The Girl in the Road (31 page)

I confided this to Dr. Kebede, the faculty adviser to ARAP on campus. She was not happy with me.

Mariama, I've been watching you, she said. I'm worried about you because you have no kin. Who takes care of you? Do you have any real friends? Do you date anyone?

I met an Indian man, I said.

An Indian man? Do you know how Indians see Ethiopians? Indians can be very racist. Especially the wealthy. They regard Africans as beneath them.

Not this one, I said. Not him.

Is it serious? she asked.

Yes, I said, even though I hadn't seen or heard from Gabriel in months.

Has he told his parents about you yet?

I don't know.

That's the test, she said. Even the most progressive Indians still have parents stuck in the Raj, and they're helpless to stand up to them. When is the last time you saw him?

I didn't answer.

Ah, I see, said Dr. Kebede, victorious. What is he then, a crush? Wake up, Mariama. It's time to stop acting like a child. There's important work to do in the world.

I got very quiet and the kreen got very loud.

Dr. Kebede looked frightened. She raised her voice as if in defense against an invisible threat. She said, I'm just being honest with you. I've seen it happen. Too many times. They pretend to be equals but really, regard us as a resource. They need energy. They'll take it from us. I want them out, Mariama. You must want it too. You must forget this nonsense.

I walked out because the kreen was thrashing so hard I was afraid it might do violence and I wasn't ready for that yet.

I couldn't put my faith in a bitter old lady. I still believed that I had to put my faith in love. Gabriel had told me about the snake, and I had told him about my mother, and that had to mean something.

Even though I'd convinced myself that Gabriel was out of the country, I began, again, to haunt the places he might be. School let out and the rainy season came. I drank buna in Meganagna and watched the entrance of Our Lady of Entoto Hospital. I found an excuse to wander down Medhane Alem, to the apartment complex where Gabriel's flat was. When I asked the doorman whether Gabriel still lived there, he said no, he'd moved before Christmas.

Ah, back to India? I said, sad but accepting.

But he said no. That he'd moved somewhere farther east in the city, in the more modern developments.

The kreen snapped up this information and gobbled it down.

I thanked the doorman. I started walking east.

“What do you mean?” I ask Subu.

“A snake has two fangs. So if the snake struck you, there should be six bites.”

He reaches forward. I slap his hand away.

“Meena,” he says.

“Don't touch me.”

He turns around and walks back to his kiosk. He sits at the stool at the counter. He raises his hands to either side. “I won't.”

I turn around to walk forward but my foot slips and, because there's actually no glass tunnel containing the Trail, I fall into the ocean. I scream into the water. I beat my fists on the Trail and shed the robe because it's pulling me down and lift myself up all the way up to my feet. I'm back, soaked.

“Meena,” he says again, more softly.

“Don't touch me,” I say.

“I won't,” he says.

I take a step toward him.

“I said I won't,” he says again.

When I saw Sunny and Mohini, I circled around the bed and sat on the chair across from it, the one next to the glass cabinet. Mohini's eyes were wide. She stared at me. She was terrified. Sunny pushed back using his hands and withdrew from her and his penis trailed white slime and swung to one side and stuck to his thigh. He lifted a pillow to cover his dark black-bear patch. Mohini rolled down her sari and turned over on her stomach and then pushed herself up to a kneeling position.

“Meena,” she said.

I was only wearing my bra on top, and my jeans were unzipped. “Yeah,” I said, “I'm here.”

Mohini saw the smile at the edge of my mouth and smiled back, in something like relief. “Meena, did you know?”

I heard the quail's spiral song right outside the window, and I swirled my finger in the air as if to trace it, as if to answer her question.

“You're not mad?”

I wagged my head like a good Indian girl. I felt strong, so full of life, like my heart was made of menthol.

“Oh. Wow. Meena, I love you. Look, Sunny—”

“I'm going,” said Sunny, already out of the bed and shrugging into clothes. “I'm going.”

“Okay, that's probably best,” said Mohini, turning from him to me and back again. “But Sunny?—Meena—I think we should all sit down and talk sometime. I really want to respect everyone's feelings in this situation.”

Mohini pulled up her bra strap. Sunny wagged his head and zipped up his pants. We both watched as he gathered up the rest of his things and made toward the front door, then changed his mind and made toward the back door. He held up his hand in farewell. Mohini and I both did the same.

Mohini got off the bed and walked toward me. I rose and she reached for my hand and squeezed it hard. We couldn't look at each other yet. We both looked at the floor. She took a deep breath and said, “Do you know how much I love you, Meena?”

Yes, I said. She loved me, so all would be well, even though all things were collapsing in flood and fire to form a new world. I still couldn't look her in the face so I pressed my cheek to hers and squeezed my eyes shut and in the dark behind my eyelids I saw her face take shape again, her skin dewy from the effort of sex.

At this I became calm.

With my eyes still closed I hugged her shoulders, swung her around, and shoved her into the glass cabinet.

It shattered top to bottom. A dog started barking outside.

I took her by the throat and slammed her head against the broken glass. She was in shock. I pushed her face back again and my hand got into her mouth and she bit me and the slime from her tongue got on my skin. All the glass had fallen now and I was beating her head against the wooden shelf. Then she was pushing back, trying to get me to let go.

I threw her against the bed. A fan of blood appeared on the sheets and a halo started spreading around her head. I grabbed her throat again. I could see her lips forming my name. She was scraping at my stomach. Her eyes were overflowing their sockets. She tried to push me away but she was getting weaker. I felt a bite at my solar plexus and reared back. She had punctured me with her fingernails. I stretched the skin above it and saw blood swell and run down. I was enraged.

I backhanded her across the face.

She went still.

When I'm done with the kiosk, it's a patch of wreckage floating away. Subu got out of my way. He sat a few scales away and watched the whole thing.

I don't know how to make amends. I also don't want to.

I try to keep walking west but I can't balance anymore. I'm surrounded by the opportunity to die. The ocean is so much bigger than I am. Mass wins. I should submit to it. I want to drop sideways or just lie down and not move.

But I act from animal self-preservation. I come to my knees to put my center of gravity closer to the Trail. I imagine a line running straight down the middle of the Trail and focus on putting my hands on it. I crawl forward. I hug the solid.

Mohini doesn't talk to me anymore. None of my counselors do. I listen but they've all fallen silent.

There's only the little woman. I see her from a long way off. She retreats before me, but a little less every time. Even from this distance I can tell she isn't shifting her weight at all. The Trail is her medium. I imagine it's the same woman I saw dive into the ocean after the ship crossing, and the same woman I saw crawl overhead on the glass tunnel, and also Bloody Mary, and also the mango-ring thief. She's the bearer of all phenomena. She doesn't appear iteratively like the bodies did. She's one continuous vision.

Then she starts leaving things. I find a conch shell sitting in the middle of a scale one evening. I leave it where it is. The next night, there's a starfish oozing from A to B, still alive. How did it get up here. I nudge it over the side and hope it survives the long journey down. The next day, as the sun is setting, I find ribbons of brown kelp arranged in a circle. She watches me from a safe distance while I examine it. I feel she wants me to. I feel she's seeking my approval. So I take note of the distribution of kelp as even and careful and artful and then crawl through the middle of it toward her.

This time she stands her ground. She allows me closer. She doesn't take her eyes off me. She seems terrified. She's naked and her skin is burnt. She looks familiar. Her arms hang askew from her collarbone. She's an old woman with the body of a starved child. Her legs are crossed with rivulets of salt. I want to lie down but instead I come just a little bit closer and see that she's holding a white rag balled up in her fist.

I stop two scales away.

“We meet again,” I say.

She drops to her knees and says,

HASSANIYYA:
Yemaya, can it truly be you?

I didn't find Gabriel that day.

But with the new knowledge, the kreen swelled like a tumor. Sometimes the pain was unbearable. People on the street and on the bus looked at me strangely, often with pity. I suspected they could see the kreen in me.

Class was out for the rainy season. I slept all day and watched the news at night. The ARAP and the PEP were both preparing for the election in August. Elections were usually in May, but the PEP had pushed them back so that the student effort would be weakened, or so rumor had it.

But I couldn't care. The kreen wouldn't let me care about anything else but itself.

I stopped going out except to get food near my apartment in Tewodros Square. I ate the same thing every day: rice and ladoos from an Indian on the corner. I liked him because he didn't give me the same pitying looks that everyone else did. As for the ladoos, made of milk and sugar, they were the only thing my body wanted. Now I know it's because they reminded me of you, Yemaya.

On Election Day, I went downstairs to get a bowl of rice and a few ladoos, just like any other day. The square was full of media, agitators, protestors, and voters streaming to their appointed polling places. It was an impressive circus. Six months ago I would have joined. But the fight had gone out of me: I loved not Ethiopia, nor India, nor cared much who won the election. All that was left was the kreen and I didn't know how to make it go away.

Then, across the square and swimming with the current, I spotted a golden young man, fine and handsome and broad-shouldered. It was my Gabriel. He looked healthy and happy. He was alone. He was wearing scrubs. He stepped out into the street and hailed the bus. He boarded. The bus pulled away south down Churchill Avenue.

So it was true. He was in the city. I realized he probably had been all along.

I paid for my ladoos, sat on a bench on the street, and ate them. I had a premonition that this was the last chance I would have to eat for a while.

When I was done, and had wiped my fingers and thrown away the napkin, I stepped into the street and called an autotaxi. The yellow vehicle slid to a halt and the door arced back. I entered and sat and told the soft mechanical voice, when prompted, that I would like to go to Our Lady of Entoto Hospital. The voice instructed me to hold my mitter to the screen. It scanned it to check my account, and then the door slid closed and the car merged onto Churchill Avenue.

I watched the great Ethiopian pageant outside my window. We were gliding through the ferenji quarter now, so there were storefronts of pale mannequins modeling the latest, wildest interpretations of Persian clothing, dresses of jade with puffed sleeves. We passed a gang of street boys with eaten shoes. A priest spoke to the air, answering the voices piped into his ear from his mobile. Two country women in Amhara dresses stepped around garbage. A stray dog wagged his tail and stared at a shop owner, ever optimistic. High compound walls glinted with broken glass. And then we were leaving the ferenji quarter, passing Ethiopia Airlines, the Ethiopia National Theatre, and Ethiopia Telecom. The car came to a stop and then turned left on Ras Mekonnen. We swung through the slingshot of Meskel Square, past a group of girls playing soccer in front of the Ethiopia Tourist Commission. At the sight of the girls, the kreen swelled and burned again. I put my hand over my solar plexus to try to soothe the pain and, with my other hand, clutched the handle of the door. The car asked me if I was well. I said, Yes, I just want to get to the hospital soon. The car clicked and sped up.

We sailed along Ras Mekonnen until it became Haile Gebre Selassie Road. The buildings thinned out. So did the crowds. We were approaching the eastern suburbs. The sweat from the kreen's most recent fit was cooling, and I wiped my hand on the soft bench seat.

The car reached Megenagna and swung around the whole roundabout, finally turning right to enter the hospital compound from the back. We slid to a stop. A pleasant tone sounded and the voice informed me that I had arrived at my destination. I got out of the car and stood in front of the hospital.

The kreen got excited. It knew we'd arrived.

How would I find Gabriel? I went to the front desk where an Indian woman sat. Immediately I realized that this was not a place where Ethiopians worked, except as custodians. This was an Indian contract hospital. My old prejudices flamed anew. The kreen ate them and swelled and became more powerful.

The clerk assessed me as I walked up. I becalmed myself and asked her where Gabriel might be.

You mean Dr. A. R. Gabriel? she said in a tone of reproach.

I felt ashamed and said yes.

Do you have an appointment? she asked.

No, I said. But he knows me. It's an emergency.

She looked at me—in fact she looked right at the kreen!—with the same pitying look I was used to from people on the street. She said, I think he's on the second floor in Obstetrics. I'll page him. Have a seat.

I did have a seat. But after she paged him, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and never went back.

On the second floor there was a directory on the wall with an arrow pointing to Obstetrics. I walked down many corridors, all white, all bright, all slippery. Then I came to another desk, where two Indian women sat. They seemed to be nurses. I couldn't go past them without asking, so I asked where Dr. A. R. Gabriel might be. The left one asked if I had an appointment. I repeated what I'd said downstairs. The right one got up and looked down the hallway and came back, muttering.

Kamala just paged him downstairs, she said to the left one. You suppose he's seeing patients right now?

The left one laughed. Let's see, it's four o'clock, she said. Time for Dr. Mehta's tea break.

They both laughed.

The kreen snapped at the inside of my chest with its fangs. I doubled over. The left one came around the desk and asked me if I needed a wheelchair. I said no. I said, It'll pass. I heard myself making mewing sounds like a kitten. She told me to breathe, and I did.

They helped me to have a seat and told me Dr. Gabriel would be with me shortly. I thanked them. Again I asked where the bathroom was. They pointed me toward it, around the corner. I walked to it but of course just kept walking.

I got to the end of the hallway and turned left. I passed a room where a lettered sign said
a. r. gabriel, k. l. mitra, s. j. andrews, m. mehta, physicians—family medicine.
But I saw through the window that the office was empty. An old Amhara in a white coat started down the hallway and I asked him if he knew where Dr. Gabriel was. He said he'd last seen him about to take tea in the gowning room and lifted his hand to point down another hallway. I rushed past him without saying thank you. I felt like there were worms writhing in my head and trying to come out of my eyes.

Like when I broke into my neighbor's flat, I began to see a few seconds into the future and float above the ground. I saw the scene forming in my mind's eye. Gabriel was in the gowning room. Gabriel always forgets to lock the door. I could hear heaving breaths in my head. I passed a nurse's station where there was a basket of scalpels, each individually wrapped, ready to use. I picked one up. The kreen flopped and snapped, striking at my skin from the inside. I pushed open the door and the universe opened its book of permissions because there stood Gabriel with his pants around his knees, thrusting into the backside of a naked woman, the both of them panting. I had found them, as I knew I would.

They separated, though a cord of slime still connected them. I went first for Meena, who had never felt the kreen, only love and adoration. I was moving in double time, above time, outside of time. I seized her jaw and pushed her head back against the cabinet to draw an arc under her throat and then, in a calligraphic stroke, down through her solar plexus all the way to her wet pubis. She slumped to the floor in a sitting position, hands at her throat, trying to keep the blood in. I then turned to Gabriel, who was frozen, staring at the kreen. He opened his mouth to cry out but my kreen wouldn't let him finish. I stuffed my fist into his mouth, which forced his neck back and drew the same line across his throat. He landed a blow on my face and pushed me away but then fell over sideways onto the floor.

Black soda flecks danced in my eyes, like they had when I hit the sand all those years ago. I couldn't hear anything. I'd gone deaf. I just watched them, Meena keeping one hand to her throat and trying to gather her feet underneath her, Gabriel trying to make his way across the floor to—what? Call the nurses? Cry for help? Blood had flooded their throats and they couldn't speak. After a minute, both of them slumped and stopped moving, just like that man in the checkered shirt.

But this time, I didn't feel better.

I'd been given permission. I'd thought to silence the kreen with these deaths once and for all. But it struck inside me again and again, with even more force. I grabbed hold of the counter to steady myself and the scalpel dropped to the floor, but I still couldn't hear it. I couldn't hear anything. The kreen was enormous now, a swelling monstrosity, eating me from the inside. It was not my friend. It was not my protector. It never had been.

And then, in one instant, I understood the path of my deliverance.

Oh, Yemaya.

You had guided me all along. And I had all the tools. I only needed to act.

I picked up the scalpel again and used a towel to wipe the hilt so that I could get a grip. I knelt on the floor between Gabriel and Meena. I closed my eyes and under the fluorescent lights I remembered the program I'd watched in the Sheraton all those years ago, how Inés Ramírez had survived, though here I was to deliver not a baby, but a demon.

I began a cut above my mons and punched far enough that I felt an itch deep in my viscera. Then I drew the knife across the skin. I was still in such an inspired state that I felt little pain. I knew you were protecting me. I had cut a hand's width when the wound bloomed like the meat of a grape escaping its skin; out surged flesh, white fat, and iridescent fascia. I put my finger inside the wound and then my whole hand, letting the blood lubricate my fingers, pushing and feeling by instinct, letting you guide me. I hit a band of muscle and went under it and found a rubbery wall under which the kreen writhed. I could feel its very contours. I spread the muscles up with one hand and, with the other, reached in to slice the final barrier.

Then I reached in and pulled the kreen out onto the floor. It looked like a red lizard, mouth open in a silent scream. Another bag of flesh followed it. A twisted cord connected me to it and I cut it.

So this is what it looked like, this demon spirit born of the sea snake I choked on all those years ago. I was free of it. It could haunt someone else, now, and I knew just who. I lifted the kreen off the floor and anchored it in the lap of Dr. Meena Mehta under the waterfall of her blood.

Now she would know what the kreen felt like.

I felt euphoric, but I also knew I couldn't waste time. My victory was incomplete. I could still be caught. You'd given me respite from the pain, for now, but I couldn't take it for granted. I started opening drawers. I found stacks of disposable gowns and tied one around my middle. It was very messy and inexact and the wound was bleeding down my legs. I began to feel glimpses of pain. In another drawer I found all kinds of medical supplies and stuffed them into my bag—boxes of nanobiotics and stem-cell strips and tubes of surgical glue. I used more disposable gowns to slough the blood off my arms and legs as best I could. There were street clothes on pegs near the door; I picked a big red T-shirt that fit over my makeshift dressings, and black denim jeans that were three sizes too big for me, and fastened them on with a brown belt.

I looked at the lovers one last time. They didn't move, and the kreen was clawing at Dr. Meena Mehta's skin and trying to wriggle into her. It wouldn't trouble me any longer.

I opened the door and looked both ways. There was no one near. This was an old deserted wing of the clinic. I had to act logically and carefully from this point on. I told myself I was on an adventure, pure and free, now, of the kreen and other adulterating influences. No one else would understand what I had done in the way you would. I had to leave the country.

I walked right out a back exit, into the sunlight, into an asphalt parking lot. My hearing began to return. I took off my mitter and dropped it into a sewer. My cash was still unbloodied, so I could use that to pay for transportation. I hailed a private car, which meant it lacked a security camera, and directed it to Autobus Terra in the west of the city, where there were buses leaving for every corner of Ethiopia every day. I could take the train, but buses were cheaper, privately owned, and less likely to be monitored.

The car asked for an initial deposit, so I threaded in a few bills and it started off, past crowds gathered at screens all around the city, watching the election returns come in. The PEP was winning by a landslide, somehow, though the Al Jazeera polls had predicted a wide margin of victory for ARAP. I knew it wasn't good. Violence was near.