My Amputations (Fiction collective ;) (13 page)

He returned to Doctor Wongo's studio. A Nigerian woman greeted him, introduced herself as Adaora Okpewho . . . “Doctor Wongo is in Nigeria on business. May I help you?” Mason didn't think, she could. Yet she was clearly not the sort of person who'd try to cure bad memory or snake bite with calcium tablets. “I came for a body reading.” “A body reading's simple. I can give you a body reading. As my ancient mother used to say, ‘Him who got text for body way get readers very good’.” And Adaora Okpewho laughed a little musical laugh as erasable as sky-writing. Mason immediately trusted her. Emotionally he'd already placed himself in her hands. And he knew she knew it. “Come over where it's warm. You must undress.” He followed her past familiar torture-gadgets to the sheet-covered mattress on the floor in a corner. When Mason was lying naked on his back on the mattress Adaora Okpewho bent down placing her knees on a cushion. Here alongside him she looked even larger. He studied her eyes. They possessed the glimmerings of the cud-blurbling of a bad dream. Yet his sense of safety didn't lose its tenure. Her alchemy was working. And she hadn't even touched him—yet. Then she did. Her hands were huge and soft with iron and webbed octaves in their rhythm. They turned him to liquid. Then the reading started. Not with her voice but with the music of her flesh. The first thing she touched was his penis. “This,” she whispered, “is your khnemu. The fibrous tissue within is a mask for the shredding pages of Baptist Church bibles. Your legs? One
at a time. This one, the left: it is a Pond Cypress pretending to be a hawk giving a monkey a ride across a dark sky—to a place of safety. The right one is a parrot who tells the slaveholder the slaves had a dance while he was away in town. You must
watch
this one. Your eyes are not spies so you can't do it with them. But to return to your legs. They're complex limbs: see this bird-like structure at your knee? It's a mule leading a man. The sound you hear behind the plowing is that of a bullfrog pulling off its jacket. You got femur and patella and fibula and tibia down here: they are all counties in High-on-the-Hog and Getting-the-Better-of-Bossman. Then this thing called coccyx. What can I tell you about it? It's close to the center. And the sacrum is too. Legs are important,” said the African woman. “They can be trees every day in the week: milky sap, corky ridges, thorns, twigs, wafer ash, yellow birch. You smell them, taste their sassafras—aromatic, sour sap. Important thing though is this: what the legs connect to.” She grinned. And grabbed his cock again. She shook it as she spoke. “This majestic thing is a crab apple one day, a black locust another, a Hercules Club. It has bark. And history. It has fast-moving guys behind it. Nicodemus from Detroit might know more about it than I. Yet, there are times, in the Blues, when the slaveholder gets the better of good old John or Moe or Moses. I'm getting away from—. Never mind. A lot comes from central West. Much from up higher, closer to the sea: Liber Metampsychosis. Ennu. Pu. Teta. So much. I'd take weeks to bend your ear. Ear-tree. And so much that wouldn't fit: everleastingness: kale or collards. Coptic concerns here backed up by all those wonderful tiny Egyptian birds of Thought: facing bowls: or equations: or puzzles.” She stopped. “Sorry. I got carried away, chum. Bud. Honey. Pal. I'll start again. Here, your hips are important: and deep inside the sacrum, the femoral artery, cushioned between the hips is the small intestine, the rectum, your bladder. Hum. Birds with tiny feet dance in your liver, your urine . . . I'm going to move on—up. Your stomach. Ah! this organ pretends to be a fool like a woolly-headed black man in the cotton field who wants to evade a confrontation with the over-seer
who sees nothing. The stomach is also hooked to a plow. It has John Henry-sweat on it. The stomach is hooked up with the strength of the bear and the wings of the buzzard. It's the organ that makes it possible for you to run faster than a deer. It's against Friday and Monday. Brer Dog and Brer Rabbit ain't got much to do with this organ.” She rubbed it gently. “Yours is flat. Butterflies ain't never been in there, I guess. (You wondering why I, a Nigerian, know so much about you, an Afro-American? No? Good. Your body tells me much.) Here—your chest.” She tapped it. “Thorns. Silverbells. Here” (she bent, placing her nose within an inch of his ribs) “We're close to the heartbeat. Yours smell of malt and pine nut. Ginger and goat drifting up from below. Ra must have smelled like that. Isis like pears and perch. I hear a herd of Cayuse ponies galloping in there: Your ribcage is a teepee—gift from your tribal ancestors of North America. Your blood is African: it's a storm: ‘de wind and de water fightin” (to quote Doctor Hurston). Pectoralis major? The base of your Talking Bones.” She sat erect again without removing her hands. “Now your neck. It's the channel: it gets tight when you have to prove yourself the fastest and the best. (Like your grandfather, you're so fast you could go out in the woods, shoot a wild, gaunt boar, run home, put your rifle away, and get back in time to catch the hog before it fell. But this swiftness gives you trouble. Makes you a dangerous over-achiever.) Your throat is subject to infection: be careful. If you have trouble the flower of the magnolia will cure it. Just chew it. Stay away from the Crucifixion thorn. Be careful in Utah or Arizona. In the Peach State beware of the one-legged grave robber and anybody who says he can turn a buffalo around. Now, your head. Your brain is sweet gum. It has a history of tricksterism: it's a dog that saves your life, a rabbit that survives the threat of bullies and tyrants. Your ventricles are black locust.” She was rubbing his scalp with the firm tips of her fingers. Your brain stem has the aromatic smell of the sassafras. It protected you from being killed by your mother and eaten by your father. Your cerebellum protects you from the return of vengeful ancestors and enemies: from the dead
generally. Without it you might be stranded in an endless winter between centuries and races. The fluid surrounding your brain is your incense and it is your own hant and spirit. That's right: keep your eyes closed. Concentrate, my son. Keep the hoodoos out. Mojo workers out, too, There's a Two-headed man trying to get inside your epidural space. He has the attractive smell of hemlock. You'll do well to wash your hair with bitter wafer ash ailanthus. Your skull bone is as sturdy as a pyramid and as serious as Zacharias and the Sycamore.” Adaora Okpewho stopped. “This is not the end. Your thighs, feet and your rear are left.” She shifted her weight and leaned toward the lower part of his body. “Turn over.” He obeyed. “Gluteus maximus. This left cheek keeps the memory of your fear of falling: it remembers what you felt as you sailed through the air when your father threw you out the window. It remembers the thud when your grandfather caught you. This other one is a storehouse too: it holds the passion of sin and crime and the whole morality of your life: guilt for the legacy of hunting possum on Sunday; gambling away the family jewels; it keeps the Lord and the Devil from exchanging places. It reminds you you need more faith. It keeps you from becoming a grave robber. It's a mulatto hobo who—” At this point, Mason and Adaora Okpewho looked toward the door. Somebody had just entered the room. It was Doctor Wongo.

Detection and deception? Possibly. May in Nice was impish: with windswept Terra Amata vibrations beneath its insistent, demanding presence.
Demon
cries! The idea of a conference of detective story writers? Rare in itself. But, well, why not . . . ? And look: genre people gotta be hipper than, say, all those so-called
serious
types . . . even if they carry toy pistols in their briefcases! The first session met at nine in the conference
room of the library, on a Monday. Mason stole his way in and sat in a corner at the back. A French scholar was lecturing on Himes's domestic novels: the grotesque and twist-of-fate in his ironic picaresques.
Le reine des pommes
was a killer! A blind man with a pistol could shoot out your reflexes! Grave Digger and Coffin Ed hit like metal file cabinets falling from a sixteenth floor window. The French critic finished and one from Holland lowered the lights and showed them slides as he talked. The jungle was evil? One had to find one's way up a mean, snaky river? or was this a journey into the mind, deep into the unexplored depths of the criminal vegetation-of-human-existence itself? Should the detective take sides with the villain, help him free himself further from the menacing presence of the—undefinable enemy. Tsetse flies might end your life before you could detect even
why
you're here. Crusaders got in the way of the search, the probing. If you're going to throw your lot in with that of the murderer, then you want to be sure to saddle up properly, pack a gun or take spears. Is your curiosity about that obsessed maniac you're searching for just down right morbid? What about your own contradictions. Your fog, your confusion. And there was the possibility of your crew, and the native dancers—who would not escape the brutality, lust and good intentions of the Crusaders. This was years after the Roman conquest and long after the beginning of the exploitation of Africans in Africa. What
kind
of detection is this? Through slide after slide, the Dutchman showed his willingness to explore the farthest terrain of his own evolving process: to search every crevice—even into the nose of a Bahr-el-gazel, in the armpit of a Kano trader, between the rear cheeks of a Basuto. Professor Franz Soethoudt's amazing lecture was a concession, a story, a plot, a line of horses plunging through the desert, carrying riders with muskets. Searching for what? Looking for the cyclical thrust of its own
tale
. . . . The morning session continued in this fashion. Mason went away at noon with a headache.

The next day, more of the same: stolen ponies, shady sandalwood, lost spies, tom-toms, governments in trouble, thoroughbreds in the backs of stolen trucks. But lunch with the detective story writers was different: noisy, cheerful. He didn't really meet anybody: just the surfaces of people. He couldn't detect any reality behind these surfaces. They possessed good faces, even kind ones, and threw off nice music, sweet, tamed voices. There was a Soviet-approved, neo-Tchaikovsky style in some, in others, German organs or French drums. Ladies sipped bitter red San Pellegrino. One, an American, was working on a whodonit about Brumbies being stolen for a meat grinder in a pet food factory. Her friend, a painter, was with her. They both gave Mason the willies: made him want to go on a crusade to save elephants and the dear rhinoceros. After lunch he went for a walk along the sea. Everybody was out. It was hot.

The conference had a lingering effect: he found himself playing detective. Even bought a black cap pistol which he carried strapped to his leg. For days now, Mason went about shooting at shocked people. An old man in a funeral procession at Place de la Beauté swung at him with a walking stick. Mourners filed out of Maria Sine Labe Concerta. They laughed at Mason. He went and bought a
water
pistol. Filled it with
milk.
On rue Foncet, he squirted his first victim: a girl in a yellow dress. She smiled and tried to kiss him but he ran. He settled down at a sidewalk cafe at the corner of rue Miralheti and rue Pairoliere. He was carrying this thing too far. What'd come over him?

They all go over to a hidden beach at the bottom of a steep hill near Monte Carlo. On the way: Mason remembers a dream he had in the night: a tiny woman in large hooped skirts with many sandwiches packed against her belly and groin—held firm by elastic of bloomers—greets him. He reaches for one of her sandwiches and she slaps his hand. She laughs at him. Says: Go suckle the moon! Jean-Pierre is driving insanely fast. Mason's companions are speaking to each other in French. It causes him to want to keep to himself. He wishes he hadn't come. On the beach everybody's like in a Cezanne: nude. Mason and his friends undress. Two fat guys approaching the surf cough and sneeze in each other's face: they seem unaware of the exchange. Mason now is not even conscious of the fact he's a foreigner: everybody who's not pink is brown or tan. Then there's a
very
dark figure coming down the rocky path to the beach. African? Welcome brother! No, not African. Too much
brown
for African. Guy alone. The dark man is coming this way: across the rocks. Carefully. Carrying—what is that? Oh, just a shoulder bag. His white pants are too long. His sandals: loose. Something familiar . . . Oh, no, shit: it's
Clarence McKay!
Mason staggers to his feet and attempts to split: nowhere to hide (“ran to the rock” . . . ), nowhere . . . Ten feet from Mason, The Impostor whipped out a giant Smith and Wesson six-shooter and aimed it at Mason. The Impostor pulled the trigger.

There is a tingling breeze coming down from the Alps cutting the fumes from traffic up on the road to Monaco. It's realistic, calm, a friendly day. Mason opens the white wine. Although he's relaxed and enjoying his escape-from-the-bullet-of-guilt, somewhere back there in the glue and glut of his history is a Pony Express rider coming forward, like a bat out of heaven, with an urgent message for him. The word could be
anything: that's the problem: it's not clear. From the so-called Impostor? The long awaited news from Himes of Wright, perhaps Dumas? The messenger has heavy saddle-bags. Lots. And the
way—Whew!
Is it news of another divorce, another childbirth? News of being inducted again into the military? Hokum? Word'd come from Schnitzler about the England trip. Soon now. He was arrogant enough to be excited. Meanwhile, enjoy. Wasn't accustomed to all of this nakedness: good though: no puritans here (“we're a Catholic country but we're not very religious”). Yet he was chickenman, chickenman—turning on a spit in a cooker (soon to be . . . ) Here on the beach, naked and turning blacker, warmer, happier, smoother, he almost dared to feel
complete:
yet—no way. The wine he'd contributed to the beach party he'd picked up at one of his old favorite caves—Caprioglio right across from Paganini's “home” on rue Saint Reparate. He scans the beach. Such grace and lines: curve of pelvis, tilt of tit, roundness of buttocks, broadness of chest, slope of thigh. Monique was making a “sand castle” with rocks. Well, dislocation is allowed—even in a straight one, ain't it? Raymonde, intellectual expert on French avant-garde and soon to be shipped to an academy of superior education in Kigali, is spitting out a bitter position pitted against Jean-Pierre's defensive verbal stand on—where'd this conversation come from?—the extent to which France aided the Nazis in exterminating six million Jews. Mason lying prone on his towel with eyes closed beneath sunglasses, picks up maybe eighty percent. Scuff. Jean-Pierre says nobody ever
told
him France handed over the Jews till he saw a movie about it. You were in the streets in sixty-eight like everybody else says Raymonde flinging his shoulder-length dark hair back from where it curled over the left eye—a C-shape concealing the figure eight. Chantal butts in to say the deal they got as a result of sixty-eight protests didn't carry with it the guarantee that anti-semitism would vanish from France. Isabelle sneers: other countries are worse. We do our best: I work every day with the disadvantaged, it's heartbreaking but we at least try. In French. Mason sits up: down the rocky shore Brieuc and Roye
are running in all their tiny pinkness with three little female cherubs. A woman with shaved cunt passes going toward the chartreuse tide. He decides to take a dip too. What a cut above Quai Lunel! Monique is already in, a back designed with freckles. How tiny her hands are! In the water he won't have to hear the words he only half understands. That time waiting to cross at rue Desire Neiland the trio of Lycée girls and boys bombarding him with questions in French. How frustrating to have to
be
the dumb foreigner! Selling tickets for charity? You want to hide. And at the entrance to Old Town at Port Fausse on the stairway an old woman asking him
something
as she gestured toward the Cathedrale beyond rue du la Boucherie and Mason's mouth hanging open . . . She might have been telling him they were dynamiting in the square and he shouldn't go or that city workers in their blue were no longer trimming hedges into square oblong rows but had now gone wild and were castrating on sight. Why always at stairways? and why did the beggars always approach him: did he look so different? They'd come up with their drugged babies telling him a story he couldn't follow: on the mall at the post office—on stairways! One nearly pushed him down the stairway at rue du Pont Vieux and rue du Collet when he refused her. Another spat on his back. Called him a dirty name. Now entering the sea is like throwing one's nakedness into music made with the feudal stones of a chateau. Even Mason feels it.