Time of the Locust (12 page)

Catacombs

U
nbeknownst
to the Rockies and long before Black Plains had been built, generations of locusts had been growing underground . . .

The Catacombs, that place of the damned and the blessed, of chilled limestone and granite and gypsum, of ancient growth crawling out of ancient things, lay in wait for Horus. It was the place where memories of the past rose like corpses and the extinct lived. Where the hieroglyphs of meaning and consequence were scrolled on the walls, invisible until the soul was awakened, until the world vanished into the dream it had been. The endless tunnels were hundreds of feet below, deep beneath the layers of Horus's mind, long, dark mazes that went on forever. The entrance to the Catacombs appeared to him one day of its own volition, an archway framing something blacker than his cell in the time of Dark rule, the death grip of the time of the eclipse. The entrance held a silken calm, and Horus felt as if he were looking into deep space. Its open mouth was an invitation to its wonder.

Horus entered the dank chill that led to the tunnels of a million paces, infinite strata and gradations. The dark rolled out before him like an open road in the night, and he could no longer feel even the presence of the shadows of his cell that stood panting near him always like fiendish familiars. At the archway, the scope of the place lay mysterious.

He took the first step forward. His bare feet were unsure on the dusty path beneath them. Was it dust? Or ash? He looked down and saw nothing. His eyes were of no use to him, and he came to understand that he would not need them where he was going. He would not need them to see. He reached out and touched the sides of the narrow passageway and felt the slime that coated the stone walls. What realm had he entered? In other floor-pacing nights of foamed mouth and crossed eyes in his cell, he was convinced that he had fallen to the lowest depth, a dimension burrowed in the deepest pit. And yet here was another doorway to another place. He thought of turning back to the familiarity of that hell behind him, the known Amenta that had held him these past seven years. But the stagnant, primal air of the Catacombs cloaked him, beckoning him further.

He took more steps forward, stumbling over what felt like jagged bones and cracked skulls scattered on the ground. Were they bones? Or his own twig legs and scaled feet? It smelled of myrrh and roses and death, of the dust of lives once lived, of final breaths. And somewhere he thought he heard the roll and crest and break of the ocean.

More than the substance that filled his cell, the walls and spaces of the Catacombs amplified the smallest decibel in his ears. Sighs and whispers leached through the pores of the granite. Spaces and walls, upper and lower realms, made their presence known by the green velveteen quiet that caked them. There were things awaiting the breath of life that remembrance would give. They waited for Horus to resuscitate them. And Horus could feel their infinite patience, ground as sharp and aged as flint, a waiting presence that needed the permission of a living being to live again.

Horus looked into the darkness. The sound of the ocean rolling and cresting and breaking came up from somewhere in the cauldron of time. The smell of seaweed and foam rose from the black. Dare he think of the Caribbean Sea crashing against the shores of Jamaica, where he took Brenda the Beautiful? It was she who revealed to him the enchantment of getting away from the grind of life, the tedium of doors and keys. It was she who reminded him that there could still be splendor out of the thorny past he did not discuss and the forested way ahead. Brenda the Beautiful. Her dark skin shimmered in the sapphire light. Her intricate coils of braided hair were coiffed into sculpture, her dark shapeliness was exquisite crystal. Her sweet smell blended with the salt breath of the ocean. They had made love under a midnight sky, diamond-encrusted with stars. They moved with the tide. He flowed into her like a hungry delta. They receded together and turned their backs onto the wet sand. They glimpsed the icy blue point of light that was Venus, close enough to touch. Horus could have pulled it down from the heavens and set it in Brenda's earring. Was that when she conceived the child?

He walked on.

There were other memories waiting, serene and petulant. They were smaller and required less breath, less flesh. They called to Horus from the corners and crevices of stone, from the particles floating around him. Like the smell of coconut oil and cinnamon. Like the deep blue of blueberries and the royal purple of plums. Like fireworks over water. But there were beasts that needed more, those memories that needed lungs filled with what air there was to breathe. They glowered through the stone, waiting for Horus, waiting for him to think of one beautiful day, of white picket fences and coffee, of the straight white lines of the interstate, and of storm clouds.

Horus felt faint and struggled to right himself in the passageway. The silence was steeped in itself and waited for him to continue, but he could not. He looked into the endless maze. The labyrinth looked back at him from oblivion. “If I think of it . . .” Horus said to the darkness, his voice echoing through the chambers. He knew that thinking about things, remembering, was dangerous. It was pain beyond pain. In the clutches of torment in his cell, he had learned that the beginnings and endings were the least of worry. There was always a beginning to something, and there was always an ending. But he had learned that the most troublesome was the middle of things, that which happened after a beginning, that which forced the end of something else. The middle was unsafe. It was what blotted out who he was before the middle, what he became after it. He was at risk of that box of teeth-chattering cold, of mind-numbing heat, of slowly dying as he inhaled something designed to poison him. It would put him in danger of not surviving another hour, another minute, another second in that place back at Black Plains. But he had found this place, this secret wonder, hadn't he? To think of any of it might mean something else this time. A way out, perhaps.

Horus looked into the darkness and felt something inside him quicken, and the thought surfaced before he had a chance to push it away: the child would be seven years old by now. The only remaining proof that there may have been something that was not ruined by what came before the middle, evidence that there may yet be something left of the man he meant to be. And the child had been there all the time, growing through the years without him. The bricked-up child was there, behind the limestone and granite and gypsum of his thoughts. Hidden since Horus looked at the pregnancy test and listened to the sirens and the
knock knock knock
. But he would not try to imagine the child's face (was it a boy or a girl?), for fear that he would not have the strength to go on. He would be forced to retreat, to walk the miles back through the Catacombs to Amenta.

The thought of going back to that place of endings, that realm away from this realm he'd found, drove him forward. He felt his way down a sloping path of the Catacombs, until the passageway turned and dipped into a deeper labyrinth. He looked into the dark. And slowly, a thin gleam appeared as if from miles and miles away, a tear in the sheet of black where a prehistoric torch of light stabbed through. He moved toward it, tracing his way along the gypsum walls. What had spilled inside coursed through him, and he could feel the memories that lay waiting behind the great boulders of stone, how they lived still, even after he tried to put them to death, how they ached to live out loud again.

Horus looked ahead to the cavernous depths. The light was still there, a seduction, a warning. Before his mind could stop his heart from resurrecting it, out of the black, he saw the sunny sky again. He saw his mother's smile again. He heard his father's voice again and remembered July 21, 1966.

Empire and Sky

T
he basketball court in New York on July 21, 1966, was alive with color and pride, blanketed by hands waving flags of red, black, and green. The crowd was a vivid, glorious patchwork quilt of colorful dashikis, head wraps, and sunbursts of African cloth, and it moved like the sands of a kaleidoscope. The air was thick with anticipation, and everywhere was a heat like the fiery blast of an explosion. It was electrified by voter drives and the Vietnam War, by riots and slums and sit-ins, by white crosses and the Klan, by Night Riders and the police, by rent strikes and cotton-picking minds. Malcolm X was already dead. He had been murdered the winter before, with his wife and four children looking on, with twin fetuses swimming in their mother's fluid, listening to the gunshots. Some traveled to Southern churches to hear Martin Luther King speak of having been to the highest peaks. The truth was revealed to him, he said. Had he really been to the highest peaks? The people weren't sure. They needed proof in 1966.

From the makeshift stage, Jack Thompson wiped his brow and looked across the field of faces in the crowd. He was no longer concerned about the death threats he received the week before. The assaulted protesters in the streets and the accosted women who stood in front of municipal buildings. The midnight shootings. The dawn beatings. He did not think of the lynchings of his boyhood in Bed, Louisiana, and those he read about in the paper. How his ­grandfather dropped from the tree he'd swung from and walked away. How his grandfather cooled his broken neck in the Pearl River and sat by his wife's bed at night to watch her sleep. Jack Thompson did not think about the rape of his young sweetheart Delia by Judd Baker in the high grasses of Boudreaux Field back in Louisiana or the things that grew wild inside of him when he grabbed the shotgun. Nor did he think about the cold New York alleys he slept in when he crossed the scratch line at last. He set it all aside and thought only of the promise he had made to himself at the Hudson River. He thought only of the promise of starting anew.

Jack Thompson looked over the faces of the people. It did not matter that he didn't recognize them individually. He didn't need to, because he knew them all anyway. They were the men at the barbershop. They were the women of the church and the market and the children of the parks. He looked at the bright eyes of his boys, Manden and Horus, and his wife, Maria, holding each by the hand proudly. And when all of it had filled him to fullness, Jack Thompson began.

“Brothers and sisters. Friends and enemies. Another of our slain black knights has left us with some important questions.”

The crowd hummed.

“Who are you? What was your name before you were brought here, and why ain't it that today you don't know what your name was? How come? If your name is Smith or Jefferson now, what was it before it was Smith or Jefferson? Can you tell me? No, you can't. Because we don't know. But that's not the point anymore, brothers and sisters. I am not here today to speak of our suffering. We know the stories. We all got a trunk full of our grandmothers' memories and what our grandfathers told us in the fields. We all got a river of tears we've cried, people we've buried, women and children we couldn't save. These things are burned into our souls without us speakin' of them. But today I am here to speak of rising. I speak of rising to who and what we are. What we were. What we are meant to be. And to know who and what you are is only half the journey. To be who and what you are is the prize.”

Jack Thompson paused and looked at the sky. The men nodded, and the women hugged their breasts. They were all transfixed in the throng of testifying to what was being said, together fed by hope and outrage, a moving, living mass of energy. On the edges stood an assortment of onlookers. A few whites bothered with the spectacle, among them a man with crystal-blue eyes who no one knew was a police officer because he was not wearing a uniform. On the edges, too, stood the junkies, whores, pimps, thugs, and others who had long ago sat down on the curb of life.

“Those of you with children, hear my words,” said Jack Thompson. “A man gotta know who and what he is before he can name himself, before he can understand anything, before he can show his children the way through. Because this place—this country—has made the black child, the black man and the black woman, invisible, brothers and sisters. And so a man has got to name himself anew. He gotta rebirth himself again before he can live. Before he can stop himself from dying.” And here he thought of his grandfather, Nathan Thompson, and how he died, and the thought fed the fires of his passion.

“I got children, brothers and sisters. And I considered them before they was born. I considered what they would face. A world that hates them and would do anything to erase any trace that they ever existed. Even the ghost. You know, my grandma Lucy, God bless her soul, used to say that the ghost comes back and stays around sometimes to give the reasons. It stays to give the living some understanding of the reasons of a man's life, of what he did and why. What are our reasons for what we did and what we tryin' to do?”

Jack Thompson looked down at his sons standing next to his wife. “I love my boys too. I want my boys to hear what kind of man I am now and understand what I was when I'm gone. And after I'm gone, I want to be nearby in case they got questions, in case they lose their way. I want my boys to live and thrive and streak the sky with all they can do, just like you, brothers and sisters. And I named my first boy Manden, for the great Mandinka empire that once was. Right now, that empire is far away from the South we know. It is far away from New York and the United States we know. But I put it in his heart. An empire in his heart. Not like in a book I read, not just in words, not in faded pictures, but in his heart. To remind him that empires lost can be built once again. That he is the keeper of greatness. And then I named my second boy Horus, ruler of the sky. Any of you heard of it? Read about it? About the son of a king who could fly? The sky is there for him to touch, brothers and sisters. It's there for him and others like him to soar to. Always. That's what I want my boy Horus to know. To remind him that he can be free anytime he wants. That he must—”

Pop pop pop

There was a loud sound that cracked over everything. Horus felt his mother drop his hand. He saw her open her mouth and scream—an otherworldly Jurassic scream, a sound made in the time of calcite seas, supercontinents, gastropods, and mammoth flora. His mother screamed, and the sound of it broke through the crowd like a shock wave, knocking Horus back. People dropped and ducked like a flock of startled birds. Legs and arms flailed everywhere. Bodies rocked and shook. Heads were thrown back. Hearts dropped and shattered into a million pieces. And there was much screeching and squawking and shouting, and there were murmurs and cries from women framed in apartment windows above. People ran in straight lines and circles. There was the loud, tense pulse of throbbing hearts thumping the ground. There were curses of men, unintelligible individually but audible in unison, that said, “They have taken another one from us.”

Horus blinked in the unreality, wondering what his father was about to say. What was Jack Thompson going to say before the bullet stopped him? What else was he going to tell his boy? Then time thickened to a sludge, and in the long seconds, Horus watched his father falling, falling forever, like a razed skyscraper losing to gravity, imploding from interior detonations. Layer by layer. Story by story. A vertical descent of stone and concrete, of steel and iron, cascading down like a waterfall in great thundering shoals, like the apocalypse, like the End of Days. Horus could still feel the warmth of his mother's hand in his palm, and in the sludge of time he looked down at it, thinking that the comfort of moments before would return time and dimension to where they once were. Horus looked for his brother, Manden, but could not find him. It seemed his own eyes had turned to rubies, for everything was bathed in red, crimson like his mother's wet hands outstretched over his father's body.

Three days later, at the funeral, it seemed to Horus that all the world was chalked and shaded in charcoal. His father was pieced together in his coffin in a gray heap of ruin. Horus stared and stared, unable to understand how such a metamorphosis could have taken place. He sat in the pew as the cold overtook him, as the winter solstice rose above the altar, as his heart floated away on glaciers. He looked to Manden, who sat next to their mother like a ventriloquist's doll. Then, from the satin-rimmed coffin, Horus thought he heard his father's voice.

“Promise me . . .”

Horus looked around, then back at the coffin. Did he hear his father say something? Was his father really dead? Horus peered into the coffin, but his father's eyes were closed. Horus looked at the women fanning their faces with the eulogy program and the men wiping their foreheads with monogrammed handkerchiefs. He looked at his big brother again to see if he heard the voice too. But Manden was leaned into a permanent crook, holding on to their mother's limp hand. And then the animated choir behind the coffin rose like an electrical storm, the wrath of organs, the fury of tambourines, the whipcrack of claps. A woman moved to the center to sing. An old Negro spiritual rose from her throat like an obelisk, the mezzo-soprano of Isis in the flesh. Horus clutched a marble in his pocket, hoping it would steady his grip on the world.

Later, as Jack Thompson grayed in his grave and the eternal snow of ashes fell on his face, Horus, together with his brother, watched their mother leave. It was a long leaving, first begun when she dropped his hand and screamed, then when she sat by the window of their apartment. Horus and Manden would never know the nature of their mother's journey when she departed from that window. Barefoot, she walked the hot coals of the
Psalms of Solomon
. She ice-climbed
Corinthians
. She rode bareback up the rocky inclines of Shomeron. She snaked black lakes and crossed the slate rock valleys of the Shadow of Death. She swam the rivers of Abana and Pharpar until her skin grew raw and iridescent. She blistered and scabbed atop a raft in
Genesis
, adrift on the ocean on the day it had been born. And when, at last, she stood before the burning bush, naked and bleeding, she asked why all that happened in her life had happened and got no response.

That was when she turned to leave for the desert. There, amid a sea of sand, the question blazed in the sky above her and made beads of glass beneath her swollen, blistered feet. The sky burned above her head, and the question remained in heaps of ash that rode the acrid winds of her thoughts: Why was her husband murdered? And the question swirled around her, until dust clotted the last tear she would ever cry.

But these were things that Horus and Manden knew nothing about. What they knew was the last time their mother cooked and they had dinner at the table, the last clean stack of folded shirts and socks in their drawer, the last night she kissed them and tucked them into bed. The two boys listened to her slip-down sounds by the window, the sing-song sound of her mind letting go and something else taking hold. She spoke only once and then no more:

Butterfly, Butterfly

Fluttering your wings of

Emerald and amethyst

Butterfly on the quick wind

Fierce you are

Ready you are

Riding the quick wind across

The seas and

The lakes and

The rivers and

The creeks

Up to the tall oaks

Past the hawk nests and squirrel holes

Down to the ivy and snapdragons

Shining your wings in the sun

Afraid of no one

Years later, Horus would picture his mother in that sing-song way, with her shimmering butterfly wings, with the sun warming her back. Horus and Manden were never to hear their mother's voice again. Whether she heard what she last said from somewhere and repeated it or she dredged it up from her soul, they would never know. Near the end of their mother's leaving, her sorrows hung in the air like notes, and despair dripped about the apartment like a ceaseless rain, and she looked at them without seeing that they were there. And that was when Horus and Manden understood that they were alone: one boy with an empire frozen in his heart and the other who could no longer see the sky.