When I Heard Calypso

This summer, the monster coiled inside your body will eat you alive. 

Your disease has no name, but many symptoms: splotchy albinism. Scarred lungs. Ugly dreams of loud static. But worst of all are your bones. They grow thorns. Sharp, often cancerous growths shove aside fascia, stab muscles, pierce nerve clusters and organs. When they eventually break off and dissolve on their own, they often take chunks of wanted osseous tissue, leaving your skeleton malformed and pockmarked as the moon. When you look in the mirror, a devil stares back, and you hate it.

The monster is hereditary on your mother’s side. Ten years of experimental drugs, ritual surgery, and chemo amputated your left thumb, your parents’ savings, your mother’s sobriety, and father’s will (he moved in with his secretary). Yet it banished the disease into remission. You thought you’d won. But last week, the feral parakeets returned. 

Cackling, shivering, dying in a late Chicago winter storm, their bodies clotted your window. You shook as radioactive green light and the smell of their urine filled your room. Somehow, the tropical birds always knew when your bones would bloom, like a choir of Norns singing into promise the season of hideous pain to come. You cried blood and stained your pillow red. You were finally ready to die.

The long winter nights force your disease into hibernation at the same time it concentrates Mom’s seasonal depression into something lethal. You stand in the hall, watching her at the kitchen table caress the open bottle of expensive rum she isn’t supposed to touch, inhaling its burnt sugar pheromones. Either you made a noise or the bond between mother and child snapped taut because she looks up into your eyes that glow red as aboriginal stars.

You take the rum from her. She joins you at the sink. Together, you empty the bottle down the drain. Who’s hands shake more? Hers or yours? She kisses your forehead and your skin flakes like brown onion shell. 

 That’s when she tells you she’s booked tickets to Belize. “I’m taking you home. I need to take you home, baby.”  

Home? Mom had moved from Belize to Chicago when she was a child and had not gone back since. She barely talked about our family, even her dead brother, though she gave you his middle name. Too many burnt bridges. And Mom raised you to be private school American, gave you the best camouflage she could buy for her Black child. Belize would never be home, and the thought of getting on a plane…

But you swallow your anger and confusion because you refuse to be her trigger. Fifteen years navigating mom’s leviathan deep moods and your dad’s explosive sullenness taught you to hide pain, scars, and feelings. So, you mimic her excitement as she spirals into her plans, the things you would see, the food you would eat, the beautiful places that existed nowhere else on Earth. She paints you a picture of her paradise, because inside of three months, she will have to bury you. 

 Your mom stills into an unnerving calm and doesn’t blink. “Some people are born already with one foot in the spirit world. The longer they live, the more it pulls them in two.” She holds your hands as tightly as she dares and you refuse to flinch. “Every moment with them in your life, good or bad, matters more. And right now, we’ve got so much work to do if we’re going to make enough good ones. You believe me, don’t you?”

Your mom is often strange after weathering a bad time. Either she’s tapping into something beyond her, or she’s taking advantage to get things off her chest. You don’t know. Either way the words leave a mark. 

When you’re gone, Mom will drink herself dead, unless you do this. Your mouth is too full of sharp teeth and thorns growing through your pallet, so habitually, you resist speaking. You close your eyes and bow your head.

 “Good!” she says, grinning. She jumps to her feet. “If we’re lucky, we’ll arrive in time for Carnival.”   

* * *

Three days later, you step off the puddle-jumper at Phillip S. W. Goldson International Airport. You are in ninety-degree weather hiding your condition beneath sunglasses, long sleeves, gloves, a hoody, and a medical mask. 

Even though the new growths haven’t started, your body is a maze of barely healed wounds and scars, inside and out. Every vibrating second of the flight was pure agony. But when you shrug away from Mom’s touch, the solid wet air that lives between downpours clamps down on your mouth and nose. You inhale your first pain free breath since you were five and the sudden liberation is an opiate. 

It fucks your sense of time, knotting together taxis, stewed chicken, crowded streets, white smiles, rice and beans, pockmarked colonial architecture, screaming howler monkeys, and everywhere pictures of a squat man with backwards feet, eyes hidden under the brim of his hat. And beneath it all, something inside of you—a thing squeezed down into a mustard seed—stirs, reacting to a slowly building rhythm.

It’s possible your first clear memory of Belize is Mom reaching out the window of a green school bus to pluck soft green mangos from a tree. You are on an over-packed guided tour. The bus grinds its gears on the road to Lamanai, a Mayan temple site west of Orange Walk, Mom’s hometown.

Speaking of Mom, her own transformation is stunning. The music, sun, and smells of frying salt fish soak into her skin like rum into black cake. Until Belize, you had never heard her shout that broad Kriol. It had manifested as a subtle edge under her English filleting white fears or Dad’s bullshit. The whole person was bursting from her American shell. It hurt.

But she hadn’t hidden anything from you that wasn’t hidden from her. Languages wait for the right environment to fully express themselves.

Like cancers. 

Like monsters.

At the ruins, Mom climbs ancient temple stairs scaled for giants and carved with huge cats. She wants you to snap pictures of her next to the sacrificial altar. Your disease robbed you of locomotion faster than a stiff walk. No stairs for you.

 “Welcome to Lamanai,” says the tour guide in her best American accent. As you adjust the camera, you become aware of oddly rhythmic whispering, like somebody singing through water. It’s beautiful. You can’t tell if you’re imagining it, so you limp away from the crowd and follow the sound to a crooked finger protrusion of jungle.

As it washes you into the tree-line’s shadow past a staring, broke-backed donkey, the song gets louder and remixes with the guide’s description of the ruins. “As you can see, the Jaguar temple is named for the carvings on the large masks.” The border between field and jungle shift like the incoming tide. “The masks form part of the altar. But the deity predates both.” The song changes, as if the singers have changed focus, no longer talking to you. “The jaguar is still worshipped by Lacandans. As farmers cut down more rainforest, there have been increased sightings…” The cloud of droning horseflies suddenly drops and lays still, a black dinner jacket on the donkey’s back. The whispers are angry now.

The music abruptly dies, interrupted by slow, evil purring that absolutely is not coming from you. Whatever is making this noise, is something else. Your mind conjures feverish darkness into fangs, slick muscles gathering to pounce, and meat stink breath. A desire to rip limbs and dance in arterial spray, so intense it ripples the air.  But you are not afraid. Your mouth waters at the nearness of quick death. 

A scream of rage and frustration explodes from the forest, bowling you over. The whispers swarm into a maddening drone. You howl with pain as something drags you backwards onto the bus full of panicked tourists. It’s Mom. Don’t know how she got down from the temple so quickly. The doors slam shut. Mom holds you close as the bus turns wildly and bangs back towards civilization. Everyone can hear the thing in the forest fighting for its life over the noise of the engine.

“What was that?” somebody asks, an Australian. Another answers the Bogeyman, but nobody is ready to laugh. The guide switches to a cold British English accent. “Not a bogeyman. Tata Duende.”

Another tourist holds up a brochure with the thick little man with the backwards feet, and dressed in red. “This guy?” They seem unconvinced.

The guide makes the sign of the cross and replies. “It is a demon. No matter what the government says. Maybe the oldest demon. You will know it by his backwards feet and thumbless hands.” She looks at you. “It lures children into the forest and tears off their thumbs.” 

You bury your hands into your pockets. 

As the bus nears Orange Walk, the horror dulls. Now everyone’s ready to laugh at the jump scare. Oh, the stories they’ll tell their friends about the howler monkeys having an orgy in the bushes. The tour guide ignores them, but Mom, oddly angry, shakes her head, and whispers, “No, that’s wrong.” She’s too quiet for anyone but you. “Tata Duende wasn’t the demon back there. He keeps the spirits in and the people out. Just some folk need to learn the hard way.”

She doesn’t ask if you’re okay. Usually, the question is rhetorical. But right now, you want to scream like the monster in the forest.  You getting eaten alive in front of her would have turned your mother inside out with grief, yet despite your guilt, you feel cheated because now it’s too late. The climate has woken up the disease in your bones and it is ravenous. You can feel it.

Flocks of parakeets and parrots fly across the road. Hundreds of them pelt the bus with their shit. Won’t be long now.

* * *

Three hours later, you are back in Belize City. Everyone is preparing for the first night of Carnival. Some stores close early as vendors set up tents, but Mom has forced you to join her in a record shop across from the hotel. She says her older brother used to bring her there. You miss most of the conversation as she runs from aisle to aisle, because you are burning up from the inside.

But somehow, the pain is different. Instead of torturing you with rivets and seizure inducing spikes, it’s a heat building in your chest and stomach. You are about to tell Mom you need to get back to the room when you hear— really hear—calypso for the first time. 

Somebody’s silver boom-box blasts Solomon’s “Calypso Rose.” Followed by “Tobago Girls,” “Ragamuffin,” and “Hot Hot Hot.” It was always there playing in the airport, the taxis, the bus, the hotel lobby, beneath your mother’s de-accented voice. This time the music is feeding this thing inside of you, cracking you open like a seed.         

A woman with a giant silver belt buckle, comes down the street, spinning her hips hard enough to spark against air and light the world on fire. People swarm the intersection after her, suddenly charged with joy. Seconds later, we are swept up in the middle of a spontaneous parade. Mom laughs, dances, and smiles like you have never seen. You’d like it if this was the end of your memories of Belize. 

But, Mom, practically manic, pulls you into the crowded street before you can tell her no. You’re surrounded. You’re burning. You have no choice. Tear it all off! The hood, the gloves, the glasses, the jacket! Oh, rip out of your own skin, if you could only find the seam, rip out of your skin. The woman with the belt buckle sees you exposed and screams.

* * *

After some friendly Belizeans helped Mom carry you back to the hotel room, you sleep. Dream. Calypso lyrics become steam escaping your fractured femurs, patella, and your skull. Marrow boils over and tendons in your hands melt like wax while you lay silent and catatonic, sweating blood in the air-conditioned hotel room. 

You wake up in time to roll out of bed, crawl to the toilet, and throw up. You flush the sick with only the quickest glance at what has come out of you: green, gristly stuff and black blood.

Drumming and excited voices projected from megaphones get your attention and you look out the window. It’s nearly evening. Mom passes by an elderly man with misshapen legs, sitting in a wheelchair in the hotel parking lot. He wears a sharp, cherry red, velvet suit and matching low brimmed hat. His spotless, green alligator skin shoes twist almost backwards on shriveled feet. He is familiar. He looks dead at you and stands up. 

The door slams. It’s Mom entering the room behind you. Caught by surprise, you trip but catch yourself with uncanny speed. Your body is lighter, as if your bones are hollow. What’s more, the constant pain that has lived in your joints is gone, nothing but a ghost. 

Mom is at your side. You let her help you stand and dress. You see yourself in the bathroom mirror. Your face has an otherworldly symmetry: wide, wide cheekbones, swollen nose, short spikes poking through your skin reminding you of a porcupine’s back or ritual scarring in Africa. Your mouth is stretched into a Chesher cat grin, nearly ear to ear.

Awed, you touch the mirror with your right hand and notice the bloating around your now useless thumb. 

“What is happening to me?” 

Mom sighs. “There is something I should have told you a long time ago.” Even after this declaration, the story comes out slowly. “You and your uncle don’t just have the same middle name; you share the same…condition. Your grandparents tried everything to save him, all except one. The obeah men, the magicians, said they’d seen it before. They said the only way he would live was to leave him in the forest. That my brother, belonged to Tata Duende. 

“They refused. Instead, they went looking for better doctors. That’s why we moved to Chicago in the first place. But it was the sixties. The best doctors wouldn’t see Black boys with no money. When he was your age, he died alone in a hospital.” 

You can’t believe what you’re hearing. “You brought me here so that you could give me to some demon?” It comes out much calmer than you feel.

She doesn’t answer the question. “I meant what I told you before we came here. Even broken hearts can make moments of joy. And we need them. God, I need them so badly, baby. I knew that eventually…one way or another, you were leaving me. I’d have to make a choice. But—”

You are so angry that as she speaks, a loud buzzing drowns her out. You still can’t bring yourself to direct your anger towards her. Instead, you run out of the room, out of the hotel, down the street, into the fading light with Mom calling after you, shouting your name.

By the time you stop running, the sky has dyed itself three different shades of purple. The sun finally slips behind the city, like a coin into a slot. Lights come on all around you. The night is alive in a way that the day can’t hope to match. Shadows take on strange colors, and you can smell everything. It takes longer than it should to realize you just ran, an impossibility since you were four.

You keep your distance from the crowd as you explore. Near the edge of the city, you enter the middle of a wide lot circled by mahogany tree stumps, some as tall as a grown man. Even with your enhanced vision, the large tent appears out of nowhere. Papa Midnight’s Extravaganza of Curiosities! 

Carnival wasn’t the head on collision between Vegas and New Orleans. It was still purely Belizean, created by mothers for their children. So, it didn’t seem out of place for there to be something like a circus. 

It begins to rain. You duck into the large tent as it fills with families. A man dances past you dressed in silver spandex with CDs glued all over his body and clean white sneakers on his feet. His daughter rides his shoulders, pulling at his thick wet hair and screeching with exhilaration. A gaggle of six-year-olds in purple and white face paint catch sight of you. Instead of crying or shouting, they laugh and bump along after their adults.  

People find their seats as carneys wearing mime masks troop into the single large ring. Two of them wearing poke-a-dot leotards hula-hoop poorly while the other four fail at juggling assorted household items, a toaster, rotary phone, dinner plates and a table lamp with the cord. Their feigned lack of dexterity is impressive. The crowd laughs when large heavy objects fall, missing them by inches as they summersault around, knocking into each other. It occurs to you that somehow you never get a good look at their hands or feet. 

You see your mom on the other side of the ring, and she sees you. You wonder at what powers led her to you across the city. You want to go to her and apologize for running away, tell her she was right, and how she gave you life twice. But then the strings of bulbs spit sparks and go out. Just when the crowd begins shifting uncomfortably, a tight circle of spotlight illuminates one figure, the ringmaster. He wears a red velvet suit and top hat. The man from the parking lot. Your fingers gouge dents into the bottom of your armrests.

“God fearing, Belizeans,” he says, “The darkest jewels shine the brightest.” He rocks back and forth like a pendulum near the end of its strength, showing his body from the waist up. Mid swing, he removes his hat and bows.

“In Asia,” he says, bobbing his head from side to side, “they say from the One came the Two, from the Two the Ten Thousand. They also believe most people, though phenomenally blessed with a human body, are animal in nature. Dog people, cat people, snake people.” He flicks his tongue between his lips and children giggle.

“Modern science confirms both. From birth to death, the sum of nature’s imagination is locked away in one drop of our blood. But sometimes, before a child is born, a relic breaks free, loosing animal nature from its cage.

“They are rare, to be preserved, old gods walking among us.” He cracks a whip he hadn’t been holding the moment before. “But they must be kept in their place.” The spotlight expands revealing a wagon behind him, as beautiful as it is old. 

“I say to you again, the darkest jewels shine the brightest. By their light, we are humbly reminded of our favored place in all of creation.” He laughed, like a barking dog. “The Devil has been busy in God’s menagerie. I give you the Jaguar Man.”

The spotlight creeps into the cage, expanding across the hay strewn floor like a fattening moon. Something swims the deep dark beyond its reach. Finally, there is nowhere else to hide. Talons splay and click on the cage floor. When it stands up, one arm over its face, we could tell it’s man-shaped, but with fur instead of skin, and so profoundly black, it hurts the eyes in the same way as staring into a solar eclipse. The ringmaster cracks the whip, and the Jaguar Man drops its arms from its face and arches its back like a cat. Two golden orbs shudder into existence. Men cry out.

You can see Mom has stopped moving, shocked by the creature, or perhaps because she knows what’s about to happen.

“In the age before conquest, it ruled the ignorant. It was worshipped by empires in many forms with many names.”

The ringmaster lashes the whip against the bars of the cage with each syllable. The Jaguar Man jumps back and makes a hateful noise deep in its chest. The same sound you heard at the ruins. The ringmaster strides forward toward the crowd, whip high.

“Do not be cowed by its shape!” he shouts, “It is still an animal with an animal’s nature, and it will be tamed.” 

The Jaguar Man roams back and forth, eyes rolling in their sockets as it slams into the sides of its cage again, and again, and again. The Jaguar Man suddenly freezes, head cocked and staring at the bars. We all heard it. Something had bent. It smiles. 

Here is the spectacular Death you welcomed in Lamanai. But you are transformed. The fear chumming the air is indiscriminate from yours, and you have never felt more human. You want to live. “Everyone needs to run,” you whisper. Then you shout. “Mom, run!” A jolt of bone growth drops you to your knees.

The Jaguar Man collects our breaths into its lungs like prayers. The sound it makes comes from an inhuman oral cavity and throat. And yet, it speaks. “MOTHERFUCKER!”  

The Jaguar Man smashes through the bars. The expression on the ringmaster’s face as the Jaguar Man pounces on his back could only be described as oddly…annoyed. The lights go out as the Jaguar Man closes its jaws around the ringmaster’s neck and wrenches.

Pandemonium. The crowd surges, crushing you to the floor. Somebody stomps on your arm and the bone snaps. The noise is horrendous. Much worse though is when a scream cuts short followed by loud, wet ripping. 

The lights spark like camera flashes. In the staccato strobe, the Jaguar Man towers over your mother, intestine and skin dangling from its bottom lip.

 “Good memories.” The two of us pouring out the rum.  

You pick up a rock and throw it, hitting the Jaguar Man in the face. “Over here!” You run at an angle. The Jaguar Man leaps past Mom and chases you.

 “Good memories.” Mom’s excitement in the record store. Her laughing and dancing in the parade. 

As the Jaguar Man closes in, the scrum of bodies picks you up, bounces your shoulder hard against a tent pole, and throws you. You flail, touch canvas, the edge of the tent. You tear a gash in the side with new claws like it was paper before dragging yourself into the rain and mud. 

“Good memories.” Sharing mangoes on the bus.

 The Jaguar Man lands on top of you, its mouth opened impossibly wide, showing row upon row of shiny black teeth, tongue uncurling to lash your face. Bloody four-fingered claws catch the Jaguar Man by the top and bottom jaw. 

Your hands. 

A part of your brain wonders how your arm and shoulder healed so quickly. Another part marvels at the strength it must take to keep those jaws from closing around your head. But most of you is struggling, kicking, shaking, weakening, as blood streams from your shredded fingers.

Suddenly, the Jaguar Man is jerked back. Dozens of four-figured hands drag the Jaguar Man away as it howls, curses, and plows tracks in the mud.

You stand up. The adrenaline in your system flushes away, leaving you shivering. People stream out of the tent and run away, until only Mom is left. She is crying. She has no words. She points. 

Behind you, the forest is bright as a night sky, full of red stars. Not stars. Eyes, like your own. You hear music that’s warm as the sun on your face, clear as Caribbean water cupping your ankles, nourishing as the first time you heard calypso. You understand the broad Kriol lyrics.

“Welcome home.”