Iron Balloons (6 page)

Up the slope in a diagonal, two shadows came from opposite directions, looked around, then lay down quickly in a chaise beside the pool.

“The smoke is okay?” she asked after being silent for a while.

“Come here often?” I replied without looking.

I lit a cigarette. But before I could insert it, I began to cough.

“Not really,” she said, coming over. “But I had to come. You know how sometimes you run from something, but as time goes on you realize you can’t run anymore? How sometimes you try and resist something and you try and try until you give in because you face the fact that you can’t resist anymore? Well, is like that. I had to come out here. I have a thing to do.”

“Anil is your boss too?” I said, pretending to be naïve. “Not just Roger John’s? Big party going on and the man giving you things to do?”

“I never said anything about anybody,” she said, shifting her weight from one leg to the next. “Is more like I’m on a sort of mission.”

“Oh, excuse me,” I said in Roger’s voice. “Lemme turn my back. Imagine, such a big house with so much space but not enough bathrooms to handle a normal fête crowd. Dem people is crosses in truth.”

“With such a serious face, who woulda think you was so dotish?” she said through a chuckle, as she put one foot up on the wall right next to me.

“If you’re on a mission,” I said, “who send you?”

I was thinking that I knew these kinds of games enough to know that all we had to do was keep it going till one person dropped the subtext and came out straight. Directness would be the cue to act surprised, then flattered, then confused.

“Who sent me?” she asked, slowly bending and straightening her leg, like she was warming up.

I brushed imaginary dust from her pumps.

“Yeah. Who sent you out here at this time of night, in a place where it have bad-johns who live in Jamaica … where they ain’t no decent men? Only rogues.”

“Your son.”

“Roger is a fella full o’ jokes, eh? You know he’s not my son, right?” I began to explain, then changed my mind. What would have been the point? The whole thing was too silly. Too complicated. She must have known his introduction was a joke.

She began to answer, then cut herself off. Fell silent. It was an active silence, one that kept demanding that we talk. I wanted to talk—for there to be talking. Talking had lifted my mood. But I didn’t quite know what to say. I was in that stage before the glands had fully warmed, and the old fears were still looking heavy and tough. I began to smoke again.

If either of us had walked away at this point, there’d be no story to tell. But maybe it wasn’t just the staying. Maybe it was the staying plus the cough. Because it was the cough that made her touch me. It was a simple pat on the back, then a resting palm, fingers kneading knots from my shoulder.

Without asking, I laid my face on her raised leg. The skin was warm and damp with perspiration and must have been smooth. I don’t know. I’d planned to wait awhile before I rubbed.

“You know, I’m not here to talk about Roger,” she said, holding the weight of my head with the muscles of her thigh.

“I know,” I said, my mind advancing to the moment when she’d let me touch her in more daring ways.

I wrapped one arm around her calf and drew it closer. She pulled away, dropped her foot, and took some hasty backward steps.

“I was sent here by your son.”

I picked up my rum glass, which had been sitting on the wall. I shook my head and drained the glass. “You wouldn’t understand.”

“How you so sure?”

I passed the glass from hand to hand. “Because … because … because there are a lot of things you don’t understand.”

“I might surprise you.”

I wheeled around and threw the glass away. “My blasted son is dead.”

There’s a story that my older brother Kenny likes to tell. Many years ago, at a party in Dominica, a woman walked up to him and said, “You know, every time I look at you I have to shake my head.”

“Yeah? And why’s that?”

“Because when you were twelve, you died—for a good few minutes—and came back to life again.”

She told Kenny that our father had brought him to the hospital to have his tonsils taken out and that during the operation he’d died. His eyes had rolled over and he’d lost his pulse.

They tried to revive him. CPR. Other things I have forgotten now. Perhaps electric shock. Then, as the doctor moved to drape him and pronounce the time of death, my brother moved his hand, flexed his wrist, I think—there’ve been many versions of the story, so it’s hard to say which one is true—breathed deeply, and began to live again.

Kenny claims to have a memory of another life. But in truth, he’s claimed a lot of things, among them that I’m going to go to hell because I’m an unbeliever, that I have a sly vindictive side, and that I did everything possible to save Pierre, my son.

Whenever he tells the story of his crossing—the words are his, not mine—he always says it had the feeling of a dream. And whenever I ask him how he knows it wasn’t just a dream, he tells me that he simply knows, that it didn’t look like a dream, that the best way he can explain it is by saying he knows it in the way he knows when a movie was shot on video or film, that it’s a deepness thing, a texture thing, a feel thing, a mood.

When he makes this point, which he always does, his voice gets a little spacey and drops a bit in pitch, and he speaks of floating somewhere above the operating theater, looking down at his body, the table being cold, the doctor and his nurses frenzied, at first frightened, then excited, their faces asking, “The boy came back to life but what the hell did we do?”

Before he’d met the woman at the party and she’d bamboozled her way into his life (he’d leave his wife of eighteen years for her and move with her to Barbados), he’d had no recollection of dying and coming back. Today he has a dream life in a beach house and his exwife does her best with my help to raise his kids.

But I must admit that Kenny has always had a certain gift. It’s not so much that he can see things. He gets premonitions. He gets the feeling that there might be things to watch for, good things or bad.

The day our mother had a fatal heart attack, he’d spent the morning calling round to see if everybody was okay. The week before I got the call that four of my plays were going to be made into CXC texts, he called to tell me it was time I word-processed my scripts. And he’d been suddenly obsessed with weeding out the family plot in the weeks before Pierre shed his bag of burdens and walked on air in a subway station in Toronto only to be grounded by a train.

“My blasted son is dead.”

I’d never said it that way before. I’d said that he’d passed on, or made his transition, or gone to a better place, but I’d never said that he was dead. Death is something for old people, something appropriately final for people who’ve gotten to a certain age, something as wide and deep as the sea at the end of a long highway. Young people aren’t made for death. Death doesn’t suit them. Doesn’t fit them right. They haven’t lived enough to earn their eulogies. They haven’t paid the price.

Since Pierre’s death six months before, I’d been trying to pay his debt, been trying to lead a better life. Trying to make it so that when my time came I’d earn the eulogy for both of us, trying to make it so that when they spoke of me they’d talk about how much I’d changed because of him, how much I’d used my life to live his dreams. Pierre was a dreamer. He wanted to do everything … make music, make movies, make art … make me understand that he was not going to be a replica of me … make peace with me, make peace with himself, with his sexuality, make sense of what it meant to have ADD … make sense of a world that refused to remain in one spot so he could focus. Could take his time and look.

When he said he thought he’d do better in college somewhere else, was I too glad to pay the fare? Should I have kept him there in Kingston, the place that my career had made my home, and watch him suffer, watch him lock himself inside his room, watch his pants drip down when he didn’t eat for days? Should I have encouraged him to try another treatment, get other drugs prescribed? Was it too easy to say yes when he said he’d like to go? Was I really trying to help him or help myself? Was I right or wrong?

“My blasted son is dead,” I said again.

“I know,” she said, and crossed her arms. “I know.”

I needed comfort. Badly.

I asked, “What’s your name, by the way?”

“Chloe.”

She came forward once again.

“How are you, Chloe?”

“I’m okay.”

“I’m Irving, by the way.”

“Nice to meet you.”

“So,” I said, “how do you know about my son?”

His death was small news even in Toronto, so I figured she’d heard about it from Pelham or Tina. People see. People ask. People talk. Chloe could have asked them what was wrong with me, why I seemed so down, and they could have said,
Poor thing, he’s lost his son
.

But instead of being reassuring, her
IknowIknow
felt glib. Pretentious. Airy-fairy cryptic. Which made me feel toyed with. Irritated. Annoyed.

“I know things,” she said.

I shoved a cigarette in my mouth. My hand was trembling. I couldn’t light it. She reached to help me and I slapped her hand away. The cigarette fell. I stomped it. Kicked what was left of it. Raised grass and dirt in the air.

“When I was fifteen,” she said, while backing off, “I was living in Blanchichessue and I caught a fever and started to burn. It took three days before my mother realized that I was really sick, that this was no ordinary thing like she was telling the neighbors for two days. By the time she could get some men to put me in a van and carry me to the clinic, they said I was dead. No pulse. No breath. When they got to the clinic, they put me in a room to wait for the doctor to come and pronounce me. But everybody knew I was dead. When the doctor came, he gave me a shot and told the nurse to give me some chicken soup when I woke. She looked at him like he was crazy and he said a single word—‘typhoid’—before explaining that although my vital signs were very weak, I wasn’t gone. That is one death. My second death was fifteen years ago. I was working as a junior secretary in the Red House when Abu Bakr and the Jamaat stormed the place and held the government hostage. That was 1990 during the coup. They shot several people. You remember that? Well, I was one of them.”

She moved toward me now with her arms crossed and went to sit again where she’d sat when she’d begun to smoke her spliff, and I walked over. She wiped her face and said, “No,” as I approached, and it was only then that I saw her tears.

“Both times,” she said softly, as her shoulders squeezed up, “my soul looked down on my body from above. I saw it all. The nurse in the country clinic. The surgeon in the theater down at General, searching for the bullets in my chest.”

Lightning looks for water. Men are drawn to women’s tears. If I dig deep enough to analyze it, I might find out why. Maybe it’s because experience teaches that a love-up is the hero’s just reward. Maybe it’s because the tears provide us with a chance to catch up on the moments we missed with our children. Maybe it’s because a breakdown is exactly what we want them to feel when we’re inside them, turning like tornados, collapsing them with overwhelming force.

But I’ve never analyzed it—even now—which means I didn’t analyze it that night. In the moment I just knew I wanted to hold her close and tell her what she needed to hear to make the crying stop, whatever that might have been … to make her pull herself together, to make her feel the world was alright, to hold her, perhaps, as I wished I’d held Pierre the last time he cried before he made that leap of faith, chancing that there had to be a better place on the other side of life.

“It’s going to be okay,” I whispered, in the way I should have whispered to my own sweet boy. And before I knew it, I’d held my arms toward her and she’d stood and come to me and I’d held her close. She was heavy in my arms, as if her legs had lost their strength to fully hold her up, and her body shook and trembled like there wasn’t just a single Chloe in her floral dress but several Chloes rolling round and crawling round, scrounging for a place where they could rest, could fit, be safe, find home.

“Your boy wants to talk to you,” she said through tears. “He wants me to connect you. He trusts me cause I’ve been to the other side. He sent me here to you.”

By then she was no longer Chloe to me. The more I held her and thought of Pierre, the more I felt her changing, the more I felt her changing into him, the more I needed her to be him, for my sake, just so I could tell him that I loved him, that I loved him so, and that it was my fault, my fault, my frigging fault for not trying harder to know, to feel, to understand, to accept, to protect, to soothe, to query, to challenge, to fight, to encourage, to permit.

“Oh my boy,” I whispered. “Oh my sweet boy. It’s okay. You can tell me anything. Anything. You have my ear. My ear and my heart belong to you.”

“First of all,” she said, “your son wants you to know that he is in a place of incredible beauty. So beautiful that he finds it hard to describe. You would never believe it. More than that, he is surrounded by a group of loving, intelligent souls who are taking care of him, so you should not be worrying about where he is or what is happening to him. He’s fine. He’s more than fine. He’s happy.”

I wanted to let her go. Her words felt inauthentic. She was struggling with the role. But I held her still. She was all I had. My blasted son was dead.

“Thank you,” I told her. “Thank you. Thank you, darling. Thank you.”

“Next, he wants you to stop beating up yourself with guilt. What happened was meant to happen.”

I eased my hold on her. Fear rushed in between us, and I squeezed her tightly once again.

“No. No. No,” I said. “Don’t say that. Don’t say that. No, son. It was not supposed to happen. That’s not how it’s supposed to be at all. You were supposed to grow old and carry my casket to my grave and cry for me, my love, then smile as you claimed your inheritance, all the things I left for you—the shoes in which I married your mother, the life insurance payback, the playbills signed by Derek Walcott, the house on the hillside in Dominica, all my artwork, the steel penknife which my father said had cut the tangled ropes on one of the
Titanic’
s lifeboats, all the old kaiso LPs, my personally autographed copy of
Giovanni’s Room
.