VI

As Sin-Sin walked deeper into the black-green air, to the place where he was to meet Blue, he wondered if Blue knew about his dreams. It seemed like Blue knew what Sin-Sin was thinking before he knew himself. He stopped walking and inhaled deeply. This must be what it smelled like at the beginning of the world, he thought. The earthy aroma of some dark secret flower.

He looked at the sleek knife gleaming in the palm of his hand. Beneath the knife, his hand-eye watched without blinking.

“What you want to tell me now?” he asked gently, smiling.

It had taken him a while to learn how to look into that eye without feeling scared. And even longer still to trust his insides to see for him instead of his eyes.

“You want to know who your daddy is, just look in that eye and see. That old eye knows. That and a whole lot more. Your body remembers things you never thought you knew, stories you ain’t been told. But you hold them there inside you like a second heart.”

Blue was right. Without seeing, he could feel. Without knowing, he could remember what he didn’t even know he knew.

Sin-Sin looked inside his hand, deep inside the eye there and felt his mother, Aimee Dubois.

She was young and slim then. She wore hope around her body like a brightly colored sash. She was a pale yellow woman, fragile as crumbling lace. A young woman running from the stifling mold of her own mother’s life.

Unlike Sin-Sin, she knew her father. Knew his raging moods, the tears of failure shining in his eyes, the angry slit-eyed look from the women who laid beneath him hoping to patch some small piece of the emptiness they could see in his eyes, an emptiness enticing as narcotics. A woman whose emptiness was more vast than her father’s had brought Aimee Dubois to her father’s house for him and his stiff wife to raise.

Aimee Dubois had known cruelty before she could write her own name. The great crushing cruelty of the coward, the indifference and hypocrisy of a woman so devoted to her god, so fanatically Christian, she could forsake the living, especially the needy young girl living inside her home here on earth.

The woman treated Aimee like the stepchild she was and never let her husband or Aimee forget it.

Aimee clung to the belief that her father loved her, though he had never told her those magic words. She had to believe in his love, in somebody’s love, because it was the only way she could endure the years of wifely rage directed at her, the illegitimate child her father had brought home, the filth and sin he had dared bring into his wife’s heavenly home, and tainted with the stench of adultery.

But when her father had walked into a room in a cousin’s house and seen Aimee pinned to a bed by an older cousin, had seen the smallness of her young body squirming beneath the bulk of the cousin who was using her bones to excite himself, when her father walked in and saw and turned and left without saying a word, without a look or a gesture to frighten or stop the cousin, without any small comforting sound for Aimee, she knew and understood then that even her father did not love her and perhaps all the hateful words his wife had hurled at her were true: that she was a good-for-nothing like her whorish mother, and would end up just like her, unloved.

Once she knew her father did not love her, would not protect her or help her if she needed it, she decided she would leave New Orleans, get as far away from the sidelight of her father’s stifling house as she could. In the meantime she would fill her head with words and sounds, escape into the worlds awaiting her inside books.

Aimee read and dreamed and filled her head with words on paper. She finished her schooling, became a schoolteacher and moved to Pearl without leaving a forwarding address.

She would reinvent herself, make herself into something she’d only read about, once she had settled in Pearl.

She didn’t dream when she first came to Pearl. The stillness of the days followed her into the nights, and except for the children of the school and Reverend Daniles, she spoke to no one.

She filled the silence pooling within the walls of her four-room house by reading the Bible, scribbling poems about beauty and sitting in front of the cinnamon-colored bricks of the fireplace, singing into the fire,

Although she first attended services at Reverend Daniles’s church, she soon grew tired of the steady eyes of the churchgoers boring into her back. She could feel their questions about her penetrating the severe cloth of her long dresses. She suspected they talked about her, as she was a newcomer to the town, that they could somehow sense her worthlessness. Soon she stopped subjecting herself to their scrutiny and began staying at home with the comfort of lines on paper and no mirrors in anyone’s eyes.

She loved the stillness of Pearl, the green aura of its towering evergreens, the glow of the red dirt-covered double-headed mountain and the small body-blue hills running from the mountain’s heads like a spine.

She did not feel as empty here as she had at home, and when she sat on the bank of the smooth black lake and cast her line into its secret waters, she felt as wondrous as a wave. This was where she had church now. She’d sit and listen to the sermons of the preaching birds and mosquitoes, the crackling old tree branches and the lilting selections from the wind, communion broken only when she pulled a struggling streak of silver from the water to take home and clean for her evening meal.

A few months after she arrived in Pearl, when the easy rhythm of moving from her bed to her car (the only car out on this side of town), to the school and the blank-eyed children, to her car again, back to her house and maybe through the trees to the lake and back to her bed again, when the easiness of this rhythm became almost enough to get her biting the knuckles of her fists, the air around her house began to change.

The air slowed its movement and then stopped. It laid over her house until it seemed like she was living inside a cup turned upside-down on a saucer.

Then one day when she stepped inside her house it was as if she were stepping into a soundless abyss without color or time. She felt a rush of water, a great body of water, moving inside her. Then as soon as she crossed the threshold, all movement stopped.

She forced herself to stretch her legs toward the kitchen, move her arms inside the room as she fixed herself food to eat. She had to have nourishment for her body, to keep up her strength for the flow of her days, the hollowness of moving from one small container into another, until her body filled with a silence so loud it echoed.

She pushed the bread into her mouth, felt the coarseness of its skin. Water rolled gently down her throat, soothing her with its coolness. She was sweating now, all the time sweating. She held the steaming dish of potatoes and cheese to her nose and filled her head with its vapor. She poured salt into her hands and licked her palms. Each brackish bead of salt filled her with a longing so deep, her eyes burned.

She began opening, all over the house opening: drawers, containers, boxes of books. She threw open the door to her bedroom and'opened the window. It was hot. The heat made her sleepy. She laid on the bed and pulled the sheets to her body close as a lover. The only sound inside her head, a soft whimper. Even the air smelled of something opening, flesh unlocking from flesh.

Though it was light outside, soon, oh very soon, the shadows on the wall would be as black as she was, lying there, open in her bed, naked legs clinching the sheets as if she were riding them. She could not open her mouth now, even to pray for early darkness.

Soon she slept and dreamed she was an island. A long yellow broken piece of land floating in black water. A land uninhabited by man.

When she opened her eyes, the night’s dark had fanned into her room.

A high moon cast a slash of white light on her bed. She heard the sound of something dragging around the house, some long thing circling. She was not afraid of the sound, not afraid when the dragging stopped outside her window.

An orange mist poured through the window as a man climbed into the room.

“You again?”

“I told you I’d be back.”

“They’re all going to think I’ve lost my mind.”

“How are they going to know?”

“You know what can happen from this.”

“You’ll have someone who’ll never leave you.”

“You?”

“You.”

“I’m going to have more than me if this turns out like I think it might.”

“We all need something more than ourselves some times, as long as we know it for what it is.”

“Like I know you?”

“I’m not your daddy.”

“And you’re not God, so why do I keep listening to you?”

“Cause you’ve got a need and I’ve got a need.”

“How do you know about my needs?”

“I can smell you when you out in the woods.”

“Well, it’s been hot lately and I haven’t been myself.”

“You’ve been more yourself than you’ve ever been.”

“They’re going to build a crazy house just for me here, they find out about this.”

“Nobody gonna find out. You ain’t gonna tell nobody, not even the boy.”

“What boy?”

‘You’ll see and you’ll know and remember what I said. What you crying for?”

“What kind of life is this?”

“It’s the one you signed up for, the one you agreed to live. You wanted all of this, your daddy, your mama, me, the boy. You wanted this. Don’t you remember?”

“No. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re not even real.”

“I’m real as your life, Aimee. As real as the need shining between your legs.”

The mist covered her body as the man stood next to her bed. She reached for the warmth of her breasts and held them up into the vapor, her nipples standing like hard bits of orange chocolate. She smelled the sea of herself, the sea of what she sensed inside the cloud around the man.

He pressed himself upon her body. She pushed her body against his. Her tongue became serpentine. Her body a rolling mass of flame.

Somewhere, deep inside, her unblemished core was touched and released.

She wanted to submerge and cleanse herself, obliterate then create herself, within the lush cloud and the man moving inside her.

A woman, Sin-Sin murmured, rubbing his knee with his hand-eye. The young wanting woman he had seen was his mother.

He marveled at the tenderness of the man who’d made her moan with pleasure, marveled at the ease with which the woman in his mother had blended with the body of the man.

He couldn’t help but wonder now if that faceless man in the orange mist was Blue.