In The Mind Of The Beast

In the mind of the beast

'I see her. Every day. Every morning.' It was casual at first, and then he got lost in it.
'Her strides are so elegant she seems to glide. God’s very own Mona Lisa. Art in motion. The only vestige of Eve, handmade by God himself. A human hourglass, modelled to perfection. Lilliputian and modern. Skin smooth and radiant like paint on a new car. I would drink my milk off her. Caramel-coloured and flavoured skin. If the sun’s radiance were a dress, it wouldn’t look better on anybody else.’

As he recited, he drifted to a place none of us in that class had ever been.
Every word was chiselled to fit perfectly into the puzzles of our hearts. Words almost edible. I closed my eyes to imagine the taste of this wine brewed from syllables.

Still, he didn’t stop.
‘Eyes that sparkle like embers, pointy pretty nose, soft juicy-looking lips that would taste better than any strawberry. The perfect ensemble for the perfect face. Your face.’

Right there, he looked at Ma’am—and she looked stuck at inhalation. There was a glow and then a glint in her eyes.

‘Hieroglyphic, but I can read it. It’s deep-seated sorrow, embedded in the corners of her smile. The glut of pupils and people only makes her more sullen. Misunderstood like the cycles of war. Two-sided like the Swastika. When all they see is the tyranny of the Nazis, all I comprehend is plenitude through the eyes of Buddha.’

His recital made the rest of ours sound like nursery rhymes, and the class’ standing ovation proved it. Ma’am was the first to rise. He bowed and strutted to his seat.

‘That’s how it’s done. That is how it’s done! Read more. Work on your diction. Be creative. Add depth and emotion to your work. Make us believe you,’ she said over the clapping. ‘Well done, Jonah. Well done.’
The most she’d said about any recital.

‘Poetry gives life to words. It gives true meaning. We should get that poem published,’ she gushed.

She should just go kiss him, I thought.

‘Sharrel, you’re next,’ she finally said.

A sigh. Deep breaths. I made my way to the front of the class. Goddammit, my belt felt tight. No, no, no. I should’ve gone to the ladies’ first. Now you stay in there, I silently instructed the flood in my bladder.

‘Ahhh… good morning, class.’

‘Good morning, Sharrel.’
I looked at him. He didn’t even bother greeting me like the rest.

‘My poem is entitled: In the Mind of a Beast.’

The class mumbled and hissed.

‘Shhhh!’ Madam said. ‘I like the title. Go on.’

I cleared my throat and began.

“He writes. Attempts to stifle their attacks on him. Demons that have stalked him since childhood. Maniacal tendencies flood his youthful mind. And yet he remains subtle.”
I hissed the last word just as I had rehearsed, listened to it echo back, and then proceeded.

“Quintessential mother’s boy is his Oscar-deserving performance. A role he took up at a tender age, like the Olsens. Quiet like a graveyard...”
I barely pronounced the word graveyard — it was more of a whisper. By then, I had them eating out of the palm of my hand.

“And socially inept like a schizophrenic, he hides. Behind his mother’s overprotectiveness, he thrives. In front of a television tube, his motives and ideologies are subdued — like rejected research proposals. He denounces play as starvation of the mind and, as such, indulges himself in Shakespearean tragedies, while his age-mates incorporate themselves into our social colony.

They label him strange. Psycho. He obliterates their conspiracies with his innocent and mesmerising looks. Charms... our mothers... ahhh... charms our mothers and—”

I was starting to sound like a broken record. The next line just wouldn’t come to me. All those nights of rehearsing were for nothing. I had completely forgotten the rest of my lines.

I couldn’t even thank my audience. I just slithered back to my seat.

I felt the weight of the silence. The shame.

“Let’s clap hands for her,” Madam declared.

I was supposed to gauge the applause.
There was no need — it was obvious who the winner was.

Dumbasses probably had no clue who I was talking about in my poem.

As Prudence read out hers (I could never read mine. And he never...), I imagined him sneaking up behind me.

“That poem was about me?” he says.

“You wish,” I reply.

I searched for his eyes — and he intentionally ignored me.

“You can come to my house anytime,” was what my mother said when he came to drop off the money his mom owed for the chickens she’d bought on credit. Mischief was all my mother saw on other children’s faces—except Jonah’s.

My mother hated children like she didn’t have me.

“If only this neighbourhood had more kids like Jonah, it would be good to raise a child in,” she would say. “He behaves like an uptown boy, unlike these slattern ones you play with, Miranda. They are no good!”

She liked his drawling, soothing tone—which I liked too. I bet he picked it up from some cowboy series. The sociopath!

“May I?”

Who in their teenage mind would speak like that?

I spun my head around, eyes wide open and lips pouted in disgust. Who else but Jonah? Offering me a hand with the cupboard door.

I—the pouter, as the boys had come to call me (because I blocked any sort of advances)—gave way to the Almighty Jonah.

Immune to puberty’s howling call to the pack’s male chauvinistic tendencies, which most had already surrendered to, he remained sweet (squeaky-sounding, I mean). Or maybe he just avoided overshooting the hoarseness in his voice, unlike the other scoundrels in my class.

“Twist the key twice, and there.”

He seemed to have romanced the door into obedience—it yielded and opened.

Instead of being thankful, my misandry would not allow me to say it. Or even show it.

“Show-off,” I mumbled under my breath.

Any other boy from my class would have demanded a medal. But Jonah’s meed, I presumed, was humiliating me.

When all hands were up, his would be down—and then, when the whole class seemed bamboozled by one of Ma’am's riddles, Ensteiny Jonah, as they now called him, would hurl his hand up like a corporal saluting a superior.

“The Thirteenth Amendment was voted into law on the thirty-first of January, 1865, spearheaded by Abraham Lincoln, and it abolished slavery in America,” the prodigy would parade his knowledge, dragging every word like it was law, entitled to our full attention.

I hated him—and yet, every night before I killed the lights in my bedroom, I thought of the bastard.

The hostility I felt towards him sank like the Titanic at that moment. Eight o’clock, every night before the news—when we were supposed to go to bed—I thought of Jonah. Like an iceberg, he had done the impossible: sunk my unsinkable ego and dissolved it into puny love.

It affected my studies. I lost focus in class.

Nothing he did—from picking up his pencil from the floor to scratching his balls in class—missed my eye.

Not under my watch, Jonah!

I wonder if he noticed that I was noticing him. Once, he threw a glance at me and I literally dodged it like a bullet, and the whole class laughed at my bêtise—the way I had shaken everything off our Group Two desk.

I had been scrapped off the Group One list (the cream of the class) because Ma’am said I was slacking.

“Is everything okay?” Ma’am inquired.

“Yes, Ma’am.” I shook my head fast and clumsily like a cuckoo spring-necked toy.

Then, after a long sermon from Ma’am about the test on Friday that could help some of us regain our honour (a blunt attack on me, I knew), the bell rang. The class was dismissed and everyone ran out of the room. Helter-skelter they went, as I watched—except Jonah.

“Miranda.” Regina gave me the can-we-go-home pose, but I brushed her off and told her that Mom was coming to pick me up, which she often did to discourage my association with ghetto kids.

My mother’s denial of our financial state after my father ran off with a younger woman was self-destructive—and it cost me my freedom of association.

We had moved to Area 15 after futile efforts to counter his whereabouts. The house had been taken after months of failing to pay the mortgage, and Father had cut off our access to his money.

I never viewed my father with a negative opinion. Nobody could put up with my mother’s bullshit—not even me. Too bad I couldn’t leave, too.

I stood by the door for minutes on end, but my Prince Charming did not emerge from the room. Suddenly, the door slammed shut, like a gust of wind had done it. Funny—we had closed all the windows earlier when a sandstorm had blown through during the last Mathematics lesson.

My obsession with him pushed me to peep through the keyhole. Prince Charming was still sitting in the front row, and Ma’am seemed engrossed in her marking. Then, Prince Charming bolted up from his chair and strutted toward Ma’am. She didn’t seem distracted by his approach.

He lifted her head to align with his, and no—I couldn’t believe my eyes, and I couldn’t even name what I saw—how he touched her lips with his and steered his head side to side as she “ate” him.

I backed away from the keyhole, daring not to startle them. But my heavy breathing could have given me away. Still, it didn’t. When I finally gathered the nerve to peer through my telescope of a keyhole once more, he had his hands on her breasts, cupped around them, squeezing.

She panted languorously like a sprinter catching her breath—only it was slow motion—and she almost looked like she could die.

I couldn’t do it anymore. Even I was dying.

I felt betrayed, and yet, a strange pulsating feeling stirred between my legs—a feeling I had never felt before. Frightened by it, I ran and ran and ran.

I don’t know if they heard me.

I would tell my mom about it. About her perfect little Jonah. My arranged suitor. What else was she insinuating with all her idolizing remarks—most of them siphoned through me? What was I to do but fall for him like she intended?

That homicidal maniac had defiled my Ma’am. My role model. Petite and modelled to perfection. Awww, now I’m using his exact words to describe her. Wait a minute. No, he wouldn’t! Nah, that sleazy bastard was talking about her all that time in that poem of his. With her small round face and cute little accessories. A stark contrast to Old Mean Mrs. Doris, who had recently passed—much to my heart’s joy. Hell probably missed her.

Mrs. Doris disciplined us to a pulp and often reeled me out of my daydreams with knuckle-knocks to my head. I instantly stopped daydreaming. Ma’am would never lay a finger on us. Even though some of the boys were bigger than her, we all treated her like royalty.

I loved Ma’am, and only Jonah had stolen my affections from her. That lunatic had done it again—because not only did I no longer adore her like before, but now, I hated her.

But even my loathing for her could not bring me to tell. The truth made me swell.
“Why are you so sullen today, Missy?” Mother asked. “Did your glamorous Ma’am spank you today, ha? You always say she’s so niceee.”

Mother spoke so sarcastically you’d almost think her teeth would fall out from too much of it. I remained quiet.
“You don’t want to talk like your dad? Then go to your room now!”

Mother was damaged, and I felt for her. Father had been so withdrawn and rarely spoke before he left. This morose, demure man was not the father we knew. The celebrated stand-up comedian who had swept my mother off her feet with his jollity had swung around to show his darker side, like turning roasting meat to its blood-dripping side.

Today I reminded her of him. I could not speak. Now I felt like I had done it.

In Ma’am’s first few days as an intern, I had also daydreamed of kissing “her soft-looking lips,” so maybe I was guilty of the crime too. Once, I had seen two women kissing on Rhythm City, and maybe that had sparked my imagination. Mother never missed an episode, and it aired before 8 pm, so she had no excuse for me not to watch it—except when I hadn’t done my homework yet, which was a rarity.

Morning came, and I sat in class staring at Jonah—with pure disgust this time. It showed on my face, in my voice, and in my temperament; I was burning with hate. Even Ma’am showed dread when she looked at me. When I raised my hand to ask questions, she stuttered, and I piled heaps of them like a fiend. Not even her Jonah could save her.

During our General Knowledge lesson on sex and sexuality, I provoked her with questions like, “Can a younger man date an older woman?”
“Yes,” she replied.
“Can they have sex and get married?” I knocked obnoxiously at her conscience.
“Yes... ahhh... no,” she bumbled through her answer. “It is socially immoral, rather unacceptable.”
“Come again!” I wanted to be her bugbear, to make her cringe every time she saw me. The pressure became too much, and she burst out of the classroom, moping.

The classroom roared into chaos and laughter. The class monitor failed to contain us, and the bell saved her from the headmaster’s discontent with her performance at upholding her duties. If there was ever any doubt about who had caught the pair in such an intimate abomination, it was no more. I had recalibrated the North Pole on their compass—but a compass wouldn’t show you how to overcome the hurdles that follow—the swamps, the ravenous predators that lurk in dark forests, et cetera, et cetera. I could neither be bought nor sold.

“Hi,” he said. “I was wondering if I could walk you home today.”

I paused, as if sinking into cinematic quicksand—the more you fight it, the deeper you sink. I felt like the rage inside me would devour me if I spoke. His attempt to seduce me had mortalized my rage.

“Come on, Miranda, let’s talk about—”
“What?” I intercepted.
“You know what I’m talking about,” he rumbled with so much assertion. How could I deny his request?

We walked in silence. Often I outpaced him, and he had to jog to catch up.
“It’s you I really like, not Ms. Paula,” he said.

I folded my arms and stood in front of him as if we were about to duel. That got the attention of some schoolmates, and I heard one shout, “Fight! They about to fight!”

“I’m a gentleman. I do not—let me underscore—do not fight women,” Jonah said.

“Underscore?” they shouted and ran off laughing. His intimidating diction had sent them running.

“Miranda, I like you, and I want you to be my girlfriend.” He stared through me as he spoke those words.

If we weren’t on such a busy boulevard, my Prince Charming would have kissed me.

I started running. I don’t know why I ran, but I felt that pulse between my legs again.

“Will you think about it?” he shouted. The snob could not run—his books couldn’t save him on that one, even though he sat through all the sports events.

“We in a good mood today,” mother said. I couldn’t stop smiling.

“Baby, there’s something we need to talk about,” she continued.

What now? Were we moving again? Not when I now had a boyfriend.

“When a girl...”
“Come on, sit down. I’ve been told I need to give you this talk,” she smiled and sighed.
“When a girl becomes a teenager like you, well, ahhhh, her body begins to change.”

“Mummy, I know, we learnt it at school,” I tried to stop her.

“Thank God... so no sex, OK?” She was worse than I thought.

Mother had grown up an orphan and always insisted she wasn’t good at this “parenting thing.”
“Orphanages don’t equate to nuclear families, you know,” she’d say with a laugh—and then start crying. Always.

I almost warned her against crying—for that day was my day, not hers to ruin.

Our little love boat took off on a slow note, and the first few days didn’t feel any different. I still felt isolated, like I didn’t belong there—“temporary,” like we were going to move again.

So I almost demanded an engagement ring to ascertain my position in his life. I wanted to be “in the room.” To be the elephant in his life, to take up all the space, to be all that mattered to him—like in the movies.

I fought my way back into Group One, back into my position of control. I reminded him that only I knew things about him and Ma’am that could get both of them into big, big trouble—that I stood between him and hell.

I demanded to sit right opposite him. I demanded he walk me home. I even ordered him to pick me up every morning for our initially quiet walks to school.

Any attempt to sit back while everyone stormed out of class for sports or home at the end of the day was met by whispers of “Could you walk me to the grounds/home?”

“Come on, Genius, you know so much about everything else, but you can’t stir up a conversation with a woman?” I got impatient after days of silent walks and uncomfortable silences between us at the sports grounds.

“What is there to talk about?” he said and punctuated it with a smirk.

“Oh, so I’m too daft for you now... I’ll see you at the headmaster’s.” I sprung up and started heading for his office.

He just sat there, and for a moment, I felt irrelevant—but my ego would not let me stop moving.

Tears of rejection crept up my eyes; anger fuelled my pace and demanded an outlet, otherwise, it would blow steam out of my ears and nose.

“Miranda, stop!” he shouted.

“You can do better than that,” my rage demanded.

Now I could hear him huffing and puffing behind me until he finally dawdled in front of me. His long, gaunt frame towered over me until he hurled himself forward and supported his upper torso on his knees with his arms to catch his breath, which only allowed him a feeble gasp of “Stop.”

“I will talk to you,” he gasped some more.

After some modest resistance, I finally applauded his laboured rapprochement with a smile.

“So, what’s the best novel you’ve ever read?” Jonah started talking.

“I don’t read novels,” I pouted, “but I like People magazine.”

I smiled, and we both laughed.

He fancied Twelfth Night, the History Channel, adored Adolf Hitler, listened to Beethoven, read astronomy books, wrote short dark stories, and recited deep poetry whose rhyme and rhythm I liked—but its themes vexed me.

He was especially proud of his story-writing abilities.

“Writing a good story is like trying to level a plane after takeoff. You excite the reader, hold them in limbo, no bumps or jittery swerves, and before landing, you should know when to—and best of all, how to.”

It dawned on me that all his life, he had yearned for an ear to pour his weirdness into—his little inventions, his obsession with vampires that propelled his fetish for blood (he occasionally cut himself to taste it), his mother.

“She is God,” he blasphemed.

“Like she is a little god, like we all are, fashioned out of a greater God?” I probed—my Christian background would not allow me to sit that one out.

“Nah. She is God.”

I had seen books on Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, and Christianity in his room, but such lunacy appalled me.

“She is my creator, the all-powerful, our God.”

“Our?” Shock intercepted and bumbled its first word like a toddler.

“Yes, our God—in the form of my mother.”

“And that makes you the son of God?”

Again, shock interrupted his philosophical bullshit, and for the first time, I understood how the Jews felt when Jesus said he was the son of God—only Jonah wasn’t this naive, narcissistic “Claimetine”—a term we had coined to describe his type who made weird claims but never of this magnitude. Your average claimetine made claims about dating a certain beautiful girl from the neighbourhood or uptown, or about how opulent her father was. But this sort of assertion from Jonah was a whole different dimension—and it only equated to clinical psychosis.

Disaffected, I vowed to cut all ties with him, but I always found myself knocking on their front porch, silently pleading for his acquaintance.

“You’re back?” he said with that peremptory smile that I, like the prodigal son, had found reason and returned to my father.

My loneliness dared not dispute it. I needed him like a king needs a God. I felt at ease around him—a weird but a sense of belonging nonetheless—that when he denuded me, I complied and even assisted him with my bra.

Now I understood how Ma’am felt, how I begged for his control, how my hymen had proclaimed his ownership of me—and I remember how so intense it was that I whispered the three magic words—I love you.