After Death(55)

Now, eight years after losing her parents, she misses them no less than she did back in the day. She is not given to the conceit that her mother and father look after her even now that they are no longer of this life. She needs no ministering ghosts. She would not call them back from their higher place to this lower world even if she knew how. Yet she feels—or needs to feel—that she and John are not in this squalid place alone, that there is mercy in the matrix of the world and that they will be shielded by an act of grace until the gangbangers leave and Michael arrives. As the minutes mount into half an hour, as the second hand on the radiant dial of her watch sweeps her and John into an unknowable future, the pervasive smell of death has so suffused her that it has also become a taste on her tongue.





HERE IN DEATH’S DREAM KINGDOM



The smaller building that bears the large white word OFFICES seems as if it will be the easiest to search, but once Aleem and Kuba get inside, they discover a warren of rooms on two floors. The place is a sieve, two or three inches of water throughout the lower floor. Debris floats on the rank and slimy tide—empty beer cans, foil bags once filled with potato chips or corn chips, pale condoms ballooning like jellyfish or slithering like translucent snakes.

“Must be where country kids sneak away to party,” Kuba says.

Grimacing as the beam of the Tac Light plays across the draff and garbage, Aleem says, “Might better take a sample of this, send it to your health app, see what you contaminated with.”

“All these offices. Who knew apples was big business?”

“Since Adam,” says Aleem.

“What Adam that?”

“Don’t be ignorant. Adam and Eve.”

“Adam I know, he with Simone.”

“Weren’t no Simone then, only Eve.”

“Simone she got a nice ass.”

Having cautiously checked out the ground-floor offices, as Aleem leads Kuba up the stairs, he says, “You got an iPhone, homey.”

“Back in the mud somewheres.”

“I mean—you know their symbol?”

“What symbol?”

“Their company symbol. Apple’s symbol.”

“Ain’t it an apple?”

“Apple with a bite out. It’s a symbol of knowledge.”

“An apple someone took a bite, I don’t want it. That ain’t a symbol of knowledge, that a symbol of garbage.”

“I’m talkin’ the first apple off the tree of knowledge.”

“Tree of knowledge? Eat an apple and it’s like you gone to college, now you can be a dentist? You the man, Aleem. I respect you, but shit. This here’s another weird idea, bro, like your explodin’ salt.”

They proceed a few steps into the upstairs hall, something crunching underfoot, before Aleem stops and slowly brooms the light from baseboard to baseboard. All is dry here. The stain is worn off the tongue-in-grove hardwood, and the planks are cupped. Hundreds of dead beetles lay in regiments like a vast defeated army under a thin shroud of gray dust. No one could pass this way without leaving a trail of disturbed dust and scattered bugs.

Leading the way down the stairs to the swamp, Aleem says, “I know you heard of the Bible.”

“Heard about the ’cyclopedia, too. So what?”

“An apple off the tree of knowledge, it’s a Bible story.”

“Since when you read the Bible?”

“Never done. But when I was little, Grandma Verna she told me some Bible stories.”

“Your same Grandma Verna she runs upper-class whores on the Westside?”

“Who has two Grandma Vernas?” Aleem says as he steps into the dismal waters on the ground floor.

“That mean old woman, got them implant teeth could crack a walnut, wears more diamonds than Tiffany ever sold, why she poundin’ a Bible?”

“She don’t pound it. She just finds it entertainin’. Like Goliath the giant.”

“The seven-foot wrestler, tattoo of a snake comin’ out his belly button.”

“I’m talkin’ the first Goliath. Check it out, man. He was ten feet tall.”

As they slosh through the party debris where once commerce was conducted and busy workers supported families by supplying something real and nourishing, Kuba says, “This Goliath, he live in a castle between the tree of knowledge and the tree of salt?”

Speedo Hickam is waiting for them just outside the front door. In his long black raincoat and hood, he reminds Aleem of a nun, too soft to endure hard weather like a man. “We found somethin’.”

“What somethin’?”

“You gotta see. Over at Whole Fruit.”

As the three head toward the largest building in the complex, Kuba says, “Another thing, with all respect, nobody ever been ten feet tall.”

Aleem says, “Speedo, you know about Goliath?”

“He a wrestler, bites the heads off baby chicks?”

“That’s him,” Kuba confirms.

“Ain’t real chicks,” Speedo says. “They’s marshmallow chicks like them at Easter.”

“Real as real can be,” Kuba insists.

“You want to think so, that’s cool with me,” Speedo says.

“Grandma Verna she say the way it happened, this shrimp David figures he can jack up Goliath, bring him down. Goliath he picks up little Davey, loads him in a fuckin’ big slingshot, and splatters him all over the side of the temple.”