Swimming in the Volcano (60 page)

The night contained a strong current, an incoming tide of purpose, carrying him along. There is a plan—it is just a plan, has nothing to do with anything else, except he is in it, and he is not powerless. He must see a woman and he must see a man: a two-part plan, one part quiet and one part loud. He could do that. He saw the aura of lights above where the hill flattened, heard streaks of music, like birds let out of cages, and told himself,
I am in it
. Make a story with the
woman, to help with a next plan. Come out of nowhere and fuck Marcus. Like so:
Bam!

At the Norton compound, there was a glossy, painted wall, roaming with flares of light, that hadn't been there before, and a gate with lampposts, and some guys standing by importantly. Ibrahim knew them but he had forgotten their names; he had forgotten everybody's name, he realized, but not their look, which was always both fear and warning. Their eyes sharpened on him and flickered as he approached the gate in a seemingly random, self-absorbed drift, like a stray.

He stepped absently forward, as if to continue on through the stuccoed arch, its flange of wrought-iron doors swept back, but a bony arm swung out in front of him to bar his entry, and, as if he had just become aware of his surroundings, he looked at the guy who challenged him, so the fellow would understand that if he touched Ibrahim, it would be a serious violation. The NPF badge in his pocket burned against his leg, useless under these conditions. The guy squinted at Ibrahim, trying to place him.

“Ain you go away?” he said, turning for confirmation to his two companions. “Ain you disappear, bwoy?”

“Is Collymore, eh?” said another, and they stared at him like an idea they had never cared for, something they would want to wipe off themselves once he had left, the bottom of existence. Ibrahim's eyes flashed, darting between the arrogant cast of their expressions—they were the same, he and they, he had run with them, scuffled with them, schooled with them, obeyed with them, but then one day he wasn't there, and while they ran headlong through the sunny everydayness of their simple boyhoods, he had been sold to the devil for a piece of fish, then indentured to the dull misery of a freedom with no center or meaning, as if vultures had torn the heart from its living flesh, and this was how they knew him, dismissing the dreamworld of their earliest years, as one among them born to badness, as the end of fellowship, a disease to which they could not afford prolonged exposure, a disaster through which they could measure—and applaud—their own secure place in the world as they were given it.

They knew him well enough not to push him, but this was another Collymore, one they had not seen before, a variation on the original.

“You get a new style of rag, eh? Collymore.”

“What's up, bwoy? You sellin weed?”

“You ain find cock to suck in St. Cee?”

They tensed and then swelled up, their legs planted in a defensive stance, their chins cocked and their hands instinctively curling into fists, seeing what they had stirred up, the flare of unpredictable intensity
in Collymore, the physical contraction—the same as a type of dog—the split-second of withdrawal which was really preparation for an attack. They had known they could not joke with Collymore—now they had a renewed appreciation of how dangerous it could be. There the four of them remained, paralyzed and bristling, in the shell of light from the gate.

But he had discipline now, and kept a list—a list of wrong-thinkers and wrongdoers—to refer back to when everything changed. He thought to himself,
Wait
, though behind the thought he had picked up a rock and cracked it into the head of the fellow who had said what Ibrahim could allow no one to say to him.
Wait
, he advised himself again—waiting was a very important thing. Selwyn didn't have to worry that he could not stay cool.

He was incapable of an ingratiating expression or tone—his manner of speaking was always pressurized, halting, elliptical, or abruptly spilling, as though speech were an accident—but they breathed again and relaxed, exchanging dubious looks, when he told them he had business inside the compound. The one who had blocked him with his arm sniggered at such a notion, but Ibrahim, steady and obstinate, not to be dissuaded from his mission, explained himself—he had a message to deliver to a white woman who had arrived late today on a plane—straining the words stiffly through his clenched jaw.

“Big Sally?”

“No,” Ibrahim answered, snapping the sound. “A next one by she.”

“Give it to me, I will pass it.”

No, he explained further, it was a private message from the woman's husband, a ministry fellow living in Howard Bay, he was instructed to deliver it personally, he must go through the gate.

“She ain reach as yet,” said the most easygoing of the three, the one who had asked if he had come to sell marijuana. “She down by Coddy,” he revealed disingenuously, earning identical sour looks for this stupidness from his companions, for giving away information so freely to one so strange and untrustworthy as Collymore.

Ibrahim stood at the gate a while longer, disengaged from their presence, staring blindly through the arch at the modern cottages and landscaped walks, in a reverie inspired by the fete, somewhere off behind the cluster of buildings, which he could hear but not see. He remembered the ruins of a small stone church on this land. He remembered goats and thorns, remembered being thirsty. He understood this too had become a place that opposed him, defined him as what was undesirable, what was to be kept out, to be watched carefully, and this understanding seemed to resolve for him an unspoken
question he harbored about his own intelligence, about the meaning he put on things and the consistency of the force he found himself against. His right eye twitched. There was a wary, uncertain silence—he knew they were waiting to see what he would do; the confrontation was perpetual, as long as he remained nearby, and for this reason alone he would not deign to move, preferring to rankle them with the fact of his existence, these fellows, who once were meant to be his lifelong friends, and not until a drunken group of white people stumbled out of the dark did they finally ignore him, and then he moved on, then he disappeared, having made himself clear.

He knew the rock track down through the bush to the beach, knew it well, where it dropped steeply and where it turned and branched, but he had not gone twenty paces down its dark channel before he tripped, propelled forward to his hands and knees as though he had been pushed from behind, and, there on the ground, the night suddenly lowered its full weight upon the hump of his back, making a noisy vibration, like an electrical charge. The nerves in his stomach knotted up and Ibrahim prayed. He experienced the same minute heave and sloshing—as if it came from deep within the earth, fading at the surface—that he had felt on the pier. There were things, things to be listened for in the muted clamor of nighttime's unlocking in the bush—things, evils, commands—and if he tried he could name them, he knew them as well as he knew this path, and he prayed to all the spirits that surrounded him not to show themselves, to forgive this trespass, he knew better than to come into the bush after nightfall with an impure mind but citylife had blunted this knowledge, and now he was too afraid to move, to attract the thing that was horror that was the thing always, always stalking him.

He prayed. Angels covered his eyes, lifted him, placed him down noiselessly among the manchineel trees behind Coddy's place, inhaling the thick, stale air at the back of the beach through his open mouth. Here were the white women, the one in the plan and another one, without their clothes, their flesh shiny with oil, their private parts glowing with white radiance in the shape of their bathing suits. It fascinated him, these ghost suits highlighting their womanness. He stepped closer toward the screen and watched them in the dim watery light of a candle, then another step closer in the sand when the candle was extinguished, watching them without thinking, without any sensation or awareness of their reality, as if he were viewing a film, until they climbed into bed together and he pressed his face against the screen, his nervous excitement like a drug that stuns.

He did not know two women could do this with one another, or
would, and seeing them with each other, linked up, was like a collision of dreams and nightmares, releasing the fumes of his own filth and shame. His sexual desires had died early—he didn't know when, it was a black spot in his memory—but here they were again, reattached, his own sex rearing up, its aching head burst through the waistband of his trousers.

It was then the other woman, her back arching, her head forced back into a pillow and slinging from side to side, saying
no no no
, saying
uh uh uh
, looked at him, her eyes rolling out of nowhere and stopping, stuck, on the beam of profound discovery that fused him to her. She screamed, but all he did was step backward, not far, just another piece of the night shifting and resettling.

The other woman—his—reared up on her hands and knees, alert and vicious, eyes turned to diamonds, hair thick and scattered, and there was something there in her feral poise that Ibrahim felt he recognized, something he knew from his imagination, something specific from his past, and he could feel his mind slide toward it, traveling toward sanctuary. He thought,
Wait, she is someone
... nobody he actually knew, but not a stranger.

Didn't she rise from the bed? Didn't she come to the screen in her nakedness, bewitching? Didn't he smell the cunt on her breath, suddenly, like the smell of a dark, shuttered bedroom? Didn't she look straight at him and whisper, so only he could hear,
Go away
, not vexed, like you might expect, but like this:
This is not the time?

Didn't he swim away from her through a gyration of fireflies, dragging his balls after him like two bleeding turtles, detached and struggling and exploding with pain?

Didn't the cocks crow, didn't he spiral forward through the night, didn't Marcus answer the door with a gun in his plump hand, saying,
Cashy? Wha de hell, bwoy, how you mekkin it?
, didn't Sergeant's pomaded hair sear his nostrils with the reek of bottomless revulsion, didn't the thump of his weight echo across the floorboards, didn't the cockroaches spin in glinting wheels on the whitewashed walls, didn't Marcus say,
Come ... you do it ... come
, and didn't he—Ibrahim—remove the iron bar of his sex from between his aching legs and bring it smashing into the emergent forms of energy, all the grasping demons that life had set upon him, like a red-eyed pack of wolves, until the air became sealed with his many terrible strokes, in a luminescent mist of blood?

And didn't he then break through the mirrored surface of the world to find himself in his father's shanty, waking on the torturous springs of an old car seat, gasping for oxygen, fever-wet with dreams,
and hear a dead man breathe again, filling his lungs with desperate life?

Didn't everything stop, and then start again when he followed the woman to Sandy Bay, and saw her in the water, at home in the waves? As he sat on the beach watching her, didn't he come close to the center of the feeling of redemption, where still there were no words, even less, and no name?

He did.

Selwyn had sent him to her, her to him. He had foreseen no less than this encounter when Selwyn Walker ordered him to return to the past, the poisoned island of his marooned birth, but he did not know until he had seen her in the waves to whom he had been sent, that it was her—she who came to him when harm came too near—and that a greater meaning had been added to his secular mission, though he could not say what it was.

There was a plan and he was in it.

The white man came to fetch the woman on Sunday evening, and the three of them returned to St. Catherine on the ferry. Ibrahim was last off, the one passenger remaining in the cabin until everyone had disembarked. He hopped down from the perch he had claimed atop the plywood counter of the ferry's never-operated snack bar, no stranger to the fierce mysteries and hidden powers of the unforgiving sea, and so he scorned his fellow voyagers for their distressed prayers and laments, they who had succumbed to the hardships of the journey before they even thought to resist, trembling in the cellars of their own weakness, the failure of will, not realizing that he was protected and so by extension they were protected too. Their infirmities made him squeamish, now that his feet touched the cabin deck, forced to negotiated their bilious puddles and fermenty splashes, the melon rinds and candy wrappers of their pathetic optimism, the beer cans—
Wanda in Wonderland, Mary in the Mood
—of their cowardice, the groundnut shells and juice boxes and cakes half eaten and half spewed, all of it the regurgitated Sunday faith of Iman Ibrahim's people. No journey guaranteed except for true believers, he had chastised, silently reproaching them throughout the crossing, flinging imprecations over their prostrated bodies, disgusted by their animal fear, berating them in the voice of his father, never speaking a word to anybody but glowering at how little real discomfort they seemed able to endure, until he saw her, an apparition in the underwater light of the exit, saw her again, the mermaid, the woman in the waves, the woman who had reared up from the feast of her own sex, and
couldn't restrain himself from calling out, even as the seas calmed as they had entered the harbor and she moved past and was gone, unmanifested:

Yes, look de womahn, Erzulie
.