The Laboratory of Love, page 15
For a week, search parties move in rows across the fields, jungle, brush. Their sticks beat the earth, punish it for concealing Sister Bridget. You can hear whistles shrieking like alarmed birds in the distance, you see beams playing through the dark. The dogs fail to pick up any scent; a body is reluctant to be found. When not even a scrap of deep blue cloth will show itself, everyone except Lily and me gives up looking. Only we know that Sister Bridget remains alive and well and near. She curls to nap beneath elephant ferns. She sucks stems like straws to slake her thirst. She nibbles berries and insects and leaves. Each day she becomes slightly less lost. Faint tolling from the world below can still make Sister Bridget shrink; yet slowly she is growing more frightened of retreating irreversibly beyond the sound of the bell than of being returned to the place from where it calls.
Sometimes Mitch claims it was his plan for us to end up in Africa all along. From the day he removes MJ, Lily, and me from Brale, BC, while we wander the world for several seemingly aimless years, my father knows that our journey leads inevitably to this cinder-block house with a tin roof and mesh-screen windows. In spite of too many damn Brits in the vicinity, the spot will be A-okay for his lucky gang. As long as we stay out of the clutches of the Catholics, Mitch always adds. At first, my brother and sister and I do seem to glimpse the mission’s score of Sisters only from a safe distance. Filing to or from their residence that hovers high above the church. Dangling rakes and hoes over shoulders like crosses, singing guttural hymns to stay inspired and in-step. We learn their names when they appear at the door to give Lily the skirts and blouses donated in Holland to clothe a little black girl. Even when my sister and I start climbing up to have Sister Elsa dig chiggers from our feet with a heated needle, we fail to notice that one of the other nuns is trying to communicate with us. After our mother arrives from Canada then returns too soon; after Ginger grows dissatisfied with a pet’s tame existence and runs off to join the pack of wild dogs that prowls the brush beyond the mission; after MJ’s chameleon, Gary Cooper, transforms into one more loss inflicted by this landscape: only then does Lily realize that Sister Bridget has been sending us signals from the start. We’re not the only ones here against our will, she silently says. Not the only ones who dream of escape. The signs are so subtle they still elude me after my sister points them out. All I see is an inscrutable face framed by a white wimple. Paper skin that must be held near the flame of Lily’s fierce gaze before a message appears on its blank surface.
Hold on.
Stay strong.
Don’t give up.
Lily clutches onto hope of finding the lost nun as tightly as she once did a belief that, no matter how much time might pass, we’d cross paths with MJ’s chameleon one day. We would recognize Gary Cooper by the string embedded in his neck, where skin has grown over one end of what was originally a leash. On the Ngondo hills, Lily remains alert to everything that tries to camouflage itself from our sight; everything the world would take away. Her grey eyes narrow into a permanent squint as, despite their scrutiny, elements of the landscape one by one become lost and never found. Sometimes, as if faith were a habit she isn’t able to break, Lily still speculates that Ginger bares his fangs among the pack of wild dogs snarling across the sisal fields. As we walk to buy a shilling of cane from the sugar man down by the road, she might mention: “We’ll find Gary Cooper when we least expect to.” A moment later, my sister idly adds: “It’s funny how that works.”
Lily no longer suggests, even casually, that our mother is going to fly to us from Canada again. Not after what happened the first time, not after Ardis wasn’t well enough to leave the clinic for a second scheduled visit. “Why not?” my sister used to shrug, about the chances of a repeat trip, as though all the missing might materialize with ease. Didn’t Ardis just need to buck up in order to get better? Didn’t our father still say it was all in her mind? I misunderstand Mitch. I believe he means that every facet of our African existence, all of it, is my mother’s fantasy. This experience upon the slopes of the Ngondo hills occurs solely inside her skull. When Ardis is cured, a diseased dream will end.
“We’re going to look for Gary Cooper,” Lily fibs in the dim bedroom, while the sun beyond beats another afternoon into submission, forces our brother to remain out of the glare again. MJ’s head started to hurt when we arrived to Tanzania. Or maybe it was after we left Spain; maybe before waving goodbye, so long, to France. As his headaches worsen, fewer of Lily’s and my adventures include our brother. We return to the cinder-block house to find him silent beneath the sheets. We share less of where we’ve been, what we’ve done. We don’t tell MJ the truth about Sister Bridget, before she vanishes or after. Too many afternoons spent inside have made our brother just like all the others, according to Lily. “Gary Cooper’s probably out there in plain sight this very minute,” she speculates with an airy wave. Her other hand flutters a paper scrap to dry the lemon ink on it.
“I bet we just can’t see him.” MJ shifts to face the wall, leaves Lily and me to ascend through air that cools as we pass the classroom where Mitch barely pretends to believe the truth of what he teaches to rows of enraptured Africans. Our father never worries where we explore or how far we roam. He doesn’t fret over undone correspondence lessons that gather dust every dry season, mildew during the rains. He isn’t able to ask Lily why she needs yet another lemon from the Morogoro market. Our father has his own secrets. They swallow him like hungry flowers in the dark.
Mist would suspend itself above the river, drift down to make Lily and I shiver where we spy. Sister Bridget rocks like she’s riding a camel. Her habit twists around her knees. One hand reaches up to urge the slow beast on. She shudders, it stops. When her eyes open, maybe they’re surprised not to discover some dune-filled desert far away from here. Every Morogoro morning can be as startling as that. Just ask Gary Cooper.
Now Lily drops any number of notes at seemingly random intervals during each day’s search for Sister Bridget, as if delivering the mail of an unmarked postal route. She no longer worries that messages might fall into the wrong hands. I’m no longer sure whose hands they are meant for. Lily has never liked to explain every little thing. Paper scraps proliferate in the undergrowth like a white flower unique to this tropical forest. Unshared secrets accumulate. Stumbling across them, we’re surprised at evidence that we’ve been here before.
Only Sister Elsa stays on at the top of the mission, only for a while. The other nuns are sent back to Holland immediately after Sister Bridget disappears. It isn’t safe for them here anymore, frowned Father Franklin. No quantity of incense inhaled behind stained-glass windows can provide complete protection; not even sweet Jesus is able to keep all danger from everyone. I picture a score of blue-robed nuns clomping in wooden shoes beneath windmills or with ruddy cheeks pacing amid the tulips, happy to be back where they belong. With a covert glance at Lily, I wonder if you must lose a sister before you can go home. Together we approach an abandoned structure where geckoes wait to be brushed from walls, scorpions shooed from the shadows. We peer through frayed screen into the porch nuns paced with hands folded like delicate secrets inside their habits, with tasselled cords swaying from their waists. They would click wooden beads and murmur prayers and beseech sweet Jesus to save the little black children. They never bother with Lily and MJ and me; we make all the nuns shake their covered heads. In the end, even Sister Bridget knows we can’t be rescued from this dream. It would be pointless to include us in her plan to escape. Futile to invite us along. “It’s every man for himself,” Lily says, clutching her scabbed knees and casting a slanted glance toward the other side of our bedroom, where MJ whimpers.
Lily will no longer tell me what she writes in lemon ink. “The usual,” she evasively answers. I suspect heat would reveal a terse plea for salvation. Conveyed not through language or even code, but through hieroglyphics, Rorschach symbols.
The sugar man says his nephew glimpsed Sister Bridget in Dar es Salaam. She was buying pigs’ feet in the market, claimed the boy. Mitch calls that an African story. Like the one our houseboy tells about slaughtered children who transform into spirits that haunt the Ngondo hills with slit throats streaming endless blood. About sparks ancient women send into the charcoal night that return as butterflies in morning, or as firefly atoms to decorate some future evening; in both cases, as vivid as Gary Cooper at his most brilliant—posed against the colours rioting Mitch’s gardens, say. Just before each sudden nightfall, the end of the sky shades into the exact blue of Sister Bridget’s habit. Once more I count the million stars that spangle my mother’s mind.
I am forgetting her serene expression and the timbre of her voice. She never spoke to us directly; she was silent in our presence; conversation with another nun would break off when we neared. Only a handful of Sister Bridget’s words lingered long enough or carried far enough for Lily and I to be surprised by how deeply they were pitched, how roughly delivered. The last time we followed her up the river path, as if she knew we were there, Sister Bridget looked over her shoulder with the serene expression that is fading from my memory like stars before each dawn.
“We never asked her to take us with her,” Lily suddenly says. Every day we climb higher into the jungle; every day we push deeper into its secret places. Every day I wonder if my sister and I
will become lost ourselves before we can find anyone. Now fireflies are always out by the time we return to the cinder-block house where our father lingers with the last light in his gardens, where our older brother stays as quiet as he can in bed. “She would have taken us if we had,” Lily states in a voice that sounds raised to defend Sister Bridget against some unspoken charge. Of abandonment, of carelessness, of neglect.
Lily glares out the bedroom window when another rainy season arrives. Like our mother would do, she bites her lower lip. A fleck of blood sticks to a tooth. Sister Bridget must be impatient to be found now that she’s no longer lost. Waiting alone in the dripping jungle day after day must be tedious. Soon she won’t be able to resist slipping down to the mission after dark. Her bare feet will step around mirrors of puddles, crush mica shards gleaming on the road. She peers through a mesh screen beyond which nuns slept in neat rows beneath mosquito nets. She descends farther to circle the church, to skulk outside our similarly unlighted house. “Who is it?” Lily wonders when knocking wakens her then me. “Who’s there?” I hear my sister ask the darkness. It’s only MJ hitting his head against the wall above his bed, trying to stop what hurts at night that way. It only sounds like knuckles rapping on a door that won’t open. It’s locked; no one’s home; someone has lost the key. “Who is it?” Lily asks, night after rainy night, though there’s never an answer.
“She would have been able to reach anywhere,” Lily says, “if she’d brought us with her.” My sister’s voice takes on a bitter tone whenever she mentions the missing nun now. Lying awake to listen for knocking in the night has made her as pale as MJ, as all the others. “We know there’s safety in numbers,” my sister adds ironically. As if we could still believe that old dictum of our father’s, after first Ginger and then MJ deserted our already thin ranks. Reduced a supposedly lucky gang’s number to a vulnerable two.
More and more I wonder if Sister Bridget ever wanted Lily and me to part a curtain of green and find her. Maybe she has concealed herself a hundred times behind bamboo, just as often held breath until we’re gone from a guava grove. Maybe we should leave her alone. Stop pretending someone’s lost when she’s hiding. I am several decades from understanding that the desire to be found and longing to remain concealed can co-exist in permanent tension. “You’re just like all the others,” Lily would say if I shared my doubt. She bickers with MJ while the sky leaks too heavily for exploring outside. Once again she blames our brother for losing Gary Cooper. Her mouth twists in anticipation of the next tart words she will lick up, swallow, turn into a secret inside herself. No one will ever know. Three tolls of the church bell command the roof to stop drumming. Then my sister and I climb past the nunnery, ascend above the mango tree in a recurring waking dream. We move through steaming ferns that immediately leave us drenched. My eyes are no longer alert for a flash of blue. They fix on Lily’s push through thick green in front of me, her quick step over gleaming vine and root. By the end of the rainy season, we’re not looking for Sister Bridget anymore, it seems. Lily is trying to escape from me, instead.
“We’ll find her tomorrow,” my sister promises when MJ starts to moan in perfect time to the knocking of his head against the wall. As if that dubious assurance could be the certain answer to each question contained within this dark room and the simple solution to every mystery prowling an obscure world beyond. At once, our brother falls silent. “Her?” he asks, perhaps thinking Lily means our mother; unaware that after three months Sister Bridget still waits to be discovered. She has long ripped her wimple into bandages for cuts and scrapes inflicted by an outdoor existence. A matted tangle, the very corn silk we always imagined, falls half way down her back. Soon her blue habit will become tattered beyond wearing. Soon there will be sightings of a spirit dressed in leaves and vines, with enigmatic symbols painted in berry juice on its parchment skin. “I meant him,” Lily corrects herself. “I meant Gary Cooper.” For a moment, Lily’s words confuse me as much as they must do MJ. At eight, murky zones of my mind already swarm with a vast cast of the vanished. Take your pick, Gary Cooper might say. I wonder who or what my sister will decide we need to look for next. I don’t realize that for our lucky gang this is only the start of searching. I can’t foresee a time when it will be each other we try to find, MJ and Lily and I. Only a quarter-century later, here in this derb at the end of the world, while I lie awake and listen for a three a.m. knocking on the door—still, even now, after all these silent years—do Sister Bridget and Gary Cooper become linked in my memory. The blue nun leads the green lizard by a string leash toward the river. Say the path curves where a leaning tree holds a secret, where the scent of mangos and lemons mingle. Say the unlikely pair disappears around that third bend. Or they’re right before me, camouflaged or in plain view or written in invisible ink upon paper air. I just can’t see them. I am unable to see through acidic darkness to where MJ and Lily breathe. The knocking starts again. Whoever stands outside the closed door still won’t go away. It’s funny how that works.
Part Four: How Much the Heart Can Hold
Nothing human is alien to me.
—Terence
“Heauton Timoroumenos”
Rorschach III : Ventriloquism
At the back of the furnace room, the tin can lurks in mute darkness. It is large and heavy and painted pale green, with silver showing at the dents. The tight lid eases off with a genie’s sigh. An acrid aftermath rises from inside; the scent of smoke mixes with those of oil and dust. I dig deep into my inheritance: pale cat’s-eyes, opaque agates, gaudy globes. The glass warms to my touch, burns and moans and whispers. Bubbles burst inside my head. The furnace beside me switches on and the earth trembles beneath my feet.
My uncle swallowed too much smoke before my birth, leaving behind his hockey sticks and baseball gloves and a universe of stunted spheres. In photographs his face looks pinched, unlike those of boys who in springtime lay stomachs against muddy grass, push hair from winter-white foreheads, with a squint send one more marble twirling toward its target. I got you! they crow at the click of glass on glass. They spin me across the field until the world revolves dizzily, until I can’t see straight. Crystal can’t help clouding. My agate eyes fog beneath some Billy’s breath.
We never visit the cemetery on the hill where my uncle and grandparents practice patience. Driving us past, my father stares straight ahead; rows of white crosses blur by. The wiring of the Christmas tree lights was faulty; one night, my grandfather forgot to unplug the cord. Since his wife dug herself into the graveyard seven years ago, he and his youngest son have been sleeping in the basement. Five older children, my father and his sisters, are already out of the house. Now empty rooms crackle overhead. Gaily wrapped presents turn brown then black beneath the Douglas fir. Smoke steals down stairs. They find the old man halfway between his bed and the window. The boy appears asleep. A lucky marble hides in one of his clenched hands.
They give me his name. Donald, they say, and his voice emerges from my mouth. Dummy, they taunt when he refuses to move my lips. My bed is in the basement, beneath the surface of the earth. The world twirls slowly; now I’m older than the other Donald ever was. I grip a favourite marble and sniff smoke. Without moving lips, I chant childish prayers; seven miles away, they ascend through the graveyard’s skin, muffled by snow as white and clean as the bones it blankets. I have passed through flame, I am as fearless as the phoenix.
