I knew that Professor Saito had cared for a long-term partner, a man who had later died. I came by this information not through a conversation with him, but from a biographical profile I had seen in the alumni magazine at Maxwell. I had had conversations with him for three years without any idea about this vital part of his life and, when I did find out, there had been no reason to bring it up in conversation. But at no time did I have the impression that Professor Saito was trying to avoid talking about his s.e.xuality. Indeed, there were two occasions on which it had come up. Once he had mentioned, in the course of saying something else, that he had known about his s.e.xual orientation since he was three years old. The second time was, now that I think of it, a kind of bookend to the first: his prostatectomy, he had told me, had effectively killed off any s.e.xual urges that had survived the other ravages of old age. But the strange thing he found, he had said at the time, was that this freed him to have more tender and uncomplicated relationships with people.
Professor Saito was like this, especially after his retirement: a curious combination of reticence and frankness. I wish I had asked what his late partner"s name was. He would have told me. Perhaps some of the artifacts on display in the apartment-the Meissen porcelain in the curio cabinet, the Javanese puppets, the row of books on modern poetry-were the legacy of this other man, with whom Professor Saito had spent so much of his life. Or perhaps there had been a series of partners, each important in his own way. But in spite of myself, unable to be fully present to our conversation, I could not lead it in this new direction. I simply nodded, smiled, and spoke about other things. He noticed, perhaps, that my attention was flagging, and he said, as if he were waking someone who had fallen asleep, You"re still young, Julius. You must be careful about closing too many doors. I had no idea what he was talking about, and I simply nodded when he said this, and watched his spidery hands slowly dancing around each other in that gloomy room.
The bedbugs were on my mind. New Yorkers had begun to speak more often about these tiny creatures in the past two years. The conversations, as befitted a troublesome occurrence in the private arena, had remained private, and the bedbugs were having an unlikely success. They were the unseen enemy that carried on their work, even as false alarms were raised about the West Nile virus, avian flu, and SARS. In the age of the dramatic epidemic, it was the old-fashioned bedbug, a minuscule red-coated soldier, that was least deterred. Of course, other illnesses were much more serious, and more of a drain on public resources. AIDS remained a devastating problem, especially for the poor, and for people who lived in the poorer countries. Cancer, heart disease, and emphysema were not pandemic, but were nevertheless of great importance among the causes of mortality. Even as the terms of transnational conflicts had changed, a similar shift was happening in public health, where, too, the enemies were now vague, and the threat they posed constantly shifting.
But bedbugs were not fatal, and were happy to stay out of the headlines. They were hard to fumigate into oblivion, and their eggs were almost impossible to kill. They did not discriminate on the basis of social cla.s.s and, for that reason, were embarra.s.sing. An infection in a wealthy home was just as likely, and just as difficult to get rid of, as one among the poor. Hotels at all levels of luxury suffered. If you had them, you had them, and ridding yourself of them permanently was difficult. And in that moment, as I contemplated these ideas, I suddenly felt sorrowful for Professor Saito. His recent encounter with the bedbugs troubled me more than what he had suffered in other ways: racism, h.o.m.ophobia, the incessant bereavement that was one of the hidden costs of a long life. The bedbugs trumped them all. The feeling was subconscious, contemptible. Had it been put to me so baldly at the time, I would have denied it. But it was there, an example of how an inconvenience can, because of one"s proximity to it, take on a grotesque aspect.
These tiny, flat creatures, which had sought out human blood since before Pliny"s time, were involved in a kind of low-grade warfare, a conflict at the margins of modern life, visible only in speech. At the end of the afternoon, when I left Professor Saito"s apartment, I decided to walk north through Central Park. The snow from three days previously had not melted. In the frigid air, it had hardened to create smooth, low hills across the fields. I kept to a snow-covered road that ran along a st.u.r.dy old wall. Footprints were visible, but there was no one else in sight. The light was so diffuse that almost no shadows were cast on the snow, and this gave one the feeling of levitation: white light above and white below. A flock of tiny birds-they might have been starlings-swirled around a tree in the distance. I had the distinct impression that the tangled branches, and the birds that wove expertly in and out of them, were made of the same dun brown substance, the latter different only because they were in an active state. At any moment, I thought, the jagged little branches would unfold their hidden wings and the entire crown of the tree would become a living cloud. The surrounding trees, too, would lose their heads, leaving sentrylike stumps behind, and in the sky above the park there would be a ma.s.sive canopy of starlings. I walked along this soothing white road for a long time, until the cold cut through my gloves and scarf and compelled me to leave the park and take the subway the rest of the way home.
Later that night, looking through my medical textbooks for more on the bedbugs, I found only dry descriptions of etiologies, life cycles, and therapies. Steam laundering and cyanogas fumigation were discussed at length, but none of this got at what disconcerted me about these creatures. But by a remarkable chance, I found among my books a volume of field reports on epidemiology from the early twentieth century, one in a stack of outdated books that had been discarded by Dr. Martindale at his lab. I had idly picked up a few of those books without really looking at them, but now I found the report written by Charles A. R. Campbell in 1903, and in his writing I got a sense of the disgust and awe in which Cimex lectularius Cimex lectularius was then held. was then held.
Dr. Campbell"s report superficially conformed to the period style for a medical bulletin, but it drew its real power from a gradual acc.u.mulation of a.s.sertions, which created an intense and oppressive image of the creature under study. One of the characteristics of the bedbug, Campbell wrote, is its cannibalistic nature. He presented evidence that engorged bugs were sometimes slit open and consumed by their young. He also described a half dozen experiments he had carried out, ostensibly in the interest of scientific research but which gave the impression of an obstacle course designed to prove the bedbug"s hardiness and intelligence. Campbell would have been disappointed, I felt sure, had the bedbug failed to pa.s.s any of the trials he put it through.
In the experiments, bedbugs survived four months of isolation on a table in a sea of kerosene without food, they came through a deep freeze lasting 244 hours without being harmed, and were able to remain alive underwater for an indefinite period of time. The cunning of these insects, an awed Campbell wrote, is remarkable, and it appears that they have, to a certain extent, the power of reasoning. He described an experiment by Mr. N. P. Wright of San Antonio-"a very reliable citizen and close observer"-in which, as Wright moved his bed farther and farther from the sides of the room, the bedbugs climbed up the wall to the precise height from which they could jump and land on him. When he moved his bed closer, the bugs climbed only as high as was necessary. Campbell"s report included a number of stories of this kind, in which bedbugs demonstrated a certain ingenuity in reaching a bed to which their access had been blocked.
I thought of the bugs in their countless millions in all the five boroughs of the city, of their invisible eggs, of their appet.i.te, which was greatest at the hour before dawn. The problem began to seem less and less a scientific one, and I came to share Campbell"s unease. The concerns were primeval: the magical power of blood, the hours given over to dreams, the sanct.i.ty of the home, cannibalism, the fear of being attacked by the unseen. My rational self was dismayed at these glib a.n.a.logies, at this unexpected surrender to the kind of insecurity I mocked in others. Nevertheless, when I was done reading, I unmade my bed, switched off the lights, and, kneeling down, carefully examined the seams of the mattress with a flashlight. I found nothing, but of course this did not in itself guarantee a restful night.
FIFTEEN.
There had been a bombing at the biggest pet market in Basra, and the scene was filled with the feathers of parakeets, the cries of dying animals, blood-streaked debris, a mangled engine, a destroyed chair, and cages twisted as though they were made of twine. On the radio, the secretary of state began to discuss an upcoming offensive in the Shiite-controlled area of Baghdad. I went to the pet market and saw the carca.s.ses of dogs lying next to human corpses. Women in black gowns cried and beat their b.r.e.a.s.t.s. There was one father who, dead, continued to clutch the vial of insulin he had been trying to take home to his daughter. I became very tired; tired unto death tired unto death was the phrase that scrolled across my mind. I was in my white coat, and my tie was loosened at the neck. My mother was in the pet market. She wore a burka, and Nadege was there with her, wearing the same. My mother asked, What is worse than the bombs? Nadege said, Bedbugs! The two spoke to each other in Yoruba. My mother said, Listen to your sister, Julius. I was about to correct her. was the phrase that scrolled across my mind. I was in my white coat, and my tie was loosened at the neck. My mother was in the pet market. She wore a burka, and Nadege was there with her, wearing the same. My mother asked, What is worse than the bombs? Nadege said, Bedbugs! The two spoke to each other in Yoruba. My mother said, Listen to your sister, Julius. I was about to correct her.
It was one in the morning, and I had fallen asleep in my clothes. I undid my tie and changed, and drank water from the gla.s.s on the side table. Before I fell asleep, I had been reading the prologue of Piers Plowman Piers Plowman. Of its long, alliterative descriptions, all I now retained was the image of William Langland wandering around the world, seeing the various work and struggle of humanity, then settling on one of the Malvern Hills and looking at a brook. He became drowsy, "slumbered into sleep," and in his dreams a magical vision of reality appeared to him, and it was just as I began to read that section that I had fallen asleep.
The light of a streetlamp trembled from behind the curtains. I was hungry but had no appet.i.te. There was a pork chop in the fridge and, as I ate it, standing with the fridge door open, the siren of an ambulance went by in the night. I opened the window, and the air entered in a single gust, as though it had been waiting for admission. The pulsing in my mind matched the flickering pattern of the streetlamp against the curtain. Below, the world was bare, and showed little sign of Langland"s "fair field full of folk." I took two acetaminophen and went back to sleep. The following day was the Sat.u.r.day of a call-free weekend, and I could sleep in, untroubled by dreams. When I awoke, I decided I would run errands and, if the day was right for it, visit the old professor later in the afternoon.
THE DOORMAN IN HIS BUILDING USHERED ME IN. THE ELEVATOR was humid and smelled of sweat. Mary, heavily pregnant, let me into the apartment. Everything was dark and gray inside. He"s very sick, she said. He"s in the bedroom, come this way, he"ll be happy to see you. But when we got there, I saw a man darken the door and go inside ahead of me. He was the doctor. Mary signaled me to wait. I went into the living room and sat down, under Dr. Saito"s ring of Polynesian masks. I could hear voices from the bedroom. When the doctor came out, he had a genial expression. His face creased in smiles as he nodded at me and left. I went inside to see Professor Saito, who lay huddled on the bed, tiny and white and weaker than I had ever seen him. His eyes, though they were rheumy and almost closed, were the only part of him that seemed fully there. His voice seemed to be coming not from his mouth, which in any case moved little, but from somewhere else in the room. The timbre was pinched, and he took many breaths. Nevertheless, he spoke lucidly. was humid and smelled of sweat. Mary, heavily pregnant, let me into the apartment. Everything was dark and gray inside. He"s very sick, she said. He"s in the bedroom, come this way, he"ll be happy to see you. But when we got there, I saw a man darken the door and go inside ahead of me. He was the doctor. Mary signaled me to wait. I went into the living room and sat down, under Dr. Saito"s ring of Polynesian masks. I could hear voices from the bedroom. When the doctor came out, he had a genial expression. His face creased in smiles as he nodded at me and left. I went inside to see Professor Saito, who lay huddled on the bed, tiny and white and weaker than I had ever seen him. His eyes, though they were rheumy and almost closed, were the only part of him that seemed fully there. His voice seemed to be coming not from his mouth, which in any case moved little, but from somewhere else in the room. The timbre was pinched, and he took many breaths. Nevertheless, he spoke lucidly.
Ah, yet another doctor is here, he said. I feel popular. But, Julius, I don"t know what you do in Africa, but I must say, I"m ready to go into the forest. I am ready to go in. It is time for me to enter the forest and lie down, and let the lions come for me. I"ve done enough, I think, I"ve had a good life, and I"m in such terrible pain just now. Who might say ninety years is not enough? It is time. I sat down next to him and held his small, cold hand in mine. He was tired, and I left him, so that he could rest. I told him I would return soon.
Later that day, not wishing to be alone with the image of Death hovering in the room with its cheap suit and bad manners, I called my friend, and went over to his place. His daughter, a bright nine-year-old named Clara, who otherwise lived with her mother, was visiting. But she"s out wandering, he said. His living room had two windows, one west, facing onto Amsterdam Avenue, the other south into a small courtyard, boxed in on all four sides by brick, concrete, and by the small windows of his neighbors" apartments. Those windows lit up one after the other with warm evening lights. There was a tall tree in the middle of the otherwise empty courtyard, bare and with a dense network of branches. I doubted that it got much sunshine, but it looked healthy enough.
That"s a tree of heaven, my friend said. I know because I, too, got curious about it, and looked it up. Botanists call it an invasive species. But aren"t we all? Once, down in the courtyard, I got a smell quite similar to coffee from one of the broken-off branches. The species was first brought over from China a long time ago, in the 1700s, I think, and apparently it liked American soil so much that it grew freely and wildly in almost every state, often displacing native species.
He went into the kitchen, and returned with a bottle of Heineken for me. It"s the shade, you see, he said. It casts shade over other plants, cutting off their sunlight. A tree of heaven will grow anywhere, practically: abandoned lots, back gardens, sidewalks, streets, beaches, unused fields, even right inside boarded-up buildings, even in a sunless courtyard choked with academics. Well, what"s so bad about that? I said. A tree"s a tree, isn"t it? Can"t have too many trees in the city. It"s not so simple, he said. The tree of heaven reduces local biodiversity. It"s thought of as a pest, no good for timber or wildlife, and not even all that great for firewood.
While he spoke, I stood by the facing wall, which had a ma.s.sive bookcase, and I looked at the endless rows of volumes, including a rich section on African and African-American literature. There was an overflow of books on the floor, and on the coffee table, I noticed a copy of Simone Weil"s essays. I picked it up. My friend turned from the window. She"s wonderful on the Iliad Iliad, he said. I think she really gets what force is about, how it motivates action and loses control of what it has motivated. You really should take a look at it sometime.
I had hoped for grace, I said, not for immortality. I had hoped for a graceful, strong exit for this professor of mine. I so badly wanted the old man to give me words of wisdom, I said, not this nonsense about lions. Maybe it"s still possible. Maybe the next time I see him, he"ll recite something from Gawain Gawain, or from some Middle English lyric. But maybe I"m being foolish. Instead of being thankful for the relationship, I"m attempting to design it to my own specifications. But, you know, I had hoped that, even as his body broke down, that intricate mind of his, one of the best I"ve ever known, would soldier on.
My friend looked at me, and said, I wonder why so many people view sickness as a moral test. It has nothing to do with morals or grace. It"s a physical test, and usually we lose. Then he clapped his hand on my shoulder, and said, My man, suffering is suffering. You"ve seen what it does, you see it every day. It might not be especially comforting to you now, but what you just said about the graceful and strong exit reminds me again of something I often think about. For many years, I"ve thought that the manner and timing of one"s death should be a matter of choice. And I really don"t think it should be limited to situations when terminal illness has made one"s suffering and death imminent. That it should be extended to seasons of life in which one is healthy. Why wait around for the decline? Why not preempt fate?
My friend had by now gone to stand by the window. I remained on the sofa and watched the low sun cut a black silhouette out of him, so that it almost seemed as if I were being addressed by his shadow, or by his future self. There were sparrows flitting about in the distance, attempting to find a place to rest for the night, darting in and out of the network of coves formed by the bare trees and the interlocking arches of the university"s buildings. As I reflected on the fact that in each of these creatures was a tiny red heart, an engine that without fail provided the means for its exhilarating midair maneuvers, I was reminded of how often people took comfort, whether consciously or not, in the idea that G.o.d himself attended to these homeless travelers with something like personal care; that, contrary to the evidence of natural history, he protected each one of them from hunger and hazard and the elements. For many, the birds in flight were proof that we, too, were under heaven"s protection, that there is indeed a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.
My friend waited for me to say something, but I didn"t, so he continued. The idea is contrary to the ethics, not to speak of the laws, of our time, but I cannot help but think that in thirty or forty years, when I"ve taken what joy life has to offer me, and come around to making the choice I have just described, it will have become, if not exactly popular or uncontroversial, at least much more common. Think about contraception, fertility drugs, and abortion; think about these decisions we make so easily about the beginning of life; think about our admiration of figures who chose their own ends: Socrates, Christ, Seneca, Cato. I suppose you don"t like how your professor said what he did about the lions, but you shouldn"t think of it as an insult to Africans. You know it wasn"t meant that way. What he seems to be saying is that, in a better world, the delirium and pain could be avoided. He could walk with his dignity intact into the forest, as he envisioned it, and never be seen again.
He had paused again, standing perfectly still and continuing to look outside. The birds were hardly visible now. Then, in a low voice, almost as if he were talking to himself or regarding his body from a posthumous point of view, he said, The reality, Julius, is that we are alone out here. Perhaps it"s what you professionals call suicide ideation, and I hope it doesn"t alarm you, but I often paint a detailed picture in my mind of what I would like the end of my life to look like. I think of saying goodbye to Clara and other people I love, then I picture an empty house, perhaps a large, rambling rural mansion somewhere near the marshes where I grew up; I imagine a bath upstairs, which I can fill with warm water; and I think of music playing all through this big house, Crescent Crescent, maybe, or Ascension Ascension, filling the s.p.a.ces not taken up by my solitude, reaching me in the bath, so that when I slip across the one-way border, I do so to the accompaniment of modal harmonies heard from far away.
SIXTEEN.
It had been several weeks since I had seen Professor Saito. At the end of March, I called him up, and a woman, not Mary but someone else, told me he had died. I gasped the words Oh, Christ Oh, Christ into the phone and hung up. Afterward, sitting in my quiet room, I felt the blood moving around inside my head. The curtains were drawn open and I could see the tops of trees. The leaves were just beginning to come to life after an indifferent winter and, on all the trees on our street, the tips of branches were swollen, the tight, green buds looking as though they might open at any moment. I was shocked, saddened, but I was not completely surprised. Avoiding the drama of death, its unpleasantness, had been my inadvertent idea in not going there. into the phone and hung up. Afterward, sitting in my quiet room, I felt the blood moving around inside my head. The curtains were drawn open and I could see the tops of trees. The leaves were just beginning to come to life after an indifferent winter and, on all the trees on our street, the tips of branches were swollen, the tight, green buds looking as though they might open at any moment. I was shocked, saddened, but I was not completely surprised. Avoiding the drama of death, its unpleasantness, had been my inadvertent idea in not going there.
I called his place again-no longer his place, the thought occurred to me-and the same woman answered. I apologized for having hung up on her, explained who I was, and asked about funeral arrangements. She said, in too prim a tone of voice, that there would be a small private ceremony and that it would be for family only. There might be, she added, a memorial much later on, in the fall perhaps, organized at Maxwell College. I asked her if she knew how I could get in touch with Mary. She didn"t seem to be familiar with the name and, as she was eager to get off the phone, our conversation ended.
I didn"t know whom to call. He had meant so much to me but, I realized, our relationship had been so private or, rather, outside a network of other connected relationships, that hardly anyone else knew about it, or about how important it had been to us. I had a moment of peculiar doubt just then: perhaps I had overvalued the friendship, and the importance of it had been mine alone. I knew this was the shock speaking to me.
It was nine-thirty in the morning, and three hours earlier than that in San Francisco. I was surprised that Nadege answered the phone. I apologized again and again when I heard the sleepiness in her voice. It"s Professor Saito, I said, he died. You remember my old English literature professor, Professor Saito. He died of cancer, and I just found out. He was so kind to me. I"m sorry, is this a bad time to call? She said, No, it"s fine, how are you? And as she said this, I heard a man"s voice say, Who is that? And she, responding to him, said, Just give me a second. Later in the morning, she called me and said that it was best if she told me the truth, that it was simpler for everyone that way: she was engaged to be married. He was Haitian-American, someone with whom she"d been family friends for a long time. They would be married in late summer. It was best, she said, if I refrained from calling. Just for now; that would be best.
I had the ulcerous sensation of too many things happening at once. What did she think I wanted from her? But I knew she had freed me from the faint hopes I had been harboring. It helped bring a concrete end to what had, in any case, ended long before. I was annoyed only at how long it had taken, and how much wasted thought had gone into it; annoyed, too, that it would surprise me at all that she"d moved on so quickly and so decisively. So my griefs interfered with each other. I put Bach"s Coffee Cantata into the stereo that afternoon and lay in bed. It was a recording by the Academy of Ancient Music. The music, rhythmic and jocose, had no entry into my mind, but I let it play on, recognizing its beauty without feeling it. Then I thought perhaps Purcell would be better, more soothing, so I put in "An Evening Hymn": a beautiful score, for tenor and six viols, but that was too lugubrious, and I was insensible to it as well. So I lay there in silence, watching dust motes, until I decided to get up, and run an errand I had been putting off-a package I had been meaning to send-and keep the self-pity at bay.
I walked into Morningside Park. There was snow on the ground still, in dirty patches. It was a world of brown and black, gray and white. My pace was reluctant. Then I stopped: I had the distinct sensation of being watched. In a tree, I saw a hawk. Or, rather, he saw me. His predatory glare p.r.i.c.ked the back of my neck, and I turned round to discover him, all intent, on a low branch not more than twenty feet away from where I stood. The park was empty, and the sun was ineffectual, invisible, hiding. He was a strong bird, big, in his presence an embodiment of an extreme elaboration of the evolutionary process. I wondered if he was, perhaps, kin to Pale Male, the celebrated hawk in Central Park who had nested on a Fifth Avenue building, or if, indeed, he was Pale Male himself. He regarded me less with disdain than with disinterest. We looked at each other, and looked, until, spooked, I lowered my eyes, turned around, and carefully, evenly, walked away from him, the whole while feeling those eyes boring into me.
When I came out of the park just north of Central Park North, not many people were about. There were two men in a doorway near the entrance of the post office, one of whom I had seen before. He had dirt-encrusted brown hair that fell about his face like fine ropes. His beard was bushy, flecked with white, and the odor of unwashed weeks emanated from him; his feet, bare and splayed out in front of him in his sitting position, were ashen. The second man, who was clean and much younger, and who was unfamiliar to me, was on one knee, holding the older man"s foot. When I got closer, I saw that they were talking, quietly and congenially, as though they were at a dinner table in a restaurant. They spoke Spanish, and laughed every now and again, seemingly unaware that their interaction was taking place in public, oblivious to my staring. The clean man was clipping the dirty man"s toenails. He did it with such attentiveness that I couldn"t help guessing that the man he was caring for was an older relative of his; his father, perhaps, or an uncle.
I entered the post office. It was late, almost closing time. Unable to find a customs form for my package, I joined the dishearteningly long line, but just then, one of the postal workers redivided the lines, opened a new window, and asked if anyone was sending an international package. I suddenly found myself at the head of a line. I thanked her, and moved toward the window. I told the man behind the gla.s.s, a pleasant, bald, middle-aged man, that I wanted a customs form. I filled it out with Farouq"s address. The memory of my conversations with him had convinced me to send him Kwame Anthony Appiah"s Cosmopolitanism Cosmopolitanism. I sealed the envelope, and the postal worker showed me various booklets of stamps. No flags, I said, something more interesting. No, not these, and certainly not these. I finally opted for a beautiful set featuring quilts from Gee"s Bend, Alabama. He looked up at me and said, I know. And he added, after a pause, I know, my brother. Then he said, Say, brother, where are you from? "Cause, see, I could tell you were from the Motherland. And you brothers have something that is vital, you understand me. You have something that is vital for the health of those of us raised on this side of the ocean. Let me tell you something: I am raising my daughters as Africans.
There was no one in line behind me, and the postal window was partially concealed by a column. Terry (that was the name on the ID card around his neck) finished processing my parcel, and asked if I was going to pay for it with cash or a credit card. See, brother-Julius, I said-okay, Brother Julius, the thing is, you"re a visionary. It"s the truth. I can see that in you. You"re someone who has traveled far. You"re what we call a journeyer. So let me share something with you, because I think you"ll get it. He placed his hands on the metal scale in front of him, inclined his head toward the window, and, lowering his voice to just above a whisper, began a recitation: We are the ones who received the boot. We, who are used for loot, trampled underfoot. Unconquered. We, who carry the crosses. Yes, see? Our kith and our kin used like packhorses. We of the countless horrific losses, a.s.sailed by the forces, robbed of choices, silenced voices. And still unconquered. You feel me? For four hundred and fifty years. Five centuries of tears, aeons of fears. Yet still we remain, we remain, we remain the unconquered.
He held the last line in a meaningful pause. Then he said, You know it? I shook my head. It"s one of mine, he said. I"m a poet, see. I call that one "The Unconquered." I write these things down, and sometimes I go down to the poetry cafes. That"s my gift, you see, poetry. If you liked that, he said, listen to this one: The catalogue of pain, that comes with cocaine, is not from us. They made it, they made the stuff, they made us tough, it was they, the bringers of pain, who brought the rough times, where once all things were calm. And now what we need, you feel me? We need to seed a new balm, a new creed. From within. From our ancestors. For our children. For our future.
Again, moved by his own words, he fell into silence. Brother Julius, he said, with great feeling, you"re a visionary, keep hope alive. I think we should see some poetry together. I can see that you instinctively get it. We must be a light for this generation. This generation is in darkness, you feel me? I know you understand. Do you write, yourself? I took the card he slid under the gla.s.s. It was printed in gold ink on off-white stock. TERRENCE MCKINNEY, WRITER/PERFORMANCE POET/ACTIVIST TERRENCE MCKINNEY, WRITER/PERFORMANCE POET/ACTIVIST. No, I said. I wouldn"t exactly call myself a writer. Well, drop me a line sometime, he said. We can go to the Nuyorican Poets Cafe. I"d like to talk to you. Sure thing, I said.
It was, in the circ.u.mstances, the simplest thing I could say. I made a mental note to avoid that particular post office in the future. When I came out of the building, the younger of the two Spanish-speaking men I had seen earlier had left. The bearded man who"d just had his toenails clipped sat in the golden glow of the sun, which had now come out, and the day became much warmer than I had antic.i.p.ated. The light fell straight down from the corner of the building across the street. He lay there half-asleep in the pool of light, transfigured. Beside him were three empty liquor bottles. I had paid for my postage with cash, and had some change. I gave the drunk two of the three dollars in my pocket. There was a feral cat behind him, seeking shade from the sudden brightness. Gracias Gracias, the man said, stirring. When I had walked three steps beyond him, I came back again and gave him the last dollar, and he smiled at me through broken teeth. The cat struck with its paw at its own shadow in the concrete.
I got on the subway at 110th Street. I disembarked at 14th Street, and cut across to the East Side, and I walked all the way down the Bowery, with no particular destination in mind, past the innumerable shops selling lamps and restaurant equipment, shops that, from the outside, resembled exotic aviaries. I finally came to a busy square on East Broadway. It was only a short walk from the part of Chinatown that was most popular with tourists, but it felt like an entire world away, for here no tourists were to be found and almost no one, in fact, who was not originally from East Asia. The signs on the shops, restaurants, businesses, and advertis.e.m.e.nts were in Chinese characters, and only occasionally were these supplemented with English translations. In the middle of the square itself, a square that was hardly more than a traffic island bounded by the crossing of seven streets, there stood the statue that, from a distance, I guessed was of an emperor or an ancient poet but that turned out to be Lin Zexu, the nineteenth-century antinarcotics activist. The severe monument commemorating this hero of the Opium Wars-he had been appointed commissioner in Guangzhou in 1839, and was much hated by the British for his role in impeding their drug traffic-was the one around which now pigeons flocked. They streaked it with gray guano, enriching the dried white material they had earlier left on the dark green finish of the statue"s robes and head. A few people ate ice cream or fried snacks as they sat on the benches of the traffic island, or walked around the statue enjoying the sunshine. Little sign remained of what the neighborhood had been in the early 1800s: an open-air market for livestock and horses, a district of flophouses, tattoo parlors, and saloons.
Everyone in sight seemed to be Chinese, or could be easily taken for Chinese, excepting me and one other person-a man stripped to the waist, and vigorously wiping his arms and chest with a rag. There was an unearthly shine to his body, as though he were already doused in oil, but whether he was applying the shine, or trying to remove it, I could not tell. He was silhouette dark, and his body bore signs either of long hours at the gym or of a lifetime of physical labor. No one paid any attention to him as he meticulously went about this task, which he soon interrupted to pick up the bicycle lying at his feet. He moved the bicycle out of the sun, so that he was more securely in the shadow cast by Lin Zexu"s monument. He then resumed his wiping, or application, of the oily material. His entire body glistened, neither more nor less than when he started, and he himself was like a bronze statue. The man then stuffed the rag into the back pocket of his jeans and, as one suddenly struck by a forgotten errand would do, jumped on the bicycle and sped away down one of the smaller streets, weaving in and out of traffic as he did so, until I could no longer see his bright black back among the throng in the direct glare of the sun.
Presently, I, too, went down one of the side streets, an even smaller and more congested one, along which prewar buildings jostled vertiginously, each with an elaborate fire escape that it offered like a transparent mask to the world. Electric wires, wooden poles, abandoned buntings, and a thicket of signs clotted the facades all the way up to the tops of the four- and five-story buildings. The shop windows advertised dental products, tea, and herbs. Large bins were filled to the brim with gnarled ginger and medicinal roots, and there was such a complete motley of goods and services that, after a while, to see a shop window full of hanging carca.s.ses of roast duck succeeded by another one crammed with tailors" dummies, yet another full of fluttering printed leaflets in a half dozen sun-bleached variants of red, and that in its turn followed by a jumble of bronze and porcelain Buddha figures, came to seem a natural progression. Into this last shop, I entered, to escape the dizzying activity of the tiny street.
The shop, of which I was the sole customer, was a microcosm of Chinatown itself, with an endless array of curious objects: a profusion of bamboo cages as well as finely worked metal ones, hanging like lampshades from the ceiling; hand-carved chess sets on the ancient-looking bar between the customer and the shopkeeper"s bay; imitation Ming Dynasty lacquerware, which ranged in size from tiny decorative pots to round-bellied vases large enough to conceal a man; humorous pamphlets of the "Confucius say" variety, which had been printed in English in Hong Kong and which gave advice to those gentlemen who wished to find success with women; fine wooden chopsticks set on porcelain chopstick stands; gla.s.s bowls of every hue, thickness, and design; and, in a seemingly endless gla.s.s-fronted gallery high above the regular shelves, a series of brightly painted masks that ran through every facial expression possible in the dramatist"s art.
In the midst of this cornucopia sat an old woman, who, having looked up briefly when I came in, was now fully reabsorbed in her Chinese newspaper, preserving a hermetic air that, it was easy to believe, hadn"t been disturbed since horses drank water from the troughs outside. Standing there in that quiet, mote-filled shop, with the ceiling fans creaking overhead, and the wood-paneled walls disclosing nothing of our century, I felt as if I had stumbled into a kink in time and place, that I could easily have been in any one of the many countries to which Chinese merchants had traveled and, for as long as trade had been global, set up their goods for sale. And, right away, as though to confirm this illusion, or at least to extend it, the old woman said something to me in Chinese and gestured outside. I saw a boy in a ceremonial uniform walk by with a ba.s.s drum. He was presently followed by a row of men with bra.s.s instruments, none of them playing, but all walking solemnly in step, marching down the narrow street, which seemed magically to have cleared itself of shoppers for their pa.s.sage. The old woman and I watched them from the eerie calm of the shop, in which only the ceiling fans were audible, and row after row of these members of a Chinese marching band marched past, with their tubas, trombones, clarinets, trumpets: men of all ages, some with jowled faces, others looking as if they were just reaching p.u.b.erty, with the first black traces of peach fuzz on their chins, but all with the most profound earnestness, carrying their golden instruments aloft, row after row, until, as if to bookend them, there marched past at the last a trio of snare drums and a final ma.s.sive ba.s.s drum carried by an enormous man. I followed them with my eyes until the procession trickled beyond the last of the bronze Buddhas that sat looking outward from the shop"s window. The Buddhas smiled at the scene with familiar serenity, and all the smiles seemed to me to be one smile, that of those who had stepped beyond human worries, the archaic smile that also played on the lips on the funeral steles of Greek kouroi, smiles that portended not pleasure but rather total detachment. From beyond the shop, the old lady and I heard the first series of notes from the trumpet, playing for two bars. Those twelve notes, spiritual cousins of the offstage clarion in Mahler"s Second Symphony, were taken up by the entire band. It was a chromatic, blues-inflected figure that must have had its first life in a mission hymn, a dirge that was like a tempest heard from far away, or the growl of waves when the sea is out of sight. The song wasn"t one I was able to identify but, in all respects, it matched the simple sincerity of songs I had last sung in the school yard of the Nigerian Military School, songs from the Anglican songbook Songs of Praise Songs of Praise, which were for us a daily ritual, many years before and thousands of miles away from where I stood in that dusty, sun-suffused shop. I trembled as the throaty chorus of bra.s.s instruments spilled into that s.p.a.ce, as the tuba ambled across the lower notes, and as the whole sound came into the shop like shafts of interrupted light. And then, with almost imperceptible slowness, the music began to fall in volume as the band marched farther and farther into the noise of the city.
Whether it expressed some civic pride or solemnized a funeral I could not tell, but so closely did the melody match my memory of those boyhood morning a.s.semblies that I experienced the sudden disorientation and bliss of one who, in a stately old house and at a great distance from its mirrored wall, could clearly see the world doubled in on itself. I could no longer tell where the tangible universe ended and the reflected one began. This point-for-point imitation, of each porcelain vase, of each dull spot of shine on each stained teak chair, extended as far as where my reversed self had, as I had, halted itself in midturn. And this double of mine had, at that precise moment, begun to tussle with the same problem as its equally confused original. To be alive, it seemed to me, as I stood there in all kinds of sorrow, was to be both original and reflection, and to be dead was to be split off, to be reflection alone.
SEVENTEEN.
In the spring, life came back into the earth"s body. I went to a picnic in Central Park with friends, and we sat under magnolias that had already lost their white flowers. Nearby were the cherry trees, which, leaning across the wire fence behind us, were aflame with pink blossom. Nature is infinitely patient, one thing lives after another has given way; the magnolia"s blooms die just as the cherry"s come to life. The sun coming through the petals of the cherry blossoms dappled the damp gra.s.s, and new leaves, in their thousands, danced in the April breeze, so that, at moments, the trees at the far border of the lawn seemed insubstantial. I lay half in shadow, watching a black pigeon walk toward me. It stopped, then flew up and out of sight, behind the trees, then came back again, walking awkwardly as pigeons do, perhaps seeking crumbs. And far above the bird and me was the sudden apparition of three circles, three white circles against the sky.
In recent years I have noticed how much the light affects my ability to be sociable. In winter I retreat. In the long and sunny days following, in March, April, and May, I am much more likely to seek out the company of others, more likely to feel myself alert to sights and sounds, to colors, patterns, moving bodies, smells other than the ones in my office or at the apartment. The cold months make me feel dull, and spring feels like a gentle sharpening of the senses. In our little group in the park that day, we were four, all reclining on a large striped blanket, eating pita bread and hummus, picking at green grapes. We kept an open bottle of white wine, our second of the afternoon, hidden in a shopping bag. It was a warm day, but not so warm that the Great Lawn was packed. We were part of a crowd of city dwellers in a carefully orchestrated fantasy of country life. Moji had brought Anna Karenina Anna Karenina with her, and she leaned on her elbow and read from the thick volume-it was one of the new translations-only occasionally interrupting herself to partic.i.p.ate in the conversation. And a few yards away from us was a young father calling out to his toddler who was wandering away: Anna! Anna! with her, and she leaned on her elbow and read from the thick volume-it was one of the new translations-only occasionally interrupting herself to partic.i.p.ate in the conversation. And a few yards away from us was a young father calling out to his toddler who was wandering away: Anna! Anna!
There had been a plane traveling at such a height above us that the grumble of its jets was barely audible over our discussion. Then only its faint contrail remained, and just as that faded, we saw the three white circles growing. The circles floated, appearing to fall upward at the same time they were falling down, then everything resolved, like a camera viewfinder coming into focus, and we saw the human shape within each circle. Each person, each of these flying men, steered his parachute, to the left and to the right, and, watching them, I felt the blood race inside my veins.
Everyone on the lawn was by now alert. Ball games stopped, chatter became loud, and many arms pointed upward. The toddler Anna, astonished as we all were, held on to her father"s leg. The parachuters were expert, floating toward each other until they were in a kind of shuttlec.o.c.k formation, then drifting apart again, and steering toward the center of the lawn. They came closer to earth, falling faster. I imagined the whoosh around their ears as they cut through the air, imagined the tight focus with which they were bracing themselves for landing. When they were at a height of some five hundred feet, I saw that they were dressed in white jumpsuits with white straps. The silken parachutes were like the enormous white wings of alien b.u.t.terflies. For a moment, all surrounding sound seemed to fall away. The spectacle of men fulfilling the ancient dream of flight unfolded in silence.
I could almost imagine what it was like for them, surrounded by clear blue s.p.a.ces, even though I"ve never skydived. Once, on a similarly fine day a quarter of a century ago, I had heard a boy"s cries. We were in the water, more than a dozen of us, and he"d drifted away toward the deep end. He couldn"t swim. We were in a large swimming pool on the campus of the University of Lagos. As a child, I had become a strong swimmer at my mother"s insistence, and somewhat to my father"s dismay, since he was himself afraid of water. She had taken me to lessons at the country club from the time I was five or six and, a good swimmer herself, she had watched without fear as I learned to be at home in the water; from her I had learned that fearlessness. I haven"t been in a pool in years but, once, my ability had made a difference. It was the year before I went away to NMS; I had saved another"s life.
This boy, of whom I now remember nothing other than the fact that he was, like me, of mixed race (in his case, half-Indian), was in mortal danger, drawn into increasingly deeper areas of the pool the more he struggled to keep his head above water. The other children, shocked into inaction by his distress, had remained in the shallow end, watching. There was no lifeguard present, and none of the adults, a.s.suming any of them was a swimmer, was close enough to the deep end of the pool to help. I don"t remember deliberating, or considering any danger to myself, only that I set off in his direction as fast as I could. The moment that has stayed in my mind is of having not yet reached the boy but having already left the crowd of children behind. Between his cries and theirs, I swam hard. But caught in the blue expanse around me and above, I suddenly felt like I was no closer to him than I had been a few moments before, as though water intervened intentionally between where he was in the shadow of the diving structures and where I floated in the bright sunshine. I had stopped swimming, and the air cooled the water on my face. The boy flailed, briefly breaking the surface with frantic arms before he was pulled under again. The strong shadows made it difficult for me to see what was happening. I thought, for an instant, that I would always be swimming toward him, that I would never cross the remaining distance of twelve or fifteen yards. But the moment was to pa.s.s, and I would become the hero of the day. There was laughter afterward, and the half-Indian boy was teased. But it might easily have been a tragic afternoon. What I hauled the short distance to the diving platform might have been a small, lifeless body. But almost all that day"s detail was soon lost to me, and what remained most strongly was the sensation of being all alone in the water, that feeling of genuine isolation, as though I had been cast without preparation into some immense, and not unpleasant, blue chamber, far from humanity.
For the parachuters, the distance between heaven and earth began to vanish more quickly, and the ground suddenly rushed upward to meet them. Sound returned, and they landed, one after the other, neatly, in billowing clouds, to the whoops and whistles of the picnickers in the park. I applauded, too. The parachuters slipped out from under their tents, crouching, and signaled to each other. Then they rose like victorious matadors, gesturing to the crowd, and were rewarded with our happy cries and louder applause.
Then it stopped. Above the noise, we heard the blaze of sirens on the east side of the park. Four police officers came racing over the ropes around the perimeter of the lawn and ran toward its center. One was white, one Asian, and the other two were black, all as ungainly in their movement as the parachuters had been balletic. We began to boo, safe in our numbers, and were pushed back from the congratulatory circle we had formed, so that they could arrest the daredevils. Someone at the far end of the circle shouted "Security theater!" but the wind had picked up, and it swallowed her voice.
The parachutists did not resist arrest. No longer enc.u.mbered by their wings, they were led away by the police. The crowd began to cheer again, and the parachutists, all young men, grinned and bowed. One of them, taller than the other two, had a full ginger beard that glinted in the sun. The parachutes remained in a glossy heap in the gra.s.s and, when the wind picked up again, seemed to give off trembling exhalations. And so we watched the parachutes breathe for a while, while the men were led away. Then, but only after what seemed like a long time out of ordinary time, we came out of the marvelous and resumed our picnic. Something had appeared in the sky, defying nature. My friend, who seemed to have read my thoughts, said, You have to set yourself a challenge, and you must find a way to meet it exactly, whether it is a parachute, or a dive from a cliff, or sitting perfectly still for an hour, and you must accomplish it in a beautiful way, of course.
Moji, Dayo Kasali"s sister, lay p.r.o.ne, a straw hat over her head. Lise-Anne and my friend were well matched, I thought. I had never met her, but he had a.s.sured me that she was his ideal companion. There was a balance in his seriousness and her natural lightness. She already understood him, which was more than could be said for his last several girlfriends. His love of philosophy was equaled by the way he (as he once put it to me) practiced biology. My friend was often forgiven his inconstancy; the willingness of women to forgive him came with his being the suave creature he was. For him to be understood, as she seemed to instinctively understand him, was rarer.
Near us, a wisteria"s boughs hung low, the petals on its purple blooms reticulated and busy with resurrection. There were some tulips, Sultans of Spring, I supposed, with large silken petals that were like ears. Bees collided again and again with the flowers, tracing flight paths all around us. On our way into the park, Moji had said to me that she was more worried than ever about the environment. Her tone was serious. When I responded that I supposed we all were, she corrected me, shaking her head. What I mean is that I actively worry about it, she said, I don"t think that"s generally true of other people. I think I waste things, I have bad habits like most of the Americans around me. Like most people in the world, I suppose. My awareness of it has intensified in the past couple of months, she said.
I had attempted to meet the issue in the right way. I asked her if she worried about things like air travel. I knew that she went to Nigeria at least once a year. Wasn"t she concerned about the environmental effect of jet fuel, and all that? She responded that she was. Then our conversation trailed off when Lise-Anne and my friend, walking a few steps behind, caught up with us again, and she began to tell us about life in Troldhaugen, where she"d grown up. Now, as I watched park workers fold up the parachutes, I remembered that brief earlier exchange with Moji. I had heard the environmental concern often enough to know how earnest a priority it was for some people, but I did not, as yet, feel it seriously in my bones. I had not experienced a fervor over it. I did not pause to consider whether to use paper or plastic, and I only ever recycled out of convenience, not out of some belief that recycling made a real difference. But already, I was starting to respect those who were fervent. It was a cause, and I was distrustful of causes, but it was also a choice, and I found my admiration for decisive choice increasing, because I was so essentially indecisive myself.
Moji lifted the hat off her face, and a bee that had been troubling her rea.s.sessed the situation and flew off in the direction of the nearest bloom. The sky had turned a darker blue, and the air was cooler. She brushed her cheek with her hand. I looked at her, and found her puzzling. She was too tall, and her eyes were small. Her face was dark, so dark that it had faint purple notes in it, but she was not beautiful in the way I expected dark women to be. You know what I know about bees? she said all of a sudden, breaking into my thoughts. That the name Africanized killer bees is a piece of racist bulls.h.i.t. Africanized killers: as if we don"t have enough to deal with without African becoming a shorthand for murderous. She leaned forward to pluck a grape from its stem on the plate. She was wearing a tank top, and I caught sight of the dark curve of her breast.
Around the country, I said, bees are dying and the scientists don"t know why. I"ve always found bees inscrutable. They are obsessed in ways that elude humans, and now they are falling prey to ma.s.s death. It has something to do with weather patterns or pesticides, I think, or perhaps some genetic change is at the heart of it. Already, one in every three bees has died, and more are to follow; the percentage is increasing all the time. For so long, I said, they have been used as machines for making honey, their obsession was turned to human advantage. Now they are proving adept at dying, too, dying from some terrible disorder in the order Hymenoptera.
There were nods and smiles. Lise-Anne looked at me with some admiration, and my friend mocked me with his eyes. Moji said she"d read something about the phenomenon, that it was called colony collapse disorder. It is quite widespread by now, she said, common all over Europe and North America, even as far as Taiwan. And isn"t it something also to do with genetically modified maize? My friend put his head in Lise-Anne"s lap, and said, That sounds like something out of imperial history: colony collapse disorder! The natives are restless, Your Majesty, we can"t hold on to these colonies much longer. Lise-Anne said, Does any of you know El Espiritu de la Colmena El Espiritu de la Colmena? It"s a film by a man named Erice, made in the seventies. In that film, bees represent, I don"t know what, but it seems that, in a violent and sad time in Spanish history, they represented a different way of thinking, a way of thinking and being that was specific to bees, but that was related to the human world. There are some scenes in that film that, really, are under my skin now. I think of the ones where the father-he has two young daughters, and one of them is called Ana, just like that little girl who was over there a moment ago-the scenes where the father is kind of sh.e.l.l-shocked, or in the cage of some memory he cannot talk about, and just works at the beehive. Those scenes are very moving, they are without dialogue or plot, but they are effective. Anyway, I don"t know what my point is, but maybe bees are sensitive, unusually sensitive, to all the negativity in the human world. Maybe they are connected to us in some essential way that we haven"t figured out yet, and their death is a warning of some sort to us, like the canaries in a coal mine, sensitive to an emergency that will soon be apparent to dull, slow human beings.
I hadn"t seen Erice"s film, but the collapse of the bee populations made me think of something else, which I now connected to what Lise-Anne had just described. The lack of familiarity with ma.s.s death, with plague, war, and famine, seemed to me a new thing in human history. These last few decades, I said to my friends, in which wars flare up in patches instead of being all-consuming, and agriculture no longer evokes elemental fear, and the seasonal variations in weather are not harbingers of starvation, is an anomaly in human history. We are the first humans who are completely unprepared for disaster. It is dangerous to live in a secure world. Look at this harmless and beautiful stunt by the parachutists. We know that they are in the right, right for having made something memorable for us, at some personal risk, but the police are charged with keeping us safe at all times, empowered to secure us with the force of arms, and protect us even from pleasure. I often think of the long nineteenth century, which, in all parts of the world, was one interminable bloodbath, an orgy of continuous killing, whether in Prussia or in the United States, or in the Andes or in West Africa. Butchery was the norm, and nations went to war on the slightest pretexts. And it went on and on, interrupted by brief pauses for rearmament. Think of the epidemics that wiped out ten, twenty, even thirty percent of populations in Europe: I read somewhere recently that the city of Leiden lost thirty-five percent of its population in a five-year period in the 1630s. What could it mean to live with such a possibility, with people of all ages dropping dead around you all the time? The thing is that we have no idea. In fact, when I read it, it was as a footnote in an article talking about something else, an article about painting or furniture.
Families that lost three of their seven members were not at all unusual. For us, the concept of three million New Yorkers dead from illness within the first five years of the millennium is impossible to grasp. We think it would be total dystopia; so, we think of such historical realities only as footnotes. We try to forget that other cities in other times have seen worse, that there isn"t anything that immunizes us from a plague of one kind or another, that we are just as susceptible as any of those past civilizations were, but we are especially unready for it. Even in the way we speak about what little has happened to us, we have already exhausted ourselves with hyperbole.
I"d been going on. It was Lise-Anne who saved me from myself by changing the subject. She said, But, Julius, you"re a shrink. I"ve always wondered about that. I"m obviously crazy, or I wouldn"t be with this guy over here. So never mind the bees or the plague and all that. Who"s the craziest person you"ve treated recently? I bet you get some really whacked-out ones. Or are you sworn to secrecy? We promise not to tell anyone.
I indulged them, and told them stories about my patients, about the alien visitations and government surveillance, the voices in the walls, the suspicions of family conspiracies. There is always a fund of humorous tales from the horror of mental illnesses, particularly in the ranks of the paranoid. I called on these stories now, even pa.s.sing off some of my colleagues" patients as my own. My friends laughed as I recalled a case in which the patient had "successfully" jammed signals from other planets, carefully lining every window in her apartment with aluminum foil, placing receptors elaborately woven from paper clips in the soles of her shoes, and always carrying a small piece of lead in each pocket, even when she was asleep. Paranoid schizophrenia lent itself especially well to such narratives, and the sufferers of the disease were good storytellers because they engaged in world building. Within the parameters of their own realities, these worlds were remarkably consistent: they only looked crazy from the outside.
Do doctors actually use the word crazy crazy? Moji asked. We most certainly do, I said. Some people, in fact, are simply nuts, and that"s what we write down in the chart. I did this just last week. Forty-nine-year-old salesman: I talked to him for a few minutes and wrote down, as he spoke: The patient is as crazy as a sack full of ferrets. Another patient I once diagnosed: Just plain nuts. I think you"d be surprised at what doctors actually say when no one is looking.
Do you know that shop near TriBeCa, Lise-Anne said, We Are Nuts About Nuts? Well, my friend said, I know I definitely am. There are actually lots of insane people in this town, maybe the majority of New Yorkers. Well, no, he went on, I don"t mean that. But, really, everyone just finds a way to cope, no one is completely free of mental problems, so I say let everyone sort themselves out. Insanity is used as an excuse for suppressing dissent, just as it has always been. Julius, I"m sure you know all about this: there used to be floating prisons in medieval Europe, ships of fools sailing from port to port, collecting the undesirables. People whom we would think of as a little depressed today were put through exorcisms. It was all about removing the contaminants from society.
And if we"re talking about real insanity, my friend went on, and I"m not going to pretend that doesn"t exist, if we"re talking about deep down, in-the-gut disjunction between actual reality and a sort of personally invented reality, well, there"s been plenty of that in my own family. What you said about Leiden, well, in a way, my family was Leiden. My father went crazy and became a cocaine fiend. Or maybe it was the other way around, maybe the cocaine came first. Anyway, he"s out there in South Carolina somewhere right this minute, looking to score some blow. That"s what he lives for. Understand that I use the word father father in a loose sense. I haven"t seen the man in four years, and the times I saw him, I wish I hadn"t. My mom, on the other hand: six children from five different men. That"s kind of crazy, too, isn"t it? I mean, how do you not quit doing that after the third or fourth kid? I"ve got an older brother who"s doing time for dealing. And that"s without mentioning my uncle Raymond. Uncle Ray was a mechanic in the Atlanta area. He had a wife and three kids. Salt of the earth type, never strayed, never did drugs. Then, when I was eleven, he lost his mind over G.o.d-only-knows-what, and he went into the backyard and shot his brains out. His youngest kid, my cousin Yvette, who was seven at the time, found him. in a loose sense. I haven"t seen the man in four years, and the times I saw him, I wish I hadn"t. My mom, on the other hand: six children from five different men. That"s kind of crazy, too, isn"t it? I mean, how do you not quit doing that after the third or fourth kid? I"ve got an older brother who"s doing time for dealing. And that"s without mentioning my uncle Raymond. Uncle Ray was a mechanic in the Atlanta area. He had a wife and three kids. Salt of the earth type, never strayed, never did drugs. Then, when I was eleven, he lost his mind over G.o.d-only-knows-what, and he went into the backyard and shot his brains out. His youngest kid, my cousin Yvette, who was seven at the time, found him.
A silence fell on the group. I knew the story. This was the appalling family background my friend had had to overcome to go to university and to graduate school, and to become an a.s.sistant professor in the Ivy League. Now, having spoken, he had a peaceful expression on his face. Ahead of us, in the lengthening shadows of afternoon, the parachutes had been folded and were being carted away on vehicles belonging to the Department of Parks and Recreation. The stuntsmen would probably get slapped with a charge of reckless endangerment and be fined. I suppose, Moji said at length, that the things black people have had to deal with in this country-and I don"t mean me or Julius, I mean people like you, who have been here for genera