He and his ways are ever in my thoughts now, since this last murder. Two down, he has two to go for the okunikua. In Olo, an ikua is a song, a bird song, or a lullaby, and the same word is used, as in our language, for a sorcerous work, an enchantment. Okun means four. Owo, aga, iko, okun, olai … as I was taught to count by poor Tourma in Ulune’s compound. But in the low tone ikua means a gift. Or a sacrifice. Okunikua is thus the four song or the fourfold sacrifice.
Four is an important number in Olo affairs, and he must murder four women within sixteen days to complete the ritual. What he will be able to do when he has finished is something no one knows, not even Ulune. No Olo has done okunikua since some time before the turn of the last century. I recall the first time I actually read about it, in Tour de Montaille’s work, in Lagos. He regarded it as a relic of the bad old days before French civilization arrived. The Olo witch who did it, whose name the Olo never mention, was annoyed by French civilization, and wished to make it go away, which in time, of course, it did. Ulune and his fellow tribal patriarchs considered that the two World Wars, the Great Depression, and the consequent reduction of the proud colonial powers to quaint little postcard nations were a direct result of this guy’s okunikua. They approved the result but, as moral people, thought the means excessive. Western historiography does not agree, since it is much more logical and scientific to assume that millions of fairly rational, marvelously educated, prosperous people went crazy and ripped the heart out of their own civilization.
I must suppose that he is waiting to complete the four sacrifices before paying me a visit. But one can only be frightened so much, and I am at this point nearly beyond fear. Numb. I take some tiny comfort in the realization that it can’t be much longer now. Meanwhile, I find that the kind of hard, precise, physical work I am doing keeps actual paralysis away during whatever meantime remains. I prime the walls and ceiling of Luz’s room, and while this is drying, I install the patent ladder. It is spring-loaded and has its own trapdoor. A cord with a red knob hangs down and when you pull it the trapdoor falls and the ladder slides smoothly down into place with a pleasant sproing. A slight lift of the lowest step, and it sucks itself out of sight. I work it several times when I am done, for the pleasure of seeing something elegant, simple, and functional, much like the sort of gear one sees in boats. Then I install the exhaust fan in its hole, switch it on, and apply the top coat of semigloss to the walls (dove) and ceiling (eggshell). More downtime for drying, during which I drive over to the unpainted-furniture store on Twenty-seventh Avenue and buy, with some of my transmission money, a little bed frame, a four-drawer chest, a night table, a toy chest, and a wooden lamp base jigsawed to represent a crescent moon on a ball. A Cuban discounter sells me a mattress, and I drive away with it stacked on top, like the Joads, and don’t I wish I were driving to California too. Back at the garage, I assemble these and paint them with quick-drying enamel.
I am just finishing gluing down the last of the gray carpet squares when Luz tromps into the kitchen. She has experienced wonders?the Monkey Jungle, The Little Mermaid and Pocahontas on video, Burger King with the playground adjoining, a sleepover with five other girls, junk food without stint. Thank you, Mrs. Pettigrew. I say I have a surprise for her, and show her the red knob hanging down and ask her to pull it. She does. The expression on her face as the ladder slides down is worth the fifteen gallons of sweat. Magic. She ascends, I follow.
“It’s very stinky in here.”
“That’s the glue. It’ll go away soon. Do you like it?”
“Uh-huh. Do I have to sleep here all by myself?”
“If you want. I have some furniture, too. Do you want to see it?”
She does, and we go down to the garage to check it out.
“Amanda has flowers on her dresser,” she says.
“I have some flowers, too, and when the paint is dry, you can put them on just where you want them.” I show her the decals I’ve bought and she wants to put them on right now and we have a little spat about that. She’s cranky then, and hyper because of all the stimulation and the strange foods, and I’m cross with her, at which point she crumples utterly and I feel like a monster. I’m afraid I am going to spoil her, and when I think this, I laugh inwardly, since it is at present unlikely that either of us will live long enough for spoiling to occur. Spoil away, then, Jane!
After she’s been calmed and cosseted extravagantly, I show her Peeper in its new cage, and we play with it, and plan the furnishings of the chicken house. Then Jasper comes by and asks if I want to have pizza with his family and our across-the-street neighbor, Dawn Slotsky, and her four-year-old, Eleanor. Luz answers for both of us, such a schmoozer she has become, and I tie a head scarf over my filthy hair, and wash my face and hands, and over we go.
We are eating on the concrete terrace behind the big house. Dawn is already there, with her child, a chubby, grubby, cherubic red-blonde in a pink dress. She and Luz immediately march off to follow Jasper, who is running around the backyard with a jar, accompanied by Jake the dog, searching for a kind of beetle that has two bright luminous spots on its back. We adults go up and look at the new room, and I shyly accept their applause. We all go sit in tatty plastic loungers with our beers (except Dawn) and I ask Dawn how she is feeling, a suitable question, I think, for someone as grossly pregnant as she is. Dawn is a second-generation Grove hippie, and no one has ever seen her in anything but cutoffs and a spaghetti-strapped top, even now, although she has elastics and aprons to conceal her great belly. Until I got Luz, we had not exchanged a word, although she always had a friendly smile. With a child, I have become a significant person on the street.
She says she can’t wait for it to be over, and she’ll never, ever get pregnant again, two is enough, and Polly agrees, and they look at me and I modestly turn my eyes down, and I can see them thinking, Oh, looking like that she’s lucky to have the one. I don’t mind this too much. Then Shari Ribera comes out with a bunch of plates and cups and utensils, and stays to chat. The subject of the Mad Abortionist comes up, which is what the papers have tastefully chosen to call my husband, and we all shudder, especially, of course, Dawn, whose significant other is a roadie, often away from home, as now. She has window bars and a large and barky mutt dog. I ache to tell her that these will do no good at all, but what, after all, could I say?
We talk about guns, then, not very knowledgeably, although I myself know a good deal about guns of all kinds, but I don’t contribute. Dawn asserts she could never kill anyone, and Polly scoffs and says she would have no trouble dispatching that guy, and she has a short list of some others, and then, catching her daughter’s eye, says, “Not your father, sugar. I would shoot him in the leg, though,” and we all laugh. Mr. Ribera is of Dominican extraction, and both his children have the unearthly beauty that sometimes occurs when the best qualities of the contributory races combine to form a perfect genetic souffle. At fourteen Shari is being hit on by everyone in pants, and is especially subjected to the sort of courtship favored by young colored gangsters in passing cars. Jasper is in middle school, and is learning, as my husband famously did, not only of the regular cracker bigotry, which the white Cubans happily share, but also of the ferocious and socially invisible racism practiced by those of darker hue than him. Jasper does well in school, which makes it worse. Or, did well. Polly is now talking about his attitude changing, hoping he will not be a problem teen. Oh, he will, Polly. There’s not a moment’s mercy from the brain poison leaching from my skin, no, not in my whole nation, as my husband once put it in a poem.
So we talk, and the pizza is delivered, and I have half a Stroh’s and a slice, and hope I will keep it down. After a really lovely evening, very like actual life, with Luz bathed and put down in her old bed, I drag out my box. I have to look things up. Ulune taught me some countermagic in Danolo, all part of the basic course, and I secretly wrote the procedures down. I have a lot of the botanicals in there, too, although I haven’t let myself think about them in a while. Perhaps I was afraid of provoking the spirits, not that I believe in spirits, or perhaps it was that nothing of note happened to me until quite recently, when I found Luz. I put it to one side, and also put aside my divining bag, and the sad if handy manila portfolio that contains Dolores’s life. Next below there is a waxed cardboard box, fuzzy with wear. It’s filled to the brim with corked bottles, cans sealed with gaffer’s tape, and dozens of small envelopes, similarly sealed, all neatly labeled in black ink in a familiar hand, my own.
It’s all chemicals, of course, as dull as that. No eldritch horrors from beyond time, no special demonic gifts, just chemistry, but not chemistry 101, and not Du Pont or Upjohn chemistry. What would you rather play with given the choice and a hundred thousand years? Would you rather dick around with stone tools, clay pots, baskets, and skins, or master the most sophisticated neuropharmacological synthesizer in the world? It’s all homo ludens. Man at play. Or so Marcel used to say, that old materialist. I walk my own sophisticated neuropharmacological synthesizer over to the sink and get it a drink of water. I wasn’t keeping a personal journal when I was with Marcel, which I rather regret. I have to reconstruct his arguments from my battered memory. You, my angel, he used to say, are a series of transient electrochemical states?perceptions, feelings, memories: very fast, very subtle, chemical states, and the amounts of chemicals required to modify these states are typically tiny, and they work in combinations of which we have no idea. Modern psychopharmacology, these tranquilizers, this Prozac the Americans are so fond
