Charles Johnson - Middle Passage

“You can do that?”

“Quite right, m’boy. ’Twasn’t easy, of course. Sometimes it’s physical, you know, like me and thee. But only for a few seconds at a time. Mostly, it’s immaterial, the way gods and angels are supposed to be. Being unphysical means there can only be one of each kind of god or angel — one Throne, one Principality, one Archangel, ’cause there’s only a formal (not a material) difference amongst ’em, so the one below is the only creature of its kind in the universe— is the universe, the Allmuseri say.” He paused, cleared his dry throat, and lifted a teaspoon of coffee to his lips. “Another thing ’bout not bein’ physical most of the time is that it can’t understand any of the sciences based on matter, like geometry. Heh heh. It can’t do geometry, you see, ’cause it’s a god.”

“Are you saying even a god has limitations?”

“That I am. And not only limitations, lad. I daresay it has downright contradictions. For example, a god can’t know its own nature. For itself, it can’t be an object of knowledge. D’you see the logic here? The Allmuseri god is everything, so the very knowing situation we mortals rely on — a separation between knower and known — never rises in its experience. You might say empirical knowledge is on man’s side, not God’s. It’s our glory and grief both, a function of the duality of mind I mentioned a moment ago. Oh, ’tis a strange creature we have below, Mr. Calhoun. Omnipresence means it forefeits our kind of knowledge. Omnipotence means, ironically, that it can create a stone so heavy it cannot lift that same stone from the floor.”

None of this was clear. Aphasic, I nodded anyway. My brain had stopped functioning a full five sentences ago. Could it be that in a dimension alongside this one I was a dwarf sitting in a Chinese robe, telling a white mate I had captured a European god and, below us, the hold was crammed with white chattel? Preposterous! Considering thoughts of this sort was like standing on the edge of a cliff. “Cap’n,” I said, swallowing, “you’ve got a god on ship?”

“You shouldn’t goggle,” says he. “Makes you look weak-minded, Mr. Calhoun. We’re not only shipping Allmuseri on this trip, we’re bringin’ back their deity too. I’d wager this freight’s worth at least a footnote in the history books, wouldn’t you say? Better’n stumblin’ on Lemuria or findin’ the source of the Nile. Most nations will pay a pretty whack to possess a creature such as this. It’s a tricky rascal, though, if you ain’t careful.”

“Tricky, sir?”

“I mean what it did to Tommy O’Toole. Legend has it the Creature has a hundred ways to relieve men of their reason. It traps them, tricks them into Heaven. It’s Loki and Brer Rabbit together. That’s why no one goes near it but me.”

“You, I take it, are immune to Heaven?”

He gave me a look, then stood, placing his hand on my arm to bid me rise, then eased me outside. “Do as I said tomorrow. Tell no one we’ve talked — and, for Christ’s sake, see what’s spooked the dogs.”

I closed the door by leaning against the muntin, and frowned (I hated it whenever anyone used the word “spook”), my head on the frieze rail, listening to blood thrum in my temples. I waited for my second wind. It never came. Forth I went anyway through layers of mist toward the animal pens, holding Falcon’s tray close to my chest, squeezing it for no other reason than to have something concrete and stable to hold onto, and holding as well a key I’d taken off his table. I couldn’t help myself. Stealing was a nervous habit for me sometimes, a way to shake off stress and occupy my hands. And I had felt nervous in his cabin because so little on this ship seemed solid, reliable. If before my report to Falcon I had felt unsure whom to trust, now I distrusted my own eyes and ears. A godhead in the hold? Closing my eyes, I made myself consider the consequences of the being that sustained the world falling into the hands of an American soldier of fortune. No explorer could touch Falcon now. He had won his deepest wish. From the Vatican to political circles in Virginia he would be pursued, maybe given the presidency or the personal empire he had dreamed of since the Revolution. Once his cargo was in captivity, under lock and key at some college (or more likely a military camp), history would change. History, as we knew it, would end for there would be no barriers between the secular and sacred. I was starting to scare myself now and figured I’d better stop. Gods only appeared, Reverend Chandler had said, on Judgment Day. For my part, I wanted to live a little longer. I was only twenty-three years old. The Apocalypse would definitely put a crimp in my career plans. I needed the world as I knew it, as evil and flawed as it was, to be there for a while. On the other hand, if Falcon had not lied, there were easily half a dozen questions I wanted to put to who — or whatever maintained the cosmos second by second. Shaking my head to clear it, I pushed on to the pens, the trembling of my hands rattling silverware on his tray, for I could not imagine all the implications of Falcon’s discovery, or what shocks at sea awaited me next.

Instantly I got my answer.

The dogs were howling, a slobber like sea foam spilling from their mouths, because Meadows was beating them viciously with a sjambok. In the glow of a deck light, I could see he was wearing my clothes. The killing part was my blouse looked better on him than on me. Lashing the ship’s dogs, he spoke to them in an unerring imitation of black English, his accent passably southern Illinoisan, his speech sprinkled with my quirky, rhetorical asides, which I swore right then I would never use again. For a moment I was fascinated. It was like watching a voodoo priest manipulating a lock of your hair. Impaling a doll effigy of you with pins. Meadows even managed to mime a few of my physical eccentricities, like the way I tugged my right earlobe when perplexed — I caught myself doing it then, glanced back at him and gasped — or sometimes rubbed my nose with a quick flick of my thumb, boxer style: gestures that were quintessentially Rutherford Calhoun and delivered now to the frothing dogs with profound, heartless doses of pain. Meadows peeled off my clothing, let the hounds smell and snap at it one last time; then he pulled a pair of Cringle’s breeches over his own, rolling up the cuffs. Again, he whipped them, wrenching his voice toward higher registers to sound like the master’s mate giving orders. It laid me low, seeing Meadows vanish and a devastating caricature of Peter Cringle emerge, boiled down to his broad outlines. The barber-surgeon was a born thespian. Knowing each mate medically, I guessed, gave him this gift for brutal satire. After rubbing the crotch of Cringle’s smelly trousers into their noses to drive home his strongest scent, Meadows draped a few articles of brightly colored African dress — Abo Po and abada — around his broad waist, unleashed a new, stinging round of stripes, and spoke those haunting words the Allmuseri men and women used, like a fragrance, breathed into the air. For the dogs, though, these were hated words, intertwined with twenty lashes. They would throw themselves, fangs unsheathed, with no thought toward their safety upon anyone speaking Allmuseri, scratching his brow like Cringle, or blending the languages of house and field, street and seminary, as I often did.

Fingers of sweat dripped from Meadows’s face, his whipping arm was sore, and he rubbed it, then peered round in my direction. I pressed myself down between the topsail bitt and foremast, the skin on my back crawling. He shrugged, picked up his laundry basket, and headed for the fo’c’s’le. Long minutes passed before I moved. My head went turngiddy. I was unsure of what I had witnessed. But I knew what it meant. This was not a ship; it was a coffin. The morrow would bring catastrophe because Meadows was one step ahead of the Old Man, giving a living weapon to Falcon’s loyalists in case the mutineers seized the ship’s guns or the Africans could not be controlled. Targeting Cringle to be torn apart I understood. But why me? Were all loyalties here a lie? We would be sunk to the bottom of the briny unless unbeknownst to these camps someone played a trump, a hole card, none knew existed.