Tiger Work, page 4
Our addiction to normality might be our most pernicious quality. In the mornings, when I wake, I mutter a few lines my mother taught me. I bathe, have a coffee, and walk to the office. I work as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered. In the evening I walk home. On the way to work, I always pass the cafes in the square. I watch the waiters laying out the tables. No one is coming, but they lay out the tables as if a horde of tourists might descend on them within the hour.
I read in the newspapers that yet again the American government has refused to take part in any climate change conferences and has declared in an official statement that climate change is a myth. I read also that all across America cities are sinking beneath the rising sea. In many cities people are having to move their possessions to higher ground. They are living in tents and hastily constructed shacks. Apparently, America is in trauma. People can’t seem to believe that their normality has been so radically altered. The Italian papers say there’s no rioting, no protesting – just a sullen mood everywhere, like a people unwilling to wake from a long dream of certainty.
There are news stories from other lands. The facts are too strange to relate. Sometimes it seems as if newspapers are trying to outdo each other in the strange things they report. Weirdness has become universal reality.
But each day, as I walk to work, there is a waiter I always wish to catch a glimpse of when I pass the cafes. He is not tall, like the man of the average female fantasy, and he is not thin, and his eyes are not blue. He is slight of build, and quiet, and he notices things. I saw him talking to a stray cat once. Then on another day I saw him feeding the cat a bowl of milk. Such quiet sympathy is rare in these times, when we’re all pulling up the drawbridges of our lives—
THE STATE DEPARTMENT DENIES
This came from a piece of metal that puzzled us for a long time, till we wondered if it coded some sort of information. When we unlocked it we found numerous photographs of a family and a city. There were images of cats and flooded streets and processions. The images began happy, but gradually turned grim. There were scraps of love letters. There was the beginning of a poem, some drawings of a child, then this. All signs show that this note was not meant to be discovered, but was written as a secret confessional. We surmised that it was written by an official of the government who clearly had access to inside information.
*
The State Department put out its official statement today about the myth of climate change. The president himself, who is temperamentally opposed to the idea of climate change, gave the statement – with significant modifications – from the Oval Office. It was repeated by the news media. He especially wanted to make this statement to kill off the wild speculation that has been driving people into frenzies of despair. He made it clear that the fluctuations of nature, the persistent flooding, the accelerated number of typhoons that blast our shores, and the forest fires that destroyed half of California are all natural acts and in no way amount to anything out of the ordinary. They’ve been going on for years. Strange occurrences do not suggest Armageddon.
There was a research project set up in the department to study bizarre events over the years. It turns out that every year has had its share of strange occurrences, and this is true going back a hundred years. It seems that we exaggerate the significance of the strange occurrences of our own times. We think them unique. The report was a much-needed corrective to the doom-mongering that has become fashionable. Compared to past eras abundant with terrible events, our times are underperforming in the field of disasters. Just think of Vesuvius erupting, of Pompeii, of forest fires that raged for weeks, of the earlier ages of global warming that set the scene for Homo sapiens to appear on the world stage. Think of the climactic conditions that wiped out the woolly mammoths.
It is not fashionable for scientists to say this now, or they would be crucified by the public, but in their private reports they maintain that fluctuations in weather conditions, the fires and storms, have been part of the history of the earth for millennia. When human beings had religion they blamed natural catastrophes on the wrath of God or the gods. Now they blame governments and corporations. We are the new gods. And we have decreed that there is no global warming.
And even if there is, so what? We are planning our relocation to Mars. There, we’ll start again – with the chosen few. Why do people think that the earth is irreplaceable?
It is merely a coincidence that of the million planets in the universe this is the only one stable enough to be a home for life. But that stability was always fragile. Humanity was always going to evolve, and evolution means destruction. It is the law of evolution itself. We always kick the ladder from beneath us. That is the way we go forward.
Pollution is the by-product of evolution, the price we paid for civilisation. Those who wish we had evolved differently not only deny history but also deny the tremendous benefits they have enjoyed. I can’t stand those teenage doomsayers who live in the luxury of the West, and all that this implies in the destruction of other cultures, the vast undocumented crimes of Western civilisation. Do they now want, in the last moment, to somehow be absolved of history and turn back the clock?
But what if the doomsayers are right? What if the president is leading us into the end of time itself? What if we are fiddling while the world burns? And the world is burning burning burning. It’s burning in the Amazon, burning in Australia, burning all over the United States. Cathedrals are burning and monks are setting themselves on fire and the ice caps are evaporating and the cities are aflame and there are heatwaves in places where there should be snow.
What are we doing supporting a president who may be leading us to the death of all things? What kind of a job is this that obliges me to obey what is going to destroy us all? Are there no limits to duty? Deep down I do not believe this programme of denial, but I am well paid, am one of the best at what I do, and here I am using my skills not only to tell what I think is a lie but to collude in the greatest lie of all, the terminal lie, the doomsday lie, the lie to end all lies.
For I can see with my own eyes that all is not well in the world. I was taking my daughter to nursery yesterday when an iguana fell from the sky right at my feet. My daughter, who is five, and still sees everything with a touch of wonder, said:
‘Daddy, why are iguanas falling from the sky?’
What was I to say? Was I to give her the president’s lie, that it is nothing unusual, that it happens all the time? I tried silence, hoping her mind would find something else to interest her. But I had forgotten the persistence of a five-year-old.
‘Why, Daddy, why are iguanas falling from the sky? One fell just now. Look at it. But why…’
‘It happens from time to time, sweetie,’ I said.
‘Is it God who is throwing them down? Is God angry with iguanas, Daddy?’
‘No,’ I said, ‘God is not angry with iguanas.’
‘Is God angry with us?’
This stopped me in my tracks. It hit me in my solar plexus, winding me, like an unexpected Houdini punch. The kind that kills you two days later.
‘What was that, sweetie?’
‘Why is God angry with us?’
‘I don’t think God is.’
‘What have we done to make him angry?’
‘Why do you say that, sweetie?’
She had pulled her little hand out of mine and stood there looking up at the sky. Then she screwed her face into a puzzled frown.
‘Because of the way he is throwing down the iguanas.’
I stood there at a loss. For the first time, I felt trapped in a lie that I had been spinning for the sake of raising this very same person who was exposing it with her innocent questions.
‘It’s not God who is throwing them down.’
‘Then who is?’
I was silent again.
‘And why are there so many people without homes, Daddy? Why do they all sleep in the streets?’
‘Because their homes have gone under the sea,’ I said, without thinking, partly out of exasperation at my own powerlessness.
‘But why did the sea rise so high?’
‘It’s hard to explain.’
‘Are we all going under the sea, Daddy?’
For the first time I became aware of the intelligence of my own daughter. She seemed to be speaking with a hidden knowledge, and she was looking at me as if I knew something but wasn’t sharing. Maybe it was just the natural scepticism of children.
‘Of course we’re not all going under the sea!’ I said, almost explosively.
She caught her breath. Then she gave me a disapproving look.
‘Where did you get that funny idea?’ I asked, as soothingly as I could.
‘The other kids at school.’
‘Pay them no attention. They don’t know anything.’
‘And do you, Daddy?’
I broke out in something of a sweat as another iguana landed at our feet. She didn’t flinch this time, just went on staring at me.
That’s when it happened.
That’s when I suddenly burst out crying and didn’t know why and couldn’t seem to stop.
I was crouching low now, down to her level, sobbing my eyes out. People were watching us. That made it worse.
‘Now, now,’ my daughter said, patting my back, touching my face. ‘Don’t worry, Daddy. We’re all going under the sea. We’ll just have to learn to live like fishes.’
THOSE DEEP MINES
Fragments found in what was Africa. This was a scrap from the faded pages of a magazine.
*
The only time I remember being happy was when I was coming out of the mines. I’d be covered in bauxite dust, my eyes rimmed with it. We went down in our ordinary clothes and canvas shoes. They would drill and the powdery stuff would be all that we would breathe. Later, when I would blow my nose, it was blood that came out.
I thought it was all normal, and I was making money to feed my family. No one ever told me there was another way. I always wanted to go to school, but my mother died when I was young and my father who loved her so much did not last long after she went. We had no one to look after us, and soon all seven of us found ourselves in the streets.
Our relatives didn’t want to know us. Some of them tried to look after us, but they had problems of their own. Then slowly my brothers scattered, and my sister became pregnant by some man she worked for, and I never saw her again.
One day a man asked if I wanted easy money, and I said yes. Then he got me to climb the back of a fairly crowded truck. Then he took us to this place far out of the city.
They put us in this shaft. Before I knew it we were going down into the earth. On that first day I thought I would die. I thought I was going down into hell.
All the others with me were also going down for the first time. I don’t know where they found them. They all looked pale. Stray dog humans who had no homes and no families. If they died no one would notice, no one would care.
We were mine-fodder. I remember the day, not long after I started, when the mine collapsed while we were inside. They didn’t come to rescue us. All the rocks and earth collapsed over us, and we had only the dangerous red dust to breathe. The few of us who were alive had to dig our way out. It took almost a whole day. When we came out into the light, they fined us and then had us jailed for the collapse of the mines. We were in jail when we heard about the collapse of four other mines.
Then we heard about the earthquakes in the northern provinces. We heard tales of the earth splitting open and whole villages falling through the gaps. We heard of the land shifting and forests disappearing and the waves rushing over the cities and burying the tractors and the offices and the flowers. We heard of tornadoes that flung houses into the air. Cities swirled in the storm, rising to the sky and scattering before crashing back down to earth. We heard of trees upside down in the wind and of the people panicking and the churches smashed by the fist of hurricanes.
Then we heard that the world we knew was gone. It had all vanished into the white hole of the storm, and no one knew where it went. It seemed that those of us who were trapped down in the mines and rotting in prison were the only ones saved. The storms blew the roof off the prison, and for a moment the sky revealed to us our limitless freedom. Then we went out into a world in which there were only stones—
AND THE GODS DEPARTED
This fragment was found wedged beneath a giant rock, a page from an unidentified book.
*
We were singing on the way to the shrine in the baobab forest. The spirits were taller than the trees. A blue mist hung from the iroko leaves. We heard the chattering voices of the spirits. They buzzed from below, as if speaking from the earth. But it is a trick they have, of throwing their voices, of making it take on the sound of leaves or lizards, just to confuse those who are not supposed to come into the forest.
We stopped singing as we entered the forest. We had been singing of our grief. The world had gone upside down and inside out. Nothing made sense anymore. We had been charged by the elders and the grief-stricken people to ask the oracle what was going on in the world.
The rivers had gone mad. The sky no longer behaved like a sky. The rivers were boiling, but the sky sent down white powder. What did it all mean? Sometimes it was very cold and ice appeared on the ground. Then the next day it would be so hot that every living thing would burn, and human beings would drop to the ground, and birds would crash into walls as if they could not see. The world was not normal anymore. Everywhere people in churches and mosques prayed and sang. But things were getting worse.
Then the elders decreed that we should go back to the old gods and the shrines and the ancestors and find out what they had to tell us. They chose me to be one of the supplicants. I am one whose head has been shaven by the terrible things of life. My eyes have been peeled by pain and trouble. I am a penitent at the feet of tragedy.
I was surprised when they chose me to lead the procession. As we walked into the depths of the forest, I beat a gong through the night to drive away unwanted spirits. We went deep into sacred terrain, to where the old gods still dwell. No one has been there since the days of the shrines, which are now lost and tangled in mangrove roots, embedded in the thick forest.
We went in there fearing that the old gods and spirits were angry with us for having abandoned them all these decades. No one could remember the last time we had gone to the shrine. No one could remember where the shrine was. We only found it again through clues in children’s songs and half-forgotten stories pieced together from our memories.
In this way we made our way back to the abandoned shrine. The path was overgrown with vines. We had to cut out the way anew. We encountered large turtles. The mangrove swamp had widened. There were wild red flowers among the exposed roots. They looked like blood scattered everywhere.
After much hacking at vines and climbers, after finding the old trail, after baulking at flesh-like flowers and smooth-skinned mottled pythons that were clearly descendants of the pythons of the old shrines, after making our way through the marsh, we found that the old shrine was protected and pristine. It was as if the priests of the old gods had been coming here, in secret, to clean their sacred spaces. But this had not been so. We beheld the freshness of the shrine with a mixture of wonder and horror.
All at once the herbalists who were with us rushed to the preserved shrine and fell in prostration before the bronze images of Ogun and Eshu, the father god and the trickster god. The herbalists and priests began jabbering at once. We stood back and watched this weird transformation. The herbalists became different people, their voices much deeper. Their faces wore distracted smiles.
While we were still recovering from the shock of finding the place intact, the shrine began to speak. The shrine spoke through the herbalists. We watched them contort and howl, as if possessed by unbearable agony. At first we feared they had been struck by snakes or scorpions or bitten by vicious insects. They began to thrash on the floor, their faces twisted. Then one of them began to drool and to shout out words that no one had heard before. We were transfixed.
Then my body received the communication. I don’t know how. I received it. The earth was howling through these herbalists. Then the howl of the earth seized me. I flung myself against a tree and began to scream as if someone had plugged an electric cable into my intimate parts. Then just as suddenly, the pain stopped. A moment of calm came over me. It seemed like the calm of death.
Then I saw the gods. They were leaving, in a procession. They did not look back. They took everything with them, the secrets of the land, the icons of the ancestors, the threads and beads and links to the spirit world. They took it all as they left our realm.
Then I knew that the end had come. I wanted to join them, but I was too much of this world. If there was ever a moment I wished myself dead, that was it. For now that they were going, we would be marooned here, useless witnesses of a world about to pass away.
All we could do was watch them leave. They left without any farewell gesture. It was as if they knew that among our many gifts as human beings was a genius for obliterating the future—
A VISION ONCE I SAW
Found half-stuffed in a bottle in the forests of Peru.
*
We came here because we wanted a vision that would surpass the negativity of the daily news. Every day brought some new horror.
We came out to Peru, to see the shaman a friend had recommended. We were going to take part in a rite which culminated in the ayahuasca ceremony.
