Chapter 11 Dummala

The Summer Court dismisses Mrs. Akan's petition. She is distraught; to calm her, Vidyucchika suggests that she ask Odeg to re-file it with the Storm Court. Odeg grumbles but acquiesces. After months of delays and abbreviated hearings and additional paperwork, not to mention multiple appearances at court by both Mr. and Mrs. Akan, the former wearing his bloody shirt despite Mrs. Akan's best efforts to persuade him to change, this results in an unexpected success: the Storm Court suspends the import ban as unconstitutional, pending review by a special commission it establishes for this purpose.

"It will be years before the commission finalizes its membership, never mind publishes a report," Odeg says. "In the meantime, stock up."

Dummala prices drop precipitously and Mrs. Akan gets death threats from would-be magnates who had invested in yakahalu plantations while the ban went into effect. Dummala resin is made from the gum—amber in colour, translucent and sticky—secreted from the bark of the yakahalu tree, which was once endemic to but is now nearly extinct in the Luriati peninsula. Cheap southern dummala floods the night markets, and the dead are forced into retreat.

Odeg stops visiting, partly because the quest is completed—the curse is broken, he tells Vidyucchika when she visits him at the office at Mrs. Akan's instigation to ask why he hasn't come by to see his mother—and partly because the house is suffused with dummala smoke at all hours. Odeg shrugs.

"If she understood that she was the one keeping me away," he says, "then she would have to admit that she got me killed in the first place. But she was never good at admitting things."

"Neither of you are," Vidyucchika says. She's sitting on his desk. His officemates are used to seeing her around; nobody even looks up when she comes to visit. Every time she recrosses her legs, her skirt riding up a little more with the movement, her bare thigh threatens to knock over a bottle of dark ink sitting dangerously close. It has too narrow a base; it sways even without direct contact, responding to the subtle vibrations transmitted from her alive body through the dead and flimsy wood of the desk, or perhaps even through the dead air. Her always-fevered heat seems to her to fill the room. She's waiting to see if he notices and moves the bottle before the spill. The dead are often not observant.

Odeg sighs. "I shot him because I thought he was going to kill her."

"Of course it was not an accident."

"Of course." Odeg leans back and looks up at her. "Fine, I'll fill in the gap in your little flowchart."

As the River Fills the Ocean

I had been thinking about it ever since he brought home the gun. It was fully premeditated. Nobody believed that was possible for a boy of ten. He was so proud of that gun; he showed me himself how to load it and fire it. He loved me, you see, almost as much as he hated her. Every few months, for as long as I remembered, he would hit her badly enough that I worried she would not live through the night, especially since he would not allow her to go to hospital or call a doctor. I would sit with her while she gasped and moaned and cried, I would wipe off the blood with my shirt. Every few months, you understand? My whole life. It was like a natural cycle, like tide and storm. I would count off the new moons, and never did more than three elapse without a night like that. Sometimes only one.

I was too young to understand the politics of the troubled times, not because they were so difficult but because there was too much of it to learn. Since they had been happening since I was born, I did not understand that the troubled times were different from ordinary life. To me, ordinary life was full of death; funerals upon funerals, bodies in coffins and bodies in pyres, bodies in the street, homes on fire, beatings and screaming. My parents were like gods to me, and their lives a myth, an epic recurrence, something cosmic and unchangeable as the sky. So when I planned to kill him for what he was doing, I cast myself knowingly and willingly in the role of god-killer. I made myself a cosmic hero, a fire-thief, a trickster. I bided my time until he raised his hand again, two new moons after I swore I would do it for real, for real-real. I went and found the gun—he kept it in the drawer of his bedside table, fully loaded—while they were enacting their ritual. He saw me before I fired: I said This to my kin. The recoil knocked me off my feet, but I got him in the heart. He was dead before I hit the floor.

Then they both got up, bleeding. My mother fussed over his wound; my father was calm, dead and slack. He picked up the gun from where I'd dropped it and put it away, he said, for safety. They lived together, dead and alive, for a year, during which my mother persuaded herself and him both that I must be possessed to have killed my own father, and for why? For what possible reason? She could not admit to her abuse; she never spoke of it. With it erased from history, there was no reason in the world for me to do what I did, except madness, except possession. The more she thought about the senseless violence that I had wrought, the more frenzied she became. She took me from adura to adura, looking for a practitioner who would go to extreme lengths to exorcise me of my monstrosity. Chants were not enough, she said. Lemons and black roosters weren't enough. The masked dances weren't enough. Finally, she found an adura whose method was to beat the afflicted, to whip them and herself into a frenzy, driving the devil out with pain. My mother howled like a devil while she watched, and I did too, as the cane flayed open my naked back.

My wounds became infected. I died. My mother refused to pay the adura, who cursed her and me both—I forget what with, but who among us doesn't bear too many curses? She tried to keep me home, but I could not stand to be near her: I ran away. I gather that my mother finally threw my befuddled dead father out of the house, after that.

Dead children are a world of their own, you know. It's a different culture. I spent some time there. Eventually I decided I wanted to grow up, and I did; I travelled; I went to law school—not in Luriat, they don't accept the dead here. I attended the Law College in Green Angels Pier, in another world than this. They don't accept my degree here, but I am allowed to work as a paralegal. Now that the case is over, I think I might go back to Green Angels. It was a better world, or perhaps it was just kinder to me. They really do have a pier there, you know, a great old impossible thing that strides out to sea for miles, made of huge stone slabs so finely joined you can't even see the seams, placed through some unknown ancient technique on a forest of hexagonal columns of basalt rising from the purple sea. I spent many evenings sitting on the edge of a cold stone slab with a book, dangling my feet, feeling the salt burn on my back. I thought then that I missed home, but now I think those were the best days of my death.

What? No, my earlobes were never long. They were always just like this. I'm my own person, Vee. Stop trying to fit everybody else into your mythology. I have too much of my own.

Watch out with your leg—oh, look what you've done—what a mess!

Mr. Akan had become so used to living in the house during the time of the import ban that he'd even taken to sleeping in his bed again, which forced Mrs. Akan out of it and into Vidyucchika's. Now that the braziers never stop burning, Mr. Akan is barred from the house. He stops coming by. Everybody has their own bed to sleep in.

Lambajihva clearly approves; he shifts from sulking in the walls to skittering in the ceiling above Vidyucchika's bed. She can almost feel his weight on her as she sleeps.

"Maybe he's moved on," Mrs. Akan says one day at breakfast. She's looking at the door, on which she has still not changed the lock.

"Like met someone else?" Vidyucchika asks.

"To the next life," Mrs. Akan clarifies. "He should never meet anybody else." Vidyucchika can only nod. The city of the dead is as haunted as ever, but Mrs. Akan has found a kind of peace, permanently wreathed in bitter smoke. She has stopped asking after Odeg.

"Now we have only your problem to deal with," Mrs. Akan says cheerfully, nodding her head at the nearest wall, incorrectly as it turns out. Lambajihva is in the wall opposite, behind Vidyucchika. She can feel his presence as if he were standing in the room, his dead atoms taking up space and displacing air.

"He doesn't care about the smoke," Vidyucchika says. "He's not from around here."

Mrs. Akan asks what that means, but Vidyucchika fills her mouth with appams so as to not have to answer. Even the food and water in this house now taste like bitter smoke, infused with its warding properties. Breakfast in particular is a bane, it having been a certain late husband's favourite meal of the day.

The phone rings, and Mrs. Akan disappears into smoke to answer. She is gone long enough that Vidyucchika assumes she is speaking to one of her many friends—never her family—for hours of rambling gossip that Vidyucchika has grown to find comforting as background noise. But then Mrs. Akan re- appears looking troubled, or perhaps confused, and says, "It's for you."

Vidyucchika finds her way to the phone through the haze; it's in what Mrs. Akan refers to as the telephone nook. Mrs. Akan does not believe in the abominable cellular; she likes to have a place specifically for telephonic conversation. The telephone itself is an old rotary phone, a pleasant green plastic, tucked into the hollow under the arm of an even older sewing ma- chine, long since retired from active duty, which sits on a treadle table with cast iron legs. Vidyucchika seats herself at the sewing machine—the chair is padded and comfortable—and picks up the receiver from where it rests on the bed plate. As she has seen Mrs. Akan do while on the phone, she spins the wheel on the sewing machine. It has a pleasing, oiled smoothness. Her bones feel hollow from fever. She lifts the receiver to her ear but does not speak.

"Your parents got in touch with me." It's Odeg, strange as it is to hear his voice. "They saw you in the papers and called the firm."

"I'm in the papers?"

"Don't you read the news?" Odeg sounds entirely serious, as always, and she can't tell if it's her or the concept of newspaper journalism that he's mocking, if he's mocking anything at all. "The Storm Court decision was big news for this city of the dead. You, me, my mother, we show up in most articles. There's a photo of you helping my mother down the steps after the judgement."

Vidyucchika makes a face, realizes Odeg can't see it, then translates it awkwardly into a grunt.

"They wanted me to tell you that your grandmother passed," Odeg says. "They already had the funeral and everything, but she'd like to see you."

"Oh," Vidyucchika says. She remembered this time to have an audible reaction, though she remains dissatisfied with its timbre. She started to articulate it at the lesser surprise of her grandmother's death—grandmothers are old, they die—and it slipped from her lips before the greater surprise arrived. "Oh?" she tries again. She has no control over this conversation, with Odeg of all people, any more than she does over the events which it is recounting. She hates the telephone, she decides.

"Okay, bye," she says hopefully. She spins the wheel again. "Wait—"

"Yes?"

"Which grandmother?"