It All Falls Down

by Sheena Kamal

  I’m not much of a giver.

  The young bluesman raises a brow at me. I ignore him, too. My focus is on the guitar.

  When he found out I could play, Seb dug out an old acoustic guitar that one of Leo’s friends had left behind when she moved to Paris. I’m not half bad. Because I’m in a bar, and because I’m feeling perverse, I start the chords to “Rehab.” Pints of beer pause halfway to thirsty mouths. Partially because of the dire warning in the song about the dangers of alcohol consumption, but also because it is a truth universally acknowledged that nobody in their right mind should ever do an Amy Winehouse cover. Because you can’t listen to Amy Winehouse without being deeply unsettled by the lyrics. You can’t help but wonder what the world lost because she had said no to rehab, thrice. Also, when the man in the song asks her why she thinks she’s here and she says she’s got no idea, that is all of us, at any given moment of the day. On any given day of our lives.

  My voice, low and raspy to begin with, catches on the word Daddy for just a fraction of a second, but it becomes much too real, much too fast for me. A change comes over me as I sing now, and it has nothing to do with wanting to show up some cocky young bluesman. I’m not fine, and my daddy will never know it. So I sing about that and it is my way of reliving what that little girl saw on the day she came home from school, the day that changed her life forever.

  The sweaty pile of cash is inevitable.

  As the MC hands it over, I wink at the bluesman. He laughs when he catches me at the door. “I set that win up for you. You can at least buy me a drink,” he says, catching me before I reach the door.

  “Buy it yourself.”

  “Would, but someone jacked my pot, which I thought was a sure thing. A couple days a week I do this open mic. Was counting on the prize money.”

  I’ve also been a broke musician, so I know what that feels like. I wave to the bartender, who pretends to be so totally immersed in stacking glasses that he can’t be bothered to come over. “I’m Nate,” says the bluesman, holding out a hand. We shake. His voice when he speaks is a little rougher than his singing voice.

  He nods to the bartender, who brings him a beer. And reluctantly pours me a cranberry juice. “Vodka?” the bartender asks hopefully. I tsk and shake my head.

  “Never seen you in this joint before,” Nate says, looking out at the crowd. They are mostly working people here, likely clocked out from their day at the factory—if there still are factories here in Detroit.

  “Never been. Came in looking for a military man.”

  “Well, look no further,” he says, grinning. “Did some time in the army, myself.”

  “Sorry, should have said a marine.”

  He sighs. “Everyone’s a critic. Why a marine?”

  I’m becoming something of a chatterbox in my winter years, so I tell him about my father. He sips at his beer for some time afterward. “Long time to be hanging on to that hurt.”

  When I used to work for Leo, every now and then an elderly lady would wander in with photographs of her long-lost cousin Mathilda, who ran away in the seventies. Leo would sit with her for as long as it took for the story to come out, then he would gently guide her to the door. There’s no point in taking cases that are more than a few years old, he would tell me. And he’s right. The trail is so cold by the time they’ve come to us that there’s little chance of generating fresh leads. The client is never satisfied. Now that the client is me, I agree. “I’m like an elephant. I never forgive.”

  “Never forget, you mean?”

  “That, too.” There are some people who can remember and forgive. But I’m not one of them.

  We finish our drinks and he drives me back to my motel. Which I only allow because I can’t bear the thought of another delightful Detroit public transit experience right now. He switches off the ignition when we get there. There are no hugs, no handshakes, no polite pecks on the cheek. “Want to see my studio?” he asks, as I reach for the door handle.

  “No,” I say. Then I get out of the car before he gets the right idea about me.

  15

  There are some things that go bump in the night that can be chalked up to the imagination. Or are simply the result of an old house settling, or someone on the floor above you going to the kitchen for a midnight snack. Perhaps the long-married couple next door has decided to give the old bedsprings their biannual workout.

  But then there are some things bumping about because they’re searching through your things as you walk through the door. Because I’ve approached from the street and not the back parking lot, and because I’m dressed to be run over in the dark, the man in my room doesn’t see me coming. It’s fair. I didn’t see him, either. We stumble upon each other like teenagers on prom night in the backseat of a car that his father let him borrow with a wink and a knowing smile.

  And in the end, there’s a little blood, but it’s from the guy’s nasal cavity as I slam the heel of my hand reflexively into his nose.

  Okay, there’s a lot of blood.

  “Oh, God. Oh fuck,” he groans, disoriented, as he tries to grab hold of me with one hand and keep his nose intact with the other. We are both slippery with his blood, but he’s bigger than me and manages to knock me to the ground.

  I roll out of reach, but he’s between me and the door, so I wrench the bedside lamp from its socket. It was the only light I’d left on in the room, and now we’re plunged into darkness. I hold it in front of me while I bang on the connecting wall to the room next to me with my free fist and shout “Fire!” at the top of my lungs to whoever is sleeping there.

  My voice, having been warmed up from the open mic, is particularly sonorous tonight.

  The robber apparently thinks so, too. He’s out the door before I can take another breath, his back illuminated for a brief moment in the harsh security light outside my room as he pulls up the hood of his dark sweatshirt. A moment later, a second set of footsteps clatter off behind him.

  Doors from the other rooms open, and then Nate comes crashing in. “Saw a couple guys take off. You okay?”

  I hit the main light switch and check the tiny bathroom, then I sit on the bed. “Yeah, I’m fine.”

  “You got . . . there’s blood on your hands.”

  I get up wordlessly and wash them in the sink.

  Nate stands in the doorway, unsure of what to do next. Other budget travelers come wandering by in their nightclothes and try to look past him into the room. “Can someone get the manager?” he says to a woman in a red velour sweat suit.

  She doesn’t move. “Where’s the fire?”

  “No fire. You’re fine.”

  “But what about those guys who were running away from here?”

  “Just let the manager know we need to talk to him.” Then he closes the door firmly in her face.

  It suddenly hits me. The intruders, whoever they were, had been seen and I’d shouted “Fire!” at the top of my lungs. “There’ll have to be a police report, won’t there?”

  “I’m guessing so.”

  “Damn it.” I’m having the worst luck today.

  “Don’t worry,” says Nate. “You can come stay with me after we get this sorted out.”

  I bunch the hideous bedsheets up in my hands and stare up at him. Does Nora go home with Nate after the adrenaline high is over, after the motel manager offers her another room, this one with a small lockbox inside, at a thirty percent discount? After the detective, who had inexplicably turned up right after the uniformed cops in their patrol car, takes her report almost an hour later and casts aspersions on her meager belongings?

  “So nothing was taken?” asks the detective, whose name is something like Sanchez. He’s in his fifties and looks exhausted. I would feel sorry for him, except I can’t imagine anyone in the world feeling more tired than I do right now. What is keeping me up at the moment is imagining myself pressing my thumbs into the deep dimples on his cheeks. He would be adorable except for the frown on his face.

  “N
o.”

  He looks at my knapsack on the bed. “This is all you brought with you? Did you check everything twice?”

  “I checked three times.” And then I tell him about my rental car being stolen and, really, they’ve got to do a better job at protecting tourists.

  “Not a great area for tourism,” he replies, writing down the details. “Tried Ann Arbor?”

  I would go over the bridge, across the border, and into Windsor to get away from this conversation if I could. But I just nod and say, “That’s a great idea.”

  “I’ll be honest with you. You didn’t give us much to go on here. There’ve been a string of break-ins in the area that I’m looking into, but this doesn’t fit the pattern.”

  “There was a tattoo,” I say, suddenly remembering the robber pausing in the doorway of the room, just about to pull his hood up. I hold my hair off my nape and point to the base of my neck. “Right here.”

  Sanchez hesitates for a moment. In the mirror above the dresser, I see his gaze linger at my neck. “What was the tattoo of?”

  “It was too far away to say for sure. But definitely at the base of the neck, like a barcode.”

  “Was it a barcode?”

  “No. I would have recognized that.”

  A flicker of something crosses his face. He’s about to say something, but decides to keep it to himself in the end. He nods. “Alright then. Stay out of trouble while we look into this. Seems to be following you around, ma’am. Stolen car and now this? You gotta be real careful in Detroit,” he says, as though you don’t have to be real careful everywhere. He hands me a business card. On his way out he casts a suspicious glance at Nate, my guardian angel, who hasn’t left the room.

  “Your car got jacked?” Nate grins, after the cop has left. “Girl, maybe Detroit ain’t the place for you.”

  “Yeah, no kidding. You got a couch at your place?”

  “A small one. My grams used to call it a love seat. Would that do?”

  I stare at the bed and assess my options. “Does it sag in the middle and have some kind of flower pattern?”

  “The ugliest kind of flower pattern you ever saw.”

  “Then I’ll be right at home.”

  So she does go home with Nate after all, I think, after we get back into his car. “This is the east side,” Nate says, after a while of driving in silence.

  “It’s not as bad as people say it is,” he adds, seeing my dubious expression.

  “I’m not scared,” I say, as he pulls into a darkened driveway on a street full of dark houses interspersed with lots that seem to consist mainly of piles of rubble. The front of the house is dark—surprise, surprise—but I can see a light on toward the back.

  “It actually is that bad, though. You should be shaking in your boots. Here.” He hands me a screwdriver from the glove compartment. “Keep that close.”

  “Wait—” But he has already left the car.

  I’m not sure if he’s joking or not. I slip the screwdriver into my pocket anyway because I’m not one to take a dire warning lightly. I follow him toward the back of the house. I hear low voices inside, but Nate doesn’t seem concerned. “My brother Kev and his girl Ash sometimes have meetings in here.” Before I can ask what kind of meetings we’re talking about, he lets himself in the back door with a key and we step into the kitchen. There is a chorus of Hey, Nates, but we are mostly ignored as we remove our shoes because whatever they’re discussing is heating up.

  There is a young man who looks a lot like Nate sitting on the kitchen counter with his legs spread wide. A woman with a septum piercing is between them, leaning her back against his chest. This must be Kev and Ash. Clustered around the kitchen table are a handful of mature students from a social studies class. Lifelong students, it seems, because they’re all pushing thirty and talking about the political implications of living in a postcolonial landscape of oppression. I understand maybe three words of every ten. By the alarmed expression on his face, Nate is in the same leaky boat.

  “But how do we tell allies from appropriators?” says a man in a Prince T-shirt, who is not white or black but is not something immediately identifiable, either. They all nod sagely at this question and pass a joint along to help the intellectual process.

  “Basement,” Nate whispers to me, nodding to the door just off the kitchen.

  Both Nate and I hustle downstairs before their politics become airborne and we are made to know more but understand less about our postcolonial landscape of depression. “I try not to see them too much outside of gigs,” he explains to me. “They got me playing some of their events.”

  “Please tell me you don’t do ‘Redemption Song.’”

  He laughs. “Right after ‘Imagine,’” he says, locking the door at the top of the stairs and shrugging past me. “Got a set with them at an Angel’s Night rally coming up next week. Bigger crowd than I’m used to.”

  “Angel’s Night?”

  “Yeah. Longstanding Detroit tradition. Night before Halloween when assholes would go crazy and set fires. Used to be called Devil’s Night but the community took it back in the nineties and put a different spin on it. Now we’ve got community patrols and events to keep the streets safe.”

  These kinds of patrols exist in pockets of Canada where violence or addiction have taken entire neighborhoods by storm. But I have always wondered if walking the streets armed with little more than good intentions is beneficial for one’s mental health. “Does it work?”

  He considers the question for a moment. “Ah, a little bit . . . We got less fires . . .” Then he gives up. “We try.” He unlocks the keypad deadbolt at the bottom of the stairs. The staircase and hallway are dimly lit and dingy, but smell strongly of disinfectant. He turns on the light in the room and leads me into his inner sanctum. I step inside and take in the tiny, neat studio with a bathroom off to the side. There is a desk with a brand-new MacBook Pro gleaming like the Holy Grail. A beat-up old Fender Strat is holding up a wall covered with newspaper and egg cartons. Strangely I feel no fear as Nate locks the door behind us and it’s only then that I put it together that the makeshift soundproofing on the walls is the source of the blessed silence we are cloaked in now.

  “Some fire hazard you got here.” I nod to the cartons, trying (and failing) to keep the excitement out of my voice. There is a midi keyboard and a condenser mic set up in the corner of the room.

  He puts his guitar case down carefully and takes up the Strat. “I know. Beautiful, ain’t it?”

  I don’t know whether he’s talking about the guitar or the room, but it is beautiful. Even the Martin, which must have seen better days, looks like all I’d ever want to come home to. The hideous flowered love seat is in the corner of the room, but instead of detracting from the setup, it adds a certain lived-in feel to the place. There’s nothing sterile or haphazard about this room. It is a piece of his heart.

  “You’re the first person I’ve let come in here,” he says, tossing me a bottle of water. I catch it reflexively with one hand. “There’s another bathroom off the hall outside, if you need it. I record in this one.”

  He types his password into the Mac and opens up Pro Tools. I watch in silence as he plugs the guitar into the computer, runs the cord into the bathroom, then closes the door behind him. When he starts playing his distinctive finger picking style, I know instinctively that he’s sitting in the tub with the Strat in his lap. The acoustics in a bathroom can be amazing, with the reverb bouncing off all the porcelain and tiles. The first chords of his original tune that he played at the open mic come through the space at the bottom of the door.

  I close my eyes to the raw, haunting melody that is being played in a bathtub and recorded on his laptop. It’s the first time ever that I’ve been lulled to sleep by the sound of live music. Right before I fall into oblivion, I wonder what I’m doing here in Detroit at all. How I’d convinced myself that I needed answers to the questions around my father’s death. How I convinced myself that they could be
answered. I should be shaken by the fact that my car was stolen and I was almost mugged in my own damn motel room. I should be at the town house with Whisper at my side, watching Seb die. Instead, I am on the ugliest sofa I have ever seen, thinking about men and death and the blues.

  16

  The next morning, Bernard Lam takes a long look at Brazuca’s disheveled hair, his wrinkled clothes from the night before, the lipstick stain on his collar, and lets him into the Point Grey mansion without a word. A housekeeper doesn’t pause in her polishing of the entranceway table as he and Brazuca pass her by. She blends into the background as easily as the potted plants in the corner, as she was no doubt meant to do. Lam gives her a friendly smile before showing Brazuca into the study.

  “I’m just about to fly to London,” says Lam, closing the door.

  “Business?”

  Lam sighs. “Some function or the other. I’m to represent the company at my father’s side. To let everyone know that he’s had sex at least once, I’m assuming. What do you have for me?”

  This time it’s Brazuca who goes to the window and looks out at the stunning gardens stretching to the basketball court. He could have waited until he was showered and dressed, but he has a feeling of disquiet that he can’t seem to shake.

  “Clementine’s dealer gets her supply through a bar in Gastown. Classy joint. Had a friend investigate it and he says we’re looking at the Khan crime family. They call themselves the Triple 9s because they’ve got connections to the UK—and it’s also a term for cooperating with the cops, which is some kind of inside joke. But here’s the thing. The Triple 9s went quiet. There’d been a turf war about ten years ago, but things have changed. Now it seems like the bar is doing well and the Triple 9s are diversifying. I hear they’re into real estate these days. Business as usual for the gang, but they’re keeping quiet.”

  “Business as usual,” Lam repeats.