The World Doesn't Require You Page 13

  Early one morning in the turgid, musty swamp, Freddie Lee collapsed amongst the rice and the brown water, a result of working his body like a machine—both John Henry, the steel-driving man, and the locomotive at the same time.

  He so loved the work, he battled himself to fill basket after endless basket with rice stalks, and as a reward he fell facedown into the crops before any of us woke. We all labored next to his body as we were told to do, coming to view his dead form with a reverence. Freddie was no longer a man, no longer our friend, but instead an offering to God, made to lie out there until Papa Troy gave word, and each night we burned the stalks we picked from around him.

  But something kept getting to me out in the sun. Something beyond the stench. Something that rearranged my mind. Man, every time I drew near to the eternally slumbering Freddie Lee and his decaying face—

  I remember when Mama Yona died and we all gathered solemnly for six hours as they put her into the earth and Papa Troy spoke of their life together, building this new world away from the world, away from cars, away from TVs, away from balloons and DVDs, away from it all, at this rice farm in the ruins of a plantation on a Wildlands hill. The children planted a tree over her resting place. And it felt beautiful and unreal, as if we existed on a spinning disc covered by a magical dome; anything could happen here. Freddie Lee believed in this life with the entirety of his—unbeknownst to him—dying heart.

  Working the watery fields after my friend passed, I didn’t become deranged, but found myself somewhere close to it. Something resembling a dark shadow spreading like an inkblot over my brain. I had obeyed dutifully following after Freddie Lee. I wondered if I’d share his fate, lying among the rice and the muck with a crumbling forever stare.

  And I could have probably taken it, inky brain and all, had I not seen that blasted cow, Lenire, tearing at Freddie’s face, ripping, chewing his flesh like fresh grass. I waved my arms and yelled; charged the beast while screaming, but her tail swatted at flies and the rest of the animal paid me no mind. The chewed face of Freddie, Papa Troy told us, is just how it’s supposed to be.

  Me and Luke and Little Yuní went out that night to move the body from the shallow waters, but Mama’s Thug Riders (that’s what they called themselves) rode in silently on their horses—at least I didn’t hear them—and waved their whips at us, opening up raw wounds on our chests and backs.

  When we returned to our cabin we listened to the breeze whistle through the cracks and we tended to each other’s wounds. I watched the great house with its light and its mirth. I was sure the drinks flowed there like the river water we diverted over the land to feed the rice stalks. Papa was having a party. There was always a party and we were the eternally uninvited unless someone important wanted a piece of our souls.

  Papa says, everyone is equal, Luke said. Some people are m—

  Shh— Little Yuní said, kissing his lips. I watched them make love. They soon crumpled to the floor, exhausted and sated as they were taught to be.

  Did you see Freddie Lee’s body? I asked. John Henry, the rice-harvesting man? If he died harvesting rice for the love of us all, then why—even before that damn cow got to him—was he all broken and bruised?

  Shh— Little Yuní said, but she had no energy to sate me, and before I could ask about the Expelled, whether our friend was close to them as the whispers implied, we all fell one by one into dazed and dizzying fever dreams. I wonder who was the first to speak of the flames in our sleep murmurs. Did we all share the same nightmares?

  Morning came, the sun rose hot over the damp fields, and we were once again the docile supplicants of Mama Yona and Papa Troy’s mercy, picking rice around our friend. Poor Freddie Lee—his face skeletal except for those swollen, staring eyes—he deserved more than the tepid love of cowards.

  It might have ended right there had Freddie Lee not risen from the dead to rip the cow into thousands of pieces.

  That morning Papa had planned to announce his next queen—could have been any of us—but we woke to bits of bloody cow meat everywhere: smeared on the windows of the great house, clinging to the rice stalks. Papa postponed his announcement and called for us to give up any information we had on the whereabouts of Freddie Lee’s body and the circumstances of the cow’s death.

  Some pointed their fingers at the three of us, but we pointed ours right back. If it were us, I said, wouldn’t we be stained? Marked like we took a bath in cow’s blood? My logic silenced our accusers.

  For three hours Papa Troy stood on the porch of the great house discussing betrayal and the life of his beloved Lenire. Tears soaked into his beard, his voice as watery as the rice fields.

  Our hearts broke, but who were we to ramble madly about what we knew, what we saw—the dead man sauntering smoothly, coolly, until he spotted the cow? He stopped and threw his head back, wailing silently—the cow had long ripped his tongue from his mouth. His raw face and his perfect eyes bathed in the light of the moon. I called his name, but he watched us as if we were merely curiosities to ponder and then ignore. He stared for several seconds before he did his violence.

  I stayed up many nights afterward to catch another glimpse of Freddie Lee, but I never saw him again. Every once in a while, I’d ask Luke or Little Yuní if we saw what we really saw, and they’d nod like walking corpses without tongues.

  One evening, when the passing of the months had given us no ease from the Thug Riders and their whippings, Little Yuní and I stood near the farthest edge of the farm.

  Did we really see what we saw? I asked again. You know, with Freddie—

  Shh, she said. Shh. She pointed to Luke walking toward us, a bundle of stalks in his arm. Behind him flames had begun dancing along the rice fields; fires even tap-danced upon the face of the waters below. The only world we knew was now shrouded in clouds of black smoke.

  I watched Luke’s rice and breathed in his fumes; he stank of gasoline.

  Little Yuní sighed.

  Luke cursed. Dumped the day’s haul to the wet ground.

  Little Yuní lit a match.

  Slim in Hell

  1.

  This was after they burned the Temple, leaving both students and teachers to sputter about, half-formed angels with stumps where wings should have been. Slim felt hollowed, just living emptiness. The world conspired to torment him. The newest Riverbeat superstar, the Kid, stared back at him every time he stepped from his apartment. At least three times a night at True Love, where Slim played piano, he saw the Kid’s disembodied face float by on a black or a red or a beige T-shirt.

  That face made Slim think of the time he stood stiff and compliant in plastic restraints. Flames sprouted from the Temple after the police rushed in. The Kid had long been expelled—a dispute with the master teachers—though it was his spirit that brought the burn. Of this Slim had no evidence, just a feeling that his life, no, the entire world, would be better off if the Kid had never entered it. The Kid’s songs were popular and catchy, sure, but they spread a poison, eroding the souls of his fans as they bobbed their heads and cheered, unwittingly dying inside, a musical cancer speeding rapidly through the body populace.

  When Slim slammed his fingers against the piano’s keys he could see the old pain-wracked face of Dave the Deity, Grandmaster of the Temple, Godfather of Riverbeat, mentor to Phoenix Starr, the greatest Riverbeat artist to live and breathe. Dave watched while the place crumbled into smoke and dust. Losing the Temple turned the man into living anguish. He would never be the same. Any day now Slim expected to hear that the old man, lying in a rat hole somewhere on the Southside, had died from a broken heart.

  The anger in Slim warped and bent his piano playing so much that the owner of True Love often warned him to ease up. My man, he would say, people want to have a good time. What you playing is equivalent to wailing and gnashing teeth. I need you to play infatuation and falling in love. You’ve felt that, right, Slim?

  The owner stood about five feet two with comically muscled arms and a comical
ly mustachioed face. He wore cheap rompers in the summer and one-piece leisure suits all other times of the year. He styled his hair with heavy grease and slicked it all the way back. Night after night, in the rear of the club, he swilled rum and went on and on about the nature of love and art. He was a bit tedious, but he was a pleasant man, and everybody loved him except Slim. Was everyone else so foolish, so stupid, that they could only recognize a clown when he wore floppy shoes and a red nose?

  The club owner once dreamt of fronting his own Riverbeat band, but that never even came close to happening. His stubby fingers made every note he plucked from his guitar sound comical. Then there was the whiny shade to his voice that he never managed to shake. His plan with True Love was to bring in the best musicians in Cross River, but he had a cash flow problem. He spent his earnings on his wife and the woman who wasn’t his wife. Consequently, all he could afford were a succession of lousy pianists who played as if they hated music, as if it were something that jabbed deep wounds into their souls; they played like they wanted to export that pain and misery to all within earshot. Slim was only the most recent in a series of what the owner of True Love called Destructists.

  These people, he would say to whomever sat back there nodding, listening, and going rum for rum with him, are more akin to serial killers than true artists. You giggle at that? How many serial killers or genocidal world leaders or school shooters were failed artists, huh? True artists, even when they going through the darkness, try to, you know, lift up the human spirit. Phoenix Starr, now, he was a true artist. Too true. Phoenix destroyed himself for art. True artists, if they must destroy something, they destroy themselves. The Kid might be even better than Starr. He ain’t destroying nothing. Not his style. Destructists try to destroy everyone else. These fucking guys I keep ending up with will never be any good at art. Art’s not capable of banging the dents out of the world, man, or creating the sort of . . . um . . . accumulated hurt they want it to, and they’ll abandon it for politics or psychology or mass murder. Watch. It’s all the same thing to them, really.

  After his rum-soaked speeches, the owner would wander over to Slim and offer suggestions. Slim nodded but made no attempt to incorporate his boss’s suggestions. One day, Slim thought, he’d come in and find his job was no more, taken by some smiling buffoon. A thoughtless, happy-go-lucky coon who possessed no facility for reflection or analysis. It would all be the Kid’s fault too. The Kid haunted everywhere Slim went, forever burning down Slim’s life as he did the Temple—the place that had been Slim’s home, musical, spiritual, and otherwise.

  Sometimes Slim walked the town while taking slow breaths to make his rage dissipate. He had learned to breathe this way at the Temple during meditation and slapboxing training. It never worked. From time to time he’d find himself near the Wildlands. Those beautiful trees. The dark woods. People say humans’ only natural predators live there. Huge things with claws and sharp beaks, and if you try to walk through, they swoop down and snatch you up. And then they peck you to pieces. Crazy shit they tell kids. They say it’s full of holy ghosts and soucouyants who remove their skins at night and animalmen swinging from tree to tree. It’s where Cross River folks first escaped to after the Great Insurrection. White folks couldn’t get past the Wildlands because there were ex-slaves in trees picking off hostiles. A band of Indians lived there, some say. Taught the Cross Riverians guerrilla warfare techniques. Some say they still live there, undisturbed and mixed with the descendants of black folks who chose not to move into the town after things calmed.

  Slim had slept under a canopy of Wildlands trees and he had never seen any crazy birds or vampires or animalmen. Really, it’s just a wooded area with a river flowing through it, strangely resistant to modernization. No politician or developer has ever been the least bit successful in getting anything built there. Any proposal faces a storm of historians, scientists, superstitious folks, conservationists, anthropologists, and on and on.

  Rumor was the Kid had found a cabin in the Wildlands that was once used to hide escaped slaves along that fabled escape route, the Forgotten Tunnel. Despite his fame and money, he retired there every night.

  One day, as Slim walked, trying to drown his irritation between thoughts of piano riffs and his own breaths, he watched the stunning and disappointing ordinariness of the trees, and it occurred to him that the Kid was likely the only dark mythical creature living in the Wildlands. It’s a shame no one had the will or the power to raze the whole evil forest. How much would Cross River grow from that one act?

  2.

  Living emptiness. It was like the feeling of having the emptiest stomach, but worse, as there wasn’t a simple fix like there is with hunger. The rain fell in tons that day. He stepped outside his apartment to clear his head with a walk and to buy some soap. The rain didn’t matter too much. A small woman stood near a bus stop. Her hair pressed flat against her face. Her jeans were soaked, as was her white T-shirt. That’s what got his attention. She looked resigned to her fate. Didn’t even bother to cover her chest—virtually bare beneath the translucent wet garment.

  He walked over to the bus stop and shaded her with his umbrella. Miss, he said, you’re soaked. Would you like my umbrella?

  No, she said, sighing. Thank you.

  Please. You’re making me cold.

  She smiled.

  The bus should be coming soon. I’ll be home soon.

  The R28-38? It’s never reliable. This time of day the old man is driving. You want to take your chance in a storm with him?

  What do you suggest?

  My apartment is down the block. Let me make you a cup of tea. I have a clothes dryer. You could dry off while watching a movie or something.

  She swayed back and forth, contemplating. Raindrops hung from Slim’s beard like ripe berries. He had softened his face, a mask he hoped could hide his living emptiness.

  Well, she said. Okay.

  He shaded her with his big blue umbrella as they walked, talking easily. She had figured she could make it home from her morning class at Cross River Community College before any rain, she told him, but she looked up and saw gray clouds rolling in overhead like tons of dirty snow. Slim liked that description, showed she had a brain, though the clouds looked purple to him.

  When they got inside, he brought her a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt. She went into his bedroom and pulled in the door, leaving a crack that light and air passed through. And when he walked by, he couldn’t help but pause to take a glimpse of her dark damp flesh. He felt his skin become warm. He saw himself bind her wrists and ankles, toss her over his shoulder, take her to the living room, and, at first, just talk, telling her all that he was and asking her questions designed to clear his head as his music had always failed to do. And then, eventually, they’d make love. But there was no hurry. Instead of binding her wrists, he dreamed about the act. He let her get dressed in peace, and when she came out they watched the news and talked about music and the Kid (she hated his songs, which made Slim feel he had fallen in love with her) and chocolate and books and the world all around them that soon faded in the presence of her radiance.

  3.

  The living emptiness inside Slim’s chest became as small as his fist now that she was in his life. Considering that the emptiness was once an outsized thing, larger than even himself, its decrease in size was an achievement. Your living emptiness, I suppose, is probably the size of two fists or as large as a big-screen television. Don’t tell me that you have no living emptiness inside you or that yours is smaller than a fist or a beating heart. We nurse it and pet it, feed it soft baby food. It’s comfortable to have that living emptiness as a companion, a cloak. Over the course of a week, though, Slim starved his emptiness. Watched it shrivel. He could attribute his change in approach entirely to the woman from the bus stop, his wet vision in the rain. She visited him day after day on her way home from school. Sat with him in the afternoon with her bare feet and her legs curled beneath her as they watched worthless tel
evision. They didn’t speak much, but when they did, it was substantial. She became like an oracle, though she never provided wise counsel or predicted the future. It just felt good to speak words at her—rarely did he truly listen when she spoke; hearing himself in her presence made him feel noble and wise. He told her of his time at the Temple, his encounters with the Kid, and she watched wide-eyed, drunk off the adventure of it all. Her life bored her most of the time, she said. Somehow her days remained resistant to excitement or intrigue, no matter what she did.

  I go out with my friends, she told him, it ends up being the one night where nothing happens. Nothing. Just driving around looking for something to get into. The next weekend—and it never, ever fails—I stay home and my friends run into celebrities buying them drinks and shit. She sighed. Maybe it’s me. Her voice dipped sadly as she said this.

  She admired Slim’s stories of the Temple. His time there had felt like monotony, but for her he could shape the day-to-day dullness into excitement, making himself the hero of these stories. She listened, her eyes dancing with envy. Dag, Slim, she replied to one of his adventures. I’ve never even gone so far out into the Wildlands. I want to see stuff like that. It makes you all wise and learned and shit.

  He had turned into something else in this woman’s care, nearly a whole man, he thought; she was a priestess guiding him across the fiery lake and back into the world.

  The talk would always turn to the burning of the Temple, the irritation that swelled to a frenzy when he saw his enemy’s disembodied face across a T-shirt.

  I heard he’s in the Wildlands, she would say. You could make a killing showing paparazzi where he lives.

  Slim would think about this and then he’d return to ranting. He spoke bitterly of his piano work at the bar.

  Quit, she said.

  You must think life is that easy? he’d often reply, and then he’d invite her to watch him play.