Malachite Sunbird and Red Dwarf Star
A low luminosity star with a long nuclear lifetime, red dwarfs are the faintest and coldest stars, so faint that their presence in remote parts of the Galaxy must be inferred from their frequency near the Sun.
-- McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology
I remember the day I became a teacher. It was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away and a few months after they released Nelson Mandela from prison. I had set out for town at the final school bell. The town was Mohale’s Hoek (one of the ten dark-spot camp-towns in the light-circle of pacific, Boer-unwanted mountains just across the western border of South Africa’s Orange Free State named The Kingdom of Lesotho) which was situated and probably still is on the opposite side of the climate-sharpened Mountain of Snakes: a high and stolid impediment to the Western value of mastering time by eradicating circuitous distance. I had been in Peace Corps for one year and had a month before ceased praying for the white, white-bearded Man to drop down to me His boring machines, had not only ceased it but had begun to believe, impractically, in the ancient obstacle’s right and ability to preserve its secret granite heart, to have faith that its so far un-penetrated sublimity might always keep unsublimated, holding Hidden Mysteries tight against any inexorable techno-phallic danger.
Up at the mountain-side, superior to where I hunkered on high rocks, watchful of a fortuitous lift, the turquoise sparrows flitted – the malachite sunbirds – speeding, livid motes sounding in a sky of the absolute broadest blue: the tiny green satellites of God soaring over a mythic earth of irregularly squared maize fields and fluffy balls of white sheep floating like land-clouds through scrubby dung-and-thatch hut-dotted foothills. The sun had passed down by about one half of itself in the endless revelation of the sunbirds, until the rattle I persevered the glaring spectacle of the Mother for floated up from the distant valley: the unmistakable rattle and squeak of a motor vehicle hoisting itself up a cruel, sharp-stoned road that on some unseen design had been cut jaggedly around the Mountain of Snakes and on into camp. I lifted myself up and out from Mother’s radiant stereoptic influence and peered into the squintingly-bright African light, picking out the mechanical reflection of the Coming of Man: someone I knew: a rare truck-owner from below. I watched the contraption jangle closer, then a bit closer, slowly. Then, slowly, I put out my hand. I slowly grinned.
The drive was pleasant; the driver, somehow, was not yet drunk; I spent my time thinking about Chris. His painful two years were done, at last and thankfully; ended were his tribulations. Sometimes it happens that way: sometimes the politics of Peace Corps overwhelm the mission and a slot is filled that should not have been. A relative of a ruling general dreams up a spurious Farmer’s Training Center, another pretend institution to fool the givers of development money into giving over development money. It works, because no one really cares where the money goes, whose pocket it lines. The important thing is that it goes, that voters in the Netherlands and Denmark and Belgium see their money drifting into countries that appear, geographically, to be struggling against Apartheid. Chris was unlucky enough to have been an American political pawn in this vein – a sacrifice given over to political expediency.
Chris was neither immune to nor prepared for the toxic dropping of his very own people’s disease-ridden shit, shit which – so long as he lived at the other end, at home in consumptive America – Chris had no notion could be so stifling, so stagnating.
Early on he had decided he would, before it was all over, give some shit back. Since that decision Chris had done no more work for the general; what he did was prop himself within the tomb of his tiny house at the bogus training center madly layering canvas after canvas with oil-based paint. And now the day before the day to fly away back had come, and shit-layered Chris had rented the conference room at the Maloti Mountain Hotel in Mohale’s Hoek to hang his frustration for exhibition and sale. Peace Corps strictly forbade Volunteers making money, but the rule assumed/feared profit made off host-country nationals, who were not Chris’ target consumers. No, his marks were the South African English, the Norwegians, the Swedes – all those leeches in Lesotho under the guise of helping-the-natives-help-themselves while in reality only helping themselves help themselves to huge helpings of home-country taxpayer money: payment for looking the other way as local army-suits packed with Orwellian swine shoveled the rest into their deep pockets.
In the truck I couldn’t help smiling. Although my work as teacher was less soul-deadening than my escaping colleague’s, my own cynicism was up enough to be able to look forward with true relish to Chris’s planned evening festivities.
Setting down in Mohale’s Hoek, I paused for a take-out dinner of deep-fried goo, eating it as I made my way to the hotel. The hotel was elaborate considering the poverty of the country, run by a family of “white Basotho,” Afrikaners so long in country milking the aid-money god they considered themselves nationals. The hotel had tennis courts, a swimming pool, a European restaurant (of the overly-meaty, off-continent style of the transplanted Dutch) and two heavily stocked if heavily tacky bars. Each day, every day, they glided in and out of the guarded gate in their hermetically sealed Mercedes like mobile whited sepulchers, getting themselves together socially to spend their generous amounts of free-time and –money in uninteresting ways.
It was with a mouthful of greasy-thick chips and fat cakes that I crossed the threshold into the transmogrified hotel conference room. Chris was out but his soul was in, and I stood amidst its glow of oily color, contemplating its ironies. The whites I spoke of: they had allowed Chris to do this. He had been bestowed the crippled status of “Artist,” and thus allowed his eccentricity. They even went so far as to acknowledge him in greeting now and then, whereas most of us dusty Volunteers get nothing from them but closed-mouth, distant stares, telegraphed out from behind the glass of their silvery, sepulchral cars, which are always slipping away on strata of dust in the flash of an instant. Still, Chris was watched carefully, living as he did amongst the blacks; he was watched to make certain he continued along in his inability to help them. Observing the failure of an idealist was a great comfort to them, as it is to most of us. That Chris was an Artist made him a double failure and thus a double comfort, doubly salving-over their refusal to face their collective hypocrisies and fears.
Teetering there in the off-center of the conference room, buffeted by the failure around me: I was astonished. Partitions moonlighted as gallery hangers, indifferently displaying at least forty different works, ranging in size from palm to refrigerator. Very few images were recognizable, and because they were bottomless in that way and more ways I had trouble locating anything in me when I gazed at them; only needling pains behind my eyes resulted from bouncing off the shapes. ... Okay, so he had been a failure as a Peace Corps Volunteer – and, maybe (I truly dont know) as a member of society – but that was all part of it. Chris created from a very deep pain inside, pictured-out his dissatisfaction and resentment with a purposeful brush. He wasn’t a born debaser, but he had been made into one, as the situation demanded. This seemed, and still seems, a good thing to me, and I can think of nothing more proper than a revenge-gathering to celebrate and pass on such aching birth to its rightful parents. These people that were coming: they were the progenitors of this misshapen sacrifice, and they would be its permanent, rightful guardians by the end of the night. And something life-renewing would result.
Suddenly, from behind me: “Hello.”