A Love Like Blood (3 page)

T
he ribs of a photography umbrella are comparable to a human rib cage, in that one break disturbs the way a photograph breathes. The sensation of breaking ribs, little snaps, like cowpea beans being torn open, is as familiar to me as the smoothness of my camera's shutter button. Two summers ago in 1996, I shot four rolls of film at the beach, where Lake Shore ends, at a curve and turns into Sheridan Road. I caught a city bus and stopped at Ardmore. From Ardmore, I caught a glimpse of blonde sand, blue water, and handsome men in Speedos. Six miles away, Father was shooting the wedding of two Somali families from our neighborhood. He asked me not to shoot with him and said that he would return to the studio later that night.

When I heard the three bells ding on the front door, I started snatching the photographs out of the drying rack. Father barged into the darkroom and glanced at the last picture as I was reaching for it. In the picture, two blond bodybuilders in Speedos were in a classic beefcake pose. Both bodybuilders had one arm flexed, and the other extended up and out to the side. Father had my body pinned down on the studio's hardwood floor before I could run out to Michigan Avenue, and disappear in the breath of the city. My chest cracked, easy as eggs, from the punches. The feeling afterwards: a gravedigger's shovel splatting against dirt. I tasted metal in my mouth. Father broke me down as if I would be born again and made perfect. The colors in the room were sucked out and turned bone. I heard tapping, followed by distant voices. I woke up stiff on a cushionless examine table, with Father whispering, “don't tell her,” in my ear. I obeyed his order and did not reveal to the nurse that he broke my ribs.

The next day, he handed me an expensive camera, now my favorite hush hush camera and told me, “I love you. I'm sorry,” in Somali. The sentences sounded more like you are a prisoner,
in being that I felt like a prisoner. To break away from under the bounds of his power, I snapped every rib on his most-beloved photography umbrella. Sharp pains shot from my chest to my shoulder as I broke his ribs; however, I could not stop. It was the first time I felt confidence radiating in my body without a camera in my hand. What was strange was that when he discovered what I did, he cleaned up the shredded nylon without saying a word.

M
etal toys hit the ground in an explosion of rage, underlining Father's last word – a sexual slur in Somali. My older brother's face begs me to bark back at him. My younger brother smoothes out the bottom of the split open box. The tape crinkles. His fingernails click against vintage dump trucks, race cars, and trains as he snatches them up. On each beat, Father's eyes blink, and then they squint at me becoming thin slits. The slits widen and become ravens. He wipes his nose with his wrist and wraps his other hand over the redness. Lean-jawed, his face slick with shea butter, a plant leaf stuck between his teeth, he only knows hunger and disappointment.

Looking at his watch, he screams, “what is taking so long?” a second time.

“Say something,” Junior whispers to me, showing off his missing tooth.

“Do you have something to say?” he asks, with his heat singeing Junior then me.

In the silence, Junior mumbles Father's least favorite curse word. On cue, Ricky reverses out of the adult world, leaving the sound of metal jangling from inside the box. Green juice dribbles down the edge of Father's mouth. He coughs, spits a stream of green, and jumps in Junior's face as the jangling dies. The familiar mint and citrus scent of khat leaves makes my tongue itch.

“I could kill you right now.” Father screams.

“Moving everything off that fast is impossible,” I blurt out.

“Only a woman would say that. Move it in five minutes. Or you will be sleeping in the truck tonight.”

The word you, in Father's mouth, stings worse than a wasp. I limp in pain toward the door, propped open by a bronze rooster. The pearl bone glints around his neck. The pearl is a talisman that can steal a sick child back from death if the child rubs it, according to superstition. For the past half hour, Junior and I have broken our backs moving the couch, clock, cabinets, stereo system, and larger boxes without stopping. Brokenness is not enough for him. Pushing past the veil of frailty is his idea of performance.

“Don't suck your teeth like a girl,” Father yells.

“Why do you talk to him like that?” Junior yells back.

“Because he's my son. Carsten. Stop,” he yells.

I ignore him limping outside bloated with the burden of Blackness. My absence will leave him empty handed with nothing physical to crush. All I know from Father is screaming, pain, finger stains, and religion. Knowing these things, I ignore the knots in my legs and run.

With the passion of a street preacher, fanatic for the word, he yells, “you woman.”

“You're the woman. You haven't moved one thing,” Junior yells.

Whomp, I hear, like a fist tearing into flesh, then the floor groans under Father's weight as he chases after me. In the hurry not to fight, I kick over a box on the steps, yanking myself up with an invisible string. Months old issues of
Chicago Woman
spill out onto the bricks and split apart at the spine. A magazine Father has freelanced for, on and off, since 1985. When his camera is not cradled in his hands, he likes to spit out woman, little girl, feminine, at me, the way village elders shoot out canuuni fruit seeds from their mouths. Both are equally ugly to witness. I stare at my reflection in the window of the car that we hitched here. The same car where I learned to pop my dislocated shoulder back into place. Seeing my father, grieving over women with shoe prints on their smiles, I want to smash the glass. I glance over my shoulder and Junior brushes past him, revealing red spots near the top of his white shirt. I realize that the spots are blood. For my brother, blood means punch back and harder. My reaction is the complete opposite – to run. A box clatters crashing closer to the house, and I push through the pain. Our old life will live in our new house through the arrangement of furniture, and that thought ungrounds me.

Inside the garage next door, Brett drops a battered bag into the bed of a pickup truck. A dust cloud trembles as it climbs up into the summer air. He grunts grabbing another bag. From the sidewalk, I darken the lines in the background and blur the shapes around them. Habit moves me to pat my chest, although my camera is not strapped around my neck. Watching him from this distance reduces the redness of the color red. Six silver-framed certificates show Contractor of the Year, Fuller Construction Company, beginning in 1989 and ending last year in 1997. A built-in cabinet with eighteen doors extends the entire length of the back wall. An enlarged picture of Brett, his father, and another blond floats in the center of the doorless middle section. The other blond resembles Brett's father. Brett's graphic t-shirt has the headless torso of a male bodybuilder with a swollen chest. His smile is the smile of my childhood. The men are comfortable, holding him in one arm hugs. Their smiles are smiles to remember. However long that he has this image, he has proof that his father loved him as he was.

“Tired of moving boxes?” he asks me.

“No, I am tired of my father calling me a girl.”

“Stand up to him.”

“And then what?”

“You'll find out what happens.”

“I know what will happen.”

“How?”

“I am his son.”

“Okay,” he says, interrupting me. “Can you help me?” He points to about twenty bags of cement mix on the black marked floor.

With the tan bags, neatly arranged on the truck, they resemble the flour sacks that are abundant in African villages. The blue USAID stamp stands out against the burlap and the brown-dominated landscape. Villagers feed their family's flatbread and fried sweet bread with the flour. Now, I can taste the cardamom, honey, spiced butter, powdered sugar, papaya jam, and khat tea in my mouth. In October, during our last visit, a group of men set two males discovered having sex on fire with two hundred flour sacks. A blistered message that same-sex desire is a Western disease, imported and caught as if a cold, and cured through a blaze. Their faces were inhuman: fathers, grandfathers, and dirty-faced boys as young as seven. They all knew these two men and had loved them, and no one in the crowd cried. Hate is thick in our blood. Around my seventh birthday, Father found out that his younger brother kissed another boy and beat him to the point that he became blind in one eye. Junior regurgitated the grisly details of the fight and punctuated the conversation with, “if he could attack his brother, then he could kill a son.” His words imprisoned me in an idea-walled cell. Often, long-term prisoners commit suicide when their requests for parole return denied. Recently, I started asking myself, what if I remain in confinement forever from Father forcing me to marry my ex-girlfriend. In those moments, death seems to be the quickest way to unglue the cinderblocks.

Paint fumes blend with the ammonia smell from the cement mix and release a noxious odor. The scent is similar to the smells of the darkroom. Dust from holes in the bags stick to my arms and onto Brett's shirt. His shirt has a starch-like stiffness, probably from being worn multiple times without being washed. I love his roughness. Staring at the dark silky hairs around his lips, I realize what attracts me to him. It is his movement between masculine and feminine. At first his sexuality was a question mark blinking in front of me, because of his manly appearance and effeminate behaviors. There is a disquieting beauty to the contrast, even more so with the construction hat on his head and the dangling curls in his face.

“This is a beautiful truck.”

“I'll take you for a ride whenever you want.”

“Does your father let you borrow it?”

“It's mine. I bought it with cash I saved working for him.”

“I put all my money into cameras.”

“That's what makes us different. I rebel out in the open. You are sweating. Let me get you some water.”

He caresses my forehead. I flinch, not from the roughness of his hand, but from being unprepared. My skin prickles from the softness of his gift. Like the sun on my face, like sweet Sycamore figs and guava paste, I love how I feel under his influence. I want to hear his breath in my ear as I stare at the dotted globs of paint on the ceiling. Clasped, but without metal joining them, our hands would connect us, the way sexual organs cannot. He disappears into the house through the side door. Working photographers know the power of place. The way a photographer stands in front of his subject affects the photograph. And the way a photographer holds a camera also has an effect. If cameras dream, they dream to be touched by someone like him.

The sensual shape of a wrench casts a shadow over Brett's face in the photograph. With my eyes closed, I try to focus in on the aspects that excite me – the pink bandanna around his head. The way his nipples poke out of the bodybuilder's chest and the ampleness of his hips accentuated by his crossed legs. The eyes, filled with black sex and white powder, have been dazzled by the sun. He is taller than my father, approximately my height, and also could be considered older. Like a cactus that blooms late at night, he stands erect, ready, showing off a pink opening at the end of a tube. The act is beautiful while it lasts; however, the witness is unlikely to experience it again. A pocketknife, with the blade out, is under the picture on the shelf. A spreading coldness on my back shocks me. I snap around. He nods, head up, holding out a water bottle. As our hands touch in the giving, a splotch at the bottom of my palm distracts me, and I drop the bottle. Nowhere else do I see maroon.

“There's a photo exhibit at the museum,” he says and picks up the bottle. “I drove by a billboard for it yesterday. We can go on Saturday.”

“I will let you know.”

“Okay. Can you bring your camera?”

The word can so close to camera conjures khaniis up from the dead, and its thorns disrupt the conversation. I watch the word hovering above Brett. I want to choke it and leave it unfruitful. However, then, I hear the word flaming in my ear and the second word materializes on top of the first. More words appear. Maricon. Broke-wristed. Sweet booty. Soft. Sugar in the tank. Fruity. Funny people. Skeef. I imagine a fat-lipped vagina smacking open in between my legs, every time Father screams skeef. The coarseness of that word transforms how I see myself. I have to prove that I am separate from it, not because I am not attracted to men, but because Somali boys are divined to become fathers. And, fathers' bodies are like God's body. The body of an ungodly man is a coffin. Every time a woman we know womb expands for a baby, her family prays for a boy. Boys are kings that can increase their family's wealth. One boy is worth five girls. One skeef is worse than having five unmarriable daughters. To say the word, emphasis is placed on the first four letters – skee (it should sound like a hiss) and followed by if. Then, add the ferocity of hungered people, and even ears that have never touched the Horn of Africa with their bare feet can hear women pounding sorghum with wooden mortars and pestles. They can hear it because the clamorous children have been startled into silence.

Seeing these slurs glued together as if they are a bridge to eternal damnation, I tell Brett, “I should leave” and the soft air of sadness dissolves the letters into a handful of dust.