Another Kind of Madness Read online

  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 s
cene 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.