There is a man in a room with walls lined with old newspapers. That is the most reliable thing that can be said. A small room in a two-bedroom bungalow in a small development called Ensom City, just outside of Spanish Town. A characterless house in a neighborhood where hardworking folk—cement and garment factory workers, policemen, soldiers, chauffeurs, low-level civil servants, and enterprising street vendors—make a basic living. He has abandoned the island, the town, the district, the neighborhood—and the rest of the house—for this room lined with newspapers. They make the place look like a gift cheaply and hastily wrapped on the inside. They are already ochred with age; the colors on the comic sections faded.
The air in this room is old. Nowhere to go, it festers into a stink, the smell of a human being undecided about living or dying and depressed enough not to care about the smell. The moisture from sweat and breath hangs in the air like a despondent fog.
The man has been lying on the single bed in the room, on the same sheets, for days. Sometimes he gets up and walks around, a tall man who carries himself like a person who has suddenly lost a great deal of weight, with the unnecessary expansiveness of someone who has been told that he is smaller than he really is. Perhaps it is the airiness of his clothes or slowness of his movement, but something about him is in contradiction. It would not be surprising to hear him say, “I feel like I am in someone else’s body.” But he does not say this. What he says is, “She bound to come back … the bitch.” There is no drama in the way he says this.
He scratches his unkempt hair, wincing at the tenderness of his scalp. Then he runs his hands across his face, his scraggly beard—a peppering of tight curls over his gaunt jaw. His skin has the quality of deep tanned leather stained with dark polish. Hair grows on all parts of his body—long, thick, gleaming strands on his arms, his shoulders, his toes, and his ears. His beauty is the subtlest of things. It arrives long after you have seen him and dismissed him as strange. But when it arrives, it overwhelms you with its certainty—it startles you with the brilliance of an unexpected smile.
He gets up occasionally to hunt down some stale bread from the bottom cupboard of a cracked dresser, or to sip water from a rust-stained porcelain sink in the corner of the room. Sometimes he just stands up and touches everything in the room as if trying to remind himself that he is alive. A peeling chair, the cracked dresser with a large blank wooden frame where a mirror used to be, the sink, an olive-colored military sack, an unsteady bedside table with a massive boom box resting on it—he touches everything. A black telephone glimmers under the bed like a wet frog about to pounce. It has not sounded in days.
The room has one high window just above the bed, a window laddered by brown louvred panels. Little light comes through this window even at the height of the day because the thick foliage of a black mango tree crowds it, its leaves sometimes poking through the open louvres.
Strips of muted light pattern the floor—which is strewn with clothes and a plague of gutted oranges. There are easily sixty or more carcasses scattered around the room, peels curling, some turning brown with decay. Their tart scent complicates the smell of human waste. Tiny fruit flies hover like moving mist over the floor and the occasional green-bottle fly darts around the scattered clothes.
This is his cell. His hiding place. He has been in this cell listening to Exodus on auto-replay on the tape deck since his woman left him, his African-American woman who thought she could come to Jamaica and ride her way through difference, through a history that is nothing less than tortuous, through his chronic sense of failure. But she could not. She left. Now she is gone, he has been listening to Exodus, trying to consume himself with that inspired merger of politics and love, trying to let himself be lifted by the wisdom of the prophet. Those are the reliable facts. Beyond them nothing is certain. Beyond them hover the edges of his sanity and little is definite in that place.
He is lying on the bed, his face toward the ceiling. Forty years old—that is his age, although lately he has been losing count. These days he wants to start counting from 1945 instead of 1962. This confusion consumes hours of his day. When he can stop thinking of his woman leaving him, he starts to think of the year of his birth. Now it is February 6, 2002. He thinks he should be dead.
Sounds come from outside the room. Sounds of a city determined to pursue its Third World rituals of laughter, dubwise, gunshot, car crash, screwing, hallelujahs, praise, and the telling of stories. The world goes on. A man’s woman has left him. She has left him to travel back to America where she came from. He has driven her away. The world outside does not find this narrative especially remarkable. Women come and go. The world outside does not know this man, does not care about this man. The world outside does not care that this man has been in his room for six days eating oranges and trying to decide whether to take his medication or not. His woman has left. She may be pregnant. He is not sure. He wants to follow her but he doesn’t know what he would say if he did catch up with her. He could sing a song, ask her if this is love he is feeling. He thinks that if he could sing that song, if he could conjure up the spirit of the man singing the song in his head—a short, skinny man with a head full of flowing natty dreads and a cocky sense of entitlement to the love of a woman; any woman, all women—if he could muster up that fiction, perhaps the people outside would care that he is locked up in a cell trying to decide whether to take his medication or not. But he has stayed in the room, eating oranges and slowly stinking up his cell with his wasting self.
He does, though, dream.
He dreams his story. He is a creature of dreams. To enter his mind would be to enter a world of muted light and dreams. The tumbling of dates—1962, 1945, 1981, 2002—and the narrative of borrowed histories are the swirl of uncertainties that stir up his dreams. In his mind, he has a narrative that extends beyond that which he can own or even claim as history, as truth.
So this is all that can be called reliable: A man is in a room filled with orange peels and filthy clothes; Exodus repeats itself on the boom box; his woman has left him and he is not sure what to do. So he sleeps and dreams and becomes. This much we know.
2.
At dawn—it was always at dawn—he felt that he had died and was now waiting to understand what that meant. At dawn, a dew fresh dawn, he would walk out into the halflight and look at the world. Then the world was not so certain of its separateness from the spirit world. Indeed, on such mornings, he could see beyond the earth, beyond the trees, beyond the sky, see into the mist, see everything in spirit and in truth. At dawn, the world was unconvinced of its mere earthiness. The world seemed completely different and he felt as if he had died at least once before. It was as if, during the night, while he was lying there in his bed, his body had curled into itself as if he needed to make space. He had curled into a tight ball as if he had never left the one-room apartment on First Street where, thirty years before, he had to share the small bed with Spider, his cousin. It was as if he had to make space for another body on the bed.
After stretching, he planted his feet on the cool tiles, then walked out onto the back porch to stare into the hills, trying to remember something, still feeling as if he was sleeping, feeling as if he should be somewhere else.
This is what it had been like since his return to Jamaica. He had been away for eighteen months. It was the first time in a long while that he had been away from home for that long, in one stretch. The travelling had been hard. Cold. He missed the yard, the gathering of men in the yard to kick some ball, to sit down and chat pure foolishness. He missed that. He missed the arguments about nothing. He missed the studio filled with smoke and the echoing of music shaping itself. He missed that. He missed the taste of the air, with its dust, with its stench of dead things. He missed eating an orange, pulling on the tart sweetness, or sucking on guineps, missed the taste of their slippery seeds, the flesh bright in his mouth and the tiny cups of green skin scattered around his feet along with the carefully stripped seeds, white with only the barest hint of pink flesh on them. He missed the sun on his back. The sun on his skin. The way the heat would come on him.
He had looked in the mirror after a few months abroad and had begun to feel white, to feel as if he was losing definition, his sharp edges. He felt as if he was losing himself in the mute gray of Babylon. He hated it. He spent most of his time indoors, in the studio, pretending to be writing songs, making jokes with the musicians who were on tour from Jamaica. But he was in mourning. That is what it felt like.
When they told him that his assassins had been found and that they were to be tried and executed, he did not hesitate. He would go back.
Three men came up to Babylon from Jamaica to get him. Three men no one would have dreamed could sit on a plane together. Two were serious generals of the street who had shed much blood in their battles against each other. The other, the third, was a longtime hustler, a man who had never sacrificed the independence of his criminal lifestyle for politics. He was very careful about that. He was a gunman, a robber, a t’ief, and he was going to rob whoever came along, and he did not give a rass whether they were Labourites or Socialists. He was a gleeful informer and the only reason he was alive was because of his firepower. But many had tried. Few wanted to associate with him. He was a genuine mafia man. That was who he was.
The three Magi came to the house to tell him that the two men who had come to execute him had been found. Joseph sat with them around a table to talk. The whole thing was a charade. They all knew it. Joseph knew it, but it was a ritual that had to be carried out. They came to tell him that it was now safe for him to go back. Joseph did not know anything about the two men they were holding. He did not know if they had anything to do with the shooting. They asked him, they repeated the names, they described the men. He knew nothing of them. He had not seen their faces as they fired bright sparks of light from the shadows of the mango tree in the yard. He had seen nothing.
But he knew that the Magi had a lot to do with the shooting and if they came to talk peace to him, if they came to tell him that it was safe to come home, then it meant that it was safe for him to come home. If they claimed that these were the ones who did it, then it was enough for him. But the ritual of atonement had to be carried out. The ceremony. The execution. It would take place in Kingston and Joseph was to be there. And Joseph, gong as ever, said he would be there, for peace was all he cared about. Peace and justice.
He returned to Jamaica and watched them hang the two men. He stood and looked the men in the face and watched them hang. Then he left the ghetto in a BMW and drove to his house uptown. He stepped into the dusty yard and sat on a stone under his special hibiscus grotto. He sat there and no one came to say anything to him. There he filled his head with the dizzying relief of smoke that helped him reach for somewhere else. He was home.
Death was familiar.
He had watched the men hang and had seen their spirits leave their bodies. But the spirits looked thoroughly confused. They had no idea where they were supposed to go. Someone was going to bury these bodies, but would this person know to light candle and hold a nine night to tell the spirits where to go? Joseph had been comfortable with the familiar taste of death, but not simply as a physiological truth, but as spiritual truth—something that went beyond the body failing to breathe again. He knew, though, that something integral had died in him as he watched the stinking fear of the two men, and smelled the shit and sweat of their writhing bodies. He had chosen to stand and look. Carried by the tyranny of his reputation and the weight of his responsibility as a tough man, he had chosen to watch. But it was more than that—it was curiosity and a peculiar desire to defy death by staring at it. He watched the men die and imagined his own death. It had been an impossible decision to make, but he had made it. Now, something had expired in him.
So he smoked his pipe in his backyard and then walked into the house to sleep. He slept.
Now morning was upon him. The radio was chattering. He looked out into the slight mist and he felt that he was dead, that he was in another world. He walked onto the porch and looked at the hills. The hills looked back at him. Then he made his way across the lawn in the backyard to the cluster of ficus berry trees at the end of the yard.
The roots coiled and twisted on the ground in a network of loops and crosses. Thick roots, smoothed and worn by rain and sun like the branches of a tree. They tendrilled their way to the thick trunk of the tree. It shot up straight, chunky like the neck of a boxer, and then spread, as if to mirror the net of roots, into a canopy of thickly leafed branches. The spread of the branches was impressive, a full wide stretch making a circle of shelter. The orange berries would fall and roll under the roots, accumulate and form a carpet of orange along the ground. Some rotting, some hard with sunlight, some still freshly crisp.
He sat among the roots and felt his body going back to sleep again. The sun crawled across his skin. He was home. Around him he heard birds and insects, but he could also hear the traffic, the seepage of radios beating out a medley of reggae and the lilt and drop of radio hosts arguing with callers.
They say prophets, true prophets, are able to prophesy their own deaths. They say that God speaks to them and assures them that their time is coming. Sometimes they argue, but always, always, true prophets know.
Joseph had seen the way those two men had died, and while he did not know of the cancer multiplying itself from his toe to his bones, to his blood, to his brain, even as he lay there staring at the sky, he knew the weightlessness of being weary of the world—the hollowness of having spoken all that was burning inside his belly. He felt dry, spent. When prophets grow silent it means they have served their purpose.
He could not see the future—that he would be leaving Jamaica again in three months to go on tour, flying late at night to New York to fill Central Park with skanking white folks, to then collapse, pale and trembling, his skin pallid like dead flesh. He could not speak of the journeys from doctors to doctors to herbalists to visionaries, or of the long, bone-aching flight to that small village in Germany. He could not know that women would soon be his keepers.
He had slept out in the open for several nights and he was beginning to lose track of the days. The sun came up and went down.
He moved among the trees as if in a dream.
3.
In the middle of the night he wakes up expecting to see a wide-open sky with the dusty scattering of stars framed by the dark shadow of mountains. But all he sees is a blank grayness of walls around him. No. He was in a room, but this room is so small, with walls so close to him he cannot breathe. He wonders how he has gotten here, gotten to this place with walls covered with newspapers, a room that does not smell like the disinfectant-neat room of sunlight and white sheets where he had fallen asleep. Instead the place smells of an unwashed body, the funk of rotten flesh and the heavy musk of human waste, and the peculiar tart scent of rotten oranges. He opens his eyes and begins to feel meaning crawling toward him—the hint of a narrative that he knows to be an explanation for what he is seeing and smelling.
The logic creeps nearer, the way a dream fades away and waking insinuates itself on the mind. The meaning of the smells comes in small spurts of revelation—first the pressing need to get up, to take a shower, to call his aunt and ask her for money, to ask where his woman has gone and if she will come back. And the memory of his woman—whose name he sometimes forgets because it is too painful to call it—hits him hard. It fills him with such a terrible sense of panic that he turns away from the thought and tries to bury himself in another flight, another memory. He can tell in those brief moments that he is running. He can tell, too, that he is dying an inglorious death. He knows that if he were to simply get up, walk over to the cracked wood cabinet, open the dark brown plastic bottle, and pour out three pills, if he were to take those pills and sit on the edge of the bed waiting for them to slow everything down, waiting for them to bring him back to the gloom of his reality, he would probably understand everything happening in him and around him.
But he does not want to move.
He wants to die.
But he wants to die in a narrative of his own making. He understands that the narrative given to him is empty. In that narrative he would die for a woman. He would die because he cannot convince her to overlook his madness, overlook his cruelty, overlook his inertia, overlook his history, and simply love him. He is dying the kind of death that will warrant a brief note in the newspapers—nothing dramatic. Forty-year-old man found dead in Ensom City home. He does not want that kind of death.
Stretched out on the bed, allowing the delirium of his hunger to carry his mind far from this place, letting the sound of reggae blanket him—Exodus playing again and again—he will find better meaning for himself, for his path. He will travel into his own myth. Willing himself to dream his own narrative is becoming painful but necessary. Yet he can also tell that what he is dreaming is not entirely myth. He is remembering, too. Remembering the twisted way in which his life is changing into a legend. He expects to wake up at the end of this, at the end of staying in this room full of voices, memories, colors, textures, tastes, smells, with enough in him to make his passing a wonderfully meaningful thing. He closes his eyes.
He was born in 1962. The year the nation was born. When he was born, ska was jumping around the city. In that year, someone said that he was a child of the future. An old man touched his forehead and said, “As your fortune go, so go the nation.” He would be told this so many times that he was sure he had heard the words of the old man himself—and he would live his life wondering whether he was guiding the fate of the nation or whether he was simply reflecting a nation bent on its own self-destruction.
His journey passed through the fearful, hopeful millenarian years of the 1970s, the years when everyone knew that some dread apocalypse was to come. Then he entered the chaos and sexual wildness of those 1980s, when he discovered that women loved him, when he walked from woman to woman, searching for meaning deep in their flesh. In the 1990s, he was trying to beat back the gruff voice of Capleton, chanting another apocalypse, but this time with blood in his eyes. With it came the frenzy of cars crashing, bodies mutilated, flesh exposed—the coked-up madness of a city coming of age, hungry to remind itself of its own strength. This was a country in trauma as it struggled to show that it still had possibilities, a country caught up in a midlife crisis, looking back at the hopeful years, the years of promise and prophecy and asking, What is left, what is left, what do I have to show for it all? Am I still sharp looking? Do women dem still go for me?
Every narrative that enters his mind is a narrative in search of meaning. He is not sleeping when he concludes that were he to travel into the soul of Bob Marley, he would find his true self.
They were both born on February 6. But one day, in 1981, when Bob Marley expired, one sunny day in May when he breathed out his last, something left that emaciated body and travelled across the Caribbean Sea and found its way into him in Kingston. It was the morning he stepped out of the Psychiatric Ward of the University Hospital into a brilliant day. His body, after the discarding of its fat, was a taut muscular thing, his eyes finally clear and his mind ticking with the promise of better days ahead. He had a paper bag filled with pills and, though no one was waiting for him, he was unperturbed. He was going to go up to Papine, catch a bus down to Half Way Tree, and then another that would take him to Ensom City, where he would clean his small house and begin to live again. In that moment, still standing out on the concrete walkway, having shaken the hand of the doctor on duty who kept asking, “Yuh sure you alright? Yuh don’ wan’ me call anyone?”; after smiling wryly at his favorite nurse, the one who kept saying to him, as if to convince herself that she was not mad to have had an affair with an inmate, “You are different. You so intelligent. We gwine to hear about you. Don’t forget me, yuh hear?”; after waving to her and smiling at the gap in her teeth, and the bigness of her muscular body that contrasted with the delicate fragility of her pale skin: After doing all this, he stood alone, breathed deeply, and was about to walk, when it came upon him.
It came not like wind or tongues of fire, but like a blanket. A heavy blanket that gathered around him and kept wrapping about his face, making it hard for him to breathe. He was gasping and wrestling, trying to fight it off. But the more he fought, the more the cloud spoke, the more the cloud carried into him the words of all the Bob Marley songs he knew. More than that, it carried the words of a man asking, Oh Jah, oh Jah, why has thou abandoned I and I to the four winds—I’s Ethiopia, I wan’ res’. Why yuh bring me back to Babylon?
He knew that it was the spirit of Bob Marley consuming him. So he breathed. As he breathed deeply, he began to feel the cloud coming into him. When it did so, he began to cry, to weep uncontrollably. He felt his body fall to the ground. Then he felt the strong hand of his nurse around him.
“I tell you, him not ready yet … The man not ready yet … Jesus …”
“Is the heat, man. Jus’ the heat. Him discharge already. Steady him there …”
“Take him inside. Help me …”
“No, him alright. The doctor sign him out.”
“Why unoo so wicked. The man need to come back inside …”
“See. See, him look better already. Hey, bossy, bossy, yuh alright?”
By then he was standing on his own again—and he felt stronger. He felt parts of himself taking on new shapes. He did not have to ask any questions about what had happened. In his head two different languages spoke, two different memories. They were wrestling with each other, trying to find meaning. Then, quite suddenly, sadness filled his chest again. He turned to the light-skinned nurse with her long eyelashes and her freckled face, her dark brown eyebrows wrinkled with worry, and he spoke as if to comfort her.
“Bob dead,” he said.
“Who?” she asked, as she touched his wet face.
“Bob, Bob Marley dead …”
“Yes,” she said. “It just come on de radio …”
He had calmed down. He was not crying. He felt his face tightening into a scowl, that familiar brooding scowl. When he spoke again, it felt like his voice was coming from somewhere else.
“Bob cyaan dead, dawta. Nuh fret.” He touched her hand. She seemed to know he was fine. He walked away from the clinic, and as he passed a rusty garbage drum, he tossed the bag of pills into it.
That was twenty years ago. Twenty years of dreams, of memories, of trying to chart a path that a living Bob would take. Twenty years of realizing that he is going to die without any glory or fanfare. Twenty years later, he realizes that a woman has brought him down—not some cancer, not some diabolic sickness, but a woman. It has taken twenty years for him to find out that he cannot be Bob Marley with this woman, cannot call her one of many queens, cannot adopt the tough inviolable pose, twenty years to know that he wants her to mother him. And in this interim, he is trying to dream himself to a meaningful death.
The fact is, his world is crumbling around him. Everything is falling apart. Everything is uncertain.
4.
He felt the pressure in his head grow. The plane rose steeply. His head pressed hard against the back of the seat; the lumps of his locks hurt his scalp now. He could feel the slow decay of the sores in his scalp despite the ointment that smelled of mint and aloe. His eyes were closed. Nausea filled his mouth with a bitter taste. He counted in his head, then began to mouth Psalm 91, his fingers tapping the rhythm on the seat handle. The climb continued, and he felt the weight of pressure on his body. For the first time he began to think of the pleasures of death.
He leaned his head toward Rhea, who stared in front of her until she felt his eyes on her. She looked at him, her face still smooth with the dark St. Thomas soil, the brown loam of ancient volcanoes that fed the banana trees rioting through that parish. The African wrap on her head was skyblue. She would wrap yards of cloth around her head to give the suggestion of locks. Few people knew that Rhea did not have locks. Her hair was thick and he was always laughing at her, telling her that she would not have to do anything to have locks—serious locks. She had thick Maroon hair, black, so dense with fertility that it shone.
Each night, when they lived in the one-room shack on the hills of St. Ann, she would sit there and rub sweet-smelling blue hair oil into her scalp, and then she would yank at the hair until her comb could run through it without hindrance. She didn’t cut it, but it never seemed to grow long, it just got denser and denser, the curls tightening with each inch added. He teased her a lot. She was still the church girl he had met on a dusty street in Jones Town, walking to the missionary congregation with her Bible in hand, her white dress stretched tightly around her hips. Her knees knocked slightly and he could not take his eyes off the way the strange stutter of her stride made her bottom roll. She had remained serious about her God. She spoke of Jesus as a friend. No, not a friend, but like a spirit child, someone she had birthed from her own womb. There was something so deeply intimate about their friendship. He had no reason to doubt her Jesus’ existence and he accepted him in the same way that he accepted that she had brothers and sisters—they were part of who she was and he understood that. She spoke of all of them in the same way—Jesus, too—as people in her life.
Now her eyes stretched Chinese-like in her face, the black depth of her irises stark against the surrounding whiteness. She was worried about him, but tried to smile. He saw too a sense of triumph in her look, and he found comfort in it. She had won. He was comfortable with that. At last, he did not have to think, he did not have to consider, to read into the motives of the people around them. He simply relaxed and let her take over. It was as simple as that. It was part of his acceptance of something larger—he knew he was going die. This was now quite clear. Jamaica was far away. He had told her that Jamaica was where he wanted to go. But she said she had other plans—they would go to Jamaica after he felt better. First they would go to Miami. There was a specialist there who would help him. Then he would go to Jamaica to recover. He would be incognito. They would stay in St. Ann, far from the madness of Kingston. It would be like those years they had spent as farmers eking a modest living from the fertile soil of those mountains.
They would then spend a year getting his strength back. He would work in the small studio that she was going to set up in the house, and they would have easy access to Miami for medical checkups. The next tour would be to the Far East. First there would be a triumphant week performing in Jamaica—a stadium concert—then another Babylon by Bus through major U.S. cities, including a major show in New York’s Irving Plaza where he collapsed and the nightmare began; then the Far East, then Ethiopia, where they would settle.
That is what he wanted, she said. He nodded, but felt deep fatigue hearing it all again—the concerts, the touring, the hangers-on, the band, trying to hold it together, trying to keep the discipline, trying to deal with the weakness he felt.
But he knew what was really coming, so he relaxed, stopped fighting. She would be in charge. He would let her do what had to be done. There she was, sitting beside him as she always did eventually. Even after her face wailed with the imprint of his flat palm, she still ran her fingers through his locks, massaged his scalp until he fell asleep with her. When he had fought with one of his other women, she was always there, her room smelling of sweet hair oil, always there to comfort him. It was her duty. She accepted it. He used to feel guilty about putting her through it, but her stoic acceptance left him incapable of even that. This was what they were. Now she was rescuing him again.
Germany had been a painful time. He had never walked so much. For the first time ever, he liked the cold, the way it seemed to clear the dizziness and clamminess from the fevers. They warned him about going out, but he would walk into the streets, limp his way through the crowds, breathe in the cold air, feel his body coming back to him, feel the sickness of an ague crawling through his system, while enjoying the pleasure of sudden freedom. He walked along the streets staring at faces. He kept his head covered, not in a tam, but with the hood of a jacket; he wore dark glasses and he walked with his head down. He could feel the heat leaving his body through his bare scalp. He started to stuff the hood with rags to keep the heat in. Sometimes he felt as if his life was seeping out the top of his skull. He felt his songs were leaving his brain and floating uselessly in the German air.
Nobody recognized him. Not in that small town. He was just another black man, another alien coming to take people’s jobs. The way he walked, the way his body seemed not to understand itself, assured them that he was just another confused, mixed-race drug addict.
He took in the town like a travel book—the quaint cobblestones, the fairy-tale facades, the snow-topped mountains, the tidily cropped trees, everything in order, in careful symmetry. The German talk he heard bounced off him like all the other sounds—alien, strange, and surreal. He knew that he was on the surface of things here, but what was below he did not want to think about. He had enough to contend with.
He walked through the town for days. In the room, he was always thinking that the next dose of medication, the next concoction he had to force down his throat, would break the hold this disease had on him—and if not that, then the compresses, the incense, the diet, the crystals, the shark cartilage, the chanting of dreads in the room—or even the constant piping of “Three Little Birds,” his most positive song, the doctor said, according to karmic scrutiny. He let it all happen because he wanted to live. He could not die. Joseph cyaan dead inna Babylon. He believed this with such force, such total conviction, that it made everyone around him believe, too.
The moments of clarity came in the streets. There he thought about dying, thought about the end of it all. Thirtyfive years old, and he was watching time slipping by. How could it be? No. T’ings not going to be alright. His skin still bloomed with sores, his blood staggered through his veins; he could feel the poison running through him. The thing was destroying him, making him weak, making him talk foolish all the time. But he also knew that he was a dread and that in his heart he could conquer all things.
This was before Rhea came. The chaos was a buffer of faith. The order she brought killed hope.
Rhea came from Jamaica and saw what chaos he was living in. She looked at him lying in bed with a haze of incense around him. She looked at him and began to cry. He had not even glanced in the mirror in weeks and suddenly saw in her face what he must look like. He saw in her eyes what a pathetic sight he must seem. He knew at once how she would appear at his funeral, knew what her eyes would say. Her shock and pain lasted no more than a few seconds, but it was enough. She smiled at him, and then exploded in anger at everyone else. She opened the windows, grabbed the waste-paper basket, and threw candles, incense, pills, needles, crystals, concoctions, and various warming cauldrons into it.
She would have picked him up and carried him down to the waiting car by herself, but she had help. She had brought with her three other women, friends of hers he instantly recognized. These three women came in distinct shades. There was Bessie, a deep and mellow woman, her black skin regal in its unequivocal purity. She always wore red and seemed always to be smiling, even when you could see flame in her eyes. Blossom was sepia-colored, her hair limp, seemingly wanting for life. She carried herself with the aloof diffidence of light-skinned people in a dark-skinned world. Her kerchief was blue—the color of the sea. The third, Barbara, appeared chameleon-like, matching always the mercurial patterns of her personality to the seeming changes in the shade of her skin. Everybody liked her, but no one could figure her out. They assumed it had to do with a beauty that was constructed from the contradictory qualities of symmetry and ambivalence. She was the spokesperson in times of conflict. She was able to calm things. Her color was pale green. These women were consistent about their colors—combs, scarves, broaches, bracelets, and necklaces—always something in their color.
They all lived in England, big-bosomed Jamaican women who thought very little of what he did, what she did, but they were old friends, her sisters, and they would be her sisters for life. They worked as nurses in London and were the only people she could depend on. They had the stern pragmatism of nurses, women who understood what it was like to help people who hated them, to clean up the shit and piss of people who could not stand them because of their skin color. These women were the ones who came to help her move him out. They looked disgusted as they walked through the rooms. They shook their heads and moaned deep inside their chests as if they had just witnessed the most tragic of moments.
He wanted to tell them to get the hell out of the place, wanted to call them whores of Babylon, heathens. He wanted to tell them not to look down on him and his locks and his Rasta truth. He wanted to cuss them, turn them out, bring down fire and brimstone on them. He knew their type. He knew the way they looked at him. He could feel their condemnation, their righteous sense of triumph. Not just because it was clear that his Jah was not doing much for him now, but because Rhea was the one rescuing him. She was the one they had comforted during all those years when he was showing little regard for her; she was the one who had suffered and complained to them about him; she was the one whom they had told to leave his wutliss self and move on to something better. She had left the church and turned to this Rasta foolishness because of him, over this reggae music. Now Rhea was going to rescue him.
They carried themselves with the stoic pride of women who could take anything, take everything, and then be there to punish their wayward men by loving them, by feeding them in their time of weakness. For some, it was their final and only revenge, their one moment of power. Rhea was enacting this power and they were there to help her. It had nothing to do with love. They knew that Rhea loved this man. They too loved their men. They loved the men who had done them wrong, who had left them saddled with children, who had left them for other women. That was never an issue. Their power was not in their capacity to love but in their capacity to be needed, in their capacity to forgive these men with the weight of their ancient memories, their ability to hold each detail, each betrayal, each abuse, each act of brutality, to hold it as an investment, a kind of loan to be paid back in full. This was the rite they arrived in Germany to enact with Rhea. They paid their own fares. They did not ask her to pay even though she could. They did not argue with her. They did not like the man, but they knew what had to be done.
They cleaned him and carried him down the stairs shrouded in blankets. They laid him in the car, patting him softly like a puppy, as the one in red drove them for five hours through country roads and small villages, until they reached Munich. They carried him into another hotel, with a larger suite of several rooms, a kitchenette, and a view over a lake.
They sterilized the room with steaming white towels and buckets of warm disinfectant. They dressed his sores and gave him painkillers, while Rhea made plans on the phone for all of them to travel to Miami in a few days time. They sang hymns, said nothing.
The hymns carried him back. They took him back to Jamaica, and he was too weak to fight the way they carried him to familiar places of comfort and possibility. They sang with the thick, round harmonies that could consume a room with their force, their weight. They kept guard on the door, and when the doctor came the next day to see him, they blocked him from entering. They told the doctor that Joseph was already out of the country.
The doctor left, but he was followed by Joseph’s disgruntled entourage who had been camped out in his room, in the hallway, scattered around the hotel—fucking women, smoking weed, lingering as if someone had already declared a wake. They came to the new hotel, some brandishing vulturous knives. The women stood firm. “Stab me den, nuh. Stab me,” the green woman said calmly. The men walked away. The women let Russell, Joseph’s cook, come in. Joseph would not eat from anyone else. Not even Rhea. Russell was the only one who expressed relief at Rhea’s arrival. He had felt helpless obeying the doctor’s twisted instructions about food for the dread. “If ’im gwine dead, den ’im might as well enjoy a good livity while ’im ’ave life.” Rhea agreed without agreeing. She told him to cook the food that Joseph liked. He served up mounds of mashed yams islanded in thick callaloo and okra stew, spiced with various herbs and coconut oil. Joseph ate gratefully. He trusted Russell.
Rhea told Joseph the plan. He listened. He could feel his body slipping from him. His scalp was hurting him more than ever. He knew that the sores were now all over his head. He imagined that their seepage inwards was touching his brain.
He picked up his guitar one morning and began to sing. Soon he forgot the words. He started to cry. He sat there, staring at the brown high-rise buildings and the misty skyline, and his mind was blank. He could not remember the words.
Russell sat in a chair behind him. He realized what had happened to Joseph and quickly began to recite Psalm 139. As the words came out of Russell’s mouth, Joseph began to sing with him. His fingers worked their way around the fret board and he found melodies to carry the psalm. The two continued like this, a song breaking out in the room, the sweet taste of holiness. Russell’s face had the wooden toughness of a sun-hardened sea jetty. His locks were virtually red and clumped in disarray around his head, just like the heads of his fellow bredren who fished the waters of Bull Bay on the rugged south coast of the island. His face was a lumped mass of muscle and overgrown pimples. Few recognizable expressions passed through that face. But sitting there, looking at the back of Joseph’s head, his face softened into strange liquid textures. He was crying as he spoke.
The song carried through the room, around and around in circles. The women did not look at each other. Their eyes were filled.
Lord, you have searched I and known I,
You know my sitting down and my rising up;You understand my thoughts from a far off.
You comprehend my path and my lying down,
And are acquainted with all my ways.For there is not a word on my tongue
But behold, O LORD, You know it altogether.You have hedged I behind and before
And laid your hand upon I.Such knowledge is too wonderful for I;
It is high, I cannot attain it,
It is high, I cannot attain it,
It is high, I cannot attain it.Where can I and I go from your spirit
Or where can I and I flee from your presence?If I and I ascend to heaven you are there;
If I and I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there.
If I and I take the wings of the morning
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there your hand shall lead I,
And your right hand shall hold I.
Line after line Russell spoke, and line after line Joseph transformed into a melody. His fingers feathered the frets as his right hand brushed the strings to create a wash of harmonics. He was just barely managing to bar the chords to create clean notes. He chanted, coaxing his clumsy fingers to speak in the familiar sharp slash of the reggae chop—bright, fresh, yet always behind everything. Russell’s voice was a steady bass line making spaces and filling them, making spaces and filling them. Outside the gray of the town seemed insignificant.
“We leaving tomorrow,” Rhea said quietly. “We going home.”
Joseph nodded. He was ready.
5.
He wakes up and knows that it is night by the sound of the crickets; their sluggish noises echo in the small room. For a moment, he is sure that a cricket is in the room with him. He panics, his heart pounding at the imposition, and then his situation comes back to him like an old sick smell—he is not trying to live. A cricket, a scorpion, a lizard, a snake, what would any of those matter to him now? The tape seems to have stopped. He reaches for it, when a sudden click reminds him that it is simply turning over. Soon “Natural Mystic” grows like a web of whispers around him.
Joseph knows he has been dreaming about dying. He knows the end of the dream and yet he wants to finish the dream. He prefers to call it a dream even though he knows that he is not really sleeping. What he is doing is thinking. He is thinking so deeply that it feels like a dream. His thinking is like a prayer—a way of making some order out of his life. Or maybe it is not order he wants, perhaps he wants to recreate it.
There is a tendency to helplessness that has haunted him for years. It made him sit dumbly in the room while Melanie, his woman, virtually begged him to say, “Please stay,” by prolonging her departure, by the way her body seemed to soften despite the harshness of her words, by the wetness in her eyes. He sat there helplessly saying nothing to her. So she left.
For him, to have acted then would have been utter hypocrisy. His life has been shaped by this incapacity to act.
He sees.
He sees the brutish way of this country of his. He knows personally many of the high-ranking politicians and business folk whose cynicism has led them to engage in the crude violence of the society. He knows that the stories of violent death, corruption, terror, and fear are rooted in something quite simple—people taking advantage of centuries of abuse. He says nothing about any of this. He does not complain, he does not accuse; he sees. He cannot imagine a way out of this morass. He has tried to write songs about it, thinking that perhaps were he to turn away from those friends, turn from the system that birthed him, turn to the myths of reggae, he would find a way to fight, to resist. But it does not happen. He is still himself, still consumed by the rituals of his privilege and unable to speak the language of radical action. It is a failure of the imagination, he knows.
How to reconcile the two worlds he thinks are his? Melanie helped him to feel, at least for a moment, that there was a true path for him—a man who could look at his country with new eyes, her eyes—and find a music to speak to that country. Now she has gone. She has gone because he was not there to protect her when she was attacked. She has gone because he could not step away from his anger at her goading him to act, to shake off the inertia of entitlement that he wore, her way of making friends with everyone she saw regardless of their class, their color, their age. She has gone because he told her that she was a true Jezebel—a bloodsucking woman who had tricked him into bringing her to Jamaica. He told her this and never took it back. So she has gone because she was an alien in an alien world and it was hard for her to sleep at night not knowing what he would do. She left because she no longer believed his promise to be her guide, to lead her along the paths to the place where the berries are, the soft place of noises, sounds, and sweet airs that he had described so well to her as he seduced her outside a club in a forgettable southern American town.
She left because he would not take the medication. She did not know who she would meet hovering over her late at night, and he could not tell her anything to reassure her.
Somewhere at the back of his mind he is waiting to hear her slipping the key into the lock, and then to see her peering into the room with that smile on her face. “Hey, baby,” the way she would say it that would make his skin prick, his groin tickle instinctively.
He is listening over the sound of the music. All he hears are the crickets.
6.
The God, tall, light-skinned, and strangely anemic in a baggy navy-blue sweat suit, strolled through the lobby toward them, his locks bobbing behind, his eyes flaming. He had the presence, the kind of confidence that forced people to pay attention to him. The muted sunlight from the wide windows looking out into the cluttered tarmac caught his chains, an array of crudely crafted chunky gold pendants that dangled around his neck.
Behind him hurried Bobo, a short, round man who insisted on wearing clothes that were decidedly too tight, who insisted, despite his copious stomach, on tucking his shirt into his tight black leather trousers. Bobo was out of breath. He wore a pair of dark glasses that wrapped around his face. He would have looked sinister if the rest of his body had not seemed so comical. He could barely keep up with the steady, assured stride of The God.
Joseph looked down when he saw them approaching. He had hoped that they would announce the flight before this confrontation.
Rhea and the three women stood up and moved toward The God and Bobo. Bobo was pointing. The God stared hard, not at Rhea or the women, but at Joseph. Joseph caught his eye and looked down quickly. He did not want to look up. He stared at the ground, then he looked into the sky. He was trying to disappear, to throw himself as far away from this moment as possible.
He was tired. The drive to the airport had worn him out completely and he was not looking forward to the flight. It was going to be painful. The sores on his back and his bottom were weeping that morning, and when one of the women had rubbed them gently with some anti-bacterial ointment, he could hear her muttering at the tragic ugliness of it all. “Why, why, why them let this happen, eh?” She was not expecting an answer. In fact, for the three days they had been in the same room, these women had not spoken to Joseph except to give him simple commands like “Lean back” or “Sip” or “Lift up.” They were working for Rhea, no one else. They simply worked, gave comfort as no one else could.
But that morning, one of them, Barbara, could not help herself. She wondered why anyone would allow this man to go through this, this man with sense, with money, with a name around the world, why they would let him go through this kind of foolishness. She wondered aloud, as if Joseph was not there.
Now, at the airport, Barbara was standing slightly ahead of Rhea, looking at this tall, lanky dread striding toward them. Joseph knew then that it was possible that he would not be on the flight out of Germany. He knew that his broken body might be taken back to another room in the city, another smoke-filled place, for someone else to rescue him, but he did not care anymore. He wanted to have his guitar with him, his Bible, and the Miles Davis tape he had been playing over and over again for weeks. He would go wherever he was taken. It was already over.
The God could bring no magic with him, just the assured look of someone who was born to be in charge. The God would come and argue that they went back too far for him to let this woman come and take over his life. The God would say that he would be better off with friends, real friends, with the bredren. The God would say that he could not die. That Rasta could not die. Rhea would never say that. Rhea knew, like Joseph, that he could die. The God would say that Joseph was a bonafide dread, and a bonafide dread could never die, it was impossible. The God would tell him that all he needed to do was humble himself and look to Jah and he would get a chance to travel to Ethiopia. There he would find the nice plot of land that they had both picked out those many years ago, that spot where Joseph planned to retire, put up his foot and plant, plant, plant, and watch Jah give the increase. The God would remind him of the dream. The God would tell him what to do and how to do it. The God would remind him that he has been with Joseph forever and that Joseph could not turn away from a true bredrin. The God would point out that Rhea was a succubus, a bloodsucking bitch who was looking for revenge on Joseph; that she was a woman, and woman is never to be trusted over a bredrin. The God would say all this and convince Joseph that he should stay.
Joseph would be too feeble to say anything. Joseph would look at Russell and Russell would look back with the dazed eyes of a man in a perpetually “red” state—the look of a dog assuring its master that it will go anywhere the master desires. Russell would have no answers. Russell would feed Joseph no matter what. He would feed Joseph until Joseph could feed no more. Joseph would get no answers from Russell. Joseph would look at The God and say, “God, yuh right.” But Joseph would not be able to move. It would have to be between The God and Rhea and the women.
He watched the confrontation. The God carried himself with the same sly danger that he had brought to the football field. There was nothing physically overbearing about him. He was slight. Fit but slight. His self-assurance lay elsewhere. What he had was a quality of danger, a capacity to believe in his invincibility, in his ability to dramatically change the direction of a game. He always wanted the ball, and when he got the ball things happened. His gift was simple: He was a dreamer with the capacity to dream impossible things and, more importantly, to execute them through his body’s remarkable flexibility. He had found a way to respond physically to the unique rhythms that moved in his head. What onlookers saw was a man with the ability to caress a football, to toy with the intelligence of his opponents, to outthink them to the point of bafflement. This, combined with his total fearlessness, made him a dangerous man.
When he stood beside Pelé in the National Stadium, The God still felt that his title was deserved. Pelé was good, but Pelé was a man like any other. Pelé was from Brazil and he, The God, was from a tiny island with no history of football to talk of, but he was The God, and he could take on any man, any man. And he did. He took on Pelé as if Pelé was a local player, and Pelé smiled at the sheer audacity of the seventeen-year-old. From the earliest days it was his way.
Now here, standing in front of Rhea, he had come to get Joseph. On the surface of things, this was a done thing.
“Bobo, tek Joseph bag and come. Russell, help me wid Joseph.” He brushed past Rhea and pushed his face into Joseph’s face and stared intently into his eyes.
“God,” Joseph said, smiling crookedly and weakly.
“Come, bredrin.” He reached round to gather Joseph up. Rhea dragged him away and he let himself be pulled from Joseph. He was not going to fight. He had come for the dread and that was the bottom line. The ritual was fine. He would play it.
Joseph closed his eyes and tried to listen to the argument. He could not follow anything. His mind was slipping away again. He was drifting beyond this airport, to Ethiopia, the brown and burnt-sienna of the landscape and the rich dark green of the vegetation, to the small plot of land in St. Ann where he found himself hoeing, getting it ready to plant tomatoes and carrots—Rhea was singing hymns in the shack—to a blazing afternoon in New York, the park overflowing with people dressed in red, gold, and green, prancing to the sound.
He stood there feeling the strange weight of his Gibson. His feet felt like clay, locked to the ground, while his head spun as if the weed had twisted itself on him. Everything was floating and his body felt lighter. The trees turned upside down as his voice tried to reach for a sound, a faraway sound. He wanted to shout something to that Yankee guitarist and his frantic stage antics, kneeling, lifting the head of his guitar in the air, prancing about the stage with a most un-reggae rhythm. Joseph felt both irritation and a deep fear that something was out of his control. Then he felt his body giving way. He was on the ground. The bass was rumbling. He was unconscious, but he could still hear the music in his head, could still see the light blue of the sky, could still feel the way his body was lifted and the music sounding like a reverb, going on and on.
7.
The man wakes and it is still dark. He knows that something has woken him, but he is not sure what. The pain in his stomach comes on him gradually but relentlessly. It is as if he is forcing his way up from deep water, his breath held and all his thoughts focused on the strain in his lungs. He feels the strain to come up for breath—the rush of bubbles, the cool of the water, and the blinding glow of the approaching light. Then he bursts through the surface, his lungs opening to take in air, his body opening to be fed by the food it desperately needs.
In the aftermath, in the calm after knowing he has survived, after finding breath again, his body begins to remind him of the brute beating it has undergone. Then comes the pain, the pain in his head, the pain in his limbs, the pain deep inside his stomach. It is the pain that has awoken him.
He lies there breathing hard, trying to work out the source of the pain and its meaning. His head is still stuck in the dream of Melanie standing there arguing with The God. The name won’t leave him. The God. He knows these people. He expects to look up and see them standing in front of him, arguing in the shadows of the room.
As he lies there, the pain creeping across his ribs, filling his head with an intense pulsing, he begins to think hard about flying away from everything, about going somewhere else. He is willing his mind to focus on the story he wants to take shape in his head. Two people arguing over him, over his body, over his future. Two people. One of them he knows well. It is Melanie. Yet in this incarnation she loves him, she is there for him. He wants to believe in this incarnation.
8.
Joseph could see a pattern. There he was, thirty-five, and he could see a pattern. He was young, but he had been around long enough to know a pattern. He had been married for almost twenty years—they had married at seventeen. Now, nearly twenty years later, he was dying. He understood a pattern when he saw one. The pattern was always the same. Rhea was there when things were going wrong. Rhea was the constant in his life. He did not like Rhea. He needed Rhea. He did not love Rhea. Love had fallen away too long ago. But Rhea was constant. The more things began to explode around him, the more Rhea was the constant that he depended upon. There was going to be no death without Rhea. There was going to be no crisis without Rhea. She was like his chi, a force inside him, sometimes dammed or diverted, but immovably there until he died. He would travel all over, screw all around, fall in love, let his body fall into the softness of other women, but they all understood that Rhea was the one he would go to when he was hungry, when he began to suspect that one of his women was trapping him with obeah. Joseph trusted Rhea because he knew that she would never harm him—she needed him. And so he needed her. He spent his life waiting for the inevitable pattern to repeat itself. Rhea was there to make sure that it happened.
Now they were airborne, the plane heading toward Miami. He thought about how quickly The God had given up. There was that look The God gave him, a look of deep regret. He put up a good front. He argued, he cursed Rhea, he even threatened to have her beaten up. But Joseph could tell that he was going through the motions. He was tired of Joseph now. He, too, had given up. It was clear that Joseph was sick. It was clear that the doctor’s shark cartilage remedy was not going to work. Money wasted, time wasted, deprivations wasted, hope wasted. Joseph was dying. The God had looked defeated. He stared at Joseph, had assured him, “I gwine come a Miami fe you, Joseph. Don’ fret. This bitch naah go control tings,” but Joseph knew that he was saying goodbye when he leaned toward him and touched his head. Joseph stared back. He wanted to say something, but he felt a terrible weight on his mind, on his brain. He had nothing to say. He resorted to a stock phrase, a phrase of deep hopelessness. It made The God’s face crumble. Joseph could tell that The God could not cope with him in this state. All through their time in Germany, Joseph had managed to maintain his brash, stoic front. The front of an orphan child.
The God had first met this front when they ran into each other on a bottle-strewn street in Trench Town where The God had organized a football match. Joseph watched on the side while The God toyed with the men who sweated around him. He never scored. He always passed the ball with careful precision. But passing was not his most cherished activity. The God was always intent on demonstrating that he was never alone on the field, for when you approached him, there were three spirits with him. They were the ones carrying the ball—he simply stood around while they bounced the ball around from one to the other. They were impish duppies, giggling at each expression of bewilderment that appeared on the faces of the men who came at The God. Joseph could see them, the three spirits. They twisted and turned and leapt up and down. Their task was never to let The God touch the ball himself. The God accepted their role and he merely followed them around. Joseph started to laugh out loud at the spectacle. He could see these things. He had always been able to see into things. He was born, his mother had told him, with an opaque caul over his face. The midwife declared him a dreamer and a visionary. But he understood himself to be something else, a strange boy who was never bothered by the apparitions that clotted the air in rural St. Ann where he was born and where he grew up.
The God was wearing a yellow and blue shirt with the Brazilian globe emblazoned in the middle. He wore tracksuit bottoms and a pair of sandals. His arms moved as if he was trying to fly—fluid, stretched out, his body pivoting this way and that, his eyes always looking somewhere other than at the ball. Most of the time he was staring into the faces of his opponents with an annoyingly defiant expression in his eyes. They would try and look away, but they would be caught. Their eyes tried to read his eyes, tried to anticipate his next move, but they were always wrong; the spirits were always going somewhere else.
Joseph pulled the bottom of his T-shirt over his head so that it wrapped around the back of his neck, leaving his chest bare. A fat shirtless player was sitting despondently to the side, trying to get his breath back, his body dripping sweat. Joseph nodded at the fat man and then trotted onto the pavement to take his place.
The God, who did not have the ball at that point, nodded at Joseph. Joseph nodded back and scowled. The God grinned. He liked this small man, with a body like a tightly wound machine. Joseph’s head was too big for his body, even without the locks. He made this even more apparent by the way he held his head up, his neck stiff, a proud strut in everything that he did. He trotted with the big-chested assurance of a star baller.
But Joseph was not a star baller, he just liked to kick ball on the streets and, as with everything else, he had learned to do it with a street savvy and aggression that usually took him far. Someone pushed the ball toward The God. Joseph pedalled backwards to face him. He made the mistake of looking at The God’s eyes. The God was smiling. Then Joseph quickly looked away—but too late. In a blur he saw one of the spirits tapping the ball over his head. As Joseph turned, another spirit had gently received the ball and was trotting beside The God toward the two stones laid a couple of feet apart in the middle of the road. The few people looking on were laughing and chanting, “Pile, pile.”
Joseph was angry. The God was grinning. He was moving swiftly toward the goal, and Joseph was at his back, sprinting and determined to make a major statement with this tackle. He raised his left leg and threw it in front of The God, going after the ball, maybe, but definitely going after The God’s shin. The God was airborne, arms now flapping like wings. He landed evenly, though, the ball still in front of him. He placed a foot on the ball, stopping the play. Then he turned to face Joseph, who was now stretched clumsily on the ground. Then, without saying anything else, The God turned and tapped the ball between the two stones. Joseph was up already. He was furious with himself. The spirits were giggling and running rings around him. The God came toward Joseph and rested an arm on his shoulder.
“Sorry, yout’. Sorry,” he said. His mockery was palpable. Then he trotted back toward his end of the street, the spirits now leapfrogging and somersaulting all around him.
Joseph hurried toward a tall, leathery-skinned, grayhaired dread who was looking to make a pass out of defense. With a small gesture and a stare Joseph communicated that he wanted the ball. With it he started to trot toward The God, who was looking away. Joseph could see the spirits coming before he noticed that The God was casually walking toward him, as if to tell him something insignificant like “hello.” Joseph did not repeat his mistake. He kept watching the spirits, dribbling around them, avoiding their playful attempts to get the ball—though they were not restricted by the rules of the game. These spirits used their hands, tugged on garments, and tripped people blatantly, making them look like total buffoons as they appeared to trip over themselves. But Joseph worked his way around them, and before he realized it, he was already past The God and standing face to face with a burly man called Blacka.
Blacka made quick work of Joseph, running into him with terrible ferocity, but not before Joseph tapped the ball toward the two stones behind him. The ball rolled in. Joseph crumbled on the ground, wincing with the sharp pain of asphalt scraping the skin off his knees. He was up and moving toward Blacka, who was walking slowly back to get the ball, his shoulders shaking with his chuckling. The confrontation was too quick to draw any attention until it was over. Joseph picked up a brick from the roadside and smashed it against the side of Blacka’s head. Blacka went down slowly and stayed down. He was bleeding. Joseph tossed the brick aside and pulled his T-shirt back over his chest and walked down the street.
He walked quickly without looking back. He could hear footsteps behind him, but he did not turn. He calculated that if the person planned to shoot him or throw a rock at him he would have done it already. At the end of the street he turned and was able to look back without seeming to be doing so out of anxiety, though his heart was pounding. It was The God, walking toward Joseph with the three spirits sprinting around him like dervishes. Joseph slowed. The God caught up.
“Yuh eat ital?” he asked.
Joseph nodded. He did not eat ital, but he knew that eating ital was cool.
“Come, mek we eat some ital patty, seen?” The God said.
“Cool,” Joseph replied.
“Blacka alright,” The God assured. “’Im head well tough.”
“Yeah.” Joseph looked down at the spirits. They were staring up at him like children.
“Dem soon go home. Is football dem come fe play, nutting else,” The God said casually.
“Oh,” Joseph said. It all seemed to make sense to him. And as they walked, the spirits lingered behind until they had so faded that Joseph could no longer see them.
The two walked silently for a few minutes. Then The God spoke. “Dem call me The God.” It was not a joke, but Joseph laughed. The God laughed too.
They never discussed the incident or Joseph’s capacity to see the spirits running around The God. It was understood as something strange that they shared. It was enough to make their friendship happen fast. Its foundation, though, was manly trust, their shared code of manhood, the very basic notion that man-friendship was different from woman-friendship. Man-friendship was quick to forgive, even if volatile. Man-friendship was uncomplicated. Man-friendship understood that women would do anything to conspire against the order of manhood. Man-friendship assumed that women did not truly know themselves. And yet, at a deep, unvoiced level, man-friendship understood that woman-friendship would win in the end. Man-friendship was a charade, really, a vain railing against the inevitability of woman-power, because, at the end of the day, man could not resist the power of woman.
9.
It was late afternoon in Miami. There was a wheelchair waiting from him in the jet way. They bundled him in blankets. He felt too hot but he did not know what to say. He was fatigued by his own fatigue. He knew he was in pain, but now there was nothing but pain. He was no longer able to imagine painlessness. It was becoming harder to call this condition painful. His stomach, he imagined, was a perforated bag of sores. The pain was thorough: muscular, relentless. His head throbbed.
The sun dropped slowly, created shadows on the pink and tangerine walls of the houses tucked in beneath the freeway. The city looked painted, the palm trees opened out sensually in the waning light.
When he first came to Miami years ago, he expected to find America and found, instead, the Caribbean. This was nothing like the metal and glossy brick of New York, nothing like the decay and aged order of Detroit. When things rotted in Miami, they smelled like the earth, they stunk like the sea. They did not have the restrained smell of colder places. Everything was tangible here. The heat clung to the body, made sweat, the people were alive, open, naked; they had skins and they spoke.
There were stretches of this city that reminded him of Kingston—avenues that led to overpasses with side guards that were crumbling, roadsides where stones, stretches of sand, and craggy grass infested the modernity of the place. Sometimes he would stand outside and breathe the warmth of the city and smell the stench of the ocean—not just salty, but funky, with the peculiar mugginess of humid sodium. It was like Jamaica.
Once he had watched crows circling overhead. They were scattered through the open sky with its untidy puffs of clouds moving casually and independently through the blue. He could tell that something had died not too far away. Now, in Miami again, he felt for the connection to home.
The Ford van that took them through the city was comfortable enough. Rhea sat in the front. Joseph was lying across the backseats with his legs propped up in Russell’s lap. Russell stared out. He was thinking of his village in St. Elizabeth on the south coast of Jamaica. He wanted to return to the familiar musky smell of the sea, the dry red dirt, the scent of rotting oranges in his yard, the graves of so many generations of his family. He had the feeling that taking Joseph to that familiar place, taking him out before the sun came up so he could sit on the edge of the sea and allow the salt to heal his body, would make him better, would change him. He imagined that the sight of the hills rising untidily behind the coast would revive Joseph, take him back to a place where things were simple as a birdcall or the taste of a mango. For all its heat, Miami still seemed like an alien place, and Russell wanted to take Joseph far away. But he knew that he would have to stay with his friend, try and feed him with food that could transport him. A man musn’ dead which part the ancestors’ spirit not living—a man must return to him navel string, Russell thought as the city rushed past—the wide streets, the cluttered houses, and the glint of cars speeding in sharp colors across the world.
The three women were in the seat in front of them. No one spoke. Joseph looked out of the side window into the sky. He could see the way the sunset was coloring the evening. He felt nauseous. He thought about dying again. He wanted to be back in Jamaica. Back in Kingston, back in the rugged mountain village in St. Ann.
They arrived at the massive house near the sea at dusk. The streets were empty. No one had announced that the great hero Joseph was passing through. He asked the women to let him walk into the house. It had never been so empty, so orderly, so lacking in life. During the five years he had owned it, he rarely stayed there. Rhea had stayed there for the past two years, after they moved their business due to the problems in Jamaica. He came there to rest in between tours. The house was always full then. It was as if a perpetual party was taking place. People were always stopping there to spend the night, to work in the studio, to just sit in his presence, to come and check out the pretty women who happened to adorn his poolside night and day. The best weed in Miami was available. It was a place of confusion, fights, gun-toting, and deep reasoning about the meaning of Babylon and the dream of returning to Ethiopia. Where the Jamaican house remained rustic, close to the roots, and smelled always of poor people’s dinners, this house revealed the pimper’s paradise of Rasta success. And Joseph would come there, lament the decay of all that was righteous in the world, but be too weary to do a thing about it.
Now it was empty. The halls were silent. He walked through the wide living area, the orange glow of sunset spilling light on the hardwood floors. Everything was immaculately arranged. He felt as if he was walking into his own mausoleum. He made his way to the room he always used, a small white room in the back of the house that opened out into a bush backyard. From there he could see the sea brimming with color. He imagined Jamaica not too far from there. Sometimes he imagined he could see Jamaica. He opened the French doors and lay on the white sheets, breathing heavily, his body weak with the exertion of this walk.
The voices of the women moving around him, preparing the room, encouraging him to put both feet on the bed, commenting on the hair he was losing, making plans for meals, all came in a wash of muted sounds. He was drifting again. Travelling.
10.
Joseph had seen death. He had seen people killed. He was always startled by the simplicity of death. Not that it was easy to kill people. Killing was painful and it took a great deal of effort. The body wanted to live. The body fought to live all the time. Like chickens beheaded. They ran sprinting around the yard, gurgling blood, spilling blood, their muscles flexing, their whole posture erect and almost dainty. People described it as a maddened run, but it was no madder than the average live and head-intact chicken’s wide-eyed sprint. The circling movements, the lifting of the knees and every muscular action were the same, despite the brain being taken away.
The body did not like to die. The body fought death. He had seen it. In films people took bullets and collapsed, as if accepting death calmly and according to a script. In life he had seen people take bullets and curse about the most insignificant things. Death did not bring profound wisdom. He had watched a friend moan and groan about the pain of a bullet lodged in his head, about the headache he was feeling. He watched his friend grow very angry, saw him get up, about to hit out at somebody who was trying to help him by staunching the blood with a towel. He was not out of his mind. This was how he normally behaved. He was angry and he wanted to do something about it. Just as suddenly, he lost consciousness, fell silent, and never woke up. No last statements, no thoughts about a loved one, nothing like that. All Joseph could remember was his friend’s annoyance at the guy who was trying to help him.
The death of others was the most normal thing in the world. It was the afterdeath that was extraordinary. He found the missing of people exceptionally difficult. Missing the person, looking out for the person, hoping to see the person in the street, then realizing that the person would not be around again. Gone forever. Thinking that after five years the person would not suddenly return. That after thirty years the person would be thirty years gone. Thirty years out of circulation. Thirty years out of memory. Thirty years faded into something tiny, something insignificant—a moment, a look, a gesture. That would be thirty years of absence. He found this extraordinary.
So he stopped going to funerals. He stopped lingering around the places of the dead. He never carried a coffin, never drove behind a hearse, never went into a church to give last rites to the dead.
11.
A sick man is in a studio playing his guitar. This narrative is more than a fiction, it is a dream that Joseph has had for years. It is a dream that has consumed him ever since he felt he could fly. When he felt the pressure of his sickness coming on him, he found comfort in the willingness of his mind to dream. And with each dream he would add to the story. The plot was familiar to him. It was a legend. The legend came to be his own narrative. It was a narrative that usurped his history every time.
He would allow his mind to travel on airplanes, to drive through quaint German villages, to mingle with the ganja smoke and roots talk of great Rasta singers and players of instruments. He would sit on his porch and look out into the open sky and find himself thinking about what dying would mean. In this way death slipped into his body.
The story was the same every time. He would make that great song, that stunning song, and the whole gathering would weep when he played it, and as they did, his hair would start to fall out in clumps. His locks would fall to the ground. And all the characters that had crowded his head would come crawling out to see the tragedy of his passing. They would hold his body, lift him, carry him to a bed, and he would rest his head on the lap of Rhea and say to her, “I am going,” and she would sing “Fly Away Home.” And in that moment his arms would fall away, and the three women would come and hover over him and pray for him and plant more dreams of home in his head, and slowly, ever so slowly, he would fade away. It was heroic, in full color, and gloriously holy.
12.
He has lived in this state long enough to know that he has been away too long. For years, the thoughts of home have been a physical thing to him. They have a smell, a taste, the feel of a landscape, the scent of a moment. In the mornings he would feel that strange nausea of excitement and unease that he used to feel before facing the day. But now it was a comforting feeling—the feeling of home with all its strange anxieties.
His mother had been absent. He had not understood this then, for he had never stopped regarding her as a victim of his father’s strange silences, his father’s capacity to withdraw into the inscrutable density of his books or his cigarettes, sucked on with a sweet passion that was hard to describe. His mother would walk through the house singing of how much she had lost. And she had lost much. His mother had one day come into the living room with the stoic, dull quality of a woman unfamiliar with the ritual histrionics of selfpity, she had come into the living room and said with such sincerity, such pained honesty: “You don’t even touch me. It has been months since you have touched me.”
This is the same face he saw when Melanie came to ask him, “Why don’t you talk to me, tell me what is going on?” The same pitiful look. “You don’t even touch me. Why has it been months since you have touched me?”
He had found this American woman, loved her and lost her. She connected always in his mind with home. He missed home. He missed the rituals of being a hero. He did not think he could give it up so easily. Yet he was sure that after the withdrawal of his illness, after the falling away of his locks in clumps, after the anticlimax of his survival, and after his plans for exile to Ethiopia had ended with the defeat of that land, the death of utopia, even after coming to settle in this simple town, a place completely unsuited to his own sense of reality; he was sure that, after all this, he would find peace, find some quiet, and learn resignation to his new existence.
But it has not worked.
Here, lying in this room, the tape player repeating Exodus until the lyrics become one song, he is still alive and she is still gone. He is washing himself with music that will purge the memory of blues and country music that the woman brought into his house, the music she heard all her childhood. Lying there, he wonders how he will get to touch her again, how he will get her to come back, where he will find her—if he can find her—before everything falls apart. He feels as if he is going to have to make decisions.
He is tasting, again, the metaphor of home. Jamaica was what he needed, he knows that. He knows he had to come home to live, just as many travellers know they have to come home to die, even though he feared it, feared the violence, the madness on the streets. In the months since he has been back he has felt the fear fading. He can feel his body shaping itself around the comforts of the familiar.
He had wanted to find a woman in Jamaica, someone who would understand him after his years away, someone who he could be with, someone who would want to be with him, want to make love with him, to make certain that if it was anyone, he would be the one to say no. It would be the woman, a Jamaican woman, who would be saying to him, as his mother had said to his father, “You don’t touch me—you have not touched me in months. I want you to touch me.” Such a woman would feed him, would wait for him, would make him feel like a man—a woman who understood the way a man’s body needs to be touched. A woman who spoke his language. A woman who understood that in his silences there is some dignity—some quest for dignity. That is what he missed.
He had planned to come back to Jamaica to find this, but instead he brought an American woman home with him, a woman who made each morning seem like an unknown space. She made his tongue feel heavy with its inability to make sense, to make her understand.
Now she has left him, walked away from him, and here he is, trying to think of whether he should go and find her, or whether he should stay in this room and let his dreams consume him.
The country is as old as he is. He has grown up with the country, and now he knows just how that island feels. He feels like the island. He had promise, but now he feels old. He feels used up. When he contemplates the forty years that he will have lived, when he contemplates what he will do at the stroke of midnight on the fortieth year of his life, he has a sense of what people in Jamaica must be feeling right now. They are waiting to see if something, someone will come and rescue the country, but are wondering if death will come before that rescue. He looks at the forty years of his life with sadness, a strange weariness. It depresses him.
13.
Coming out of sleep, it takes awhile for Joseph to understand that his weakness may have had something to do with his hunger. The tape is still going. The world outside is defined by the radio. Voices chattering, images of faces looming over him. Then they disappear. He keeps returning to his dream that is no longer a dream but a narrative with sequence and meaning. He has to return to it because it gives him a sense of grounding. But the narrative is being interrupted by voices, by the sound of the telephone that has been ringing for a while now, after a long silence.
Joseph is hungry. He feels the hollow inside him. It no longer hurts. It is a dull pain. He is not dry. He has been drinking water from the tap, walking to the toilet, cupping his hand under the tap, and drinking until his stomach hurts with the pain. Then he goes back and lies down and waits.
He is dreaming of Melanie. Melanie is lying on a table, her legs apart, and a man in a mask, a man with tendril hands that look uncannily like the hands of The God, is leaning down between her open legs and doing something to her. Joseph can tell that the man is feeling deep inside her for something, and when he seems to have it in hand, he is grimacing with the effort of moving it, pulling at it. Melanie is in pain, howling, twisting. There is blood underneath her, spreading. The light in the room is blue.
Joseph opens his eyes. Perhaps she has had an abortion. He struggles to grasp the idea. He closes his eyes again.
Like the fragmented samplings of a surreal dub track, the voices of the world, the sounds of the radio enter Joseph’s mind and slip out again, bubbling behind his dreams and over them. The distant sounds of an argument down the street between a man and a woman, the yell of the kisko and ice cream seller on his scooter, the tinkle of the postman’s bell, the dogs’ sharp bark, the twisted paths of his dreams, all gather in his head.
“This country gwine to hell, Mr. Brown. It gwine to hell …”
Movement of Jah people!
“Why yuh say that, sir?”
Rest on your conscience, oh yeah, oh yeah!
“We selling the land, selling the land to tourist, to white people.”
And move your window curtain …
“It’s a old habit, my friend, but what to do?
Good, good, good loving …
“Revolution, Mr. Brown …”
This could be the first trumpet, might as well be the last …
“You mean political revolution?”
Cause every lickle t’ing …
“Yes, Mr. Brown.”
“My God, my good man. I think somebody should get your address and put you in a museum. You’re a relic, man. Don’t tell me, sir, but are you a Marxist?”
Open your eyes …
“Yes, Mr. Brown. Revolution is what we need. We want to nationalize everything, Mr. Brown. And we execute all corrupt officials … and t’iefs and robbers must be whipped in public.”
Woe to the downpressors …
“My friend, I am afraid you’re mad. You must have fallen asleep twenty years ago, man. Manley is not Prime Minister again, you know, fellow? The Berlin Wall is history.”
Let’s get together and feel alright!
“Yes, an’ damn fool people like you will burn too. Yes. You t’ink I don’t know how much coffee land you own up in dem hills? You t’ink the people don’t know what a capitalist exploiter …”
Exodus!
“Sorry, got to go. Next. People’s Voice, what’s on your mind?”
Exodus!“Mr. Brown?”
Yeah, yeah, yeah!
“Yes, ma’am, you are on the air.”
Rule equality …
“Mr. Brown, I believe is oral sex killing our nation today …”
Set, set, set, set, set!
The voices come in and out. His mind catches a phrase and follows its meandering way into chaos, then everything slips away. The music blankets him, and he wakes to the sound of voices, the litany of blood, the litany of corruption, the litany of scandal, the litany of fear.
When he opens his eyes he is on the stage, sees the silver glare of the lights above him. He sees the fluttering of the canvas cover that is stretched over the stage, sees the labyrinth of scaffolding, sees two white boys dangling from the scaffolding, staring down at him in shock, then he sees Melanie’s face. He sees the fear in her eyes. Then he closes his eyes again as he feels them lifting him.
Someone was arguing with his woman, Melanie, the American woman, the one who left him. She used to be Rhea. But Rhea does not have her swampy, low-country Southern accent. This is Melanie. This is the woman who wrapped herself around him in their small bed, the woman he screamed at, told her she was so typically Yankee, so bloody self-righteous, and no different from the pigs from that country. The woman whose face crumbled with sadness at the flash of his words, at the fact that there was no way he could take them back. This is the woman who left him. Packed her bags and left him. The one who, when he asked her, “Are you going to leave me here to die?” had said, “You would be happier dead. You know that.” And she had left with that. Left on a plane and gone far away.
She laughs and throws herself against him, embraces him, touches him like she has not touched him in a long time. All around them, people are leaving. They are going away from them—going away from the dream. She is laughing and asking him if he wants something to drink, some iced tea or lemonade; offers him rum in a white and blue enamel cup. She asks him if he has taken his medication. She asks him if he needs a bath—a warm bath to cleanse his soul. He has dreamt this before. He can tell that he’s going to keep dreaming this as long as no one comes for him, comes to rescue him.
14.
He wakes to find himself where he has always been, in his apartment in Ensom City, sweating and frightened by the dream. Yet the dream is not complete. It is never complete. These vivid snippets are all he can remember—the laughter, the feel of her body against his, the sense that she is somewhere waiting, the heavy ganja-tinged presence of the roots man in his skin, and the hurtling departures of all the people he knows.
15.
No one comes to rescue him. Time is no longer clear. Perhaps days have passed. Perhaps some hours, but long enough for the room to smell like a tomb—a tomb with a freshly buried body. The rot is thick in his nostrils. He wants to fly. He wants to fly so much. But he is anchored. The anchor holds him in the room, in the heat, in the smell of his body decaying.
But he does manage to climb through the thick citrus grove, long neglected and cluttered with intense brush and the tangle of twigs and limbs from the prickly trees. As he walks, he makes a song for the names of home in his head. The heat is steady, though a soft breeze dances around him. He breathes. He keeps wiping the sweat from his hand, switching the brown paper bag from one hand to the other. He tastes the salt dripping from his moustache into his mouth.
He finds her sitting beneath a flowering poui tree at the far end of the pimento barbecue. The wash of orange light from the fading sun and the spread of petals on the floor around her make her white dress golden, tender, and graceful. Her face is lined with the markings of her years—her cheeks sharp, her lips still full but wrinkled. Her head is bandannaed and her white scarf moves with the leaves’ shadows. Her feet are bare, resting on the soft petals.
But he knows it is she. Years later, beyond forty, beyond fifty. He has lived to see her and he recognizes her.
He catches her eyes. They brighten. He waves and lifts the bag up to her. The brown bag weighted with his offering.
The last fifty yards fill his head with the pounding of blood, the wheeze of his chest, the grunt of each effort to move, to reach her.
He feels love seeing her there, feels tenderness for the woman who smiles at him. When she speaks, the rich earthiness of piedmont soil falls from her lips. Her voice carries him to swamps that seem to belong to another country—somewhere hot and dense, somewhere gummy with its humidity. The trees there are alien things, grotesque, bearded, dark green trees that give off smells as intoxicating as liquor.
He lays the bag in her lap, and she opens it while looking at him.
“Are you taking medication?” she asks, or seems to ask, but it is like wind. The voice does not stay long. It leaves her face, and her mouth does not move. She is smiling a simple closed-lip smile as the voice fades.
“You sure you alright?” the voice says.
He can see a tangerine-colored face looking back at him, but that too fades. Then it is Melanie sitting there patiently, her stomach distended, her dark mahogany arms roped with muscles, her hair dangling in long tight braids down her face, and her eyes glowing with recognition—those black eyes, those deep black eyes.
She bends over the bag and opens it slowly. Her hand reaches in and extracts the damp balls of rolled tamarind flesh spotted with the sparkle of brown sugar. She nibbles the fruit with her lips and holds her body as the flare shivers through her. She holds the sticky fruit out to him and he bites into the gummy flesh, the crunch of sugar against his teeth.
The music keeps coming back to him through the haze. What he wants is the woman who has left him. And maybe this is what love means: the capacity to imagine love far into the future. An impossible place where the paths are not charted and are cluttered with prickly bramble.
“It is my birthday,” he says to her.
“How old are you, baby?” she asks.
“Forty,” he says.
“Forty? But you died at thirty-six.” She is sucking the tamarind balls.
“No, I didn’t,” he says. “I …”
He cannot speak anymore. The music fills the room and then suddenly stops.
He wakes to hear the tape player clicking. The tape has stuck. He is forty. He is not thirty-six.
He reaches to touch her. She is not there. She has gone.
He sits up and stares at the walls—the newspapers. He feels the dust under his feet. He is not dead. He is forty. It occurs to him that were he to stand, were he to walk to the door, were he to step into the streets, were he to travel the miles, he would come to this swampland and find something like love. And he will find a new name, and perhaps he will work out another dream, another legend of love. It comes to him quietly like a memory.
He stands.
The room spins slowly. He takes a step forward and feels the lurching of his insides. The tape clicks on, the sound growing louder until it fills the room with its echoing.