Time of the Locust (8 page)

Brenda again looked at Manden. He looked back at her but remained silent. Brenda knew it was her decision. She had been solitary in Sephiri's care. Despite her occasional insistence on this family charade and Manden's monthly check, she had been on her own. She felt her ankles swelling as she fidgeted in the seat. Perhaps this was a way to finally get a glimpse of what was going on in Sephiri's mind, some circuitous route to reach him. This could be a chance to connect with him, to get him what he needed. Maybe then she would have a chance to tell him that he was precious to her in spite of everything, that he had been conceived in love after all. In saving him, perhaps she could find a way to save herself.

Sugar

T
here are moments that leave a mark. That set in motion a trajectory of events from which there seems to be no escape. There were many such marks for Brenda; pivotal among them was the day her doctor told her that she was heading toward diabetes. His warning came the morning after a long night with Sephiri. He had been agitated by something, and she could not get him to stay in bed and go to sleep. She walked him back to his room over and over, laid him down next to her in her own room, put pillows and blankets on the floor in the hallway, all to no avail. When she gave up well after midnight, she turned on all the lights, locked herself in the bathroom, and broke down crying. She let him roam around the house while she slumped on the sofa. Around three o'clock, he finally settled on the living-room floor in front of the television turned to a channel with nothing but loud static. Exhausted, she tried to cancel her appointment later that morning and was told by the bubbling receptionist that it was important that she not miss it.

“Impaired glucose tolerance,” the doctor said. It was a pre­diabetic condition (
pre
meaning one last chance before it all goes to hell). Her cells were swimming in a bath of sugar. Her pancreas was turning on itself. The rest of her would be next. Kidneys. Eyes. Nerve endings. Heart. She needed to make some lifestyle changes. Eat healthy. Exercise. Reduce stress. Lose weight. She stared blankly into the doctor's eyes, thinking,
When? How?

The doctor went on about green leafy vegetables and ­thirty-minute walks, and Brenda drifted into thoughts of how the vortex of Sephiri's autism consumed her. What scraps were left around the edges went to supporting the two of them with her job. The money from Manden helped with unexpected expenses, but she wasn't foolish enough to think that this would go on forever. Eating, as she was loath to admit unless she was in one of those soul-clutching moments late at night, was her only comfort. Often it was the drive-thru, takeout, or frozen meals. Burger King. Checkers. Kung Pao chicken. Sara Lee. Hungry-Man. This freed her to get through meal ordeals with Sephiri, who wanted peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Brenda was determined that he would eat something more substantive. Quinoa and buckwheat. Raw vegetables and fruits. Fresh strawberries and turkey. Fish and eggs. Most of the time, Sephiri was fussing at the table, throwing his plate on the floor, screaming and grabbing the grape jam from the pantry. Or else, he was motionless at his plate, lifeless and staring. There wasn't time for her own meal planning. She couldn't leave him in the house alone to take a walk, nor could she bring him with her. There weren't any yoga classes or gym memberships to fit into her day. Insomnia, which ruled her life by force or default, took what energy stores she had left.

The doctor handed her a Centers for Disease Control brochure on type 2 diabetes and treatment. On the cover was a youngish-­looking white woman slicing a tomato in a bright kitchen with a vase of cut flowers on the table. She wore a fashionable yellow sweat suit, and a man smiled adoringly from the doorway of the ­adjoining room. When Brenda opened the inside flap of the brochure, there was a list of dangerous related conditions: blindness, amputation, gastroparesis (stomach illnesses), atherosclerosis ­(vessel disease), heart attack, stroke. At the bottom, it read, “It doesn't have to happen to you.”

Brenda knew many women with diabetes, including her supervisor, a rotund mahogany-brown ball of congeniality. She was the kindest to Brenda when Horus's trial began and told her to take as much time as she needed when she heard about the verdict. “I'll be praying for you,” she'd said. When Brenda started to “show,” her boss bought her a gift bouquet with a bottle of prenatal vitamins stuffed inside. “Take those horse pills every day, and take care of yourself, Brenda,” she had said. “You don't want to have sugar problems later.” In most places she'd frequented, the condition was a casual part of discussions among women. Pricking their fingers with elegant devices pulled from purses, nodding their heads in satisfaction when the light turned green or the white strip came out or when the number appeared on the little digital screen, they acted as if the whole business was a part of life, a part of getting older. Like graying hair or having grandchildren. “Girl, my sugar's up,” she'd heard them cluck over salads drenched in dressing and bacon bits. Her mother, too, had been diabetic. It was the contributing factor to her sudden stroke, as Brenda later learned in the meeting with the doctor who performed her autopsy. When Brenda noticed the blood-glucose monitor and the white orthopedic shoes in the bathroom and asked her mother the meaning of it, she waved the question away with her hand as if swatting a fly. “Brenda, when you been through what I been through, a little sugar ain't nothing to cry about,” she had said. With that comment, there was the opportunity to open a door to the past again, but looking at her frail mother, content only with her daytime soap stories and prune juice, Brenda left it closed. Years later, she would wonder what her mother meant, if it compared to anything she had to face.

“If you want to be around for your son, you will change,” the doctor said, looking at Brenda through horn-rimmed glasses. He was a kindly black man, many years her senior. “You have to understand that this can't be taken lightly. Diabetes is no walk in the park. With your weight as it is and from what I've seen with the tests, you're a prime candidate. I've seen it over and over. We all have obligations, but you've got to put yourself first on this one.”

Brenda looked at the doctor. He wore an asymmetrical Afro that reminded her of photographs she'd seen of Frederick Douglass. However true it might have been, what he said sounded like a commercial for some pharmaceutical company or health association. The idea of caring for herself had been foreign other than the basics, and those had been choppy. Dental checkups (if she remembered or when a tooth was hurting). Mammogram and Pap smear examinations every year. Well, some years she had missed. The OB/GYN always seemed to be some pearl-necked cosmopolitan from Boston or San Francisco, chatting her up with casual conversation while she dug around her insides with birdlike hands. She didn't want to lie across a slab and pretend to be nonchalant while the cold air raised crops of goose bumps all over her body and the fluorescent lights blinked the way they had when she viewed her mother in the hospital morgue. How many pamphlets did she need to be handed about hypertension, cancer, glaucoma, and heart disease? She knew about the dangers, the risks. At the last examination, two years ago, a young nurse in a pink smock with matching streaked braids in her hair handed Brenda a brochure on obesity and depression. But she hadn't asked her for a brochure. She hadn't asked her for a damned thing. She didn't mind skipping the loud silence of the nurse as she slid the little metal bricks across the bar when she stepped on the scale. Over more. A bit more. More.

Besides, there had been no time. There would be no time. ­Sephiri's medical appointments and conferences with his care­givers and the hours spent waiting for prescriptions to be filled at the drugstore, at the Walgreens, at the People's pharmacy, ate up her accrued leave as soon as she earned it. In between, there were work deadlines, trips to the store, sitting in traffic, oil changes and repairs for the car, the endless laundry and soiled carpet cleanings. Putting herself first meant letting everything else fall.

If you want to be around for your son . . .

Brenda couldn't stop the words from ringing in her head. The thought of becoming ill and not being able to care for Sephiri, to run the regular and never-ending business of their lives, was too great a thought to fit into her mind. The thought of her boy at twenty years old, or thirty, filled her with angst. If she couldn't care for Sephiri, who would? There was no one else to try to follow Sephiri through the tunnels of his hours, the indivisible spaces of his mind. That she would be the one to do so until her dying breath was something she was absolutely certain of, and yet the road stretched long and bleak. Between his schedules and diet plans and medications and treatments, she didn't have the time to think about her own health, the nature and shape of her own existence apart from it all. She'd lost track of herself a long time ago. She didn't have the slightest idea of how to start climbing the mountain of her own life plan outside of Sephiri. Outside of autism.

“I like to see my patients lead full lives,” said the doctor.

But my life is already full
, thought Brenda. It was full to the brim with everything. She looked at the poster on the examination-room wall. A woman was smiling with her two children sitting on her lap, a golden cross around her neck. Brenda had not been back to Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church since the last days of the trial. She'd known many of the people there since her childhood, when she sat in the pews as a girl. Horus was not one for church every Sunday, but she was able to get him to go on holidays. She remembered pleasant afternoons on the hill where the church stood, which had one of the best panoramic views of Washington, D.C. From the top, she could see the black Potomac River that snaked the white monuments, the giant obelisk piercing the sky. She had spent countless Fourth of July holidays watching the fireworks from that hill, holding sparklers in her hand as the sky exploded with color. She remembered looking out over the city on that Sunday after the verdict, furious with God. The women had gathered around her in a ring of prayer like moths circling a light, trying to balm her distemper, telling her what they told themselves a thousand times.
God don't give you more than you can bear. It's all part of His plan. The Lord is testing you.
But Brenda had watched them all try to deal with their own tragedies over the years and was never able to tell if the advice had been applicable to them. The son who was shot. The daughter whose home was visited by Child Protective Services. The mother whose lights were disconnected. The HIV-positive niece. The cousin who lost his job. The uncle whose leg the doctors said they had to take; sugar had gotten the best of him.

Years later, when Brenda was up with Sephiri at four o'clock in the morning (he wanted to spend the night walking up and down the stairs), she sat on the sofa watching a documentary. In it, a Native American talked of his life, of all he'd seen, of what he knew to be true yesterday and tomorrow. “Religion is for those afraid to go to hell,” he'd said through watery eyes. “Spirituality is for those who have been there.” And indeed, Brenda felt she was living in a hell. One that had swallowed her husband whole. One in which she could see her boy burning but could do nothing to rescue him from the flames. That was when, after holding anger and grief for so long, she made a deal with God, which was this: she would talk to Him about something only if she had the fortitude, and He would listen only if He could do something about it. Brenda had begun to wonder if that private arrangement was coming to an end.

“The truth is,” said the doctor, “if you don't start making some major changes now, you're going to get sick.” He handed her another prescription for blood pressure and a referral. “Fill this prescription today, and I want you to make an appointment to see a nutritionist. There is only so much the body can take. You owe it to yourself.” He patted her gently on the shoulder and gave her a meaningful look.

Sitting on the hard examination bench, Brenda's legs had fallen asleep, and she rose to gather her shoes and purse. Her heart was pounding, her ears thumping with the blood pumping through her. She read somewhere that the heart beats some hundred thousand times a day, thirty-five million times a year, two and a half billion times in a lifetime. Her heart had beaten through so many things. Thirty-five million beats in each of the years of her life, each beat striking the drum of her heart and then gone forever. How many more beats did it have left? She picked up her purse, clutching the strap. Tired. She felt tired all over, as if she had walked for miles, had swam kilometers in the sea. If she couldn't help herself, how could she help Sephiri? She slipped her feet into her flat loafers, her most worn shoes. They would have to carry her on yet another journey now, one even more ominous. Again, the two signs materialized in her mind:
What are you going to do?
and
Why are you doing what you're doing?
She didn't have the answer to either.

Water World

T
he little boat materialized. Sephiri blinked to make sure that it was there. He was ready to ride in it, and just as suddenly, he was sitting inside of it, on the little wooden bench, floating atop the beautiful current that was as turquoise as the bathwater he sat in every night before bedtime. He began to float away, the sun's warm rays beaming on his head and shoulders. He blinked again, and there were the giant rocks hailing him from a distance, the Obsidians. He floated toward them. He was enjoying the sounds of the water sloshing against the side of the boat when he heard a voice.

“So you've found us again,” said the voice.

This sort of thing always filled Sephiri with a jolt of excitement. In Water, voices were quickly understood. He scanned the blue for the source of the voice. The surface was gilded with sunlight.

“Down here,” said the voice.

Sephiri looked into the water. It was his friend, the dolphin, who had been gliding alongside him, his gray skin slick and glistening in the bright rays.

“Hello,” said Sephiri.

“Welcome back,” the dolphin said. A merry creature, the dolphin always greeted Sephiri when he entered the World of Water.

Sephiri rejoiced. Whenever he was angry or lonely or confused, he knew that he could always travel out to the great ocean. Now he could forget about the things that troubled him in Air. The ocean was the great bath that washed away all tears, the great tranquilizer of fears.

Sephiri had been coming there for a long time. The creatures who inhabited the Obsidians and swam in the currents around them shared knowledge with Sephiri about all the living things that had ever existed and chronicled the alliances, truces, and wars. That was how he learned about the locusts of his dreams. “Well, they only rear up when it is their time,” the dolphin said as they floated together on their backs looking at the cloud formations. “They are the message carriers.”

“Really?” asked Sephiri, filled with wonder.

“Yes,” said the dolphin. “They only appear when something important is going to happen, something that will change everything.”

Sephiri wondered what it could be as the wind kissed his face.

The dolphin rose a bit from the surface of the water and looked intently at the boy. “The Great Octopus says that you may visit with your question now.” The dolphin knew as well as anyone in the World of Water that an invitation to visit the Great Octopus in his lair was an honor.

Sephiri was giddy with excitement. He plunged into the deep with the dolphin. Down they drifted, deeper and deeper, and when the water changed from turquoise to electric blue to indigo, they stopped. Below them was a void of darker water.

“This is as far as I can go,” said the dolphin. “Wait here for the Great One.” He swam once around the boy and glided away.

In the next moment, as the ocean held Sephiri suspended, an enormous creature emerged from the abyss beneath his feet. The Great Octopus looked at the boy through two giant orbs and beckoned him to follow. The boy swam alongside its long plum and maroon tentacles, which swirled through the water like massive coils of hair. Together, they descended into the deep, scaling the underwater mountains.

At long last, they reached an enormous den, a jagged mouth carved into the side of the mountain near the ocean floor. It was a realm inhabited only by the fierce, where there was almost no oxygen, where the viperfish, dragonfish, and other beasts reigned. Sephiri strained to see in the growing darkness, until a school of anglerfish, flashlights dangling from their foreheads, approached them to light the rest of the way. The anglerfish swam ahead, pleased to be a part of such a rare visitation. Sephiri swam behind the Octopus through a maze of jutting rocks. They came to a great cove covered in a blanket of purple and pink coral and stopped. Sephiri seated himself on a huge sea sponge and watched a school of iridescent organisms swim by. The Octopus floated down to a smooth plateau of rock and spread himself out, covering the entire rock shelf in tubes of plum.

“So, Sephiri,” bellowed the Great Octopus. “You know I only allow a visit when I can feel that you have a question.”

Sephiri hesitated. He indeed had a question, but he was unsure if the Octopus would be able to answer. After all, what he needed to know concerned the Land of Air, not the World of Water.

“Do not delay, boy,” said the Octopus. “Remember, your visit must be brief. It is dangerous for you here. You seem to have solved your need for air well enough, and your mind keeps you warm at these depths. But the bottom dwellers will soon sniff you out, and I will be forced to ink even the anglers to provide you with cover.”

Sephiri did not want to make the Great One angry. He was upset that things kept changing in the Land of Air, threatening to ruin everything. But he didn't want to waste his chance with the Octopus on that. He needed to know about a different matter. “I heard something,” he said.

The Octopus looked at the boy. “We all hear many things, some of which are not worth listening to, some of which are the only things of importance to know. What is it that you heard?”

“A different kind of voice from the Land of Air, I think. But I didn't understand,” said Sephiri. “I could barely hear it.”

“Did you recognize the voice?”

The boy was silent for a moment. This was the first voice from the Land of Air that had ever drawn his attention, other than his mother's voice. But he was never entirely sure what the words coming out of her mouth meant. He had learned that her voice went with certain things done in repetition, like walking toward that white van that went to the Autism Center or going to the bathroom. This voice was not that voice.

“No,” said Sephiri.

The Octopus looked at the tall seaweed wave in the current. In his long years, he had seen this happen before. A voice difficult to hear meant there was a choice to be made between realms of existence. The boy had been a part of their realm for many years, and he knew that this could mean that he would stop visiting forever. But he could not withhold the truth. That would break a universal law. “The voice is asking your permission to be heard,” said the Octopus. “It is soft and low because you haven't been ready to hear it. It was waiting for you.” He twirled one of his tentacles, sighing. “Sometimes a voice comes to tell us something we do not wish to hear but need to. It can also come and tell us something we always wanted to know but hadn't been able to find out about before.”

Sephiri wondered what the voice could be trying to say. “Should I listen to it?”

“If you want to, you'll hear it,” said the Octopus. “And once you start to listen, a change begins that cannot be stopped.” The mammoth being rose, floating just above the rock shelf. “This is the enduring message of the locusts, Sephiri. When they emerge, what follows is truth. All you can do is bear witness.”

Sephiri watched an ancient whale sail over a barren reef.

“You'd better head back,” said the Octopus. “As I have said, these visits must be brief. Go back through the coral beds. The iridescent ones will light the way. The anglerfish will take you up.”

Sephiri thought about what the Octopus said as he floated to the surface and began his departure, but he was not sure what he should do. He wished he could have stayed longer with the Great One and asked the million other questions he had. How does one smile? Why do children play together? As he drifted back over the ocean to the shores of apprehension, Sephiri closed his eyes, thinking of the Obsidians and all he learned and discussed with the inhabitants. And he wondered what the voice would tell him if he listened.