The Fifth Sacred Thing (74 page)

I can’t survive your love, Mama. It’s too strong for me. I’m dissolving, losing my self in you. And I love you but I liked being me. But I can’t save myself or anyone. Forgive me for failing you, Mama.

The sun was gone, the sky filled with an orange glow that began to fade.

“But you haven’t failed me, child. All you promised to be was my instrument.”

My instrument. Like a trumpet or a harp or the bray of a conch shell. Music roared through her. Madrone heard Bird’s song and then music from some deeper source his songs only echoed, like the hum of a thousand bees and the royal scent on the air, like the moment just before coming when everything compresses down into a point of incipient pleasure, like the release of wave after wave after wave.…

So it wasn’t a knife after all, Madrone thought, but another sort of instrument. She felt light, suddenly, a great weight she had been carrying dissolved, she was floating, weightless, and around her head were thousands upon thousands of golden bees, fanning the air with their wings so that it smelled sweet, sweet.…

“Over there,” the Melissa cried out.

“You be spotter, don’t take your eyes off it,” Isis directed. “Ready about! Cast off. Pull in that sheet. Here we go.”

Under the swarm on the water was a human form. The bees were crawling up and down an inert body that floated like driftwood.

“It’s alive,” the Melissa said. “The sisters are singing distress but not death. Hurry.”

Isis maneuvered the boat as close as she dared to the floating figure.

“I can’t come in any farther,” she said. “You swim?”

The Melissa gave her a shocked look.

“Ever row a boat?”

“Never.”

Isis sighed. “All right. Look, you sit here and take the tiller. I’m going to let the sails flap in the wind, and we won’t go nowhere. That’s right, keep it just like that—if the boat starts moving that way, pull it in the opposite
direction. Right. Now, can you call off the sisters? I don’t want to get stung to death out there.”

The Melissa closed her eyes.

Madrone felt something change. It was the humming, the humming was gone. She was sorry, she missed it already. Maybe I’m dead, she thought, and cautiously, she opened her eyes. If this was death, it was a lot like life, an expanse of blue water rapidly darkening to indigo in the twilight.

“Hey!”

She thought she heard a sound and tried to answer, but nothing much came out of her lips. Then there was a face near her face.

“You!” Isis said. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

“I’m drowning.” Madrone managed a hoarse whisper.

“I can see that. Can you grab hold of this ring?” She pushed a white foam donut into Madrone’s hand, which closed over it.

“Can you grip it tight?”

Madrone nodded. Her hand closed on the ring like a claw. Isis disappeared, and soon Madrone felt herself being towed through the water. For a moment, she felt a sense of loss. She had been ocean, Goddess, life itself. Now she was one small piece of life, moving through the water, another alien form.

At the side of the boat, Isis hoisted Madrone on her back, carried her up the ladder, and deposited her on deck. Madrone rolled over, tried to breathe, and expelled a gush of orange-red bloody water.

Like a birth, she thought, as she vomited again.

“We’ve got to get her warm,” Isis said, taking the tiller from the Melissa and making fast the jib sheet. “Take her down below. Get her warm. Let her drink some honey water.”

My birth. Born of water, out of the ocean, womb of life. Reborn.

I guess I’m going to live after all.

28

“I
want to see him!” Maya stood, gripping the edge of the round kitchen table with her hands, her knuckles white. Sam sat across from her, his dark brows knitted together, his lips folded tight.

“He seemed to indicate that you should keep away. It’s too dangerous, Maya. I was stupid to mention your name.”

“I don’t care, he’s my grandson. I get to run some risks in this too!”

“You’ll shame him, Maya. You’ll put the final seal on his humiliation!”

“Bullshit!”

Sam blew out his breath in a long sigh and said in a more conciliatory tone, “He’s got guards with him all the time. If they learn you’re his grandmother, you’ll be a prime candidate as a hostage.”

“I don’t care. I’m old, Sam, what do I care if I die? It’s long overdue.”

“What, I’m not reason enough to live? I thought you enjoyed our little anatomy lessons.”

“Don’t make jokes right now, Sam.”

“Forgive me.” He reached across the table and stroked her hand. “That’s how I deal with pain.”

“It’s
not how
I
deal with pain! I want to do something about it! I want my grandson!”

“Leave him alone, Maya. You can’t do anything for him right now.”

“Maybe I could help him.”

“You can help him by staying away. Maya, you’re an old woman, you’ve fought a lot of battles; can’t you just sit this one out?”

“Sit it out! You’re as old as I am!”

“I’m fifteen years younger than you!”

“Men age faster! They wear out sooner! Not soon enough, as far as I’m concerned!”

But she stayed away from the Plaza.

No one took the ration cards. After the first morning, no one spoke to Bird when he appeared in the Plaza every morning, flanked by his two guards, his
shadows. They even looked sort of like him, the same dirt-brown skin, close-cropped wire-wool hair, and black eyes. All the men in this unit looked like that; it was days before he could tell one from another, except for the numbers emblazoned on their gray uniforms. Not that it mattered—they had no names; as far as he could tell they addressed each other by shortened versions of their ID numbers, Threetwo, Sixforty, as they spoke in the lingo that Bird remembered from prison, the staccato dialect of the pens, clipped and abbreviated as if those who spoke it were not entitled to use as many words as other people.

The barracks was a former office in an old government building, with desks removed and rows of pallets lying under windows that would not open. On his first night, Ohnine, the biggest guy in the unit, suddenly rushed at him, fists flailing, letting out a bloodcurdling scream. Bird sighed: he had been through this before; it was prison all over again. He grabbed Ohnine’s right arm, twisted, and flipped him over on his back. Ohnine recovered quickly, rolled back onto his feet, and came at Bird with a knife. Bird’s foot connected with Ohnine’s solar plexus, and in a moment he had knocked the knife out of his hand, where it skittered across the floor.

“Don’t even bother,” Bird said, as Ohnine started to get up again. “I cut my teeth on tougher guys than you. Don’t care if you come from the pens. I come from the street, man. I’m Satan’s favorite child. I’m big brother to five thousand devils, and I eat demons for breakfast.” He realized, suddenly, that he was enjoying himself. So much for nonviolence, he thought. Given the opportunity, he would like nothing better than to beat the shit out of every man in this place. And if he had a gun, if he could train it on the General’s brow and pull the trigger and watch his brains splatter out on the ground.…

But he didn’t really want to kill these guys. They were kind of pitiful, actually, and now that he’d beaten up their leader, they’d probably be his best friends, in time-honored male tradition.

In an odd way, Bird felt at home with them. He had walked out of the charmed circle of love and friendship and community; they had never been inside it. Their tales of their upbringing were harrowing. They liked to brag about whippings they’d received and beatings they’d endured as children. They’d grown up together. His unit had come from the pens and gone through training as one, providing for each other their only taste of affection and loyalty.

“Don’t trust nobody, man, outside your unit,” Ohnine told him. After Bird had passed Ohnine’s initiation test, Ohnine adopted him, bunked beside him. Bird taught him some simple throws, and in return he told Bird things. “You better be tight with your unit, because that’s all you can trust. Your unit can make you or break you. Save your life or take your life. We stand together, and nobody messes with that.”

He thought a lot about the discussion in the Plaza. Was Lily right? Were they capable of transformation? Compassion seemed to have been bred out of them or knocked out. They would defend to the death any member of the unit challenged from outside, but among themselves, their greatest pleasure seemed to come from beating or hurting or humiliating one another in large or small ways.

“Hey, you soulless demonfucker, lick my ass!”

“Gonna break your head, fat boy!”

“Suck my dick!”

Nevertheless they were not completely removed from kindness. He sensed in Ohnine a kind of sympathy. On Bird’s worst days, when the daily purgatory in the park had worn him out and he lay huddled on his bunk sick with vertigo and self-hatred, Ohnine would come and sit by him.

“Leave me alone,” Bird would say, but Ohnine would stay.

“Don’t beat yourself up,” he told Bird once. “Guards are made through torture, man. We all been through it too. You got to go to that edge in yourself, past that point where you think you got control.”

Bird looked up at him, amazed. Just for one moment, they were actually meeting, soul to soul. He was being offered comfort, absolution.

“I broke,” Bird said.

“We all break. Sure, man, I know how you think, we all think that way, we think, Hey, I’m the one can beat it, they may break you but they won’t break me. But we all break. And once you know that, it give you confidence when it come your turn to break somebody else down. Because you know he gonna do it, no matter what he say or what he think. You can have patience, you can stay calm.”

Will that happen to me? Bird thought. Will I turn into a breaker, a torturer?

“Tell you how we do it, man. You got a client—that’s what we call the stick we’re working on—you got to get him to give you just a little bit. Don’t break him on something big, to start, but you pick some little thing, something he can say, Hey, why not do it, why not say it? Ain’t worth the pain to hold out. Get him used to giving way, ‘cause once he start he gonna give and give and give. Then you make him do the next thing, small thing again, move him along gradual like. Step by step. Till by the end, you got him lickin’ your hand like a dog. And that’s a damn good feeling, to take a strong man down that road.”