Iron Balloons (25 page)

That is what he wanted, she said. He nodded, but felt deep fatigue hearing it all again—the concerts, the touring, the hangers-on, the band, trying to hold it together, trying to keep the discipline, trying to deal with the weakness he felt.

But he knew what was really coming, so he relaxed, stopped fighting. She would be in charge. He would let her do what had to be done. There she was, sitting beside him as she always did eventually. Even after her face wailed with the imprint of his flat palm, she still ran her fingers through his locks, massaged his scalp until he fell asleep with her. When he had fought with one of his other women, she was always there, her room smelling of sweet hair oil, always there to comfort him. It was her duty. She accepted it. He used to feel guilty about putting her through it, but her stoic acceptance left him incapable of even that. This was what they were. Now she was rescuing him again.

Germany had been a painful time. He had never walked so much. For the first time ever, he liked the cold, the way it seemed to clear the dizziness and clamminess from the fevers. They warned him about going out, but he would walk into the streets, limp his way through the crowds, breathe in the cold air, feel his body coming back to him, feel the sickness of an ague crawling through his system, while enjoying the pleasure of sudden freedom. He walked along the streets staring at faces. He kept his head covered, not in a tam, but with the hood of a jacket; he wore dark glasses and he walked with his head down. He could feel the heat leaving his body through his bare scalp. He started to stuff the hood with rags to keep the heat in. Sometimes he felt as if his life was seeping out the top of his skull. He felt his songs were leaving his brain and floating uselessly in the German air.

Nobody recognized him. Not in that small town. He was just another black man, another alien coming to take people’s jobs. The way he walked, the way his body seemed not to understand itself, assured them that he was just another confused, mixed-race drug addict.

He took in the town like a travel book—the quaint cobblestones, the fairy-tale facades, the snow-topped mountains, the tidily cropped trees, everything in order, in careful symmetry. The German talk he heard bounced off him like all the other sounds—alien, strange, and surreal. He knew that he was on the surface of things here, but what was below he did not want to think about. He had enough to contend with.

He walked through the town for days. In the room, he was always thinking that the next dose of medication, the next concoction he had to force down his throat, would break the hold this disease had on him—and if not that, then the compresses, the incense, the diet, the crystals, the shark cartilage, the chanting of dreads in the room—or even the constant piping of “Three Little Birds,” his most positive song, the doctor said, according to karmic scrutiny. He let it all happen because he wanted to live. He could not die. Joseph cyaan dead inna Babylon. He believed this with such force, such total conviction, that it made everyone around him believe, too.

The moments of clarity came in the streets. There he thought about dying, thought about the end of it all. Thirtyfive years old, and he was watching time slipping by. How could it be? No. T’ings not going to be alright. His skin still bloomed with sores, his blood staggered through his veins; he could feel the poison running through him. The thing was destroying him, making him weak, making him talk foolish all the time. But he also knew that he was a dread and that in his heart he could conquer all things.

This was before Rhea came. The chaos was a buffer of faith. The order she brought killed hope.

Rhea came from Jamaica and saw what chaos he was living in. She looked at him lying in bed with a haze of incense around him. She looked at him and began to cry. He had not even glanced in the mirror in weeks and suddenly saw in her face what he must look like. He saw in her eyes what a pathetic sight he must seem. He knew at once how she would appear at his funeral, knew what her eyes would say. Her shock and pain lasted no more than a few seconds, but it was enough. She smiled at him, and then exploded in anger at everyone else. She opened the windows, grabbed the waste-paper basket, and threw candles, incense, pills, needles, crystals, concoctions, and various warming cauldrons into it.

She would have picked him up and carried him down to the waiting car by herself, but she had help. She had brought with her three other women, friends of hers he instantly recognized. These three women came in distinct shades. There was Bessie, a deep and mellow woman, her black skin regal in its unequivocal purity. She always wore red and seemed always to be smiling, even when you could see flame in her eyes. Blossom was sepia-colored, her hair limp, seemingly wanting for life. She carried herself with the aloof diffidence of light-skinned people in a dark-skinned world. Her kerchief was blue—the color of the sea. The third, Barbara, appeared chameleon-like, matching always the mercurial patterns of her personality to the seeming changes in the shade of her skin. Everybody liked her, but no one could figure her out. They assumed it had to do with a beauty that was constructed from the contradictory qualities of symmetry and ambivalence. She was the spokesperson in times of conflict. She was able to calm things. Her color was pale green. These women were consistent about their colors—combs, scarves, broaches, bracelets, and necklaces—always something in their color.

They all lived in England, big-bosomed Jamaican women who thought very little of what he did, what she did, but they were old friends, her sisters, and they would be her sisters for life. They worked as nurses in London and were the only people she could depend on. They had the stern pragmatism of nurses, women who understood what it was like to help people who hated them, to clean up the shit and piss of people who could not stand them because of their skin color. These women were the ones who came to help her move him out. They looked disgusted as they walked through the rooms. They shook their heads and moaned deep inside their chests as if they had just witnessed the most tragic of moments.

He wanted to tell them to get the hell out of the place, wanted to call them whores of Babylon, heathens. He wanted to tell them not to look down on him and his locks and his Rasta truth. He wanted to cuss them, turn them out, bring down fire and brimstone on them. He knew their type. He knew the way they looked at him. He could feel their condemnation, their righteous sense of triumph. Not just because it was clear that his Jah was not doing much for him now, but because Rhea was the one rescuing him. She was the one they had comforted during all those years when he was showing little regard for her; she was the one who had suffered and complained to them about him; she was the one whom they had told to leave his wutliss self and move on to something better. She had left the church and turned to this Rasta foolishness because of him, over this reggae music. Now Rhea was going to rescue him.

They carried themselves with the stoic pride of women who could take anything, take everything, and then be there to punish their wayward men by loving them, by feeding them in their time of weakness. For some, it was their final and only revenge, their one moment of power. Rhea was enacting this power and they were there to help her. It had nothing to do with love. They knew that Rhea loved this man. They too loved their men. They loved the men who had done them wrong, who had left them saddled with children, who had left them for other women. That was never an issue. Their power was not in their capacity to love but in their capacity to be needed, in their capacity to forgive these men with the weight of their ancient memories, their ability to hold each detail, each betrayal, each abuse, each act of brutality, to hold it as an investment, a kind of loan to be paid back in full. This was the rite they arrived in Germany to enact with Rhea. They paid their own fares. They did not ask her to pay even though she could. They did not argue with her. They did not like the man, but they knew what had to be done.

They cleaned him and carried him down the stairs shrouded in blankets. They laid him in the car, patting him softly like a puppy, as the one in red drove them for five hours through country roads and small villages, until they reached Munich. They carried him into another hotel, with a larger suite of several rooms, a kitchenette, and a view over a lake.

They sterilized the room with steaming white towels and buckets of warm disinfectant. They dressed his sores and gave him painkillers, while Rhea made plans on the phone for all of them to travel to Miami in a few days time. They sang hymns, said nothing.

The hymns carried him back. They took him back to Jamaica, and he was too weak to fight the way they carried him to familiar places of comfort and possibility. They sang with the thick, round harmonies that could consume a room with their force, their weight. They kept guard on the door, and when the doctor came the next day to see him, they blocked him from entering. They told the doctor that Joseph was already out of the country.

The doctor left, but he was followed by Joseph’s disgruntled entourage who had been camped out in his room, in the hallway, scattered around the hotel—fucking women, smoking weed, lingering as if someone had already declared a wake. They came to the new hotel, some brandishing vulturous knives. The women stood firm. “Stab me den, nuh. Stab me,” the green woman said calmly. The men walked away. The women let Russell, Joseph’s cook, come in. Joseph would not eat from anyone else. Not even Rhea. Russell was the only one who expressed relief at Rhea’s arrival. He had felt helpless obeying the doctor’s twisted instructions about food for the dread. “If ’im gwine dead, den ’im might as well enjoy a good livity while ’im ’ave life.” Rhea agreed without agreeing. She told him to cook the food that Joseph liked. He served up mounds of mashed yams islanded in thick callaloo and okra stew, spiced with various herbs and coconut oil. Joseph ate gratefully. He trusted Russell.

Rhea told Joseph the plan. He listened. He could feel his body slipping from him. His scalp was hurting him more than ever. He knew that the sores were now all over his head. He imagined that their seepage inwards was touching his brain.

He picked up his guitar one morning and began to sing. Soon he forgot the words. He started to cry. He sat there, staring at the brown high-rise buildings and the misty skyline, and his mind was blank. He could not remember the words.

Russell sat in a chair behind him. He realized what had happened to Joseph and quickly began to recite Psalm 139. As the words came out of Russell’s mouth, Joseph began to sing with him. His fingers worked their way around the fret board and he found melodies to carry the psalm. The two continued like this, a song breaking out in the room, the sweet taste of holiness. Russell’s face had the wooden toughness of a sun-hardened sea jetty. His locks were virtually red and clumped in disarray around his head, just like the heads of his fellow bredren who fished the waters of Bull Bay on the rugged south coast of the island. His face was a lumped mass of muscle and overgrown pimples. Few recognizable expressions passed through that face. But sitting there, looking at the back of Joseph’s head, his face softened into strange liquid textures. He was crying as he spoke.

The song carried through the room, around and around in circles. The women did not look at each other. Their eyes were filled.

Lord, you have searched I and known I,
You know my sitting down and my rising up;

You understand my thoughts from a far off.

You comprehend my path and my lying down,
And are acquainted with all my ways.

For there is not a word on my tongue
But behold, O LORD, You know it altogether.

You have hedged I behind and before
And laid your hand upon I.

Such knowledge is too wonderful for I;

It is high, I cannot attain it,
It is high, I cannot attain it,
It is high, I cannot attain it.

Where can I and I go from your spirit
Or where can I and I flee from your presence?

If I and I ascend to heaven you are there;

If I and I make my bed in hell, behold, you are there.

If I and I take the wings of the morning
And dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea,
Even there your hand shall lead I,
And your right hand shall hold I.

Line after line Russell spoke, and line after line Joseph transformed into a melody. His fingers feathered the frets as his right hand brushed the strings to create a wash of harmonics. He was just barely managing to bar the chords to create clean notes. He chanted, coaxing his clumsy fingers to speak in the familiar sharp slash of the reggae chop—bright, fresh, yet always behind everything. Russell’s voice was a steady bass line making spaces and filling them, making spaces and filling them. Outside the gray of the town seemed insignificant.

“We leaving tomorrow,” Rhea said quietly. “We going home.”

Joseph nodded. He was ready.

5.

He wakes up and knows that it is night by the sound of the crickets; their sluggish noises echo in the small room. For a moment, he is sure that a cricket is in the room with him. He panics, his heart pounding at the imposition, and then his situation comes back to him like an old sick smell—he is not trying to live. A cricket, a scorpion, a lizard, a snake, what would any of those matter to him now? The tape seems to have stopped. He reaches for it, when a sudden click reminds him that it is simply turning over. Soon “Natural Mystic” grows like a web of whispers around him.

Joseph knows he has been dreaming about dying. He knows the end of the dream and yet he wants to finish the dream. He prefers to call it a dream even though he knows that he is not really sleeping. What he is doing is thinking. He is thinking so deeply that it feels like a dream. His thinking is like a prayer—a way of making some order out of his life. Or maybe it is not order he wants, perhaps he wants to recreate it.

There is a tendency to helplessness that has haunted him for years. It made him sit dumbly in the room while Melanie, his woman, virtually begged him to say, “Please stay,” by prolonging her departure, by the way her body seemed to soften despite the harshness of her words, by the wetness in her eyes. He sat there helplessly saying nothing to her. So she left.