Читать книгу Another Kind of Madness - Ed Pavlic - Страница 9

BOOK ONE: NEUTRAL CORNERS

Cold, endless summer days …

—CHAKA KHAN

And after how many speeches to herself about what not to do? Things not to do such as, first and foremost, meet anyone, much less someone, at a basement party? After all of that, Ndiya Grayson met Shame Luther at a basement party. It was the Fourth of July, a Sunday. Well, by the time they met it was early Monday morning. Over the next month she’d seen him twice. This night would be the third time. Ndiya promised herself to review the two previous occasions so she could make the third time turn out different. What does that mean, “turn out”? “At least give it a chance to happen,” she’d thought to herself. As for Shame, OK, she thought, “It’s some-kind-of-his-name.” That’s what it said on the flyer Yvette-at-work brought to show her on Tuesday, after Ndiya’s email about having met him at the party: Night Visions: Catch Shame Luther: Wednesday Nights @ the Cat Eye. The glossy card featured a yellow cat eye superimposed over a piano. She slid it across Ndiya’s desk without a pause in her step, “This your basement boy, girl? Watch yourself with musicians.” And no she didn’t just keep walking.

Musicians? Shame hadn’t mentioned the music part when they met. He said he was a laborer. He recited it as if standing at attention: “International Laborers’ Union, Local 269.” She had no idea what that meant. As they shook hands on the porch, she’d managed, “Yeah? Where’s that?” She noticed the callused skin of his palm and the thick, smooth feel of his fingers. His hand felt like it wore a glove of itself. “Well, the local’s in Chicago Heights. But for a few more weeks,” he said, “that, the work, is a wire mill out west up on Thirty-Eighth Street.” “Up on Thirty-Eighth?” she thought. He said the name, “Joycelan Steel.” She remembered the name because she didn’t know what a wire mill was and because the name, Joycelan Steel, sounded like a person she’d want to meet. Names: Shame Luther and Joycelan Steel. The union, the local, the work? None of it sounded real. On her guard that first night, she didn’t ask him anything more about what or where or why he did whatever he did. She didn’t ask. She was trying to keep it simple. She failed.

■

And at night, the city arched its back. Its eyes faded to slits, front limbs stretched out. The claws became invisible, likewise the scars. The heat eased as the day gave up. Motion ensued where everything except scars rests. Scars took over and attempted to redeem the day. A telephone pole begged the cleat take back its divots. Things no river could forgive vanished. They didn’t disappear. Just slipped up inside of wherever they were for a while. It’s like the way you fold a piece of paper in half, trace your thumbnail down the crease until it’s sharp enough that the missing half of the page fills the room and there’s nothing else to breathe. They say a person experiences a rush of pure elation at the exact moment of drowning. At twilight, in the summer, the day drowned in the dark. Pieces of elation came alive, parcels of fugitive heat. Invisible streams of it moved around, lolled about in the streets, paused without pausing on stoops.

So for a few minutes at dusk the city opened. It was as if all the promises of invisibility existed without the terrors. The terrors came later, of course, enough to break a bent beam of light. But for a half hour or so around sunset after a hot day, it was pure drowning.

Ndiya Grayson would get off the bus to go see Shame Luther at twilight. She stepped into this place he’d found to live where elation hung out longer than it did elsewhere. Where life was wound into what happened on the missing half of the page. It’s why she arrived by descending degrees, presence terraced. It’s why she was already gone by the time she found she couldn’t leave. Had never left. Long gone and never left; she held, as it were, the American ticket.

To tell it means to unfold the untold. The sky glowed overhead, the orange clouds of a night in late summer, Chicago. The hiss as the bus knelt down. It dipped its bumper into the huge puddle left over from the afternoon’s gushing fire hydrants on three of the four corners at the intersection. It’s just a few world-changing blocks east from the corner of Sixty-Third and King Drive, a few minutes’ walk. As she’d learn later, a few minutes’ walk into a past she’d never had, her past. There was no place in the city like it and no place in the city was close. No police of place, fences buried underground. She noticed it right off. She remembered it with the feeling that it was remembering her.

She’d ask Shame about it when she and Mrs. Clara’s Melvin finally got inside his door. He’d take Melvin’s goggles and her thigh-length linen coat and try not to notice, just yet, her soaked high-heels and dripping skirt. He’d say, “Yeah, this is where all the city’s twilight comes to stay the night. And, do you know, there are places that have none at all? We get theirs too. Isn’t that right, Melvin?” Melvin was oblivious in his red swim trunks with blue sailboats. He rocked back and forth on the outside edge of his sandals and held one yellow rain boot by its pull-on loop in each hand. Shame: “A little payback.” And she: “Payback? For what?” And Shame, smiling at the hallway outside the open door behind her: “Come on in.”

All of that was still a bus stop and a three-block walk away. It’d seem to her that it took half her life to walk those three blocks. In a way, she was right about that. But for now she was still on the eastbound 29 bus. She was still dry, hadn’t felt the fitted glove of air. So she hadn’t asked herself anything yet. Yet. The word seemed laced into all her time with Shame. Call it “time.” Hers with him seemed to be built of delay. Every moment shackled to its mirror in a kind of tug-of-war between this and that, here and there. Things took forever to happen. They happened when they happened and never felt late. Then the bizarre part, they happened again and again—and so really happened—later in her mind. Ndiya’s memories of time with Shame stood out like colorized scenes in a black-and-white film. No. They were like parts of a movie that she’d encountered first as music and so could never really take the movie version seriously. It’d be weeks before she asked herself much at all about Shame Luther. But when she did she’d find music where she thought there was vision, touch where she thought there should be music. And whenever there was supposed to be touch she found a part of her life that had nothing to do with him at all.

She hadn’t thought it through, refused to in fact. So she knows all of this in a way she can’t tell herself about. Known without the telling to self. Words evaporated into what lay behind them before her brain caught the voice. Absorbed, maybe. But—then what? As she moved up the aisle to the back door of the bus, she felt like she was already in the street. The crushing heat of the afternoon was gone. She loved the summer heat at night, the way the whole city stretched out in strings of light, turned its back and breathed long and quiet.

■

Breath in slow motion. Easy as this here. The mute pressure of heat lightning. The way a city slipped its pulse into you. This was a South Side summer night and the difference, that is, the memory, struck her immediately when she’d come back at the beginning of the summer.

Ndiya had sworn she wouldn’t come back to Chicago, not until they tore The Grave down. Somewhere in herself she believed they never would. From all what they’d stole into her as a child, she’d assumed they never could come down. From all what they’d torn—in her mind, something in how she’d been sent away had made the buildings indestructible. Now they had come down. It was national, international news when they’d decided to tear down the projects where she’d grown up. It was journalism; she had her doubts. But here she was. True to her word.

True to the word. “Here” she was, back in this city that she’d forced to forget her name. So she thought. Immediately upon her arrival, she’d found that “here” was a verb. She felt “hered.” The first thing she noticed about this verb was that it hurt. And the hurt twisted into colors, a kind of bouquet in her arms and legs. The bouquets changed her pulse, sharpened her vision until the colors in the world began to switch places: blue bars from the city flag on a police car swooped up into the sky; red from the stripe on a passing bus caught and wrapped around parked cars; silver green from trees in the park blown into the air made the wind momentarily visible. Here was musical. When the colors “hered” their way around playing musical chairs, she noticed, they didn’t hurt anymore. Here bristled and sparkled. But it wasn’t pain. She learned that all kind of things, voices in daily, anonymous speech more than anything else, had the power to here her. All summer voices in crowds of people jousted about until she lost track of which voice came from which face. “Where is this here?” she repeated to herself as she checked to see if the strange lightning in her arms and legs was visible to people around her. Didn’t seem to be.

More than twenty years she’d lived in other places. She found that “there” was a verb too. She’d felt all kinds of “theres” and “thereings,” the ways people could unknowingly there her. All kinds of ways. At every new job, people asking her the question and—without noticing Ndiya’s face—answering, “Chicago? Great place. Oh, I love Chicago, the Art Institute, and we have friends in”—fill in the name of whatever suburb. Or it was, “My daughter lives near Wrigley Field.” Ndiya wondered how everyone’s fucking daughter could live near Wrigley Field. At first, she’d attempted to halt these “thereings” by stating merely and matter-of-factly that she’d never been to the Art Institute nor had she ever seen Wrigley Field. But after a few rounds of those “thereings,” she found herself frightened by the accumulating urge to smash the visibly confused face staring back at her over a cubicle wall or via a favorable angle in an anonymously glossy, marble-veined women’s room wall or mirror. For years, in self-defense, she called it pleasure, the way those there-smiles she wore felt hammered on her face with hot nails. This was the period of her life she called Ndiya-Walking-Away. It didn’t last. And, reluctantly, she’d conceded that she’d gotten nowhere walking away which, in a way, felt to her like a virtue.

■

Looking out the windows of the bus as it inched through traffic east on Sixty-Third Street, Ndiya could smell it. “Here.” Chicago laid out on its back, its chest rising and falling as if lying next to a midnight blue lover. The lake. She thinks of the lake as Chicago’s unmapped East side. “Forget State Street,” she thought, “the dividing line between east and west is Lake Shore Drive.” As a child, she studied “Chicago” in the encyclopedia. In third grade she found a map of the city in the World Book’s volume H under “Hydrogen Bomb.” She traced it carefully into her notebook. There was a map of the city with a hydrogen bomb blast marked by a black dot in the middle. Concentric circles of destruction radiated outward. She asked her teacher where exactly on the map they lived and Mrs. Cross had swiftly taken the book away from her. It didn’t matter, she had it in her notebook. Years before she’d ever really connected it to the actual lake, she found a fold-out National Geographic map that showed the contours of the bottoms of all the Great Lakes. She’d mark her way east off the edge of the city and imagine herself a mile out, floating eight hundred feet above the earth on the sound of the invisible water.

Not the waves on the lake—her map showed the shape of all that space under what you saw on the surface. All that cold, dark water plunging down and away from anything anyone could ever know. While she stared at the map, she traveled as if she was underwater where sound comes at you from all directions at once. Suspended in this unknowable sound, her own index finger with the mocha moon-sliver at the top of the nail traced the darkening shades of blue on the map. The shades told its depth. Once, in second grade, she filled a five-gallon pail for their box-garden project and found she couldn’t move it at all. Her teacher, Ms. Willis, had to pour half away so she could carry it. “So, it’s heavy too,” she thought, narrowing her eyes. She checked both corners of her vision as if she’d just discerned a crucial secret. For weeks after that, she went to bed and lay there sleepless imagining how the lead-heavy depth of the whole lake would feel if it was her blanket and how nobody—not her mother, not Principal James, not the mayor—would be able to move it.

Nothing in Chicago ever made sense to her without the lake. Strictly speaking, nothing much made sense with it either. But with the lake floating out there, in her mind, it didn’t matter as much. She remembered the Fourth of July when she was little. They’d go to the lake. It seemed that the whole South Side lined up along the shore. She always wondered if they (“We?” she thought now) thought the lake would open up and everyone just walk away. When memories like this came to her, it felt like she could blink with her arms and legs. It was as if her whole body closed quickly then reopened. To herself she called these memories body blinks. No music in Chicago makes sense if you can’t feel the Moses effect in the song: the pulse-way people arrive but never get there, depart but never leave a city. No sense, not sense to feel, that is, if you can’t hear that. You have to follow a song out over the lake at night till the sound of all the spilled light of the city disappears into the waves. If you’ve done that you know that the light is the gloss of all the never-lostness and not-foundity, the used-to-be-somehow and the not-quite-ever-again-ness of the people, of even one gone-person. When you do that you, that used-to-be or could-have-been but now-never-again version of you blows off with it.

For Ndiya, no matter the pronouns and prepositions, every song was really sung to that unknown, invisible weight. And she had the chart on her map. She listened to her clock radio at night, volume down so low she used it as a pillow to hear the songs played by her favorite DJ, Misty after Midnight. She’d listen with her eyes closed and then open them up and place each song on her map of the emptied-out lakes according to something she thought of as the depth of the sound. The depth of the sound was the weight of a song. Sound never lost, songs without a trace.

As she rode the 29 bus, Ndiya heard Deniece Williams’s “Free.” In her memory she saw her ten-year-old finger catch the red glow from the digits in the clock face. Her finger pointed at the blue-black center of the lake’s terraced shape. She still thought of “Free” as Chicago’s heaviest song, an impression she couldn’t shake or believe, find or lose, until she heard the song again and it was as plain as never is always plain. The way Niecy’s voice stood alone among the instruments. The way she floated and dived. The way the song was, on one level, so simple. The way she sang the filigreed frailty of what she knew and her point-blank refusal to take any refuge in it. Blue silk stitched around an ice cube. So clear the cold it held felt like a mouthful of high-altitude sky, almost empty. The song was a dare: “Go ahead, melt. Give up your shape against the smooth blue skin of it all.” Ndiya held that song in her mind like a low moon rising up. Kept it in her mouth like a cherry gumdrop full of venom. Walking down the aisle of the bus, she tried and failed to remember ever hearing the song played in any other city. She knew she had, of course. Still, she wondered if it was possible to hear this song outside of Chicago. What could it possibly sound like with no poisonous moon low over the lake’s impossible weight? She figured it must be possible. For someone maybe, but not for her.

At night, in the summer, she thought, the city got its breath from the cold bottom of the lake. It heated the air in its lungs, took what it needed, and breathed the rest out invisible. She imagined body heat blowing out the open window of a car speeding down South Shore Drive. She imagined the weight of the whole lake balanced on the head of a pin. She’d never actually been on the lake in a boat, but thought it must actually move like her uncle Lucky’s big old burgundy sedan. “My ninety-eight,” she remembered him saying. She didn’t know what that phrase had to do with a car. She decided, vaguely, it must mean something chrome and cursive.

It didn’t matter. She remembered Lucky’s cut-eyed smile, the way he wore his hat pushed back on his wide forehead so it made him look like he’d always just been surprised and was always, anyway, ready for more. Rusty-haired and freckled. That phrase, “ninety-eight,” floats on loose struts. “Hair on fire,” he’d say. In his voice, it sounded like “hay-own-fie.” Uncle Lucky drove with his right arm laid across the top of the passenger’s seat so he could wave at people without looking at them. His left wrist draped on the wheel to coax and nudge the loping chassis through the curves. She used to think he steered that car the way you do a friend with your shoulder and an elbow in the ribs when you pass a secret joke between the two of you. She felt both her arms blink at the term “ninety-eight.”

Ndiya looked at her face in the bus window, “The two of you.” Then she thought, “The both of you.” She recognized her reflection in the smudged glass, the girl under the lake disappeared under that suspended blanket of sound. The word “disappeared” echoed into static and traveled down her arms and legs. To keep her balance in the aisle, she thought of Lucky and his falsetto “ninety-eight.” She thumbed a bassline on her thigh and heard it in her chest, boom-bomp, “Riding High.” Faze-O: Lucky’s theme music. Ndiya blinked her whole body closed, hard, and opened back to the present. Her voice evenly split between plea and command: “All you colors back in your places.”

To focus, she reminded herself that this bus took her to her third date with Shame. That name? Just then she heard three sirens, all of them in the distance. “These aren’t dates!” she scolded herself as the siren of a distant fire truck caught her ear. The clear sound of its bell bounced off the bus driver’s rearview mirror and came straight down the aisle. The distant clarity of an emergency cued a thought that she didn’t know this man all that well. Didn’t know his neighborhood at all. She thought, “Shame? Is he serious?” She’d heard more bizarre names, but this one seemed to sit on its owner a bit too much like the crushed rake of a loud velvet hat. Yvette-at-work’s warning about musicians had gone all “red zone” when Ndiya showed her Shame’s address: “This Negro lives where? And you don’t ee-ven know his name?”

She had been “here” before. Now she wonders if she means “there”? That was date number two. This thought broke a rule. She’d vowed not to admit to herself that date number two had happened: “Mind off number two, nothing happened, never happened.” But even if it hadn’t happened, she had ridden over there with him on his cycle—“Ah, ah! Mind off that, never happened.” In any case, this was her first time coming to see him, here, by herself. She allowed herself to think about that because if she really thought about the last time, she wouldn’t ee-ven have agreed to come back. She liked to think in that voice even though she knew better. She felt the epic adrenaline in that voice. She felt the power of that idiom and the betrayal of her disappearance into static as a child. She shook it off and thought safely about language.

Moving up the aisle, she held the thought under her tongue in her mind; she could taste the difference. “Here” and its grace-note silent t. The way the word “even” arched its eyebrows and appeared in her face. “Chicago,” she thinks. Even the way you say “ee-ven.” She felt the meaning push up from beneath while the sound of the word held both ends down. Ever since she’d been back, her arms and legs blinked on their own. Tones in simple words pulled them apart from the inside. Words, or whatever they were, played through her body like a flashlight waving around underwater. Chicago. A place where you could taste words. Ndiya stared at her reflection in the window. She turned away, eyebrows up, body closed. Then she whispered to herself, “Call it even.”

■

At night, the sirens tie the city together in a web of ascending and descending sound. Sirens in the daytime tear the city limb from limb. Audible ones lash the ears. Doused in daylight, the scars hold fast to the people who wear them. At best, people attempt to steer their scars, to ride them like invisible, runaway trains. They aim the remaining pieces of themselves at whatever they do. Twilight changes that. At twilight, you might not think it’s comic, but it is: no one owns the scars. By night, you might call it tragic, but it’s not: the scars change back into wounds. Wounds do most of the owning. After as much daylight as they can get and as much nighttime as they can take, people, like a vast clockwork of diagonals, javelin themselves into sleep. Listen to a million icicles diving into hot sand, the sound of a city going to sleep. The night-sirens only appear from far away, a map of non-arrival, an otherness, an order. A dark blue depth so deep inside it sounds far away. Distant, that is, until they’re too close, too deep, too quick. Until what’s not you is you and so it’s too late. During such a night, a dead scar opens into a living wound like a night-blooming blossom.

Ndiya was in the aisle of the bus when it stopped at her stop. At once, the distant fire truck turned, another body blink broke the ricochet and the thought vanished taking Yvette-at-work’s warning from her vision before she realized she’d seen it. She didn’t feel it. Distracted by the joust between “here” and “there” for less than the time it takes good luck to turn bad, she missed the worn-chrome handle at the edge of the bus seat. Instead of the handle, for a whole stride, she held on firmly to the slumped shoulder of a sleeping old man. As her left hand reached for the next handle, her right released its hold on the nearly worn-through fabric of the old man’s jacket. Her fingertips grazed his as he reached his arm up from the heavy plastic bag in his lap. He was dreaming. Her hand had sharply squeezed the thick shoulder beneath the thin cotton when Yvette-at-work’s warning about musicians appeared to her like a distant siren. When their fingers grazed, the touch of Ndiya’s hand nudged the man’s dream. His wife’s hand pressed his shoulder at the breakfast table. He dreamed his wife waking him up and handing him a lunch box. Her face in his dream turned into a flock of crimson gulls: it was some kind of warning. Without knowing it, Ndiya had touched a life in whose dreams “here” meant “gone.”

Esther Brown’s lovely face. Half a million black women Ndiya never knew; women she’d refused, without knowing it, to become. It was the first time in years that that man had touched a woman’s fingers. And he’d missed it. If he’d been awake, he’d have magnified and replayed the texture of tiny washboards from their glancing fingerprints in his mind. He’d have chosen a minute and a place in his apartment in which to keep that accidental texture alive. He’d have played that off-chance touch until he could hear her fingers move the air aside and taste them in the ache from the delta of swollen glands in his throat. Where this man lived, to say nothing of where he worked, such a touch from such a woman was a sacred thing. It was a prayer, in fact, a here that’s hardly there at all, a here that tells gone where to go.

If he’d been awake, he’d have had one more thing to hide from his partners at the job. And that’s what he figured he needed, more things in his life that he couldn’t possibly tell to the men at work. While Esther Brown was alive he’d have said just the opposite, “Why don’t we never do nothing, never go nowhere?” But now he knew different. She was right. What he needed was more things in his life he couldn’t tell the men at work, which is why that touch was a prayer. Or it would have been if he’d been awake. As it was, such touch was a dream. As far as he was concerned, that was close enough to a prayer and, anyway, he wasn’t talking about either one to those fools at the job.

Jay Brown, sleep. He rode the bus home two hours late. He tried to pretend he got off work at five instead of three thirty. Jay Brown faked like he got paid on Friday instead of Wednesday. So, he wore an old gray suit, his only suit, and kept his work clothes and boots in a plastic bag in his lap. He rode the number 29 bus with an old briefcase full of work-worn tools wrapped in newspaper under his seat. The kid at the job years ago asked Jay Brown: “Why you wear a suit home from work?” And Jay Brown: “So maybe knuckleheads think I get paid on Friday.” The kid: “Why?” And Jay Brown: “Why? So, rob me on the wrong day, that’s why!”

■

With a light touch on the brushed silver of the pole, the rear bus doors jerked open from both sides. Body blink. The first thing Ndiya saw was a little girl. She had bright barrettes for each braid on her head and lay facedown on the sidewalk. Her hands were cupped into parentheses around her eyes and binocular’d her view straight down in the ground. Her toes drummed lightly against the crushed concrete as she lay on her belly. Ndiya, feeling as if she was viewing her own innards through reversed binoculars, thought, “What, exactly, does that to concrete?” Her eye traced the frayed edge of the faded black, cutoff T-shirt. The girl’s face popped up from her cupped hands and she yelled, “Fifty!” In Ndiya’s vision, the orange sky brightened as the broken line of rooftops across the street darkened. Somehow, with no transition, the little girl went from lying still to full stride down the way and around between the buildings, “Get-gone or get-got here I come Imma get you, Lester!”

When the little girl popped to her feet, Ndiya glimpsed the message on the cutoff shirt. She called back the image after the girl had spun and vanished. Above the frayed and curled edge, two stick figures held hands, one with dizzy-circles around her head. In Gothic script it read: I’m Allergic to My Sister! Without moving, Ndiya shook her head the kind of way you do when you agree with something you know is wrong.

Ndiya’s body blinked again. She recalled how it felt when, in the third grade, she tripped little evil little perfect little Tara Davis and ended up giving her a temporarily busted-up lower lip and a permanently chipped front tooth. The diagonal-chipped-tooth effect had somehow perfected Tara’s face in a way Ndiya and everyone else envied forever for always for the way, years later, it made the older boys love her. Now, for the first time, with a shudder, as she stared at the darkening line of rooftops and the brightening night sky beyond them, Ndiya felt the gravity of what all that attention must have been to that perfected, injured, and targeted little girl. A cloud of static sizzled across her body and Ndiya shook her head, again. Avoiding the mirror in her body, she thought, “Jesus, Tara Davis,” said, “Thank you,” to the driver and stepped off the bus.

Her weight shifted just before she checked down for her step to the curb. Inverted directly beneath her, she saw the buildings across the street and the bright sky beyond. She watched the reflected sole of her shoe as it came straight up at her. A streetlight’s glow spread across dusty, liquid skin of the surface. Her eyes told her that she’d stepped from a plane, not a bus. The dream-fall feeling bloomed behind her eyes and she heard Yvette-at-work’s voice: “You a mess. By the way, you do know that was a man’s shoulder you had your hand on back there on the bus, right?”

She rode a ribbon of air for a moment—before she found herself splashing into a puddle with both feet. Even with her heels, the water was over her ankles. Misjudging the step by a thousand feet or so caused her to land with her left leg perfectly straight, shooting pain up her spine and nearly popping her kneecap off. The splash vanished back into the oily murk as the bus leveled itself and went on. The departing bus stirred a wave of hot water that hit the back of her legs just below her knees before it washed over the broken curb and across the ruined sidewalk. She felt the warm wave pull at the hem of her pastel teal, cotton-linen skirt. The dreamer with the long-fingered shadow on his shoulder went away too. He dreamt on in a dream as thin as the camouflage his gray suit provided his life. Rainbows gathered themselves around Ndiya’s legs as she stood beyond-ankle deep in disbelief. “What next?” she thought, “Dolphins fly and parrots live at sea?”

Single drops of oily gutter water ran down her legs. She felt a few ash-colored drops on her arm. A single drop slipped down her neck and disappeared into the collar of her coat. And then another body blink. “There, no, here he was,” she thought, “Junior.” She once knew a strange little boy, Junior Keith, who called drops from these puddles gutter-pearls. “Little nasty, little big-headed, Kodak-glossily-jet-black and girl-attached-to-eye-having Junior Keith,” she thought. Hydrants open. He’d wait on the sidewalk. He always somehow avoided getting wet himself. She had no idea how he stayed dry but she knew exactly why. His Grandmama. Junior loved to sneak up behind girls and, depending on their height, he’d lick their arm, shoulder or sometimes even the back of their leg. “Hmm. Mm, Gutter-pearls!” he’d say, and run off down the block and across the street to the safety of his grandmother’s raggedy old porch. There his sisters Lynn and Vanessa were usually lurking ready to pounce on somebody and call it protecting him. Those girls were hell on sequin roller skates: “Na-ah, Grandmama,” they’d say, “we wasn’t fighting, just protecting Junior from that boy down the block—ooh, he think he bad.” Ndiya felt the wet skirt clutch her legs as the air made its way through to cool the fabric. And she thought, “So much for casually anonymous arrivals. So much for ‘at least give it a chance to happen,’ to ‘turn out.’”

She hadn’t seen Junior coming. He didn’t just arrive. Nor was he alone. His image rode a roar of static, a hot numbness. This body blink felt like an empty flame. Ndiya felt it burn but refused to acknowledge the heat. With a precision so complete it masqueraded as innate, though it had been systematically learned, honed, and deployed, Ndiya coexisted with a rare thing about which both—maybe all—of her selves agreed without agreeing. This deal of nonengagement was as perfect as water poured from two pitchers into one pail. Except there was no pail. So the deal was pure pour, forever. As in, if you throw a sea turtle into an infinite well, you might as well call the turtle a seagull. This was her method of control, of avoidance. A method she’d used to make this city forget far more than her name. Twilight in Shame’s neighborhood meant Ndiya Grayson wasn’t alone. This fact was precisely why she’d come back and exactly what she’d lived her life avoiding.

And the city had forgotten nothing.

Then there appeared a bright, capsized yellow boat. It had a blue rudder and a red propeller. The border of Ndiya’s vision widened to include a pair of tiny yellow boots and two impossibly large eyes. These eyes didn’t appear to recognize anything in their sight as much as they appeared to house the whole scene inside themselves. It was as if the tiny owner of the huge eyes had bypassed vision altogether and beheld the world as if it was all a matter of inner vision. She felt like he could bypass her skin and soaked-through clothes and x-ray each crook and notch in her spine. “Big, aquarium-eyed little boy,” she thought.

Then, she thought, “Again. Again.”

An old woman was crocheting an expression across her tight-lined face by lamplight. She warned, “Look out for the water, honey. Dirty.” Then her voice changed color, “That’s enough playing tsunami by the bus stop, get yourself on up out away from there, now, Melvin.” Ndiya: “Too late I’m afraid, ma’am.” The crocheted knots beneath the old woman’s eyes looked like someone was pulling them open and closed from behind. Slack for her, tight for him. “Come here, boy.” Then, “Oh, honey, that’s a shame.” Next, “Here, Melvin, now!” And again, “But it’ll dry child, it’ll dry.” And, “Over here, before now! Before you get yourself into …”

But Ndiya’s mind had tipped like if you try to carry a wide, inch-deep tray of water with one hand or balance it on top of your head.

Here she was somewhere between ankle- and knee-deep in what was looking like a third fiasco. And she hadn’t even started her review of fiascos one and two. After meeting Shame at the party, each time they got together began with some farcical incident precisely calibrated to prevent her from feigning any dignity or self-assuredness. Ndiya had plenty of both. She knew it and for as long as she’d been grown she’d been bothered that she couldn’t account for where or how she’d come by any of it and what, if any, good it did her.

So, with Shame, she thought she would experiment, maybe improvise. What was to lose? She met him, after all, at a basement party she knew better than to go to anyway. Somebody’s friend of a friend named Renée had thrown herself a Fourth of July birthday party that was supposed to be a reenactment of one she’d had in 1985 or something. Ndiya’s plan with Shame was to act like she had the false, everyday kind of confidence and protect her secret. She’d act normal. Brilliant. But it didn’t work. After the first few seconds of their first date, she needed the secret kind, at least.

There was the first meeting at Earlie’s Café. Ndiya made it clear beforehand, this was not a date. She’d rushed—if it was possible to rush by bus?—to her brother’s place after work to grab her oversized and always overstuffed canvas handbag. She’d left it over there on a rare visit the previous night. Wanda, Malik’s girlfriend, answered the door. She blocked Ndiya’s path and handed her the bag. Aiming beyond Wanda’s attitude, Ndiya called, “Can’t stay, gotta meeting!” to the blue room the TV lived in, and bolted back to the bus stop thinking, “It’s time to empty this bag.” Traffic was bad, she had to transfer twice; she was at least an hour late. She kept reaching for her phone and then remembering that Shame didn’t have one. When she arrived he was waiting for her outside the café. He sat facing the street and leaned back on his hands on the top of a stone picnic table with his feet planted wide apart on the bench. “There he is, with his feather-light brown self,” she thought, “and there he’ll stay.” From across the street she let him know that she’d seen him with half a smile aimed at the ground in front of his feet. Then she focused on the door to his left while holding him in her sight. She thought, “OK. Keep him there.”

Ndiya tabulated her quick survey from her peripheral vision: “V-neck T-shirt (bad sign) and faded jeans (neutral and leaning on what’s next like a spare in bowling) that rode up to reveal his unpolished (thank heavens) brown boots (the kind with the metal ring at the ankle, that could be OK) and what looked like a brown leather jacket on the table beside him.” From across the street she noted that his clothes all seemed too loose to fit but weren’t baggy. She thought, “It’s been a while since I’ve crossed a street for this kind of thing.” The dusk of the street and the blue light atop Earlie’s awning traveled the lines of Shame’s face. The shadows made it seem like his face had been sewn together from a haphazard assortment of three or four faces. She searched for the sloped lines she subliminally depended on when meeting people and found precious little to work with. She didn’t remember this from the porch at the party. “Not good,” she thought. “He damned near looked white.” But this wasn’t quite a thought. It was more like an itch near the corner of her mouth.

All that changed when he got up to shake her hand and said her name: “Enter Ms. Ndiya Grayson.” First of all, he got it right. Áh-ndiya, accent on the first syllable and the a pronounced soft like the opposite of “off,” not sharp like the a in “candy.” No one got all that right, ever. He read the surprise in her face and said he knew the song. “That’s good,” she thought, because she didn’t. “What song?” He laughed and she remembered his easy smile. “A little too easy,” she thought. She noticed first, then, what she’d learn in stages later. Shame only looked like himself when he moved or when he spoke. And his voice sounded exactly like he looked; it was uncanny. When he sat still, pieces of his face and body pulled against each other. Then, she’d learn later, there was his life: his before-work vacant-self; the with-kids dude; the chef-Shame; and the piano man. In his life Shame was a kaleidoscope. He changed into a third, fourth, fifth person altogether. “One, two, three,” he’d say sometimes, “which Shame you want me to be, which kind you want from me?” He said it was a quote, or almost. She asked from where and he didn’t say. Her first, zero-sum impulse was to wonder where were the people whose faces he’d stolen, pulled apart and put back together. But she cut herself short before that. She was still on that whole “give it a chance to happen” thing.

Still in the street, she replayed his voice from the night they’d met: “Gosh, I guess every day is Wednesday, right?” And she: “What?” And he: “If I’m not mistaken, you just said hello to me and looked at me with both eyes at once. That’s rare around here, that’s all.” And she: “If you say so, but—Wednesday?” And he: “The Mickey Mouse Club, you know, Wednesday: Anything Can Happen Day?” She: “Oh, OK. That’s cute.” And now, outside Earlie’s Café, she thought, “There he is,” and, seeing her reflection walking in the window behind him, “There you are. There you both can stay. Here can sit this one out.”

When they shook hands she felt the thick skin of his palm again. He said, “Thanks for coming, I like your ride.” His open tone left no room and less need for her rehearsed, frustrated, CTA mass-transit-hell excuse for being late. Shame led her by the hand through Earlie’s as if the place was a tight, dark cave. In fact, the space was the opposite of cave-like, tall windows and high ceilings. Ndiya’s first impression, however, had been a kind of softness about everything in there. She followed closely. Shame’s right shoulder interrupted her view of palm trees, bushes, and shrubs of every size. She quickly forgot her trip over there, crazy-always-guarding-the-door-ass Wanda, her lateness, and her neutral corners rationale for asking him to pick a spot near where neither of them lived. She’d even forgotten the silly day-of-the-week thing about Wednesday.

The softness came from what the music at Earlie’s did to the space she felt around her. At first, she didn’t hear anything. The sensation was that she had entered through a door in the wide hip of an upright bass. She heard Shame’s voice and saw his head gesture this way and that. He didn’t turn around. “I come here for the plants, the wood, and the sound. I can’t really hear the music anymore, but it’s good to know it’s there.” He continued while she followed thinking, “Maybe this corner isn’t quite neutral enough.” Shame said, “This place always makes me feel like ordering a Scotch so old you can’t even drink it, you have to just tip the glass, close your eyes and inhale it into your lungs.” He continued, “It’s the same with the sound. Do you know an amphibian hiccups to breathe under water?” Strangely, she did know that. But she let it blow by.

Maybe Shame was nervous. He went on, “Do you know who Reggie Workman is? Red Garland? Wynton Kelly? Otis Spann? Errico Beyle?” “Ah, musicians?” Ndiya managed. He said nothing in response. He might have nodded but that could have been a way to silently say hello to someone at one of the tables. They came to a corner table between two windows looking out at a small garden, a courtyard. On the table stood a white card with “S. L., 7:30” written on it in black marker. The time had been crossed out and “8:00” had been written in; the “8:00” had been crossed out and, this time in red marker, “8:30!” had been added. Ndiya winced.

Immediately after they arrived at the table, Shame sat down, swept the card into his back pocket, reintroduced himself and, before she could sit, asked if she had a tissue. Ndiya thought to herself how glad she was that he hadn’t made a big act out of pulling out her chair, etc. She asked if he had a cold and he said the tissue was for his glasses though he wasn’t wearing glasses. She rummaged around at the bottom of the bag. Playing off her surprise at feeling the slim plastic packet without having to go in after it headfirst, Ndiya assured him, “Of course, sure, here you ar—”

Then the scene dropped like if she’d stepped backward off a ladder she didn’t remember climbing. When her hand emerged from her bag with the pack of tissues, a Velcro patch from her brother’s busted-open house-arrest ankle cuff caught her sleeve. The ruined hunk of plastic and wire leapt as if it had hurled itself out and landed on the table. It bounced once and turned over the sugar bowl and toothpicks spiraled across the dark grain of the floor and through the aisle coming to rest strewn about the feet of the couple at the next table.

Shame sat looking at her with one hand on the table-top. His other hand was extended toward her to take the tissue. He hadn’t flinched, he hadn’t moved at all. Judging by his relaxed posture, nothing strange had happened.

Ndiya’s ears reduced the room to the sound of the flat-line, we’re-losing-her tone. The jolt triggered a kind of survival mechanism she had employed many times in her life but knew nothing about. Her body leaned into the immediate present, her brain snapped back and became surgically abstract. It all happened without her intending, and it worked. It was kind of the way her brothers and their friends used to discuss running from the police. You never run in the same direction. They called it fifty scatters. They described it all in comic, managerial tones: “Now, police show up, we out, fitty scatter on they ass. Meet up later and assess the situation.”

Ndiya felt her body fifty scatter. Her mind abstracted, analytical: “No matter the length, all instants are exactly the same size. It’s the shapes that never repeat. Some twist and recede, some gape and come right at you, others, furtive, listen around corners.” She took account of the instant. The objects before her eyes on the table made no sense. She thought perhaps the place had been bombed. Maybe the toothpicks were splintered wood from the roof? Her mind a-twirl, the room somewhere bent and concave in the chrome mirror of the still-revolving sugar spoon. She couldn’t recognize the broken-open cuff of plastic on the table. Obviously, she had no idea Malik had hidden the damn thing in her handbag. As if laying down cover, her brain told her that it wasn’t a bomb. Her eyes recognized the torn blue flag with its four red stars, of the CPD. Her mind filled the instant with Malik’s milky-eyed, laughing, beautiful face.

Ndiya watched her vision like a foreign film as it hopped from the broken cuff across the toothpick-strewn tabletop and landed on Shame’s face, Ndiya watched her vision like a foreign film. Then he did react. Ndiya’s mind backed away and took in the scene as if it was printed in subtitles at the bottom of the screen. Shame’s eyebrows lighted into an asymmetry of pure surprise and sheer pleasure. Ndiya watched as her mind leapt in to abstract the anomaly of Shame’s expression. She decided it was actually wonder and that, for Shame, at least, wonder must be a subset of pleasure. “Or maybe vice versa?” her brain asked itself. “No,” she thought as Shame’s expression replaced Malik’s face in her mind, songs pinned all over it, like a depth-chart of Lake Michigan with no water in it, “Definitely, Shame’s wonder is inside pleasure.” Ndiya’s mind continued on: “Pleasure’s the wider circle. Wonder is the deeper blue.” It concluded, “Shame’s wonder gets deeper as its surface area gets smaller. That’s about pressure. So the formula: wonder equals pleasure under pressure.” Then her brain gave up its finding: “In other words, this man is trouble.”

Her analytical brain circled the wagons. Tactically, she could feel that retreat wasn’t an option. So, Ndiya’s body stood its ground before the absurd scene. The absurdity was her brain’s problem. The rest of her was right there. To an observer it might have appeared that showing up late and tossing a busted-up house-arrest bracelet out on the table was how she usually began a conversation with a man she’d just met.

Ndiya heard Shame laugh in words, “Well, hey now!” And she felt his extended hand take hers, lightly, and guide her down to the chair beside him. She wasn’t blind, exactly. There were bowls of light playing in and out of each other. The whole plan about acting normal, about the false and real confidence was out the window. She remembered thinking, “Another blown date. So blown!” Another page of life had been slashed diagonally across the middle and torn from the book.

All this was trivia, however. The real trouble was that the push and pull of Shame’s stolen faces was totally gone. A familiar play of curves appeared, somehow, from under the angles of his face. Her thought just then wasn’t a thought, it resolved a melody in her body. It was like a sound in her hands or a turbulent feeling around them as if she’d reached into rushing water. She sat down and turned toward a pair of eyes that looked like leaves on the bottom of a clear pond. Light brown, flecked with dark spots. “Sunspots,” she thought, as her brain informed her that sunspots are actually huge magnetic storms. Shame’s voice: “My cousin used to use an electric can opener and a Bic lighter, looks like you just slammed yours fifty times in your car door or something.” He looked under the table and laughed. “Is your ankle OK?” Then he turned to the waitress, who looked as if she was afraid to approach the table with the piece of wreckage on top of it: “Angela, may we have two Blue Labels, please, neat.” Ndiya saw the waitress staring at her out of the corner of her eye. The waitress said, “Right, Shame, sure.”

This date was so blown. Oh so blown. Somewhere, she’d already begun to type the postmortem email to Yvette-at-work. Email. This thought brought with it its own waves of disbelief, but that was the story of date number two and, for now, that was too much. And, remember, date-by-whatever-name number two hadn’t ee-ven happened.

Ndiya felt music around her. A distant song played, something about no mountains and no moving, no tides and no turning. She couldn’t quite hear it. Or maybe it was thunder? Shame’s voice was stuck in her head among the clanging sounds. She heard echoes of the phrase Bic lighter over and over. Then Shame’s voice: “Ever notice the tiny dude with the huge Afro on Bic lighters?”

Shame’s honey and molasses accent. “Here I am,” she thought, “deep, in denied territory.” And Shame: “Let’s have a drink.” And she: “You already ordered.” And he: “So I did. Done! I stay away from expensive liquor, but in this case.” Her eyes focused on him again. She felt like he’d curved himself across the upturned spoon on the table. Her voice answered him as if on its own. It sounded like she’d whispered it into a wind tunnel: “No. No car door. I, I ride the bus.” He: “I know, remember, said I liked your ride, your carbon footprint?” He laughed. She: “It’s not mine, it’s my brother’s.” She saw Shame’s lips move but she didn’t hear him. She felt the music again, nearer. She nodded at whatever he said while a song too far off for her to hear chimed: Just as sure as I live, I will love you alone….

■

Since that first house-arrest bracelet night, Ndiya kept a still shot of Shame’s face looking up from the table to hers. Obscure details like this burned into her memory. She replayed the instant between the points of his eyebrows and the tone of his voice, “Hey now … Bic lighter.” It had happened a thousand times: Shame’s voice with sunspots in his eyes, some far-off song holding on to her by her shoulders. She listened for the Doppler effect. She looked hard into the from-somewhere memory. She searched for Shame’s retreat but found nothing. There was only his wide-open face.

The way that tangle of wire and plastic hit the table and Shame’s face fell through those pulled-apart lines and into itself, it was as if he appeared from nowhere. Ndiya had much too much experience with nowhere to trust it. And she prided herself on not being taken off guard. She depended upon that forewarning. She didn’t appreciate things like beautiful faces falling through themselves and appearing, unannounced, before her eyes. She searched his face again for the way people do their eyes, the eyes behind their eyes, like they’re pushing back from a table getting ready to stand up and turn away. It wasn’t there. Each time she recalled the scene her thought was, “OK, I’ll catch him this time.” But she couldn’t. The expression, the voice, the bit about his cousin with the Bic lighter, none of it added up. The shape of the instant appeared as itself, different every time.

If she were paranoid, she thought, she’d be sure he’d planted the bracelet in her bag. If she’d gone crazy, she’d remember that happening very clearly. There’d be evidence filed in the precinct of certainty. She wasn’t crazy because nothing was certain. Or almost nothing. Later that week, she’d gone into a corner store and checked; there really is what looks like a little dude with a huge Afro on a Bic lighter. It was an instant in time. She had proof. So she halfway thought her sanity, or at least a kind of clarity, depended upon her ability to make one instant in time be itself. Be still.

She tried but she couldn’t do it. What scared her was elsewhere. Somehow, despite all of her expert deployments of abstraction, it took no effort, in fact, for her mind to fix itself on the image of a man who looked like Shame—that damned name—who could watch a house-arrest bracelet tumble out, catch a shower of toothpicks in his lap and the first thing that comes to mind is a description of a tiny blip of a mark with an Afro on his cousin’s Bic lighter? No matter the abstract expert, there was no man like that. What appeared was him, every time. Shame. His apparent ease, the clarity and concision disturbed her. The timing. But there it was, undeniable. No, she hadn’t known anything like it, like him. And she told herself out loud, repeatedly, she didn’t want to.

She began to wonder what that cost him and where he’d paid. Then she banished the thought before the pressure had a chance to do its thing. “Wonder be damned at the bottom of the lake,” she thought. “Dolphins and parrots can go on and live wherever they want.” Somewhere else—or in the same somewhere, it didn’t matter—she didn’t want to know such a person existed. Not in Chicago, not across town, and certainly not with no random sun-spots happening at the bottom of a clear pond just across a table from her.

■

Ndiya had accepted that it was some kind of personality trait she’d come by through genetic mutations. She had a knack for getting into bets with herself that forced her to sacrifice pledges and vows she’d made in the mirror. Here was another one. In no uncertain terms, she’d pledged, however impossible she knew it was, to erase all evidence of date, meeting, whatever-it-was number two with Shame Luther. She’d also vowed a new level of self-scrutiny that, she reasoned, was the only way to avoid disasters in her personal life. This was necessary now that she apparently had a personal life in which she wasn’t the only person. She’d promised herself that she’d go over all impressions of her brief and catastrophic times with Shame Luther before she’d see him again.

Partly because she feared if she did it sooner she wouldn’t show up at all, she’d put off the emotional inventory until she was actually on her way to his place. Then, the splashdown off the bus. She’d had the impulse to cross the street and get on the next thing smoking that would debit her metro pass. Right then and there, as she stood in the water, Ndiya shook her head at her soaked Nine West heels and her sodden skirt. “Ain’t this just a crying sha—oh hell, OK, here we go, step number one, date number two.”

The second date hadn’t begun as a date. Fact. That was true as trouble in mind. It had started like sudden sunlight through the back door. If not a fact, it was at least a fluke. A chance meeting that caught her in a bad way, followed by a bad decision that precipitated a personal, public relations disaster. That disaster set a system in motion that would change her life, then several lives. Still, as she stood on the sidewalk, soaking wet, Nydia felt like she was over most of it now. That was another troubling pattern about the time since knowing Shame: the bigger the disaster the easier it was to put away. But little incidents and impressions of incidents would dog her. Yvette-at-work said, “Ndiya, you should talk to someone, you know, a professional.” She figured date number two must have been bad because, as she sloshed away from the puddle and down the block toward Shame’s building, she found that almost none of what she recalled had to do, strictly speaking, with him at all.

She remembered his unzipped jacket as she’d seen it from across the street, his cycle. U-turn. His offer and then his shoulder against her chin as she sat behind him and watched Chicago lean away from them with the high-pitch, first part of the S curve and then back toward her as they leaned away from the lake on the second curve. The engine cleared its throat, lowered its voice, and the city disappeared behind her back and into the wind. She remembered the sweet-salt smell inside his helmet that she wore and the texture of the way tiny points of hair lay down smooth against his shaved head. She felt her hips learn how to balance on the cycle without falling off the back. Meanwhile her arms tried to avoid holding on to his waist tight enough to feel his belt buckle and his torso beneath his jacket. She feared if she got too close and he hit the brakes she’d butt him with the helmet in the back of his bright, bald head and they’d crash. She remembered biting the upturned collar of his worn leather jacket.

Memories flipped in a series of images, some of them blank. Sunpool on his scalp. Burnt-down candles on an old piano. A Frank Lloyd Wright–looking daybed with mat-thin cushions. The warm, amber-and-blue glow from the thing he called a tube amp on a low table across the room. She remembered almost nothing else about the room except that it was filled by the sound of some oud player Shame seemed to worship. She thought it was strange that he turned off the music when he got home. She can’t even remember exactly what he’d said an oud was.

“You gotta love that, playing tsunami,” Ndiya thought, as she walked down the block beyond the old woman crocheting prophetic comments into a doily in her brain. She passed Melvin with his plastic boats in the gutter. A young man slipped through a set of double doors across the street. His denim jacket opened in the warm breeze and interrupted her recollection. Surprised at her pleasure in the even rhythm of her memory through which flowed a level of detail she could taste, she noted the slightly electric, morning-coffee and cigarette effect. She decided date number two couldn’t have started out as bad as she’d recalled. Maybe. But it got that way. Then she wondered: Maybe disasters happen in reverse? They wash over you, move back into your past and then flow forward dragging it all along with them like historical flotsam into the future. “Maybe we don’t have a chance, maybe we’re all playing tsunami,” she thought.

Eyes straight ahead, what you do is focus on something about twenty miles away. This allows you to see everything and gives no one the impression that you’re actually looking at them. Having found it an effective way for a single woman to negotiate city streets at night, Ndiya had actually learned to do this confronting dining halls at college. “Whitecaps today,” she’d chant to herself as she blurred her vision and looked for a round, dark pool that would be one table of black students with whom she’d eat. While eating, she’d focus so hard on each face that the chalk-faced waves and wan-toned voices surrounding them disappeared. The background turned into what she’d seen the weatherman standing in front of when they’d gone to the TV studio on a field trip in fourth grade. “WGN’s Roger Twible,” she had kidded herself then, “and the pure, blank blue he keeps behind him.” And now she thought again, “Ain’t mad at him.” Then she realized how uneasy she was on this street because she was doing it again. Her eyes strained against her peripheral vision as she followed a man’s progress across the street without turning her head to watch.

The bus disappeared into the darkening distance and she saw the young man undo the denim flap on his jacket. He inserted a tightly wrapped packet of plastic in his breast pocket. He appeared to her and then disappeared. He had something in his face she wanted to trust. Everything about it was even; there was nothing soft, nothing hard, nothing too round, nothing too sharp. He fell through her sight into the easy, curved play of light on lines and the spectrum of brown out of which she built everything she knew about how, what for, and why to look at people. All the possible ways of being came inevitably from these basic shapes and shades in faces. When there was no human face like that around, those patterns appeared anyway. They turned to her out of trees, clouds, waves at the beach, the froth of a cappuccino. All that led to a static she wasn’t going near. She carried that space hidden inside. In that static, a kind of noiseless noise, drifted something she refused to know but knew was true: it’s the people you know, that you trust—leave love alone—that hurt you the worst. People you don’t know or trust can kill you, or maim you; but that’s it. The real injuries that leave you touched and staggering around hiding from yourself come down the hallway, they invite you to come along and you follow. Afterward, they hang there in the torn-open wound of your trust. The arrival of trust is subtle and dangerous, its perils are intimate, vertical, bottomless.

This young man’s eyes were deep without the masked howl that she usually saw in the faces of black men with deep-set eyes. Her father’s face flashed and went away. Every hair on this young man’s head and in his wispy goatee was in place. But he didn’t have the razor-coiffed precision of the cuff-linked men at work who stalked about the Loop like perfection itself. She’d see these professional men at lunch meetings; she knew their smell. They walked like they were fresh from the weight room and flashed corporate AmEx cards like they were swords in a divine battle scene in some museum painting. The young man—truth be told he was a boy in her mind—struck her with a grace, an elegance in his stride and the perfect break of his jeans over tooth-white sneakers. For a flash, she replayed her long exile from Chicago in her brain and, against that second’s blur, she gave herself to this young stranger. She kept her eyes twenty miles out over the lake and him in her peripheral vision. It was an old technique, let the body ache but refuse to feel it. Wonder your way around the pressure of the moment. Let it sing.

This kind of openness felt very new to her. It had been a long time.

A pastel of music melted in her body. It did a slow, counterclockwise lap in her brain passing by her right ear: I’ve got things on my mind. It disappeared until it reappeared in her left ear and she heard, I’m not too busy for you. She knew the song, knew its moves. She loved the song so she turned it off before Kenny Lattimore had his chance to croon her favorite line, If you’re feeling a-lone.… She could trace the gentleness of that line as it moved through her body like a long swallow of hot chocolate at the bus stop in the winter. The kind of warmth that you feel when you swallow, the kind that makes it seem like anything you look at will melt. The song laid the words perfectly along the lines and shades in the faces she saw pass her on the street. With lines like this, she could abstract her way past the masks men wore in public and even past the others she’d found stuck to their faces in private. “Male privacy!” she thought. “It’s up there with companion for life and soulmate in the bait-and-switch way of the world.”

She mourned the secret war black men fought, must fight anyway, in places far away from her, quite possibly far away from everyone, with those gentle lines and the fantastic beauty in those shades of brown they carry through life. “Let’s not ee-ven talk about eyelashes.” Black men’s beauty and the near-cosmic arrays of violence leveled against it. She began to smile, then felt a rush of tears pressing into her eyes and a lump in her throat. Then she put it all away: “Brain broom, must pan, thought box.” She had a hundred tricks like this.

To hasten away the romance, she considered the casualties of this gentleness. This was no trick. She felt her scalp sweat and her eyes harden. The casualties of that gentleness were women. Every time. “And it ain’t ee-ven gentle,” she thought. She remembered something Shame had said to her that first night, out in front of Renée’s party on the Fourth of July. They could hear the music slow down, and the dusty sound rose like floodwater in the basement. She was halfway into praising Jesus that she’d come up for air and was outside when the music got low. It was an old song. She knew because the words were overpronounced in a way that made her feel eighteen years old. Dream about you ev-er-y night-tah, every day-ah: a city soul singer with a country preacher’s punctuation.

“Smoke City,” Shame said. “Remember them? I knew this singer, ain’t seen him in years and years, but that’s a whole ’nother story.” Then he said,

–I love music that starts with how life is and then opens up like this and makes life seem like how it has to be and at the same time makes it all sound like you know it can’t never be.

He concluded the thought scowling at the ground:

–All at once.

And she, trying to follow the logic as she repeated what he’d said to herself:

–I’ll have to think about that.

–Naw, just listen is all. Otherwise, well, never mind the otherwise.

And she thought to herself, “Who the hell is this?” and to disguise the thought, she asked the singer’s name.

–Never mind, that’s part of the otherwise.

As he said this, Shame’s eyes rose up. He’d been staring at the ground. When he looked to the sky his eyes passed over her face. Ndiya felt a strong pull, or was it a push? As their eyes passed each other, she thought she heard a voice in her ear say, “Careful with that.” She must have said it to herself out loud because Shame asked,

–Careful with what?

–Oh, never mind.

–Oh, right, “never mind,” that’s part of the “otherwise.”

But Ndiya thought, just then, that party didn’t count as a meeting or a date. So, she was under no obligation to deal with it.

■

Despite being soaked and conspicuous, Ndiya tried to maintain her equilibrium in this unfamiliar street. She thought, “Weather and the blank blue behind it,” and blurred her ears from the inside. The song was no more and the young man was greeting another young man and a woman who’d each been shifting their weight from one foot to the other at the corner since she’d passed by them on her way. One eyebrow up, she felt her top lip fold inside her mouth, her teeth scraped across it twice before it popped back cool in the air. OK, here goes.

Date number two. Late July? A Friday? The twenty-third? She’d been invited to a birthday party for Maurice from the firm. Maurice Thomas, Esq. Morehouse, Phi Beta Sigma, Northwestern Law, office 2402. She knew him mostly from editing his briefs. Immediately after they’d been introduced, she named him “That Maurice.” She couldn’t have been back in Chicago for more than six weeks. She was new at the job. Afraid to unpack most of the boxes in her provisional, no-lease townhouse sublet. She had regular urges to tape up the few she had opened, call the movers, and spend half her savings on a one-way move to a brand-new nowhere in the big old ABP, her personalized acronym for USA.

Her job was to keep records in the firm, sit in on depositions, prepare forms, motions. The computer did the formatting and the abstract, opaque legalese the lawyers used came naturally to her. “Naturally” meant it was a skill she’d practiced unconsciously in order to survive. She recognized the technique immediately. Just like she did, the legal language surgically and tactically excised its connection with the world outside the precise matter at hand. The point was to create a version of whatever case that guarded against threats. Bring it on. If she could do anything, Ndiya Grayson could do that. In two weeks, she could mouth the words before the lawyers got their sentences out. In three, a few junior associates recognized that she wrote in their world-obliterating tribal language better than they did. Most quickly began to simply list the basic facts of the case and let her do the rest. They’d make a special effort in five-syllable words to say—strictly on procedural grounds, you understand—that they’d need to proof the briefs before they were submitted, but she knew it was all show. They probably didn’t even read them until they were on their way to court, if they ever got that far.

She felt a flash of panic when she saw how plainly some people read things about her that she hadn’t consciously disclosed. She asked Yvette-at-work about her future as a legal ghostwriter. She was told not to sweat it. “If they know you’re smart you’ll either get promoted in a little while or fired right away—how long has it been?” She’d started as a temp and, when the temporarily absent person stayed gone, she’d signed a one-year contract for more money than she’d ever thought she’d make. In truth, she thought to herself, it wasn’t so much a job as an excuse to get out of bed, shop on Oak Street, and live in a part of the city that meant absolutely nothing to her. “What do you expect,” she’d laughed to herself, “going to work in a building that looks like a fifty-story pair of sunglasses?” She imagined that the buppified stretch of townhouses on the near South Side where she sublet her place couldn’t mean anything to anyone. She figured that was the whole point. She was wrong, of course, but that didn’t matter yet. And if you allowed for travel well beyond the speed of light, and back in time, the neighborhood was just a few blocks east from where she’d grown up.

The message about Maurice’s party was the first post she’d received after having been added to the SnapB/l/acklist. This was the secret listserv that trafficked news between the young, gifted, and professional black employees of Gibson, Taylor & Gregory, the corporate law firm where she worked. Somewhere, of course, she knew better than to click to join and RSVP to the list to say nothing of actually showing up to That Maurice’s birthday party. And worse, Yvette-at-work had written back to the list to acknowledge that Ms. Ndiya Grayson, new colleague and the newest member of the list, would be there and everyone should make it a point to introduce themselves.

Nevertheless. “No, forget the n,” she thought. “Make it ‘evertheless.’” At six thirty on that Friday evening, she found herself in front of a mirror, humming along to the sublet TV’s “Soul Salon” and lost in time blending shades of MAC on her eyelids. She checked the rhythm-method calendar of her hair: “It’s Friday, second day out of the braids and on its way back for the weekend. Sunday evening, back to braids.” She made sure the seam in her stockings was straight up the back of her calf. The door of the building said, “Don’t!” when it slammed behind her but she shook it off and went down the steps to take the bus uptown to the Violet Hour. Everyone was meeting there for dinner before they headed off to whatever other closet of uptown nowhere the rest of That Maurice’s party was to take place in.

■

Leaving big-eyed Melvin and his grandmother or whoever she was behind, Ndiya continued walking as the business strip gave way to residential buildings rimmed with lawn and living room furniture and old people to nod and smile at as she passed. In her mind, she continued on with her self-promised reckoning with date number two. The incident. She remembered riding the bus up South Michigan Avenue, awestruck by the unfamiliarity of the city and bothered by a strange feeling that she knew all of the black people she saw personally. Coming back to Chicago felt like returning to a family of two million people who lived in, or near, a city that’d embarked on an aggressive campaign of cosmetic surgery. “Way too aggressive,” she thought, as she wondered if what happened to Michael Jackson’s face could happen to a city. She knew it could. She’d been to Phoenix, an experience—or, more accurately, the utter lack of—which changed USA in her mind to ABP: “Anywhere But Phoenix.”

Still, this was Chicago. She thought, “It is still Chicago, right?” The miles of empty lots, abandoned blocks, and defunct train tracks that she’d known south of Grant Park were one place of massive change. And she knew that what she’d known was itself—for someone else—a bit of blur that wasn’t designed to last either. “Chalk it all up to America’s War on Time,” she thought.

Thoughts like these made Ndiya half regret her youthful, vengeful lack of patience and half wish she could feel it again full force. Then she remembered Art. After college they’d moved back to New York City where he’d grown up. She saw herself smile and wince and shake her head in the window as post-op Chicago wheeled past like it was on a gurney outside the bus. She remembered, though, how her youthful fire had delivered her to dangerous dead ends. “Look at me,” she’d told Art. “I can go anywhere in the world and never be mistaken for anything but exactly what I am, NAF, Negro American Female. All I have to do is open my mouth and say a word or two. A person, a language with origins nowhere, no history. Certainly nowhere and no history the world will admit to.”

She had looked in Arturo’s eyes as they opened up and fell through the back of his head like someone had kicked through the scrub and knocked the lids off of two long-abandoned wells in a ghost town. This had begun to seem like a weekly ritual. Aggravation building, she had thought, “He better not cry because I’m not sure if I’ll cover his wide, ever-earnest face with kisses or bust him in his no-irony-having mouth.” His tone as cold and clear—and, Ndiya thought, poisonous—as the abandoned water in his welled up eyes, Art had said simply, “You’re lucky.” And with her response, what had already become a kind of code-phrase for her life knowing Art began to feel like some kind of secret name or destiny; “Maybe I am.”

■

As she traveled toward date number two on the bus up Michigan Avenue, still trying to admit to herself that she’d decided to go to That Maurice’s birthday party at all, she looked down to her left and into the sun. Where once lay strewn and tangled abandoned railroad tracks, she saw new, sapling-studded rows of townhouses and signs: 2 Bdrms of Brilliant Light Starting from the Low-400s. She thought to herself, “Botox and a nose job, and what the fuck does low-400s mean?” In the end, she couldn’t file the altered landscape under anything resembling “change” in her thoughts. She knew ripples would pour out of the money changing between the same hands and shift the gravity of things. Maybe that is change?

Everyone else would be forced to react. At the same time, she wasn’t inspired by the, in her ears, delusional howling about gentrification either. “Who the hell got to keep their neighborhoods?” she thought, with a force that made her look around to see if she’d actually said it out loud. If she had said it out loud, no one on the bus cared. She hadn’t invested in either position. She’d opted out or tried to. So she figured her thoughts didn’t really count and that’s exactly the way she’d wanted it. For a minute, she even thought about giving brothers like Maurice Thomas a break. Maybe she would. She thought, “Who knows, maybe this party would be OK.”

Maybe it was all the maybes. She thought of Arturo again. She’d gone home with him and she’d seen the gentrification wars up close and impersonal in New York City in the summer of 1991. Art had told her about growing up in Alphabet City and it had sounded like Mister Rogers. Of course, it wasn’t that way at all but you couldn’t tell him that. She remembered the banners and fliers from that summer: Save Tompkins Square Park. The first time she saw one of the placards, she’d asked Arturo, “Where is Tompkins Square Park?” He pointed across Avenue A into a tangle of weeds and bent iron fencing behind which she’d seen all manner of makeshift dwellings and the rhythms of the homeless men and the thin-boned, addicted white girls who, from what she could tell, lived in there. “Save that? Too late, baby,” she’d said. Art shook his head: “They just want to clean up the place, Ndiya, are you mad at that?” And she: “Yeah, and clean you right up and out of here along with it.” But she didn’t mean what he thought she meant. As always with Art, she meant, “Maybe I am.” She’d walked through the park with him several times already. She’d certainly never had the impression that it was a place to be saved.

She’d recognized the people living in that park. Mostly they were dangers to themselves. Most of the men were vets and other fugitives cured when Reagan cut the funding and “liberated” them from the VA or whatever other kind of care they’d been getting. The girls and their paramours were all, she suspected, from Milwaukee and they couldn’t seem to tell if they were being saved by dope or punished by life in New York. “Saved or punished,” she thought, “it beat Milwaukee.” By Milwaukee, Ndiya didn’t mean the town itself. She’d never been there, after all. She thought of it, instead, as the paradigm town of Happy Days white amnesia and numbness that silently, somehow, seemed to work like quarantine for the however many hundred thousand black people who lived there. That could be any number of American cities. In Milwaukee, as in Chicago, as elsewhere, it all happened under the banner of the stolen American Indian name and that clinched the cynical deal and made most of what she saw burn down her arms from her young and half–numb struck flamethrower of a brain.

Riding the bus to Maurice’s party, she could see that she and Art both had had it all wrong back then. The placards and petitions and protests weren’t meant to save or clean up the park. They were meant to prevent the police from occupying it in order to clean it up. The white girls she saw who’d left Milwaukee to grow mats on their heads and convince themselves that “life” meant forgetting to change your T-shirt, they didn’t want the park cleaned up. They wanted it preserved so that the twisted thicket could remain just like it was. All this was far beyond Ndiya at the time. In retrospect, she was happy to have misjudged it like she did. In a way, by then, her own private pain and the numbness she guarded it with had made her conservative. If it hadn’t, she might have really hurt somebody. Likely, she’d have hurt Art, even worse than she did. Art who ordered and gathered his own thoughts by disagreeing—albeit always in the most agreeable terms—with whatever Ndiya said. Art said he wanted a “good life for himself.” Somehow this meant he’d convert all memory and things he saw in the present into models of such a good life to be replicated.

Outside Tompkins Square Park and down the block were huge, would-be empty lots full of fragments from broken bricks and pieces of broken window frames. Arturo explained that the buildings had been abandoned and then demolished and the bricks had been mined for use in suburban housefronts all over the country. Not always in that order, either. Often bricks were mined while the buildings stood. He said white men used to come to the neighborhood and offer a dollar for every hundred bricks the kids could load on their pickup trucks and flatbeds. A penny a brick. Arturo and his friends had worked many summer nights until dawn loading down those trucks with bootlegged bricks. The buildings leaned, floors bowed, the walls in the hallways curved. Slats under the busted plaster protruded like ribs of an animal left for vultures on some Sunday afternoon wildlife show. In the basements, the whole structures of shifting, diminishing weight made low moans and sharp coughs. Art said he knew two boys and their sister who were killed when a floor and ceiling collapsed after too many bricks were mined from weight-bearing walls in the basement. At dawn, after those nights, their hands were hot and raw, forearms scraped from carrying bricks stacked in each arm. When the light came up, the trucks drove away up First Avenue loaded down so that the front wheels looked like they barely met the pavement.

Ndiya was always amazed that Art could relate stories such as these and retain a sense of optimistic detachment, as if the moral of all of these stories was that everything happened for the best. At school she’d admired this in him, and she had thought it was a radical kind of focus; at home it seemed much more like a determined blindness.

In these lots cleared by Arturo and them, Ndiya saw where hundreds of people had built shelters. Families lived there. She could see the World Trade Center in the background, and in the foreground lived a shantytown. There was another down the block and there was another around the corner from there. She identified with these people somehow. She’d prayed for the buildings she grew up in to be vacated and destroyed. On a bad day she just prayed for them to be destroyed. She felt something familiar in the dissembled misery she witnessed in these lots. She saw kids playing much like she’d played, getting pain and fun and joy and bitterness and togetherness and betrayal all tangled up with each other in their bodies until, she thought, no one could get them untangled. Anyone who suggested that they could be untangled was an enemy. They’d grow up like she had, until she hadn’t. They’d be afraid of all the people they loved until they didn’t know if they were in love with fear or afraid of love itself.

Remembering all of this on the bus to Maurice’s party made her feel it all again. Most powerful of all those feelings was the truly strange rain of realization that happened when she began to learn that this inseparable tangle wasn’t true for everyone. Or that’s what they said.

Some people she saw on her walks through Art’s neighborhood were addicted already. She recognized them because they were the only ones who walked like they knew where they were going in the morning. Others soon would be. One or two of those kids in the shanties would move though it all just like she had and come out without any visible scars. They’d bear their experience, mostly a series of things that should have but didn’t happen to them, like an unintelligible alphabet written in kerosene on their skin. Their lives would swerve between lighted matches that would touch off sketches of flame on their skin and furnaces would roar in chests, fire in their veins. Then, if they were lucky, they’d scramble around lighted matches and call it life. All her life, Ndiya had found she could recognize these people no matter where she saw them. She’d never been able to make up her mind what, in fact, distinguished them from the crowd. She could feel these people recognize her as well. Their eyes would catch and fall open. There’d be a quick nod and then they’d turn and be off.

That’s what she had thought in her twenties. None of it was true. And most of her sudden flashes of anger were really about the numb wall she’d put between herself and her actual past. In a way that was even less memorable to her than it was visible to other people, she wasn’t one of the spared, to whom things hadn’t happened that the odds said should have happened. In fact, as if in a twisted symmetry, things that should never have happened to anyone had happened to her. In just that way, by changes almost as simple as grammar in a sentence, she’d invented a story to stand beside her. This twin person could negate what had happened to her in that abandoned elevator when she was twelve.

All of this, guarded by a sentry, sat behind a wall no one, certainly not Arturo Almeida, was going to get behind. In a way that was standing right next to her before she’d seen it approach, and in a way her sentry was incapable of dealing with at all, Shame’s reactions to things had awoken something, put something in motion. From the start, part of knowing Shame took place behind this wall in her life story, took place in a part of her life that wasn’t in the story. She could feel he was trouble. Nonetheless, she went along with the string of accidental inevitables that happened after they’d met. She didn’t know why. With Shame, in exactly that unforeseen way she’d armed herself against, she felt alive close up; trouble, for once, felt like distant thunder.

In New York that summer with Art, some of the adults she saw headed and raised families in these thrown-together shanties often comprised of materials stolen from construction sites, two-by-fours and sheets of blue plastic, with portions of abandoned cars and delivery vans. She couldn’t tell how many families lived in a sky-blue US Air Force school bus that had been turned on its side in one of the lots. She’d pass by in the morning as the addicts stalked their singular purposes and the employed adults in the shanties tried to wipe wrinkles from their loose pants and tight jackets. Some stood in line to brush their teeth at the steady trickle from a long-spent fire hydrant near the corner. She appreciated their struggle for dignity, and their misery echoed the wordless and violent melody of her worldview in a way that made her sweat feel like it ran down someone else’s skin.

She remembered the protests and the way the NYPD surrounded the park. She remembered no one seemed to care about the families in the shanties all around or the other families, like Arturo’s, who lived in the projects that loomed over Alphabet City from Avenue D. It was all about that disaster of a park. She didn’t ever see any of the people from the projects or the shanties—too busy dodging matches—at the protests about the park. The protesters were the only ones she didn’t recognize. But, she thought, she knew them all. For all she knew, every one of them had individually passed her in the crowded but utterly empty hallways and pathways of the college she’d attended. Instead of looking at her, they all intently studied the fucking wall or became instantly obsessed by trees in the distance. The scary thing she didn’t learn at college, as she’d find out later, to her horror, was that they basically treated each other and most of all themselves the same way.

And she suspected the difference between the police and the protesters was a matter of competing dialects in the same language. For the people in the shanties and for Art’s mama, and for his little sister, the police and the protests, finally, meant the same thing. The police were getting paid to do what they got paid to do. They looked the part. Most of the protesters looked like, and even more, sounded like, the whitecaps Ndiya had abstracted into “weather blue” in order to survive college. Most of them had the same ratty T-shirts and jeans on and hadn’t rubbed quite enough grime over their suburban accents to cover up their SAT scores. She used to taunt Art mercilessly about this. He’d take her to some newly opened restaurant full of whitecaps and she’d ask him, “How does it feel to be the grime these people rub on their tongues?” His eyes would do the abandoned-well thing and she’d scrape her lip with her teeth.

Neither one of them knew the half of it then. They didn’t know that these hopelessly clean people under their precisely wrinkled clothes were protesting desperately to save the catastrophe in the park. The park wasn’t the point, much less the people. It was the catastrophe that mattered. It was the catastrophe they thought could bleed for them and help them walk on the water of their wants to the other shore of what they needed. Transcendent catastrophe, the dark matter, as ever, of self-reliance. When flashes of all this dawned upon her, Ndiya felt possessed by a violence at once very far off and as near to her as the metal taste of anger in her mouth; Art would shake his head at the ground: “You’re selling them short, Ndiya.” And she: “Yeah?” Her top lip scraped twice on her teeth and then back in the cool air. “Maybe I am.”

■

Ndiya paused in the street. She also paused recounting date number two with Shame so she could focus on the end of the “maybe I am” days knowing Arturo. Split between the scene in the street and her memory, she felt something, maybe sundown, warming her back. Or maybe it was the memory-sun through the window on the bus up to Maurice’s party? It hadn’t come to her in years, and then, just then, there it was.

One wrong afternoon Arturo had to physically prevent her from attacking a staccato-syllabled, open-faced young white woman on the street. Looking at it now, Ndiya thinks the woman had done her best to impersonate the appearance of the addicted girls she’d seen in the park. Somehow she had stepped out of nowhere, directly in front of Ndiya’s next stride. She pushed a squatter’s rights petition into Ndiya’s face. Maybe it had nothing to do with the park, the catastrophe, or the vacant lots, maybe it was just how the woman ended what she said with her tone of voice pointed up in the air like one person riding a seesaw? Maybe the provocation was simply the collision between the dingy clothes, the militant white-straightness of the girl’s teeth and the fashionable angularity of her eyeglasses? Or maybe it was that voice she’d just bought from the Gap? It didn’t matter.

The slashing phrases that erupted from Ndiya’s mouth echoed in her memory. The scratch-the-surface-and-look-what-you-get look on the struck-open young woman’s suddenly old and closed face scared Ndiya all over again for the fresh waves of hatred it inspired when it came to mind. Ndiya prided herself and depended upon her ability to see these people long before they saw her. She’d missed this one and so Ndiya heard herself saying, “You better get your motherfucking hand out my chest, bit—”

Art grabbed her from behind, pulled her back toward the corner hissing, “Hey, hey, hey now, hey now,” into her ear through the siren pulsing in her head. On the bus, Ndiya absently bit through the skin on her knuckle thinking about it.

When they got to the apartment Ndiya went straight to the bathroom and double-locked the door. She took Art’s mother’s hidden cigarettes out from behind the radiator and smoked one and then another, blowing smoke out the small window that stayed open over the chipped tile in the shower stall. Art, bless him, somehow knew better than to bother her with his sapper’s kit of mitigating questions and accommodating disagreements.

She sat, frozen, timing her pulse against the duet of drips from the shower and sink. Her eyes followed the joints in the wall between the cinder blocks north, south, east, and west. That summer, Art’s little sister, Sonja, had created a mural of lower Manhattan using the tile joints on the bathroom wall as the major streets; she’d begun to color in and label storefronts, vacant lots, schools, and churches. All her friends’ apartments were labeled. Sonja had listed the names of the people in them, who worked, and who did what. Ndiya traced lines between these buildings and a key to the map comprised of hearts and stars and frowning faces. A week ago Sonja had proudly told Ndiya that young Latino brothers from Washington, DC, called it a Youth Map and they paid her a hundred dollars per week to do it. Several of her friends were doing their own Youth Maps as well. At the end of the summer, they’d receive a final payment after submitting their finished maps and a written report describing what they’d learned making them.

“Recon,” Ndiya thought. The little girl was a doubleagent and she didn’t even know it. Who would pay how much for the information these kids come up with? What would it be used to do? Despite all that, the love in Sonja’s mural had calmed Ndiya before. This time, as the pieces fell together, it felt like the eye, the camel, the needle, and the last straw. Then her face folded into itself and splintered when she smashed her hand into the mirror as she spit out, “Squatter’s rights? It doesn’t age well, you know.” Then her body broke into convulsive sobs and a sound filled the room that had no room in it for anyone’s maybes. She pictured the woman with the petition, “I’d pay to see her petition for her own family’s rights to squat in an abandoned building while kids mine the walls for bricks. Her family probably lives in a house, in Connecticut no doubt, made of the damned bricks themselves. Of course they do, it’s perfect. I wonder why she won’t squat in that house?”

An hour later, she came out of the bathroom feeling clean and elegant as brushed steel and sharp and mean as the ivory-handled knife her father had used to cut her slices from his apple. He told her it was a gift from his father. At once, in a clear sweat, Ndiya understood that gift. “Maybe I am” was slashed and lay dead on the tiny, white, nicotine-tinted octagonal tiles of Art’s mama’s bathroom floor. He knew better. But Art asked anyway. And she: “It was about, Arturo, what kind of people could imagine what other kind of people, families, kids, Art, kids, deserve squatter’s rights.” Then she lost it and screamed, “And it’s about having clue-the-fucking-first and, so, not jumping up in my face with no white-ass-uptilted-seesaw voice, period. Ever!” Even then she could feel that this was about much more than that but she defended herself by blaming that feeling on Art.

With her voice echoing in his screamed-at eyes, Art said that she didn’t understand, and she thought to herself, “You’re damned straight I don’t. No maybe about it.” Art held her hand but she could see him try and fail to well his eyes. She asked him, “What if they’re people, real people?” In that moment of intense and reductive focus, she told herself that she could see Art had no idea what she was talking about. And she could see more clearly than ever that he was determined not to know. At that time, she couldn’t admit what all she, too, was determined not to know. As for Art, if he’d known that much, she’d have respected that. He didn’t and she could see then that he wouldn’t. Blind to herself, she could see that Art was determined to be a certain kind of American, the kind that wants to be an American. Ndiya was equally determined to be another kind of American, the kind determined not to be Arturo’s kind of American. As soon as she realized this, of course, she’d need to find another Arturo somewhere, or she’d need to be alone.

She’d heard about medical training and how doctors needed to insulate themselves against all the kinds of caring and feeling that sent them beyond their clinical abilities. This enabled them to perform the technical features of their work. From college English, Ndiya remembered Hemingway’s doctor saying of the American Indian woman, “Her screams aren’t important. I don’t hear them because they’re not important.” She’d been afraid to ask the professor about it in front of all those whitecaps in the class. But she remembered wondering if the doctor would have said that if the woman was white? What if she was his daughter? Suddenly she saw the answer: especially then. The answer was yes. If it wasn’t, that staccato white girl down on Avenue A could have squatted at home in Milwaukee, CT or wherever-the-fuck.

The police, the protests were all part of the same stage. No one had a home here. That was the way it was supposed to be. She was mad at Art for accepting that. She was mad at him, mostly, because she silently insisted upon an essential homelessness. At bottom, she was mad because she was lying to herself. But all of that was far, far ahead; in a way, all of it led her to where she was.

On her walk to Shame’s apartment, buried in her assessment of date number two, she saw for the first time how she and Art were in denial about almost everything. And how they’d covered up those denials by blaming pieces of each other they’d surgically isolated in order to focus upon. Almost none of it was conscious, she thought. In that moment, she decided, it wasn’t surgical either. Surgery was conscious; this had been a kind of unconsciously agreed-upon mutual mutilation.

That summer afternoon in 1991, Art, bless his blesséd heart, tried to hold her bandaged hand and she felt all of it getting away from her as the waves of panic turned into motes of flame that strung into lines. The lights lighted up beautiful rounded lines in faces she’d known and faces she knew that she never got to know, faces that never got to know. And she saw the world turn over and all the mirrors began to glow and the heat raged from behind the smoke-blackened glass that hissed when you put your ear near it and, if touched, would have made your hand wish it didn’t have fingers.

She remembered seeing Art’s mouth moving but she couldn’t recall, probably never heard, a word he said. She smelted this anger into a kind of pain. Then she made that pain into the platform of her reality; the pain was safe, the violence in her remained distant. This worked as long as she could see threats in the distance as they approached. It was how she survived her twenties. She made herself impossible. This impossibility of self made her impermeable to surprise.

She left Arturo’s house the next morning at 6:00 AM with her mother’s voice singing in her ear: I’m going to lay my head on that lonesome railroad iron. Let the 2:19 train ease my troubled mind. She was surprised to find Manhattan still asleep and the streets to the Port Authority empty as she made her way along the long blocks west. “Somewhere, anywhere, everywhere else,” she’d said to herself at the time.

“What the hell does all this have to do with date number two?” she thought. Still not really wanting to know, Ndiya asked herself this as she replaced the layers of time and came back from Manhattan through the bus ride through post-gentrified Chicago and returned to her soaked skirt and cool legs in the Sixty-Third Street of the twilight present. Then, before a beat, back to the uptown bus of her memory.

■

The danger signs had been clear on her way to Maurice’s party. The trip back to 1991 had made it worse. But when the mirror started to smoke, Ndiya knew how to stand with her back to the wind. She knew how to survive herself. She’d gotten good at it. “Hell is where the heart is,” she told herself. And she calmly closed her heart’s eyes. She pictured the map and told herself where all this had happened and that, yes, it had happened to someone—but it hadn’t happened to her, not to this her. She pictured a calendar, slowly turned the pages, and confirmed that it wasn’t happening now.

She kept it together. The goal was to recall things without experiencing them. She couldn’t always do that. But it helped to know the goal. She kept her eyes closed but eased up on the pressure so the tears stayed where they were. She kept her full eyes closed. The way she saw it, things in Chicago and elsewhere in the United States would continue to slosh about, unanchored, and in the end everyone needed it to happen and in the end no one really had any idea what it could mean to them. “Other than the pain,” she thought. “We’re all squatters,” she allowed. “Maybe, finally, that’s what ‘Maybe I Am’ was so enraged about. Let’s just admit it.” It was gentrification, after all, that had brought down The Grave and brought her back to Chicago. “Gentrification had torn down all those projects, it sure as shit wasn’t no squatter’s rights,” she thought. Gentrification, greed, and a good dose of pure sha—that name again.

She opened her eyes and let the sun pour into her pupils from beneath a gray bank of stratus clouds somewhere out west over Cicero. When her eyes adjusted and her sight returned, she saw a beautiful, perfect, empty beach. The copper, gold, and blue on her eyelids reflected in the window. The sight replaced the city and her pointless and personal analysis of the politics of gentrification. She knew she couldn’t help it; and more importantly she’d learned that the intensity of her reaction to things didn’t often match up well with other people’s views and ambitions. She called that fact “privacy.” So, she went to the beach. The private beach. Her eyelids.

The high and low dust of the metallic colors on her eyelids had perfectly set themselves off against each other. Even though she had added it last and wished she put it on first but didn’t have time to start over, she saw that the clear-sky-meets-cold-lake of the blue had somehow found its place beneath the bronze and copper dust; the result was the perfect set of illusions. Water and metal, sky and dust, matte and gloss, surface and depth, sunrise and sunset moved over and under and around each other on each eye as she winked at herself—right eye, left eye. Then she blew a kiss at the perfect pain-beach of a face in the window.

“Pleasure to meet you, my name is Ndiya Grayson,” she whispered. “Happy birthday, Maurice.” She smiled, “Pain-beach, gosh, haven’t been there in forever.” Maybe it had been since Phoenix? “Put the pain in the water and stand on the beach. Wade in when you want. Small victories,” she’d thought. “A little run of those and some luck, I might survive this dinner with the SnapB/l/acklist folks. I might even have some fun. Is that a crime?” She knew she’d asked herself this out loud and she didn’t care, even though somewhere she knew perfectly well that she thought it was a crime.

As she made her way step by quietly sloshing step east down Sixty-Third Street, on the third and—according to his directions—final block before arriving at Shame’s place, Ndiya approached an alleyway that led between the backs of the buildings facing Eberhart to the west and Rhodes Avenue to the east. Most old-time blocks in Chicago had one. She knew what was down there. Broken pavement pulled up by neighborhood plows, chain-link fences leaning one way and their gates leaning the other, maybe stray dogs, an old garage or parking for apartments, maybe a bike thrown down in the middle, trash cans and, starting right about now, she thought, the rats that came with them. She started not to even look. She did. Then she looked again.

Just off the sidewalk, there was a row of black iron bollards with a thick silver chain hanging between them. From the middle of the chain hung an upside-down orange triangle and centered within it was a black exclamation point outlined in day-glow yellow. Part of the alley was grass. Not grass. It was a manicured lawn with ivy at the edges climbing up the walls on either side. Twenty feet from the sidewalk, a picnic table sat crossways in the middle of what should have been an alley. But this wasn’t an alley.

Two old men sat on the near bench with their backs to her. Beyond them she could see a basketball court with one hoop. Strings of white-and-blue holiday lights lighted the court area from around the edges and beyond that the far side was a mirror of the nearside complete with two old men facing her from the distant picnic table and Sixty-Fourth Street to the south behind them. Was it a mirror? She looked for her figure on the opposite street but couldn’t decide if she could see her reflection or not. She’d never seen anything like it. She’d seen abandoned lots turned into rock gardens and even broken up into plots for neighbors to grow their greens, turnips, tomatoes and peppers in. But a beautiful grass alley, she thought as she kept walking, and a basketball court for old folks? What had Shame done, lied about his name and his age and taken up in subsidized housing for the aged? She stopped walking. Those hadn’t been old people on the court. Then she did something she never did in unfamiliar territory of any kind. She took a step backward, stopped, and stared directly at what she was looking at. They were young people on the court. Or maybe they weren’t all young but they weren’t old. She saw the boy with the jean jacket and his two associates from down the block sitting against the wall in the grass. She wondered why she’d thought it was for old folks when someone took a shot and the others turned to watch the ball in the air.

It struck her like it had when she’d gone to Comiskey Park and sat in the bleachers. You saw the pitcher throw, the batter swing, the ball react. But you didn’t hear the crack of the bat for a half a beat or so. And you could hear each word the announcer said several times. She’d gone first with a group of spelling champions from Chicago elementary schools. They were paraded out onto the field while the crowd had recognized “these Chicago youngsters for their hard work and the excellence they’d achieved in spelling.” She could still hear the phrases circle through the stadium like they were surrounded by twelve announcers. She’d never heard the word “youngster.” It sounded to her like some kind of furry pet that ran on a wheel in a glass tank. She looked around to make sure the voice was talking about them. And she didn’t know anything about baseball but she immediately loved the open arena in the night air. The solidified glow of the false daylight fell dim and bright at the same time. The smooth diamond, the precise line between the brown dust and the green grass. And, most of all, she loved the overlapping and askew play of sight and sound laid out in space so she could examine it. This seemed like the whole point of the game to her.

Inning—another new word—after inning she sat there knowing that the laws were the laws. Sight and sound must behave in this strange way all the time. She knew about thunder and lightning and one-Mississippi, of course. But still she wondered why she’d never been in an arena where you could watch it happen like this in so many ways at once. Who’d hidden this from her? This was what “education” was to mean to her always. There was a rush of discovery followed by an immediate, accompanying, cutting sensation that it had been hidden from her on purpose. The thing whirred in her, a tornado of elation from the discovery and rage at the withholding. Later, she’d wondered if this belly-twisting sensation happened to all the kids she knew. If it had, they’d certainly kept it a secret from each other. She couldn’t remember learning how to do it, but she’d converted the hot twists in her belly into a kind of tutor, a partner with whom she rehearsed all the hidden, secret things she learned. Even when Ndiya found that facts in history or certain characters in books were common knowledge to many people, she retained the feeling that, in fact, she and her twisting partner were acquainted with these things in ways only they could understand. “Hide it from me, from us, we’ll find it and make it into something only we can recognize,” she declared. Staring at the dim-bright distance while the sounds and sights dove and arced, she thought, “If everyone had their own night and night was a fruit and you could split it open when it was ripe,” this was exactly what the inside of her ripe night would be like.

The basketball game down the designer alley and Comiskey Park and the tornado effect she’d learned to quell enough to hide from everyone but herself roamed through her again. She couldn’t really hear anything from the scene down the alley. She tried to summon up her almanac of ways to “here” and “there” herself and found no familiar cues. The ball didn’t seem to make noise when it bounced. She assumed it bounced but she hadn’t seen anyone bounce the ball. The shot was the first action she’d focused on. The ball hung there and she got the roller coaster–belly feeling she had waiting for the sound of the hit to catch up to her vision of the swing. But unlike the split-open instant inside her ripe-fruit night at Comiskey Park, this thing went on and on and on and on. The ball was like a singer holding an impossibly long note. It hung in the air like a question no one could answer. From the career described by the ball and the rate of its diminishing speed, she sensed the shot would probably make it to the apex and go down the other side. Then again, it might not.

Three figures sat against the wall. They all focused on one of their outstretched arms. Ndiya couldn’t tell whose arm it was that warranted such scrutiny or why. She looked back and the ball was still slowing down, traveling upward. From the first moments of their first meeting, she’d had this sense that things involving Shame Luther took a long, long time to happen and then they seemed to have happened while they never had actually been happening. Still, this was another level. The other people on the court walked around each other, placed their hands on the back of the person in front of them; those in front seemed to hold their arms out to their sides like wings as they backed up into the ones behind. They all moved in a two-step, four-beat rhythm.

The players didn’t move nearly as slowly as the ball suspended in the air. Suddenly, one man broke the spell and moved more quickly than the rest. He took off his hat, dropped it on the ground, stomped his foot firmly on top of it and walked off the court to talk to the three sitting against the wall. He gestured easily and slapped the hand of the young man with the beard and the deep-set eyes she’d seen on the street. She thought, “They all move like Sunday morning.” Easy like her uncle Lucky’s voice sounded when he drove her around in his loping ninety-eight, like she remembered watching the trees move from the front porch down in Greenville on a thick summer night full of her great-uncle Clem’s music and the electrified skeletal glow from thunderstorms in the distance. The South. Everyone in the alley laughed at something the woman sitting on the ground said and the basketball player bowed to her and ceremoniously removed the hat he didn’t have on down to his waist and back to his head as he straightened up.

“Jesus,” Ndiya thought, “they’re all high? All of them? Always were? Lucky, Clem, those splayed-out pecan trees too? Southern thunder is high? Even the ball’s high?” Normally, stopping to look at anything in an unfamiliar neighborhood like this was out of the question. The trick was to stare twenty miles off and always, always, look like you had somewhere to go and not quite enough time to get there. At the same time, you never made a rushed or sudden move. Ndiya realized she’d just broken all the rules at once. She was soaking wet up to her knees, in high heels, starstruck still and staring, blind to everything else, at the slow-motion scene down the alley, a scene no one else on the block seemed to think noteworthy at all. “Here I am,” she thought, “an easy mark, an open wound.”

The player went back to the game. He slowed down as he returned to the court, making exaggerated motions with his arms and hips so that it looked like he was wading out into deepening water when he crossed under the lights at the court’s perimeter line. He waded back to his hat and the player dancing in place behind it. He picked up the hat, put it on, and resumed his movements with what, just then, looked like his dance partner in the area just to the right of the hoop.

As she watched the other players, Ndiya wished she’d paid closer attention to basketball once or twice so she could judge what was going on here. They clapped their soundless hands, rubbed them together and held them out, palms up, at arm’s length so that they looked, from the waist up at least, like they were about to meditate. One knelt down low as if to pray, then untied and retied both his shoestrings. One swayed back and forth, holding on to the pole beneath the hoop. Ndiya thought she saw one kiss the neck of the player in front of him. Another, off to the far left by himself, stood in place watching the ball while his right hand worked its way into his back jeans pocket. He removed a pack of cigarettes while his left hand produced a lighter. The decidedly unathletic gesture made her notice that none of them had on gym clothes of any kind, though a few at least wore sneakers. Then she checked quick to make sure the gym shoes weren’t all the same like the black Nikes of those crazy Comet Hale-Bopp folks who’d followed that comet up out of here a few years ago. Nope.

The smoking player held both arms extended straight out to either side. His lighted lighter in one hand, glowing cigarette pointed upward and pivoting to follow the movement of the ball in the other. Obscured by her angle of view, Ndiya saw the flame and the glow from the tip of his cigarette while the rapt, stationary player traced the flight of the shot as it moved beyond the apex and began to pick up speed. It looked as if something impeding the ball’s progress had been removed from in front and placed behind to push it on its way toward the rim of the hoop which, Nydia now noticed, had a long net of tinsel stars and sequins hanging down from it. She’d seen basketball courts. She’d never seen one with the net hanging down almost halfway to the ground. This hoop looked more like one of those West African crowns worn by kings to obscure their human faces while they performed supposedly divine duties.

Most of the courts she remembered in Chicago either had chain nets or no nets at all. Her brothers had always had their own nets that they took with them and brought home when they were done. Just then it dawned on her that the net-thing had something to do with the question of touch. Her brothers had always discussed “touch” like it was some mystical attribute possessed only by gurus. She didn’t know what that was about, but she knew her brothers sometimes had to fight in order to leave the park and take their nets with them. For a few summers, they and their friends had talked about it ceaselessly, as if it was an issue they should submit to the UN. Finally, she asked them what they needed nets for anyway and they all turned to her at once and froze. Six boys with exactly the same look on their faces, and no one moved and no one said anything. She turned and walked away, at which point the cursing and revenge plotting resumed.

■

Ndiya stood there revising what she knew about the physics of basketball and thinking how none of this strangeness boded well for her evening. One of the old men on the picnic table turned around and yelled, apparently at her,

–Miss, would you mind and please tell Mrs. Clara to tell Melvin that a shot’s about to go in?

Exactly then the other old man interjected,

–No it’s not!

He didn’t take his eyes off the nearly stationary ball. The first man turned to him:

–Yes it is!

Then he turned back to her:

–Would you mind and see does the boy want to come and watch?

And she did. She minded. It seemed like it’d been two lifetimes since she’d minded someone. She minded him back up the block feeling like she was moving on a sidewalk that was itself moving almost fast enough to get back to where she came from if she kept on minding. She hadn’t even thought about which way to go or to make sure she knew who Mrs. Clara and Melvin were. She was just minding.

When she reached the old woman and the tsunami boy, they were packing up the yarn and needles and boats. Ndiya mustered,

–Ma’am, Mrs. Clara, ma’am, the gentleman down the, er, down the alley, I mean in the park?, a gentleman down there would like to know does little Melvin here want to come and see the, ah, the shot go in, or, or not?

Mrs. Clara looked up at Ndiya as if they’d known each other for life:

–You hear that, Melvin? Now go on. This nice young lady, what’s your name honey?

–Ndiya, my name’s Ndiya, ma’am.

–Yes, yes, I see. Well, Melvin, you go on with Miss Kneed-in-the … you just go on and see does the shot make it in the net tonight or doesn’t it, OK?

Mrs. Clara handed Ndiya a small backpack. Melvin moved his goggles up to stick above his eyebrows, this pushed down his brow and seemed to make his whole face frown.

–OK, Nana.

Then he raised up his hand and, taking Ndiya’s:

–Let’s go!

Ndiya turned, holding little Melvin’s hand. She heard Mrs. Clara charge,

–You mind now, Melvin, you hear?

And so, Melvin minding Mrs. Clara to mind Ndiya minding an old man on a picnic table, the both of them sloshed and squashed back to the opening of the alley and up to where the two old men sat concentrating on the shot.

–You all just made it, won’t be a minute—

At which point the other old man said,

–Bet it will!

And the first continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted,

–before Nesta out there makes his shot and Lee Williams, right here, loses another quarter to yours truly, Lucious Christopher.

Lucious Christopher extended his hand and Ndiya, feeling like she was still minding, introduced herself,

–My name’s Ndiya. Ndiya Grayson.

–Grayson … Grayson. Lee Williams, you ever known any Graysons?

Lee Williams, eyes drilling the floating ball, answered,

–Used to know some Graysons from visiting my cousins down in Greenville, but that’s a long time ago.

–Don’t mind an old man’s lack of manners.

Lucious Christopher said, gesturing to the bench in front of them,

–Young lady, have a seat.

And, then, a light tap on her shoulder.

–Ah, beg your pardon there, er, you don’t mind me saying, but you a little old for swimming on the block there, Miss Grayson. You should go on down to the beach.

Lucious Christopher and Lee Williams looked at each other with the all-knowing, we-best-watch-this-one look on their faces. Ndiya’s face heated up as she ignored them. She had a spinning-dizzy feeling like she was a ball of string that was being very quickly unspooled.

And then Lee Williams:

–Grayson! Yes, Lonnie and Lucky, old Clem and them—but that’s all I can get back, it’s been a long time.

Lucious Christopher:

–Is that right? I knew a Lonnie and a few Luckys, can’t recollect they last names, but now you mention it, years back, didn’t one of them Grayson ni—well, brothers—take up with a fine young woman who got herself one of them new apartments off in The Grave? Then, remember there was that crazy thing with—

Lee Williams cut him short:

–Don’t know. Like I said, they was Greenville ni—I mean, brothers—when I knew them. Now, hush while I sight-guide Nesta’s brick on toward the hoop in such a way that it don’t do a “Chocolate Thunder” on Junior’s backboard.

Ndiya sat, stunned, thinking, this is not happening. Melvin immediately climbed into her lap to wait for the shot to go in or not. While helping Melvin change out of his boots, she welcomed her thought: “This might not be happening, but it’s certainly going to impede the dreaded conclusion of my evaluation of date number two.”

Wrong again. As they watched the ball gain speed on its way down the slope toward the front of the rim, Ndiya heard the faint sound of a piano from above the court. The music sounded like it curled around itself in circles of differing speeds and radiuses. In wide, slow sweeps cut by faster, tighter arcs, the first note of each phrase was loud and clearly audible. The notes that followed faded until they almost weren’t there at all when a new phrase began somewhere else, loud at first and fading as if it curved away. It sounded like the piano rode the curve out of earshot. Then, there it was, come around again. It sounded to her like wheels inside wheels.

From time to time, the phrase would start with a note sung by someone and once in a while a few notes would be sung inside the phrases. She’d just noticed it, but Ndiya guessed that the music must have been there all the time because, now that she did hear it, the players’ movements seemed to follow the phrases. They didn’t all follow each phrase, though, nor did they move for the complete audible length of the brief, arc-like tunes. Nonetheless, now that she’d noticed it, the music provided a cadence that held the scene together. Up close, it all seemed less like the baseball diamond inside ripe nighttime and more like she was watching through the thick glass of an aquarium. Movements behind that aquarium glass had always made Ndiya slightly nauseous so she closed her eyes to steady herself. This was a very bad idea.

Upon closing her eyes, Ndiya felt like she’d been lowered headfirst into the music coming from a window above the alley. Instantly, the whole of date number two flashed through her body and behind her eyes as if it had all happened in about twenty seconds. It didn’t move like her memory; the fluid thing washed over her body in one piece like if you watch a wave pass overhead from beneath the surface of the water. She felt the pull of its weight draw over her and move through her at the same time. She saw herself standing immobilized at the Violet Hour window watching the SnapB/l/acklist folks toasting Maurice at a large table to the right of the bar. Maybe it was the way that window framed the scene? Or being home in Chicago? She didn’t know. In that window she’d seen clearly for the first time the vast distance between herself and these youngerish, blackified, professionalized peers. The distance had always been there, she’d insisted and depended upon it. But she’d never opened her eyes and stared at it like this. “Hope it works,” she whispered, either to them or to herself. She had been leaning toward the window. Her face was close enough to the glass that her breath clouded the surface. Suddenly a cement-like certainty seized her. There was no way she could get through that door. At least it seemed like they hadn’t seen her, she thought. But she knew that she didn’t care what they’d seen. She didn’t know what to do.

A new note sounded a new phrase from above the alley. Ndiya saw herself turn away from Maurice’s birthday party and enter the bar next door. She’d leave the bar after half of an Elton John song and two drinks. “Two Blue Labels, please, neat,” she heard herself say.

She’d said it immediately upon reaching the bar, without knowing why or waiting for the barman to approach. She didn’t realize that she’d repeated verbatim what Shame said seconds after the thing with Malik’s house-arrest bracelet. So, we could say she called him up. In the space of about thirty seconds, she downed the brown contents of both tiny glasses, thinking the liquor was too soft to be considered liquid. Then she looked in disbelief at the bill, eighty dollars? Without a pause she placed five new twenty-dollar bills in the black leather folder and left. The price of “whatever the hell Blue Label was” echoed around. It contended with what little she’d assumed she’d known about Shame. International laborer in some local 269 or something? Joycelan Steel-something-something? What was that?

Then she thought, “And here I am soaking wet, sitting on this bench with a little boy in my lap and Shame’s whole block’s high? My whole life’s high?”

Before she could turn toward the southbound bus stop in her memory, the music faded away and a new note punched through the air over the alley. The note brought the scene from date number two to her eyes like the whole thing was a movie on a screen in the alley playing for everyone to see. It wasn’t really in her eyes, of course. It was worse—the physical scene was on the loose in her body:

Shame on his cycle pulling up to the opposite curb. He waves and takes off his helmet, staring at her. She sees herself nod. His U-turn through traffic. The ride. Helmet smell. Sun on scalp. The drinks in her arms and pools of heat in both heels. Song by a long-lost, one-hit group, Surface, in her head. “Happy.” Shame’s toe popping the bike into higher pitches around corners and the pop into a low growl when the road was straight. Oh, you coming right over? Beautiful, baby. Diagonal park. Worn boot heel. Kickstand down exactly onto a small square of wood nailed into the gutter.

Then stoop.

Inside, steps.

The sound of twilight joins the memory wave to the present. Shame’s back on the piano stool. Drowning.

This music. The same music she’s hearing now.

Phrases, broken circles. Splices. Zoom lens. Her fingers strum Shame’s ribs beneath his extended arms while he plays. Four up, four down. A scar-notch in his skin, two fingers wide on left rib number three. Shame plays. The Surface song in her head, Only you can make me.… The voice in her head, just then, going under, Ndiya has left the building … far below the surface. The stool spins. He turns around but the music continues. Shame’s hand Shame’s hand on Shame’s hand on her back. Up under her shirt. Her sudden panic that he’ll touch the scars. That he’ll stop. That he won’t. That he’ll ask. That he won’t. How he both does and doesn’t. The music doesn’t pause, moves from the past to the present and back. Notes fall and stick to her like an April blizzard blown through a fire escape. Her head turns toward the ceiling. The open Y of his thighs narrows against her legs. Her body overhead. The room in her mouth with a voice of its own.

She woke up on the floor. Midway to the bathroom, she paused on tiptoes and turned back to look. Shame laid out immobile on the rug like a crime scene. After she nearly stepped on it barefoot and a stack of books tumbled over, she slammed a thick hardback volume down on a huge, glossy, black spider. The spider hadn’t tried to run. Ndiya had a moment’s sense that it may have turned toward her just before the book smashed to the floor. She stood up and read the title of the weapon from above: Milestones: The Music and Times of Miles Davis. She left the thick tome there on the floor, covering the murder.

■

Ndiya forced her eyes open as the shot hit the net and bright rain sparkled out from the tinsel and sequins. Melvin raised both hands and said,

–Boo-ya!

Lucious Christopher:

–Lee Williams, the ever-if-only-from-time-to-time-sermon-iferous, I say that’ll be legal tender the equivalent of one American quarter, or do I put it on your tab?

And Lee Williams stood up and stretched his back:

–Let it ride.

The players chanted “On and on and on and on.” The ones against the wall raised up their hands and called out, “Like a—say what?!” And the chant repeated. They all began to move toward the other end of the alley. The three against the wall got up and joined them as they walked south toward Sixty-Fourth Street. Ndiya saw that it was the young woman’s arm they had been staring at on the side of the court. As they walked away, the woman held it out in front of her and each player bowed and kissed the underside of her forearm. Ndiya noticed that the extended arm was multiple shades lighter than the woman’s other arm.

At least that’s what it looked like to her and, “At this point, why not?” she thought. Melvin looked up at Ndiya:

–Could you take me back to Nana, now?

Tingling in the music, Ndiya realized that most of her was still back on date number two. She shook her head to get Shame’s fingers off her spine and replied,

–Ah, yes, let’s go.

Though she had no idea where to go. She stood up to go somewhere. Lucious Christopher said,

–If you can’t find Mrs. Clara, just take Melvin up to Shame’s with you, Ndiya Grayson. We’ll tell the old bird to come get him when we see her but she’ll probably check there first herself.

Ndiya, minding, nodded in silent disbelief.

As she stood up with Melvin’s hand in hers, she felt like she’d been off the bus and on that bench for hours if not days, maybe years. But she knew it hadn’t been long because her shoes and skirt were still soaked. And it was still twilight. She knew very well that all of this was crazy: “Dripping wet, the whole damned neighborhood’s high, Melvin, Mrs. Clara, Lucious Christopher, and Lee Williams who seemed to know where I am going, to say nothing of where I’ve been, better than I do?” She knew it was crazy somewhere, but it didn’t feel crazy here which, she knew, too, made it all the crazier. Melvin looked up to her and said,

–I’ll take you to Shame’s house.

With a security wall of hard-won tricks and tactical anger beginning to fail and leaving a person she barely knew exposed, Ndiya walked with Melvin toward 6329. If nothing else, she knew it was within easy earshot, whatever that meant. At the very least, she thought, it meant Shame lived nearby.

■

When she turned toward whatever was nearby, Ndiya encountered a memory that had been following her around for days. On the morning one week after the house-arrest night, she sat alone at her sublet’s drop-leaf kitchen table with a bowl of oatmeal. She replayed the triangle of Shame’s reaction to Malik’s busted bracelet. And before that, there they were in the street outside the party on the Fourth:

–Where do you want to meet?

–I don’t know, neutral corners? OK?

–Fair enough; I know just the place.

She sat at the kitchen table, crossed her legs, and felt herself slip as she corralled the last pool of melted butter and brown sugar into her final lump of oatmeal.

She couldn’t decide. So she paused with the bowl in her left hand, elbow on the table, the spoon held in her right. She uncrossed and reverse-crossed her legs and felt herself, again, as her legs moved over each other into the new position. As if she’d snuck around the back of her self and looked in the window through the split in the curtain, she thought, “Ndiya, my girl, that’s different.” Fear followed the pleasure. “That was a date all right,” Ndiya thought, and looked at herself in the window. She nodded in the moment and planned to deny everything later.

She balanced Shame in her memory like the spoon in her right hand. Sugar melted into the tiny veins in each swollen grain of oatmeal. The final bite was light brown, sweet and perfectly hot. She thought, “Last bite in the bowl, perfectly hot and the first bite hadn’t burned my mouth. Is that possible?” She glimpsed 9:15 on the clock as she figured the possibles or not of a perfectly hot, honey brown, last bite of oatmeal in the bowl. “Improbable, at best,” she thought. Fifteen minutes to get dressed and get on the 9:30 bus to work. “But possible?” she weighed the one thing against the other.

Her eyes narrowed, she stared at her reflection in the window. Her bedroom door ajar, its reflection hovered like a dare above the street behind her reflected face. “Yes, OK, it’s possible. It’s also possible that I’ll get the 10:30 bus and Ms. Yvette Simmons”—she’d just begun to think about Yvette-at-work’s actual name—“can do like this,” she said to her double. A thin blade of anger flashed. She knew it was her fault, not Yvette’s. She decided not to care, took a deep breath and puffed her cheeks into her best Dizzy Gillespie in the window until a laugh burst out and fogged the glass. She turned and, in a bright rain of descending minor thirds, Evelyn King chimed her brain. She left the bowl where it was on the table, sing-whispered, All the way down, and walked back to her room. Just then a heavy pendulum swung suspended from a long wire and for a slow moment Ndiya’s body came near, then closer, almost within her reach.

■

Fifty yards from Shame’s door, Ndiya said to herself, “Just get it over with.” She held Melvin by the hand while they walked. An instant from the first date at Earlie’s hung in her mind like a portrait. For the rest of that evening they’d talked. They did all the things that couldn’t be avoided. Ndiya watched herself listen while Shame talked around things, trying as she did, to fill space but reveal nothing. The kind of things people say when they first talk. Granted that those conversations don’t usually begin with a ruptured house-arrest bracelet plummeting its way through the sugar bowl and toothpick box and into your date’s lap. But still, that was the kind of conversation they’d had. She hoped it was anyway, because she couldn’t remember a word of it. The first time, then: a bassline like a thumb in her mouth and down her spine, Malik’s damned bracelet, an open triangle in Shame’s face, and that one phrase, “Bic lighter.” All of that and “maybe I am” hadn’t come near the place. Then the fucking battle of Jericho, date number two when her tongue found a notch in the skin over Shame’s third rib and she felt music smooth as a heavy stream of mercury poured over her waist and down her legs. Afterward, she nearly stepped on a seemingly self-sacrificing spider, which she’d murdered with a huge, hardback biography of Miles. Her thought echoed from when she’d first met Shame, when they first shook hands on the porch outside Renée’s party. Her first thought had been, “Whose hand is this?”

Then, at home, the email she sent to Yvette-at-work. Ndiya wrote: “Didn’t make Maurice’s party, regrets. Ran into Shame. Went home with him. Ran into Shame, girl. Never been anywhere like that. Where have I been? Where am I now? Please advise.” She thought about ending the note there but continued: “Told him: it felt like he’d waited his whole life to touch me. When he dropped me back home, he smiled looking down at the ground and said, ‘That was a risky thing to say to me, Ndiya Grayson.’ I didn’t know what to say, I could barely hear him over the vibrations in my legs. Don’t know why I’m telling you? What now, Yvette? What now?” Send.

Ndiya stared at the screen. She could still taste Shame Luther’s salt when she suddenly regretted writing anything to Yvette. Open confession wasn’t her style at all. It seemed so strange to confide things to someone before she’d really confided them to herself. She was just about to click the screen to reread her sent message again and ease her mind when a new message appeared. There was the sender’s name in her box. She thought, “Even Yvette can’t be this quick.” The new message wasn’t from Yvette. For an instant she looked at the words in the inbox and it was if she knew no one by that name. She blinked hard and looked again at the sender’s name: Ndiya Grayson.

The message Ndiya had replied to had been sent by Yvette to the SnapB/l/acklist, not to her. So, her reply had been to—there it was. Date number one might have been a hot, sweet, last bite of oatmeal. No one knew. Date number two wasn’t supposed to be a date at all, turned out hotter and sweeter than number one. And now everyone knew. Ndiya’s forehead touched down on the keys. “When a fever breaks,” she thought, “it’s like being hit with a bucket from a cool mountain stream. Forget ‘maybe I am’ and the ABP. Here she is everyone: Ndiya Grayson has come back home.”

■

Ndiya and Melvin stood on the steps. This was, indeed, date number three, which everyone but her seemed to know about. Sixty-three twenty-nine in chipped, cursive gold script painted across the top of the glass double doors. She looked at her reflection, soaked skirt, foaming pumps and all. As she reached for the bell she whispered to the window,

–No there or maybe about it, here I am, both of us.

She smiled at Melvin with his goggles on his forehead. He held her hand and pulled it in front of his face. She thought they looked like they’d been playing together in the deep, hydrant-puddle of twilight. Ndiya whispered to the glass,

–Tsunami it is. But he’s going to have to tell me his real name.

She pushed the doorbell with her index finger and they heard nothing. After a moment Melvin said,

–It’s never locked. I think we should go on up.