In Darkness (34 page)

Strangely, although his fury and disappointment had left him along with the feelings of cold and starvation, although he seemed to have left the sensations of the flesh behind him, he felt drawn to that husk of a body below. He felt that he would like to drift down again, to sink into it, to comfort it. It seemed a sad and lonely thing, an empty vessel that he ought to fill. He strained toward it, yet nothing happened.

Then it was as if something caught him, some updraft like those thermals that suspend birds in the sky, and he was pulled upward.

His body faded below, and then he was inside Fort de Joux, looking at the stone from inside, and for just an impossibly small iota of time he knew what it was to
be
stone, to breathe and flow so slowly that a century passed in a heartbeat. Then he was in the light again, drifting through the iron bars of the cells above, a rusty taste in his mouth, before bursting through the roof and lofting his being into the alpine air.

He gazed down at the castle that had held him, so small now, an eyrie perched in the mountains. Below lay a valley which began as a rocky ravine, angled down through pine trees, and ended as soft green pasture. The road to the prison twisted and turned through it. He smiled, for it was the essential quality of a valley that it must have an issue, that it must come to an end and spill out into fertile lowlands. A valley, he reflected, was an escapable thing by its very definition. It was difficult to find your way out of a cave. But a valley, ah, a valley. You could walk out of a valley, out of the dark place, away from the awful sharp towering of the mountains, and into the world.

As Toussaint floated, a light rain began to fall. Droplets passed through him, became, for brief instants, one with him. He felt the freshness and the eternality of the water, and when he saw the white rivulets of the waterfall, tumbling from the cliff to his east, he understood that all water was the same, how no drop was different from any other.

He had no body, so he did not feel joy precisely – he
was
joy, just as he was water, and stone. He was the air and the air was free and that was joy. He managed by an inflection of his thought to float down, over the prison, toward the grassy lowlands. He was above the birds; a crow circled, cawing, underneath him. The sun was high and bright in the sky; the trees and grass yearned toward it.

Toussaint understood that he was dead. He did. But he understood, too, that they couldn’t hold him anymore; they couldn’t keep him in that place where there was no light. He was finally and completely free.

No . . .

No . . .

No, because then he was pulled again. He was no longer flying, but being carried by something invisible yet powerful. He rose up, up, up. The valley became smaller and smaller, until it wasn’t a valley, but a single cleft in a stone, filled with moss. Then he was in a vast whiteness, like a thick fog.

He rose through it, broke through it into a clean blue sky, and the clouds he had come through were a great white carpet below him, stretching all the way to the horizon, where he could see stars. Stars – in the daytime!

With a rush, the clouds began to roll beneath him; the sun above turned through the sky. There was no precise sensation of speed; he had no skin to register the pressure of air, no nose and no throat to feel the rushing push of the wind as he moved, but he knew that he was going very fast, just as he knew he was traveling around the world.

I’m going home
, he thought.

He broke through the clouds again and saw the green island laid out underneath, vivid against the blue of the sea. It was dusk – he saw the sun setting over the water to the west, saw lights glowing from the land, so many lights.

Toussaint descended with growing wonder, staring down at the strange country he was falling into, seeing the sprawling cities that had swallowed the forest, the great buildings that had replaced the plantations. A colossal machine with the wings of a bird flew underneath him with a roar, turning him in the wake of its eddies. He fell past it – or fell through it, perhaps.

The cities were too big; it was impossible. So many people could not live in one city! They would go mad; it was a kind of prison. Thousands and thousands of lights glowed in the gathering dark, and as he accelerated through the air he saw that each light was not a home, as he had thought, but only one of many windows in each building. The lights burned everywhere; the people in the Haiti below him seemed unable to bear darkness. Even the flying machine, banking as it approached the ground, flickered with red and white lights. Between the cities, even, stretched tendrils of light, as if the cities themselves required connection, required touch, like people, and so were putting out filaments of bright engagement, as if they had been turned, by the habitation of so many people, into living beings themselves.

All this, he noticed in a heartbeat. Then he was closer, and he saw that this was a broken land. It had seemed so beautiful from above, sparkly and many-pointed with light, but now he saw that most of the buildings were collapsed or collapsing, and everywhere was rubble. Trees and walls lay flat on the ground, flying machines circled, as if fascinated by the damage.

What happened to it?
he thought.
What?

As he neared the tops of the buildings, the ruination became even more clear – he could see where people had erected villages of tents amongst the debris of the city. From its location on the island he could tell that it was Port-au-Prince, but it was not the Port-au-Prince he knew. It sprawled, it contained multitudes – and it was shattered.

And yet . . .

And yet . . .

And yet, rushing through the air, Toussaint saw black people everywhere, walking the streets, talking, sitting in groups around fires. He saw only a handful of whites, and he understood that this great city – this immensity of lights – was a city of blacks, and he was shown that in this shining future his people were free.

A roof rose quickly to meet him. It belonged to a great square building with thousands of windows, many of which had shattered as the building had slumped to the ground, as if too exhausted to remain standing. He tried to cushion his fall; the hard plane of the roof was coming faster, faster, faster, and then . . .

Then he was inside dense material – it wasn’t stone because he couldn’t feel it living – and there was twisted metal, too, and glass. He was inside this nightmare only briefly before he landed with a crashing impact.

He waited, but nothing changed.

His journey had ended; his exodus was over.

He
had
returned.

But to where?

He was in a small place, he sensed, something like his cell in the French prison.

He was aware of someone whimpering in the dark, and he was not at all sure that it wasn’t himself.

He was inside the broken building, he knew that. But that was all he knew.

He put his hand in front of his face. He could see nothing. He was stunned by the heft and weight of his arm, by the familiar conspiracy of muscle and tendon and joint that raised his hand before him. He ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth, felt the foreign hardness of the tooth firmly planted in his gum, the one the gun shell had knocked out.

My tooth grew back?

He opened his mouth to scream, and that was when the pain struck him: the sensation was of a brick slamming down onto his leg, of a fire in his arm. He probed with his fingers and felt the stone-like material that trapped him. He was in a body once again, though not his own, apparently.

He was a prisoner once again.

He was trapped in an impenetrable ruin, with something heavy bearing down on his leg. He didn’t know what had happened to this world, but he could see that it would never be the same again. He was not in a valley, he realized with horror; he had never been in a valley.

He was in a cave, and there was no way out.

Always

We are in the darkness.

We are always in the darkness.

We understand what Boukman said in Bois Caiman; we understand it for the first time. Behind the mountain is another mountain; behind the fire is another fire; behind all of this is another thing, another mass, and it does not correspond to the contours of this world; it is everything that is here in the world, but it is so much more, too.

We have a mouth – we can feel it in our face, an opening into us that can let the spirit out – but when we use it, when we speak, there is no one to listen. The voices that come to us, drifting through the darkness beyond our prison, they might as well be the voices of the dead.

Far beyond our walls, far beyond the bounds that hold us, there are people who want to help. There are always people who want to help, but they are too far away, and we are too silent. Though we have control of our own body, can animate our limbs to touch the boundaries of our reality, we are powerless to break through our reality, powerless to go out into the light, where the masters live.

We are a slave.

We are a slave to this space, to the inevitable decay of trapped things. We can feed ourselves, but there is no food; we can work with our hands and with our minds, but there is nothing on which to work; we have eyes, but there is nothing to see.

There is no future and no past.

We are in the darkness.

We are one.

Now

I have an idea.

There’s nothing else I can do, so this is my only idea.

It’s the last thing left.

I remember how Manman said that back in the day, instead of offering sweets, they used to kill two chickens for the Marassa and give the lwa the blood, proper old school. I can feel the blood from my arm, thick and kind of trickling.

I figure it’s worth a try.

I don’t know how to make the veve of Marassa. Even if I did, it’s too dark and I don’t have shit to write with. But I put my fingers in my wound and I bite a scream that wants to come out. I take some blood and I smear it on the rubble in front of me.

My voice, it’s rough and dry; it’s like a cog on a bike that hasn’t been oiled. But I sing as best I can:

— Marassa Simbi,

Mwen engage dans pays-a,

Marassa Guinin, Marassa la Côte,

Mwen engage dans pays-a!

I sing it over and over, even after I think my voice will dry up altogether, refuse to move anymore, like cogs do sometimes. It doesn’t.

But nothing happens, either.

Some time passes, and nothing continues to happen.

I realize that I’m ready now, that all my options are gone. I’m waiting for the end – or we are, I should say. It seems there’s someone else here, someone older, but someone I know. Someone I’ve been, or who has been me. Someone from my dreams. I know that doesn’t make sense, but I’m dying; I don’t have to make sense.

I’ve told you my story now, so perhaps you can leave me in peace.

I wonder if maybe I should have taken that half of the necklace from Manman and put it with mine. I wonder if I should have forgiven her. No, that’s a lie. I know I should have forgiven her. She’s my manman, and I sent her away full of shame and guilt. For all I know she’s dead now, and I’ll never be able to say sorry.

I close my eyes, try to picture my manman’s face. It’s not happening. I manage to remember an eyebrow, a certain smile. But the image of her is like a TV screen where the aerial has gone crazy. Not only have I lost her in the darkness, but I’ve also lost the memory of her. She’s destroyed completely; I got nothing left but an eyebrow and a smile, some things she said, the memory of the warmth of her hug.

She’s gone, and I’ll never see her again, not even in my mind, cos my mind is a dark place and images get lost in it, distorted.

I say it to myself over and over, I’ll never see her again. But not with my mouth cos my mouth is too dry, with my mind only.

I begin to cry.

I wonder, if I die, and she’s dead, will I see her then? Will I see Marguerite, too, and Papa?

And I answer myself, no. There’s nothing after death.

I know cos I’ve been in the darkness all this time, which is as close to death as you can get, and I’ve seen no moun, apart from when I was Toussaint and I saw all those people of his – Boukman and Isaac and Brandicourt. But that wasn’t real;  that was my mind breaking, like my leg, crushed by concrete and darkness.

I keep my eyes closed.

I begin to die.

There’s a ripping, tearing noise, very loud and close. I think, this is maybe the end, maybe death is finally come. I’m glad. My arm and my back hurt, my mouth is again as large as the world, and there’s someone here in the darkness I need to meet, who I need to be one with.

Through the pain of my thirsty mouth I say:

— Thank you.

Then there are anpil shouts and screams. I think some of them are in English, but most are Kreyòl. At least one sounds like a woman’s voice. I wonder if this is the land under the sea where the dead go, and if I’m gonna meet my sister there.