The Basilisk's Mouth

03: A HIGHER POWER

 Superhuman.

 Master race.

 We meet our young friend again, this time bundled up against the jittery glass of a bus window. He is buried underneath a thick beige jacket, the kind worn only in those autumn months that bring the first bite of cold back home. Except it's never really cold here, just less hot. Clouds are looming in the sky and threatening a downpour. Rain means something different here, too. You could be dying of heatstroke one day and wake up to a flooded house the next. Everything about his new home screams extremity.

 Black buttons gleam down his chest like a line of rotted teeth. Underneath the heavy folds of the material you can see his arms, trussed up at his sides and hands somewhere deep in the pockets. His cheek bounces on the bus window, and it must be uncomfortable, but the stubborn ox doesn't move.

 Motherland, a passing billboard proclaims. Sacred place.

 He doesn't like taking the bus on his own, because his thoughts always wander to places he doesn't want to revisit. This time, his mind is overrun with thorny bushes of war propaganda; an unfortunate side effect of travelling through the city centre. It only makes him more agitated, and my job harder. It's so hard to find good soil for a seed when every viable plot has been choked up with ethno-nationalist slogans.

 Mutterland, a rumbling current at the back of his skull whispers. Just a small rearrangement of letters, and all of a sudden the word becomes illegal.

 I will narrate today because today is special. His mind is often a wonderful place, but it can be terribly prone to repetition. I mostly end up uncovering the same thoughts, most of which is dwelling on whatever deadline he's late for. But today, his thoughts have ventured to more spiritual places than he usually frequents. The memory I have nestled in my palm is over a decade old; I wasn't expecting to see it again. I packed it deep in the dirt when he was just eight years old, and he's been quite content to leave it there ever since. My host isn't the reflective type.

 In fact, there's a lot of new things running through his mind this time. It's been a long time since I've heard German, too. We're both surprised. The dam must have breached.

SAIA DO NOSSO PAÍS a sign proclaims, championed on the emaciated arms of a man sitting on the steps of the old US embassy. There's always somebody sitting there, and today there's a growing crowd. They starve themselves outside that door. Sometimes the soldiers clear them out, sometimes they leave them there. A corpse clutching a Portuguese sign makes a compelling argument. Johann ducks his head, not daring to look around in case he catches somebody's eye, and pretends not to understand the sign like any decent citizen.

 The memory he's dredged from the dead takes us back to his first holy encounter. By all accounts, it was a surprise. He knew God was supposed to exist; that was why people built churches after all. The tolling of their bells would accompany him on his walk to school in that murky hour before the sun rose. Even so, he found it strange that God could pass judgement on street corners all over the city, and yet nobody talked about it. God, like everything else, was assigned an address and a plot of land against the pavement.

 But I digress; you'll see all that very soon. Our memory starts with the rush of air at Johann's back as the front door of the house slammed shut behind him. It was a cold morning, somewhere in February, and his school bag was cutting a canyon into his shoulder. He had left early that morning, desperate to taste fresh air. I try to tease the memory out further and draw out what happened before he left the house, but the spindly little roots are truncated, lost to time. For some reason or another, they've come loose in his head and all he has is the aftermath. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to fill in the gaps, and resume my telling on the front steps.