Читать книгу Nine Bar Blues - Sheree Renée Thomas - Страница 11

Three o’clock in the morning, Old Mama Yaya walks at this hour unobserved, past tumbled-down apartment buildings, empty lots, and shuttered storefronts dark and asleep. She limps slowly in the streetlight, but there is another light. She looks up to her left, grimacing as if the gang graffiti has suddenly come to life, her gaze arcing toward the candle burning in the second-floor window. “Close your eyes, child,” she mutters. “At this hour, even haints sleep.” Adjusting her cart, she continues down the sidewalk, rattling as she goes.

The child sits at her makeshift desk made of cinderblocks and her daddy’s old albums. Led Zeppelin, Muddy Waters, and Parliament Funk stare back at her. The child likes the album art, although she does not understand it. What does it mean to get funked up? She wants the P-Funk, too. She loves Minnie Ripperton’s Afro, so lush and wild as a black sun. These are her friends, the music and the beautiful math behind the music. She imagines it as a kind of sacred geometry, a language that speaks to her when words are too difficult to say. It gives her the same feeling as when her daddy lifted her up into the sky, lifting her by her elbows, as beautiful as seeing a moonrise over stunted willow trees. In her daddy’s hands she feels neither too fat nor too black. Skyborn, she is no ordinary, plain girl. She is a magician.

After the sun stopped shining in Memphis, Nelse decided that she was better suited to theory than to operations. After all, theory was not a product and Nelse was a ponderer. Her grandmother, who raised her after her father got shot in a failed home invasion, had called her a natural-born Figurer. All math was figurin’ to her grandmother, and all math came easily to Nelse. She was inexplicably moved by it, the possibilities shifting like a multicolor Moebius strip, like the rainbow ribbons in her hair when her daddy’s arms lifted her as a child, skyrocketing her into that other space. There she could sit with the cinderblocks that now looked like two ancient columns, sit with the paper Big Mama collected from the office building’s trashcans, ‘cuz most people wasteful and the rest ain’t got no good sense.

Theory allowed her to work mostly alone, and alone was how Nelse preferred life. There was less margin for error. When Big Mama would come home from the third shift at the factory, she would cry out in her tin-can voice, Girl, don’t tell me you been sittin’ up figurin’ all night, wasting your eyesight. She would gather Nelse up in her arms, stare deep into her eyes as if trying to guess her future, then she would scold her once more, saying, If you don’t sleep more, you’ll stunt your growth and have only one titty. Nelse would pat her flat chest and giggle at this, then finally drift off to sleep, the beautiful equations and figures filling her head.

Big Mama was always saying funny things, but the words that meant the most to Nelse were, Get yo’ lesson, child, if you don’t get nothing else. And get is what Nelse did. Lying on her bed, the sky outside her window as dark in the morning as it was in the night, she wiped away the final remains of the odd, recurring dream and wondered why the sky used to turn perfect red at the end of the day. She wondered why the soap bubbles in her childhood magic wand formed in nearly perfect spheres, and why the human voice filled with emotion could urge a dying plant to grow or impact the cellular life of water. She wondered why a spinning top didn’t fall over but instead slowly gyrated, its speed inversely proportional to the initial turn, why outer space goes on forever. And when the city did not burn up when the sun went out, she wondered how life continued to go on the way sap rose in the remaining trees, rose against gravity, the way the people rose, hoping to see that shine again, glimmering along the muddy river, hoping against probability, against fate.

The sky now was as muddy as the river. The first day the city woke and the sun had not, people stood out on their porches, circled the pavement around their lawns, and stared, just stared at the sky, as if willing the sun back. The young folk danced down the streets with flashlights, flirting and laughing loudly as if the sun had gone out for their pleasure. The sick and shut-in sat hunched at windows, clutching curtains, shaking their heads at these end days. Then the cell phones rang out until every line was busy. The media was in an uproar and the newly minted mayor had to be rushed to the Med after having a minor stroke. The children, those in public school and in private, were unashamedly happy. They leapt in their yards, jumped like grasshoppers until frightened mothers and fathers shooed them back into the houses. When the airwaves cleared, the mayor, mildly recovered, finally made a speech. Memphians were to get duct tape and garbage bags and seal all their windows and doors. This could be the result of a terrorist act, directed at the good citizens of Memphis. Who would do this, why, and what for were the questions that needed figuring. No one had answers.

Not the Shelby County Center for Emergency Preparedness, nor the governor and the congressmen, even the President and the CDC could not explain why the sun had gone out only in Memphis. Some said it was because the city had given up its charter, others said it was a Chickasaw curse for building on the bluffs and bones of the city’s first inhabitants. And then there was some who blame every crooked thing on Voodoo Village. Whole families went by car, truck, and foot across the arched bridge, zooming across I-40 like hell had opened up behind them. Barbecue pits, student loans, and 30-year mortgages, even some marriages and Elvis, great day in the morning, Graceland!, were left behind without a backward glance.

No one commented on how the darkness lifted and the sunlight shone at exactly halfway across the M-shaped Hernando de Soto Bridge. If nothing else, that oddity alone was enough to prove to some that the city had been specially marked as cursed. “The Lord done spoken!” the preachers cried and gathered their flocks with them to safety. SUVs and church buses honked and stalled on the crowded bridge, the people turning their backs on the hulking Pyramid that glowered mutely behind them. Many remained hovering in the fields, camped out in West Memphis bottom-land in their cars and tents. They didn’t worry about waiting lists for trailers, FEMA had not bothered even shipping any. Still others just headed on down to the dog track and casinos, carrying their last dollars and their Emergency Preparedness bags with them. And those who once thought they lived in Germantown, and Cordova, and Collierville, soon learned the true geographical reach of East Memphis. The sun was out in their neck of the woods, too. Only the good citizens in North Mississippi sat smugly in their homes, daylight shining through their curtained windows, shaking their heads at the spectacle that had finally overcome the City.

Nelse lies in her bed in what would have been late afternoon, twilight, just before the old evening, when the first lightning bugs would come out. Her head ached, migraines, vestiges of the crazy dream. The same she’d had since she was a little girl. Had someone already figured out why a focusing mirror must be parabolic in shape? Why a flat or spherical mirror won’t work? There was a logical reason, a kind of quiet grace, she knew, but none for why the sky in Memphis remained forever dark, nor why she remained, when so many others had fled, praying and crossing themselves, never looking back.

Closing her eyes, she imagines various shapes; her mind traces the trajectory of light rays, ancient messengers of stars long dead before the journey. Silvered glass curving, nothing like the shadowy glass in her grandmother’s chiffarobe.

Big Mama, are you with the stars, up in the heavens shaking your head, trying to help me figure this out? Yellow and gold light rays careened at angles to the perpendiculars, reflected at equal angles, slow danced like she used to by herself with her father’s quiet storm albums, her mind heading back into space. Polished glass flexed and curled, like the dark lashes of her closed eyes. She wiped a tear away, imagining glass gently sweeping through space as helicopters droned above. Glass holds memory, mirrors distort reality. There had been no mirrors in her grandmother’s house.

The world buckled to its knees when the sun stopped shining in Memphis. Just as it had when Nelse took her first algebra class. The lesson began with word problems, and while the teacher droned on about state tests, Nelse had felt herself warming inside, like when she’d lean her head against the window and let the sun warm her skin. At first they thought it was a power outage, a fluke by Memphis Light, Gas & Water, but when the signals uncrossed, MLG&W had promptly released a statement that basically translated as, “We ain’t got nothing to do with the sun!” Nelse remembered when a straight-line wind had come flying off the Mississippi River, cutting down hundreds of the city’s oldest oak, pecan, and poplar trees, all the way from the banks to the city’s limits at Stateline, how they lay piled up all over the city like corpses. But this was nothing like that. The only trauma was that building inside the people. They spent the first day trying to figure out if they’d finally lost their natural minds, but NPR and the National Guard soon told them they had not gone stone-cold crazy. Memphians were fine. The sky was not.

“How the hell can particles in the air do this?” Marva, Nelse’s next door neighbor, wanted to know. Nelse usually only saw her when Marva darted across her yard in the mornings to steal her water, “My dahlias take better to the sweet water in yo’ pump.” Truth was, Marva didn’t want her own water bill to be sky high. Today she didn’t even try to hide her hustle. Marva had stood in the middle of the devil’s strip, clutching the flowers to her chest. “What’s gon’ happen to my garden?”

That first nightday, Nelse opened her bedroom window and the wind fluttered the lace curtains as if a handkerchief waved by invisible hands. It had to be a mistake, a grave error, as if someone had taken a great cosmic clock and sprung much too far ahead into the future. It had to be a power outage in the night or the work of Nelse’s diabolical pills—which dulled the migraines, felled her nightly like an ax to a tree, and turned her into a sleepwalking clock-changer—or a dark cloud sent by terrorists, terrorists who hated the South and its barbecued pulled pork. Perhaps they really had lost their minds.

“What is the mayor going to do about this?” Marva wanted to know. She sat now on Nelse’s lumpy sofa, too frightened to look outside again. Every light in the house was on, a parody of morning, as if it were the eve of a New Year. Nelse sat bravely by the window. “They say it happened after South Africa, all those years ago,” she said. “Capetown water all dried up. Fire in the sky, too. The ash was so thick that for three whole days it was utter darkness.”

“But nothing’s happened. Our water’s fine. We aren’t in a war. Well,” Marva said, giving Nelse an exaggerated side eye, “those foreign ones don’t count if nothing’s happened here.”

“The weatherman said it isn’t dangerous. The sun just isn’t out.”

“Are you going to the lab?”

“I don’t think so. Were you going to the gym today?” “I don’t know.” Sun or no sun, 24 Hour would be open anyway.

Nelse stared out at the gloom, shivering. She could only imagine the commotion downtown at Buckman Labs, or in the ‘hood, whose footprint was getting larger with every wave of white-and-hanging-by-the-skin-of-their-teeth-black-middle-class flight. All down the street, on the other end of the city, the young people wandered beneath the still-unlit streetlights, some with flashlights or lanterns, laughing. No old people out on the street at all, not in this kind of confusion, not with the sidewalks as loud as the Memphis in May festival and the flash of police lights like Cops everywhere. The chargers speeding up and down the expressway, blinding everybody, menacing and panicked, sirens blaring. In the house across the street, Nelse could just make out a couple sitting down to a candlelit breakfast. And below, in front of the neighborhood eyesore, the only mango yellow-orange house in the cove, stood a Haitian woman and her daughter, hand in hand, nearly indistinguishable in headwraps, talking quietly, looking straight up at the black sky. It was ten in the morning and as dark as the inside of an eyelid.

And Nelse hated it.

“We’ll be alright,” Nelse said, trying to sound like she believed it. “Not time to worry yet.” But she looked over at Marva rubbing an ink spot out of the sofa’s upholstery, and though it was not time to worry yet, Marva began to cry. Finally Marva announced they must call family and friends. No one should be alone. Nelse, who had no friends beyond her work at the lab, pretended not to hear as Marva desperately called one adult child after the other, until there was no one left to call. And so Nelse found herself doing the unthinkable. She agreed to invite Marva’s friends over for lunch and make what they could from the pantry. For some unspoken reason they dared not go outside, though the city had finally put the streetlights on. Nelse imagined that the throngs of young people downtown had lessened with the dimming novelty of it all. Perhaps they’d gone inside to make love, busily conceiving the population boom they could look forward to, if and when the darkness finally lifted. “No Show Sun Spawns Blackout Babies,” the Memphis Flyer might announce.

Marva made Caesar salad and pasta by dropping eggs into the crater of a flour volcano. She did this in silence, flour puffing into the air as if she had burst the seeds of a milkweed. Nelse thawed and roasted a chicken with cilantro, lemon pepper, honey, and herbs.

As she worked her stomach groaned, not from hunger but from fear. The idea of strangers rambling through her kitchen, rifling through her silverware put her teeth on edge. And most importantly, she had no idea what she should wear. She had long since stopped worrying about style, or the mysteries of her hair that broke combs and spat out plastic teeth and grease, or her problems knowing when folk say what they mean or when they mean what they don’t say.

At noon, she heard a rattle from the living room, Marva drawing the curtains. Nelse understood. They were not chosen, they could not bear witness to the constant night. Then she heard—like an exhalation of relief—the sound of a match. Candles. The scent of vanilla and pears filled the air. Only two neighbors came, those who had heard of Nelse’s work in “the sciences”: an elderly colleague of Marva’s who’d also retired from the college and a kindly, nervous painter Nelse had once met briefly at an artist’s reception at the Brooks. They were good, intelligent small-talkers at a party; neither was suitable for the endless night. They had clearly come out of loneliness. Nelse and Marva found themselves smiling and dutifully filling dusty wine glasses and listening for a doorbell that never rang. What was meant as a time of solace had become one of civic duty.

“I hear they are turning to rations,” said the colleague, a professor of magical realism with a graying Afro. Nelse wanted to know what kinds of rations. “Gas,” he said. “And fresh food and meat. Like in the war.” He meant World War I. The helicopters hovered, dropping water bottles and energy bars from the dark sky. Marva had stumbled on some, after raiding Nelse’s water hose. “Who knows? Maybe nylons, Marva.” Marva would not have it. “Ridiculous,” she said, regretting the company of this pompous man. The curtains blew open to reveal the unearthly blackness. Nelse said she could not remember much about the war, nor anyone who had ever been in it. The painter spoke up, and what she said chilled them: “I think they’ve done something.” Nelse quickly said, “Who? Done what?” Marva gave her a look.

The painter winced at her own thoughts, and her brass jewelry clanked on skinny wrists. “They’ve done something and they haven’t told us.” They’re always doing something and they don’t tell us, but Nelse kept her peace. The professor seasoned his salad with a practiced flick of his wrist. Nelse feigned indifference. The chicken still sat in the kitchen, glistening and uncarved, smelling like burnt sugar. “You mean a bomb?” “An experiment or a bomb or I don’t know. I’m sure I’m wrong, I’m sure—But you know they keep spraying us from the skies,” the painter said and tapped her temple. “You know it’s not for mosquitoes.” “An experiment?” Marva said. She looked frightened.

Just then, they heard a roar. Instinctively, they went to the window, where in her haste to open it, Nelse knocked a little sandstone elephant over the sill and into the afternoon air, which was as red-dark as ever, but they could not hear it breaking above the din: the streetlights had gone out and now the city was alive with cries. Nelse wanted to kick them all out and listen to her father’s albums. Why did the streetlights go out? It’s unclear. Perhaps a strain on the system, perhaps a wrong switch thrown at the station. Perhaps a big-bellied squirrel, scampering where it wasn’t wanted. But it was a fright to people, but not quite a mighty inconvenience. That was when the blackouts began, the rolling blackouts, meant to conserve electricity. Two hours a day—on Marva’s and Nelse’s block it was at noontime, though it made little difference—with no lamps, no clocks, no Wi-Fi, just flashlights and candles melting to nubs. It was terrifying the first few days, but then it was something you got used to. You knew not to open the refrigerator and waste the cold. You knew not to open the window and waste the heat. You knew not to open your mouth and waste your breath.

“Temporarily,” the mayor said, now composed. “Until we can determine the duration.” Of the darkness, he meant, of the sunless sky. When he said this over the radio, Nelse glanced at Marva and was startled. As a child, she had noticed how sometimes, in old-fashioned books, full-color illustrations of the action would appear—through some constraint at the bindery—dozens of pages before the moments they were meant to depict. Not déjà vu, not something already seen, but something not-yet-seen, and that was what was before her: a woman in profile, immobile, her hair a wild puff like a demented dandelion, her face old-fashioned, last century’s features, resigned; her eyes blazing briefly with the fire of a sunspot; her hand clutching the wine glass in a tight fist; her lips open to speak to someone not in the room. A song in reverse, played much too fast.

“Marva?” she asked. Then it was gone. Her neighbor turned to her and blinked, saying, “What on earth does he mean by ‘duration’?” What she really wanted to ask was why didn’t Marva’s children ever come? She didn’t ask because she already knew the answer. They all did. They were afraid. They all were. They were all waiting for someone or some answer to come to them, to help them figure this all out. They sat alone in the darkness, reading by candlelight, as Nelse had done as a child, panicked as pigeons, waiting for someone to come, and yet they would not stir an inch. Why, the children had asked, didn’t Marva just drive in her Benz and come to them? They were closer to the authorities and could take care of her better from their homes in Harbor Town. Why wouldn’t she when she’d always done so before? They were busy with their own children, trying to keep them calm, entertained. No, they weren’t afraid, just … The adult children finally decided to leave without Marva, when they’d run out of reasons not to come to her. After the riots began, about two weeks later. She’d be alright, they rationalized. She was staying with a very responsible neighbor. They couldn’t quite recall her name. The nice negro who worked at the laboratory. Didn’t matter that they didn’t know Nelse from Booboo the Clown.

Unused to company, unused to another mind living and breathing and tidying and, goodness gracious, commenting on her things in her personal space, Nelse doubled the doses of the sleeping pills, began floating through her day in a fog. It made the time huddled in the darkness go faster.

One nightday Marva convinced Nelse to drive out with her to the farmer’s market in Klondike. Surely there must be ripe tomatoes still there? It was only the second time they had gone out of the cove since that first day of the darkness, and they were still unsure if they were right to do so—if it was frivolous to be seen in a tiny market with overhead mirrors to discourage the thieves and poor people jostling against wealthier ones, all grasping at the last remnants of normalcy and good health. Marva felt everyone should be in mourning. She had taken to wearing her pearls and best black dress, just in case.

“The mirrors should be covered,” she had said to the artist and the professor at that first gathering. “Mirrors are portals to the spirit world. There are enough haints here now, don’t you think? Shouldn’t there be wailing somewhere? Nelse, put on one of those whining, crying, hiccupping records you call ‘classics,’ why don’t you.” Nelse could hear the exaggerated sniff from the kitchen.

“If you covered the mirrors, we won’t have nothing,” the Graying Afro had said, anxiously glancing at a reflection of himself. As the darkness hung over the city, unmoved, he had slowly begun to lose the iron grip he held over his tongue. He was a parody of a parody, a kind of Cornel West bow-tied 300