Tales of the Out & the Gone (16 page)

“What you call it?”

“Anyscape. The 1st one. Molecular Anyscape. The Resoulocator— that was the improvement. T-Dis-Appear. Nicknames. Perfect Nigger. American Citizen. Ellisonic. Migration. I got a name for each step.”

“And now?” I rolled my eyes as he got completely out next to me, dissing the Dis report on Appearance.

“This is the next to last. I can disappear. Dis visibility, be unseen. But now I can be around anyway, perceived, felt, heard. I can be the music! Yeh. But now I got something even heavier.”

This dude is out—it ain’t no jive. He had actually done those things. And he never swore me to secrecy either. He just fixed it so I couldn’t remember nothing, except when I came back.

“Further out? The cloth refiner?” He said he needed to make the cloth fade more so he could get in and out of the bank w/o any hysteria. It took a few hundred thousand to get where he was technically.

“How come they don’t detect the money splitting?”

“Well, I ain’t been able to stabilize the cloth thing. Sometimes people see the money floating off. But I still get away.”

“How come they don’t say nothin’?”

“Well, it’s hard to explain, I guess. Floating money. They studying it.”

“Oh?”

“A few weeks more, I’ll rob all the mammy-jammas clean!”

“Wow!” I thought of a stream of exclamations, but I could only analyze it while hearing it. I needed to reflect, but your boy wouldn’t allow it.

“But now, B., dig this! I pushed the Anyscape into Rhythm Spectroscopic Transformation. And then I got it tuned to combine the Anywhereness and the Reappearance as music!”

“What? Brother, you know this is some deep technical stuff.”

“Aw, no it ain’t. It’s science. I can teach people how to make and use these.”

“What?”

“Now I added Rhythm Travel! You can disappear & reappear wherever and whenever that music played.”

“What?”

“So if you become “Black, Brown & Beige,” you can reappear anywhere and anytime that plays.”

“Go anywhere?”

“Yeh, like if I go into “Take this Hammer,” I can appear wherever that is, was, and will be sung.”

“Yeh, but be that song and you be on a plantation.”

“I know.” He was grinning. “I went to one.” He was staring me down, winking without his eye. “I seen some brothers and sisters digging a well. They were singing this and I begin to echo. A big hollow echo, a sorta blue shattering echo. The Bloods got to smilin because it made them feel good, and that’s the way they heard it anyway. But the overseers and plantation masters winced at that. They’d turn their heads sharply back and forth, looking behind them and at the slaves. Man, the stuff I seen!”

“You mean you been Rhythm Traveling already?”

“Yeh, I turned into some Sun Ra and hung out inside gravity. You probably heard of the Scatting Comet. Babs was into that.”

“Really? Man, so—”

“I know. Why? What I’m gonna do with it? Yeh, but I’m just explaining now. I got a lotta tests.”

“I guess so.”

“But I want you to try it.”

“Hey …”

“Hey, brother. Ain’t no danger. Just don’t pick a corny tune.”

1995
(Originally published in
Dark Matter,
2000)

SCIENCE & LIBERALISM
(A SHORT TALE)

“Like the time my man built this record player which took yr voice & played it back as music. But if you was lying, it would kill you.

“So we made him leave it at home when we went out.

“But then he pulled it out at the party.

“And everyone got outta there, one way or another.

“Naw, we wasn’t there. Now they looking for him on TV!”

“Yeh,” the other man said, “And you under arrest!”

1996

WHAT IS UNDUG WILL BE

The pretenders arrived after we’d found out they were pretenders, and the people killed them. Don’t blame me with Sarah Vaughan, when we used to walk up the hill pointing at her house. It’s the pretenders who make-believe her house ain’t there no more, just a Boys & Girls Club the off pretend is for the on. I see that funny-looking sun and can’t pretend it’s the real one. The real one is locked up. You see, God is the guardian of Good, so it don’t escape and get rid of bookkeeping. The missing front wheel—you can’t have infinity without two good wheels. That’s why the 1st Crazy Eddie was lame. See, the woman-headed lying nigger, so hip he could hang out in the desert forever waiting for a new horn, told the sister upstairs that the dude was really a human being. You know the riddle, hey diddle-diddle, niggers play second fiddle. Four legs, two legs, and three legs. But three legs is a lame. A FM who goes north becomes a MF. Frowny, he called himself, opening the supermarket of Dis. It was Hell, which was the future not coming. A two-legged man who never arrives. Then it was Hades. The past tense of wealth, which is insanity. Then dig, you knew where light went. You didn’t understand that when you said “out” and the lame said “out,” they was different outs. You wanted Bird to climb black fire wings wailing the blue raise of gone went. The square—I told him that was curtains—some snow juju greedy inside garbage that stunk with charm.

“To eat, you beat.” Remember the slogan? What about, “Don’t make me happy if you respect my intelligence.” Remember that? The limping crazy motherfucker told us he discovered yodeling in a labyrinth—who else ate doo-doo while rich, squeezed Africa’s titties for milk, stored in the refrigerator, waiting for Alan Ladd to kill him? And the withered bastard had a pen that shot poison swords. Remember Colonus? That’s literary for frozen nigger pops, chocolate blood sweet. And the baseball mind—oh diamond crystal salt—which is white, ain’t that right? He meant out as the city’s enemy. We is in on all the time, except when we go out, like on out, which is where the good go and come to and from—is you with us, jitterbug? But out mean darkness which is hip, but lame mean that as if nothing could exist, it could. But wouldn’t that be something? So now they come frowning and eating everything like the low cuss they call God. I told you a dog shit the church out of his backwardness. God is a broke short passing for in, but it’s only out as in the opposite of off. And darkness, for a lame, has nothing to commend it but his cannibal breath and lying tongue. If you eat doo-doo your breath stink, or so the Pope do sing. And if feces ain’t the past and turns into money, the cow jumps over the moon and never comes down, but frozen in the north, growing balls in the sky. And what is really ain’t and what ain’t is just a coat of paint and the devil own everything, and you see him on television, lame motherfucker.

That’s why when the rest of on got hip to off and offed him, dug dis/stance was the graveyard, an illusion of skulls being on a flag—with you they background anonymous and still, except for the wind. And you know the Negro played God and the skull made-believe it had Malcolm behind them in white, a frame for the cross, which ain’t even fishy—it’s dead. What I say? And the skull tells the rest of the niggers to lay flat and passive like they worked in the museum, a tombstone for ideas which was a couple of weeks ago.

That’s how long you been down, and I don’t mean hip. Except at the top of your lying body is your woman, the only sane person in the desert, and you holding her back, being an animal and refusing to leave the ground, so it’s a playground, now a desert, and it’s the whole meal. Don’t make me say it. You ain’t got no more juice, except north, where they too hip to lie completely. Like half a lie is better than a full deck. Gravity. They in an airplane ruling. Or in a laboratory. They ain’t Tarzan, and if they was, you warned them not to fall in the trap they set for you. So you joined Local 666 and they got you a gig in his movies as uncivilized. Dig that.

Pirates was not minerals, you found out (later), but they wanted to be. Brains was not edible (but they was) and spendable. So we changed the laws and slavery was actually a religion. Didn’t your father dig it first and set himself up as invisible except for
De Toad
(Dutch for “murder victim”)? Jesus! Yeh, him. With blond hair, and the deity Schwarzenegger, after you lost your warmth and came back looking like you had lost your skin to your limping kin.

Dude lost in a forest as a baby with a twin named Flawed Operator. Backwards, he wasn’t no baby either. With Wolf Mama, the white blues singer. Janis, you dig? When it was us, she could see out both sides of the world, the past and the future. Now she’s dead to confirm a lie, and a Dutch banker married her and sent her OD’d to paradise, which is an arrestable offense. Surround it. Don’t let it sweeten the world. Don’t let them be happy. Take the
p
out and give them a God that makes noise and flies, a woman that lives in Halloween with
Homo Locus Subsidere,
the bent-over junior Tarzan who bathes in toilets so he still think he bad. That mean bath. Remember Isabella, the transvestite Edgar Allan Poe of Middle America? Still pretending. That’s why they get killed when now comes.

Stop getting High. This is what the initials told you. A message. The calendar’s genius. Changed it. Julius and Augustus get in it, so with Paul that’s 13, which is really unlucky. That mean dark, not like us, but like they mind which says when he stuck Cane in his eyes, it was to improve the Armed Forces. Especially the semen, which was dry since he left the best of it in his mama, then denied you was his one-drop overseas sun. Called you Moon, the Bob Marley of Ireland. That’s where that mystery shit came in. Stonehenge. And the nigger nodding on the corner where you left him when you went to get fire, and where you dropped, everybody turned into new. Could sing like you. And dance. And was gone so long. Got so high, you forgot the you of I. And the time grew into a prison, the destination into a villain you looking for, and come was embarrassing if it was mentioned; go was half a vulgar job description.

I know the treble clef. From Thought, them Egyptians, your man who went further east. Your man. All them guys and dolls, I read about them niggers. Got outta here. When the band broke up and your arrival turned to stone and you couldn’t understand yourself and started arguing with your own eyes. Like you could see what never will exist.

I remember your father told you your mother got here first. And you went with this karate muh-fuh. The blue was cool. The idea that there could be light, you couldn’t dig. That was hard, since when we went up in the skyscraper and shit on the government, they thought they could turn to butter by circling our triple-hip outness, howling like they deserved to eat us.

But the Negro was run out of India. I saw a picture of him in the papers, blue. He went for it and made the lie a game, and the agony of the waiting room a country where money talked in consonants. A job. Remember when you was asking questions about that? Jesus! Come out the john, tricked by the Times. His accountant killed himself. His johnson betrayed him and told stories about his life that neglected to say he was impotent with fear. He was the 1st one at the tomb after the murder. Claimed the nigger had come back and told him that God wanted him at the Audubon, wanted him murdered to prove he could be the weatherman.

Got a job as a mystic in a candy factory, a private dick, hooked up with the scary quiet of delusion, a rock star, and made the big time before they hung him, ancient Mussolini style. Father Christmas was St. Nicholas of the normal. Like a white lie, which is like a circle around knowing. “Contain it,” speaks the Yellow Submarine, which is where your man went before they exposed him and put him on a cross to invent television and candy.

Stay out the mountains. That was a dumb statement. After the world broke up, there was a middle made of water. And your singing got large and you wanted to get in something and get away from your responsibilities as dead man—you was the Johnny Ray of being digested. You was Ahab later as an autobiography of your photograph, but disguised as Trane, high as the 1st father tripping out at the prison picnic.

Tender. The runner. The money. The soft of yourself before you was tricked. The pretender was your man, the goat lady, the ram of snot. Stay out the mountains. Here they come. Your boy was saying you a mulatto. Jacub, I knew him in his later years before he got to Chicago, when he was still building the mother ship, but he was so high it come out the father ship and could only fly to Rome. Your mama wasn’t in it. He couldn’t get no leg. That’s why he called the sisters “nun.” He wanted to be Elvis Presley once his man told him he could go north and start a newspaper for the little people. His gig had run out in other as jackleg—was this you or him? Oh, I see. When you took up singing, and he was copping your stuff as a shadow of the coming, which was cold when it went all the way out the way. The way they wanted out was north, not south.

That frown should have told you the city was not the town. They were in the future, like Dis, like Capital, like Hades when it was Havies. It’s heavy. It’s still Havies. Not you swimming with the woman. You the havie-not, the heavy knot on your past. The gas from your non-answerable prayer. An invisible invoice. You will not get paid.

Father Sex. You created Europeans from chains. You was Jacub before Hollywood. You created Hollywood because you didn’t want to talk. You made the woman feline so you could teach philosophy while you was asleep.

So you created yourself as the answer to what you shouldn’t have asked. It was perfect. Each drop of shit has something to say. Pray you ain’t being talked about by what you create as waste. Haste, like we say, but tie up your camel and quit playing jazz. Use a rubber.

You ain’t a pretender but sometimes I wonder why you pretend. You ain’t the only mother that went, but you is the only father they sent. Your destiny has become an inverted design. Your future is smaller than Babel. So you be quiet and eat the questions as answers to your religion.

They killed the pretenders, I’m telling you. The animals who thought the world was endless feces. The runs. The races. Told you death was real, an advertisement for insect mercy-killing. Meditate while you head for the closet. Blue glass like your changed flick when they ran you out of contemplation with straight hair, the 1st cowboy.