SURRENDER (EXCERPT)

BY MYRIAM J.A. CHANCY

Port-au-Prince Central Prison

(Originally published in 2010)

Early Afternoon, March 7, 2004

The moment of awakening reaches Romulus Pierre in the depths of the dank corner of a jail cell, surrounded by the stink of urine, of human and bestial feces ground into the dirt floors, with only a small square of light streaming in from a brick-sized opening up above that allows the prisoners to know when the sun rises and night falls. Some count off the days by etching lines into the pitted walls of the cell; others, without hope of ever being able to wake from the nightmare of their incarceration, let the days run one into another.

For Romulus, awakening comes in the form of muscle tremors, stomach spasms, and hallucinations. The tissues binding his muscle and cartilage hunger for an infusion of narcotics—cocktails of prescribed and illegal drugs—cocaine, heroin, antidepressants, uppers—anything he can get his hands on.

For one hundred and eighty-six days, his hands have had nothing to grasp in the regular schedule he has grown accustomed to—not the comforting smoothness of a small pink pill or the cool plastic cylinder of a needle case.

His hands roam the puckered and uneven walls next to his cot as he tries to grasp the outline of a face floating there, then they cling to his body frame when the convulsions shake him so hard that he feels the bones of his vertebrae lurch back and forth as if ready to leap from his body and leave the flesh behind.

In the span of the first weeks of his incarceration, once it was known who he was and why he was being held, some heady substances did find their way to the cell like the miracle of rain after a long drought. For a few days he was his old self again, bleary-eyed, smiling, stoned, feet on the ground, elbows on his knees, hands cavorting in the air above his thighs as they animated a story he told of his travels to a prisoner listening at his feet, while others turned away from his suffocating self-importance. They would defecate against the walls in silent protest as Romulus spoke. There wasn’t much room for movement. There wasn’t any room for heroics.

Romulus did not seem to notice the turned backs. He attended only to the face upturned toward his, as he spoke with authority of things he has seen, even as his tongue became thick and unintelligible, even as he lost track of the events in the tale he was telling and grew silent as the drug took over and left him dumb. He seemed only to notice the punctuated indifference of some of the men in the cell when the drugs leached from his system and left him, insomniac, craving more. He would have drunk his urine if there had been any privacy in the cell, in case the drugs were still lurking in the warm liquid. For him, these were desperate times.

When the doors of the cells are broken open, he has been sitting there in doubtful company for one hundred and eighty-six days. He has counted each and every one of these days without pencil and paper, without scratches on the wall. Any drug addict worth his salt needs to keep track of things like an eagle-sharp accountant, to count how many pills, how many possible hits, how many highs, and how many hours between, how many days to the next drop, the next payment, the next OD, the next stomach pumping, the next withdrawal, the next averted death. The minutiae of time becomes a science, a honed sequence of small events toward ecstasy, briefly experienced and furiously repeated over and over again in a frenzied pantomime that provides the necessary illusion of having a worthy goal. It functions like an ill-paid but time-consuming occupation; time, therefore, has to be made an ally. Not other people’s time, mind you, but the time related to the ups and downs of addict life. Time is a relative invention and a good pal in the world of hallucinations and deprivation. It is all that will remain after the wives are gone, taking their children with them, gone with the friends bearing that look of disgust and despair on their righteous faces. Romulus can do without the lot of them. He thinks this even while imprisoned, surrounded by men he is sure have committed heinous acts against humanity and nature.

On the last of those one hundred and eighty-six days, even in the haze of his drug-addled mind, as an empty pocket of time forces him to think about those who once peopled his life, the stadium seats he’d filled with fans, the money he made from records that had gone platinum in the Caribbean and in Europe (he’d never tried to conquer the North American market: it was too vast, too fast, even for his adrenaline-driven life), Romulus has an uncommon realization. He lies there on his cot and grasps that beyond the drugs, beyond the hallucinations and the gripping nature of the loss of time, he has had no life whatsoever for at least twenty years.

It is a sad moment, an empty epiphany that someone of his intelligence should have deciphered earlier had he not been thinking of the next hit, the next score, the little bags of dust floating in his suitcases, many of which had mysteriously gone missing from his last transaction, which was why he found himself penned in between steel bars and an impacted floor of red dirt on his own native ground, a land which, some ten years prior, he had been forbidden by law to reenter. He had somehow forgotten about this pithy detail when he had agreed to smuggle the suitcase of cocaine past international borders.

When the doors are finally flung open by men in military garb, he is too sad to stand and walk out with the others who jubilantly jump up and down in the mucky excrement of the stall in which they have all been kept, brothers in criminal excess, many for longer than one hundred and eighty-six days. Romulus has sat there like a prince amongst his people, the only man with a cot to sleep on while the others slept rolled up in rotting blankets stinking of more than a hundred years of servitude. Romulus thinks that he is unlike the other jailed men. He has had money, position, fame. But, he has come to realize, by the time the doors creak open and the cries of Libere, nou libere go up, that he has thrown away his freedom for little more than year upon year of escape from reality.

Romulus sighs to himself and watches the men throwing themselves into the sunlight, their bodies floating, emblazoned by the light, the darkness they are leaving behind giving them form: dark angels spilling out into a fallen paradise.

Romulus thinks about the faces that have hovered above him throughout his time in the prison. They have been mostly women’s faces. They speak to him, he is sure of this, but he is often unsure of what, exactly, they are saying. They seem to be as lost as he is, lost to time, in fantastic worlds of their own making. He sometimes wonders if they are the product of women hallucinating elsewhere in the world. He wonders if being in an altered state can make a person fall into another’s dream. He likes this feeling of ambiguity. That and the floating feeling he experiences when taking the drugs make the trips worth it, like traveling without ever having to board a plane.

At times, the faces seems to prophesy great things that he has yet to do, though he is never sure what those things might be. It is just a feeling they give him, as if there are unexpected heights still to achieve, as if he could undo the train wreck that he has made of the last twenty years of his life. Other times, there are children in these hallucinations, but none look like the children he has fathered. All of them are white, or white-appearing.

He isn’t sure that they should be trusted, those faces. After all, they have come to him in the throes of delusion. One apparition has been especially persistent, a woman with a long, pointy face, a white woman who resembles his first love, with skin so translucent beneath her eyes that he can see the filaments of a blue circuitry of veins. She hovers there, right above his head, whispering crazy pronouncements that Romulus does, in fact, understand, much to his surprise, even though she speaks in a language different from his own.

She speaks to him of rivers below the ground and spirit-dwellers who hide in hollowed trees and vales. She speaks of a landscape unfamiliar to his senses but he follows her there to a country so green it makes his Haiti seem like a heap of bones, a cemetery. She wants him to return to this forgotten place, this place of her first beginnings. He wants her to go away from the space above his eyes, a space gouged by many desperate fingers trying to find a way out. Go there, she whispers persistently, ignoring him, in the speech he can’t quite place. They are almost mystical, these drug-induced delusions. Why would he ever stop? The only thing that might make him stop is the fact that he is afraid of this particular apparition. She makes him question his sanity. The more he sees her, the more he feels that he must be nearing his own pivoting point, walking a line he has crossed many times before with the aid of his many hallucinogens, a line between rationality and destruction, between the real and the fantastic.

He usually prefers the fantastic to anything else life might offer, even the first love of his life with her translucent skin and fine bone structure, her body so narrow that it labored to produce a first child, who then died in utero, and then contorted itself to produce a pale-as-roses son who survives still. He would be twenty or twenty-one, that first son. A full-grown man Romulus didn’t even know, born in the years when he was still on the cusp of remaining in the real world. He had not quite been an addict then. But by the time the boy was three, he had already lost a sense of up and down. They had called him Christian.

She had taken everything, that first love. Her name was—is—Ellen. She had taken the house and the pool and the rights to the royalties from most of his early recordings. The apparition who looked so much like this first wife, who had been there even before he had a first wife, told him to forget such details in her strange tongue that made him think of the word brogue. As other faces receded into the wall, hers became more pronounced, coming and going like the fine breath of air that sometimes wafted in from the brick-sized opening up above.

In the end, Romulus did not have the strength to tell her to disappear. He closed his eyes instead and felt her hovering above him, penetrating the soft matter of his mind. He wished she would disappear when the pink pills found their way into his open palms, held out like a supplicant receiving communion after a long period of retreat and contemplation.

After a few weeks, the pills stopped coming. All he was left with was his slackening body, tired muscles, shortening sinews, sluggish blood, rattling bones and rattling teeth, hair falling out, skin flaking.

Romulus did not think that he could bear the periods of withdrawal, his muscles quivering intensely as if in shock.

To distract himself from his own failing form, he watched all the other bodies around him, defecating, peeing, peeling, brown skins turned to odd shades of dullness out of the sun’s reach. Smiles turned to grimaces; folds of skin became grotesque as each of them lost weight. They were thrown dirty aluminum bowls filled with a greenish-brown slop once a day, if they were lucky.

He had never seen such shit.

For the first month, he waited for his sister to bring bowls of white rice with dark beans and a stew of chicken falling from the bone. For a time, he traded those meals for his drugs and then, when the pills ran out, he traded the food for his cot and quiet. His frame became lighter and the apparition resembling Ellen haunted his dreams.

L ap pèdi tèt li, the other men said of him when he would scream at the walls to leave him alone. They laughed at him under the cover of their thin arms and elongated fingers, looking day by day more like the figures of emaciated peasants Romulus had seen captured in the paintings that hung in his Miami houses. He laughed wryly to himself: he had become one of the figures in his own paintings.

She told him to forget about the paintings. He had work to do beyond these prison walls. A land to go to so far away from everything he had known, a history to resurrect. If only he would awaken.

Romulus struggled with her every night. His stomach clenched at the sight of her. His dreams were polluted with her image, the sounds of her foreign tongue. She took him to her land so green it seemed touched by the hand of God. There, the skies hung low above the hills; the clouds embraced their roundness like the suckling child its mother’s breast and threw shadows down like blankets of protection. Yet, in places, there were barren mounds without pasture, small crosses by the side of rocky roads weathering heavy rains to commemorate the dead.

Romulus could not understand it but he vowed to her that if he ever got out of this stinking hole of despair, away from the men whose humanity rotted steadily from within, if they hadn’t already lost whatever shred of decency they had been born with—if ever he got out, he would go to this land, if she would only leave him alone after that, if she would only relent and let him regain his right mind.

He did not imagine, as he made this promise, that deliverance was already on its way. He had not imagined that he would ever again walk further than five paces forward and two to the right where he urinated against the wall every day, burning a hole of anger into the limestone, washing away someone else’s trace of existence with each impotent outpouring, each erasing the other in a dark dance of expiation.

* * *

On the one hundred and eighty-sixth day of Romulus’s captivity, deliverance arrived.

* * *

On that eighty-sixth day beyond the first hundred, Romulus sits on his pallet and looks out at the sea of legs and arms before him. The stink emanating from the walls and floor is at its worst. He has almost become immune to the shit, the constancy of anxious sweat rising from the serpentine, coiled bodies before him. And then, suddenly, the earth trembles beneath them. The doors are pried open and blinding light streams into the darkness.

Men wearing worn and mismatched army fatigues pull the thronged arms and legs out into the daylight. Romulus has his vision of dark angels in flight. He sits like a rock on the cot while the others precede him. He sees a dark arm hovering in the open space of the door, a space the length of a man, tall and broad, much larger than the brick-sized opening above they have all gotten used to for light. The arm motions in his direction. Romulus does not know if he can move. He closes his eyes and She comes to him.

Kanpe. He thinks he hears her tell him to stand up, as if all these days and nights of communication have taught her his language.

Kanpe, he hears again, but this time it is a man’s voice. The dark arm gestures toward him.

Romulus rises and walks toward the light, knowing it could be the death of him. The prison doors have never been opened in all the time he has been there. No one has left. No one has entered. The cell has been filled to capacity with no hope of exit. It is the kind of thing one gets used to in Haiti.

* * *

Romulus realizes he is still alive when the heat of the sun hits his skin and the winds play with his tightly curled hair. The dark arm he has seen in the cell is attached to a burly man dressed in army fatigues. Romulus suppresses laughter: the man’s head is topped with a red beret recalling scenes from Ramboesque American films.

It surprises him, the gurgling well of happiness in his chest, the desire to feel mirth rather than his stolid apathy. He looks away from the man in the red beret and the fake general turns from him and begins to exclaim to the company of men that they are all free. All the criminals and innocents, free.

Romulus begins to walk away from the jubilant, stinking men (for they are all men, young and old, well and decrepit, all shades of brown) as they scream their freedom to the blue canopy of sky, as if their deliverers are emissaries from the heavens rather than rogues in borrowed clothing.

Romulus walks away from the group with only one idea pulsing in his mind: to walk all the way through dust and fire, from the hell’s edge of the prison walls and into the city’s glowing inferno to reach its other side, to reach the roads leading out toward the country of his cursed birth.

March 7, 2004, Streets of Port-au-Prince

Romulus pursues his path with driven intent. Focus, he thinks, focus. He speaks to himself in a colonial tongue, a language he learned in order to get by in the world. Without it in America, ou bannann: no one with nowhere to go. You might as well be left hung out to dry, as the Americans liked to say, like a sheet of banana leaf.

As soon as he is out of the prison walls, and far enough away so that the men he had been jailed with cannot see him, Romulus begins to run, homeward, not thinking about who might be there to greet him, or if he will be welcome. He does not stop to think about his disheveled appearance, his sunken cheeks that make his eyes seem as if they are bulging out, frog-like.

He has lost many pounds in the prison, pounds he cannot afford to lose from an already slight frame. His shirt is torn in places, missing buttons. Still, he runs. How could his sister turn him away? Blood is blood, as his father had always said, despite his own lack of attention to matters of loyalty. Blood comes back to blood, always, like rivers to their beds.

There is an indescribable stench in the air. Romulus is used to the smells of rotting garbage, has gotten used to the putrid odor of disintegrating human waste. But what he smells in the air now is even more overwhelming than what he has endured in prison. His eyes trail the spumes of smoke rising from behind the crowded buildings on both sides of the road. He is startled, as he looks left and right, to see rubber tires piled high burning in the middle of what had been open roads.

In one alleyway, a car sits, torched, stripped of its tires, its windows smashed. Grocery stores that had been off-limits to the poorest of the poor stand looted, usually full shelves empty, products strewn on the floor rendered inedible. He falls into a sea of demonstrators, bodies pushing against him from all sides. As he wades through the crowd, he sees a charred body at the side of the road. The form is carbonized. He cannot tell if it is a man or a woman. What might have been an arm points upward, a black branch emerging from a charcoal trunk.

A few feet beyond the first corpse, another lies on the ground. Half of the man’s face is smashed, stoned to death. An eye stares out at Romulus from its hollowed cavity, blood pooling out from the deep wound staining the broken cement of the road. Romulus winces. Poor devil, he thinks.

Romulus’s run has slowed to a fast walk as he navigates the debris in the roads as best he can, avoiding the waves of demonstrators emptying from the houses of the bidonville and spilling out into the street. His mind reels at the thought of what has been going on outside the jail walls all this time. He has been safer in there than out here, he realizes, and wonders if there is anything to return to, any home left standing, if his sister is still alive.

“Romulus!” he hears his name called. He continues, thinking the voice is in his head. After all, hasn’t he gone mad? He keeps on.

“Romeo!” the voice calls again, more insistent, distinct. It is a man’s voice and Romulus realizes then that it is coming from beyond him, from the direction he has just left.

He tries to keep on but as his feet move forward, his head turns back. He walks forward like an ostrich, his feet moving, his long neck peering over his shoulder, his eyes too curious to stay on course.

In the moment of turning his head, Romulus has the sensation of energy slipping away from his being. The feeling is like a small wave washing over him. It leaves a tingling in its wake and a sense of foreboding, of loss. But Romulus cannot fathom what it is that he could be losing, though he knows it has everything to do with this moment of turning around, with the need to hear his name called out more pronounced than his desire for freedom.

“Romeo,” the voice says again, using his stage name to good effect. Romulus sees the lips of a square-jawed face mouthing his name. The man’s high cheekbones seem to be holding up great folds of skin that embrace his chin in a swath of thickness. The folds stretch and tremble as he speaks. “Romeo, brotherman, where are you going?”

Romulus thinks about his sister’s house out in the country cradled by those of neighbors they have known all of their lives who had practically raised them both out of the crib. He looks at the man who towers over him, thick and elongated cords of muscle binding his arms and legs. Romulus recognizes the man from the meeting in Miami that had led him home and then to prison. He remembers that the others had called him Marc or Marco. Romulus had never considered that he would run into him again.

Marc advances toward him, all muscled power. Romulus regrets having stopped. Marc is bad news. Romulus knows he is going to be swept away into something beyond his control and yet he stands still, refuses to turn away. He should keep on walking but he is used to being swept up. It has become a way of life. Romulus tries to think of the fact that Marc knows him only as a first-class junkie, not as the person he has become in the prison: swept clean, penniless, with only the shirt on his back to show for wealth. He has to maintain the coolness of intent he had had in that meeting in Miami when he had been wearing a designer suit and worn dark glasses to cover up the fact that he had been high even as he had made a deal with people he had never been involved with in his life as a musician, people who were far below him in the food chain of Haitian life.

Marc’s face does nothing to promote trust, with the jagged scar that runs down the length of his left cheek, as if thunder had visited him there and felt his flesh wanting.

Still, Romulus moves toward the man as if he might present salvation. The truth is simply that the fear of returning to a place he can no longer legitimately call home has taken stronger root than the desire to continue running toward the place his youth remembers. He does not realize yet that he is running, nonetheless, from one hell to another. Sometimes, one hell was sufficiently different from another to seem like a worthwhile reprieve.

“Sa k pase?” Romulus asks, forgetting without truly forgetting the chaos surrounding them, the burning pyres of car tires, the crowd emptying into the streets chanting, Libète, libète—a rallying cry not heard for years.

The mantra of the dispossessed had escaped ready definition over the years as the times changed: leaders fleeing and returning while the masses remained prisoners to a land once rich, a land rich still with the echoes of their ancestors’ knowledge, their murmurs sounding out in the barren hills, imitating the cries of children at their births. Some of them had no intention of ever leaving. They watched those who left and returned with mirth, sometimes with condescension. Journalists mistook the hard glints in their eyes for murderous envy while their anger festered for expression. Most of them simply wanted their piece of land, their corner of the universe beneath the benighted stars promised to them after the Revolution. They were frustrated by the constant denial. This time, it was for their children that they abandoned shacks and stands, some of the wealthy at long last joining them in solidarity to announce that the future might be different—that the next generations might not have to survive in misery. It was a wonder, really, Romulus thinks, that the masses had any energy left at all.

“Ki bagay sa a! Yo lage kò ou nan la ri a? Ou pa gen limouzin ou?” Marc laughs a wide laugh, baring red-gummed teeth, and sweeps a large hand through the air as if to show an invisible limousine. His head tips backward, forcing the muscles of his wide neck into half-moon arcs that form an elongated v-shape emanating from the clavicles of his collarbone and ending just below each ear on both sides of his jaw. His laughter ripples out in waves, making passersby heading out to join the demonstration frown in wonder at this merriment. These are difficult times, after all.

Romulus feels only shame rising up from his solar plexus like bitter bile, shame for the loss of his past fortune, shame for the loss of the meaning of his family name. He keeps to himself that he had been heading to his sister’s home.

He walks toward Marc and feels, suddenly, for no reason at all, as if he might be letting go of his past forever. It is a feeling not unlike the snap and spin in his head when he flirts on the edge of an OD, a hair’s breadth away from the black abyss of non-return.

He should never have turned around.

Romulus had known moments like this before, moments in which the past seemed to recede and the future seemed like a wide, open pit before him in which, without a care, he could fall headfirst. He had learned that the feeling was deceptive. There was nothing but the present with which to contend. Yet, he knew that what one decided to do could alter one’s life so irrevocably that one would want to go back and undo each of those moments as if they were knots on a string. Sometimes, he’d made decisions that altered not only his own life but the lives of those for whom he cared—his wives, his children, his bandmates.

Romulus was an expert at leaving things and people behind as he moved forward. He was like the children in the fable of Hansel and Gretel, leaving houses and cars in his wake as the children had left morsels of bread when they walked through the forest. For Romulus, waiting at the end of the path, in the blistering heat of the witch’s oven, was the anger and disappointment he engendered in others and would do everything to avoid. It never occurred to him that others did not see him as an innocent in a hostile world, but as the witch herself, hidden in the woods, waiting to strike. Deep down, as destructive as he was to himself and to others, he sought to be found. It was this yearning that delivered him to Marc, even though Marc’s smile was no more convincing than a scorpion’s.

“Ou ta prale?” Marc asks with false caring.

Romulus feigns ignorance of his motives and smiles sheepishly. Marc wraps a thick, seemingly protective arm around Romulus’s diminished frame.

“E ou menm?” he asks Marc while he thinks of the last time someone had put an arm around him. His thoughts vaguely drift to Brigitte, his third and last wife, the only one who had looked nothing like the woman who appeared in his dreams, who persisted her haunting in his hallucinations.

It had been Brigitte who had prompted Romulus’s illegal return to Haiti by locking him out of his own house. If it hadn’t been for that, Romulus would never have agreed to become a carrier. He would never have seen Marc standing in the darkness of a room that contained some of the key figures involved in drug trafficking across Haiti’s borders. He never would have found himself, now, with this fiend’s thick arm around his shoulders. It wasn’t his fault.

“Ou pral wè,” Marc says as the two are encircled by a group of young men Romulus has mistakenly assumed to be on their way to the march, heading toward the square in front of the Presidential Palace where the statue of the unknown slave stands blowing his eternal bronze conch shell as if mocking them.

Freedom. Emancipation. These were words that had lost their meaning.

Romulus no longer knows the country well enough anymore to identify the group ferrying him along under the protection of Marc’s heavy dark arm. He feels suddenly like a child, captive and subservient, afraid of what might happen if he chooses to break away, running, again, toward home or what was left of home. In Miami, he had heard about the paramilitaries dressed from head to toe in futuristic-looking black gear that seemed so anachronistic in a Haiti that still appeared almost medieval. As a child he had resented this more than anything. He had wanted to be a part of the modern world he saw advertised in the French press and on the news beamed in from the outside world. He yearned for the pleasures recounted by uncles who floated in and out of the country with unceasing levity, thick gold rings and bracelets shackled to their fingers and arms like spoils of war. These were uncles who fell beyond the circle of his mother’s approval. Romulus had to seek them out on his own, surreptitiously. They were dangerous men, men who had links to the government, if one could call it that, men who talked of themselves as existing beyond the laws of any land and seemed successful in doing so. Romulus had wanted to be one of the anointed, not dangerous per se, but certainly beyond the law. He had learned that wealth was the key to obtaining this sort of dubious freedom. For him, music had been the way.

They walk against the flow of the crowd, lost in it for long stretches, and then they are suddenly alone, heading up into the hills above the capital where the houses of the rich gleam like white and pink shells rising fresh from the ocean bed. Romulus begins to feel nervous. He knew these homes well once. He had even owned one. There were relatives and friends of his father’s who lived there still. What did these men want? He had heard of the chimères spreading panic in their wake. He had heard of the kidnappings and ransoms demanded of the wealthy or dyasporas like himself. Returning dyaspos were always surprised by such events. They did not realize that what was survival elsewhere constituted wealth here, that for those on the ground they had become part of the elite, however Black they might be.

Romulus wonders again what he has gotten himself into. This is a rare thought for him, one that surely stems from his sobered state. For the first time, Romulus begins to understand the root of his addiction: his fear of being forgotten. He craves recognition of any kind. This is what has brought him within the fold of this unlikely group, men clad in discarded Nike-wear from the factories, brightly colored short-sleeved shirts and baseball hats advertising Canadian baseball teams. He has been brought amongst them by his fear of refusal at his sister’s door. But as he feels his legs grow leaden while they make their way in convoy to the upper reaches of Lalue, it is a new fear that grips him, the fear of harming, in full consciousness, one of his own.

Romulus wonders if he is imagining the heaviness growing from Marc’s encompassing arm dropping into his body like poisonous lead. He wonders when and where the journey will end. Some of the men are speaking in low whispers to each other while they look ahead, determination outlined in their posture and in the straight-ahead doggedness of their heads, eyes fixed on the goal lying before them, in those hills that still sing with green bursts of color, unlike so many of the bare mountain ranges that ring the city.

They pass tall wall after tall wall, some topped with coils of barbed wire, others with the more colonial lines of jagged broken bottles: green, amber, and clear, cemented to the top of the walls. Romulus recognizes his old house and cringes as they pass it. He does not own it any longer and doesn’t know who lives there now. They pass the UNICEF headquarters and its half-mooned entrance filled with a line of high-end jeeps. It is surprising, even to someone of Romulus’s background, to note how well-equipped their saviors are. The men point at the jeeps and comment. There is laughter in the ranks for the first time. And then, a few houses later, Marc’s arm stops propelling Romulus forward and falls away. It is the moment that Romulus has been waiting for, to breathe again, but his stomach is clenched. They are in front of a house he knows all too well.

Marc smiles upon seeing the light of recognition of Romulus’s eyes and the men move forward in unison. Unlike the other houses, the portal to this one has been left unlocked. The men move one by one in an organized single file past the gates and stumble into the yard. There is a familiarity in their movement. Romulus feels as if he is experiencing his own, disturbing déjà vu.

* * *

Romulus feels his hand on the vined gates as he follows Marc and the other men into the yard. His hand has performed this action before, pushed the gate open confidently and ushered himself into another world, a world so unlike the broken and sullen streets that greeted him daily like so much useless ash. He has walked down the flat white slabs shaping a snakelike path to the front door, through the lush flowers of the manicured front garden, his leather school bag bouncing up and down the length of his right thigh. He had come all the way from the private school for boys he attended in the city, brought to the hills in a tap-tap, when such service had been available and reliable, the streets not so far gone as to need American technology to be tackled. Now, there are no black-speckled orange lilies craning their necks toward the path, nor the pink leaves of fallen bougainvillea strewn across the stones, making a scratchy, papery noise as the wind lifts them away, nor are there roses in full bloom, their heady perfumes letting him know that more treasures lay ahead behind the heavy oak door of the house.

If Romulus had paused to think about love over the years, in the absence of his mother’s arms, and in the silence that enveloped his father’s occasional appearances in his life after he had left home at sixteen, he would have remembered his times in this house as defined by such a thing. But since love had so far eluded him, like a glass vase kept out of grasping hands on a high shelf in his grandmother’s house, he could not attach the word to the place. He could, though, feel warmth enveloping his chest as he moved forward across the stones that had been reshaped by the many feet that had rubbed away their harshness and left behind grooves telling of movement and hospitality. The owner of the house was as retiring as she was welcoming and only the stones revealed how many guests had quietly and ceaselessly beaten a path to her door. Was this what the men before him were doing? Had done already, in another time? Romulus could only wonder. They seemed so out of place, so ungainly, so unrefined. The owner of the house is nothing if not refined.

If love is not the word that came to mind when Romulus thought about this house and its once lush gardens, it is another word that pronounces itself a close synonym to his mind and in his memory: music. It had been here, amongst the sound of the bougainvillea flowers scraping past his feet, the rosebushes, and the tall, wild grass, that he had begun to understand the meaning of the word symphony and the conjoining of sound and scent to create a language that only the spirit and heart might be able to decipher.

She had been his piano teacher, and for a time, in his adolescent years, the years before he had drifted away into the fog of chemically induced visions, his muse. She had been the first woman he had loved without recognizing the feeling as love, and left, never to see her again, as his mother had left him some forty years before, without a trace. It dawned on him fleetingly that he himself was the trace his mother had left behind: the thought gave hollow comfort.

Although it had been the murmur of something akin to love that Romulus had felt then for Tatie Ruth, the owner of this house, Romulus had had no designs on the woman to whom he would dedicate his first songs and empty pop lyrics. He barely took note of the fact that Tatie Ruth had been in her thirties when he had taken lessons from her, still a relatively young woman. He had taken no notice of the curvature of her bare legs shaped by long walks in the mountains when the air was clear and crisp, legs that spindled out from beneath her skirts like the long stems of the most hardy of flowers. She would adjust a thin sweater on her shoulders, push back her reading glasses, and peer over his head at the notations on the weathered sheet music she allowed him to take home so that he could continue to practice, either at the home of the uncle with a piano, or in the large hall at school where gatherings were held on holidays of the Catholic calendar. In those days, he had no knowledge or interest in the female form, or perhaps Tatie Ruth had simply seemed beyond the reach of his eleven years. He kept all of his energies for the music, as if he was an athlete in strict training, remembering only much later how inebriated and inspired he had been by the pollen of flowers in the garden, by the whiff of Tatie Ruth’s thick French perfume.

It is this sensory memory that strikes him as he walks into the foyer, the tiles radiating cold, stunning him into his past, his beginnings, a time that had been so innocent and free of all the madness that followed on its heels.

“Sa n ap fè la?” he asks Marc. “Ou konnen Tatie?” he continues, a childish innocence punctuating his words.

Marc leaves the questions hanging in the air and gestures to the others to take their positions. He sweeps Romulus back toward the front door.

“Sa k gen la?” a thin, reedy voice wafts in from the back of the house. Tatie Ruth. Even after all these years, Romulus recognizes her distinctive Creole. Soigné. Careful and peppered with French intonations. She would be in her late seventies by now, aging, skin and bones made heavy by the pull of gravity.

Marc signals Romulus to speak. The men are positioned in the darkness of the receding perimeter of the round foyer like foxes circling a chicken coop. He hesitates. Marc gestures more emphatically. This is no rehearsal. What has he gotten himself into?

“Tatie,” Romulus begins, “Romulus ki la, wi.”

“Romulus!” she exclaims, voice quivering slightly, emotion audibly catching in her throat. He hears her moving hurriedly through the halls of her house to the foyer. “You came back.”

He sees confusion in her face.

“Are you back at the house?” she asks, referring to his old house up the road, the one he had once lived in with Ellen. He had hardly seen Ruth during the two years he had lived there, trying unsuccessfully to end the drug habit that eventually destroyed the marriage.

Romulus has no answer for her. He becomes suddenly self-conscious of his attire, of the soft layers of dust clinging to his perspiring skin. The heat is suffocating. He feels tired, wan. What can he be doing here? Why this, the gathering place? He has the impulse to tell her to run back, run back, to keep out of sight, but he knows it is too late. He is always too late.

“They let you out?” she asks, her voice weak.

“Wi,” he says finally, because there is nothing else he can say. How did she know? Did everyone know? “Yes. They let me out. I’m out.”

She emerges on one of the arcs leading from the foyer to the rest of the house. There are three such arcs. She stands in the hollow of the farthest to his right, the men forming a half-circle in the dark. She is still slightly too far away to see them all gathered there, foxes in the den.

Go back, back, Romulus thinks, hoping she will turn and ask him to follow her to another part of the house, perhaps to the back kitchen for a strong cup of café. Then he could tell her about Marc and the men and the need to find shelter in her yard, or elsewhere.

But she stands there like a ghost, waiting for him to speak, and Romulus realizes that she has been waiting for a long while, although he is not so sure that she has been waiting for him in particular. Does she already know what is about to happen? She must have heard about the jails being opened by the rebels.

“I’m sorry,” she says, “It’s just that . . .”

“Je sais,” he responds, feeling the rush of shame travel up the length of his neck.

She has lost nothing of her mystique with her wide robes and flower-print dresses. She is stooped slightly and grasps her back with one hand against the pain radiating there to her right hip. Her hair is held back in a tight bun and though they stand some fifteen feet and years apart, he can smell her perfume more strongly than ever, making him wonder at the clarity of his pre-addict memories. They are both like ghosts standing before each other, each remembering the other as they had been in another life, incredulous over the changes that time has wrought. Still, they cannot see each other clearly. The foyer is dimly illuminated by light streaming in from the arcs. There are no windows here. Romulus can make out a table in the center of the room, a walnut table with a sturdy clubfooted stand. A thick plastic sheet seems to cover the surface of the table.

He would think later that this was an odd detail to note at the time—the thick plastic covering nothing like the delicate embroidery that usually graced Tatie Ruth’s tabletops, embroidery she taught the young girls who were hired help in the neighborhood to make, so they would have some kind of a trade. He sees the photographs beneath the plastic, his much younger face staring up at him, as if looking at a stranger. What a failure he must be in her eyes, Romulus thinks, forgetting for the moment the men hidden in the shadows. What a failure.

Then, simultaneously, as if propelled by an invisible shift in gravitational pull, they advance toward each other. Romulus stands closer to the table with its plastic covering. He can see now that the plastic keeps a series of photographs locked in place beneath its weight. Tatie Ruth advances into the circle of awaiting men. He thinks that he sees her smile at them in recognition, a smile quickly dissolving into apprehension.

Their eyes catch and Romulus senses that he is being forgiven his betrayal. Tatie Ruth smiles again quietly, sadly, and then makes a small circular gesture of hand tight against her waist as if to say to them, Come, come, I have been waiting for you.

* * *

Later, only minutes later, minutes that seem to stretch into an unbearable knowledge of infinity, Romulus falls into a black hole of amnesia, a temporary blackout that will help him to survive the day as he has survived so many others. This time, however, he is sober and he still cannot believe the sight before his eyes: was it she who had fallen, or he? Was it Marc who had used the machete or one of the skinny young men in the troupe too impatient to wait to be led through the house’s many halls to a treasure they must have assumed lay beyond? Was it their feet he heard running back up the path, leaving the front door wide open so that light inundated the dark foyer suddenly, like a blast of thunder in a storm, or was it he himself fleeing the scene? Had it been his fourteen-year-old face that he saw looking expectantly up from a jaggedly trimmed black-and-white photograph beneath a now blood-streaked clear, plastic tablecloth, he standing amidst the bougainvillea in the garden in his Sunday best, sheet music in his hand? Was that his smile as a twenty-four-year-old, cut from a newspaper and placed next to a picture of a young woman who eerily resembled his visitor in prison, that peaked face hovering above him on the walls? Picture upon picture: brown, yellow, peach-complexioned faces—a map of Tatie Ruth’s inner world laid out as if she was afraid that she would forget them all, or that the disappearance of the actual people from her hall meant they would never return. There, too, was a photograph of an unsmiling Marc in short pants, exposing knobby knees, skinny fingers poised over piano keys.

In this way, she kept them captive to the echoes of another world that reverberated with music and laughter, sounds she hardly heard anymore, sounds replaced with the ringing of bullets and cries of despair and a silence all the more piercing for its meaning: the absence of love.

Blood speckles the bright faces and white teeth. Was it hers or his? There is a wild rush of sound in his ears, making a small whoosh as the liquid particles hit the solid surfaces in random syncopation. He’s heard the sound before, usually before landing on the ground after a particularly bad hit. This time, he has to remember his sobered state. It is difficult to mark a difference. He wonders if he has ventured close to death. His own? Hers?

The pictures beneath the plastic look up at him, furiously, as if he could have stopped the chaos. It is vertiginous to peer down at so many faces and to feel the sensation of falling toward some unknown depth.

* * *

As Romulus’s body convulses in a cold sweat against the clamminess of the linoleum floor, he hears some of the men walk through the house under Marc’s supervision. They seem unable to uncover the treasure they have sought.

He hears them scramble and swear beneath their breaths. We shouldn’t have killed her so fast, one of them says. He hears them curse him as they step over his body on their way to other parts of the house. Romulus cannot open his eyes. He cannot move. For a moment, he thinks he hears her call out his name. He thinks he can see her in his mind’s eye, but he cannot move toward her, cannot embrace her. It is too late. All he wants to do is lie there and let life seep out of him. He is a coward too, not wanting to see what has already been done to Ruth. He cannot think ahead to what might happen to him if he is found there, in a house turned upside down with bitterness, a woman’s dead body lying not far from him. His body aches; his mind feels on fire. He cannot move. He could be dying. He lets his mind drift away from his body, from the house, from the other men. He thinks about his childhood, his absent mother and brooding father. He wonders how it could all have been different.

He dares not open his eyes. He does not want to see the sight of blood, his own or another’s. He does not want to see the ghost’s face mocking him for his cowardice or Ruth’s frozen in disbelief at what he has become.

* * *

The only thing Romulus can be sure of as he feels his body run cold and slick with sweat, before his head comes in contact with the ground, rendering him unconscious, is that he had not heard her scream her surrender or her pain. All he hears as he falls is a throbbing silence in the house and the muted sound of field crickets emanating from somewhere beyond.