Tempest Other

First, there is nothing but the dark listening to the dark and the gothic decrepitude of sleepy side roads, but now we see the walkers, two, struggling drunkenly over the mad mosaic of warped and pockmarked tarmac amid the signpost-less cartography in the deep dark night of the Sunshine City. Our starlit heroes make their way, the moon a thin fingernail crescent outlining a jet-black sphere. Rufaro and Lutuli, now in the full dark of the shadowed night, now splashed in the light of a passing car like a pair of wide-eyed revenants loosed upon the suburbs, walking a somedeal path, gestured at without surety.

Homeward from the Strathaven tavern where they had walked for cigarettes because Rufaro only had two and two was not enough to last until morning, and they did indeed find cigarettes and also beer and some unnamed gut-rot hooch passed to them under a table and they saw a man stabbed with a broken bottle and his friends running after the one who did it, and the man shouting to no one, and then sitting down quietly in the pooling blood, watched by all but none would touch him, and they thought that this might be the time to leave this place and these sotted vagabonds and ne’er-do-wells and go home to their beds.

So, homeward. But the route is long and they are walking and the indigo night is caulked at the seams to let but little light as stars would offer upon their dark odyssey.

Damn this stony path, Rufaro says. Our first mistake was leaving the house. Our second was leaving the bar.

Lutuli says nothing.

If we meet someone walking the other way, make sure you look as though you want to rob them. Either that, or I’ll have to pretend I’m robbing you.

Lutuli smiles.

Past vleiland ploughed by hand and rowed with maize, inflorescent and tasselled in this muggy midsummer, along unsigned roads with names to those that know them, under eyeless street lamps standing purblind and useless at the tarmac’s frayed edge, they walk. Beyond and beside them squat colonial adobes, deco flats with curved balconies and flaking paint, flattened and rusted chain mail fences, skelter Durawalls falling slowly, slowly back to earth. Every so often, a granite boulder finding miraculous balance upon another emerges happenstantial from the darkness in front of them, sinks back to nothingness behind them. The beautiful remains of some vast geological cataclysm unearthed, old time writ in stone. Invisible in the dark, a dog is barking. The crescent moon has set and there’s no moon now and it’s only getting darker. On they walk.

Helluva way to spend New Year’s Eve, says Rufaro.

Still, at least we have each other, says Lutuli. Everyone needs something in this world. In this moment we have each other.

Until that gets taken away, says Rufaro. That’s how it is in this bitch of a world.

You worry too much. Let’s just enjoy the night air. The walk.

Theirs is a city of cul-de-sacs. The kind of place where a traveller must know their way before the journey starts, such are the potential dead ends. Every so often a car passes, the walkers simultaneously made night-blind by headlights even as they walk past cavernous broken drain covers – a deathtrap for the incautious – or unmarked roadworks, burst pipes pumping from deep underground into pools of unknown depth, every road a maze of potholes, and one so deep and fertile that a tree grows out of it, a full and living tree. At the roadside are bare wires emerging from the earth like giant neon earthworms, marking the place where streetlamps once stood.

But our walkers know their way. Despite old houses wearing new faces. Despite the shape of buildings, walls, street corners being created anew and each time slightly different by that sweep of headlights before being sucked away again into the night, the same lights making dancing eldritch forms of their own shadows. Ionit stations of light, but drunk. Very drunk.

They cross over Acthnici, follow Suffolk to West, and there turn right. They have been watching a distant storm as they walk, silent sticks of lightning incandescent against the sides of blue-grey caverns in the sky.

Are we chasing this storm, or is it chasing us?

At the robots they hook left and start up the Argyle hill. At the top stands a streetlamp, alone in all the urban surrounds in that it still shines, its lonely beam held in place by an aspiring gyre of moths and flying crickets and great horned locusts. A hilltop diorama, granite in the ridgeline, hidden kopjes just out of sight.

You know granite attracts lightning, says Rufaro.

Ghostly histories lurk in the empty streets of Harare’s oldest suburb, unchained in the unchimed hours of the night. Rufaro stops to piss onto the verge. Lutuli’s filthy All Stars padding impatiently upon the tarmac. One hundred years ago, a lion walked this same ground. The lion killed three horses of the Pioneer Corps, and so some men with .500 bore express rifles cut for spoor and tracked and hunted him down and shot the lion dead. He measured ten feet six inches from his nose to his tail, and they skinned him before going home to breakfast. No lions here now. And what spirits reside in a city that is not a city but a concrete dream of one? A city deconstructed and recobbled with a lunatic logic that works yet. Aye, for some. Amid the silence of unrisen bones.

They summit Argyle and go down and over Connaught, crossgraining through the suburban back roads. They turn on King George and trudge back uphill, then taking Natal, downhill once more, the road passing over Avondale Stream, where once, as a boy, Lutuli had seen fish swim in clear water under lily pads, over river rocks. No fish now, no lilies, no rocks, the stream concreted and canaled, flowing in a culvert under the road and out the other side.

The night is dark and the lights are few, and as they bridge the dark waters they can see to their left the orange glow of oil lamps, or is that a shack fire, or some hinkypunk messenger? Something flickers in the thick riverbank vegetation. Life defying concrete. Thin light breaking through fever trees strangled thickly with lianas, wending through cat’s-tail bulrush, blinking off the butterfly leaf of the bauhinias. A thin purl of water, treefrogs squeaking in the dark, the miniature anvil plink of a courting fruit bat.

The stream passes on into a wide vlei. Deep in the vlei, among the riverine treeline lives a community of the indigent, the paupered, the orphaned and the insane, making house with offcut scraps of corrugated tin and rotted cardboard and huge irregular sheets of mouse-chewed plastic, halfbricks strewn upon rooftops to stop the wind from carrying blighted hovels and shanty all off into the night. Forgotten people living invisible lives, sight unseen on the city’s cadastre.

Stepping ever forward into the past, our walkers are looking not upon their ruin, nor their light, when a Honda Fit, one-eyed and fan belt screaming, comes careening around the corner of Bath onto Natal on the wrong side of the road, hooting and throwing gravel up as they dive for cover into the dusty and thorn-ridden stand of roadside weeds beside the culvert. They lie for a while, silently, and then Lutuli speaks.

There is a lesson here, but we won’t find it until afterwards.

Life is indeed vanity, says Rufaro. And it is transient. And that teaches us humility. And anyway, only a drunk man could walk these streets without falling over.

Isn’t that right.

I guess we should have had one more. For the road.

As they stumble to their feet, daggling through the roadside detritus at the intersection of tarmac and vlei and stream, the gaping maw of a broken storm drain opens up suddenly in front of them. Stepping aside so as not to fall in, Rufaro kicks a broken piece of cinder block stashed at the road’s edge for god-knows-what purpose and lets out a screeching yowl like a stricken cat.

I can’t do this anymore. Let’s stop. Have a smoke. Think about things. Let’s at least talk about some philosophy before I die, squished under the wheels of a goddamned Honda Fit. I’m not baptised you know? Things are not looking good.

He pulls a box of Everests from his pocket and lights one. Lutuli is working at something in his hands, rustling a paper, tipping a baggie. He rolls, licks and lights it, and then speaks.

OK fine, I have a philosophical question. If you unscrew your belly button, will your bum fall off?

He smiles again. Rufaro just looks at him.

Maybe philosophy is now boring to you. Let’s talk of the spirit. Of the spiritual. Fundamental, no?

Perhaps, but where is it? How can it be held? Touched? How would you paint it? Write it? Can there be a photography of the invisible? Show me the secret mathematics of a formula that is balanced by death. By what peculiar physics, against which inverted laws, do things come to be and then not? Things exist. And so what is nothing? If my bones sleep here, where will I be? Would the world feel my absence? Were there any to mourn?

OK, calm down, my friend.

Fine.

But let’s talk about something. How about art?

Art fart.

Don’t art fart me, I studied under Peter Birch at his School of Art. On Chitepo. Formerly known as Rhodes. There by Greenwood Park.

School of fart.

OK, so that’s the kind of midnight shamble home it’s going to be, is it? I thought you said you wanted to talk about philosophy before your imminent death?

All I’m saying is that in the final analysis, it’s all a bit fucking useless isn’t it? In terms of understanding. To the end of our days, there are things we will never understand. Better to find a way to be comfortably humble at the foot of the mystery. Art doesn’t explain, it asks. What kind of person would want to live in a universe that is fundamentally knowable?

Without warning, concussive pops and bangs reach them in the night air. They look and see the fiery rosettes exploding and falling down the night sky. Red blue green. Yellow. White.

The Northern Suburbs are celebrating, one of them says.

They are smoking and watching the distant fireworks when from out of the murk there appears a man pulling a hand-drawn carry cart stacked to more than twice his height with bric-a-brac, odd bits of wood, sheet metal, lengths of pipe, and what appears to be roots, tubers and leaves, all held down with twine and sheeting plastic. They watch
him approach.

Who’s this gwash oeun, says Rufaro.

A hag-ridden and irregular man, panel-beaten by life, misshapen at the mouth, bowlegged. He wears a ragged brown tunic and, as far as they can tell, nothing else. He draws up beside them, easing the arms of the cart down with a groan.

Hello my brothers. I see you are smoking. Could you spare one?

Intrigued, Rufaro produces the cigarettes from his pocket, taps one out, and pops a match for the man as he leans and pulls.

Where are you going, mukoma?

Where am I going? Oh I don’t know. That way.

He points. They look. Nothing. Darkness.

Are you lost?

No. But I would like to be lost. I like that feeling. Of being lost. It’s like escaping from a jail. For me. Not that I’m escaping from any jail of course, or on the run. He laughs.

Hmm. OK. They study the man a little more closely now.

People are saying there is a big white snake that lives in these sewers, says the man, looking down into the dark waters of the culvert.

Lutuli looks down also, squinting into the murk.

It doesn’t bite you, but if you see it you’ll go mad, the man says. So please don’t look for it. Especially on a night like this.

Lutuli looks up quickly, miming a sudden and profound interest in the stars.

Which people? asks Rufaro.

I have seen a white snake and a beautiful flame lily, says Lutuli, looking at Rufaro and smiling.

Anyway, rather a snake than a lion, says the man. He pulls deeply and jets two streams of smoke, incandescent in the dark air, through his nostrils. How is your evening going? As for me, I am just pulling my cart on my way down the road. But it’s so dark on these streets. Who knows what is in the dark? Or who? I can’t stop thinking of this lion. It was in Hurungwe. They say it killed more than 20 people there. And also in Omay communal lands. It was seen even as far as Muzarabani. This was in the 1980s. It used to kill and eat people around sundown. So what people started to say, they named the lion Maswera Sei.

They all laugh.

Oh you like that one do you? There are even stranger stories to be told about this place. I have heard of a certain hill in Buhera district that is very sacred. One hill among the Chiurwi hills. One wouldn’t utter negative or vulgar statements nearby, unless if one is desperate for wonders. Strange fires. Mermaids. Snakes with human faces. That sort of thing. It was also a place beloved of the comrades during the war. Dzapasi Assembly Point was not far away. Anyway there was a funny story that happened there. This was just after Independence. Some youths went to the hill and made the mistake of throwing coins into a certain dziva. At this point some 40 head of cattle belonging to several families slipped into the granite rock and drowned as if they were in water. There may have been some goats too. They went under the rock and couldn’t be found. Only their horns remained above. They resurfaced after three weeks, after the ancestors had been begged pardon. Unfortunately some people had tried to pull some of the cows out with ropes. These ones were never seen again. The animals that were released from the rock came rolling down the hill like a ball. Kukunguruka. Anyway that’s what I heard.

And as we speak, a sacred hill in Dzivarasekwa is being blasted for a quarry, says Rufaro. This is what we have become.

We are indeed a long way from the castle kopje, agrees Lutuli, suddenly wistful. From the cathedral mopane. Strip away the regolith, and there’s nought inside.

What the fuck are you talking about?

Don’t speak like that, says the man. And you my friend, he adds, turning to Lutuli. I also don’t know what you are talking about. But you say mopane. Well, the forest is still here I think. Just look behind you, he says, gesturing at the dark vlei beyond the road.

It’s hidden. It’s underneath. But every chance it gets, it comes back to the surface. One day it will come back completely. That’s how things work. It’s a big circle, this infinity of ours. Everything touches everything. And we’ll get back to where we started.

So infinity’s a circle is it? asks Rufaro. Where’d you read that?

More things in heaven and earth, Horatio, says Lutuli.

The man just laughs. I thank you for the smoke, he says. And now I must continue to where I’m going.

They watch him go, the handcart piled high and his two bare legs working visibly beneath it, and he looks like nothing else but an enormous beetle.

After a while Lutuli says: Naked we come into this world, and naked we leave it. But go un-trousered in the streets just once between times and you’ll see fire.

They kill their own smokes, and walk on. The storm is closer now, their steps quicker. Ahead of them, lightning bright and soundless with thunder chasing after it, moon-cobbled clouds quivering in the sudden, momentary flash. Thunderheads move through the sky’s dark with depthless enormity, an Empyrean night sky of shaped obsidian cast with stars that wink to chart the storm clouds’ shape, shown gargantuan and true in sudden firebolt and vast echo.

They are on the other side of the open vlei and almost at Downie and home when Lutuli notices little blue flames are running on their belt buckles, the eyelets of their shoes. They think it very amusing.

Are we high?

Strange vapours in the air, something other and unnameable hides within the city’s nighttime miasma. A dark sky condensing and pressing downwards upon them, sudden winds flattening the grass and setting a hiss among the tall trees’ leaves.

The walkers walk. The watcher watches. Something something. Nothing nothing. The storm whipping up. The night closing in. See it now like torchlight in the trees.

What is that? asks Rufaro.

Lutuli turns, and he looks, and behold, the orb comes out of the north sky, a fire folding in on itself. Inner brightness alchemic, out of the midst of the pale fire that set shrouds of light upon their bodies. Omnidirectional, a wheel in the middle of a wheel, and their work was like unto the colour of a moonstone. Rufaro would later swear to it that he heard the voice of one that spake.

The glowing light moves yare and everyhow. Luminous. Knowing. Purposeful. Searching. Numen of this place, new risen. Wheeled eyen pellucid, offering form but not shape, line but not detail, crafting semagrams in the still indigo air with its studied and deliberate wanderings. Tracking the telephone wire, trying the lock, opening the door. The dark offering space to the light. The light giving form and depth to the dark’s space.

Coming nearer now. Up close it shows its substance. A mysterious alchemy abounds. Unknown eigenstates in ontic superposition. Spooky action not distant enough. Perfect globules mapped in hemispheric dimple upon that bright surface. You would swear it nor ball light nor angel, holding to some third and other corporeality. Spirit matter moving. Be not afraid.

And they, our two friends, standing agog in hominid confusion, rough hands reaching out in supplication to the faultless polish of the monolith. The offered gift: a terrible knowing. Will-o-the-what-the-fuck. They turn and run into the night, chanting glorias with their screams.

They vault the chain mail fence and kick in the door and slam it to behind them. They sit panting upon the ratty green sofa and do not speak for a long time. Then Rufaro says I don’t have an answer. I don’t have one. And I don’t want one.

OK. Me too. Happy New Year.

New Year’s morning finds them still curled up together like two chongololos on the shabby and tatterdemalion sofa. A new day heralded by backyard gunpowder shows and artless bang-bang pranks with squib matériel widespread among the suburban youth. The staccato clatter of fireworks sets the dogs shivering and raises a multidialect shrieking among the garden birds. A sticky thickness descends in the golden wake of the storm. Strange airs. The trees are uncommonly still, still life in green-gold, everywhere something growing, green on green. A twirling brawl between starling and goshawk seen through dawn shivelight of sundapple and branch. Nature with itself vying. Two sides to the coin, two faces to the mask. A beauty sublime in the rightful light of the broad day.

The storm has cleared. A tempest other rises on hot invisible thermals and looms unseen beyond a spectral horizon.