Code Noir, page 22
Still, after I landed in this waterlogged place I tried to mount a return voyage, as though the vastness before me was as familiar as the Atlantic. I thought I could take any vessel—even an old thing, wretched, unapologetic in its unmoveable but hopeful state. I thought I could take a minlo to build my way into a boat coming your way. This is all it would take, I thought. Now I laugh and laugh at that thought.
“Speak,” The Voice tasted.
“Why you here?” I asked.
“To believe you,” it tasted.
“Believe me?”
“Yes.”
“Say more,” I begged.
“Each time one of you is removed from Terrum by hurt, not nature, you are believed here,” it tasted.
“Do you have gods?” I asked.
“All of here is,” it tasted.
“Do you die?”
“There is no death,” it tasted.
My mouth fills with sour.
“Do you shit?”
“Only pollens,” it tasted.
“Is there birth here?”
“There are mothers,” it tasted.
“You know our oceans, mountains, forests, deserts. What is here?”
“At last,” it tasted.
And then silence, or something like wind. Faint, suggestive.
“Well?”
“Here is only time,” it tasted.
And just like that, there was nothing. I blinked. And just like that again, a massive stone structure rose in plain sight.
But let me start at the beginning. There’s a war I must tell you about.
I had merely been doing the dishes that day. Of course it would be the mundane things that undid me. I had been doing the dishes at 8:45 p.m. on a Friday evening in August in a year I remember only by the number of depraved politicians Terrumians swept into office. What is the name for the thing that makes an entire species want to self-destruct? What was the year? It wasn’t in the year of Ra, who traded tobacco for something-full-of-luck with the western chiefs. It wasn’t when they hung Angélique in Place d’Armes. That was 1734. It wasn’t in the years of Pedro Alonso Niño, the many Martin Luthers, Marcellus François, Olivier Le Jeune. The year the Soviet Union collapsed? The year the American empire became a spectre to itself? The terribleness of being alive only in name. Any of those years would do, of course. The point is that I was suddenly swept across a vast waterscape as though newly born. As though I had become an idea hitchhiking on another hitchhiked idea. Or a wave carrying a very big fight.
Go back. 1754. Another fervour legitimizing the end of Terrum, then called The World. Men carrying the bones of thousands in cloth sacks on their backs. Bones of other men fallen in war and bones belonging to those whom they called failed witches—those whose spells hadn’t worked to keep the fallen comrades from falling. Many with gods not so radically different from one another—even the dei ex machina. Believers were ready to strap any servant of these divergent gods to spikes. These men who would cut off the tongues of their captives for eating at the sacrificial fires, who would turn these non-believers to ashes. In those days, symbols worked to incite entire populations. I’ll never forget the year we stopped in traffic with my grandmother on the stretcher. I remember the wind against your shirt, matching the fretful sirens that October morning. That possibility of sadness as you snuck into my bedroom window in our apartment complex. Our grandmothers sharing sweet tea on sweltering summer days. What else am I to do now but remember? Why am I telling you all this? To be unafraid. I’ve found a new way to lose a memory without also losing myself. Do you have reason now to distrust that I am indeed speaking to you from the great expanse? I can’t be sure, and still I am unafraid. Perhaps this is how death forgets itself. Perhaps this is why somewhere even I am possible. What year is it now? Do the years follow each other’s return? Is it that year again where, within a few months, the whole Eastern world has or will have moved West? Many have or will have drowned? Others have or will be swept offshore, most never seen again? Look for a thing and you might find it. I could still be wrong about much of all of this.
* * *
Hudson Bay: More gravity had gone missing here.
The scientists had come. One, more moustache than chest; another in a hoverchair who could speak only with a machine. Another of the milky crew, all bent at the upper back. Each time they came with their machines and theories, but they had not figured out how to cross the threshold. I gathered that nothing quite so seamless was expected of me.
I entered a room with thick, glistening forest choking in on all sides. The Voice asked me to stand, so I stood in a garden of strange plants for hours. At one point I think I saw a monastery, a massive old thing from which sounded a bell so loud that even though I found the will to love the chirping bird or the buzzing bee, and even though I was moved to horror by the clap of a scissor bird, and even though I was momentarily given a silence pure and vast: I did not hear any of that world. The cobblestone path was long and winding and dizzying. When the bell slowed, I was in mid-chant, swung between the silences between the tolls. Then some hooded figure arrived holding a chalice. A hood was pulled over my own head. When something like light found my eyes again, I was fond of what I saw and remember walls made entirely of hieroglyphs. That was what they looked like, all floating and iridescent. Large spiders the size of tortoises were frozen in mid-air, and anacondas the length of the Yukon, drawing the boundaries of wards. Or that was what they looked like. The tortoises themselves the size of acrocanthosaurus, with spears still impaled in their sides, their unhatched eggs piled on top of their shells. Or that was what they looked like. Monkeys, too, holding erect spears as thick as popes. Or that was what they looked like. A brown lion dotting every edge or boundary in perpetual salute. Or that was what they looked like. Nothing here was close to an honest world. But it felt inevitably like home. A brutal place, but still mine.
The hooded figure stood in the shadow of the trees that ran along the top of the hill. I was standing beyond the shadow, where the water of Hudson Bay lapped in a depressing rhythm. The hooded figure began singing—vocals pushing up from an impermeable deep. I felt the vibration of bass, alto, tenor, and descant in my skin and spine. Then a large door, facing somewhere south of Churchill, opened.
A woman who seemed to walk without balance crossed the threshold. I could smell intense sunlight and passion fruit. She was trying to breathe as calmly as possible. She knew the science of breath, I could tell. For a moment, the entryway was illuminated. The woman was sculpted, beautiful, the colour of roasted walnuts. Her hair was white from root to tip, but she looked no more than twenty Terrum years. She held her ears and pinched her eyes shut as lights flashed until they faded. Then she turned back and I peered out to see what had claimed her attention. The crew of milky scientists were pointing at the spot where the woman had stood only a moment ago, beyond the threshold, now full of complaint. But I kept quiet, so I was not surprised that she did not notice me at first. When she turned back, I had moved closer to her, and she threw a fist at me. Her hand passed through me and I laughed. She stumbled back then, quieting her breath. I could tell she had already adjusted to the newness of this place. Or she could have been a most expert pretender.
I said, “Hello.”
She did not answer. I spoke again in Spanish, French, Arabic, Creole, Dutch. Nothing. “Ase,” I said. And she lit up.
She said, “Carmine Baptiste.”
But I could not hear her. I could only read her lips. She kept speaking and I shook my hand to say, Stop, I cannot read your lips, leaping as they do.
We had to figure out how to communicate. Remembering The Voice, I latched on to an instinct to shift senses. But how could I convince Carmine Baptiste to do this? I pointed to my ear and then at her mouth. She nodded. I touched the back of my hand and then her nose. She bent, it seemed by instinct, and touched her nose to my hand. I nodded. I placed my nose close to her mouth. It wasn’t until we touched, tongue-to-nose, that I understood my first few sentences.
She began speaking again. I smelled Igbo and Yoruba. Had she switched tongues? What I smelled from then on had the potency of sunlight and passion fruit.
I smelled something about her being in search of her gods, how important she felt it was to be radically one-minded—a seeker in that pursuit. I noticed her rachitic legs and I looked up and smiled each time she said ancestor.
“What about the lost gravity here? Is that not why you really came?” I smelled.
Pointing back at the threshold, she said, “They don’t need to know all of our ways. Let them believe we are who they assume us to be.”
Eventually the charge from touching organs seemed to wear off and we had to repeat the initial connection every half (Earth) hour. I tried hard to remember another time when touch wasn’t an end or weapon. Maybe this was it.
Finally, we walked away from our sure place, from the threshold we couldn’t be sure we’d find again. Past five skulls, flies frozen in mid-buzz above them, some honey-glazed flesh still hanging on earlobes, cauldrons filled with hot wax, with boiling cane sugar, with indigo pigment, with cotton-like air. Reminders, we assumed. We entered a great expanse, glistening and with every bright colour in every pattern, all networks and perfumes against amnesia. Then the kinfolk appeared. I recognized Mama G, Grandpapa, Andre, some men I’d fucked, some women I’d made love with, other double-bodied lovers. And millions and millions of other, unknowable kinfolk.
Carmine Baptiste took a cloth sack off her back—something I had not realized she carried until that moment. She laid the following on a line of salt between us and the gatherers:
A piece of copper
A piece of zinc
A drop of gold
A leaf of geranium
A coca leaf
A red carnation
A white carnation
One black rose
A piece of cinnamon bark
One bay leaf
One rock of clay
One watermelon seed
One large book. Black Elixir: poems and stories, the title read.
Carmine Baptiste stepped back. In concert, the kinfolk in the front row sprayed us with sea water from their mouths. Ase! everyone else rang out. Whenever sea water fell on the artifacts Carmine Baptiste had laid out, it turned them wild with luminescence. We all flared like the briefest of suns and the expanse vibrated, the dust full of meaning, before quieting again.
“What is the nature of the missing gravity?” I smelled Carmine Baptiste’s slow speech. Its forcefulness did not fit its volume. Carmine Baptiste seemed like a storm whose purpose was to reveal but not destroy. A storm with the precision, or rather the authority, of a sip through a straw.
The great expanse shook with the laughter of the kinfolk.
I did not feel hungry in the great expanse. And I did not see Carmine Baptiste eat, so I assumed the same of her. Touching organs was a way of enrapturing all the senses, so you did not want to do it too often. Otherwise, I would have, right in that moment, touched with Carmine Baptiste to be sure about her capacity for hunger in the expanse at the threshold of Hudson Bay, which was yet another place like The Voice—with its cycles and atmosphere and utter impossibility, all of which is fair, given the instruments of existence. What else to expect of a place that might bring the dead back to life?
The hooded figure appeared, offering some artifacts. Carmine Baptiste accepted a black tunic, leather belt, scapula, and cowl. I was suspicious. What could initiate such a thing? Still, the presence of these things and the figure’s newest vocals made us feel heroic, like a strong voice, like three or four voices in one. I had forgotten about the hooded figure during the time I’d spent with Carmine Baptiste. It was impossible to tell how much time had passed.
(The time stamp on this conveyance is a matter of protocol, not accuracy or need.)
When the bright luminescence appeared again like a sun cracking a riotous pattern in the line of salt at the boundary between the kinfolk and us, the hooded figure walked away with relentless good cheer. I wondered if we had witnessed an honest happiness. Carmine Baptiste tongued the back of my hand and slid a hand slowly up my back. Something in the act was grotesque, yet necessary for renewal. The feel of an entire minlo in each of her fingertips.
I tasted something like, “Why are you not at work?”
A sound like a car horn blew and confusion straightened my back.
By some instinct I walked up to the salt line, where I could see all the kinfolk. They were more alert now, as though I had pushed open a window so that the whole world could fall in. The kinfolk began speaking. I could not hear them, but I felt them vibrating in my skin. I watched Carmine Baptiste listen. I watched Carmine Baptiste understand.
“Tell me.” I turned to her sharply and tasted her tongue. “Tell me.”
The charge of my too-eager tongue in Carmine Baptiste’s heated mouth threw me backward. I fell, scraping my elbow on the line of salt. My arm disappeared. Carmine Baptiste told me to lie low. I kept to the floor of this place.
Another, another, another, the voices of the kinfolk pulsated.
I tasted honey and cannabis and the steely taste of spring water right from the source. Then salt, which, while harsh, was not offensive.
Montreal this time, pealed a single infantile voice.
A bright flash brought a young boy. He took a fedora off his head and pulled a folded paper out of the lining. He removed a loosely rolled paper bag from his pant pocket and sat on the line of salt.
The boy spoke: “The war of 1812 is over. I am the last to die for the British.”
The boy rolled some eucalyptus leaf into a cylindrical shape and lit the bundle, which glowed like sapphire.
The hooded figure appeared again and passed the smoking bundle around the boy’s chest three times. The boy became a carbonated mass and dissipated, and soon he reappeared on the other side of the line of salt, fully past the ancestral threshold.
He smiled at me and then gave us his back and walked into the mass of kin.
In that moment, I imagined him and Pellock Jones and Fitz Zipper and Sales Tinnitus playing cricket on the road in 1902. They’d go hunting every full moon, every new moon, when the woods were more dangerous. In one and a half minloes they’d be hard-working men. Men who no longer worked on other people’s farms. They’d have no sons, no daughters.
* * *
June 33, 4054
Woo Ma’n Zenith, ASETO’WNIN
Four Trillionth Revolution Sun, Resolution 9008443.789
c/o The Cleric, Hudson Bay
Carmine Baptiste is shaking. She needs a veil removed from over her eyes. She was often full of the uncharged calm of the grave, so what follows was forewarned. She invites me to sit with her where the line of salt thins and thins. It, too, will soon disappear.
A sign forms above the charge of the disappearing salt. It reads: This is a protection spell for the blue planet. The air thins and we begin to fall. We fall for a long time.
#June 6, 1999—Nova Scotia. Bay of Fundy.
A tidal bulge that day. Not two hours ago, the boats sat on the seafloor.
#March 9, 1989—Quebec.
A coronal mass ejection. Full province blackout. A blast of magnetism from the sun.
#October 22, 2012—New York/U.S.A., Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Bahamas.
Hurricane Sandy. Astronomical, they say.
#January 7, 1642—Shanghai, China.
The Bore Tide. She was at its edge. 19 lives lost again in August 1953.
#November 26–27, 1703—Great Britain.
The Great Storm. “A calamity so dreadful and astonishing, that the like hath not been seen or felt, in the memory of any person living in this our kingdom.”—Queen Anne
#March 11–14, 1888—East Coast, United States of America. Atlantic Canada.
The Great White Hurricane. 10–58 inches of snow. 200 seamen dead. 400 more died on land. Glitch. Sudden anomaly.
#March 18, 1925—Illinois, Missouri, Indiana, U.S.A.
Tri-State Tornado. 73 mph. 219 miles. 3.5 hours. 695 dead.
#March 12, 2004—Brazil. Passo de Torres, Santa Catarina.
South Atlantic tropical cyclone, Hurricane Catarina. 41,500 homes destroyed or damaged. 3 dead.
#August 23, 2005—Bahamas, Gulf of Mexico, Florida, Texas, New Orleans, Mississippi Goddam.
Hurricane Katrina. Category 5. Breaches in surge-protection levees. At least 1,245 dead.
#June 15, 1903—Anchorage, Turnagain Arm.
In from the Gulf of Alaska. A wild bore tide moving inland into Cook Inlet against the current. Took down a herd of moose and the labourers who were tracking them.
#April 1, 1972—Mount Redoubt.
700 lightning strikes in the volcano within 70 minutes.
#January 12, 2010—Léogâne, Haiti.
16:53 local time. Magnitude 7.0 earthquake. 316,000 dead.
#December 11, 2010—Minneapolis.
Frozen graupel. Empty Metrodome. Roof collapsed beneath 18 inches of graupel snow.
#March 10, 2011—Tōhoku and Tokyo, Japan.
The Great Tōhoku Earthquake. Massive tsunami, coastal devastation. Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident. 600 sq. km evacuated. 47,000 homeless.
#March 11, 2010—Pichilemu, Chile.
6.9-magnitude earthquake. One death by heart attack. One presidential inauguration.
We find ourselves once more at the threshold we’ve been unsure of ever finding again. Where in time? I cannot tell you. We had walked out of Hudson Bay with voices filling our heads. The crew of milky scientists had long abandoned their materials, their dogsleds and snowmobiles, their maps and machines, as though they’d left in a hurry. As though Hudson Bay had become aware that it was a place with no way in and no way out. Except by air, of course. We find a small globe playing and replaying a message along its SX exterior. The voice accompanying it I can no longer taste, but I recognize its lulls, its cadence, echoes of its gentle rove in the mouth. A percussive thing, Sapphic in its textures.
