The Quiet Parts Pt. 16
Come evening, Leigh tries on dresses. Fifteen ensembles touch her skin before she finds one that best displays her curves. When she asks Sequoia’s opinion, her comrade appears disinterested—seated on the rail of their terrace, they gaze on the Majestical Defile. Leigh, still stinging from the Maroon bitch’s rejection, demands to know what gives.
“What are we doing here?” asks Sequoia distantly.
“We’re getting our army,” Leigh reminds them. “We’re going to march the Summer people across the hall and destroy Sankofa. Which was your idea!”
“Something doesn’t feel right. Can we just go to Mica and get the army now? And get the war over with quickly? If Chen—”
“Who cares! You can be a landlady if you want. I’m going to be a queen! A god!”
Sequoia, often agreeable so as not to disturb the balance, looks strangely decisive in this new place. Something about them reminds Leigh of Brendan; left with a pile of granola bars to tide him over until her return, he had the ingratitude to That’s all? her from his gummy eyes.
“We should leave,” says Sequoia.
“Whatever! The last thing I need is whining from an unimaginative person. That’s always been the problem with leftists. Everyone talks such grand ideas. In the end it’s just that—talk. You know what? Goodbye!”
Leigh, a true blue doer, makes her way barefoot down the crystal-lit corridor. At the entrance to his chamber, she pulls aside the ruby-beaded curtains and slips her face through. “Mica,” she says sultrily.
His vast bedroom is dimly illumined in rockshine. In a circular depression in the floor, Mica sits shirtless, covered to the waist in woolen blankets. Leigh can make out five other pits where his companions sprawl in the embrace of one another.
He growls deep in his throat. “You’re late.”
Breathily she says, “Forgive me, my lord.”
He keeps in arm’s reach a tattered copy of Dhalgren. He notices her notice and says, “I had it in my pocket when I woke up. It is the only thing I kept of the other place.”
“I see the influence,” she purrs, slinking inside. Beyond the window, nighttime colors stretch across the firmament in tendrils that instill in her an achingly romantic feeling. “You were always a well-read little fucker. This world—a little Delany, a little Butler, a little Le Guin. But all you. The fiery young poet who wanted to kill capitalism.”
On hands and knees, she crawls to him like a panther. She slides into the pit and the softness of his blanket makes her feel like she is swimming. When she lays her head in his lap, he tips a chalice made of silver-black gallium to her lips, a heady vintage that tastes something like cherries, and goes straight to her head. They kiss. Mica proceeds to lower her top and suck her breast.
“Yes, my love,” she exhorts. “Yes, my god! I shall be your Eve.”
No sooner does she say it than a shifting in the blankets startles her. Like a leviathan, Ayana rises, naked. Without asking, the lithe woman sucks Leigh’s other breast.
Surprised and disappointed at this lack of consent, Leigh stammers. “I-I-I guess this could be cool. Sure.”
Thanks to the orgy, she gets little sleep, and in the morning is sore from her pelvic bone on down. It turns out Ayana is a giving lover, one of the best Leigh has had. For that same reason, she suspects foul play. If the so-called Captain of the Mothership seeks to incapacitate her physically or psychologically with those four orgasms, she will find Black Girl Leigh far tougher than she thinks.
Leigh joins the rest of Summer at the obelisk, in the place of honor atop the dais with Mica and Ayana. A thin youth rings the gong to begin the ceremony. The sound makes Leigh clutch at her sleep-deprived head.
“Are you alright?” asks Ayana, next to her in futuristic regalia.
“Just capital,” Leigh snarks. She wears a flowing cobalt gown cinched tight around the waist with a belt of golden discs, many jeweled necklaces around her shoulders. As a gift, Mica has given her a bronze ceremonial dagger she wears sheathed in her belt. “The mark of a warrior,” he called it, “who crossed many lands.”
“Have you seen your friend?” Ayana asks, precociously concerned.
“Not since last night,” Leigh answers, wondering what game the Captain is playing. Sequoia vanished in the night, along with their camping gear. Where does her genderqueer friend plan to go, Leigh wonders, given she still wears the keyring around her wrist? Perhaps they intend to explore the Five Realms. Or hang out with telepathic slugs.
No matter. Leigh gazes on the crowd of brown people standing—Mica does not believe in kneeling—and feels a rush of power.
First, the people scream in exultation. Their cries fill the sky like a raven flock. Then Mica summons the spirit of Haitian revolutionary general Toussaint Louverture. He psychically communes with the liberator for an excruciating length of time, while the people of Summer stand in quiet respect.
At last, Mica delivers Toussaint’s words about finding joy in the small things when hard times occur. Leigh wonders: what hard times? As far as she can tell, Mica has crafted an Eden. A paradise for her to rule.
Along with their new companions from the Mothership, the Summer people make their way on foot to the Majestical Defile. Striding next to Mica, Leigh notes they wear crystals in their beards and eyebrows, a glittering compliment to their flowing robes. Something about this feels quintessentially black, like she is accompanying them to the river where they will baptize a child. That sense of community, what drew her to blacks in the first place, makes her dizzy from what she guesses for happiness.
In the rear of the Defile exists a cavern of red stone. There the people gather on seven rings of ascending height that create a colossal amphitheater. Around them, vermilion and violet threads glitter in the jagged walls. From her seat on the lowest ring, Leigh can see across the cavern floor three times the size of a football field. There are mysterious holes that shine forth golden light, and glistening lakes, and a labyrinth made of rock.
Seated to the right of Mica, she asks him, “What games will they play?”
He smiles as he sips from his chalice. “All of them.”
To celebrate the momentous occasion, the champions of Summer compete against the Mothership ambassadors. The first competition is shooting discus. As soon as the clay disc takes to the air, a lean youth from Summer draws his bow and lets fly; the disc falls to the scarlet floor with an arrow clean through the center of it.
Next comes the warrior from the Mothership, who takes a knee, aims her laser spear at the disc, and moves her fingers over a pad at the top. A red laser bursts from the muzzle to obliterate the disc. No one cheers louder at this feat than Mica.
“I told you!” he roars, jumping to his feet. “Where’s the barber? I told him they could do it. Now he owes me six emeralds, so he’s hiding from me.”
From two levels up comes an indignant retort. “It doesn’t matter because I’m about to win it right back. Tola will get her spear right though that hoop.”
“I don’t want to hear it!” Mica screams at him. And Leigh takes it all in.
Throughout the cavern, a festive atmosphere reigns, the Summer people boisterous like black folks in a movie theater. It feels almost profane to witness this: lives unburdened by even the thought of oppression. That Mica could create this new evolution of African speaks to his power and as-yet-untapped potential.
No one speaks to her except through Mica, a gendered hierarchy she embraces, for she feels like a queen. Those that do come, ask her about the other place.
“It was a complicated place,” she answers diplomatically, wondering why she hesitates to speak ill of America. “But there were many there who believed in justice.”
“Complicated?” Mica booms. Anger and confusion crag his expression. “Complicated? It was a genocidal hellhole. Let’s speak of it no longer.”
Silenced by her man yet content, Leigh divides her attention between the trash talk in the stands and the games on the field. Competitors wrestle, run footraces, swim lakes, and throws spears at targets. They navigate the labyrinth. They chop with axes at a great red obelisk to determine which warrior possesses the strongest arm. Toward the end of the games, competitors paint images on giant slabs, reminding her of graffiti. For their last trial, they perform something like brag rap where each champion tries to outdo the other with tales of his deeds. Thoroughly engrossed, Leigh cheers and feasts on strawberry rocks until she grows sick.
When it comes time to crown the champion Yakeh, a swaggering Summer warrior, it is Leigh who places two necklaces on her to signify their nations coming together: one of ebon stone, one of glowing microchips.
Then everyone goes outside, singing and dancing to the melody of extraterrestrial instruments of which she knows no earthly counterpart, save for the drum. Across worlds, the drum remains the heartbeat of blackness. Joyously she flies from partner to partner.
Time being mutable in sunless Summer, she can’t tell the hour when Mica gathers the united tribes on his terrace. Under a dusk-like prisming of orange hues, he declares, “Today has been a glorious day, but our tribe extends far beyond the borders of this land. It extends beyond our walls, beyond spacetime itself. This woman, Leigh the Traveler, has come to us from afar. Please, tell us why you have come.”
She has been planning this speech all day. Standing before the people, she feels like Fred Hampton. Like Dr. King himself.
“Friends,” she says, summer in her blood. “I admire your ways and have come to love this place as my own home. But there is a rival kingdom called Sankofa. They are barbarians who stain the name of blackness. They tried to kill me. They kidnapped two of my friends and are torturing them. I come here to seek your aid. With this army before me, we can liberate their people from tyranny, and send those devils to the mud where they belong—”
“Enough.”
She bristles. “Who dares interrupt me?”
“I dare, woman,” says Mica. Next to her, he stands with two fingers under his chin, as if his head has grown heavy, his eyes cold, his breathing staccato. “Zip it. Hush that noise. Slow your roll. Why would we go to war for you, hmm?” he queries sharply. “You think you matter that much, she-devil?”
She seizes with fear watching him leave her side to walk among the people, who clear a path on the jade outcropping. His voice is the mournful rumble of a fault line cracking before an earthquake. “There was a time, my people, when the powers asked me what I wanted. I told them I wanted the dead returned. I wrote a very long list.” His voice snags on sorrow. “Zhantee the tanner, your name was Korryn. You were beautiful. A mother and a poet. Sifa the wine-maker, your name was Darren. You were a lover of myth and tales of warriors. Tuyaden the blacksmith, you were a child named Tamir, with no greater concern than playing with your friends. Yakeh”—he gazes with pain on the champion from the games—“your name was Trayvon. You were a young warrior who died at the hands of a coward. You were slaves once,” Mica yells. “Slaves from a broken world speeding toward downfall. Here the people are free.” Now he aims his accusing finger like an arrow at Leigh. “Her people murdered you.”
“Nope,” Leigh says.
“Shot you dead.”
“I am not a cop,” she reminds him.
“They reveled in your blood.”
“Somebody else.”
“Shackled you.”
“Centuries before I was born.”
“Woman, if you don’t stop your yapping, I will gladly beat the shit out of you in front of all these people. You see, in this place, you’re the oppressed minority. This idiot,” he addresses his people, “wants us to redden our hands with the blood of our own. But it’s time.” He takes a deep, savoring breath. “Time for vengeance!”
“No, Mica!” The voice belongs to Ayana, who pushes through the crowd, holding tight to her laser spear. “You go too far. I agreed to this farce, now I regret it. You’re behaving like them!”
“How dare you!” he snarls. “I am nothing like them!”
“Let her go,” Leigh’s savior implores. “The Mothership is anarchist. We don’t believe in prisons—”
“Yeah, well, Summer is socialist. We’re gonna stick her ass in the gulag and torture her for a thousand years.”
Leigh, being the center of attention yet helpless in her own fate, looks to the crowd for any path of escape, and terror steals her breath—she sees Andre staring at her. All through the crowd, his lifeless eyes condemn her from the beyond.
“Her coming here is a test,” Ayana continues, one god to another. “As to whether we can make a new beginning. Our exile in Ameri—”
“Do not say that word. And you better not say it was a blessing,” he warns.
“But it was. Insofar as we understand what no human does. Those four hundred years were our lesson in empathy. We are the most humane people. That’s our power. Let us forgive her. Not from fear of reprisal, but because we want to. If we carry the anger with us”—her eyes glimmer—“then did we ever truly leave the other place?”
“They have found us!” Mica roars. “Do you think this will be the last of them, if we let her go? The devils will come and murder us! Steal everything we have.”
“Then we can assimilate her. Teach her our ways.”
“You mean your ways,” he snorts. “‘Cause I ain’t doing that shit.”
“Yes,” Ayana says brightly. “Our ways. We have an abundance, spiritually and physically. It’s unhealthy to live in fear. It perpetuate negative cycles.”
“Bruh,” says Mica.
“There’s good whites, and there are bad whites. You get that in a world of duality.”
“Duality? Ain’t no one here but niggas.”
“The energy we put into the universe manifests in positive and negative,” Ayana preaches, and the women of the Mothership begin to hum. They tap the butts of their rifles on the floor, a celestial choir. “We have to break the cycles of trauma to reach a higher plane—”
“Bruuuuuuh!” Mica roars. “This is not California. You a literal god talking that bullshit.” Suddenly he laughs out loud. “Man, you are so glad to have a white woman here. Some people ain’t never change. That’s how you used to get played, my nigga.”
Embarrassed, she clenches her jaw. “The Mothership objects to violence—”
“Bitch, bitch, bitch. Reggie, just ‘cause you turned into a woman don’t mean you gotta act like one.”
Ayana crosses her arms. “I did not become a god so you could misgender me.”
“We ain’t gotta be woke no more. Black men run shit here!”
“The alliance is off!” Ayana declares.
“Why?”
“‘Cause you need to work on your shit.”
As the gods argue, Leigh clenches her fists because, of all trials she has faced, this provides no path to agency. Only a hope her ally can prevail. The world fills with the sound of her terrified heart pumping as if to exit her chest, and the cries of seagulls circling above.
“Fine, then.” Mica turns his back on the Captain. “Go back to your ship. But you don’t get my prisoner.” On his way past a resident of Summer, he touches the woman’s shoulder. She starts to convulse.
“It hurts, doesn’t it? That’s what they call a bullet. Hurts worse than anything.”
He touches another, then another. One by one, they fall to their knees. Pain erupts from every mouth. Their eyes bulge as if blind from despair.
“That was the moment you died. Look at the pale creature killing you! Their disdain for life. Now listen to your rage. That thing killing you knows it will not be punished.”
As each person rises, staggering under their newfound knowledge, they stare at Leigh in hate she cannot comprehend. Mica has done a cruel thing in delivering such memories, vestige of a world that now enflames them with its violence. In her innocent body, her fragile bone and blood exists their vengeance. They will rip her open, she knows. Piece by piece.
Suddenly laser fire fills the air. Everyone drops. After the barrage, the air reeks of ozone.
“For the love of Mica!” screams Mica, on the floor with his arms over his head. “You could’ve hit my obelisk!”
Having thrown herself down for cover, Leigh looks up to find Ayana striding through a path the huddled people have made for her. Her warriors train their guns above the crowd.
“I did not want to have to do that. Everybody chill out. Technological superiority coming through. Yakeh,” she says, and turns to aim her rifle directly at the champion, who crouches, one hand on the hilt of her short sword. “Yakeh, you are a beautiful, brave queen but we let you win the games. Take your hand off your weapon and assume the position, or I’m gonna turn that pretty dome of yours to a stadium. Thank you,” she says when the shamefaced champion sheathes her blade. “Only through empathy and understanding can we heal these traumas. Leigh,” she greets, coming to stand before to her. “Stand.”
She does so, tears on her face.
“Do you want to go home?” asks Ayana. Bright-eyed, smooth-skinned, angelic.
“Yes.”
“You are home. You were born into a death cult who taught you oppression is the only joy. Do you know how I know that’s untrue? Because that wasn’t my world in America. No matter what happened to me, my beautiful people had my back. I didn’t create this utopia. I was born in it. All we needed was the land. Come home with me.”
Surely she expects Leigh to agree, if for no reason other than self-preservation. Here is the maddening thing about Ayana: she believes Leigh’s story over. Twenty-nine years of adventure shrunk to a cowry shell, a single white bead in her paradise.
Leigh stammers. “I . . . I don’t know if I can.”
Impatience wrinkles the woman’s brow. “Then tell me what you want, Leigh.”
Leigh fights to answer the riddle. Truthfully, this whole journey that began on her date with Andre, she has never considered her goals beyond her need to be celebrated. Her recklessness, which up till now she thought of as her power, she hates because it has delivered her to this condescending trans woman’s mercy. As confusion fogs her mind, she realizes Ayana views her as a thoughtless child. Her fear gives way to rage, and she chooses the bloody path.
In a swift motion, she draws her dagger and sheaths it in Ayana’s gut. The Captain gasps. Smiling triumphantly upon the dead, arrogant bitch Leigh realizes there is no blood on her blade. Another stab, then another. Her blade glances off an invisible barrier.
“You put your shield up to speak to me?” she screams in disbelief. “That's so mean and untrusting.”
Ayana sighs heavily. “You poor, pathetic girl—”
Leigh’s fist to her face puts Ayana down. Wasting no time, Leigh runs down the promontory to the unguarded obelisk. Laser blasts ring in the air, but she fears nothing. This is true power: when faced with their refusal to give her what she wanted when she wanted it, she could simply destroy everything, including herself, and leave others to pick up the pieces while she rested victorious.
All along the obelisk, the ancestors gather. They snarl at her. If they could deter her they would, an impossible task for a bunch of shitty ghosts. She hoists the gong mallet, hauls it over her shoulder in preparation for one good swing, and addresses the people now charging toward her in bloodlust.
“I am the god here!” she declares. “You think you’re so smart? You’re stupid. Stupid stupid stupi—”
A laser hits the hammer. As she stumbles from the force of it, she sees Ayana at the back of the crowd, on the floor, smoke billowing from her sidearm. Leigh has no time to catch her balance before she plummets from the outcropping.
Wind whistles in her ears. So, she thinks with dreamy acceptance, I’m going to die.
A violent shock. Water pulls her under. Lungs bursting, she struggles to rid herself of the necklaces threatening to drag her to a painful and ironic death. Free of them, she kicks out with her legs, swimming for her life.
Gasping, she emerges. From above sounds the fury of the savages. She swims to shore and crawls onto shining purple land, bedraggled, soaked and heavy from the dress she wears. With a jolt of fear she remembers the keyring, overjoyed to find it still on her wrist.
One look at the outcropping reveals the savages pouring into the city, mad with bloodlust.
Down the shore comes a rider on a red quarter horse. Leigh almost weeps to see Sequoia in the saddle. “Where were you?” she asks.
“I knew something was wrong,” they say. Their leathers are crusted in crystal particles. “I was trying to find a way to sneak in and rescue you. Get on!”
“Let me take the reins!”
“Really?” Sequoia is incredulous. “Obviously I can ride.”
“Well, I’m just better!” Whether or not that is true, she would feel safer as rider than passenger. Groaning, Sequoia dismounts so Leigh can take the reins. Her companion saddled behind her, she kicks her booted heels in the horse’s flanks. Though her lungs ache, with every passing moment her strength returns.
By the time they round the lake, the horde are descending the path from the city. Leigh spurs their wheezing horse toward the Majestical Defile.
“Shit!” says Sequoia. “They’re gaining ground!”
“So we kill the spare.”
“What?”
Leigh shoves them off the horse.
The roan rides faster. Glancing over her shoulder, Leigh watches the Summer people descend on her friend. Fists rise and fall. Feet kick. When they lift Sequoia like some pagan sacrifice, Leigh’s stomach heaves at the grotesque they have made, a freak owning neither limbs, lips, eyes, nose, nor teeth. Yet Sequoia screams.
Leigh rides for the tower.