Freshwater(51)

NZ?P?TA





(Salvation)





Chapter Twenty


Hiding, oh, hiding! The hidden should hide very well, because I am letting go the leopard.




We

Allow us a moment to explain a few things. When you break something, you must study the pattern of the shattering before you can piece it back together. So it was with the Ada. She was a question wrapped up in breath: How do you survive when they place a god inside your body? We said before that it was like shoving a sun into a bag of skin, so it should be no surprise that her skin would split or her mind would break. Consider her burned open. It was an unusual incarnation, to be a child of Ala as well as an ?gbanje, to be mothered by the god who owns life yet pulled toward death. We did the best we could.

Because we came through gates that did not close behind us, it was easy for us to make reality loose for the Ada. We had one foot on the other side at all times; it was nothing to step away from this world. And you must know this, you must see, how this world is a terrible and wicked place. We sectioned off the Ada in lavish and extravagant folds, playing fast with her memories. There are many advantages to a broken mind.

When the Ada was a child and the neighbor’s son came into the room she shared with A?uli, when he reached his hand between the Ada’s legs, under the cartoon nightgown she wore, we decided that she did not need to remember the exact ripplings of his fingers. Not that time, or the time after, or the time after that. It continued until the Ada wrote Chima a letter and asked him to stop inviting the neighbor’s son over late at night, which was when it stopped. We sectioned off the image of his silhouette bending over her bed, of his arm reaching. When the neighbor himself, the boy’s father, groped the Ada when he had her alone in his living room, when she was twelve, we did it again. We sectioned well—the Ada who was before the sectioning was not the same child after the sectioning. When she reached back for the memory, it would be as if it belonged to someone else, not her.

There was only us; we couldn’t entrust her to anyone else. Saachi left and Saul was always at his hospital, and the Ada was at the whim of Chima’s hands. He beat her often because he could—he was the first son and the firstborn, and she was his responsibility. The Ada fought back, and cried for her human mother until she realized that it made no difference. Even when Saachi did return, once or twice a year, it was not real. “She will leave,” Chima reminded the Ada, when she tried to report him to Saachi, “and it will be just you and me again.” By the time he raised a belt to her, the Ada knew no one would stay long enough to protect her.

When we were first placed inside her, with these humans, the odds were that the Ada would survive. It was, in retrospect, a very low bar to set. She did not die, yes, but she was not guarded, she was violated, so as far as we were concerned, they failed. This is why we have never regretted stepping in, whether as ourself or the beastself. Show us someone, anyone, who could have saved her better.

Sectioning the Ada gave her isolated pockets of memory, each containing a different version of her. There were versions to whom bad things had happened and, therefore, there were also versions of her to whom these things had not happened. The Ada could look back on her life and see, like clones, several of her standing there in a line. This terrified her, because if there were so many of her, then which one was she? Were they false and her current self real, or was her current self false and it was one of the others, lost in the line, who was the real Ada? We could not alleviate her terror because we would not allow a bridge between her and the past sections of her. We had separated them for a reason. Many things are better than a complete remembering; many things we do are a mercy.

But there were still dangers involved in what we did; sectioning is a brutal exercise, after all, and it became uncontrolled. The Ada was living in multiple realities at once, floating loosely between them, forgetting what each one felt like as soon as she moved to a new one. It was as if she had been thrown back into the open gates and was trapped forever between realms. For her it was deeply unsettling and felt like a developing madness. So the Ada started marking her skin in new ways, to remind herself of her past versions, tattooing her arms and wrists and legs. We accepted this because it was a worthy sacrifice; there is little difference between using a blade and this alternative, this ripping through the skin with multiple needles, injecting ink until the flesh swells and leaks and bleeds. She had a thick sleeve of black ink tattooed down her left forearm, where she usually did the blood offerings, and she never cut herself again after that. We had all evolved.

She even put a portrait of us on the high of her left arm, of herself staring out, of us peering over her shoulder with our mouth fastened to the junction of neck and trapezius, a phantom arm wrapping around her, a ring suspended in the blankness. All these things she was doing to her skin made her closer to us; it was like an advertisement, a timeline of sections, who she was on the inside being revealed on the outside. We have always been in support of that, like when we carved up her chest. Knowing that Ala, in her cruel motherlove, would not permit us to return through her mouth and into her womb, all we wanted now was wholeness. But when a thing has been created with deformations and mismatched edges, sometimes you have to break it some more before you can start putting it back together. And sometimes, when the thing is a god, you need someone holy for that.