The Meq (27 page)

“Yes, I can see Carolina,” he said. “She is standing. She is all right, but confused, a little dazed, I think. But . . . but . . .” He was straining forward in his saddle, looking left and right, frantically. “I can’t see Star, Z. I can’t see Star!”

Li and I pushed forward, finally making it to Carolina, who had lost her robe, turban, and veil. She was shaken, but coming to her senses. People speaking in Arabic were dusting her off and feeling her limbs, making sure nothing was broken.

“I’m fine. Thank you. Enough of that, thank you,” she was telling them. Just then, she saw Li. “Find Star,” she yelled, “find Star, Li!”

I got to her a moment later. “Are you all right?” I had almost to yell myself.

She reached out for my hand. “Yes, yes, I’m fine, just scared. Where’s Solomon?”

“He’s all right. He’s stuck back on his camel.”

“Good,” she said. “Let’s find Star, Z.”

The camels had been secured and the panic of the crowd had dissipated. Shouts passed back and forth between our guide and two other men about who was to blame. Up ahead, there was a circle of people gathered around a doorway. Li was on the outside of the ring, waving to us. We ran toward him. He nodded at the circle and Carolina pulled at people’s arms and shoulders, yelling, “Out of the way!”

In the middle of the circle, sitting on the stoop of the doorway, Ciela was holding a trembling child, wearing a robe, turban, and veil with her head buried in Ciela’s chest.

“Is she all right?” Carolina asked in a kind of strained whisper.

Ciela nodded, but didn’t speak. She held the child close, rocking back and forth, and softly saying, “Shh, shh.”

We stood in silence, catching our breath, which was difficult. Dust was everywhere, kicked up during the melee, and the camel boys were still trying to calm the animals. I looked back for Solomon, and just as I saw his familiar white head above the crowd, I caught sight of something else familiar, a movement between the camels, but I couldn’t pinpoint it. Then Solomon broke through and took charge.

“Is everyone in one piece?” he asked Carolina.

“Yes, thank God,” she said. “We could have been thrown anywhere.”

“Is Star unhurt?” He bent down and patted the child, who still clung to Ciela for dear life. “Star, honey,” he said in his softest voice, “are you all right?”

She nodded, but kept her face pressed against Ciela’s chest. Solomon stood up and looked around angrily for our guide, who had disappeared. “I shall sue them for zis,” he said, then he helped Ciela to her feet. He and Carolina put their arms around her. “Come,” he said, “if everyone is up to it, we go ride the Ferris Wheel. I guarantee in five minutes, Star will forget zis ever happened.”

After several wrong turns, we eventually found our way out of Jerusalem and through the Japanese Gardens, just in time to make our prearranged ride on the Ferris Wheel. We were still flustered as we approached it. I could barely comprehend the sheer size of it. It was over two hundred and sixty feet high, had thirty-six cars that were almost thirty feet long and over twelve feet wide, an axle one hundred and forty feet above ground, and steel rods extending in pairs to the rim all around. To me, it looked like a giant, spinning spiderweb.

We walked up the platform and the doors to our car were opened. There were glass walls on all sides so the entire fairgrounds could be observed as the wheel turned in its great orbit.

After all the cars were loaded, the ride consisted of four revolutions. On our first revolution, we all stood in silence and gazed down on the Fair and Forest Park from a new perspective. At the top of the arc of our second revolution, Carolina, who had been standing next to Ciela, leaned over to kiss Star, pulling the veil away.

She jumped back, spinning and hitting her back against the glass wall. “That’s not Star!” she shrieked.

Ciela tore off the turban of the girl she was holding and Solomon looked at Carolina, turning as white as his beard. “What did you say?” he asked.

My own throat went dry and I felt the old feeling of the net descending. We all looked at the child, who was staring back at us blankly. She was blond and female, but clearly not Star.

I went to the glass wall that looked out over where we’d been, over Jerusalem. Two hundred and sixty feet below me and boarding the small train that ran through the Fair, with Star frozen against him, paralyzed in fear, was the Fleur-du-Mal. He wore the same robe as one of the camel boys, but had taken off the turban. I could barely see the green ribbon at the back of his head. He turned and looked up at the Ferris Wheel and grinned. Even from that distance, his teeth were a brilliant white.

Solomon saw where I was staring and looked down. He found her immediately. He ran to the glass, pounding his fists on it, trying to break it, and screaming, “No! No! Zis cannot be!”

The big wheel wouldn’t turn fast enough for him. He kept pounding and screaming as we made our descent. What was probably two minutes seemed like two hours. Before we got to the platform, he turned bright red and began to cough violently. Li and I tried to reach for him, but he slid down the glass wall and sprawled on the floor. He went into a seizure and his chest heaved in spasms. Carolina knelt down and loosened his shirt, but he started to lose color and his breathing stopped completely.

Finally, we got to the bottom of the arc and Li rushed out onto the platform to find water. I looked around at the crowd and asked if there was a doctor among them. There wasn’t. Carolina shouted out that he’d started breathing again, but just barely. Then, two of the Jefferson Guard appeared and called to a third to find a stretcher. They were policing the Fair and I wondered for a moment if I should mention Star. Carolina must have thought the same thing, because she looked out at me, then quickly shook her head.

Li came back at the same time as the stretcher arrived. He sprinkled water on Solomon’s face as we lifted him onto the stretcher and into the shade of the Falstaff Inn, a hundred yards away. His breathing was shallow and uneven and he drifted in and out of consciousness. Carolina decided we should get him home as soon as possible and have her doctor meet us there. A carriage was located and we were transported through the main entrance, with an escort of ringing bells to clear the way, and on to Carolina’s, where she had him moved upstairs to the carriage house. She opened the windows wide on all sides and made sure there was a breeze getting to her sofa, where Solomon lay on his back. She propped his head up and, when he was conscious, tried to help him sip water. She didn’t mention Star once, nor did anyone else. I looked at her eyes. They were as glassy as if she had taken strychnine. She was in shock, but somehow managing to go on, to function.

Time passed and the doctor failed to arrive as he was supposed to. The room was hot and the air was thick with the sweet smell of honeysuckle. Ciela was becoming more and more frantic and overwhelmed with worry and finally snapped, running down the stairs and crying uncontrollably. Li sat in the corner of the room, as always, but once I saw his hands tremble slightly. I walked out onto the balcony and, for some reason, screamed as loudly as I could at the setting sun. It was my kind that had done this. It was my kind that was poisoning the lives of the two people I loved the most. It was not just the Fleur-du-Mal who was an “aberration.” We, the Meq, were all an aberration, a mistake, a flaw that would eventually act as a virus and destroy the whole grain, the “natural” beauty, the way things should have been without us, alive and undisturbed.

We waited. Each of us sat and waited. Darkness fell above and below and Carolina lit candles inside. The doctor never came.

Solomon awoke around midnight, just enough to open his eyes and call for me. I sat on the floor next to him.

“Zianno, come close now,” he said. I leaned over so that his voice was in my ear. “On my way through the Milky Way, I will leave a trail. Will you be able to find it, Zianno?”

“I couldn’t miss it. You are an excellent pathfinder, old friend.”

“Then I shall do it,” he said and took a quick, shallow breath. “Yes . . . that is it, Z . . . zis is good . . . zis is good business.”

We shut his eyes for him. He simply left. I looked at Carolina and she was tearless. Sad, broken, and tearless. Li got up slowly, walked out of the door and down the stairs. A few minutes later, I thought I heard the door to his small apartment open and close. After several more minutes, I made Carolina stand up and I took her to her room. I gently helped her lie down and said, “Tomorrow we find Star.”

“Yes,” she said. “I know we will,” but she was numb, inside and out.

I closed her door, put a blanket over Solomon, and walked out onto the balcony, overlooking the “Honeycircle.” I breathed in the thick, oversweet scent. I wanted more of it. Without thinking, I leaped over the railing and dropped twelve feet, crashing into the edge of a honeysuckle bush and rolling in the grass.

Somewhere in the darkness, somewhere inside the “Honeycircle,” a voice said, “Careful now, you could hurt yourself doing that.”

I felt the net descending for certain. It was him. I got to my knees, then stood up.

“
Bonsoir,
Zezen.”

I turned. He was standing in the opening. His silhouette was black against black. His teeth sparkled white.

“Why have you done this?” I asked. “You already killed her sister.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, moving slightly to his left. “I realized that when I saw her, quite by accident, a few months ago. I immediately thought of our last visit, brief though it was. I believe your words were, ‘She’s not the one you want,’ or words to that effect. I could not resist the chance to right a wrong, so to speak. Do you see my point,
mon petit
?”

“I want the child back.”

“Oh, such a simple wish and yet so difficult to grant.”

“I want the girl!” I lunged at him and he seemed to disappear in the dark, then I felt a hot sting, first in my right shoulder, then my left. I tried to reach out and couldn’t. He had slashed all the tendons at the top of my shoulders. Then, just as I tried to turn, I felt the same hot bite behind my knees, this time with pain. I went down without a step. I was bleeding heavily, but I crawled through the opening. He was waiting, standing over me. I could see his ruby earrings reflected in the candlelight from the carriage house. I kept crawling toward the stairs and the light. He walked alongside me, casually.

“Perhaps we shall meet again, Zezen, when your manners have improved. I should like to talk with you at length sometime, about the Meq. I think you would find it enlightening.”

I kept crawling. “What do you care about the Meq? You had Baju killed and stole the gems from the Stones.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about.”

“Yes, but you have the wrong villain,
mon petit.
You will have to ask Opari about that one.”

I looked up at him. He was smiling and backing away. His teeth were all I could see, but they were blurry and spreading apart. I was losing consciousness. I tried to get to the stairs, just the stairs. I made one more push with my elbows and hit something next to the bottom step. I rolled over in pain and everything began to go black. The last thing I saw was the wheel of Star’s tricycle, spinning against the sky.

 
PART III

And now and then a son, a daughter, hears it.
Now and then a son, a daughter,
    gets away.

—LEW WELCH

11

ZOR

(DEBT)

When you have a great meal, do you owe your hosts for the experience? Do your hosts owe the grocer for enabling them to obtain such wonderful fiber and grain? Does the grocer owe the farmer for supplying such a high and constant quality of grain? Does the farmer owe the grain itself for being such a strong and pure genetic strain? Does the grain owe the light and rain for allowing it to ripen and multiply? Does the light and rain owe the earth for tilting and spinning around the sun at just the right speed and distance? Does the earth owe the sun and does the sun owe a force of creation and destruction greater than itself for permitting this to happen?

Of course! But tell me, when is this debt ever paid?

A s the Meq heal, part of us, the part of us that calls itself “I,” must go into a waiting room, an annex of ourselves that is safe and silent, completely inviolate and yet as empty as the space between stars. I remember nothing of the five days it took me to heal. The five days of mystical Meq restoration of tissue, fiber, sinew, and bone. Willed or unwilled, our bodies are repaired and made new. Outside, we awake unscarred and innocent. Inside, the ravages of time and events are piling up in our annex, our waiting room, like stacks of unread letters and unopened bills.

Sometimes, the healing is ordinary, no more complicated than rest and bandages. It is nothing special, only faster, and we return physically as we were. Other times, it is far beyond ordinary, and we have “evolved,” adding something to our senses and our unique arsenal for survival. It is awkward, clumsy, and always unpredictable. I discovered this as I awoke, not to sight, but to sound.

“I tell you, Carolina, he just vanished.” It was a man’s voice and it brought me to consciousness, though I kept my eyes closed. It sounded nearby, but somehow muffled. I listened harder and I realized the muffling was caused by a wall between wherever I was and the voice. A living wall. A deafening, roaring wall of cicadas. I moved my fingers, my toes. I could feel that I was lying on my side with my legs drawn up to my chest in the fetal position. “Not a word, not a note!” the voice said loud and clear. It was moving back and forth, as if the man was pacing. I opened my eyes slowly. I was in half-light, dawn or dusk, I couldn’t tell which. I was staring at dots, dots in a long ragged line, and then, as I focused, one dot, one dot that became a star named Sirius, the Dog Star. I knew because it was written in bold red print outlined in gold. It was painted on the wall. I was in Star’s bedroom, in the carriage house.

“Nothing! Nothing except that damn baseball glove.”