Iron Balloons (24 page)

He sat among the roots and felt his body going back to sleep again. The sun crawled across his skin. He was home. Around him he heard birds and insects, but he could also hear the traffic, the seepage of radios beating out a medley of reggae and the lilt and drop of radio hosts arguing with callers.

They say prophets, true prophets, are able to prophesy their own deaths. They say that God speaks to them and assures them that their time is coming. Sometimes they argue, but always, always, true prophets know.

Joseph had seen the way those two men had died, and while he did not know of the cancer multiplying itself from his toe to his bones, to his blood, to his brain, even as he lay there staring at the sky, he knew the weightlessness of being weary of the world—the hollowness of having spoken all that was burning inside his belly. He felt dry, spent. When prophets grow silent it means they have served their purpose.

He could not see the future—that he would be leaving Jamaica again in three months to go on tour, flying late at night to New York to fill Central Park with skanking white folks, to then collapse, pale and trembling, his skin pallid like dead flesh. He could not speak of the journeys from doctors to doctors to herbalists to visionaries, or of the long, bone-aching flight to that small village in Germany. He could not know that women would soon be his keepers.

He had slept out in the open for several nights and he was beginning to lose track of the days. The sun came up and went down.

He moved among the trees as if in a dream.

3.

In the middle of the night he wakes up expecting to see a wide-open sky with the dusty scattering of stars framed by the dark shadow of mountains. But all he sees is a blank grayness of walls around him. No. He was in a room, but this room is so small, with walls so close to him he cannot breathe. He wonders how he has gotten here, gotten to this place with walls covered with newspapers, a room that does not smell like the disinfectant-neat room of sunlight and white sheets where he had fallen asleep. Instead the place smells of an unwashed body, the funk of rotten flesh and the heavy musk of human waste, and the peculiar tart scent of rotten oranges. He opens his eyes and begins to feel meaning crawling toward him—the hint of a narrative that he knows to be an explanation for what he is seeing and smelling.

The logic creeps nearer, the way a dream fades away and waking insinuates itself on the mind. The meaning of the smells comes in small spurts of revelation—first the pressing need to get up, to take a shower, to call his aunt and ask her for money, to ask where his woman has gone and if she will come back. And the memory of his woman—whose name he sometimes forgets because it is too painful to call it—hits him hard. It fills him with such a terrible sense of panic that he turns away from the thought and tries to bury himself in another flight, another memory. He can tell in those brief moments that he is running. He can tell, too, that he is dying an inglorious death. He knows that if he were to simply get up, walk over to the cracked wood cabinet, open the dark brown plastic bottle, and pour out three pills, if he were to take those pills and sit on the edge of the bed waiting for them to slow everything down, waiting for them to bring him back to the gloom of his reality, he would probably understand everything happening in him and around him.

But he does not want to move.

He wants to die.

But he wants to die in a narrative of his own making. He understands that the narrative given to him is empty. In that narrative he would die for a woman. He would die because he cannot convince her to overlook his madness, overlook his cruelty, overlook his inertia, overlook his history, and simply love him. He is dying the kind of death that will warrant a brief note in the newspapers—nothing dramatic.
Forty-year-old man found dead in Ensom City home.
He does not want that kind of death.

Stretched out on the bed, allowing the delirium of his hunger to carry his mind far from this place, letting the sound of reggae blanket him—
Exodus
playing again and again—he will find better meaning for himself, for his path. He will travel into his own myth. Willing himself to dream his own narrative is becoming painful but necessary. Yet he can also tell that what he is dreaming is not entirely myth. He is remembering, too. Remembering the twisted way in which his life is changing into a legend. He expects to wake up at the end of this, at the end of staying in this room full of voices, memories, colors, textures, tastes, smells, with enough in him to make his passing a wonderfully meaningful thing. He closes his eyes.

He was born in 1962. The year the nation was born. When he was born, ska was jumping around the city. In that year, someone said that he was a child of the future. An old man touched his forehead and said, “As your fortune go, so go the nation.” He would be told this so many times that he was sure he had heard the words of the old man himself—and he would live his life wondering whether he was guiding the fate of the nation or whether he was simply reflecting a nation bent on its own self-destruction.

His journey passed through the fearful, hopeful millenarian years of the 1970s, the years when everyone knew that some dread apocalypse was to come. Then he entered the chaos and sexual wildness of those 1980s, when he discovered that women loved him, when he walked from woman to woman, searching for meaning deep in their flesh. In the 1990s, he was trying to beat back the gruff voice of Capleton, chanting another apocalypse, but this time with blood in his eyes. With it came the frenzy of cars crashing, bodies mutilated, flesh exposed—the coked-up madness of a city coming of age, hungry to remind itself of its own strength. This was a country in trauma as it struggled to show that it still had possibilities, a country caught up in a midlife crisis, looking back at the hopeful years, the years of promise and prophecy and asking,
What is left, what is left, what do I have to show for it all? Am I still sharp looking? Do women dem still go for me?

Every narrative that enters his mind is a narrative in search of meaning. He is not sleeping when he concludes that were he to travel into the soul of Bob Marley, he would find his true self.

They were both born on February 6. But one day, in 1981, when Bob Marley expired, one sunny day in May when he breathed out his last, something left that emaciated body and travelled across the Caribbean Sea and found its way into him in Kingston. It was the morning he stepped out of the Psychiatric Ward of the University Hospital into a brilliant day. His body, after the discarding of its fat, was a taut muscular thing, his eyes finally clear and his mind ticking with the promise of better days ahead. He had a paper bag filled with pills and, though no one was waiting for him, he was unperturbed. He was going to go up to Papine, catch a bus down to Half Way Tree, and then another that would take him to Ensom City, where he would clean his small house and begin to live again. In that moment, still standing out on the concrete walkway, having shaken the hand of the doctor on duty who kept asking, “Yuh sure you alright? Yuh don’ wan’ me call anyone?”; after smiling wryly at his favorite nurse, the one who kept saying to him, as if to convince herself that she was not mad to have had an affair with an inmate, “You are different. You so intelligent. We gwine to hear about you. Don’t forget me, yuh hear?”; after waving to her and smiling at the gap in her teeth, and the bigness of her muscular body that contrasted with the delicate fragility of her pale skin: After doing all this, he stood alone, breathed deeply, and was about to walk, when it came upon him.

It came not like wind or tongues of fire, but like a blanket. A heavy blanket that gathered around him and kept wrapping about his face, making it hard for him to breathe. He was gasping and wrestling, trying to fight it off. But the more he fought, the more the cloud spoke, the more the cloud carried into him the words of all the Bob Marley songs he knew. More than that, it carried the words of a man asking,
Oh Jah, oh Jah, why has thou abandoned I and I to the four winds—I’s Ethiopia, I wan’ res’. Why yuh bring me back to Babylon?

He knew that it was the spirit of Bob Marley consuming him. So he breathed. As he breathed deeply, he began to feel the cloud coming into him. When it did so, he began to cry, to weep uncontrollably. He felt his body fall to the ground. Then he felt the strong hand of his nurse around him.

“I tell you, him not ready yet … The man not ready yet … Jesus …”

“Is the heat, man. Jus’ the heat. Him discharge already. Steady him there …”

“Take him inside. Help me …”

“No, him alright. The doctor sign him out.”

“Why unoo so wicked. The man need to come back inside …”

“See. See, him look better already. Hey, bossy, bossy, yuh alright?”

By then he was standing on his own again—and he felt stronger. He felt parts of himself taking on new shapes. He did not have to ask any questions about what had happened. In his head two different languages spoke, two different memories. They were wrestling with each other, trying to find meaning. Then, quite suddenly, sadness filled his chest again. He turned to the light-skinned nurse with her long eyelashes and her freckled face, her dark brown eyebrows wrinkled with worry, and he spoke as if to comfort her.

“Bob dead,” he said.

“Who?” she asked, as she touched his wet face.

“Bob, Bob Marley dead …”

“Yes,” she said. “It just come on de radio …”

He had calmed down. He was not crying. He felt his face tightening into a scowl, that familiar brooding scowl. When he spoke again, it felt like his voice was coming from somewhere else.

“Bob cyaan dead, dawta. Nuh fret.” He touched her hand. She seemed to know he was fine. He walked away from the clinic, and as he passed a rusty garbage drum, he tossed the bag of pills into it.

That was twenty years ago. Twenty years of dreams, of memories, of trying to chart a path that a living Bob would take. Twenty years of realizing that he is going to die without any glory or fanfare. Twenty years later, he realizes that a woman has brought him down—not some cancer, not some diabolic sickness, but a woman. It has taken twenty years for him to find out that he cannot be Bob Marley with this woman, cannot call her one of many queens, cannot adopt the tough inviolable pose, twenty years to know that he wants her to mother him. And in this interim, he is trying to dream himself to a meaningful death.

The fact is, his world is crumbling around him. Everything is falling apart. Everything is uncertain.

4.

He felt the pressure in his head grow. The plane rose steeply. His head pressed hard against the back of the seat; the lumps of his locks hurt his scalp now. He could feel the slow decay of the sores in his scalp despite the ointment that smelled of mint and aloe. His eyes were closed. Nausea filled his mouth with a bitter taste. He counted in his head, then began to mouth Psalm 91, his fingers tapping the rhythm on the seat handle. The climb continued, and he felt the weight of pressure on his body. For the first time he began to think of the pleasures of death.

He leaned his head toward Rhea, who stared in front of her until she felt his eyes on her. She looked at him, her face still smooth with the dark St. Thomas soil, the brown loam of ancient volcanoes that fed the banana trees rioting through that parish. The African wrap on her head was skyblue. She would wrap yards of cloth around her head to give the suggestion of locks. Few people knew that Rhea did not have locks. Her hair was thick and he was always laughing at her, telling her that she would not have to do anything to have locks—serious locks. She had thick Maroon hair, black, so dense with fertility that it shone.

Each night, when they lived in the one-room shack on the hills of St. Ann, she would sit there and rub sweet-smelling blue hair oil into her scalp, and then she would yank at the hair until her comb could run through it without hindrance. She didn’t cut it, but it never seemed to grow long, it just got denser and denser, the curls tightening with each inch added. He teased her a lot. She was still the church girl he had met on a dusty street in Jones Town, walking to the missionary congregation with her Bible in hand, her white dress stretched tightly around her hips. Her knees knocked slightly and he could not take his eyes off the way the strange stutter of her stride made her bottom roll. She had remained serious about her God. She spoke of Jesus as a friend. No, not a friend, but like a spirit child, someone she had birthed from her own womb. There was something so deeply intimate about their friendship. He had no reason to doubt her Jesus’ existence and he accepted him in the same way that he accepted that she had brothers and sisters—they were part of who she was and he understood that. She spoke of all of them in the same way—Jesus, too—as people in her life.

Now her eyes stretched Chinese-like in her face, the black depth of her irises stark against the surrounding whiteness. She was worried about him, but tried to smile. He saw too a sense of triumph in her look, and he found comfort in it. She had won. He was comfortable with that. At last, he did not have to think, he did not have to consider, to read into the motives of the people around them. He simply relaxed and let her take over. It was as simple as that. It was part of his acceptance of something larger—he knew he was going die. This was now quite clear. Jamaica was far away. He had told her that Jamaica was where he wanted to go. But she said she had other plans—they would go to Jamaica after he felt better. First they would go to Miami. There was a specialist there who would help him. Then he would go to Jamaica to recover. He would be incognito. They would stay in St. Ann, far from the madness of Kingston. It would be like those years they had spent as farmers eking a modest living from the fertile soil of those mountains.

They would then spend a year getting his strength back. He would work in the small studio that she was going to set up in the house, and they would have easy access to Miami for medical checkups. The next tour would be to the Far East. First there would be a triumphant week performing in Jamaica—a stadium concert—then another Babylon by Bus through major U.S. cities, including a major show in New York’s Irving Plaza where he collapsed and the nightmare began; then the Far East, then Ethiopia, where they would settle.