Iron Balloons (7 page)

I began to find it hard to breathe. Like I was holding her too hard. It was fear. Fear like a blade trying to get between us. Like wind prying shingles from a roof.

A car had backfired on the plain and I’d been yanked out of the movie I was making in my mind, the one in which I was the loving father cradling his son, and the sounds of the world rushed inside my head … a mix of heartbeat, music, tree frogs, crickets, wind, and distant human voices … and I became aware of myself as I was, a desperate man holding a broken woman whom he wanted to die and come back as his son.

I saw myself like I was not myself, but another Irving watching from above. Or so I wanted to think. So I wanted to believe. And I willed myself to believe it, and as soon as I did this, I could ask her to speak to him.

“Pierre,” I whispered, “if you’re here, let me know. Are you here?”

A hand slipped up my back and cupped my head. A voice said, “Yes.”

“How do I know?”

“It’s me. Yes, it’s me.”

“Me who?”

“Daddy?”

“Yes, son?”

“No. It’s not Daddy. It’s not Daddy.”

“Yes, it’s me. Yes it’s me.”

“No. It’s not Daddy.”

“Yes, Pierre. It’s me. Please believe me. It’s me.”

“It’s not Daddy. It’s not Daddy. It’s Dad.”

“God bless you. God bless you. God bless you, my son. Yes. God bless you. Yes. It’s Dad.”

“Dad? Dad?”

“Yes, Pierre.”

“I love you, Dad. Stop worrying. It’s over. Don’t bother to try and live for me. You can’t live for me. Move on with your life. It’s over, Dad. It’s finished. It’s done.”

I stood there holding Chloe for a very long time. How long, I’m not sure. But long enough for Pelham and Tina to feel they had to come and find me.

It was an awkward scene: Chloe and I were hugging each other in silence with our eyes closed, rubbing each other’s backs, crying when the crying would come, quiet when the quiet brought relief, but not talking, not talking. Then, in the middle of this search for peace, I heard Tina calling from a distance and Pelham coughing to warn me.

“I think we getting ready,” Tina shot from thirty yards away. She was angry for sure. When I looked, she was already tramping up the grade. Pelham was squatting with his elbows on this thighs and moving his head from side to side as if he had to double-check what he’d seen. Before he left, he clapped his hands and laughed.

“So you’re gone?” Chloe said, composing herself.

I began to do the same. “Yes. I gone.”

“Thanks for holding me.”

In a mutter, I said, “No. Thank you.”

And somehow I knew, perhaps in the way my brother knew he wasn’t dreaming that time, that I’d return to Kingston as a slightly different man. Different how and to what degree, I didn’t know. But I knew.

“Be good,” Chloe said, and kissed her palm. She placed it on my cheek.

“I will,” I mumbled. “I hope to see you again.”

“Some things you should leave in their time,” she said.

“You’re right, you know. That’s true.”

“You’re not coughing anymore,” she said brightly.

I touched my throat. “I only cough when I smoke,” I said, and smiled.

“But you don’t do that anymore.”

“How you know that?”

“I know a lot of things,” she said, and shooed me off. I realized then that she was wearing bangles. They clattered when they shook.

As I walked up the grade toward the house, I turned to look at her again. She was lighting up a spliff.

“He never used to call me
Daddy
, you know,” I shouted. “He only used to call me
Dad
.”

“I know.”

“I was going to ask you how you know, but I think I know. Or at least I know what I want to know.”

“You know,” she said, “you’re just putting up a fight.”

“How you know?”

“Because,” she said, “I know.”

She was veiled in smoke. I could see the glow and smell the spliff burning fierce and new. My last impression was a shadow in a swirl of smoke dissolving in the glimmer of the city’s lights.

SOMEONE TO TELL
by A-dZiko Simba

I
t’s the most incredible thing you’ve seen in your whole life. You can’t move because of the incredibleness. It has stuck you right to the spot, so all you can do is stay there not moving. It has opened up your eyes wide, wide, so all you can do is look, and you can’t even make a sound because it have yuh mouth seal up and lock down.

The only thing you can do is look and think. And the only thing you can think is “incredible.”

Incredible
. And you’re so glad that last term Mr. Swaby gave you new words to learn every week, because without that, without that, you wouldn’t even know what to think, but you do know … incredible.

But now the night is starting to come down and the trees are starting to turn into people with long arms and too many fingers and the Christmas breeze is starting to blow. It has a coldness in it, and when it passes, the tree people begin to moan and crack their bones like old people. Like tired old people grumbling up stairs. You run out of the bush and onto the road. It is not that you are frightened. Of course you are not frightened, but you just think you have seen enough incredibleness for one day, and anyway, you are hungry and now is a good time, a very good time, for you to go home. You run all the way. Not because the old tree people are after you, not because Delroy once told you that on certain nights, in certain places, dead people come alive in trees and take up stray children. You just run because you like to run and home is a good place to run too. That is all.

Mary Janga is on the porch. Mary Janga is always on the porch playing mummy with her dollies.

She talks to them like they’re real people, like they can really hear her. Then she combs their hair and takes off their clothes and combs their hair and puts their clothes back on again. Then she gives them dirt and cut-up leaves to eat and you shake your head and you wonder about Mary Janga. Wonder if there is any hope. And when she stops talking and combing and feeding and bends her head to listen to what the dollies have to say, you realize there’s no hope for Mary Janga at all.

But even so, you are happy to see her sitting on the porch because she is someone to tell.

Mary Janga says she will only listen if you tell her dollies too. You are too excited to care. You tell her, “Yes,” and you wait for her to line them all up so they can all look in your face and hear what it is you are saying. Now they are ready. Mary Janga and her dollies are all lined up, all ready to listen, except for Floppy Florenzo the Rabbit, who keeps dropping over on his face.

Mary Janga listens with eyes open big and wide. When you get to the end she makes a face like she is trying to squash it up into a ball and stuff it through a little hole. And then she says, “Yuck!”

Mary Janga is not from planet Earth. An alien spaceship left Mary Janga in your yard one day. She has come from a place where they talk to plastic dollies and they say “Yuck” to incredible stories. One day her people will come back for her and you won’t have to put up with this nonsense anymore.

You suck your teeth to let her know that you know the spaceship is coming any day now, and then you run inside to tell your mother.

She is in the kitchen. She is always in the kitchen. You wonder what it is about being a girl that always keeps them in places.

You just start to tell your mother the story. You don’t even get anywhere yet, but she turns around and smiles and says, “That’s nice.”

Nice? Nice?

Nice bounces around in your head. You cannot believe she said, “Nice.”

You feel like shouting, “NICE?” Like if you can make it big enough and make it have enough of a question in it, she will realize it’s not the thing to say.

You have just seen the most incredible thing in the whole wide world and your sister says, “Yuck,” and your mother says, “Nice.”

You go outside to look for your father.

The truck’s hood is wide open like a huge mouth. It has swallowed your father right up to his waist. Just as you reach him, the truck spits out his arm, and his hand searches around in the tool box, finds a spanner, and then disappears again.

The engine is roaring. The engine is louder than your voice.

You have to call him three times before he hears you.

He turns off the engine and stands up.

The light from the lamp stuck onto the battery puts shadows on his face. Where there are no shadows, you can see sweat and lines of black grease. He looks like he belongs to some tribe or some gang. In his hands are spanners and ratchets and screws and wires and chunks of metal that don’t belong in his hands. He doesn’t speak. Not with his mouth. He speaks with the look on his face. It says,
What happen?
like he doesn’t want an answer, like he would rather listen to the engine. Like the engine has something more incredible to tell him than you do, like you don’t have nothing incredible to tell him at all. But you do, so you open your mouth to tell him and he says, “Pass me the three-quarter socket.”

And even though they’re only words, it’s like a needle jooking you. Jooking a hole in the incredible bubble of the story you have in your head, and so now you feel all the wanting-to-tell-it come hissing out, and you feel the story shrivelling up and folding away.

You pass him the stupid socket and then you run across the yard and jump on your bike and ride through the gate in so much vexation you don’t tell anybody anything.

If it was daytime you would ride into town and ask the lady at the library who stamps books and knows everything if there isn’t someplace you could go to complain about the family you are in.

You ride until you realize it’s too dark to ride. This realizing it’s too dark to ride occurs at the same time you feel yourself flying because the bike realized, before you did, that it’s too dark to ride and it stopped this riding-in-the-dark stupidness before you did. So now you are flying, and flying would be okay if you didn’t already know that at the end of flying is bush and macka and pain.

The bush comes with a
oorphrumph
sound. The macka comes with a
eeeyii
sound. And the pain—the pain calls down all kinda bad-word sound that you didn’t even know you knew. But you do, and you holler them out like any old drunken man on a Friday night.

There is something about pain that makes you feel for home. Makes you forget how much complaints you have against your family and you just wish you were in the arms of your mother with her hands fixing up your broken body, with tenderness in her eyes and a worryness on her face. She can say, “Nice,” now. She can say whatever she likes. You don’t mind. Pain can make even “Nice” sound like something someone could say. Pain is like that. Pain is also like a worm chopped in two. It has a furious rolling and wriggling around in it and a crying for its mother in it.

You don’t know about your father coming for you.

You don’t know about him carrying you like you are two years old all the way back to the house or about your sister wailing when she sees you in his arms with your leg looking like it has been put on back to front, inside out, upside down.

You just know that this place, this bed, is not your place, not your bed. And when you try to move, you wonder if this is even your body. Your whole body feels mashed like pounded yam and your head is a fish swimming around and around and around in a bowl.

You try to sit up, and that is when you notice that you cannot sit up because of your leg. It feels like it is in concrete. Your head is still spinning so you have to ease up carefully. Someone has put your leg in concrete, and around it is wire and pulleys like you are a machine. Slowly you begin to understand what has happened—
they’re
turning you into a machine. Mary Janga’s people have come for her and taken you instead, because they want to turn people into robots. And who with any sense in their head would take up Mary Janga when they could take you?

You have to escape. Just as soon as your head stop this spinning t’ing, you will escape, you tell youself. You tell youself you will lie down for just a minute and then you will escape. You will lie down and close your eye for just one second and then … and then … and …

A big face is smiling down at you. It doesn’t look like an alien face. It looks like a normal somebody’s face. It is smiling but you don’t smile back. You know you are in mortal danger of being turned into a RZ105 or something like that, with numbers and letters for a name. But the more you look, the more this face begins to look just like somebody you know. The face begins to be the face of Nurse Lawes.

The face says, “So how you feeling? You take a bad fall, y’know.” (This is just the sort of thing Nurse Lawes would say.)

When you try to lift up, the Nurse Lawes face says, “A’right, take it easy. We have yuh leg in traction.”

You wonder what your leg in concrete has to do with ploughing up land, but you figure tractors are big machines and your leg is like a machine, so maybe they correspond. You don’t say anything. You just nod. Aliens can be funny, you tell yourself. Nodding is best.

Next thing you know, she’s lifted you up with one hand, and with the other, she’s organized the pillow into a back rest so you can sit up. You sit up and look around and realize that, guess what? Nurse Lawes is Nurse Lawes, because guess what? You are in the hospital. All around you are beds with children in them or not in them. Some children with bandages on their heads or around their arms are sitting in a corner watching TV and some are playing together with toys on the floor and some of them are reading books and some are just lying down still, but all of them have on pajamas.

Nurse Lawes tells you she is going to bring you a drink. You watch her walking to the end of the room. You want to call her back and tell her that you don’t want a drink, you want to go home. You want your mother; you want your father. You even want Mary Janga. But you feel too shame to shout these things out and so you just think them to yourself. And while you are thinking these things to yourself, you start to think about what happened to put you in this bed that is not yours, in this place that is not yours. But all this thinking starts your head spinning again and you have to close your eyes.