short story

I am not dead.
     The thought jolts him into consciousness, bringing a strident tattoo of pain drumming on every nerve. And something else, something heavy pressing him down. A cold, hard, unyielding thing, caging him on the surface of the museum roof - trapped!
     He jerks his body convulsively, twisting frantically until he manages to wriggle free, skinning his hands on the rough concrete in his panic. Then lies with his cheek against the roof, breathing. The air tastes of blood, and each breath brings a kick in the ribs.
     He stands unsteadily, buffeted by the wind that is still gusting fiercely, driving fine needles of rain into his skin and soaking through his sodden garments. The sky has a greenish cast, lowering under massed torn clouds; the dull glow of the obscured sun is dipping towards the skyline in the west. He stares at the distant fringe of buildings, their familiar outlines serene in the fading light. Don’t look down, he tells himself. Not yet. If he doesn’t look he can pretend that nothing has changed.
     But he can’t stop his gaze from falling, as if it has been sucked into the chaotic turmoil beneath him, and the illusion is abruptly dispelled. Everything below two stories is submerged. He’d imagined that it would be a sea, a silver shimmering sea blotting out the chaos and rage and greed in the world, but it isn’t. It’s a roiling churning broth, slapping against the buildings, thick with debris: cars, splintered wood, tree branches, twisted metal, boats... as if the city had been swallowed, shredded and regurgitated in disgust.
     Is anyone alive out there? Crouching on a rooftop like him, or clinging to some piece of flotsam? It seems impossible that many could have survived. The city had been dying already, the subways and basements under water as the higher swells each year breached the levees; the skyscrapers falling in as their foundations tilted and cracked in the sodden earth. Only the destitute remained, those who’d survived the waves of malaria and cholera, living like rats in the shells of buildings, or in Vegas, the huge shantytown that carpeted what had once been Central Park. Before the latest hurricane they’d sent helicopters with loud hailers calling all to evacuate the city. For days he has stood on the roof, watching the ragged tide dragging their meagre possessions through the streets, as the helicopters wheeled away, their duty perfunctorily executed.
     The sky darkens as the copper disc of the clouded sun slides behind the buildings. A wave of dizzying nausea sweeps over him, buckling his legs so that he sinks down against the parapet. He puts his face on his knees, and notices first the blood clouding the puddle at his feet, and then the long ragged tear through his trousers into the flesh on his calf. Deep, almost to the bone, pale beads of fat gleaming in the blood. As soon as he sees it, it begins to hurt savagely.
     It’ll kill me, he thinks. A cut like that... infection, gangrene... the slow, grudging death he’d dreaded. He should be dead already, should have been blown into oblivion, just one more flying fragment. He’d come onto the roof to give himself to the storm, to let it rip through him, tearing out the old sorrows, leaving him clean-boned and bloodless.
     But he’d been flung against the turret and trapped by - he peers across - a piece of the water tank by the look of it, pinned by the wind like an insect caught on a windshield. He feels a surge of disgust at his persistence in living, this unseemly clinging to life in this land of dead things. The long dead in the glass cases of the museum, the newly dead bobbing together under the waves, bumping against the plethora of things they’d so treasured when alive. Laz-y-boy recliners. Footspas. Plastic fish that sing don’t worry, be happy.
     He could just stay on the roof, in the wind and rain. Death would come faster here. But a sudden craving for the warm enfolding stillness of the museum impels him to drag himself up painfully against the parapet and limp to the stairhead, wrench open the door and half fall inside.
     It’s dark in here, but he knows it well enough. He stumbles down the stairs along a short passage and into the hall of Ornithischian Dinosaurs. A cool spray gusts into his face. In the dim light he sees that several panes of the tall windows have been smashed in, and one of the great dinosaur skeletons has crashed onto the floor. He stumbles through the glass and broken bones into the corridor leading to the old “Dinostore” shop where he’s set up home. He gropes through his few possessions until his fingers curl onto the flashlight. He switches it on, and does a quick sweep – everything seems to be untouched here. His head and leg are throbbing, but he needs to see the animals before he can rest.
     He makes his way through the passageways of his expansive home, a building he has not left for twenty-five years. Since that day, which still comes to him in the strobe light staccato images of madness recalled. He’d travelled to this country to receive his father’s posthumous award for bravery in the service of wildlife conservation. But his mind finally shattered when they called his father’s name. He’d crushed the champagne glass in his hand, blood splattering his hired suit, and run out, through the cars and people and noise, running until he found himself at the museum, drawn by the billboard of the rhinos displayed outside.
     How safe it had felt, then. The great thick walls, the dim light... a place where nothing could ever die because everything was already dead. He’d hidden in storerooms, pretending to be a visitor, scavenging the bins when his money ran out. They threw enough food away every day to sustain a village.
     Doc found him, and helped him hide. Gave him work sorting collections, fed him when the food ran out. The museum had been closed for years now. For a while they’d kept a “skeleton staff” (how tired that old joke became), but it was only Doc and Sono in the end. They talked about taxonomy, compared the Latin names and Zulu names of the millions of species that once roamed the earth. As if uttering their names could stop them from slipping into the long dark night of extinction.
     We must go, Doc said when the helicopters came with loud hailers. Worst hurricane on record... they say the whole island will go.
     But Sono couldn’t leave. And finally Doc had gone reluctantly. I’ll come back, he promised.
     Did Doc get out? Throughout the night before the hurricane hit the shore, Sono had heard the sounds of gunshots, screaming and sirens, as the rats (human and rodent) had fought over each other to get across the bridges – the tunnels were all flooded. How would an old brittle twig like Doc get through that?
     As he heads down the marble staircase to the Hall of African Mammals on the second floor, the oily roil of water gleams in his flashlight. He wades down into it – thigh deep, the currents eddying painfully around the cut in his leg. The elephants have stood their ground, emerging like ancient dreams from the water, but some of the smaller animals have been swept from their alcoves. Their forms bob against him, glass eyes gleaming in the torch light as he moves it over them.
     The solar lamp he’d kept burning in the rhinos’ alcove has gone out, but the animals are fine – their alcove is high, and the water is just lapping the edge. Mother, father, child: the archetypal family. The hollow promise of a future, belied by the bleak horror that seems to lurk in their eyes as they stand, staring darkly past their horns into the chaos beyond. The small patch of dusty grassland on which they eternally graze is scattered and sodden, as if the rhinos had trampled it in panic in the night. The water must have spilled into the alcove, which is no longer encased in glass. Broken when the last vandals sawed off the horns, despite the sign explaining that they were fibreglass. He and Doc had fashioned new horns from the moulds kept in the back rooms, but the glass was never repaired.
     There is an orange smear on the young one’s mouth. As Sono leans forward to inspect it, his flashlight catches the gleam of eyes. Real eyes, not glass ones. A scrabble as the thing tries to burrow deeper under the mother rhino’s belly, but Sono grasps it and hauls out ... a child. Barely recognisable as such – a ragged, feral, filthy, thing, twisting round to bite his hand.
      “Hold still!” Sono roars, “or I’ll drown you like a rat.”
     The child freezes and squints up at Sono fearfully. Sono sets him down more gently on the grass fragments at the edge of the alcove. The child shrinks away from him.
      “What’s your name, boy?” (Is it a boy?)
      “Draino.”
      “Draino? What kind of name is that?”
     The boy is silent, staring at his feet.
      “How you get in here?”
     Nothing.
      “Where’s your family, Draino? Your folks know you here?”
     The boy waves to the three rhinos.
      “Them’s my folks.”
      “They’re rhinos, boy. I mean your real family.”
     The boy sticks out his lower lip and glowers at Sono. He reaches behind him and pats the young rhino on its orange-dusted nose.
      “’S my brother. Brother Rhino. I gi’m food.”
     Sono sees now the empty packet at the young rhino’s feet. He picks it up. Cheezy Kurls in yellow on the red shiny foil packaging. The inside of the foil is dusted with orange.
      “Where you get these?”
     The boy hangs his head.
      “Man drop ’em. Everyone running and running cos’ the Hurricane coming, an’ I runned an’ runned an’ squeezed in the pipe an’ I found my family. If that Hurricane come here, my family gon’ stick’m with those sharp horns. Gon’ stick’m right where it hurts, mister. Right where it hurts.”
      A sudden animation at the end, piercing the sullen passivity.
     Sono considers the boy. A refugee from Vegas no doubt. He and Doc had tried to make the museum impenetrable to intruders, but perhaps there was an air vent somewhere that a small child could enter. He must have gotten in here before the storm. Much good it would do him.
      “I can’t help you,” he says. “I got nothing for you, see? You’ll just have to fend for yourself.”
     The boy nods solemnly, as if Sono has given him a useful instruction.
     Sono turns to go, pushing against the water, pulling away from the drag of the boy’s eyes on the back of his head. Haai wena! His long dead mother scolds. You just going to leave that child? Just leave that boy alone in the dark?
     Sono sighs, and turns back. The boy watches impassively. Barely six years old, by the size of him, and already with such low expectations of adults.
      “Get on my back,” Sono says gruffly. The boy reaches small hands over his shoulders, tucks bony knees around his waist. The feel of him, this small live thing, stirs something in Sono, more like nausea than tenderness ... that something so vulnerable could exist in a world so brutal.
     He wades back past the ghostly elephants, and puts the boy down when he reaches the stairs. Back in the storeroom he switches off the flashlight, switches on the solar lamp and considers. The water tanks and solar panels on the roof are gone, but Doc had filled several water barrels from the tanks. Composting toilet still works, although he’ll run out of sawdust sooner or later. Solar lamps can be charged at the windows in the Dinosaur Hall. Enough food for a week perhaps cans of beans, corn meal. Gas stove. First Aid kit. A self-inflating dinghy with waterproof lockers. He’d watched Doc fussing around, getting all this ready, bringing in supplies or dredging them from storerooms. Seemed too cruel to tell him that he had no intention of surviving the storm.
     The boy is eyeing the tins hungrily. Looks like he’s never had much to eat, even before the storm. Sono opens a can of beans and passes it to him, with a spoon. He shovels the food into his mouth eagerly but keeps his eyes alert, darting between Sono and the door as if calculating his escape route should Sono try to snatch the food back. Sono watches him, absorbed by the pale streaks appearing in the grime as the juice runs down his chin. A white child, he thinks, still conditioned enough by his homeland to be surprised by impoverished white people, although God knows there are enough of them here.
     His leg has been throbbing dully, but a sudden sharp stab of pain reminds him that it needs attention.
      “Gotta do something, Draino. You stay here. Finish that food, there’s water to drink if you want it.”
     He gathers dry clothes, a bucket of water, rags and the first aid kit, lights another lamp to take with him, and moves to the bathroom down the hall. No running water of course, but he can empty the water down the drain.
     He puts a plug in a basin, and fills it with water from the bucket, props his leg on an upturned bin and examines the wound: a long ragged gaping tear into his calf, embedded with torn fabric and grit. He cuts his trousers away and picks out the scraps with tweezers. He pours disinfectant into the wound, grimacing against the sting, as rivulets of cloudy liquid and blood run over his foot into the drain below. He pours antibiotic powder onto the serrated flesh, lights a candle, threads a needle, heats it in the flame, holds the lip of the cut together and begins to sew. Each stab of the needle sends a hot shard of pain shooting through his leg, and by the time he has managed five crude stitches and covered them with a dressing he is sweating and nauseous.
     As he winds the bandage over the dressing, he catches a pale ghost in the mirror  the boy, standing behind, watching. He darts away when Sono sees him.
      “Come back!” Sono calls.
     He pauses.
      “Come here, I won’t hurt you, just want to wash your face.”
     The boy approaches warily. Sono ties off the bandage, takes a clean rag, wets it in the bucket, and wipes the boy’s face. He jerks back as if the water were acid.
      “Hold still, boy. Just want to wipe your face and hands. We have standards in this establishment.”
     He wipes the cloth gently over the face... cheeks, mouth, eyes screwed shut, ears... such painfully familiar geography. Where were they now, the ones whose faces he’d washed, who’d washed his own as a child? What good is this, some part of him snarls. What good is this pretence that we have hope here? That we are still guests at life’s table, and not beggars at the window waiting for death? He wipes the boy’s hands brusquely, then peels off his own sodden shirt and trousers, and puts on the clean clothes. The boy is staring at his face in the mirror, touching it and then the reflection as if it is a wonder he has never encountered. Perhaps it is. *

Back in the Dinostore, he sees that the boy has found the set of plastic animals he’d saved from the store before it was looted. The African Wildlife collection. Set out on the great planes of the carpeted floor: elephants, rhinos, giraffes, sable antelope, springbok, buffalo, lion, zebra, leopard, crocodiles. Neatly lined up in pairs, as if setting off in search of an Ark to carry them into a future.
      “It’s alright, you can play with those.” Sono says, seeing the boy’s fear when his eyes fall on the animals. He kneels down besides them.
      “C’m here,” he says, “I’ll teach you their names.”
     The boy comes forward.
      “Elephant, indlovu, the wise one”, Sono says. “Giraffe, indulamithi, the quiet one who is taller than the trees; lion, ingonyama, the royal one who gets the meat; rhino, ubhejane, the strong one...” Sono holds up each animal as he names it then sets it down besides its partner.
      “These are their names in isiZulu, the language we speak where I come from in Africa. Once all these animals lived there, near the place I lived when I was a child. But now“
     Sono knocks down the elephants, the Sable antelope, the giraffes, the leopards, the rhinos. “These ones are all gone. And many others have gone. Many, many others.”
     The boy stares at the fallen animals.
      “Where they go?” he whispers.
      “People killed them, boy. People killed them all, with their guns and their oil and their coal.”
     He pushes himself up, and sets out a bedroll and sleeping bag for the boy. “Time to sleep now. We cannot waste the light.”

Sono sleeps fitfully. He’d placed the boy’s bedding across the room, but in the night the child brings his sleeping bag over and curls against his back. Sono rolls over to watch him sleep, inhaling the sharp musty odour rising from his small body. His face is silver in the moonlight, his long eyelashes dark against the pale cheeks, a plastic rhino in each hand. What can he know of rhinos, this boy? What does he see in them? Through the high window the moon looks down on the world, just as it always has.

The next day Sono heats water on the gas stove, fills the bucket and takes it down to the bathroom. Water and gas are precious, but if he’s going to sleep beside this boy something must be done.
     He comes back and takes the boy by the hand. As they near the bathroom the child tries to break away, but Sono picks him up and carries him kicking and bucking, uttering a guttural wail of fear and distress.
      “I’m not going to hurt you, boy. You just need a bath.”
     In the bathroom he sits on the closed toilet seat, the boy gripped between his knees, while he chops the grey matted hair that is crawling with lice. The boy keeps up his low keening growl as Sono tears of his clothes, then stands shivering while he washes him, his shoulders hunched, shorn head down, as if waiting for an executioner’s axe.
      “There, that wasn’t so bad was it?” Sono asks as he towels him dry.
     Sono dresses him in clothes from the Dinostore - shorts and a t-shirt with “I “ and a picture of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Much too big, but at least they’re clean.
      “Why you called Draino, boy?” he asks as he dresses him.
      “They found me in a drain when I was a baby. Pastor John says my Ma ’n' Pa is drain rats. But he wrong. Them rhino’s my family.”

Sono takes the boy to see the Peoples of Africa on the second floor. The water has subsided, but it is still over his ankles, and he carries the child on his back. Doc had assured Sono that the Peoples of Africa are not stuffed, but he can’t help wondering. There they are, a family of Batwa “pygmies” aiming arrows into the trees at birds that will never be shot, masked dancers from Guinea Bissau suspended in mid leap. The information plaques describe these scenes in the present tense (the men go hunting while the women pound the corn) as if they are contemporary vistas into these lives. As if this static, simplistically narrated, ritualised village life still sustains itself somewhere in the world. As if all the forests the Abatwa once roamed have not been razed by loggers and miners, the Abatwa massacred and raped, the animals slaughtered by poachers or soldiers.
      “See boy? This is how people lived once...” Sono makes up stories about the frozen figures. The boy holds on to his shoulders, saying nothing but it feels as if he is listening. Such a still child. Langalihle flits through Sono’s memory, chattering like a small bright stream, always asking questions, skipping, dancing... This boy says little, keeps his movements small, everything to stop himself from being noticed. But some stubborn spirit seems coiled inside him. He is not all broken.
      They wade through the Hall of African Mammals to the rhinos. The animals watch them from their dim, shadowy alcoves; the elephants charge eagerly towards them, trunks raised.
      “Indlovu, the wise one”, the boy whispers against his neck.
      Sono stops so that the boy can stroke a huge leathery ear, his small hands pale against the wrinkled grey skin.
     At the rhino’s enclave, he scrambles off Sono’s back and scrabbles across to them.
      “Look Mama Rhino, look Papa Rhino, look Brother Rhino... “, he croons, showing them the two plastic rhinos that he has been carrying all morning.
      “New friends for you.”
     He whispers into the baby rhino’s ear, then holds his own ear against its mouth, and nods. He turns to Sono.
      “Rhino family sad down here in the dark. They wan’ come live wi’us.”
      “Forget it boy.”
     But half an hour later, they are hauling Brother Rhino up the stairs.
      Moving Mama and Papa Rhino is impossible – they are old, heavy models, the skin stretched over wood and wire and plaster. But the young one has been redone with moulded foam. Much lighter, but bulky and still a challenge. They’d floated him out of the gallery into the hall, then Sono cut the old canvas fire hose off the wall and tied one end around the rhino’s middle. Now the boy is putting everything into pulling him up the marble steps, eyes screwed up with the effort.
      “Pull, boy!” Sono says, when he flags. “That’s your brother there. Don’t you let your brother go... Family gotta stick together.”

They put Brother Rhino by the broken windows in the Ornithischian Dinosaur hall, so that he can gaze out at the ruined city. The small plastic animals are placed in a reverent circle around him.
      “Brother Rhino happy now,” the boy says, his face transformed by a smile that seems to illuminate him from the inside. Sono finds something like a smile tugging his own mouth and eyes.
      “What ’bout his mom and dad? They gotta be missing their boy.”
     The child considers this. “They happy,” he says at length. “They happy ’cos their boy’s happy, ’cos their boy’s wi’ his brother.”
     Sono looks at the rhino over the bent head of the boy, whose cropped hair gleams in the evening sun like the winter grasslands of Sono’s childhood home. Brother Rhino stares out impassively, but something like a smile seems to flit across his boot-shaped snout.

By the evening of the third day, his leg is hot, swollen and throbbing, with red lines running up towards his groin. He languishes on his bedroll, which he has dragged to the big window by Brother Rhino. The damp heat is stifling, and he craves the air gusting through the broken panes. Sometimes it brings the smell of decaying things, but other times a sharp salt breeze from the sea blows clean through his lungs. The boy plays besides him, chattering softly to the plastic animals and Brother Rhino, a tender vibrant noise like the sound of new leaves rustling in a spring wind.
     The world warps around Sono as his fever grows. He shouts in the night, converses with his dead father who sits across the room from him in his green Rhino Ranger’s uniform, his chest a flower of blood. Although he did not die in that uniform. He died in a white t-shirt, because that night he was off-duty.
      “I didn’t know”, Sono cries. “I didn’t know you would investigate the shots. I told the poachers to go that night because you were off-duty. You were off-duty, Baba, why did you come running to save your rhinos, not wearing your bullet proof vest?”
     But his father does not answer, just shakes his head in bewildered disbelief.
      “It was for Langalihle, Baba, I needed the money for Langalihle. She had to go to a private hospital, she was dying in that rubbish hospital... one night I found a rat under her bed...”

Sono wakes to find the boy wiping his face with a cloth.
      “Hol’ still,” the boy says. “Jus’ washin’ your face. We got standards this ’stablishment.”
      “Who’s Langalishy?” he asks later, holding a water bottle so that Sono can drink. “You bin callin’ an’ callin’ langalishy, langalishy.”
      “Langalihle. My daughter, my little girl. It means the beautiful sun”
      “Where she?”
      “She died many years ago. She got sick, we could not save her. She was the same age as you, I think. How old are you?”
     The boy shrugs.

Sono’s mother pays a visit, poking him awake him with her unforgiving finger. You got to get that boy out of here, she says, scowling. Food’s low. You gonna let him watch you die, then starve to death himself?
      “Eish, Mama,” Sono groans, but drags himself back from the twilight into the harsh glare of the living. He tells the boy where to find Doc’s telescope. He scans the city, the brown water flowing sluggishly between the buildings. There is no sign of life. But later in the day, he sees a thread of smoke rising from the balcony of a building down the street. He focuses the telescope on the balcony through the afternoon. Two or three shadowy figures flit against the windows. And once, a figure lifting a small one, a child, holding it up and then hugging it.
     Did he see it? He looks and looks, but the figure is gone.
     It’s not much.
     But it’s all there is.
     Drifting in and out of delirium he instructs the boy on inflating the dinghy, filling the lockers with food and water, the first aid kit, the flashlights and solar lamps, the gas stove. Sometimes the room fills with his relatives, helping to prepare for his father’s funeral. “We must get ready to slaughter the cow,” he tells Draino. “Go see if the women are done with the umqombothi.”
      “Tomorrow we are going in that boat,” he says, when it is ready.
      “What about my family?”
      “We can’t take Mama and Papa Rhino, boy. The boat will sink.”
      “We take Brother Rhino,” the boy says firmly. “You don’t let your brother go.”

Sono finds the strength to help the boy to drag the dinghy and Brother Rhino down to the second floor and out through the fire exit onto the parapet above the tall pillars fronting the museum. As they push away from the parapet with the oars, Sono is gripped with trepidation. How can he send this child and Brother Rhino into this chaotic, devastated world? How can they leave the sanctuary of the museum? Where elephants still charge, and the Batwa still draw their bows, and masked dancers still dance for the rain in Guinea Bissau?
     But it’s too late ... the building is receding as the current pulls them away through the debris of a destroyed civilisation. The boy laughs, both amazed and alarmed to be floating. And Sono feels the wind of the outside world on his face and laughs too, the sound foreign to his ears, like a long-locked door creaking open.
     Their progress is slow and erratic, one oar each, the boy splashing more than rowing, his own hands seemingly joined to his arms by wet string so that he can barely hold the oar, never mind pull it against the water. Things bump against them, anonymous wood and plastic fragments mostly, but occasionally something recognisable – an office chair, a supermarket trolley, a sign that reads “no dumping”. And then, two corpses, mother and child floating together, her pale hands reaching out for redemption too long in coming. Sono pushes them away with his oar before the boy can see.
     They drift slowly towards the balcony. When they are closer, he lifts his telescope again. A woman with a child is standing at the railing, peering at him as if trying to identify him. He waves wildly. She waves back tentatively.
      “We going to that lady, okay?” He says to the boy. The boy nods, doubtfully.
      “It will be fine, I promise. I can’t look after you alone any more... I’m.... I’m not well, boy... you understand that, don’t you?”
     The boy’s lip trembles; a tear runs down his cheek. He turns to bury his face in Brother Rhino.
      “Listen, Draino?”
     The boy nods, keeping his face pressed to the rhino’s wrinkled hide.
      “You need a new name, boy. You can’t go into the world with a name like Draino. You want a new name?” The boy nods again.
      “I’ll give you my name, okay? Not Sono... the name my mother gave me. Themba. It means the one who has hope.”
     The boy looks up from the rhino.
      “Themba...” he repeats.
      “You like it?”
     He nods, vigorously.

“Why you called Sono?” he asks.
      “I gave myself this name. I no longer deserved the name my mother gave me. I gave myself the name of Sonosakhe, for I must live with my sin.”
     The boy shakes his head. “You Themba too. You, me both. An’ brother Rhino. All Themba.”
     Sono smiles, then sinks back against the dinghy. His arms keep rowing mechanically, quite disconnected from his own volition, sustained it seems by an external force. The water splashes his hands, cool against his burning skin. The sun dances on the water’s surface and the buildings. He lifts his face to a sky softened by a spray of silver tipped clouds. He is back in St Lucia, the lake as it was in his childhood, when the elephants still swam with their trunks up like periscopes and the rhinos still wallowed in cool mud holes. A flock of flamingos stand in the shallows, swallows swoop over their heads. His father smiles at him across the boat.
      “Keep rowing, Themba my boy,” his father says. “Keep rowing.”

END