Stories for Chip (41 page)

“I'm sorry to hear that,” said Dan, pathetically.

“It's OK,” said Megan. “Everything dies.”

Fábio Fernandes

1.

I started to levitate on the eve of my suicide. It wasn't on purpose. I was fairly relaxed, mind unfocused, as people who have made up their minds to do irreversible things probably feel. I was standing in the middle of my small, cluttered scriptorium, looking at the shelves heavily laden with hardcovers and paperbacks, in search of some book, any book. I remember thinking of Egyptian pharaohs and the things they carried to their tombs. I also recall thinking I would like to be buried with books. Or burned. Maybe cremation would be better.

Then, suddenly, my feet weren't touching the floor anymore. I wasn't out of balance. I wasn't wobbling. I was sure that was no episode of labyrinthitis, and, more important, I had drunk no spirits nor taken any drugs. I had planned to go to into the night really gently, gently and completely lucid. Was I hallucinating? I wondered then. Or would it be a sign? If so, a sign of what? Of a miracle? Sainthood? A mutation? Superpowers, perhaps? Would I then be a supermutant Jesus? I also remember wondering if this strange occurrence would in any way affect my decision to take my own life.

2.

Every war only ends with a treaty. Treaties were created not only to enforce peace, but to serve as flags, markers, landmarks to tell everyone:
behold, this war is heretofore ended
. So that, when two former enemies meet, they don't kill each other. (Sometimes the treaty means squat, but that's another story.) Anyway, they are not supposed to kill each other anymore. And, if one of them does it, there will be punishment. Sometimes they kill each other, and that brings the story to an end—but not this story, alas. What does one do when the war is
inside
?

My condition is not as simple as schizophrenia (simple in the sense that you can medicate the patient, that is, that there is a palliative treatment). My condition is legion. Treat yourself like the enemy. Exorcize yourself. Barbiturates, slit the wrists open, all these are dumb, brutal methods—and utterly ineffective. For all you can do is reach a kind of truce. This way lies negotiation. And negotiation is not an art. Negotiation is death. So I must find another way. Another door to me.

3.

I stayed awake for most of the levitation night looking at old pictures. My mom holding me as a baby. Standing to her right, in a black suit, my grandfather. A gaunt, stern man in his sixties then, he wasn't a bad fellow. But he wouldn't be caught smiling. His upbringing. But he was a good and fair man, or that is the way I wish to remember him. A member of the Church of the Latter-day Saints. I'm not a member of any church. But these are my last days. Will I be a saint, after? A ghost? Pigments and pixels in pictures?

4.

Finally, I slept. And she was holding my hand right next to me in the airplane during the turbulence, and that was when she said for the first time the words
I love you
. And even though the plane shook a lot and I was frightened, I could not help but smile, because I was beside myself with joy. I was witnessing an occurrence rarer than a plane crash. And she said it again, this time with a smile in her sad eyes (her melancholy eyes were her trademark; to this day I wonder if this was why I fell in love with her; I teased her once, telling her the real reason was that I had seen her gorgeous legs when she walked into the classroom that balmy evening in October, but to be honest, I think I will never know): “In case anything goes wrong now, I just wanted you to know that I love you. I love you. I love you.” She said it three times. I couldn't have been happier. We kissed then—a shaky, trembling meeting of lips, no more, but that was more than enough—and we held hands for thirty minutes more until the turbulence subsided. And we had not died. And she was still there. And I was still in love with her. And she was.

5.

And she was telling me, the door is cryogenics. She saw in my face, even via messaging, my resolve to end things. We were too distant from each other to protagonize a love scene. I wasn't in the mood for love anyway. I would regret it later. I was out for war. If it had to be a cold war, so be it.

6.

Break my body, hold my bones. Grind me into powder. Scatter what is left of this dust to the wind, so that soon there will be no visible particle left. It will be better this way. To have and have not. To be or not to be. Veni, vidi, vici. I went, I was, I had. It was not enough, but it was all I was allowed to get. Now I am a dead man walking. I am the incredible shrinking man. I am the man who folded himself. For I have touched the sky. I loved and was loved back. Once, this was a noble truth. Not anymore. No regrets. Nothing else matters. Please kill me.

7.

No sleep tonight anymore. I can sleep when I'm dead. Who said that? Churchill? Fassbinder? It doesn't matter. All that matters now is the past. Another photo: in the center of the image, a father holds his infant son. The father is smiling; he looks nervous. This is his first child. It will not be his last, but he doesn't know it yet. (He will have a daughter three years later, but his wife will get pregnant before that and will suffer a miscarriage. Some things are better left unknown for now, however.)

The father is standing between two well-tended bushes in a rose garden at his aunt's house. The father is a very tall, thin man, and he's wearing a well-cut suit. He looks rather uncomfortable in it, but handsome all the same. The son is just a baby. Forty years after that snapshot, the son, a poet dying of cancer, will write a story about that photo. About those two people frozen in time, in the cold sleep of memory.

8.

I hardly felt the second occurrence of levitation. Most miracles go unobserved while we're busy living our lives. I am visiting the avenues of my death, all the houses, the open doors.

Cryogenics is not rocket science, you told me. You were right. Rockets go somewhere. A frozen body is a thing of beauty, a joy forever:
it will never pass into nothingness
. And quoting Keats without knowing it, you killed all the poetry. That, I remember, was when I stopped answering your messages. Either way, I would never see you again, and I couldn't bear it.

My feet bound to the ground again, I start having second thoughts about taking my life. Maybe I'm bound by some invisible force. Maybe this force is more tangible than everyone around us can possibly suspect. The force of an oath, even if it's an oath I make only to myself, after a life of suffering, when I reach a safe harbor, a haven, and I can finally disembark, put my feet ashore and thank heavens (or Fate, if I suffered so much that I can't possibly believe in any gods anymore) because I have finally reached safety, at last I have the supreme joy of finding a place to stay, a room of my own, having some food in my belly, maybe even a stray cat to pet when I'm feeling lonely, and the beach to gaze upon when I want to feel lonely. But then I'm never really in solitude, because of my oath.

What do I know? What I still know is nobody belongs to anybody, and in the end, this is all well and good, this is as it should have been all the time. But having this knowledge does not ease my pain, for deep inside I would have you as mine and I would have my heart as yours, but our timelines crossed each other in some twisted angle, or maybe in parallel, and that was not to be. We did meet, though, and it was good. But ours was only a node in the wider net of life, and who knows when we shall meet again? Not us.

9.

My body is not my temple. Every health freak worships this figure of speech more than their own blood-sugar levels. They are wrong. A body is not fit to worship; too messy for that. Nor is my body a city. Every age seems to have the metaphor it deserves.

In the times of Diderot, D'Alembert, and La Mettrie, L'Homme Machine, the Machine Man. God was the Architect of the Universe. Everything was cogs and coils, nuts and bolts. For a thing to work, it should be mechanical, they reasoned. In this they weren't so far from the truth. All things break down. Even bodies. Especially bodies.

In the beginning of the twentieth century, the Gernsback Continuum, the WASP dream of reaching the future by purification of the species. Citius, Altius, Fortius. Faster, Higher, Stronger. Able bodies. We know what Hitler did to the unable ones.

Today, what do we have to show as a metaphor? The Gibson Continuum, maybe? Post-post-cyber hybrid hacktivists flaunting their cyborginess as the beginning of a brave new world? Aside from the notion of the brain as a computer, the idea of body as machine remains the same. They are not enough, all these metaphors. They were never able to convey all the complexity of flesh and blood. Better to widen the scope and say just this: the human body is a battlefield. Of viruses and bacteria; of hatreds and passions; of external pressures, tangible and intangible. The human body is the fucking Battle of the Somme repeated
ad infinitum, ad nauseam
every single day of our lives. I know mine is. There is only one way to stop this battle.

◊

10.

The capsule.

11.

Before sleep, a last thought: one day I will be out of cryosleep and the world around me will be unrecognizable. I will barely be able to utter any sentence—any word—in a way that makes sense to the generation who will wake me. Maybe they will have translating implants. Maybe they will be post-humans, genetically modified to understand virtually every old language the peoples of Earth ever spoke in its history. Maybe humankind simply won't exist anymore and I will be awakened from cold sleep by machines, robots or artificial intelligences, incorporeal entities for whom the act of levitation is more an archaeological footnote than a true experience of something called
flesh
so far removed from their reality. I don't know. Yet. All I know is one day I will be out of cryosleep and the world around me will be unrecognizable.

But maybe, if I'm lucky, some symbols will be available that can be understandable by both sides. Music, for example. Not lyrics, but notes. And voices. Maybe Elizabeth Fraser singing. Anything. I would like that. It would be a good awakening in the distant future.

Kai Ashante Wilson

Having seen the reggaezzi perform, the righteous of Sea-john shake their heads in wonder. They will then murmur severally or as one, <<
Légendaire.
>>

[
Tonight
]

The cavalcade forms up. In beats, without words, the drummers argue a bass line. While higher registers wait in silence, contraltos and bassos scat and moan, improvising the tune (the lyrics never change). The soulful melodies these deeper voices come up with are much too cool, and none capture the hot quiddity of their subject. “Make dat shit
bump
, y'all,” a counter-tenor exhorts. “Put some stank on it!” So the music picks up funk and swing. A girl bounces and stretches with the other dancers. They have black skin, or brown, or golden; hers is gray, waxen, and flyblown. What ails this girl, her bones slipping so weirdly in raddled tissues? It's death: she died three days ago. But so long as weary flesh lasts she has the right to choose it over imperishable spirit. Thus can her body rise again, and she dance tonight with living brethren. The boy she loved, dead these years, not days, reappears as another name among the beautiful lights, and plays
guitarra
with the same prodigy as before, when he lived. Dancers up front, players and singers trailing, they'll process down Mevilla, the witches' hill, and up and over the great breasts of the Mother, middle hill crowded with shanties of the poor, and onward to the furthest hill of Sea-john, Dolorosa, where rich families live in gardened houses and foreign powers keep grand embassies. A boy nicknamed
El Supremo
is about to join their host—he lies tossing in his bed, way over on that easternmost hill. No one will see this parade pass, few hear it. The performance is for that one boy alone, whom the reggaezzi will gather to their number at last, tonight.

◊

From the roof you can see the world. Downhill, north: the Kingdom is dark, except where yellow licks the darkness. Some torch or lamp burns here and there as far as the horizon. The southern view is the ocean, entirely dark save for two moons out at sea: one true, clear and still in heaven's vault; another false, dappled and shuddering on the vast black waters. The swelter lifts—a gust of seabreeze gives her goosebumps. But the filthy heat settles right back down. Some man is kissing her son under the archway of the house gate.

Is
this
how matters stand now, with tongue and teeth? In aid of asphyxiation, of cannibalism, more than love? All that biting! The moon's so bright, she feels implicated in the sloppy grapple below. Why does the boy let that man grab and handle him so? When she lies down with her husband or with her wife, the love's never harsh or ugly. Back when she and Jahs were as young and foolish as their son is today, even then, in the raw passion of first kisses, softness and respect were foremost. But now a caress and tenderness must be relics, not what youth want.

Night-bees flicker throughout the house garden. Below, the lime trees are all in flower, and green lights dim and kindle among the blossoms.

The boy utters little cries in his attacker's arms, though hardly in distress. Dance usually does so much better by professional bodies: thickening the thighs, making the back and arms formidable. It's just too bad
la dança
will whittle that rare body down, to all fine bones and no spare flesh. Her son—

“Ma'am?” Cook whispers from the stairwell to the roof. “Miss Savary? Duh baby just got in, safe. I wanted you to know. Dey out by the gate, him and his gentleman.”

“Yes, Cook. Thank you.” Savary sighs, and rolls the hulled berries from her skirts into the bowl. “Why don't you go on to your room now, dear, and rest? We can finish up in the morning.”