by Nami Mun
Knowledge
We were sitting on a bench in Union Square, waiting for Duffy the dealer to show up with a new batch of speed-balls. Knowledge leaned back and stretched her legs out, and I did, too, letting the afternoon light seep through our jeans and T-shirts.
“You keeping good these days?” she asked.
I told her I was.
“Where’re you shacked up?”
I told her I was fine.
“I didn’t ask how you were, I asked where are you staying.”
“The ferry,” I said. “Sometimes the subway.”
She nodded. “The ferry’s nice. You can’t beat the view.”
“One of these days I’m going to go to Ellis Island and see the Statue of Liberty up close,” I said.
She cringed with disgust. “Why you have to go and say that?”
“Say what?”
“We’re sitting here, having a nice conversation, and all of a sudden you say cheesy shit like wanting to see the Statue of Liberty. And anyway, it’s not on Ellis.”
It hurt me when she criticized. On the streets she was my teacher, my mother, and I wanted her approval as much as I wanted money.
“You don’t need to see the Statue of Liberty to know you’re free.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“That shit’s for tourists. Like her.”
A woman sat down on the bench across from us, her fingers, as plump as larvae, gripping a purse to her chest. “You’re free right now,” Knowledge continued. “You can do whatever you want with your life.” A few pigeons landed near us and began pecking by our feet. “You think I’m gonna be dealing for the rest of my life? You think I’m working like this so I can live under a bridge? Fuck that.”
Knowledge had thick shoulders, a boxer’s nose, and a pointed chin that shot out from her neck like a spade ready to dig. She was the hardest-working pusher I knew and maybe the only one who never used. “The harder you work, the luckier you get,” she said, showing me the underside of her arm where she had inked the very words.
“Is that tattooed?”
She looked like she might hit me. “You turn stupid since I saw you last?”
“Why’re you yelling?”
She licked an index finger and rubbed a letter off. “Don’t you ever get a tattoo, understand? All it says is that you ain’t open to change.”
“You don’t have to be so mad.”
“Yes I do,” she said, locking eyes with me. “Least until you grow up.”
“I’m grown.”
“Well . . .” she said with a smirk. “You still got more learning to do.” She laced her hands behind her head and smiled at the trees and the sky. “But that’s okay. That’s what I’m here for.”
“Yeah. That’s what you’re here for,” I said.
The sun loved us that afternoon. It loved the birds and the grass and the benches all equally. I looked at the woman across from us. The sun was loving her a little too much. Her face was red, as if her too-tight sweater was pushing all the blood in her body up to her two bulbous cheeks. A pair of pink spandex leggings encased the rest of her, showing every pockmark on her thighs.
“Damn, I wish I had a pool,” Knowledge said, tilting her chin closer to the sun.
A pair of pigeons waddled over to the woman, and she cooed and smiled at them too loudly, as if she were onstage.
“Bet you guys would like a snack, is that what you want?” she asked the birds. Then she yelled across to us: “These pigeons are everywhere!”
Knowledge leaned in and whispered, “You see the way she talks to us? She’s one of them types that likes to think she’s cool enough to talk to us poor little people.”
“It’s such a gorgeous day, isn’t it?” she asked us.
“Maybe she’s just being nice,” I whispered.
“Go ahead. Answer the bitch, you think she’s so nice.” Knowledge smacked my shoulder and looked away.
“Yeah, it’s pretty sunny,” I said to the woman. “Are you from out of town?”
“I said answer her. I didn’t say nothing about asking her questions.”
“From Savannah. Georgia. Do you know where that is?”
“Aw shit, she’s from the south. She think she’s gotta be nice to the slaves.”
“Kind of. I’ve never been there, though.”
“Okay, you can stop talking to her now.”
“Boy, these birds are really aggressive,” the woman said, and from her bag, she produced a hairbrush, a subway map, and a wallet and laid them on the bench beside her before fishing out a bag of Pepperidge Farm cookies. With a look of romance in her eyes she crumbled the cookies and tossed them to the ground, and none of us noticed the man walk up to her.
“My wallet!” the woman screamed suddenly, pointing at the thief, who was now speeding through the square. And not a second later, Knowledge took off after him.
“He’s got my wallet!” the woman said again, just to me, and I could tell she was still a few minutes away from actually believing that her wallet was gone. I was already a block behind but I ran after Knowledge anyway.
Years after this, but long before she was shot and left to bleed to death across the street from Bronx-Lebanon Hospital, Knowledge found herself standing in line at a downtown bank, her clammy hands holding a stickup note. She would tell me that her heart pounded slower but worked harder, trying to pump out what felt like oatmeal instead of blood. As her body inched along the velvet rope, she prayed for things, like a small fire, a power outage, even another bank robbery. Anything to stop her from committing the felony her boyfriend had sent her on. Time moved both fast and slow, and neither speed synced up with her fears as she stood at the head of the line. The tellers looked too chipper for a Monday morning. Did they even have money on Mondays? she wondered. Shouldn’t she have come on a Friday? She couldn’t remember why she opened the stickup note, just that she did, and that her boyfriend, the first and only boy she’d ever dated, was the one who had penned it: This is a stickup. Give me all your monie.
The misspelling stopped her.
“Next in line,” a teller called.
Knowledge herself had quit school in the ninth grade but she couldn’t believe that he had misspelled money. “What kind of an idiot can’t spell money?” she told me. “How fucking stupid do you have to be? And if he’s that stupid, how stupid am I for robbing a bank for him?”
“Ma’am, I can help you here!” The teller was a squeaky white girl with a scarf tied around her neck.
“Christ Jesus, the window’s open, you gonna go or what?” a man behind her shouted.
She looked at the teller again, her perky nose and pursed lips. She couldn’t let this snob think she couldn’t spell. Plus, the two cameras up by the ceiling corners were gunning for her, zooming in on her fingerprints. “Go ahead,” she said to the man, and backed away from the line, slowly and carefully, as if the bank’s marble floors were crawling with snakes. When she stepped outside, all of New York surrounded her—the traffic, the radios, the pedestrians jamming the streets as the sun winked on their sunglasses and windshields and hot dog carts made of aluminum. Knowledge stood in the middle of it all and waited for the universe to confirm her decision. It only took a minute. A cabdriver screeched his brakes and cussed her out. She was dazed and crossing the street. “You coulda been killed!” the cigar-mouth said, and that was enough of a message. Yes, she could’ve been killed, and there was no way she was going to lose her life for some idiot who couldn’t spell money. She had worked too hard to go down like that. She had standards.
After thanking the cabbie she treated herself to a slice of pepperoni and hopped onto a train that did not take her to the bathroom at Grand Central where her boyfriend was waiting.
Knowledge had standards.
She had principles. No one ever understood what they were exactly but at least she had them. It was her principles that ran after the thief to get the woman’s wallet back. And it was her principles that ha
d him trapped in the middle of the street, in the center of a small crowd, backing up the one-way traffic. By the time I caught up to them, Knowledge was circling the man like a boxer in a ring.
“Empty your pockets!” she ordered, and he did as told, pulling out the white tongues of his jean pockets to show he had nothing except lint and tobacco shreds.
“What’s going on?” I asked, my breath short from the run.
“What the fuck you looking at!” she screamed at the man. “Take off your shirt!”
Her voice sounded different, lower than usual but also bright with adrenaline. The man dropped his white tee to the ground and someone in the crowd whistled.
“Turn around!” she yelled, and it dawned on me that she sounded like her father or stepfather or whatever he was, the one who’d caught us stealing his Christmas tree.
The man held his arms out and pinwheeled slowly, his sweaty chest covered in snails of black hair. He was maybe in his forties, with patches of gray along the sides of his bumpy Afro. He didn’t look scared as much as exhausted from having run seven blocks with a morally strict girl chasing after him. I looked over at Knowledge. She wasn’t even close to being out of breath.
“Maybe you’re taking this a little too far?” I whispered.
“Too far?” She gripped her hips, looked at me straight, and then her stare slowly drifted to somewhere behind me. “I’m just getting started,” she said, and as if my comment had sparked more authority in her, she commanded the guy to take off his pants.
“Uh-uh. No way,” the man said, shaking his head.
Knowledge charged his face, and with the volume increasing with each and every word, she said, “Take—your fucking—pants off—now!”
Maybe the guy had thought she was an off-duty cop. Maybe Knowledge looked to him like an underaged narc. Or maybe he had grown up with a father who yelled just like her. Who knew why, with a crowd of twenty or so people watching him, he let a seventeen-year-old black girl from the Bronx convince him to unbutton his jeans, unzip his fly, and drop his pants so they bunched by his ankles, showing the corners of Twenty-second and Third his grim and sluggish underwear.
And nothing else.
“Where is it?” Knowledge demanded to know.
“You have to believe me. I have no idea what you’re talking about.” The man’s voice rattled with frustration. “I was just walking and you came after me, with that look on your face and—”
“Oh shit,” some kid said in the crowd, bordering on laughter. “She got the wrong guy.”
Knowledge was crushed. The look on her face had morphed from righteousness to doubt to stunned disbelief. She turned to me, and I knew she was asking if I thought she had the wrong guy. He was definitely older than I’d thought he’d be, and kind of out of shape to be a mugger.
“It’s by his foot! Under the jeans!” somebody shouted, and before Knowledge could investigate, the man hiked up his pants and broke through the crowd, leaving behind one fat wallet the size of a fist. Knowledge didn’t run after him. She simply walked up to the wallet, picked it up, and looked at it. I was young then and hadn’t yet discovered what it felt like to be proud of someone. The city was filled with cops and lawyers and officials who were supposed to help people in need, and there was Knowledge—a pusher, a transient, a wealth of misdemeanors—standing in the middle of the street as a crime fighter.
“So, what did we learn today,” she asked me.
“Trust your instincts.”
“Wrong. Stay in shape ’cause you never know when you have to kick some ass. Okay, what else.”
“Help people when they’re in need.”
“Wrong again. Help only strangers. You can’t go around helping all your friends ’cause they start depending on you and that gets you nowhere, okay?”
“Got it. Be good, but only to strangers.”
Knowledge laughed and shook her head. “People think they’re being good just ’cause they mow the lawn when their wives tell ’em,” she said, loud enough for all to hear. “Or they give money to church when they got money in the bank. That’s got nothing to do with good. Let’s see how generous they are when their pockets are empty. You get what I’m saying?”
I nodded. The crowd loosened. They were fools. They weren’t ready to hear the truth.
“That’s when you see character,” she said, just to me. “Don’t be fooled by personality. Anyone can have a good personality. Shit, a dog can have a good personality. But God don’t give a shit about that. He judges character. And he judges you during wartime, when you’re in action, when you’re down in the trenches. Not when you’re sitting at home, drinking tea.”
A cab pulled up at the corner and out came the woman from Union Square. I pointed this out to Knowledge. She was too busy staring at the wallet in her hand. “I’m gonna be saved,” she said, and looked to me. “I’m gonna be saved.”
The woman waddled up to us. “Oh, thank goodness. We’ve been driving up and down . . .”
Knowledge, with genuine pride, handed the wallet over. Somebody clapped. The crowd had dwindled down to maybe ten or so, diehards who wanted to see the ending.
“Here.” The woman opened her wallet. “Let’s give you something, a little reward.”
Knowledge held up her hand. “We’re all good. Thanks is thanks enough.”
“But you have to take something. I insist,” the woman said, fingering some cash.
“Really. I said your thanks is enough. So why don’t you just say thank you, and we’ll get moving.”
“I don’t know why you’re taking that tone with me. I am trying to thank you.”
Looking to the side, Knowledge cleaned her ear with an index finger.
“I see nothing wrong with giving people money, especially when they deserve it.”
“I’ll take your money,” a construction worker said.
“Listen, lady.” Knowledge braced the woman’s arm. “You gonna say thank you or what?”
The woman snapped her arm back. “Who do you think you—”
Knowledge leaned in and whispered, “The next two words out of your mouth need to be: Thank. You.”
“Like I said—”
Right away, Knowledge snatched the wallet from the woman’s hands. “I warned you,” she said, and walked off.
“She’s got my wallet!” the woman screamed but nobody stopped Knowledge.
This image of her strutting down the block came back to me when our paths crossed in a Kentucky Fried Chicken, years after we’d lost each other. Knowledge worked in the back, her hands drowning and shaking a fryer basket of meat. The fade in her uniform told me she’d been working there awhile. The scabs on her face told me she was using now. I was, too, but I hadn’t plunged as deep as she had. That’s what I told myself anyway. I’d never seen her so thin. Her body seemed empty of flesh and fluids, and she was missing really important things, like her two front teeth. I was getting a bucket of wings for me and Benny, a guy I couldn’t stop dating. I didn’t call out to her. We hadn’t seen each other for five hundred years. Too long to catch up properly with a counter between us. Plus, she wouldn’t have wanted me to see her that way. So deflated, and so lost, shriveling inside that uniform of hers, the only thing holding her body together.
But on that sunny afternoon, Knowledge walked tall and proud down Third Avenue, her back as straight as a skyscraper.
“That was amazing,” I said, catching up to her.
“I know,” she said, sounding surprised herself. “I wanna see but I don’t want to turn around. Is the crowd still there?”
I looked back. The street had returned to its normal pace—the sun and the cars and the people had erased the event. Even the woman was gone.
“They’re all still there, watching you walk away.”
“As they should be,” she said, picking up her stride. “As they should be.”
At some point we stopped at a trash can. Before Knowledge tossed the wallet, she pulled the cash, gave me a
twenty, and shoved the rest in her pocket. “Sometimes you gotta do wrong to do right, know what I’m saying?”
“Now I do.”
“That’s my girl,” she said, and the smile on her face lasted for two blocks.
On the Bus
One time I rode a bus that ran a red light and crashed into a family wagon, killing the baby in the backseat.
But before that, I sat with my face out the window, letting the sun zap the ants crawling behind my eyes. Two days of speeding, bagging, drinking crème de menthe, and snorting procaine, and now it was daylight, and the worms were already digging into my skin. The guy sitting next to me bit into a soggy taco. The smell of wet beef made me want to vomit.
And then I saw him. Two seats down, with his back to the window. An old black man with sky-bright eyes who smiled at everyone as though he’d seen all of them as children once. He looked familiar. Bald head, white beard, skin darker than grapes. His uniform overalls had a stitched name tag that had no name, and the mop next to him was new, its head still wrapped in plastic. He could’ve been a janitor, but I’d never seen one ride around with a mop, or look so happy doing it. He nodded and beamed at everyone. Until he turned to me. With his hands on his lap, he stared into me as if to light me on fire.
That’s when we slammed head-on into the station wagon.
Someone screamed, Oh God! just before the crash, which sounded like a thousand knives being sharpened all at once. People lunged forward and then back, landing on their ribs, their cheeks. Apples, celery, and canned beans rolled on the floor, and an old lady’s walker slammed into the fare machine. On his knees, a man in a suit gathered the papers that had spilled from his briefcase, not hearing the girl next to him crying for her doll. It felt good to hear the bus come to life. It calmed me to see them acting out what I felt inside. Some tried to push open the doors, others hugged, and others cried into their hands, their fingers wiping their eyes. But the black man—he hadn’t budged. He was still facing me. Even his mop hadn’t moved. That’s when I knew he was God. He’d come for me but the baby had gotten in the way.
