William Lohier

Because the knock didn’t sound like Sam’s or a neighbor’s or even a Jehovah’s witness. Besides, on the 21st floor we didn’t get many stray knockers to begin with. I ignored it at first but they started knocking so loud I thought they might break down the door so I threw the rest of my shit in a duffel and kissed grandmama bye ‘cause I knew the cops wouldn’t hurt her.

How’d you know it was the cops? Barry’s voice emanates from above the stove where a pot bubbles and spits. And how’d you know they wouldn’t hurt her.

People don’t knock unless they want something, and they don’t bang like that unless they’re willing to take something they know you don’t want to give. Anyone who’s willing to take like that is a cop, and I wouldn’t put it past them to hurt an old lady, but what was I gonna do, drag her through the mirror with me into this purgatory shit?

You should facetime her. You ain’t talked to her since you moved in right? He ladles lentils into two gleaming white bowls.

Barry’s chuckle is deep and chocolate rich. Yeah, he says, call her after lunch.

The stew is delicious. Full bodied and laden with spice, it touches a simmering heat into the back of my throat and we shovel spoonfuls into our bodies. I found the recipe in grandma’s book of voodoo spells and made it so often when I first got here that even Barry knows it by heart. The spoon sways dangerously and clatters against the bowl. Light spills through my hands. Things are starting to slip through me, out of me, like my entire body is exhaling itself. It begins to drizzle and leaves careen from the dying orange tree in the corner to rest like tiny canoes on the floor.

Brrrrrrrring! cuts through the rain. It’s another scam call. They say I’ve won a trip to an island resort and promise chaise lounges and sunset margaritas. I quiet and sit on the banks of an anger that expands and contracts like an ocean, then I hang up the phone.

These goddamn scammers, Barry’s voice rumbles. It’s a rote response. The scam callers here are just as unreal as we are. The day I moved in I talked Shawn’s ear off with follow-up questions about exclusive suites and all-you-can-eat buffets. I asked if he’d ever been on a cruise and he started to scream. Another time I asked Tenille if she could help me find the square root of two and she began to shoot off decimals at an inhuman pace.

The rain comes down in sheets of radio static. I dump the bowl in the sink. The static rain pours in through my ears and jumbles up my mind and tremors through my hands. I slap them together until my palms sting and the outlines of everything blur like the world has been draped in wool. I look through the pantry for something with real weight to ground me and heave our flour sack from the floor. The heft presses into my hands then through them and a poof of whiteness thickens the air. Laughing tearfully, I pour the rest across the gleaming linoleum and scoop handfuls of starchy whiteness down my throat until I writhe and choke.

Barry is sweeping up the mess when I come to. He’s a good roommate. He was already transparent when I moved in and I’m not quite sure if his body is still human-shaped or if it’s looser somehow, more diffuse, like he’s spilled across his outline into an informal lightness. His theory is some abstract bullshit like he’s attached to nothing so he can be everything. He keeps the apartment very clean.

The ceiling shakes and the room rumbles with bass. Someone’s having a party upstairs.

You alright? Barry’s voice echoes. I shudder and vomit a starchy mess across the floor. Barry sighs.

Thanks man, I mumble. In the bathroom I hold my hands under the faucet and let water trickle through them. The counter is cluttered with old skincare. It’s all leftover PR from Barry’s influencer days. I wash off my face and chest and brush my teeth and moisturize.

Our bathroom has no windows. It has no doors either, like every other room in the apartment. The light is grainy and horrific no matter the time of day and mirrors stretch across all four walls into staircases and corridors of mise en abyme. It’s the one room Barry won’t clean. When I tried to kill myself for the first time I saw my body flailing and kicking the way I’d seen it done in movies and the dark shame that rose in me was so heavy it turned my limbs to lead. I hung for the rest of the night thinking I was dead. Barry screamed when he found me in the morning. I had left a window open and the apartment was frigid. He was almost completely disappeared by then, more transparent than our clouded breath. By the time he got me down we were both crying and snow fell a thick and heavy white indistinguishable from the luminous sky.

In the afternoon I facetime my grandmother. My face flushes away to reveal a ceiling fan spinning vigorously. Grandma, I can’t see your face, I tell her. I can see you, I can see you, she says. Her face hovers like an enormous dark saucer on the screen, blotting out the fan. Then it disappears. A sigh crackles through. The connection is slow. I look at myself in the corner of the screen. You gain weight! Her joyous voice is hoarse and weathered with years of good use. I nod and smile. Thank you! I say, with equal enthusiasm. I gain weight too, she says. It looks good on you, I reply. The food is so good I am getting fat, she says. That’s good, I say, I made your lentil stew today. I miss you. The image judders and suddenly her face returns like a moon, puffy and deeply grooved. It’s so cold in this country, she says, always winter. I nod solemnly and mime shivering in an arctic wind.

I’m well. The rain whips up and begins to batter. Yourself?

I am good, she says. Are you in your father’s house? He come to visit me. Silence crackles. But the people here are racist, she says decisively, and moves her face from the camera. I hear her spit.

What did they do? I ask. Her face rises and balloons past the edges of the screen. I know they are racists, she says. How are you?

I am in my cage. She sighs. Are you working hard?

I’m trying to teach myself how to dance! I rise and demonstrate.

I danced when I was a kid. You taught me how to dance for church.

My childhood was too short. I want to go home. We freeze for a moment. The call chews up her words and spits them out.

I want to go home so bad I can taste it. The ceiling fan whirs.

Oh yeah. How are you? I just wake up and I am so angry. She chuckles.

You should rest. Is your bed comfortable?

I feel like I forgot how my body is supposed to feel.

Nonononono. She frowns. You, your body is for now cherie. Pas pou lougarou. I send my sons to good schools. I send myself to this cold country.

Are you watching the trial? she looks away, eyes vaguely reflecting a TV glow.

She unleashes a great bellow, ugly and full throated, and her face folds in on itself. She moans and rocks back and forth. The image shudders and lags.

Then there is stillness and her face clears into a squinting moon.

I wonder what she sees. I feel like everything I am is an abstraction for the consumption of others. It is time to go, she says and the screen goes dark. From the well-deep blackness I stare at a face staring up at me. The drizzle beyond the window breaks into mist.

She was right though, Barry laughs. You really can’t dance.

Neither can she, I snap. The ceiling snaps into a listening silence. When I was little she used to take my feet and put them on hers and when I was too old for that we would watch Dancing with the Stars and shake and let our bodies move however they felt. But that was a long time ago. After she moved in with us she was depressed all the time and all she did was sit and sigh and I could see the life slipping out of her into that ugly brown chair. I spent hours watching her stare out into space like she wasn’t the one who taught me that life moves as a body and the one who crossed an ocean just to follow a fucking dream.

Barry lifts a water-heavy pot onto the stove and the burners cast weird blue ghosts across the kitchen walls that flicker and shift and moan with weariness and sorrow.

I felt like I was the only one who could help her. Her husband was dead. There was no one else she could talk to about what she was going through. I could help with the voices she would hear or calm her down if she got too paranoid, but when she told me she was going to kill herself I didn’t know what to do. She just broke down one day and said she was ready to die. She was a trained nurse and said she knew which pills to take and how many and I was crying and begging her not to but she was too wrapped up in her own suffering to care.

So that night, after everyone was asleep I crept into the bathroom and stood in the dark working up the courage to grab the pills and flush them down the toilet and when I stood up on the counter to open the medicine cabinet I tumbled headfirst into glowing sand. It was a beach, just water and space and patterns in the sand. I didn’t even know the sky could hold so many stars. I stayed there all night, looking up at them, and listened to the waves crash against the shore.

The pot is boiling over. I stand to lower the heat and pour rice into the seething water and think of all the hateful things I’ve ever said to my parents, despite my childhood and their love and years of schooling and lessons that taught me less than grainy videos of police shootings. The best part of living here is that there are no taxes. I don’t pay rent every month or a phone or electricity bill and water still comes when I turn on the faucet and the lights are never cut out and in the pantry and freezer there is always enough.

I lie on the floor and stare up at the orange tree. The scattered marcescence wavers like shrouds. My body feels distant from itself and in the space between resides all the jumbled emptiness that I am, mirrored, dissolving into patterns of jabbered nonsense. I imagine a sky thrumming with rain and a clock that circles through hours and days until my mind is hopelessly far from meaning, drifting across an impossible ocean. Here, in the darkness, in endless water and pounding rain, there is nothing to focus on but breath.

Long gauzy breaths that flutter like black banners in the wind.

In out like a ship rocking gently on a dark sea

The rhythmic thirds of a chant trouble the exhale. I force myself to the window with growing annoyance. The night that drips like watercolor. Outside, stories below, the road is crowded with a dark sea of heads punctuated with signs growing soggy in the downpour. One word after another begins to take shape in the mindless droll. End… All… Hate… cycled and recycled ad infinitum. I listen, feeling glum, and look for meaning in the rain swirling through the heavy black sky. the words grow closer until they jumble together entirely and fade into the sound of the night. I check Twitter. I shut the window. This is beyond hate. I fight the urge to close my eyes to the spectacle and watch as the crowd scatters and count each crack! that resounds through the patter of rain. A body falls in the street. My body is that body. Sometimes it lies in the street for hours in broad daylight. Floodlights pierce the window, so bright they are blinding. I reach deep inside myself to a place, wild with writhing aliveness, where at night the scattered parts of me consolidate and shift. I finger the jagged edges, the broken and singing pieces of me that are my hate, knotted and smoldering like the tangled pipes of a furnace.

I suck my teeth and nurse my singed fingers. The stovetop flickers in blue tongues speaking a burning incoherence that would consume everything. A smoldering house. I shiver. In the bathroom, the mirrored walls are alive with light from elsewhere. I see myself reflected hundred, thousand, a river of minds bedded with sorrow. I stagger and almost fall and the mass ripples with aliveness. I remind myself we are reflections of each other, brought alive by wheels of spinning light. I turn to myself and we step towards each other. I look into tired wet eyes and breath brushes my lips. I lift my arms. The worn and glittering array readies itself for embrace. CRACK! I see myself sharded and removed from context, an arm here, a roll of fat. I run hands through hair. CRACK! and I can’t recognize my body as a body, there is only shape and color. Then, with a sigh, the mirror shatters and crumbles into dust and I can’t see my body at all.

Spring washes over me all at once. I know it is spring because the air smells new and I hear crashing waves nearby. I breathe it in, a new season, and sneeze, and follow the wind to the shore.

Small fires dot the beach and laughter pervades. People gather and flicker in the firelight and their voices spar and sing with the ocean. I walk from trees whose leaves and branches cut facets across the sky. The sand gives beneath my feet like ghostly clouds before wide currents of air. They glimmer and drift and a sun drops like a molten coin below the horizon. There is a canoe at the shore, pointed lovingly to face the sea. I walk toward it through the celebration.

A pinwheel crafted of glossy dark leaves catches wind and spins. Across the beach lovers massage each other’s swollen calves. Farther down, people are dancing.

On the horizon, ships wander until their ghostly outlines are swallowed by the distance.

Someone hands us plates heaped with food. We swallow and laugh and cough through the spice.

People gather for the departure. The strength of dozens of arms pushes the canoe through the sand. Voices call and the ocean responds and grasps us with the tenderness of water. It is so dark I cannot distinguish between water, canoe, and persons, and sky. I feel water lapping at my shins and hands rough and warm against my back. I grasp her hands as the canoe begins to glide faster than my legs can push through deepening sea. Words seem pitiful and inadequate in the face of so much darkness and life.

Above, nearly indistinguishable from the night, people are flying. Their great beating wings leave scattered and ephemeral imprints on the water and the sand.

William Lohier

William Lohier

Fiction

Summer 2021

Jumbo Mumbo