Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings

Depress the upper portion of the bolt catch to release the bolt.

Tap the forward assist to ensure that the bolt is fully forward and locked.

You won’t need to put it back on SAFE.

This is what you get when you have man from Jungle. Them hot for the C so they freebase and freebase thanks to Weeper. Josey Wales leave we but warn that anybody leave him get shot, and we remember that they used to call him Ba-bye. As he and Weeper close the door they lock it and we hear a click. The house getting smaller and hotter and I think about the guard I going to kill, the police. The Babylon.

Seven man. Twenty-one gun. Eight hundred and forty bullet. I think of one man and one man only and is not the Singer. I think of him running into a wall and balling high voice like a little girl. I think of him saying is not me you come for who you come for downstairs because he must be a pussyhole like that. I think about man who cheat and get away and man whose luck run out. I look at him and say this is what death going to look like.

A nd now we are in the time of dying. The year surrenders in three weeks. Gone, the season of wet hot summer, ninety-six degrees in the shade, May and October rains that swelled rivers, killed cows and spread sickness. Men growing fat on pork, boys’ bellies swelling with poison. Fourteen men lost in the bush while bodies explode, three, four, five. Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. I stole those words from a living man who already has death walking with him, killing him from the toe up.

I look down on my hands and see my story. A hotel on the south coast, a future my country could taste. Sleepwalking, they said when they found me, and so they build a picture from hearsay of my two hands held out in front and stiff like Frankenstein, my eyes closed, my legs stomping in a communist march, over the banister, three, two, one. They found me naked, my eyes alert but washed of their brown, my neck floppy and the back of my skull smashed, my penis at attention, something the hotel workers saw first. Hidden in my blood was dirt from a man’s push.

There are things about death that the dead cannot tell you. The vulgarity of it. Death changes where you die into a room where the body shames itself. Death makes you cough, piss, death makes you shit, death makes you stink from inside vapors. My body rots but my nails still grow into claws as I see and wait.

I heard that a rich man in America, a man with money and power written in his name, died inside a woman that was not his wife. An enormous boat of a man crushing the woman with his deadweight, a man who was burned eighteen hours later by his wife because she couldn’t bear to smell another woman on his body.

I was inside a woman whose name I cannot remember but she stopped me complaining of thirst. But there’s wine right here. Can you get some ice? Who puts ice in wine? I do, and there are other things I’ll do too if only you’ll get some ice. I run out naked, and giggling, it’s five in the morning. Tiptoe down the corridor like Wee Willie Winkle. The dead have a smell but so does the killer. My death took two, one to demand it and the other to make it so. Before I flew over the banister there was lemongrass and wet dirt, the crunch of a footstep on floors clean as mirrors.

I am in the house of the man that killed me. I have never smelled myself on his hands, just the linger of old death, not a stench but the memory of it, the iron tinge in the blood of stale kill, the sweet stinking lure of a body dead five days. In the world of the living he is a mature man now, not caring that he smells like he stumbled upon somebody else’s money, like expensive suits that used to belong to somebody else. Except he is not wearing a suit. I was naked when they found me and he is naked as I find him. His belly is rounder, his back ripples fat as he thrusts up and down and he’ll have to dye the back of his head again. His body hits hers in a sweaty slap, slap, slap. He grunts on top of her, the first runner-up he married. The white bed is a whirlpool. She notices that he is not stopping and taps him on the shoulder. His head is in the pillow but he’s holding her down, she’s in jail and knows it so she taps him again. He grunts and she pushes him You know I don’t want to get pregnant you son of a bitch . He plops his weight on her until he comes and blows his breath all out in the room. Jamaicans need to know that them leaders can work it, he says. It’s the first time in years that I’m hearing his voice, except it’s not years. I’m stunned that it hasn’t changed, still sounding improper even when he speaks correctly. I am in the wrong place and so is she. She is the first runner-up he married when he failed to get the Miss Jamaica. Her father wanted her to marry full white. Dry shit come of me batty before me make some Syrian with a Lebanese haberdashery marry my bloodcloth daughter, he said.

The woman whom I was inside I cannot remember her name. I never see her, not that I would know where to look. Maybe there was love but ghosts haunt out of longing and I have no longing. Maybe it was not love or maybe I am not a ghost. Or maybe my longing isn’t for her. Who asks for ice in wine? Did she know that he was outside the door waiting on me? Someone called me a mangled spider with a cock on top. Not one of the hotel staff, they would have no knowledge of words like mangled. Maybe someone who was already happy to see me gone. I have no memory of his face.

The first runner-up pushes him off and hisses Is a good thing I didn’t forget the foam . Don’t… you… know… he pants the rest of it out… that birth control is a plot to kill black people?… and laughs. He rolls over and plays with himself. I want to slip inside him, to pretend that I would feel what he feels, but even at the foot of this bed I smell over a hundred dead men. A glass shatters and they both jump. Her nightie had been pulled over her breast so she pulls it down. You and that fucking cat, he says and gets up. I watch his belly settle itself and his cheeks go sallow, not even this, not even sex ruffles his hair, packed tight like the tin man. He makes me miss living, swinging, sagging. The bedroom has furniture she picked out, with knobs and curves and carvings of grapevines. A mosquito net hangs from the ceiling. A television hides in the corner, the door to the bathroom open but the doorway dark. He always thought that men who had any sense of style or beauty were perverts. I remember him saying this about another party member as he drove away. I never shared his hate because I saw Noel Coward every summer and called him uncle. He and his traveling companion.

The man who had me killed reaches for his gun, lying in wait on the bedside table, and leaves his pants on the floor. The first runner-up points to the pants and he makes a joke about never dressing up just to meet loose pussy as he goes through the door. I want to stay with her for a while, curious about how she regains a peace in herself, but I follow him.

In the living room is a man I can’t remember if I know. The living room is a cemetery, rank with dead smell. Some of it coming from the man. He is black one second, a hint of chinaman the next or maybe he shifts with shadow. I can already smell how he dies. He is coughing in a glass, saying,

— Me did think this was water.

— You don’t know what white rum bottle look like, or you can’t spell rum?

— Smell? I gulp before I smell. — Spell. S-p-e-l-l.

— Oh. Hearing not too good. Too much pow pow pow, y’know?

— How the r’asscloth you mistake that for water?

— I don’t know, water that come in a special bottle sounds like rich people things. Rahtid brethren, is so you gallivant ’bout the place?