, teach her to think for herself. Provide the tools she needs to prosper, given the limitations this conventional reality has placed on her.
And if I could ask one small thing of you, Dear One, it would be that you occasionally think of your father—even after my body has returned to stardust, and I am nothing but the ghost of an angel in mossy chains, haunting endless grasslands in search of a spear tip sharp enough to finally cut this knot.