Counternarratives (38 page)

Nests of words and figures, which snared me.

First feet so that they will never run away. Then hands, so not even the
simplest tools. Then eyes, so no recall of a single place you stash them. But keep
the tongue and vocal cords until the end because they may have something else to
surprise you with.

My later approach, almost to the letter. How I will surprise you.

You will.

Tell you something.

The baobab tree lives forever and offers shade, but not cassava fruit.
Today smells like that evening in the clearing, you know.

I can't smell it.

It does. The stink of oblivion. Its anticipation. The smell that lies
outside the smell. Fumes beyond and beneath it. Something worse, don't you agree,
lurking there? You still have your nose.

Yes, no, nothing like that evening. I can't.

You can probably hear it in your voice, and mine. In the silence before
I entered.

No, fumes, no sounds.

You probably cannot just hear it but taste it. That's how the oracle
described it, no? A feeling so strong the ear tastes its contours? All that poetry
like a radar. We survived but not the victims of that ambush. An open field, though,
for you.

Yes, but no, it was an ordeal after that.

Every such situation presented itself as an ordeal, but you saw the
window before you. You leapt right through. I followed you.

Windows, yes. Now, no.

It wasn't supposed to stay open for me. Yet every time when you tried
with me you failed. After the first time, the failed assassination at the market, I
realized I had to place my steps inside and then ahead of yours. Enter your
frequency. The truth that I was next, your truth. That's how I knew. The acid in the
tap. The radioactive isotopes those painters painted all throughout the house.
Survival is a great motivator. Somehow you missed that.

I missed.

You did and didn't. You were watching but you couldn't see past your
ken. The untimely horizon. I won't even use the metaphor of chess, which you banned,
remember? Recall how you always beat me back then? Then you contrived to let me win,
until I got the gist. You hated that you could imagine what the person next door or
across the street was thinking but you couldn't figure out a winning strategy
against your former protegé on that board. How many did you tear up or burn? It
fascinated me that the king was so powerless, waiting to be taken. He should have
been able to control his fate and the throne.

Powerless, and taken.

Terrified of knights—and pawns. A bishop, how ridiculous. The queen is
the one who never gave a damn. I was the queen, then. But yoté, choko, checkers,
backgammon, cribbage, senterej, go, poker, 21, roulette, I laugh at all those
metaphors today because they point to chance and I don't take any.

No chance, no time.

Out of time. Except now.

No, I can't believe it.

That your clock is running out? That you will surprise me? Before it's
too late. There was that class we took together while in exile, the philosophy of
military strategy, or political philosophy, or philosophy of politics itself,
something enthrallingly useless.

Yes. Plato, Machiavelli, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Schmitt
—

All those damned Europeans, all that claptrap.

Emperor Frederick the Great, Teddy Roosevelt, Franco, Mussolini, Stalin,
then a week for Mao, Trujillo, Amin, Pinochet, Bokassa . . . I
imagined they've added Saddam, Cheney, Ghaddafi, the rest.

To what end? Our ancestors had more wisdom in their little toes.

My avatars, my favorite monsters.

At first I thought that was when you began formulating your schemes. But
no, it was earlier. Before the philosophers, always political. You always had such
ambition, foresight. Even in childhood, I envision, since I didn't know you then.
Those stories about your youth, on the other side of the country, how you organized
the local children, drawing maps in the sand, compelling them to strangle animals,
memorize secret words. It took me a while to catch on, and up.

Then you were behind me.

Fully. Behind, until I passed you. Surpassed you.

Past me.

I want to say that I remember the exact moment but that would be too
cinematic, too perfect. Like a still from a movie, or a literary scene. Is there a
computer code for that? A simulation I can view on the nearest screen. I don't
recall it. No need now to say I did. I was carrying out all of your plans, to the
letter. Rewriting maps, strangling opponents, devising secret languages.

All my plans, opponents, letters.

I would say to myself, he foresees everything, moves men around like
figurines. Without ever consulting the spirits, the oracle, those magical books from
the Middle East and East and elsewhere. He has the insight of a seer and the might
of a deity. That's why I called you, we all called you The Prophet.

The Prophet, men like figurines.

Because you knew how everything would unfold, how you would unfold it.
No instructions needed. The Prophet foresaw the complex mathematics of circumstance
and how his actions would affect them.

Prediction, or statistics, or complex systems analysis.

I never studied any of that in school. Perhaps military colleges should
teach it.

Poetry, history, psychology, ban all of it.

You banned most of it. I thought you had a hologram of the world, of
everyone else's head, in yours, a cybernetic game turning it every which way, the
dates, the days, the figures, the complicated transactional interplay of everything
materializing in its array, with the will to realize it. Even if that's not what it
was like the metaphor works. You with your all your thinkers and dreamers, those
bards, black, brown, yellow, white, whatever the color, that cannot save a single
soul, including you.

Yes, my avatars, my monsters, I can hear their words right now.

You even wrote your thesis on Amilcar Cabral, another poet, one of
ours.

No, Frantz Fanon. On the justification and cleansing power of violence,
in the service of revolution.

Blood for the stanzas, odes to gore. That brain, so sharp, cutting even
now like a well-honed trap, correcting me. I did say I want to be surprised, though
the squeak, as you liked to say, cries out to be silenced.

Yes, that insistent noise. It became habit, the algorithms of reason,
action, circumstance. I could place myself in the minds of others, their bodies, and
view the world through their eyes, step where they stepped before they knew they
would. What they would do I could always counter it. Equations for such things,
code, scripts, texts, written or sung a thousand years ago, last decade, but
something finer, more subtle too, that could not be written down, though I did.

Lyric poems, oral stories, short stories. You banned them all. I
initially followed your lead, all of it except the most inane trash, though some of
that can provoke enough sympathy to start people thinking. I realized that I would
just have to tinker a bit.

That's dangerous too, I learned soon enough.

If you don't tinker, and control it. Yourself. I give them a steady diet
of garbage, music videos from Rio, US reality shows, K-Pop, Mexican telenovelas,
Bollywood gangster tales, Nollywood films about witches, fads, diet shows, hair
shows, dubbed and scrubbed. Patriotic dramas, documentaries on the colonial wars.
You can never go wrong denouncing the British and French. Louis XIV, King Leopold.
Dead kings. You. Even a trickle of attenuated religion now and then, nothing to give
them any hope or ideas. Thin as wartime broth.

One minute everyone is equal and the next minute they see that they're
not, or they're appealing for help to a higher power. A god takes the shape of a
man.

Mysticism, ritual, pageantry, emptied of content, Prophet. Rules to
follow, without being told. The American evangelicals even endow some of it with a
veneer of legitimacy.

Soon they start to see themselves as one in the same, all believing in
that same figurehead.

None except that nation, and you know who that is now. We've always had
more than enough minor engines of resentment among the ones who might do some
damage, so I remove them, finding multiple other ways of pacifying the rest. Then
it's South vs. North, East vs. West, this tribal yawping vs. that tribal yawping,
the lighter ones vs. the blacker ones, but with something to placate them all at the
end. Nothing like a forgiving mirror.

A nation of narcissists, knowing nothing. You still have to be vigilant.
I wasn't.

Is this what you screamed your lungs out for? Was that your story about
reality? What do you hear right now?

Your voice.

With those ears? I should not have to waste a breath asking anything
twice. What do you hear?

I hear your body ever so slightly shift in your chair, your thick
buttocks cushioned by a very soft pillow, softer than a calf's sack. Though you love
handmade suits from Italy and the UK in private, and your Nehru collars, African
printed cloth and kufis in public, you have on a uniform, a plain one of ours of
which you have many, a castle's worth, I can hear the faintest rustle of the duck,
it's immaculately starched and pressed and hasn't lost its crispness because of this
heat. You have on a black beret, fabricated and blocked in the Basque region of
Spain, not the Chinese kind, though you have been to Shanghai alone several times
within the last six months. That hat sits easily on your shaved head, smooth as an
egg, though sometimes when you touch it the rougher, gray hairs that you didn't
completely remove softly scratch against its inner lining. Instead of your usual
patent leather driving loafers, you are wearing black steel-toe boots, thick soled,
polished by peasants' tongues as I used to say, so shiny you could scorch the sun
with them. You don't have on any medals, any jewelry, any makeup, any cologne,
except a very mild deodorant manufactured in Cape Town whose combined fragrances my
ears, let alone my nose, cannot make out.

I knew you had it in you.

You knew.

Can you hear how aroused your skill has made me?

Please.

Can you hear that?

Yes, I can hear your . . . pressing against the fabric of
your. . . . Please don't.

Don't what?

You know. Please. I don't. . . .

Have these months not taught you anything? Have you completely lost the
ability to see into the future? Put yourself inside my head like you used to. Your
little hologram or code or poem or statistical algorithm or whatever it was.

Yes. No.

If I wanted I would have done that straightaway. If I wanted your wife,
your mother, your father, your children, your grandchildren, the grandchild living
in the penthouse condo in Abu Dhabi and the one working for the Royal Bank of Sweden
in Stockholm and the ones cavorting like princes in their chateaus in Atlanta and
Los Angeles, if I wanted your entire native ancestral village to lie prone before me
as I entered them one by one, if I wanted to raze the entire village and rape all
the crushed and dismembered and burnt bodies, if I wanted to destroy every vestige
of every single soul that spoke the same language as you and rape their ghosts, rape
your ancestors who were my ancestors, if I want to rape the vestigial mother and
fathers of us all, if I wanted to rape the last embers of your existence and memory
and then what wasn't even left after that, I would have done so. I can write the
story of reality however I see fit. At any time.

No. Yes.

And if I instead wanted it to be as it was when we sat facing each other
in the darkness in that clearing, when binding ourselves to each other not just to
overthrow our supposed liberator, the tribune of the people, our leader with his
bloodshot eyes and blood-drenched hands and blood-drained soul, if I wanted it as it
was when we devoured each other that night, like lions, though we were both still
cubs, when I shared everything of myself with you and you with me, or at least I
thought you did, though you were even holding something back then. Admit a sick man
into your home, but not your bed.

No. I was looking ahead. Yes.

You were looking ahead to the bead on my throat.

No, I was . . . looking
back—

And as you entered me you were thinking instead of my bond, this will be
a dagger, or a bayonet, or a Kaleshnikov butt. . . . You were
thinking of terrors that would send the most extreme dystopian writers into
paroxysms, that would make our ancestral spirits and the griots who have shared with
us their stories shudder with envy and horror, and you would start as soon as you
could.

No, not that night. I waited, until the time was right.

In time, then. With that burst of fear you feasted on your second
chance. Try harder. I do want you to surprise me. How can you do that? If you don't
do that . . . what else?

Do I hear?

Do you?

Yes. I hear your dyed black mustache curling upwards at the corners of
your full lips as they bow into a grin, I hear those lips brushing against your
teeth whiter than Kibo snow, I hear your pleasure at how this is going, how things
have unfolded over these last few years. I also hear the sweat trickling down into
the open placket of your uniform shirt because even though they have turned up the
air and opened the vents this cell is still a dutch oven, I hear your flaring
nostrils, flecked with the residue of an early morning snort of cocaine as you were
listening to your favorite rap artist whom you flew in to perform at your daughter's
13th birthday party and who also put on a private show for you, your nose which is
now smeared with some sort of paste made of Noxzema and miracle fruit, nevertheless
periodically wrinkling at the stench, though they cleaned me up, several times this
morning, they scrubbed me and this room up and down, every corner as well as the
ceiling, before you would set foot in here.