Chris was at the sliding-glass, holding a box of wine (the popular, efficient way to sell wine in South Africa) in each of his hands. Children burst from around and between his legs, hauling more boxes. Chris smiled brightly, showing a mouthful of teeth. His long brown hair was washed, I noticed, considerably awed, but still wilder than usual. As usual were the paint-stained jeans, the denim-weave only barely hanging together anymore, and his ubiquitous frayed gray wool sweater.
“What are you eating?” he demanded of me, the children washing back out through him on some other errand, a laughing, smooth brown tide flowing around a centrice.
“Chips and makuenea,” I admitted, a little more defensively I meant to.
Mocking disappointment, Chris shook his head. “Why is it everything you eat is the same color?”
“Leave me alone,” I told him. “You only see me in camp; I eat well enough at home.”
He shrugged and smiled again, really too excited to keep pretending to pursue it. “Help me with these,” he said.
We loaded his wine onto card tables and, one after the other, let out and circumcised the rubberized serving mechanisms; each squirted forth a surprised bit of different-colored stuff.
Soon the child-tide washed back in, this time carrying bread.
I smiled at Chris.
“Feeding,” he said, smiling back with all those teeth again – not evilly, not insincerely, but maybe some of both.
Soon darkness came to Africa. The whites followed it closely, as hyena do. First came the various British, followed by the “white Basotho,” then, somewhat more warily, the Fins and Danes and Germans and the rest until the room was full; the wine was being imbibed and, to my surprise, hunks of the bread were being torn away and devoured. The gathering gradually grew warm, electric. I sat gazing out from behind my little observation desk, my small money-box and a pile of red, stick-on dots set out before me, the art and everything else everywhere else. Being comparatively dim – red dwarf star – no one mistook me for the artist, the centrice shining unmistakably brightly: the glowing eye of a hurricane: an inscrutable smile above a relaxed frame: a propped right arm, wine glass held aloft meditatively, swaying amidst the whirling atmosphere at it seethed with ever-increasing heat.
I glimpsed him (the babe striding the blast) there flitting above the conflagration, recoiling every time I heard the deafening sound of the white, actually pink people scraping into him, shuddering and spinning away devastated, their chalky wings damaged and smoldering. Purposely colliding, one female the color of a split peach, said to him: “The beauty you call Notes, Chris: is it meant to convey our lack of individuality within a civil structure?” Chris offered his smile – hot, green eyes flashing – and sheepishly admitted, “Yes, that’s ... exactly what I meant,” bursting the woman into flames. Immediately after a flushed male angled inside, confiding: “I realize, Chris, that Notes is a message piece; but is it that God has a purpose for each of us, will provide, somewhere, a place for us?” The Artist beamed, wine glass high, and repeated breathlessly, “Yes, that’s … exactly what it means.”
And on and on the hurricane burned, coiling upward and outward brightly, weakening the center that would eventually transpire. Outside the sliding glass, out in the dark land, many sets of ancient, inscrutable eyes watched with bored interest the ceremonial burning of the hairy, pink monkeys. Me, the puzzled midwife just inside the door – I could only just keep up, tagging the burning monkeys’ purchased pieces of the host with my tiny red dots and taking their other-peoples’ money with glee. At the end everything had a dot; every burnt offering spun out the glass door on barely aloft flaming wings.
Finally, Chris flickered and floated from center, settling next to me.
“I’m drunk,” he said, his smile now goofy but as uncontrollable as a severe wound.
“So am I.” I held my breath, suddenly frightened of something. “...What happened?”
“How much?” he wanted to know, ignoring my vague question.
“... There’s nearly three thousand Rand here.”
Chris stared, then asked: “Is there still wine?”
We weaved through ashes toward the bank of boxes to check the red and the white. We urged the utters to provide one last time, leaving us with an alchemical matrix in our glasses, a swirling concoction of healthy flush. Lumps of hardened bread lay crushed on and about the table, or below trampled in with the ashes. Disassembled, there seemed more of it than when it had been whole, especially strange since I had seen so much of it being eaten.
“Soon I fly back home,” he chanted.
“... Are you frightened?” I asked, not watching him directly, still unable to breathe well; an air-hunger gnawed in my blood.
He stared at me for a moment, stared through me, then he whispered: “I won’t submit, though. I may fly back, but I won’t ... fall in.”
I grimaced, unsure how it could work. “... What would you do there then?”
“… Go back to school,” he said tentatively, and then whispered it a second time: “Go back to school…”.
I sunk slowly, sipping my wine-brew, gazing away. “Chris ... you remember it there. Remember? You can’t just ... be like you can here. And that in itself’ll lead you into their queue.”
“No,” he said emphatically, and the word was a talisman against my weakness spreading.
I looked at him and felt myself needing to believe, too. We were alive at that moment; we had been alive since we got there, or at least since we had got there and purged America’s tranquilizers from our systems. Cooling magics were surging through us, making us seem self-resurrectable. … But would it be a new immunity? Could it last back there, back in that … dying place? Resurrection is nothing without regeneration; who wants to be a walking corpse? For me, I knew, my own regeneration depended on Chris, who would go before me. If he returned and dropped away, then I would return to also become a living corpse – “dead man in life,” as Lawrence said. If he could get lost then I could be easily bent, twisted, congealed inside, a blackened shell in short order; empty inside napalm-flesh walking but nuclei shriveled; a surround of force of freezing loneliness; a blistering toxicity of ineluctable blackness. If Chris with his powers proved un-ever-lasting then I would be burned hollow in no time – like the pink monkey I feared waiting just behind the mirror every time I looked.
But “No,” he had said, and I will make my living remembering.
