Soucouyant Page 3

  ‘Something funny? Incongruent, motherfucker?’

  Soon nobody at all was smiling at my brother. He came to be ‘known’ by teachers, neighbourhood watch volunteers, and police throughout ‘the good neighbourhood’ where we lived. Could this be the worst of all possible fates, to be known by professional knowers? My brother reacted by becoming increasingly quiet and withdrawn, his body toughening around him like a carapace. He stopped communicating to anyone, including Mother and me.

  He still sat with us for supper, his final familial obligation. But there came the day when Mother leaned over to me and whispered that dreadful and inevitable question.

  ‘Who is that one sitting across from us?’

  My brother heard, but he didn’t seem hurt. His eyes gave nothing to us as he left the table and walked upstairs to our bedroom. He spent the rest of the night packing up. Early in the morning, I heard the front door open and noticed my bedroom drapes rustling with the changing air pressure of the house. The door closed and there was more rustling of the drapes. And that was it.

  I was looking out of the window at his departing figure when I sensed her behind me. I turned and saw Mother with a pink rubber shower cap on her head, her night-shirt open, her breasts partly exposed.

  ‘What wrong?’ she asked. ‘It look like there something wrong in you face.’

  ‘Nothing’s wrong, Mother.’

  ‘Don’t lie to me, dear. I know when something wrong. I you mother, you know.’

  THEN MY OWN leaving. I wouldn’t just leave her, of course. I’d first alert all of the crucial people at the bank and the phone and cable companies. I’d arrange for monthly withdrawals from Father’s insurance for necessities. I’d contact social services as well as Mother’s friend, Mrs Christopher. I’d make all sorts of provisions for my departure.

  ‘Do you understand, Mother? I’m making provisions.’

  ‘Ground provisions? Eddoes? Cassava? Cush Cush? Yam? Since when you learn to cook, child…?’

  I packed one afternoon as she kneeled at the bathtub faucet, cupping her hand under the weight of the water and then releasing. Cupping again and releasing. I stuffed the rest of my clothes into my burlap bag. I slipped downstairs to the kitchen and began stuffing slices of bread into the lint-filled pockets of my windbreaker when she caught up with me. Mother had splashed water on her dress and was now pinching the damp material away from her thighs and looking at me with childish embarrassment. She had left the tap running upstairs, and water had already begun to drip from the cracked and sagging ceiling of the sitting room. Mother watched me shoulder my bag and then smiled.

  ‘You’s getting milk?’ she asked.

  ‘You already have milk, Mother. It’s in the blue carton.’

  ‘Blue,’ she said softly, as if tasting the word. ‘The colour blue.…’

  I caught a bus heading west toward the city. I sat in coffee shops for hours, cold skins of white surfacing and clinging to the edges of my paper cups. At night, I found a hostel room which smelled of cabbage and stale piss. I slept hard, so hard, and never again paid any attention to dreams.

  ‘You crying,’ she had asked, just before I left. ‘Why you crying, child of mine?’

  THE CITY WAS for me a place of forgetting. I found my anonymity in a series of rent-by-the-week rooms, in under-the-counter jobs as a dishwasher and holiday flower-seller and hot-dog vendor. I met others who were fleeing their pasts, the discontents of nations and cultures, tribes and families. I roomed for a while with a kid, barely sixteen, who was born in a logging town in British Columbia but who hitched a ride here in the cargo bin of a train. It was a risky trick, his journey east, and not everyone could manage it. Not everyone could handle the cold and dark. And not everyone had the insight to prepare themselves for life as a world-famous rapper by carefully studying the best of the best. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, Run DMC, and, most recently, Public Enemy.

  ‘Damn straight, homeboy. Know-what-I’m-saying? ’

  Once, I got us a gig cleaning cutting surfaces and machinery in a poultry processing plant to the north of the city. We were bussed to a site where all of the regular labourers were brown and spoke Spanish to each other. We were told where to point the hoses of superheated chlorinated water. We weren’t advised to wear gloves or masks though, and so, when my symptoms emerged, I was told with the rest of the workers not to panic and that the blisters and wheezing would soon pass.

  ‘Homeboy’s Canadian too,’ my friend explained to the shift boss, cradling his wrist and nodding in my direction.

  ‘Yeah?’ said the boss, turning to me and lowering his voice. ‘Better get your dumb ass to a hospital, Canadian.’

  ‘WHAT THE HELL is wrong with you, homeboy?’ asked my friend a couple days later. We were sitting on a bench in the downtown train station, looking up at the crazily high ceilings. Our hands were plastered with band-aids and leaking a thin pink fluid, and my friend was chain-smoking menthol cigarettes. To cool his throat, he explained. I expected him to be mad at me for setting us up with such a stupid job, but he was mad at me for some other strange reason.

  ‘What’s your story, homeboy? You’re always visiting bookstores and reading poetry and shit. You talk all good. Man, you talk as if you’re whiter than me, and my grandfather was in the bloody Asiatic Exclusion League! What’s up, brotherman? What’s your problem?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You’re a fool, homeboy! A total fool! You should have ’nuff ducats by now. Nigga’s got to get his…!’

  I GAVE IN TO his coaxing. I responded to job ads in papers, but never seemed to leave an impression on anyone. I landed a few interviews but always got through these poorly, responding vaguely and unsatisfactorily, no doubt, when the questions began to get a bit personal. I eventually landed a job in an all-night coffee shop on Bloor Street, not far from the financial district. A rotating staff of coloured women, a posted schedule reminding us of the benefits of ‘flexible hours,’ a shift manager with an MA in economics from Makerere University, Kampala. It was better than the poultry factory, though. And there were even small perks. On slow Monday evenings, I’d invite my friend to visit and offer him one of those hot chocolates that dribbled out of a noisy machine into a large Styrofoam cup.

  ‘That’s right!’ he’d say while the machine whirred. ‘Straight-up big ass beverage, gee. Yaaaahhh, Boooyeee…!’

  We’d find a seat and spoon the top-froth into our mouths before adding whiskey from a concealed flask. We’d drink quickly and wait for the happy war of sugar and alcohol and caffeine in our blood. Lionel Richie played about us in a continuous loop, and the downtown lights glimmered. We had arrived. We were at the heart of it all. One of my co-workers, a woman named Carla, mentioned that branches of this shop had opened in Japan and South Africa. They were even thinking of opening in Cuba. The same patented coffee-blend. ‘The same damned Lionel Richie.’ I was feeling the alcohol and struggling to think. We were everywhere at once? We were nowhere at all? Had we each, in our own ways, escaped?

  In any case, I wandered back.

  I’LL EXPLAIN IT this way. During our lives, we struggle to forget. And it’s foolish to assume that forgetting is altogether a bad thing. Memory is a bruise still tender. History is a rusted pile of blades and manacles. And forgetting can sometimes be the most creative and life-sustaining thing that we can ever hope to accomplish. The problem happens when we become too good at forgetting. When somehow we forget to forget, and we blunder into circumstances that we consciously should have avoided. This is how we awaken to the stories buried deep within our sleeping selves or trafficked quietly through the touch of others. This is how we’re shaken by vague scents or tastes. How we’re stolen by an obscure word, an undertow dragging us back and down and away.

  ‘What?’ my friend asked.

  I rubbed my eyes. A dark room, the smell from the garbage dumpster, a cheap digital clock showing 3:34 a.m.

  ‘Sorry…?’ I answered.

&nb
sp; ‘You were mumbling something. Sookoo … sookooya…?’

  ‘Nothing. Sorry. I must have been dreaming.’

  ‘Try dreaming to yourself, homeboy.’

  But it was simpler than that. I wanted to see her again. I wanted to see the life in her face. I longed for her as any son would for his mother, even so frightening a mother as she had become. And so, two years after leaving her, I dropped everything and returned to her a stranger.

  I’VE FORGOTTEN HOW the monsters strike. Sometimes, you won’t even hear the approach. Ripples will appear in vases and teacups. Chairs will buzz and glasses chime. With the fastest beasts, the passenger trains on transnational trips, you’ll imagine the house itself tugging and swaying as if alone through the violence of sound. A thunderclap. A blur across the west-side window of the sitting room, and only if you already happen to be looking in that direction.

  It’s late into the second afternoon of my return, and Mother is napping upstairs in her room. I’m in the sitting room floating my eyes over a newspaper, some heated editorial on the Multiculturalism Act passed over a year ago. The young woman, Mother’s nurse, is here too, and she’s claimed the entire couch for herself. She stretches out on her side, absorbed in a book, the tangled mass of her hair like a pillow. She’s been ignoring me, but when the train passes, she lifts her head to the window in time to see the buckling curtains, the gulls lifting up in panic from the shore below. Afterwards, she looks up at the ceiling where a tarnished chandelier still swings slightly. Dust falling from one of the ceiling screws in a thin ribbon.

  ‘It’s OK,’ I say, smiling. ‘It’s an old place, but I figure we’ve got at least a couple of weeks before it collapses.’

  She blinks irritably at this and returns to her book. I still haven’t been able to draw her into a conversation. I don’t even know her name. She’s reading another weird title. Electroless and Other Non-electrolytic Plating Techniques: Recent Developments. I try not to stare, but her birthmark looks a bit like one of those symbols on a weather map.

  I’m about to leave the room and fix something to eat in the kitchen when I hear it. The sound, from upstairs, of the bathroom faucet squeaking open and the deepening bang of water in the tub.

  ‘I should check on her,’ I offer.

  ‘Excellent idea,’ the young woman replies dryly and still without looking at me.

  Mother sits on the edge of the tub. She’s in her bathrobe and she’s passing her hands through the flowing water. She reaches down and begins to stroke the glossy grey stain that funnels towards the drain. A residue impervious all these years to even the most aggressive chemical cleaners. She doesn’t seem to notice the dampness growing on her sleeves. Mother’s wrists, the freckles on her knuckles, the veins upon the backs of her hand. She notices me and smiles, then cups her hands once more under the solid weight of the water.

  ‘Come,’ she says.

  I step nearer and she holds her hands above me, releasing the water upon my head. Water breaks upon me, pebbles rolling down my head and blossoming on my shirt. Mother does this again, and once more. My shirt now soaked, the bathroom mat changing to deep green.

  ‘This is it,’ she says.

  ‘What, Mother?’

  ‘This is how you grandmother blessed us. She led us to the sea. You was too scared to go under the waters, and so she cupped some over your head. You licked the salt from you lips. Such a face.…’

  I don’t remember this. I remember a single trip to Mother’s birthplace as a young child, but I don’t remember the blessing at all. It’s possible that it never happened and that Mother is mixing things up. But does this matter? Mother lifts some more water and washes me again. And again. It matters that I stay still for her. It matters that I stay like this for as long as Mother can recognize me and continue.

  But she stops now and frowns at something just over my shoulder. She spots through the combination of bathroom mirrors a creeping scar beneath the hair on the back of her head. She gestures to touch this, but she then brings her hand to her chin, running her fingertips along the lacy script.

  She looks at me. Her face a question.

  ‘Chaguaramas,’ I explain. ‘There was a fire. Your chin was cut and an old woman healed you with cobwebs.’

  ‘Cobwebs…?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, Mother. It happened long ago. A faraway place.’

  ‘I know,’ she says. ‘I remember.’

  Two

  THERE’S A PROPER name for Mother’s condition. We learned it years ago during our visit as a family to a downtown medical specialist, a man whose full cheeks and comb-over immediately suggested to me good spirits and optimism. He personally walked us from the waiting room into his office and asked if we wanted anything like coffee or juice. Cookie, perhaps? He extended his hand not only to Mother and Father but also to me and my brother, still children at the time and used to being overlooked in serious settings. He explained that the condition was always expressed in different ways by different people, but he admitted that he was puzzled by the many unusual features of Mother’s case. How early the symptoms had appeared, and how slowly and unevenly they had developed. The specialist asked questions and waited patiently for answers, and he ended the session by politely stating that, if Mother and Father refused to agree to any more tests, there was very little that he could do.

  ‘But take these,’ he said, handing us some pamphlets. ‘And please call me if ever you want to talk.’

  Later on the bus ride home, my father broke the silence.

  ‘That was a nice man.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mother. ‘Very nice.’

  ‘Polite,’ said Father.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mother. ‘Oh is so lovely when you find people who is doctors but so nice and polite.’

  The next day, I lifted the lid of the kitchen garbage bin to see the pamphlets half-buried beneath a mound of carrot peelings. Blisters of damp orange on the paper.

  THE WORD IS OLD and has been used in medical contexts for over two thousand years to describe many types of unusual or incomprehensible behaviour. Today, the word is most often connected with illnesses associated with aging, so much so that the terms ‘early onset’ and ‘presenile’ are applied when cases arise in people barely forty years old.

  There’s a crucial difference between the condition and its cause. The condition is the strange behaviour itself, but its cause might be due to any number of factors such as toxins or physical injuries or known illnesses or even less tangible factors such as depression and psychic trauma. Then there are storied causes, apocryphal causes. The woman from Pickering who very hesitatingly decided to try a cone of genuine cherimoya-flavoured gelato (she said ‘hmmm, very exotic,’ and was never again the same). The boy who hammered at his penis fifty times a day and thus irreparably busted in mind. There were more mysterious causes too. I myself remember a bright day when Mother took me to a park near the beach. I would have been four or five. I remember Mother looking up into a cloudless sky, an infinite blue. I couldn’t read the expression on her face. After this, everything seemed to change.

  What do you do with a person who one day empties her mind into the sky? Both Mother and Father didn’t want any more scans or questionnaires. They were suspicious about the diagnostic tests which always seemed to presume meanings and circumstances which were never wholly familiar to them in the first place. They were especially suspicious about medical institutions and offices. The scissors and hooks which certainly lurked in those antiseptic spaces. The bloody and jaggedly-sewn cures. Patients’ heads opened up and then roughly laced back like old washekongs.

  ‘Like what, Mother?’

  ‘We wasn’t talking to you, child. You just finish you peas.…’

  So after leaving the specialist’s office, we all went immediately to the neighbourhood hardware store. My father spoke with the owner about extending the small garden on our front lawn. We live in the house at the edge of the bluffs, Mother reminded him, and then reminded him again
. We wanted to plant more flowers, she added. Vegetables too. And flowers. The salesclerk nodded none too enthusiastically. Father asked about the hardiness of certain perennials and the pros and cons of using railway ties for hemming in plants. Things you’d want to eat, you see.

  ‘But flowers too,’ interrupted Mother. ‘Impatiens and begonia. Sweet pea and morning glory. Pansy and … shame a lady. Hibiscus … and shame a lady. Hibiscus … and … hibiscus.…’

  ‘Hibiscus is a tropical plant,’ Father explained to the owner with a weak smile.

  The store owner assured us that he knew what a hibiscus was, and, moreover, that his railway ties were untreated and wouldn’t leach dangerous chemicals into the soil. We left buying pansies and a sweet potato vine and promised to come back soon, ignoring the giggles from a salesclerk. We returned home and Father surprised us by disappearing for an hour and returning with four rotis from his favourite place farther west in Scarborough. Mother complained about this extravagance and offered unfavourable opinions about the competence of the ‘small-island’ cook who ran the shop. She complained again when the rotis were dealt out, a whole one for each of us, like swaddled children for ogres. We laid into the brilliantly coloured juices and the dalpuri and achar which they had added just for us. After we feasted and were feeling tired and happy, Mother produced a deck of cards and invited us to play a game she called ‘All Fours.’ She seated us around the table and began dealing, then stopped and softly sucked her teeth. Laughed a bit to herself. Shook her head.

  ‘I’ll explain the rules,’ offered Father.

  ‘Yes, dear. You explain this time.’