Creatures of Passage. Morowa Yejidé

while the fog came and thickened around her. Now she could feel it. The colonel’s wife, she thought. It’s the colonel’s wife today. She put her foot on the gas pedal and disembarked, coasting down the street.

      MESSAGES

       Nephthys heard things whispered over the water in the stygian nights, and she gazed across the fathoms deep, wondering where that solitary black began and ended …

      Nephthys drove downtown toward the Ebbitt Hotel in the northwest quadrant once more, where the fog told her the colonel’s wife would be waiting. She passed street signs and highway signs and posters plastered on street poles. She recognized some words more easily than others, but only if they came with a place where she had experienced something. She knew residential signs not because of what the letters indicated, but because the spot where the signs stood marked indelible places in her mind. The Safeway grocery store on East Capitol Street, for instance. That was where a young man she’d taken was hauled away to St. Elizabeths. And each time she drove by, the memory played in her mind.

      Besides, there was always help if Nephthys needed it. There were nice black office girls in Dupont Circle who were still living with their parents until marriage. There were proud young men from Howard University who answered her questions or offered instructions in lengthy orations, asking her, “Ma’am, can you remember all of that?” In fact, Nephthys could remember what they were saying and the color and pattern of the shirts they’d been wearing if she spoke to them five months before. Words were but a calling out of symbols that held purpose only when put together, but meaningless apart. Images were files in her head. Sounds and conversations were permanent, recordings grafted onto her mind. And she’d always felt that the lettering, the glyphs that other people seemed to need to use, was a lower form of communication. So there was no need to say the words I can’t read.

      As she approached the Ebbitt Hotel, she saw the colonel’s wife sitting in the familiar black car parked in front. Sometimes, in the wanderings of her own heart, she wondered where else the destinations of her passengers might lead, and she stared at the woman and through her and out to the reaches of the territories.

      * * *

      The colonel’s wife felt her pulse quicken when she saw the Plymouth coming down the street. She’d risen well before dawn that morning in the Kingdom of Virginia, where she lived in a beautiful home in the fiefdom of Alexandria. She knew that her husband, Colonel Piper Abramson, lay silent in their rosewood-framed bed each time she left for her covert passage, pretending to be asleep. She’d watched him spend thirty years of his life in the sunless moonless airless rings of the Pentagon, and she knew that he was prepared to spend thirty more roaming the pathways of denial. Because she’d learned, among the long list of things ascertained from her appalling in-laws, that children of respectable families did not have mental illnesses. And there were times when she wondered if her husband was right, that their son’s condition had somehow come from her own savage beginnings, for she hailed from the Nordic outback of the Upper Peninsula in the Kingdom of Michigan. And each time she sat in wait for Nephthys to arrive, she stared into the dawn, contemplating the role she played in their son’s biological demise.

      * * *

      Nephthys pulled up in front of the Ebbitt and stopped, the Plymouth idling softly.

      The colonel’s wife got out of her car and locked it and came over and slid into the backseat. She handed Nephthys a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill, a small fortune she felt worth paying for the important task at hand, for she was uncomfortable with boarding a bus, where everywhere she turned there seemed to be eyes questioning her reason for being there. Nor did she want to catch cabdrivers stealing looks at her through the rearview mirror in judgment of where she asked them to take her. So it was no surprise that the colonel’s wife thought it fitting to ride to Anacostia in the safety of Nephthys Kinwell’s Plymouth to see her son in one of the psychiatric wings of St. Elizabeths Hospital. It was where she and her husband had him committed six years before, so that their neighbors and the rest of the family could go on thinking he was studying medicine in Europe. Many years later, another son of privilege would make his own living film by attempting to assassinate a movie-acting king, but instead end up entombed in the same walls as her own son. And like other mothers who crossed into that wild realm of the southeast quadrant, each time the colonel’s wife entered St. Elizabeths she left a piece of herself there.

      The white girl in the trunk rattled the crank of a broken car jack and Nephthys pulled off.

      “Morning, Neph,” said the colonel’s wife. She’d never been able to pronounce that peculiar name in all its fullness—Nephthys Kinwell—and they’d agreed without ever saying aloud that the abbreviated “Neph” was acceptable to each of them for different reasons.

      “Mornin’ it is,” said Nephthys.

      They rode on, pausing for motorcades and funeral processions and pulling over so that fire trucks could pass. In the usual silence that ensued, the colonel’s wife listened to the bump scrape tap of the white girl in the trunk, thinking about what such dark lingering could mean or not mean. For she made her clandestine trips to St. Elizabeths not only to see about the well-being of her son, but to also see how close he was to death. She thought about death more often as she grew older, as the reality of not having any grandchildren settled into the foundation of her opulent colonial home. But more than her own fatal musings, she thought about her son’s ravings. On her last visit, he spoke of the long conversations he had with Death when it came to his room in a black robe and sat by his bed. And he talked matter-of-factly about the five ways that Death told him creatures of passage die:

      1. Moving through spaces

      2. Staying in one place

      3. Resigning life to another

      4. Surrendering one’s life

      5. Entering the Void

      Her son confessed to her that he knew the last one well, since the Void called to him through the expanding kilometers of his madness long before he strangled his girlfriend to death. And he was certain that the Void would obliterate him on his thirtieth birthday. The colonel’s wife was terrified and intrigued by the things her son said to her, and in her long, empty days in the catacombs of the family mansion, she read books on the mysticism of astrological patterns and tarot readings of death and theories of the afterlife.

      So it was no surprise that the colonel’s wife made a point to pick up a copy of the Afro Man newspaper in the lobby of St. Elizabeths on her last visit, for she’d heard that the Lottery section was all about death and who was next. And it was through the guarded conversations she’d had with the orderlies who checked her purse for weapons and contraband that she discovered the Lottery had been in print for over ten years, and that its author was Nephthys Kinwell’s niece.

      * * *

      They waited at a stoplight, listening to the Plymouth’s engine clack and the white girl in the trunk drum the spare tire. A man standing on the corner was humming a popular song to himself, and when he saw the unmistakable Plymouth he stopped and walked the other way. The light turned green and Nephthys pulled off.

      The colonel’s wife watched Nephthys take sips from her flask, never worrying about her ability to drive. But sometimes she paused at other things about her, like the curious lilt in her voice. Not quite Southern. Not quite Caribbean. “Where are you from?”

      “Sea Islands.”

      “Oh?”

      “Uh-huh. My people were Gullah.”

      “What?’

      “Gullah.”

      “Gullah …” said the colonel’s wife, baffled. “And your name, what’s the origin?”

      Nephthys shrugged. “Don’t know the whole story.”

      Because the truth was that the twins were named by a butler on the old Sea Island plantation where their parents had been employed as servants. The butler was an ageless man brought to the island on a pirate ship as a child, his own given name and lineage long