Tropic of Night (33 page)

I am just finishing gluing down the last of the gray carpet squares when Luz tromps into the kitchen. She has experienced wonders?the Monkey Jungle, The Little Mermaid and Pocahontas on video, Burger King with the playground adjoining, a sleepover with five other girls, junk food without stint. Thank you, Mrs. Pettigrew. I say I have a surprise for her, and show her the red knob hanging down and ask her to pull it. She does. The expression on her face as the ladder slides down is worth the fifteen gallons of sweat. Magic. She ascends, I follow.

“It’s very stinky in here.”

“That’s the glue. It’ll go away soon. Do you like it?”

“Uh-huh. Do I have to sleep here all by myself?”

“If you want. I have some furniture, too. Do you want to see it?”

She does, and we go down to the garage to check it out.

“Amanda has flowers on her dresser,” she says.

“I have some flowers, too, and when the paint is dry, you can put them on just where you want them.” I show her the decals I’ve bought and she wants to put them on right now and we have a little spat about that. She’s cranky then, and hyper because of all the stimulation and the strange foods, and I’m cross with her, at which point she crumples utterly and I feel like a monster. I’m afraid I am going to spoil her, and when I think this, I laugh inwardly, since it is at present unlikely that either of us will live long enough for spoiling to occur. Spoil away, then, Jane!

After she’s been calmed and cosseted extravagantly, I show her Peeper in its new cage, and we play with it, and plan the furnishings of the chicken house. Then Jasper comes by and asks if I want to have pizza with his family and our across-the-street neighbor, Dawn Slotsky, and her four-year-old, Eleanor. Luz answers for both of us, such a schmoozer she has become, and I tie a head scarf over my filthy hair, and wash my face and hands, and over we go.

We are eating on the concrete terrace behind the big house. Dawn is already there, with her child, a chubby, grubby, cherubic red-blonde in a pink dress. She and Luz immediately march off to follow Jasper, who is running around the backyard with a jar, accompanied by Jake the dog, searching for a kind of beetle that has two bright luminous spots on its back. We adults go up and look at the new room, and I shyly accept their applause. We all go sit in tatty plastic loungers with our beers (except Dawn) and I ask Dawn how she is feeling, a suitable question, I think, for someone as grossly pregnant as she is. Dawn is a second-generation Grove hippie, and no one has ever seen her in anything but cutoffs and a spaghetti-strapped top, even now, although she has elastics and aprons to conceal her great belly. Until I got Luz, we had not exchanged a word, although she always had a friendly smile. With a child, I have become a significant person on the street.

She says she can’t wait for it to be over, and she’ll never, ever get pregnant again, two is enough, and Polly agrees, and they look at me and I modestly turn my eyes down, and I can see them thinking, Oh, looking like that she’s lucky to have the one. I don’t mind this too much. Then Shari Ribera comes out with a bunch of plates and cups and utensils, and stays to chat. The subject of the Mad Abortionist comes up, which is what the papers have tastefully chosen to call my husband, and we all shudder, especially, of course, Dawn, whose significant other is a roadie, often away from home, as now. She has window bars and a large and barky mutt dog. I ache to tell her that these will do no good at all, but what, after all, could I say?

We talk about guns, then, not very knowledgeably, although I myself know a good deal about guns of all kinds, but I don’t contribute. Dawn asserts she could never kill anyone, and Polly scoffs and says she would have no trouble dispatching that guy, and she has a short list of some others, and then, catching her daughter’s eye, says, “Not your father, sugar. I would shoot him in the leg, though,” and we all laugh. Mr. Ribera is of Dominican extraction, and both his children have the unearthly beauty that sometimes occurs when the best qualities of the contributory races combine to form a perfect genetic soufflé. At fourteen Shari is being hit on by everyone in pants, and is especially subjected to the sort of courtship favored by young colored gangsters in passing cars. Jasper is in middle school, and is learning, as my husband famously did, not only of the regular cracker bigotry, which the white Cubans happily share, but also of the ferocious and socially invisible racism practiced by those of darker hue than him. Jasper does well in school, which makes it worse. Or, did well. Polly is now talking about his attitude changing, hoping he will not be a problem teen. Oh, he will, Polly. There’s not a moment’s mercy from the brain poison leaching from my skin, no, not in my whole nation, as my husband once put it in a poem.

So we talk, and the pizza is delivered, and I have half a Stroh’s and a slice, and hope I will keep it down. After a really lovely evening, very like actual life, with Luz bathed and put down in her old bed, I drag out my box. I have to look things up. Uluné taught me some countermagic in Danolo, all part of the basic course, and I secretly wrote the procedures down. I have a lot of the botanicals in there, too, although I haven’t let myself think about them in a while. Perhaps I was afraid of provoking the spirits, not that I believe in spirits, or perhaps it was that nothing of note happened to me until quite recently, when I found Luz. I put it to one side, and also put aside my divining bag, and the sad if handy manila portfolio that contains Dolores’s life. Next below there is a waxed cardboard box, fuzzy with wear. It’s filled to the brim with corked bottles, cans sealed with gaffer’s tape, and dozens of small envelopes, similarly sealed, all neatly labeled in black ink in a familiar hand, my own.

It’s all chemicals, of course, as dull as that. No eldritch horrors from beyond time, no special demonic gifts, just chemistry, but not chemistry 101, and not Du Pont or Upjohn chemistry. What would you rather play with given the choice and a hundred thousand years? Would you rather dick around with stone tools, clay pots, baskets, and skins, or master the most sophisticated neuropharmacological synthesizer in the world? It’s all homo ludens. Man at play. Or so Marcel used to say, that old materialist. I walk my own sophisticated neuropharmacological synthesizer over to the sink and get it a drink of water. I wasn’t keeping a personal journal when I was with Marcel, which I rather regret. I have to reconstruct his arguments from my battered memory. You, my angel, he used to say, are a series of transient electrochemical states?perceptions, feelings, memories: very fast, very subtle, chemical states, and the amounts of chemicals required to modify these states are typically tiny, and they work in combinations of which we have no idea. Modern psychopharmacology, these tranquilizers, this Prozac the Americans are so fond of?this is the savage hitting the fine Swiss watch with a flint hammer to make it work again. In contrast, we have the sorcerer. He has tens of thousands of chemical species available to him in plant tissue, not to mention commensal bacteria and fungi and viruses that can live in and modify the human body, not to mention mutagens that can actually change the DNA in the human brain, and he has for his laboratory bench, himself, or his victims or allies, and he has time, all the time in the world.

But, says the angel, okay, they can drug themselves, have trances, visions galore, and they can drug their subjects, or victims, with or without their knowledge, but what about all the weird stuff, affecting people at a distance, influencing dreams, cursing, being invisible …

No, no, you haven’t understood, my sparrow. Their bodies are changed. They can make psychotropic chemicals to order, even chemicals affecting a single person. They make them in their own bodies, and expel them through the breath or the pores. The melanocytes all over the skin surface are deeply connected to the limbic system and the pineal body and they can produce exohormones, which, entering the bloodstream of the target through any number of routes, proceed to the brain, where they have the most profound mental and emotional effects. Interesting, hein ? The same bodies that control skin pigmentation? An irony, no? Yet here is the essence of what we call sorcery. The sparrow has questions. How come science hasn’t detected these exohormones? Well, science has; am I not a scientist? But what you mean, my artichoke, is “detected chemically.” And the answer is that science is not looking. Science looks largely for what it expects to find, and it does not expect to find any real effects in the claims of sorcerers. Also, science is good at searching for what can be controlled in a laboratory setting, and what can be repeated, so that a certain cause always associates with the same effect. But this is not the case with sorcery, which is an art.

All this was before I met the Chenka, so my questions were like those of a person from a culture that had no music: how can mere ordered sounds affect the emotions? Preposterous! How could a great musician talk to such a person? Looking back now, I see how incredibly patient Marcel was with me, and I blush to recall it, blushing being a good example of psychophysiological effects. And others: did you ever, while sitting in a public place, get the feeling that someone was staring at you, and you looked up and sure enough there was? One of Marcel’s favorites. What do you think that is, mental rays? Beams from the eye? And love. We say, “it’s chemistry,” but it really is chemistry. How little we know, how much to discover, what chemical forces flow, from lover to lover. Yes, indeed.

Marcel’s chemical theory “explained,” if that is the word, much of the anecdotal material about shamanism and sorcery that anthropologists had gathered over the years. He thought that all these were the scattered remains of a very, very old technology. What do witches do, in stories? Two things: they make brews and they cast spells. Brews, of course, are obviously the traditional use of biologicals, and spells are, despite common belief, not silly callings to demons or spirits, but mnemonics. At least, originally. Chenka sorcerers, Marcel claimed, typically had fifty to seventy-five thousand recipes and procedures in memory. And, of course, there is the rub. If you multiply your body’s powers through technology as our culture has done for the last four centuries you are much better off in a material sense than if you only amplify the subjective ones. This is why Sioux shamans no longer rule on the Great Plains, and why, throughout the world, preindustrial peoples are happy to trade fifty-thousand-year-old traditions for cigarettes, whiskey, steel knives, and plastic jugs.

Except for the Chenka, who were a special case. Why did their tradition survive intact? Marcel didn’t know, but he used to grin and say, moving his hands as a conjurer, “the mysteries of the normal curve!” When you get out three or four or five standard deviations from the mean you find some weird stuff. Genius. Golden ages. Giants and dwarves. Two-headed babies. And the Chenka. It’s a good nonexplanation. We thought the Chenka were unique, until I discovered the Olo.

Enough musing. I page through my notebooks until I find what I’m looking for, a kadoul, a ticket to the magic kingdom. I take kwa -leaf, a West African member of the Boraginceae rich in pyrrolizidine alkaloids, mash it with some powders, use a cereal bowl and the handle of a screwdriver as a mortar and pestle to grind the stuff that needs grinding, add a little of my own spit and piss and some water, and put it on the stove to boil down. I say the necessary words, in Olo. The spell, the witch’s brew. It smells dank and rank as it boils. When it has cooked to sludge, I affix a dish towel to a bowl with a rubber band and strain it through, getting about a quarter of a cup of a strong-smelling greenish-brown liquid. I add to this some brown powder, some red powder, some of my blood. The liquid turns a sludgy black and seems to shrink in volume, which is what it’s supposed to do. My artillery. I pour it into an old jam jar. It will keep indefinitely. A good thing, too, because I realize I am not up to changing my interior chemistry just yet, for there are two problems. First, after the drug, and during the time I am under its influence, I will not be fit for anything else but sorcery: not working for Mrs. Waley, not driving a car in accordance with the highway code, not caring for Luz. A sorcerer needs a support team when he or she travels in the m’doli, like an astronaut does on a space mission, and I have none as yet. It was not something I contemplated Dolores ever needing. The second reason is that once I take the stuff, I will be out in m’doli, and my husband will no longer be in any doubt as to my continued earthly existence. A dilemma. I tell myself I am awaiting allies and I go up on a chair and push the jar to the back of the top shelf in my food cupboard. And a third reason: I am scared shitless.

While I am considering protective measures, I decide I may as well take care of the m’fa, too. In the very bottom of my box is a triangular package wrapped in rubberized fabric and gaffer tape. It is my Red Nine. I unwrap it and pick it up. A handful. It weighs, if I recall, two and three-quarter pounds unloaded, and this one has ten rounds in it. My dad kept it on the Kite, and I stole it back when I stole the Kite. I put it on the high shelf next to the kadoul. Maybe I can shoot him if he comes in his body. Could I shoot him? I never killed anyone but me on purpose. In any case, I know it will shoot me, so it will serve in the last extremity, if I find myself literally falling under his spell. Odd, how those common dead metaphors spring horribly to life. Entranced. Enchanted. Bewitched.

Now everything goes back into the box, except the journal, which I continue to read. I wish to reacquaint myself with Jane. The period of Jane’s life between Chenka and Olo was an album of self-delusion, with good examples of all the major types?professional, social, romantic … no, I am being too hard on her. She was a tough girl. It’s not easy losing your first big romantic thing and your sense of the underlying reality of the cosmos at one and the same time.

This gets me thinking again about Dad (for I have gone to see that boat, Guitar, several times, down at Dinner Key). I wonder, is that kind of person still around, will we ever have people like that again? He always said it was his generation, that peculiar lost one that was born during the Second World War. He used to tote up the things that his generation was last at. Last to experience segregation of the races, last to come to sexual maturity before women’s lib and the Pill, last to believe that the United States was invariably the good guy, last to defer without much question to teachers and elders in general, last to get the full load of dead white male culture force-fed into their brains and souls, last to grow up before TV became the ruling power. If Catholic, last to get raised in the pre—Vatican II shut-up-and-do-what-we-say, superstitious, devotional American church. The last to start screwing before Roe v. Wade, and hence and finally, the last to think it mandatory to marry the girl you got pregnant. Thus me.