The Beautiful One (Chapter 1, Alevan Thirty)

I. THE BEAUTIFUL ONE

                     What is history but a fiction that’s agreed upon?

                                                            — Napoleon Bonaparte

        

As soon as she was old enough to utter words, she spoke in vivid detail of past events, of times long gone, and of days yet to come. In a trance-like state, she would recount her life as a slave enduring a cruel mistress, of running away to the swamplands of Florida and being taken in by the Seminoles, of wallowing in the filth and despair of an asylum while waiting on someone who never returned. In gruesome clarity, she would painstakingly replay such events with the ability to name both places unknown and persons unfamiliar to either of her parents.

In her heart, she held tight to a belief not easily explained. She was convinced she was from another place to which she would one day return. It was her faith in this notion that fueled her existence. Everything she would do fell in line with this conviction.

        The intensity and lucidity with which the two-year-old relayed such events frightened her father. “That was just a dream, sweetheart,” he once offered. This only led, however, to an unbridled emotional outburst, previously unseen from the unusually placid child. From that day forward, her father kept his thoughts to himself.

        Later, when she turned five, he invited her, instead, to write down her dreams and ideas and bought her a brown leather journal for that sole purpose. He once picked it up with the intention of reading it through, read one entry, and would never touch it again.

Every morning at sunrise she would write in her journal her thoughts along with the events of the previous day. The words starting each entry were always the same: ’Twas a beautiful day’. Oftentimes, what she described thereafter was anything but beautiful. In fact, if you were privy to some entries, you might delineate them as horrific. She would argue, however, that it was just an experience in an otherwise beautiful day. Such was the child’s disposition and yet another distinction between her and everyone else.

        When she turned six, a school psychologist suggested she had a form of synesthesia. She did not see people the way you and I would. She would look at you and first see the aura around you, the colors emanating from your being. These colors would change around most people, depending on their mood or disposition. Since Shadows—as she referred to people—were led by their fluctuating emotions, their auras would be in constant turmoil. Happiness might be conveyed by either an orange or yellowish hue, depression, bluish or purple. Anger or jealousy might be crimson. “But the Beautiful Ones,” she explained, “are constant. The spectrum—the colors in the rainbow—envelope them, always.” In this lifetime, there was only one other person she found befitting that description.

        The child’s diagnosis by the school psychologist was welcome news to her mother. Mrs. Waters fancied her daughter to be—like herself—a misunderstood genius, a prodigy born at the wrong time and to, unfortunately, the wrong parents. She felt she too, was misunderstood and her talent wasted. She once had big plans for a brilliant future but fell in love with a man whose religion she later adopted and found nobility in poverty.

        Mrs. Kathleen Waters dreamt that tomorrow had a prettier face, but instead, every morning awoke to the truth. She did not want to be known as just another dreamer, yet time was moving past her treadmill existence. In her early years, she had been obsessed with achieving fame and, in her mind, was interviewed by Oprah many times. At first it was Arsenio. When The Arsenio Hall Show was cancelled, she became distraught and physically ill. She realized that every cancelled talk show brought her face-to-face with the reality of her own obscurity. After her second daughter turned two, she began reading scripts and rehearsing for roles in an effort to escape the life that once held so much promise and was now filled with so much despair.

        This stifled artist, her husband, and their two daughters lived in a northeast section of the Bronx called Throgs Neck in a housing project that was good by housing-projects standards. Still it was a housing project, nonetheless. Eight years earlier, at the height of their religious fervor, they sold their Brooklyn condominium and most of their worldly possessions to rid themselves of anything that would hinder a life of fulltime evangelism and moved to an area where there would be more souls to save.

        Mrs. Waters had decided she would leave her family if and when the right professional opportunity presented itself and was lost in such thought when her older daughter came to her, bent over and suffering from stomach pains. The girl had had such complaints for over a week, and, as usual, Mrs. Waters administered a glass of warm ginger ale and sent her to bed. At first, the child had gone to her father for help, but he had been too busy at the time to be bothered with her childish grievances as he was in the middle of preparations for the next day’s street service and saving souls. As a result, he had advised his daughter to seek help from her mother.

        The next day, the school nurse called Kathleen Waters at her job. “Your daughter has just been rushed to Jacobi Hospital,” she said. “She’s in very bad shape.”

        The stomach aches, the doctors would explain, were caused by gastrointestinal bleeding due to Crohn’s disease. By the time the diagnosis was made, the aggressive condition was in an advanced stage and the doctors moved to rush the child immediately to surgery in an effort to save her life. Her parents, specifically her father, feared such a hasty decision because their religion prohibited receiving medical blood transfusions even in such dire cases as a life and death situation which, according to the doctors, this certainly was. He thought it best to consult the Congregation Wise Men. The doctors argued there was no time to waste, but Jack Waters insisted on waiting on the counsel of the “wise men” who were neither in the medical field nor, as the doctors would later point out, wise.

       “You cannot let your daughter receive a blood transfusion and sacrifice her everlasting life for this temporary one.” The gray eyes of the fresh-faced, acned, young white man, all of twenty-something, held a grave look. “Jack, you know this.”

       “If your daughter does not get a transfusion, she will die,” a hospital administrator said sternly. He spoke directly to Kathleen Waters in an obvious appeal to her maternal instincts. She held her head low as to not make direct eye contact.

       “You’re trying to save her temporary life,” the other wise man shouted back. “We’re trying to save her eternal soul.”

        And so the surreal battle went on, back and forth, Jack and Kathleen Waters becoming mere spectators as their older daughter, all of eight, lay moaning in a bed only a few feet away. While men of religion advised to let her die and medical personnel stormed out of the room, the machines hooked to the little girl beeped and whirred.

        Jack Waters was a man of faith.

        Years earlier, as a young man trying to make his way, he would embarrass himself with the overindulgence of drink. He would express his love for people and in this state he’d share his dreams and aspirations. A man craving respect, he would then spend whole weekends regretting what he must have done on Friday nights and avoid seeing anyone who might replay his transgressions when he would be of sober mind. He thought the birth of his first daughter would help him kick the habit, then the second, but still, he found himself in situations of celebration–someone’s birthday, landing a new account, a promotion, a death, a birth, a holiday—that would inevitably lead him to being the man he so wanted not to be. Finally, a chance meeting with a former schoolmate introduced him to the way of the Lord which meant forgiveness of past sins and a real reason to quit the drink.

         When his older daughter had come to him, he had been preparing a sermon on the story of Lot found in the book of Genesis. For some reason, he realized the date. It had been four years, to the day, since his last drink. He could sure use one now, with his child in the hospital and the deteriorating state of his marriage, but now was not the time to dwell on such thoughts.

        Presently, he was having a hard time wrapping his mind around the story of Lot in the city of Sodom and Gomorrah. The father of two young girls, himself,  he was struggling to understand why Lot, while harboring the two angels in human male form from a homosexual mob hell-bent on raping them, would offer his virgin daughters to the mob instead,. Was this something he could gloss over? Could the lesson be, simply, hospitality? No, too frivolous, he concluded. Sacrifice? That was it. Sacrifice. Would the congregation understand his sacrifice of his own daughter at that very moment and see the parallel between him and Lot? Would they see the connection between Lot’s wife and his own, turning back, yearning for the temporary life filled with fool’s gold? He was wrestling with such thoughts when Kenyatta, his older daughter’s best friend, knocked on the door. “Young brother Thomas. What can I do you for, this evening?” he said in greeting.

        Kenyatta smiled weakly. “She needs her school bag,” he said as he entered the apartment and went straight to his best friend’s room.

        Normally, such a presumptuous act would never be tolerated, but this was Kenyatta Thomas. The relationship the boy had with Jack Waters’ daughter was almost supernatural, other-worldly. They would talk for hours on end or just read books in each other’s company. They were both eight years old but seemed more like an old married couple that had been together for years past retirement. Their relationship was closer than that of his own marriage, Jack Waters often thought, but there was something about the boy–something about him that slightly unnerved Jack, made him just a bit uncomfortable. He could never put his finger on it, but it was definitely there. And every time he was in the boy’s presence, he tried to pinpoint exactly what it was.

***

It was his eyes. That is what Jack had finally found was disturbing about him. Large, sad, and reticent, they would frequently elicit a “what’s wrong?” from a curious adult. Once Kenyatta gave his usual response, “nothing,” the initial concern would turn to irritation. This made it difficult for Kenyatta to keep friends as most parents urged their children to shun the child with the low, black cloud seemingly shadowing his very existence.

The Waters were no exception, the only difference being that their daughter paid no attention to their warnings. Her only friend, he visited her daily in the hospital. Before and after school, he would come by with notes or work or cookies he would bring from class tucked into paper napkins. Their relationship bemused the staff.  They often wondered if he really understood the gravity of her condition and if that was the reason he would always look so sad.

 Kenyatta Thomas was the son of Louisa Thomas, the most religious woman in Throgs Neck. Old-timers in the neighborhood would remember Kenyatta as tall and thin. He was a strange, quiet child with a pleasant enough smile who’d visit them bright and early on weekend mornings to peddle religious reading material. Oftentimes, he’d recite a scripted sentence or two about the importance of pleasing God and studying His Holy Word. Before leaving their door, he would politely request a small donation to cover the minimal cost of the printed material he would attempt to leave.

It was on such an occasion, while accompanying his mother one Saturday morning into the white section of Throgs Neck called Edgewater - basically a trailer park built on swampland on the outskirts of the projects - when a middle-aged man sicced his German Shepherd on Mrs. Thomas. The incident left her limping from a bloody gash in her coffee-stockinged leg for the rest of her tour. Whether the man had been disgruntled with black people on his property, or religious folks, or because of the early hour, or all of the above, Kenyatta would never know.  He just knew that from that moment on, if people chose to go to hell, he wanted nothing to do with helping them in their decision one way or the other.

It was also around this time of his childhood, when he was about six or seven, that his maternal grandfather fell terminally ill. You see, one would be remiss in telling the story about Kenyatta Thomas’ peripatetic, clinophobic life without mentioning a thing or two about his grandfather. Pa, as his grandfather was called, was not in The Truth, the religion that governed the lives of his wife and four daughters, so they considered him worldly and dismissed him as an outsider. His opinions and advice were seldom solicited, and when his girls grew older and found themselves husbands who shared their views, he became a mere figurehead, similar to an outdated monarch of a country long since converted to democracy.

“Oh, and this is our dad,” they would say to fellow believers.

Pa’s dreams in life were never realized. He lost his freedom to decide his own future when he returned home from the war and impregnated the new neighbor that had moved in across the street from his family’s middle-class home while he was off fighting the good fight. They were married some months later, and in a few short years added three more daughters to their roster.

He worked. It never mattered what type of job he had. He hated them all, but he worked hard and provided a comfortable life for his wife and children who would eventually become zealots. It was only after his daughters became the age of young women that he started to feel defeated. They had chosen the religion of their mother over life, and he was gravely disappointed in them. He was hoping to see the fruition of his sacrificed dreams manifested somehow in their lives—at least in one of them. Instead, they chose to have religious doctrine dictate their thoughts and ideas of right and wrong, and as he bemoaned the loss of his younger years, his daughters grew to despise him.

As Kenyatta grew older, memories would resurface in the form of dreams, but the memory of the last time he saw his grandfather was not one of those. He carried that memory consciously around with him forever. He never forgot.

“You’ll have at least one chance,” Pa whispered to the young boy from his deathbed, enunciating as best he could. He wiped bile from the corners of his mouth. “I had a chance once. Twice, maybe. But I was so shackled with…” His voice trailed off as if he were looking at something in the distant past. “I told your mother and her sisters about it when they were in their twenties. Your mother, Louisa, may have been thirty by then. But they didn’t want to hear me. They don’t want to hear nothin’ that’s not in agreement with their…beliefs.” He said the last word the way some people pronounce cuss words.

Any time Kenyatta would hear that word, he would think of Pa. Even some twenty years later, Kenyatta could close his eyes and hear that one word, distinct from all the words he heard that day.

“I had my chance,” Pa continued. His voice trembled. “Now, I don’t know where I’m going.” The old man turned his head away and began to sob. His tears rolled down the deep creases of his face.

Kenyatta patted his grandfather’s old and wrinkled hand in a child’s attempt to comfort. “It’s all right Pa-Pa. It’s all right.” It would be the last time he would see his grandfather and his only lasting image of him.

***

        Kenyatta made his way along the eleventh-floor corridor of Calgary Hospital on his way to visit his friend in room 1130. Calgary was the place where all terminal cases were sent, and the staff was known for its bedside manner in a patient’s last days.The large oak board Kenyatta’s mother had made him wear hanging from a rope around his neck, announcing his sinful ways, made a rustling sound and impeded his gait.

        Nurses, doctors, and orderlies all stopped their work to look, reading the black, blocked letters with the word thief spelled theif on the board that covered most of his torso. Some just shook their heads while others held their hands over their mouths. One worker ran to get another and pointed in disbelief.

        Kenyatta barely noticed the ruckus his presence caused. He poked his head into room 1130  before entering.

        His friend was not on the window sill immersed in writing in her journal as she usually was when he visited. This day, she was lying in bed. A large, bright rainbow colored in crayon stretched across the wall above her bed near the window.

        He looked down at her in sleep and noticed her head had been shaved, her earrings the only indication of her femininity. He felt bad for staring. The strangeness of the situation reminded him of a dream he had the night before that had awakened and frightened him.

He had been standing in some sort of cabin, and a woman stood before him, holding a bloodied axe. She did not seem to be threatening him with it, but still, he felt unsettled by the image, and it had kept him up for some time afterward. Now, visiting his friend in her hospital room, he somehow knew the woman in his dream was her. No, not her, perhaps, but rather some reincarnation of her.

       “I see you peeking, Kenyatta.” She sat up in her bed and gave her best effort to smile. “Come here, silly.”

        Kenyatta stepped forward, sheepishly.

        She studied the bold words written on the board he wore, the kind someone would wear handing out fliers in the street advertising a service. “Do not talk to me. I’m a liar and a theif,” she read aloud.        “Whatever are you wearing that silly thing for, Kenyatta? Take it off before someone sees you.”

       “I can’t. My mom says I have to wear it for the whole day.”

       “Why?”

       “I took an extra cookie from Miss Fortunato’s class on Friday without permission.”

       “A cookie? Was it one of the ones you brought to me? Take that off, Kenyatta, or you can just leave here now.”

        Reluctantly, Kenyatta took off the board and set it down, ever so carefully, near the door.

       “That’s better. I need you to do something for me.” She reached under her pillow and produced her leather-bound journal, the book she had been writing her every thought and dream in every day for the last three years, the book she never allowed anyone to even look at, never mind hold. And now, she was extending it to him. “I want you to keep this for me,” she said.

       “Wh—what are you gonna write in if I take it?” he asked.

       “Just for a little while. The doctor says I need to rest up, so I won’t be doing any writing for a while. I won’t need it.”

        Kenyatta studied the book for a moment before slowly reaching out and taking it. He felt like Charlie Brown to her Lucy and grabbed it quickly for fear she would pull the football away. It was much lighter than he expected it to be. He had never held it before—no one ever had. The leather binding automatically gave it significance and made it feel like it was meant for an older person. Taking it felt like a larger responsibility than he was ready for.

        She looked at him. “I’ve loved you since before the earth had rings. Don’t you remember me?” she asked, tears stinging her eyes.

        Kenyatta was afraid to make eye contact. Instead, he stared intently at the journal now in his possession. He read the words she had written on the cover aloud: “The Beautiful One.”

       “I never liked when anyone but you called me that,” she said almost absently. She gazed deep into his eyes. “Cowards get cooked, Kenyatta.”

        Kenyatta, the boy with the unusually large, sad eyes, looked at his friend and tried to make sense of what was happening. He was not understanding anything she was saying. She was bald, in a hospital bed, and had just given him her journal—her journal for which she would fight someone for just staring at it too long.

        She looked at her friend, the sad eyes that seemed to infuriate adults, the confused expression etched on his face. She glanced to the sandwich board he was to wear that advertised him as a wicked boy. She rose and grabbed him by his shirt, pulling him close. “I’ll never forget to remember you. You were a rainbow, Kenyatta. You were a rainbow.”

        Kenyatta, now even more startled than just seconds earlier, took a few steps back without losing eye contact with his friend. “I’ll see you after school,” he said, grabbing the board before making his getaway.

***

        Jack Waters sat on his daughter’s empty hospital bed, staring into his personal abyss. A sound drew his attention to the doorway.

        Mrs. Waters entered the room carrying two suitcases. She set them down at her feet. “My baby has not died in vain, and you will not kill me like you did her, though you tried. You definitely tried. You’ll be seeing me, but I won’t ever see you, again.” She picked up her bags and started to walk out, then paused. She turned back to the man she loved once upon a time. “Just think of the irony, Jack.”

        Jack Waters raised his head to see the woman that was leaving him, the woman he had promised to love, honor, cherish, and protect. He realized, for the first time, those were all but mere words.

       “You gave up alcohol and sin only to worship a God that would bless your sacrifices by allowing your child to die.” Mrs. Waters stayed a few seconds to make sure her words marinated through to her husband’s psyche. When she once again turned to leave, she noticed her daughter’s friend standing in the doorway. “Kenyatta,” she said, looking at the closest friend to her child, “I am so sorry.”

        Kenyatta raced down the corridor, out of the hospital, and found himself in the street, not even remembering if he had taken the elevator or the stairs. An apologetic, feeble drizzle turned into a sudden downpour. The child had no destination in mind. He had no place to go. He just ran.

        The real irony befallen to Jack Waters was simply this: while he was consumed by religion and consulting scriptures in a constant search for something beautiful, the most beautiful thing he would ever experience had been right there with him for eight years.
        A truth that only the child with the despised eyes could see.

© 2018 (Alevan Thirty) Askia Farrell