The Weird Part 101

'Yes. Please. I can't bear what I'm feeling. I've been through so much, seen so much these last months, I...'

'Help you?' the old man said again, whispering the phrase as if it had been rendered in a lost language. 'I cannot even help myself...how can I possibly help you, young man?'

McGrath told him. Everything.

At some point the blackened creature entered the room, but McGrath was unaware of its presence till he had completed his story. Then, from behind him, he heard it say, 'You are a remarkable person. Not one living person in a million has ever seen the Thanatos mouth. Not one in a hundred million has felt the pa.s.sage of the soul. Not one in the memory of the human race has been so tormented that he thought it was real, and not a dream.'

McGrath stared at the creature. It came lumbering across the room and stood just behind the old man's chair, not touching him. The old man sighed, and closed his eyes.

The creature said, 'This was Josef Le Braz, who lived and worked and cared for his fellow man, and woman. He saved lives, and he married out of love, and he pledged himself to leave the world slightly better for his pa.s.sage. And his wife died, and he fell into a well of melancholy such as no man had ever suffered. And one night he woke, feeling a chill, but he did not see the Thanatos mouth. All he knew was that he missed his wife so terribly that he wanted to end his life.'

McGrath sat silently. He had no idea what this meant, this history of the desolate figure under the lap robe. But he waited, because if no help lay here in this house, of all houses secret and open in the world, then he knew that the next step for him was to buy a gun and to disperse the gray mist under which he lived.

Le Braz looked up. He drew in a deep breath and turned his eyes to McGrath. 'I went to the machine,' he said. 'I sought the aid of the circuit and the chip. I was cold, and could never stop crying. I missed her so, it was unbearable.'

The creature came around the wingback and stood over McGrath. 'He brought her back from the Other Side.'

McGrath's eyes widened. He understood.

The room was silent, building to a crescendo. He tried to get off the low stool, but he couldn't move. The creature stared down at him with its one gorgeous blue eye and its one unseeing milky marble. 'He deprived her of peace. Now she must live on, in this half-life.

'This is Josef Le Braz, and he cannot support his guilt.'

The old man was crying now. McGrath thought if one more tear was shed in the world he would say to h.e.l.l with it and go for the gun. 'Do you understand?' the old man said softly.

'Do you take the point?' the creature said.

McGrath's hands came up, open and empty. 'The mouth...the wind...'

'The function of dream sleep,' the creature said, 'is to permit us to live. To flense the mind of that which dismays us. Otherwise, how could we bear the sorrow? The memories are their legacy, the parts of themselves left with us when they depart. But they are not whole, they are joys crying to be reunited with the one to whom they belong. You have seen the Thanatos mouth, you have felt a loved one departing. It should have freed you.'

McGrath shook his head slowly, slowly. No, it didn't free me, it enslaved me, it torments me. No, slowly, no. I cannot bear it.

'Then you do not yet take the point, do you?'

The creature touched the old man's sunken cheek with a charred twig that had been a hand. The old man tried to look up with affection, but his head would not come around. 'You must let it go, all of it,' Le Braz said. 'There is no other answer. Let it go...let them go. Give them back the parts they need to be whole on the Other Side, and let them in the name of kindness have the peace to which they are ent.i.tled.'

'Let the mouth open,' the creature said. 'We cannot abide here. Let the wind of the soul pa.s.s through, and take the emptiness as release.' And she said, 'Let me tell you what it's like on the Other Side. Perhaps it will help.'

McGrath laid a hand on his side. It hurt terribly, as of legions battering for release on a locked door.

He retraced his steps. He went back through previous days as if he were sleepwalking. I don't see it here anywhere.

He stayed at the ranch-style house in Hidden Hills, and helped Anna Picket as best he could. She drove him back to the city, and he picked up his car from the street in front of the office building on Pico. He put the three parking tickets in the glove compartment. That was work for the living. He went back to his apartment, and he took off his clothes, and he bathed. He lay naked on the bed where it had all started, and he tried to sleep. There were dreams. Dreams of smiling faces, and dreams of children he had known. Dreams of kindness, and dreams of hands that had held him.

And sometime during the long night a breeze blew.

But he never felt it.

And when he awoke, it was cooler in the world than it had been for a very long time; and when he cried for them, he was, at last, able to say goodbye.

A man is what he does with his attention.

John Ciardi.

Worlds That Flourish.

Ben Okri.

Ben Okri (1959) is an iconic Nigerian writer who often experiments with new literary forms, styles, genres, and traditions. Although he began his career as a realist dealing with postcolonial themes, Okri soon delved into what has been called, for lack of a better term, a form of 'African magic realism'. Myths from the Yoruba culture have been particularly prominent in his subsequent work, including in his masterpiece, the Booker Prize winner The Famished Road (1991). Okri himself emphasizes that the surreal or fantastical elements in his work coexist with the real (and urban) world in his fiction. Luminous and strange, 'Worlds that Flourish' (1988) is a wonderful contemporary evocation of an encounter with the weird.

I was at work one day when a man came up to me and asked me my name. For some reason I couldn't tell it to him immediately and he didn't wait for me to get around to it before he turned and walked away. At lunch-time I went to the bukka to eat. When I got back to my desk someone came and told me that half the workers in the department had been sacked. I was one of them.

I had not been working long in the department and I left the job without bitterness. I packed my things that day and sorted out the money that was owed me. I got into my battered little car and drove home. When I arrived I parked my car three streets from where I lived, because the roads were bad. As I walked home the sight of tenements and zinc huts made me dizzy. Swirls of dust came at me from the untarred roads. Everything shimmered like mirages in an omnipotent heat.

Later in the evening I went out to buy some cooked food. On my way back a neighbour came to me and said: 'How are you?'

'Fine,' I said.

'Are you sure you are fine?'

'Yes. Why do you ask?'

'Well,' said the neighbour, 'it's because you go around as if you don't have any eyes.'

'What do you mean?'

'Since your wife died you've stopped using your eyes. Haven't you noticed that most of the compound people are gone?'

'Gone where?'

'Run away. To safety.'

'Why?'

'Don't ask me.'

'Why haven't you gone?'

'I'm happy here.'

'So am I,' I said, smiling. I went to my room.

Barely two hours after the conversation with my neighbour there was a knock on my door. I opened it and three men pushed their way in. Two of them carried machetes and the third had a gun. They weren't nasty or brutal. They merely asked me to sit quietly on the bed and invited me to watch them if I wanted. I watched them as they cleaned my room of my important possessions and took what money they could find. They chatted to me about how bad the roads were and how terrible the government was and how there were so many checkpoints around. While they chatted they bundled my things into a heap and carried them out to their lorry as though they were merely helping me to move. When they finished the man with the gun said: 'This is what we call scientific robbery. If you so much as cough after we've gone I will shoot out your eyes, you hear?'

I nodded. He left with a smile. A moment later I heard their lorry driving off down the untarred road. I rushed out and they were gone. I came back to my room to decide what next to do. I couldn't inform the police immediately because the nearest station was miles away and even if I did I couldn't really expect them to do anything. I sat on the bed and tried to convince myself that I was quite fortunate to still have the car and some money in the bank. But as it turned out I wasn't even allowed to feel fortunate. Not long after the thieves had left there was another knock on my door. I got up to open it when five soldiers with machine-guns stepped into the room. Apparently the thieves had been unable to get away. They were stopped at a checkpoint and to save their own necks they told the soldiers that I was their accomplice. Without ceremony, and with a great deal of roughness, the soldiers dragged me to their jeep. Visions of being executed as an armed robber at the beach filled me with vertigo. I told the soldiers that I was the one who was robbed but the soldiers began to beat me because it seemed to them I was trying to insult their intelligence with such a transparent lie. As they took me away, with their guns prodding my back, my neighbour came out of his room. When he saw the soldiers with me he said: 'I told you that you don't have eyes.'

Then he went to one of the soldiers and, to my astonishment, said: 'Mr Soldier, I hope you treat him as he deserves. I always thought something was wrong with his head.'

The soldiers took us to the nearest police station and we were all locked in the same cell. The real thieves, who seemed to find it all amusing, kept smiling at me. At night the soldiers came and beat us up with whips when we refused to confess anything. Then in the morning some policemen took us outside and made us strip naked and commanded us to face the street. The people that went past looked at us and hurried on. I shouted of my innocence and the policemen told me to shut up. We stayed out facing the whole world in our nakedness for most of the day. The children laughed at us. The women studied us. Photographers came and flashed their cameras in our eyes. When night fell a policeman came and offered me the opportunity to bribe my way out of trouble. I burned all over and my eyes were clogged with dust. I told him I had to go to the bank first. The thieves paid their dues and were freed. I stayed in a cell crammed with men screaming all night. In the morning one of the soldiers accompanied me to the bank. I drew out some money and paid my dues. I went home and slept for the rest of that day.

In the morning I went to have a shower. Going through the compound I was struck by the absence of communal noises. No music came from the rooms. No children cried. There were no married couples arguing and shouting behind red curtains. There were chickens and rats in the backyard. My neighbour came out of the toilet and smiled when he saw me.

'So they have released you,' he said, regretfully.

'You are a wicked man,' I shouted.

'People don't go out anymore,' he said, coolly ignoring me. 'It's very quiet. I like it this way.'

'Why were you so wicked to me?'

'I don't trust people who don't have eyes.'

'I might have been executed.'

'Are you better than those who have been?'

I stared at him in disbelief. He went and washed his hands at the pump and dried them against his trousers. He pushed past me and went to his room. A moment later I saw him going out.

I still felt sleepy even after my shower. I went to my room and got dressed. Then I went to the front of the compound. I sat on a bench and looked at the street. The churches around were not having their usual prayers and songs over loudspeakers. The muezzin was silent. The street was deserted. There were no signs of panic. The stalls still had their display of goods and the shops were open, but there was no one around. There were a lot of birds in the air, circling the aerials. Somewhere in the distance a radio had been left on. Across the street a goat wandered around the roots of a tree. The c.o.c.ks didn't crow. After a while all I heard inside me was a confused droning, my incomprehension. Something had been creeping on us all along and now that the street was empty I couldn't even see what it was. I sat outside, fighting the mosquitoes, till it became dark. Then it dawned on me that something had happened to time. I seemed to be sitting in an empty s.p.a.ce without history. The wind wasn't cooling. And then suddenly all the lights went out. It was as if the spirit of the world had finally died. The black-out lasted a long time.

For many days I wandered about in the darkness of the city. I drove around in the day looking for jobs. Everywhere I went workers were being sacked in great numbers. There were no strikes. Sometimes I listened to the Head of State's broadcasts on the radio. He spoke about austerity, about tightening the national belt, and about a great future. He sounded very lonely, as though he were talking in a vast and empty room. After his broadcasts music was played. The music sounded also as if it were played in an empty s.p.a.ce.

In the evenings I went around looking for friends. They had gone and no explanations or forwarding addresses were given. When I went to their compounds I was surprised at how things had changed. The decay of the compounds seemed to have accelerated. Doors were left open. Cobwebs hung over the compound fronts. Outside the house of a friend I saw a boy staring at me with frightened eyes. When I started to ask him of the whereabouts of my friend, he got up and ran. I went back to my car and drove around the city, looking for people that I knew. Then I really began to notice things. There were people scattered in places of the city. There seemed no panic on their faces. It began to occur to me that the world was emptying out. When I took a closer look at the people a strange thought came to me: they seemed like sleep-walkers. I stopped the car and went amongst them to get a closer look, to talk with them, and find out exactly what was happening. (The radios and newspapers had long stopped giving information.) I went out into the street and approached a woman who was frying yams at the roadside. She looked at me with burning, suspicious eyes.

'What is happening to the country?' I asked her.

'Nothing is happening.'

'Where has everyone gone?'

'No one has gone anywhere. Why are you asking me? Go and ask someone else.'

As I turned to go the fire flared up, illuminating her face. And on her face I saw a sloping handwriting. On her forehead and on her cheeks there were words. Then I noticed that her hands were also covered in handwriting. I drew closer to read the words, but she began screaming. I heard the ironclad boots of soldiers running down the streets towards us. I hurried to my car and drove off.

As I went home I noticed that a lot of the people in the streets had handwriting on their faces. I couldn't understand why I hadn't noticed it before. And then I was suddenly overcome with the notion that my neighbour had words on his face. I drove home hurriedly.

It was dark by the time I arrived. I couldn't risk having the car three streets away, so I parked it outside the compound. I think it was with that act of caution that the thought of fleeing first occurred to me. The birds had increased over our street. The radio was still on somewhere in the distance. Its battery was getting weaker. The wind whistled through the compounds. Stray dogs roamed down the street. I sat outside and waited for my neighbour. When he didn't come back for a long time I went and knocked on his door. There was no reply. I went to my room and ate, and then I went and sat outside again. I listened to the radio dying. I listened to the thin military voices. The night got darker and still my neighbour didn't return. I listened to the wind straining the branches of the trees. Stray cats eyed me in the dark. I went to my room and I slept that night with the feeling that something was breaking on my consciousness. When I woke up in the morning I noticed that the Head of State's lonely face kept slipping into my mind. I had a shower and ate and went and knocked on my neighbour's door. He still hadn't got back.

I prepared to go out but thunder sounded in the sky. By the afternoon it had started to rain. The street swelled with water. The gutters overran. The rain poured into the open doors of the rooms and fell on the stalls with their undisturbed display of goods and beat down on the clothes that had been left hanging. The wind blew very hard and shook our roof. The branches of a tree strained and then cracked. From afar I could see smoke above the houses. The rain poured down unceasingly for two days. My neighbour still didn't return. The water went up to the b.u.mper of my car. The rain finally extinguished the distant radio. The Head of State made desperate broadcasts about cleaning the national stables. I sat in my room, imprisoned by the rain. I listened to the water endlessly falling. My roof began to leak. I heard a cat wailing above the steady din. Sometimes the rain accelerated in its fall, and managed to obliterate both time and memory. It soon seemed as if it had always been raining. With the city empty of people, I began to hear broadcasts in the rain. And then in the evening of the second day, a realization came upon me. I went to the window, my ears reverberating with persistently dripping water, and looked out. That was when I discovered I had temporarily lost the names of things.

I stayed indoors till the rain stopped. Then I stayed in another day, to enable the water to sink into the swollen earth. I went and tried my neighbour's door several times and then I went into his room. Nothing had been disturbed, but he seemed to have altogether vanished. On the fourth day I ventured down our street and witnessed the proliferation of disasters. Trees had fallen. Houses had crumbled before the force of the wind and rain. Dead cats floated in the gutters. There were no birds in the air. I went back to my room. My head jostled with signs. I got out my box and stuffed it full of my papers and clothes. I packed all my food into the back of the car. I left my door open. I tried my neighbour's room for the final time. I got into my car and set out on a journey without a destination through the vast, uncultivated country.

It wasn't easy getting out of the city. There were so many roadblocks and soldiers were all over the place. They stopped me and searched the car. At every one of the roadblocks the soldiers commented on the food I had at the back. They asked where I was going. I told them I was going to visit my mother who was ill in the village. Then they would ask if I thought that people were hungry. When I said no, the soldiers would take some of my food and wave me on. By the time I cleared through the last roadblock I had very little food left. But that wasn't what worried me. What made me anxious, as I drove through the forests, was that the car kept giving me trouble. It would stall and I had to sit at the wheel and wait for the engine to cool. When it did start, and move, it did so erratically. The car would suddenly, it seemed, start driving me. It picked up speed, and slowed down, of its own inscrutable volition.

I drove for a long time down the winding forest roads. I managed to cross a wooden bridge that had been partly devastated by rain. For long periods of time I heard only the purring sound of the car. Sometimes it seemed as if I were driving on one spot. The road and the forests didn't seem to change. I crossed the same partly devastated bridge several times. I got tired of driving without seeming to be moving. I stopped and locked all the doors and got some sleep.

I felt better when I woke up. I was driving for a while when I felt that I had broken the sameness of the journey. Mountain ranges, plateaus of ambergris rocks, and precipices, appeared all around me. I pa.s.sed a clay-coloured anthill. I slowed down for a pack of hyenas to cross the road. I came to a petrol shack. The door was open. There were dirty barrels of petrol and diesel oil in the front yard. I stopped the car and parked. I pa.s.sed the greasy hand-pump and knocked on the door. An old man came out. He had a pair of grey braces over a black shirt and he wore filthy khaki trousers. He was barefoot.

'You're the first person I've seen for a long time,' he said.

I asked him to fill the tank. He didn't say anything to me as he did so. I changed the water in the radiator. He didn't have any brake fluid. I sat on a bench and listened to the insects of the forest while he slowly and painstakingly looked the car over and tuned the engine.

'How do you manage to live here?'

'I manage. I like it.'

I paid him. As I was getting into the car the old man said: 'Don't go that way. I haven't seen any vehicles coming back. Stay where you can be happy.'

I nodded, smiling. I shut the door and started the car. As I moved away I waved at him. He didn't wave back. He stared at the car motionlessly. I drove on into the forest.

Further along I ran over a goat that had been crossing the road. I felt the wheels b.u.mp over its body and I stopped. The goat jerked on the tarmac. When I came out of the car I heard violent noises and saw people emerging from the forest and rushing towards me. The men had machetes and the women held long pieces of firewood. I ran back to the car, but when I started it the engine only whined. The people pounced on the car and smashed the bodywork with their machetes and firewood. They broke the windows and several hands reached for my face. The car started, suddenly, and I sped off with a few hands still grasping for my eyes. I swerved both ways and people fell off and I drove on without looking back. Afterwards I saw blood and bits of flesh on the jagged, broken windows.

And then it was as if the rain that had fallen in the city began to catch up with me, intensified. The forest reverberated with thunder. Lightning struck in the trees. The leaves were blown into frenzies by the relentless wind. The car kept swerving and sometimes it was as if the wind was blowing the car on, lifting it at the back. Sometimes I did not feel that the wheels were on the road. I drove on air. I drove on through the torrential rain. There were trees swaying and leaves flapping everywhere. And then there was water pouring on the trees everywhere. Now and again someone would emerge, soaking, from the forest and would run across the road and wave for me to stop. I did not stop for anybody, or for any reason. I drove on in demented concentration. Soon my eyes got tired. I was thrashed by the rain and all I could see was the windscreen and the forests distorted in the rain. I found it difficult to blink and when I did I felt the blankness pulling me into sleep. I would wake up to find myself veering off the road. I managed to sleep while driving.

When night came thickly over the forest I couldn't separate the darkness from the rain. Occasionally I saw a flash behind me which I thought belonged to a car. I adjusted the mirror and in the crack of a second I saw my face. Thunder broke and exploded in front of me. A moment later there was a forked, incandescent flash which lit up the handwriting on my face. I negotiated a bend and heard a deafening crash in the forest. Something shattered my windscreen and I drove wide-eyed into the darkness. Insects flew into my face. Wind, rain, and bits of gla.s.s momentarily blinded me. Then I saw that a tree had fallen across the road ahead of me. The car spun into the vortex of leaves and branches. And then there was stillness. For a long moment it was completely dark. I couldn't hear, see, or feel anything. And then I heard the whirring engine and the insistent din of insects and rain.

I tried to move, but couldn't: I felt I had become entangled in the car. I heard magnified grating noises. I was covered in crumbly earth which seemed alive and which stung me. Something settled inside me and I extricated myself from the front seat effortlessly. When I was out of the wreckage I saw that the car had run into a large anthill. There were ants everywhere. I pushed on through the rain. I couldn't find the road. I went on into the forest. I pa.s.sed rocks flowering with lichen. I moved under the endless lattice of branches. Thorns of the forest cut into me. I didn't bleed.

I came to a river. When I swam across I noticed it was flowing in a direction opposite to how it seemed. As I came out on the other bank the water dried instantly on me. I went on through the undergrowth till I came to a village. At the entrance there were two palm trees growing upside down. I went between the trees and saw a man sitting on a chair outside a hut. When the man saw me his face lit up. He ululated suddenly and talking drums sounded at distances in the village. The man got up and rushed to me and embraced me: 'We've been waiting for you,' he said.

'What do you mean?'

'We've been waiting for you.'

'That can't be true.'

The man looked quite offended at my remark, but he said: 'I have been sitting outside this hut for three months. Waiting for you. I'm happy that you've made it. Come, the people of the village are expecting you.'

He led the way.

'Why?'

'You'll find out.'

I followed him silently. As we went on into the village, I noticed that there was a woman following us. Whenever I looked back she hid behind the trees and bushes.

'We've been cleaning up the village for your arrival,' the man said.

We pa.s.sed a skysc.r.a.per that reflected the sunlight like blinding gla.s.s sheets.

'That's where the meeting will take place.'