The Laboratory of Love, page 14
The headaches occur more often, except during the rainy season. Say for those moist months the tin roof is pounded and beaten instead of my brother’s skull. Say drumming water can substitute for drumming blood. Subdued by a liquid din, MJ, Lily, and I play inside; beyond the window, red dirt hemorrhages downhill. Untouched correspondence lessons accumulate in the corner. Mitch has become too preoccupied to ask what we’ve done all day when he returns home from teaching. Africa is not working out quite as he planned. MJ, Lily, and I embark on another round of the Somewhere game while in the kitchen the houseboy rattles pots in counterpoint to rain’s percussion. Rogacion won’t come into our room even when MJ’s okay. He is spreading stories through the village, according to Mitch’s sources there. “Those damn Brits sure did their job on the fellow,” my father comments, when the stiff houseboy won’t unbend enough to squat with him in the dust or mud. What Rogacion says occurs inside the cinder-block house could only take place at night, when he goes home after making supper. When he’s not there.
Each headache leaves my brother paler and quieter than the one before. Each requires more time to be recovered from. “The last thing he needs is an audience,” explains Lily, as we ascend without MJ into the jungle where Sister Bridget is lost, where the missing nun waits to be found. My sister believes that MJ doesn’t want us to witness how, more and more, he counts beneath his breath when it gets bad. If the right number is reached, the hurting might end. Nor does our brother wish to hear where we’ve been and what we’ve done without him. His face turns to the wall when Lily tells about climbing to the top of the mission to ask Sister Elsa to remove our chiggers. To dig out with her heated needle the parasite that burrows through skin to lay eggs in the rich, warm flesh below. “You must roll them out,” stresses the last nun left since Sister Bridget vanished and the rest returned to safe Dutch soil. She grips a foot in one hand, while the other aims her needle at the red swelling that betrays an intruder’s point of entry. Sister Elsa swivels her wrist subtly, turns the silver sliver like she’s opening a dangerous door, withdraws the necklace of miniscule, transparent beads. She holds this shining string up to light, swipes at her dark blue habit to clean it off the needle. Intently, not flinching, Lily observes as the operation is performed on her. When it’s my turn, I close my eyes and hear Sister Elsa intone: “You must not allow the chain to break.” Her guttural accent makes these words of the sole remaining nun sound like ancient, sacred law; they linger as a warning in the almost-emptied structure’s air. If a chigger string breaks while being removed, my sister and I know, eggs left inside the skin will hatch there. They’ll grow larger and swell fatter. They’ll find their way into your blood. You could lose a limb, as some of Mitch’s village fellows leglessly attest. That’s why we aren’t supposed to go barefoot in the dirt, Lily and I. That’s why, when we do, we have to climb to the nunnery at least once each dry season. Like Mitch, MJ never gets chiggers. My brother isn’t outside enough, I think. Not sufficiently to be infiltrated by this landscape. Mitch claims it’s because his oldest boy has skin as tough as his. At other times, it’s because they’re the dark-haired duo. The lucky pair.
Between each headache, my brother looks on-guard against the next. Strained by the suspense of when it might begin, alert for the first twinge of returning pain. MJ becomes listless even when he says he’s okay. He’s unable to lead our trio during increasingly brief respites from what’s wrong. Was he this quiet on Ios? Wasn’t he livelier in Lisbon? Or was MJ crushed from the start by the weight of being Mitch’s oldest boy? Paled by that swarthy shadow? I can’t remember and Lily won’t say. My sister doesn’t like to discuss anything before Africa. “It’s the moon and the stars,” she mentions, when we’re walking back from the river with lucky frogs after dark, once again shoeless in spite of chiggers. Lily means that the headaches imitate the rhythm of lunar cycles; come and go according to the whims of Pisces, the dictates of Virgo. My sister cranes her neck to study intricate, illuminated patterns spread above. “It’s going to get worse,” she predicts.
Lily shakes the thermometer, frowns in our father’s doorway. “He needs to go to the doctor,” she says again—as if it wasn’t, in part, to move beyond the reach of the quacks that we left Brale, BC, in the first place. To escape the damage they inflicted on Ardis. Treatment that turned her into a long-term inmate of a cold Canadian clinic. Transformed her into a mother lost at the other side of the world. My father looks at Lily, looks back at his maps. “It’s all in MJ’s mind,” he explains, tracing a finger slowly across the Aegean Sea. “He just needs to buck up.” The thermometer is missing the next time Lily sends me running for it. Now we have no instrument to measure the heat of the fire burning our brother’s brain.
Sound hardly ever emerges from our room while Rogacion is around; dry season or wet, it still isn’t as bad during the day as after dark. MJ’s first cry makes the houseboy freeze each time. He leaves the kitchen, sets out on the village path. Tells more things that make African tongues click against teeth as Lily and I pass. When Rogacion returns several days later, it’s freshly apparent that he never approaches within six feet of my brother. Eventually, Rogacion won’t wash MJ’s sheets, clothes. Lily and I scrub them in the sink, hang them on the line. Mitch doesn’t have to know everything, my sister says about this secret.
Then the headaches seem gone for good. Glaring sunlight doesn’t bother my brother after he finds Gary Cooper. He ties a string around the chameleon’s neck and leads him all afternoon through Mitch’s gardens. Our father is satisfied that once again he’s been right. His oldest boy has bucked up, just like the old man said he would. “It was in your head the whole time,” he repeats. A moment later, my father adds: “I knew you’d be better once we reached Africa.” As though we came to this continent expressly to search for a cure for MJ. As though his condition preceded our arrival, rather than the other way around. My father watches MJ promenade his pet with an intentness that suggests a boy can camouflage himself from sight as easily as a lizard. In the end, it’s Gary Cooper who vanishes. The string around his neck frays then breaks. He slips away to freedom, where survival will depend on luck, and on his skin’s ability to be both changeable and tough.
After he loses Gary Cooper, MJ’s headaches are worse than when Ardis flew across the world to us during our second African year, when she fails to arrive for a scheduled visit three years after that. I waken to the sound of my brother’s head knocking the wall above his bed. Let me in, let me out, let me reach the right number. One night it’s noise from beyond the cinder-block house that disturbs my sleep. MJ’s and Lily’s beds are empty. I’m drawn across the rough grass by sound I can’t identify, by a voice I can’t place. Need to know pulls me deeper into Mitch’s tangled shrubs. My brother is curled into a ball in the dirt, beneath the frangipani. He’s naked, growling. A stick is clenched between his teeth, in his foaming mouth. Lily squats nearby. Satisfaction shines on her face as I retreat unseen to the house. In the morning, I might believe it was just another dream if flecks of red dirt didn’t nestle in the corner of my brother’s left eye, in the lobe of his right ear, between two front teeth. “I slept just like a log,” Lily yawns luxuriously.
Mitch begins to mention his Aunt Lil. He remembers her fits. The frozen blood, the spells, the special sight. He peeks across the supper table to where MJ droops above his untouched cassava, while Lily complains about her fate as our most eccentric ancestor’s namesake. “It could have been worse,” Mitch says. Instead of explaining the comment, he glances at MJ again, winces as though his own head hurt.
Mitch hopes a sojourn at the Mombasa shore will make everyone A-okay, but his gang hasn’t bucked up by its return to the Ngondo hills in time for the summer rains. Rogacion fails to materialize at the kitchen door after we get back. He’s left the area, say some of Mitch’s sources; according to others, he died suddenly in our absence. No one else will come from the village to save the cinder-block house from assuming an aspect of neglect that deepens each rainy day. MJ remains inside throughout this season, whether his head hurts or not. Or because it always hurts. Five years have thickened the bougainvillea that Mitch planted around the cinder-block house. Leaves press wet against window screens, block sight of the world beyond, make our already dim bedroom murkier. An oversweet smell hangs ever-present in damp air; it won’t wash off my brother’s sheets, clothes, skin. MJ never whimpers across the dark room anymore. He doesn’t growl through the dark night again. His head no longer knocks numbers against the wall. Or maybe I don’t hear it. Maybe the rain’s too loud. Maybe I don’t waken. Maybe I have already fallen into an enchanted slumber from which I will always struggle to escape.
To be heard above the rain, Father Franklin has to pound our door. Mitch has failed to show up to teach again. “He took MJ to the doctor in Dar es Salaam,” says my sister, as though the white Peugeot was not drowning in the drive. As though MJ wasn’t in bed in our room down the hall. As though lately our father hadn’t been wandering out in the wet almost every day. The same too-sweet smell that haunts MJ will steam from Mitch upon his soaked return. Again he’ll shake off raindrops and look toward the door shut between his oldest son and himself. Again nervousness will seem to shade into fear as my father towels his dark hair dry. “It’s Africa,” he says, coming in from the deluge one afternoon, as though Lily and I should understand that these recent days have been spent searching for the cause of his oldest boy’s suffering. Here is the diagnosis that would elude the quacks; a source of pain whose removal could thwart Sister Elsa’s needle. For once Mitch shares a revelation without a ringing tone of triumph. The tin roof falls silent, as if rain has halted at my father’s announcement rather than commenced an ordinary four o’clock caesura. Sudden quiet always feels unsettling; first words spoken after its arrival sound too loud. “Where are the suitcases?” asks my father in a voice seemingly amplified into a shout. “And where are the trunks?”
In Copenhagen, Jakarta, and Rio de Janeiro, my brother doesn’t demur when Mitch declares that our departure from Morogoro cured his oldest boy. He smiles wanly when Mitch states that ever since the whole team has been tip-top, A-okay, dandy. My brother won’t share the glance Lily and I exchange when the leader of our gang brags about its toughness. As we drift farther and farther from the Ngondo hills—without, it seems, ever reaching anywhere—Mitch starts to imply that the damn Brits drove us away. Or else it was the Catholics who made us leave Paradise. “Or the chiggers,” Lily sarcastically suggests. She and I wear anklets of pin-sized scars that fail to fade even as our bleached heads darken. Africa got inside our brother and burrowed so deep that even Sister Elsa’s needle could not roll it out cleanly. “It’s the chiggers,” MJ grimaces when no longer able to conceal that, whether or not they ever went away, the headaches have definitely returned. This happens after we finally make it back to Canada. In Brale, BC, it’s not so easy for Mitch to prevent the quacks from getting at his oldest boy. He tries to suppress satisfaction when their tests fail to reveal what’s wrong and their drugs don’t succeed in easing what hurts. Lily and I try to express surprise when MJ disappears at seventeen. Two years later, Mitch vows to bring my brother back home, vanishes with unmistakable finality himself. After the lucky pair has left, and my turn arrives to abandon Lily and Ardis to their uniquely private, similarly painful Brale devices, I’ll wonder if any of us managed to escape Africa unscathed after all. Without abandoning one of our own, without breaking the chain, without leaving a limb behind. In my Santa Cruz or Seville or Sidi Ifni dreams, during an exile’s anodyne sleep, the cinder-block house has become entirely swallowed by bougainvillea, transformed into an oversweet secret. The bedroom at one end is as obscure in day as in night. Sounds of pain burrow through the dark, penetrate pores, sliver through flesh to multiply over and over in my poisoned depths.
What the World Takes Away
After everyone else stops, we still search for Sister Bridget. “They didn’t look hard enough,” explains Lily. “They gave up too soon.” My sister insists that she and I will find the missing nun up where jungle distills Africa into a cool green element you can taste, mist you feel on your face; there beyond vines twisting and coiling into letters of some secret alphabet, beneath the mossy clouds. Her blue habit is soiled and torn after one week outside. She has lost her rope sandals. A wimple no longer looks white. Idly, purely from custom, Sister Bridget fingers her rosary, counts beads beneath her breath in Dutch. Her expression appears enigmatic and serene at the same time. You can’t tell whether she wants to be found and brought back, or whether she’d prefer to stay missing. Only Lily and I realize she became lost trying to escape. Only Lily knows why we would hunt someone whose flight from here I thought we always wished for. “Of course, she won’t be the same,” is my sister’s sole comment concerning the discovery we hope to make, who it is we’ll find. Lily gnaws her lower lip; a fleck of red sticks to a tooth. “No one could expect that. The jungle changes you.”
From our hiding place behind bamboo, Lily and I would watch her emerge from the nunnery at the top of the Morogoro mission then pause to ensure this exit had not been detected by the sisters still communing mutely inside with God. The screech of a parrot in a coco palm lifts her eyes, impels her up the path that climbs into the jungle. Or the church bell will make Sister Bridget move away when its pealing floats up this high. A dark green tangle swallows a deep blue habit after twenty steps, allows Lily and I to follow unnoticed. The third twist in the trail is marked by a bent mango tree. A hollow in its trunk holds another note for Sister Bridget to find. She passes the spot without a glance; she’ll come back after dark. It would be unsafe for her to pluck our message from hiding for a quick glance in daylight, as it’s always too risky to carry any of them away. Help is near, this one invisibly vows. You have to hold lemon-juice ink near to direct heat—say, to the candle flame that will illuminate Sister Bridget’s journey back here through the dark—to see what it says. To an unknowing eye, the scrap of paper appears blank. Waiting to receive a communiqué, rather than to impart one. “They’re all she has to hold onto,” says Lily, whenever we substitute a fresh message for one that has already given strength. At first it puzzled me how lemon words revealed by the heat of Sister Bridget’s candle could fade from sight by the time my sister and I remove them for careful disposal. Why those paper scraps appear innocently blank, not dangerous at all, when Lily burns them at the far end of our father’s garden. Then I understand. It would be equally risky for Sister Bridget to leave an exposed message in the hollow where she found it as to slip one into a pocket of her habit for a souvenir. Evidence mustn’t fall into the wrong hands. No one can know. At midnight, beside the mango tree that bends where a trail twists for the third time, Sister Bridget holds a message her grey eyes have just absorbed in one hand and the candle that revealed it in the other. Her flame relieves the surrounding darkness only enough to throw a confusion of too many suggestive shadows. Only enough to draw nocturnal jungle life to watch and wait just beyond the feeble glow. Sister Bridget closes her eyes, moves her lips. She is reciting a silent prayer or mutely repeating our several words of faith and hope. Before returning the scrap of paper in her hand to its hiding place, Sister Bridget licks our secret citrus secret from it. Her mouth twists as she erases one more tangy clue.
The messages are always short and simple.
You’re not alone.
Sister Bridget knows little English. She must memorize our words on the spot.
We know.
No need to sign our names. Sister Bridget will realize it’s us.
We understand.
Who else could it be?
“Which nun is she?” Lily asks the African inspector who appears at our door while the church bell appeals for darkness to deliver what it withholds. Although Sister Bridget is discovered missing before dawn, Father Franklin waits until dusk to alert the police in Morogoro. The next day they return with dogs. Lily and I hear distant barking as we discover the hollow of the mango tree to be empty for the first time. Sister Bridget has taken our last note with her, along with a candle stub and a box of matches.
Don’t lose hope.
As if that were something you could misplace, something you might not find again.
It falls from your pocket as you rise higher above the world; it hides in a snarl of fronds and leaves.
Shines like an alert eye through shadow. Winks through pools of green.
“She’s watching us,” says Lily when we reach the old teak forest, on the other side of the river crossed on bridges of fallen trees. My sister’s nostrils quiver, dilate, flare. She can smell how near it is, what we’re looking for.
Sister Bridget was just another Dutch girl who skips along dikes and skates like Hans Brinker across frozen canals before the Catholics kidnapped her to the Ngondo hills of Tanzania. Father Franklin forces her to wear a blue habit with a white collar and white wimple; Sister Elsa straps rope sandals to her feet. Immediately, the captive realizes how difficult escape will be. She knows little English and less Swahili. She doesn’t possess a passport, a ticket, one East African shilling. The other nuns rarely let her out of sight. Sister Bridget counts rosary beads and inhales incense and moves her lips in obedient prayer. She paces a long, narrow porch while the jungle pants promises, shrieks invitation beyond. She sustains a serene expression. Twelve dutiful years will lull the mission into forgetting it holds a hostage. Then it’s simple for Sister Bridget to slip from the nunnery during afternoon hours meant for solitary devotion. A bent mango tree always appears at the third twist of the path. The path always leads to the Ngondo River. On a wide, flat shelf of stone carved by the cascade, within its liquid roar, Sister Bridget rocks herself away again.
