Dead Americans by Ben Peek Page B

the desk, the darkness making his bones more prominent, as if there was no skin at all behind them. With his bony hands, the Aborigine stroked the glass jar of the head, as if it were a child that he could pick up and hold close to his chest. “After he had been killed, King had his head removed, to make sure that he would not rise again. He did it that very night, in his backyard.”
    Twain shuddered. “Where are we?”
    “We are in London, in Joseph Banks study. King had the head sent here afterwards, to study, to learn what it was that made him hate them so much. In doing so, he took everything I had given the warrior, and isolated it from the Aboriginal people, destroying the last remains of his power.”
    “Surely something could have been done?” Twain asked, approaching the desk.
    “No,” Cadi replied coldly. “The warrior himself was the symbol. I realized the mistake afterwards, and rectified it with my Irishman, but in this case, the Eora’s skin, his entire body, was the symbol that could unite them.”
    Twain stared at the floating head. After everything he had seen, everything he had been forced through, he wanted the head to leave an impression on him, to suggest to him the quality of the Aboriginal people who lived in Sydney and the white men and women that lived in the city too. But mostly, he wanted the head to explain the figure that had taken him along this journey with intensity that bordered on fanaticism. But the longer he stared, the more it resembled but a simple head.
    “Do you understand why Sydney needs a new heart?” Cadi asked, passing through the table to stand before him. The head of the Eora warrior appeared to float in his stomach, part of the spirit.
    “Yeah,” Twain said uncomfortably, wanting to step back, but unable too. “I understand why you want one, but maybe you’ve looked at it wrong. Maybe things aren’t as bad as you say. At any rate, there’s nothing I can do about that.”
    “That’s untrue,” the other replied quietly, an underlying menace in his voice. “You bring with you a culture that can be embraced. A symbol for a revolution that can wash away the old hatred, and bring a new beat to the city.”
    “But—”
    Cadi’s bony hand plunged into Twain’s chest before he could finish. The pain was immense: it spread through every fibre of his body, terrible, and inescapable. It was death. He knew that. He would never see his wife or daughters again, never write another word; it was all over . . . and then, through the pain, he felt the beat of his heart fill his body like the sound of a drum, beating the tempo of his life . . . 
    It stopped.
    Cadi pulled his bony arm out of his chest, the flesh and bone parting until it released the still beating heart of Mark Twain.
    Seeing it, Twain’s consciousness failed, his legs went weak, and he began to fall.
    “I will not let the English win,” said Cadi without remorse, his voice reaching through the pain and shock.
    The ground rushed up to Twain. Black and solid, he could not avoid it, he could not escape it, and he did not want to escape. Let it be over, let it finish, let him go. He could still feel his heart beating, but it was no longer his own: it was stolen, ripped from him to be placed into a city he barely knew. It would do no good. The spirit was wrong: revolutions were not done with symbols and stolen cultures, they were seeded from within, grown from what was the land and people, created anew. Change would rise in Sydney only when the city was its own creature, when the people in it embraced it, when they understood all that had happened. Change could not be forced; to do so would result only in a cosmetic, shallow, tainted beast—the exact kind Cadi fought against. Realizing this, Twain wanted to cry it out, to tell Cadi that it was futile, that he was
wrong
, that he had to acknowledge the past, that he had to accept it and resolve the issues that arose from it; that only by doing this