by Ben Philippe
“I knew you were around,” he continues. “We all heard when he came back. I just . . .”
All? Does he mean his siblings? Our siblings?
He glances down at my résumé for the last time. “. . . I thought you’d be younger, I guess.”
“Yeah, um, you too.”
I suddenly feel a reckless sort of pity for him. Roger was the youngest one from the previous collector set. He was the saddest story I’d picked up on overtime.
When Dad left for Haiti, Roger had moved in with one of his mother’s sisters while my dad got to work wooing a newly available twenty-seven-year-old nurse who turned out to be my mother. There were rumors of Roger getting kicked out by his aunt, doing drugs, getting arrested, falling off the map. Things that my dad could be blamed for. Instead, he had ended up here: working at a grocery store. Fed and reliable, wearing dress shirts with rolled-up sleeves.
“Do you think we look alike?” he asks, still glancing at me as he escorts me back to the front of the store, hands in his pocket. The interview was over a million questions ago. He doesn’t seem upset. Just curious.
“I don’t know,” I say. No, we don’t.
A strange bit of math occurs in my head. I’m better looking than him, which means that my mom was better looking than his. That’s how genetics work, right?
How many times did he belt you? I want to ask. You can have him back, y’know: we don’t want him.
Since that episode, I’ve gotten into the regular habit of looking up my potential siblings online (basically anyone with the last name Philippe who lives in one of the cities he’s frequented) and imagining the narrative of their lives without engaging. There are a few. Very round heads, our bloodline. More questions.
“Dad sure is something, huh?” He exhales, staying inside the lobby as the glass doors slide open for me.
I give him an extended handshake that he returns, back straight and professional again.
He smiles and gives me a curt head nod. “Well, good luck with everything. Let’s stay in touch, yeah?”
“Definitely.”
My mom’s prettier than yours, dude.
I don’t tell Mom I had run into this boy, now a man, that she had occasionally mused about being a stepmother to had Dad only brought him to Haiti with him.
I spend that summer working at a bookstore in downtown Montreal. It takes an hour to get there each day, but I like the smell of new, unboxed books and the downtown hustle. I never hear from him again. The man had, like, a chip on his shoulder about the whole dad thing. You hate to see it.
Hi, Ben! So, um, I think we might be . . . half-siblings? Should I reach out? I have proof?
Yikes. This is awkward.
Honestly? You wouldn’t be the first. And while I might even believe you, I promise you that #FathersDay trending on social media is no reason to send me an email. You won’t find what you’re looking for here. We got his good hair and piercing eyes: that’s enough of a beautiful bond, right? Let’s not ruin it by getting to know each other. I’ve got limited emotional bandwidth at this point. Think of us as Sand Snakes scattered to the wind. (If you do not get that reference then you do not read the A Song of Ice and Fire series and you already will never be my family.)
I nevertheless wish you all the happiness in the world, though. Really! It’s very cool that you’re Dutch.
Fourteen
I Was Promised Ballplayers and Rap Stars, Addicted to the Limelight
Somewhere along the way, I also discover I’m smart and head off to Columbia University. No, scratch that.
You don’t just head off to an Ivy League college with a 6 percent admission rate and 10.9 billion USD endowment. You also don’t just “discover” that you’re smart like it’s a mole on your lower back while brushing your teeth in the shower one day. That was just a needlessly self-deprecating lie.
Take two: I’m fucking smart and I get into Columbia University.
If it sounds cocky to say, I apologize, but a non-negligible percentage of the world thinks my skin color puts me closer to a monkey than to a human and I’m writing this at a time during which the most powerful politician on earth routinely makes sweeping statements about the IQ of my entire race from his ketchup-and-tanning-spray-residue-coated phone. Now, I will own up that I am categorically not “street-smart” and I’ve given entirely too many digits of my credit card number to telemarketers before realizing what was happening and throwing my phone across the couch with a delayed gasp, but I could down a bottle of Bacardi 151 and tank that asshole in an IQ test. I lucked out and got the type of smarts that does well enough on standardized tests.
I never doubted I was smart. The more stupid people you interact with, the easier the fact sits with you. Honestly, spend ten minutes reading replies on Twitter and you’ll want to submit your brain for both study and display after your death. Even when shoving a wrinkled C- calculus quiz into my backpack in a flush of embarrassment or breaking into frustrated tears trying to put together an Ikea bookshelf. In those moments, I doubted the existential soundness of quadratic equations and the insidiousness of ready-to-assemble furniture from the dastardly Swedes, but not my intelligence. I sometimes wonder if all of Robert’s children across the globe share this weird confidence. Sure, our dad was a big ho, but we sure read them books güüd.
It’s more accurate to say that I committed—during that all-important window from ages sixteen to eighteen—to the incoming wave of standardized exams, R-Score (a nonsensical Quebec grading system), and GPA that all amount to a North American education. My smarts paid off. I’m good at all-nighters and I don’t have much else going on. Video games have gotten dull. And just like that, the future is unlocked.
DRIVE-BY READING RECOMMENDATIONS:
SAT for Dummies
Calculus II for Dummies
Okay, real talk: those yellow For Dummies books saved my GPA so many times, I cannot even tell you. They are better written than most academic textbooks out there. Sure, the cover is embarrassing, especially when you have to purchase it in person, but whatever your ethnicity, there is no shame in being bad at math. Especially calculus. My God, can calculus gobble it. Derivative these nuts, Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. You too, Archimedes. Get in there; don’t be shy.
To this day, I don’t think I’ve wanted anything as badly as I wanted one of those big envelopes. In the end, I get three big ones and four small ones that regret to inform me they’re blah blah blah . . . I don’t even open them. The written rejections will be reaffirmed via email later, anyway.
The other two big ones are good, really good, but without need-blind financial assistance for international students—which Canadians very much are—they are nonstarters. (Mom has $700 in American dollars in savings, and that makes it a good year for us.)
In the end, Columbia is the only yes without asterisks attached, and for a brief second, opening that “Congratulations!” email, my atheism wavers. Columbia University was the one to hit me in my toes at the mailbox. I read that email and felt it in my actual toes. Blame Rory Gilmore and seven consecutive seasons of Gilmore Girls slowly indoctrinating me to the privileged elitism of higher education. Blame Gossip Girl and all the establishing shots painting Manhattan as the mecca from which all rap songs were born. Kanye West’s entire discography becomes my song in one envelope. My high school and CEGEP friends are already downgraded to good acquaintances from my past in my mind.
I needed a story, my own story, away from Robert’s brood and Mom’s dashed dreams, and it will now be an American tale. I’m Fievel Mousekewitz, and I’ll belong there.
I’m Pam Beesly going off to an arts program in New York City instead of staying in Scranton and getting saddled to Jim’s insecurities. I’m Jon Snow ranging north toward the unknown wildlings. (Technically south, but you know what I mean.) I’m Dolores riding a speedboat away from Westworld hidden inside a different robot’s body.
Mom’s and my aimless search for vague upward mo
bility finds a brand: the American Dream. Not North American, not French Canadian. American.
The one with the Second Amendment; ’Murica with the giant houses and crowded inner cities. ’Murica. Land of Oprah and Madea. Struggle and opportunity in equal measures at every corner, where your life might be a sad ballad, or a chart-topping song, or elevator music. If you don’t know what your Blackness means yet, I highly recommend moving to the United States: they will tell you very quickly.
To ensure that your Columbia University ID is awaiting you at a kiosk on College Walk in a few months, you are to send a photo ahead along with the letter accepting said future and all the stories waiting for you inside of it.
The photographer at the local Quebec pharmacy back home, 370 miles away, is meant for bigger things, and reading over the instructions carefully, he looks at the clock wistfully. There’s a bandaged tattoo on his arm, peeking from under his Pharmaprix polo, still fresh and not ready to be uncovered. I’m the last in line and he wants to go home. “It says I’m not supposed to use the flash.” I come out as an outline more than a person. If the purpose is identification, then I’m the most recognizable, featureless blob of blackness that appears to possibly have ears.
“Is that okay?” He sighs, dreading that it won’t be. “Dude, I’m a Rorschach test,” the current me might say. But I’m grateful for the big envelope waiting for me at home and I don’t want the universe to punish me for forgetting my station at the photo kiosk, so I nod politely that it is.
“What’s it for?”
“A school ID.”
“Shouldn’t you be taking that at the school? McGill? Concordia?” he inquires, slipping into his coat.
“Columbia University.”
“Cool, yeah, I love BC,” he says, thinking British Columbia. “I have cousins there. It’s not very diverse, though.”
I stare.
“Anyway, yeah, you’ll be fine with that photo. It’s just an ID. Good luck.”
I lick the envelope and then lick it again, sealing the rim tight before also wrapping the sides in scotch tape to make sure nothing slips out. It’s my ticket to America, the place that has been advertised since Haiti. Canada with jazz fingers and a snazzy jacket. The land of Martin Luther King Jr. and civil rights where all the television I watch is made. America: land of dreams where they also gendered the green M&M and made her horny for some truly inexplicable reason, I think, munching on some M&Ms on the ride home that night.
“This is a gift,” Mom repeats at various points that summer before I head off to Columbia, sometimes out of nowhere. To herself more than to me.
We take a Greyhound bus from Montreal to New York City. My aunt and uncle will meet us there the next day, flying in from Florida. They want to visit the city and my mother’s English isn’t that great.
“It’s a very fancy school, Belzie,” Aunt Louisa says. “You can’t show up there and not be able to communicate. It will look bad on all Haitians.”
My own English doesn’t factor into the equation—I’m the teenage package being delivered, after all—I shouldn’t have the responsibility of translating my own drop-off. My aunt puts family first in a way I don’t always understand but will always envy.
We get into Port Authority, Manhattan, New York, at 12:23 a.m. Some timestamps you make a point to remember. My two bags are filled to the limit, leaving the nylon stretched and tearing. Mom has packed candles and matches in all the side pockets. One of them will break apart on the elevator ride to my dorm. She spent the summer overwhelmed, both happy and sad, all at once, because her son got a full ride to Columbia University, in America, and away from her. Ultimately, the woman will never experience a single shred of doubt in her faith, let alone contemplate atheism, because of that fact.
The cab screws us over, and a simple ride from Port Authority to a Days Inn on 94th Street costs us nearly $60. I like being screwed over by a New York City cabbie on my first night there. It’s already a story.
Mom and I share one room with two beds on a smokers’ floor because of some mixup in the reservation. We smile and I bump my head into Mom’s shoulder on the elevator ride up to the small bedroom via a cigarette smoke–drenched hallway. The hotel could assign us a smoker to puff a cigar into our faces all night, we would not care. This is a gift.
“Do you wish your dad was here?” my uncle asks me as we move me into my dorm the next day with my mom and aunt lingering behind.
It’s not a strange question from an uncle. I understand his need to ask it. “A little,” I say with a performative small shrug of the shoulder. I don’t, but I know it’s the answer he wants to hear. I occasionally ask about him to be viewed like the sort of kid who asks about their dad. A good person. It’s a script.
My dad is back in Haiti now. He has already met a new wife. She, too, will be moved to Canada. The third wife to be sold the same dream, only at an even younger age than my mom was. He doesn’t have new stories. Just the same one he replays over and over again, expecting a different outcome with new players.
Mom and I say goodbye at Port Authority later that evening as she takes an eight-hour bus ride back to Montreal, alone. My uncle and aunt offered to accompany us, but Mom and I wanted our last bit of time alone. She has a nursing job waiting for her. She’s the private nurse for a woman suffering from advanced arthritis in the neighboring town of Brossard, Quebec.
She will fall into a depression and find her way out of it. I won’t hear about it until it’s an anecdote she can wave off in midconversation. That time she broke her thumb as a kid. That time she stayed in bed for twelve days because I got busy and we didn’t talk for twelve days. But for now, we say goodbye in the grimy basement of Port Authority, by Gate 2 where French Canadians can be heard buzzing in line.
The last thing she does before we part ways is sign the cross on me twice. First, she draws a small one on my forehead with her index finger, and then she covers my whole being with a second large one, touching my forehead, chest, left shoulder, and then right shoulder.
“I don’t believe in this,” I say, annoyed and now officially adult, in a fresh Columbia University sweatshirt.
“You don’t have to.” She shrugs as she does it again, like she did when she was tying my tie before sending me off to my interview with my half-brother three years ago.
“This is a gift,” she repeats in French-Creole hybrid, which is all we still speak to each other.
I watch her go with the ID card in my hands. The ID card is an impeccable laminated card that will let this blob of black be identified anywhere on campus. Rubeintz B. Philippe, not so much. I look at the requirements for graduation, and I decide to keep it. For three years, security guards will look at me and frown when checking into dorms, friends will laugh at how I could be any Black guy.
I ride the subway back to campus alone. I have to read a chunk of The Iliad before a general assembly for my Literary Humanities course, and begin a lifetime of missing my stop going uptown and backtracking on the downtown train, pretending that was the plan all along.
Some people say New York City is overwhelming to newcomers, but it isn’t to me. It feels right. The bustle reminds me of the flashes of Haitian markets on the edge of my mind, only with fewer women carrying baskets on their heads. I feel safer in the crowds, that mass of bodies pouring out of trains at Times Square and 42nd Street, than in the wide, empty suburban streets of Sherbrooke. There are stories here. They’ve been waiting for me.
“C’est un cadeau.”
Fifteen
Sure, I’ll Be Your Woke Black Friend
I spend nine days with a roommate who is very nice but plays a lot of early-morning tennis, which is certainly a lifestyle choice. My only memories of him will be half-asleep glimpses of him spreading out his wet towel to dry at 5:30 a.m., after a post-run shower. He is the only human being I’ve ever seen chug a solid banana.
I think we were expected to be friends because we are both international students, but we truly
have nothing in common. He is white, tall, with a square white forehead and white barrel chest, looking like an Eastern European model from the Winklevoss collection. His accent and mine don’t harmonize.
“My family comes to New York every summer,” he says as we politely reconfigure furniture. “I’ve been here since June.”
“My mother and I took the bus one day ago,” I answer.
He looks confused.
“You said Canada.”
“Yeah, it’s around ten hours on a Greyhound.”
Opposites don’t always attract or repulse: sometimes they just smile and nod a lot.
I want a single very badly and end up doing a room swap two weeks in with someone who desperately wants a roommate for the full college experience. I do, too, but not all at once, not if it’s farting in shared air and wondering if I snored the night before. I have a man’s body now. The beard is almost here and the pubes need trimming. I need a single room. I’ll become friendly at a slower pace that doesn’t have me excuse myself to the library four buildings away at 11 p.m. when I need a long poop that requires enough privacy for self-actualization.
My years as an undergraduate student of Columbia University are best summarized as a series of questions rather than stories.
Was my admission a fluke? Will everyone be cartoonishly rich? Did everyone here already read The Iliad in high school? Should I get an internship right away? Shouldn’t Viacom be rich enough to pay all of MTV’s interns something? What does “making connections” even mean? Am I smart enough to pull off a triple major in economics, creative writing, and sociology? (No.) What is “Four Loko”? Is that James Franco? Will you please get this Four Loko away from me before I vomit at the memory? How many meals can you afford with $17.84 in your bank account? When was the last time I spoke to Mom, again? Wait, what do you mean graduation is in three days? Why are all these blue-haired fiction majors now comparing Wall Street incentive packages or heading to Harvard Law? What’s a life plan? Where can I get this wrinkled graduation gown pressed in two hours? What is this salty water in my eyeballs? What’s supposed to happen next?
