Читать книгу Another Kind of Madness - Ed Pavlic - Страница 10

BOOK TWO: STOLEN HANDS

One day you’ll realize we’re not strangers.

—CHAKA KHAN

He had work and plenty of it. By some measure, at least two jobs. Probably four and maybe more than that. Work was about all he had and that’s how he’d wanted it. And money, he’d saved ten years of wages. Good wages. By the summer we’re talking about, the summer that had waited almost until it was over to begin, when he met a woman named Ndiya Grayson, Shame Luther had steady work during the day around Chicago. The small construction company he worked for as a laborer had found a way to downsize its scale and insinuate its specialty into a wide range of factories and mills in Chicago’s rapidly changing—meaning quickly evaporating—industrial sector. So he had that. That particular summer, the job repairing the acid tanks at Joycelan Steel looked like at least a few months’ worth. Steady, if irregular, work. The mill was operating at as near as possible to full capacity during the repair. So the schedule fluctuated from week to week: four days on, three days off; seven days on, no days off; three and four; five and two; and so on. This was the way it was in the twenty-first century. The days of long jobs on newly constructed factories were, as far as he’d seen, over in Chicago. He’d spent ten years of his life chasing that kind of work through the South and Southwest until it crossed the border and disappeared into Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, or elsewhere. Ten years living on out-of-town expense checks, banking his wages. He’d worked out of his twenties and into his thirties: ten years in orbit. Then back to Chicago to work as he would or wouldn’t in the city. So, that was one job, which he’d decided would be a rhythm around Chicago, or nothing. That was all he wanted, all it made any sense to want.

He had a job as house piano to the alley cats in “the green zone” behind 6329. An hour of twilight, a few nights per week. That paid whatever rent he’d otherwise have owed Junior. That wasn’t exactly true, but that’s all he knew at the time. He had the deal with neighborhood parents, that is, the mothers, to cook dinner weekdays for an ever-fluctuating rack of kids. That didn’t pay anything in cash or otherwise, a fact that the mothers were still trying to figure out. In fact, far from charging, Shame regularly loaned the mothers and their families money. Then, after he’d taken the dare, he had the new job at the Cat Eye across from Earlie’s Café on North Broadway. He played Wednesday nights, one hundred dollars for three twenty-minute sets. He’d insisted only that it be Wednesday. The piano a job? Work? Not hardly and, he thought, it wouldn’t last whatever it was. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need the hundred dollars. He did it for the simple dare of it. And that wasn’t exactly true either.

Soon he found another reason to play at the Cat Eye. After the first two weeks, he decided he should sit down at 6329 and plan out three sets’ worth of music. Not a play list—he didn’t play “songs”—but at least a set of chords or basic motifs to concentrate on during each of the twenty-minute windows. He couldn’t read or write music but he could, so he thought, at least make a plan. The time went by in a flash. It was over almost before he’d started. Planning a few things out seemed simple enough. He couldn’t do it. When he tried to keep conscious track of the music all hell broke loose: ideas spiraled from the chords and chords from the ideas until he was paralyzed and dizzy. More than that, he found he couldn’t remember anything at all about the previous six sets’ worth of music he’d been told that he had played at the club. The sets were empty windows in his memory.

He remembered the surroundings and conversations going on around him and a few loosely involving him between sets. He remembered people telling him that they liked the music. He remembered that there were more people there on week two than the first week. But the time at the keys was perfectly—almost too perfectly—gone. At this particular time in his life, recently returned to the city, the city that for him had been rebuilt around the one grave in his life, my grave, he’d have paid a hundred dollars for a blank hour, an hour beyond biography and its endless ventriloquisms. Of course, that hour was far from blank, but he didn’t know that either.

So those were the jobs: Joycelan Steel, the alley music, the kids, and the Cat Eye. When, rarely, he thought about it, it seemed like a lot. It seemed like he should be a busy man. He wasn’t. Or maybe he was, but he never felt like what he heard people call busy at all. He never felt like he was in a hurry. Mostly, he felt like something he couldn’t see was watching him take apart and reassemble his life.

■

South Rhodes Avenue. The building is three floors, two apartments on each floor. Red brick. Shame lived on the third floor next to a retired man called Luther B. People in Chicago know the neighborhood as Woodlawn. People in Woodlawn know it as the Washington Park Subdivision, which is where the old Washington Park Race Track once stood. People in Washington Park know the first three of the five buildings (6309, 6319, 6329, 6339, and 6349) south of Sixty-Third Street and before the vacant lot on the west side (yes, on your right walking toward Sixty-Fourth Street) of Rhodes Avenue as Juniorville. Sixty-three twenty-nine had been built in the 1950s when that particular piece of the ghetto had been razed and rebuilt to house old black people who weren’t allowed into the new subsidized and segregated “retirement” housing in nearby Hyde Park. The building had an elevator which quickly went out of service if it ever, in reality, made it into service. When the neighborhood hit its low point in the mid-1980s, the hydraulics, the stainless post, even the elevator carriage itself had been either sold, stolen, or both. It didn’t matter much to the old folks. Most had either died or otherwise left the building and or the block. All had vacated the top floor that was dangerously inconvenient most of the year and deadly in the summer heat.

A market abhors a vacuum. Ad hoc drug trade moved in and made a bad thing worse. In the late 1980s, Junior came up the ranks in the Black Swoosh Syndicate that replaced the demise of Jeff Fort’s El Rukn empire. The BSS sold franchises. Junior took a lease on the north part of the block. He gutted and rebuilt the buildings. Then, inexplicably, he moved other aged residents back into the buildings. Many of these people were retired police. Among other things, he’d decided to move the oldest residents into first-floor apartments and give up on the idea of an elevator altogether. He closed off the shaft and left the space empty. Instead of security cameras, payments to the police, and bars on the windows, Junior and his minions circulated an invitation to any thief who thought he could rob residents or burglarize residences in Junior’s three buildings and live to fence the proceeds. As a kind of punctuation in the warning, the locks had been conspicuously removed from the front doors of his buildings.

Junior didn’t pay the police because he thought he didn’t have to and so did the police. A series of half-truths spliced with incontrovertible facts no one could figure out how he knew signaled that something was up. Finally, by a few key bold and imaginative leaps, which had to be real because they made no sense, he’d convinced everyone in Cook County Detention that he knew and could prove valuable things about powerful people. The formal precision and logic of Junior’s mix of information and isolation alone could have provoked serious doubt but the people he needed to convince were very narrow-minded realists; they didn’t give a shit about form. Their language was a grammar of powerful and powerless, the visible and the invisible. Junior’s brain contained a portfolio of documented relationships between very visible, officially powerful people (police commissioners, district attorneys, members of the Mayor’s office) and other very powerful, officially invisible ones. He had a clear chart of how the visible power of the official ones offered an official invisibility to the interests and operations of the others.

When he came out of Detention, Junior became a charter member of the latter group at an opportune time. Which brings up two reasons that I’m the one telling this story: 1) my family was at the center of the officially invisible web of power on the South Side; 2) the worker-piano player now known as Shame Luther was my best friend. We were best friends, that is, until the day I died and he split and stayed split. I’d say he split town, left Chicago, but the split was far deeper than geography. I died a week before my twenty-fifth birthday. Shame was actually in Los Angeles on a job, the last day of a job to be precise. We’d had very specific plans for my birthday and thereafter.

So all the splitting started there. The point is he never came back to Chicago. Because we’d been inseparable for years, Shame’s prolonged absence raised a few invisibly powerful eyebrows. About ten years later, when Junior heard that Shame had come back to Chicago, the gears of our present story had locked teeth. All they needed was one of those everyday accidents in life—the kind often blamed on form or on the logic of fiction—to set it in motion. Meanwhile, Shame had returned to the city all but consciously guarded against knowing anything about the gears or the story. He’d returned as he had from an isolation that masked his outrage about being alive at all. So, in other words, he was an accident waiting—maybe begging—to happen.

During his first weeks living there, Shame had extended the bedroom in his apartment. He’d taken out the wall and added joists, subfloor, and flooring to make an alcove where the elevator shaft had been. It was a perfect place to put the bed. He’d added what he called a wall of light in the wall facing the street across the vacant lot to the south. This was useful in walls that couldn’t support a real window of any meaningful size. Instead of a window, he rebuilt one alcove wall using frosted glass blocks to allow light in without taking down the building and without putting his bed on display to everyone in the street. He added a pattern of clear glass block in the wall as well. This became Shame’s wall of light on the third floor of 6329. The clear blocks were perfectly transparent but telescoped objects indirectly in the viewer’s sightline by several orders of magnitude. The effect was startling, and Shame thought the volatile but precise optics had to be an accident incidental to the rigor of the clear glass blocks’ integrity as weight-bearing building material. In other words, the view was weird and it wasn’t the point. In ways similar to Junior but to drastically different effect, Shame had a knack for fixating on details others passed by. Junior used this to accrue power over people’s blindnesses and fears. Shame did the opposite. He rode those fixations; often this made him oblivious to his own blindnesses and fears.

Nonetheless, in this case the effect of the glass blocks turned out to be crucial for Shame. In whatever direction he looked, focused by one of the clear blocks, the thing just to the top right of his focus was enlarged as if seen through a telescope while everything else appeared to slide down a convex dome out of sight. When the angle of vision shifted, the dome revolved. Images from the street in front of the building slid upward toward and downward away from the point of intended focus as if the world rode on an off-center carousel. So Shame thought he had the best view in the city from his bed facing east across Rhodes Avenue.

■

Another thing Shame had at 6329 was a roommate that he was unsure about. The roommate made him self-conscious about guests, especially ones who threatened to invite themselves to stay the night. In late April, he began to wake up with spots on his ankles. One, maybe two per month. He’d moved in and immediately used steel wool, excess expansion rope he took from the job, and a dozen tubes of construction foam and caulk to close cracks along walls and inside closets. The roommate situation wasn’t about mice or rats, that he knew. The first spot on his ankle was thick in the center, almost as if a tiny marble had been placed under his skin. It itched and stung a little when he sprayed Benadryl onto it. Over the next week, the thick dot disappeared as a halo or a kind of atoll appeared around it. The marble had become an island on his skin an inch or an inch and a half in diameter. Shame decided that he had a large spider living with him who visited him in the night. Over the summer the bites moved up his body.

For ten years he’d lived on the road with the company’s traveling crew. He’d lived intensely alone, worked at least six days a week, studied after work and on his half-day off in his endless series of cheap motel rooms. On his half-days off he almost never talked to anyone. Ten years. Then, upon his return to the city, his first company had been a spider he’d never seen.

He’d come off the road last year and taken up Junior on his offer. He didn’t know how Junior knew he’d come back or why he’d offer him a place to stay in exchange for “services to be named later.” Upon returning to Chicago, Shame had found that, without his noticing, all of his senses had begun to work basically like the glass blocks he’d installed in the bedroom wall. Maybe it was only like this in Chicago? He didn’t know. He’d had enough of the road and didn’t plan on leaving town again. He didn’t know what his life would be about. He meant to figure that out here. As soon as he’d returned, he noticed things and, even more, people would approach into magnified focus and bend out of range in a rhythm that changed constantly but didn’t seem to alter in response to anything he could determine or control. On the job, no problem. Everthing fit in place. Off the job, things slipped and slid. Since moving into Junior’s building, the intensity of his perceptual exile was easing up bit by bit at Earlie’s.

The first step had been Earlie’s Café all the way up on North Broadway. He’d heard an interview with the manager who’d said they opened the place “because we love music.” Shame thought that was a place to start. He’d begun to go there after getting off work and cleaning himself up. Shame was clearheaded at work. But everything else he looked at appeared to him as if it was behind thick aquarium glass. He’d allowed people—he guessed they were people—to talk to him at the bar: Lester, Than-ha, JiLisa, Wayne, Reg, Karmen, the four Kims, and maybe a few others. He trained himself to sit still and listen while their faces slid in and around folding over on themselves. For weeks he watched people talk.

After a few weeks, he’d begun to sit at a table in a corner of windows near the garden and read. He’d intended to keep on studying as he’d done on the road. For years he’d traced the music of what he considered the great voices in American jazz: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Billie Holiday, Charles Mingus, Wynton Kelly, Lester Young. He didn’t exactly know why he was doing it. It struck him that the music he studied (phrase by phrase, song by song, year by year, each artist one at a time) was older than he was. Sometimes twice his age or more. It also struck him that the music was much closer to the age of the old men he worked with. Maybe that’s why he’d done it. He didn’t know. He’d grown to love the music. It never felt old to him. Note by note, gliss by gliss, it felt like it’d become flesh of his flesh, as if his body bore the old-time music into the contemporary world. He’d become a kind of time warp. He wondered if this alone had caused his senses to bend and smear in the gap between the music he’d slow-poured into his brain like warm honey and the manic, info-flow world he found around him in Chicago during the first years of the twenty-first century.

As far as his studies went, he thought it wouldn’t matter that he was back in Chicago. It mattered. As soon as he arrived, he found it impossible to concentrate on the music as he had. In retrospect, the next part looked like a cheap setup. Maybe it was. When he arrived on the third floor of 6329, there’d been an old upright piano in the hallway. It sat on oversized, hard rubber studio rollers. On the back of the piano was well-stenciled script: Mount Carmel High School for Boys. He didn’t ask and he didn’t know why. He rolled it into his apartment mainly because he didn’t have much furniture. He’d never sat at the keys of a real piano before. When he did he loved the feel of the mechanism connecting his fingers to the felt-covered hammers he found hidden inside. From the time he rolled that piano into his apartment, it had seemed as if he didn’t hear recorded music anymore. He’d assembled a vintage stereo system before he found that listening had changed. He loved it, still, for the way it filled space around him with electrified warmth. He could listen, of course, but he didn’t hear it like he had on the road when it seemed like he could step inside the music and watch the world as if through a window in a song. On the road, he’d felt like he could grab hold of the sound, like it was made of physical components. At 6329 he always had music playing. But he didn’t really listen because he really didn’t hear it any more than a fish feels the water that surrounds. Maybe what Shame had begun to do with music had more in common with breathing than it did with listening. Or maybe more with drowning.

When Shame sat at the piano and touched the keys, he felt the notes made by the hammers before he heard them. It was as if the hammers were inside his body somehow. And he could feel the mechanism between the keys and hammers as if they were joined to his tendons and muscles. He began to suspect that the piano listened to the recorded music he played more than he did. Even if he couldn’t play anything, he began to hear music when he played the piano much more than when he listened to recordings. He didn’t hear what he played. It was coming from somewhere else. So he decided to leave music playing for the piano to listen to when he was out of the apartment. He turned it off when he came back. Then he’d play the keys and listen to what appeared in the distance. Because he did all of this, whatever it was, alone, Shame had no gauge for the intensity of what was happening to him.

There were the recurring dreams of being trapped in narrow alleys by collapsed buildings. His hands buried in brick, he tried to cut them off at the wrist but couldn’t cut through thick piano wires in his arms. The dream of showing up to work with keys instead of hands, pedals instead of feet. As he’d learn later, he could hear music performed live as well. But for six solid months, other than work, sleep, and log two hours a few evenings a week standing on the bank or wading ankle deep into conversations at Earlie’s Café, Shame had done nothing in his house but listen to what happened elsewhere as the living tendons of that old piano moved the hammers in his body.

During the first months, a few of the people he’d talked to at Earlie’s had worked their way up to inviting themselves to his place. They were all women. By then he had come up with the afternoon-chef job with the kids and so he’d clean up from the first shift—more on that to come—in the kitchen and cook dinner for the visitors from Earlie’s.

He kept it cool. He’d play the guests music that he couldn’t hear anymore on the stereo. Visitors were more interested in the glowing tubes of the amplifier than any music that happened to be playing. In contrast to the dice-roll of kids he’d host on the first shift, he enjoyed the adult company, the presence of a fully grown body in the room with him. Human stillness. He wasn’t studying anymore. He didn’t know what he was doing. It felt like he was skating. What he was skating on and what was below that, he didn’t know. People were there but it felt to him like no one really came to visit. No one stayed the night. And no one ever came twice which, at the time, was a good thing.

No one, that is, except Colleen, who turned out to be a very crucial presence, a real person and a friend. After a half dozen of these other dinner visits, he figured out what they felt like. He and his guest were ventriloquists’ dummies. They talked but in ways that, somehow, weren’t theirs to say. For years after I was dead, Shame hadn’t talked to anyone effectively. The ventriloquist thing with those first visitors didn’t bother him too much. He didn’t mind the feeling. But he didn’t recognize it and he didn’t trust it. Everyone was still cool at Earlie’s as far as he could tell, but none ever mentioned coming back to 6329. The closest he’d come to his visitors, in fact, was when he’d fall on his bed and watch them leave out the front. He’d watch them warp down the street as the scene poured up through the clear glass bricks in his bedroom wall. That was enough for a while.

■

He knew it was ridiculous. But he thought of the spider as his first overnight guest since he’d quit traveling full time with the construction crew. He’d had no overnight guests on the road, either, only music. If there was sex, that usually took place in the company-owned Ford F-250 he drove. He looked. There were no webs in the room. The boards in the floor were warped enough to allow easy transit to untold worlds of tiny, flexible beings like spiders. Not roaches. He’d caulked and puttied and steel-wooled and foamed those openings. He’d spent enough years on the road in efficiency motel rooms where he had to stomp his feet on the way to the bathroom at night and shake the cereal box before pouring it into the bowl in the morning. He wasn’t going back to that. He’d rather go back to planet college. Well, OK, maybe not that. If the spider wanted to come from out of the old elevator shaft through whatever crack she found and slip up next to him in the night, as long as she left nothing more than one of these small hickey-like bites or so per week, he could live with it. With her. Again, he knew this was strange, which, he told himself, was half the battle.

So he made a quiet deal with his silent roommate. As long as she could slip in and out of bed with him and he didn’t wake up and she was gone by morning, she was more than welcome. It was a pact with silence and a truce with its consequences, a kind of embroidery of fear and, maybe, an experiment with trust.

The bites traveled up his body. Another appeared on the inside of his upper arm. This one was the same as the others. A marble on days one and two that diffused into a poison reef and atoll by the end of the week. The barrier faded and went away by day seven. The spider’s visits made him notice spiders. He read that, in fact, westerners in temperate climates are never more than five feet from a spider. He made a small series of transactions with his roommate during the first six months he lived at 6329, apartment 3B. Spiders aren’t silent, they’re silence. During the years working on the road, he’d come to understand himself as a repository of silence in a mad-loud world. The hemorrhaged world bled noise. He didn’t participate. Less and less. On some jobs he ran a diamond-blade brick saw, cutting very dense, ceramic brick. A small hose sprayed water on the blade. This meant specialized cuts, expensive brick, no mistakes, and a diamond blade spinning at 4500 rpm an inch from his right thumb.

The blare from the blade was beyond deafening. Earplugs did nothing. The sound waved its way past skin and flesh directly into the bones. It rode the marrow, bypassed the ears, and opened into the mass of the skull. Floating in an amplifier, his brain itself translated the vibrations into sound. In fact, he’d come to believe that, like water, bone marrow transmitted sound better than air and so he had given up on the earplugs altogether. But it wasn’t just the saw. It was the world gone agog on blather. The saw was, however, good training for this world. He’d imagine that he was a set of inverted waves that canceled out the noise of the saw. Same amid conversations and in front of all manner of media. TVs had proliferated in public spaces. When he’d stopped watching altogether, it became obvious to him that TVs watch people, not the other way around. And he could see clearly that TV had turned many people into things that didn’t need to be watched. In fact, TVs worked much like spider webs. Those caught ended up like the dried husks of bugs one finds in a web. It was only a matter of time before the screens had sucked all the juice from people’s homes and would then need to reduce their size and find a way to follow people out into the world and into every waking moment. At that point the only unwatched piece of life would be sleep; Shame doubted that wall would hold. Screens would be invented that could watch people in their dreams too.