Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  Partly because she feared if she did it sooner she wouldn’t show up at all, she’d put off the emotional inventory until she was actually on her way to his place. Then, the splashdown off the bus. She’d had the impulse to cross the street and get on the next thing smoking that would debit her metro pass. Right then and there, as she stood in the water, Ndiya shook her head at her soaked Nine West heels and her sodden skirt. “Ain’t this just a crying sha—oh hell, OK, here we go, step number one, date number two.”

  The second date hadn’t begun as a date. Fact. That was true as trouble in mind. It had started like sudden sunlight through the back door. If not a fact, it was at least a fluke. A chance meeting that caught her in a bad way, followed by a bad decision that precipitated a personal, public relations disaster. That disaster set a system in motion that would change her life, then several lives. Still, as she stood on the sidewalk, soaking wet, Nydia felt like she was over most of it now. That was another troubling pattern about the time since knowing Shame: the bigger the disaster the easier it was to put away. But little incidents and impressions of incidents would dog her. Yvette-at-work said, “Ndiya, you should talk to someone, you know, a professional.” She figured date number two must have been bad because, as she sloshed away from the puddle and down the block toward Shame’s building, she found that almost none of what she recalled had to do, strictly speaking, with him at all.

  She remembered his unzipped jacket as she’d seen it from across the street, his cycle. U-turn. His offer and then his shoulder against her chin as she sat behind him and watched Chicago lean away from them with the high-pitch, first part of the S curve and then back toward her as they leaned away from the lake on the second curve. The engine cleared its throat, lowered its voice, and the city disappeared behind her back and into the wind. She remembered the sweet-salt smell inside his helmet that she wore and the texture of the way tiny points of hair lay down smooth against his shaved head. She felt her hips learn how to balance on the cycle without falling off the back. Meanwhile her arms tried to avoid holding on to his waist tight enough to feel his belt buckle and his torso beneath his jacket. She feared if she got too close and he hit the brakes she’d butt him with the helmet in the back of his bright, bald head and they’d crash. She remembered biting the upturned collar of his worn leather jacket.

  Memories flipped in a series of images, some of them blank. Sunpool on his scalp. Burnt-down candles on an old piano. A Frank Lloyd Wright–looking daybed with mat-thin cushions. The warm, amber-and-blue glow from the thing he called a tube amp on a low table across the room. She remembered almost nothing else about the room except that it was filled by the sound of some oud player Shame seemed to worship. She thought it was strange that he turned off the music when he got home. She can’t even remember exactly what he’d said an oud was.

  “You gotta love that, playing tsunami,” Ndiya thought, as she walked down the block beyond the old woman crocheting prophetic comments into a doily in her brain. She passed Melvin with his plastic boats in the gutter. A young man slipped through a set of double doors across the street. His denim jacket opened in the warm breeze and interrupted her recollection. Surprised at her pleasure in the even rhythm of her memory through which flowed a level of detail she could taste, she noted the slightly electric, morning-coffee and cigarette effect. She decided date number two couldn’t have started out as bad as she’d recalled. Maybe. But it got that way. Then she wondered: Maybe disasters happen in reverse? They wash over you, move back into your past and then flow forward dragging it all along with them like historical flotsam into the future. “Maybe we don’t have a chance, maybe we’re all playing tsunami,” she thought.

  Eyes straight ahead, what you do is focus on something about twenty miles away. This allows you to see everything and gives no one the impression that you’re actually looking at them. Having found it an effective way for a single woman to negotiate city streets at night, Ndiya had actually learned to do this confronting dining halls at college. “Whitecaps today,” she’d chant to herself as she blurred her vision and looked for a round, dark pool that would be one table of black students with whom she’d eat. While eating, she’d focus so hard on each face that the chalk-faced waves and wan-toned voices surrounding them disappeared. The background turned into what she’d seen the weatherman standing in front of when they’d gone to the TV studio on a field trip in fourth grade. “WGN’s Roger Twible,” she had kidded herself then, “and the pure, blank blue he keeps behind him.” And now she thought again, “Ain’t mad at him.” Then she realized how uneasy she was on this street because she was doing it again. Her eyes strained against her peripheral vision as she followed a man’s progress across the street without turning her head to watch.

  The bus disappeared into the darkening distance and she saw the young man undo the denim flap on his jacket. He inserted a tightly wrapped packet of plastic in his breast pocket. He appeared to her and then disappeared. He had something in his face she wanted to trust. Everything about it was even; there was nothing soft, nothing hard, nothing too round, nothing too sharp. He fell through her sight into the easy, curved play of light on lines and the spectrum of brown out of which she built everything she knew about how, what for, and why to look at people. All the possible ways of being came inevitably from these basic shapes and shades in faces. When there was no human face like that around, those patterns appeared anyway. They turned to her out of trees, clouds, waves at the beach, the froth of a cappuccino. All that led to a static she wasn’t going near. She carried that space hidden inside. In that static, a kind of noiseless noise, drifted something she refused to know but knew was true: it’s the people you know, that you trust—leave love alone—that hurt you the worst. People you don’t know or trust can kill you, or maim you; but that’s it. The real injuries that leave you touched and staggering around hiding from yourself come down the hallway, they invite you to come along and you follow. Afterward, they hang there in the torn-open wound of your trust. The arrival of trust is subtle and dangerous, its perils are intimate, vertical, bottomless.

  This young man’s eyes were deep without the masked howl that she usually saw in the faces of black men with deep-set eyes. Her father’s face flashed and went away. Every hair on this young man’s head and in his wispy goatee was in place. But he didn’t have the razor-coiffed precision of the cuff-linked men at work who stalked about the Loop like perfection itself. She’d see these professional men at lunch meetings; she knew their smell. They walked like they were fresh from the weight room and flashed corporate AmEx cards like they were swords in a divine battle scene in some museum painting. The young man—truth be told he was a boy in her mind—struck her with a grace, an elegance in his stride and the perfect break of his jeans over tooth-white sneakers. For a flash, she replayed her long exile from Chicago in her brain and, against that second’s blur, she gave herself to this young stranger. She kept her eyes twenty miles out over the lake and him in her peripheral vision. It was an old technique, let the body ache but refuse to feel it. Wonder your way around the pressure of the moment. Let it sing.

  This kind of openness felt very new to her. It had been a long time.

  A pastel of music melted in her body. It did a slow, counterclockwise lap in her brain passing by her right ear: I’ve got things on my mind. It disappeared until it reappeared in her left ear and she heard, I’m not too busy for you. She knew the song, knew its moves. She loved the song so she turned it off before Kenny Lattimore had his chance to croon her favorite line, If you’re feeling a-lone.… She could trace the gentleness of that line as it moved through her body like a long swallow of hot chocolate at the bus stop in the winter. The kind of warmth that you feel when you swallow, the kind that makes it seem like anything you look at will melt. The song laid the words perfectly along the lines and shades in the faces she saw pass her on the street. With lines like this, she could abstract her way past the masks men wore in public and even past the others s
he’d found stuck to their faces in private. “Male privacy!” she thought. “It’s up there with companion for life and soulmate in the bait-and-switch way of the world.”

  She mourned the secret war black men fought, must fight anyway, in places far away from her, quite possibly far away from everyone, with those gentle lines and the fantastic beauty in those shades of brown they carry through life. “Let’s not ee-ven talk about eyelashes.” Black men’s beauty and the near-cosmic arrays of violence leveled against it. She began to smile, then felt a rush of tears pressing into her eyes and a lump in her throat. Then she put it all away: “Brain broom, must pan, thought box.” She had a hundred tricks like this.

  To hasten away the romance, she considered the casualties of this gentleness. This was no trick. She felt her scalp sweat and her eyes harden. The casualties of that gentleness were women. Every time. “And it ain’t ee-ven gentle,” she thought. She remembered something Shame had said to her that first night, out in front of Renée’s party on the Fourth of July. They could hear the music slow down, and the dusty sound rose like floodwater in the basement. She was halfway into praising Jesus that she’d come up for air and was outside when the music got low. It was an old song. She knew because the words were overpronounced in a way that made her feel eighteen years old. Dream about you ev-er-y night-tah, every day-ah: a city soul singer with a country preacher’s punctuation.

  “Smoke City,” Shame said. “Remember them? I knew this singer, ain’t seen him in years and years, but that’s a whole ’nother story.” Then he said,

  –I love music that starts with how life is and then opens up like this and makes life seem like how it has to be and at the same time makes it all sound like you know it can’t never be.

  He concluded the thought scowling at the ground:

  –All at once.

  And she, trying to follow the logic as she repeated what he’d said to herself:

  –I’ll have to think about that.

  –Naw, just listen is all. Otherwise, well, never mind the otherwise.

  And she thought to herself, “Who the hell is this?” and to disguise the thought, she asked the singer’s name.

  –Never mind, that’s part of the otherwise.

  As he said this, Shame’s eyes rose up. He’d been staring at the ground. When he looked to the sky his eyes passed over her face. Ndiya felt a strong pull, or was it a push? As their eyes passed each other, she thought she heard a voice in her ear say, “Careful with that.” She must have said it to herself out loud because Shame asked,

  –Careful with what?

  –Oh, never mind.

  –Oh, right, “never mind,” that’s part of the “otherwise.”

  But Ndiya thought, just then, that party didn’t count as a meeting or a date. So, she was under no obligation to deal with it.

  ■

  Despite being soaked and conspicuous, Ndiya tried to maintain her equilibrium in this unfamiliar street. She thought, “Weather and the blank blue behind it,” and blurred her ears from the inside. The song was no more and the young man was greeting another young man and a woman who’d each been shifting their weight from one foot to the other at the corner since she’d passed by them on her way. One eyebrow up, she felt her top lip fold inside her mouth, her teeth scraped across it twice before it popped back cool in the air. OK, here goes.

  Date number two. Late July? A Friday? The twenty-third? She’d been invited to a birthday party for Maurice from the firm. Maurice Thomas, Esq. Morehouse, Phi Beta Sigma, Northwestern Law, office 2402. She knew him mostly from editing his briefs. Immediately after they’d been introduced, she named him “That Maurice.” She couldn’t have been back in Chicago for more than six weeks. She was new at the job. Afraid to unpack most of the boxes in her provisional, no-lease townhouse sublet. She had regular urges to tape up the few she had opened, call the movers, and spend half her savings on a one-way move to a brand-new nowhere in the big old ABP, her personalized acronym for USA.

  Her job was to keep records in the firm, sit in on depositions, prepare forms, motions. The computer did the formatting and the abstract, opaque legalese the lawyers used came naturally to her. “Naturally” meant it was a skill she’d practiced unconsciously in order to survive. She recognized the technique immediately. Just like she did, the legal language surgically and tactically excised its connection with the world outside the precise matter at hand. The point was to create a version of whatever case that guarded against threats. Bring it on. If she could do anything, Ndiya Grayson could do that. In two weeks, she could mouth the words before the lawyers got their sentences out. In three, a few junior associates recognized that she wrote in their world-obliterating tribal language better than they did. Most quickly began to simply list the basic facts of the case and let her do the rest. They’d make a special effort in five-syllable words to say—strictly on procedural grounds, you understand—that they’d need to proof the briefs before they were submitted, but she knew it was all show. They probably didn’t even read them until they were on their way to court, if they ever got that far.

  She felt a flash of panic when she saw how plainly some people read things about her that she hadn’t consciously disclosed. She asked Yvette-at-work about her future as a legal ghostwriter. She was told not to sweat it. “If they know you’re smart you’ll either get promoted in a little while or fired right away—how long has it been?” She’d started as a temp and, when the temporarily absent person stayed gone, she’d signed a one-year contract for more money than she’d ever thought she’d make. In truth, she thought to herself, it wasn’t so much a job as an excuse to get out of bed, shop on Oak Street, and live in a part of the city that meant absolutely nothing to her. “What do you expect,” she’d laughed to herself, “going to work in a building that looks like a fifty-story pair of sunglasses?” She imagined that the buppified stretch of townhouses on the near South Side where she sublet her place couldn’t mean anything to anyone. She figured that was the whole point. She was wrong, of course, but that didn’t matter yet. And if you allowed for travel well beyond the speed of light, and back in time, the neighborhood was just a few blocks east from where she’d grown up.

  The message about Maurice’s party was the first post she’d received after having been added to the SnapB/l/acklist. This was the secret listserv that trafficked news between the young, gifted, and professional black employees of Gibson, Taylor & Gregory, the corporate law firm where she worked. Somewhere, of course, she knew better than to click to join and RSVP to the list to say nothing of actually showing up to That Maurice’s birthday party. And worse, Yvette-at-work had written back to the list to acknowledge that Ms. Ndiya Grayson, new colleague and the newest member of the list, would be there and everyone should make it a point to introduce themselves.

  Nevertheless. “No, forget the n,” she thought. “Make it ‘evertheless.’” At six thirty on that Friday evening, she found herself in front of a mirror, humming along to the sublet TV’s “Soul Salon” and lost in time blending shades of MAC on her eyelids. She checked the rhythm-method calendar of her hair: “It’s Friday, second day out of the braids and on its way back for the weekend. Sunday evening, back to braids.” She made sure the seam in her stockings was straight up the back of her calf. The door of the building said, “Don’t!” when it slammed behind her but she shook it off and went down the steps to take the bus uptown to the Violet Hour. Everyone was meeting there for dinner before they headed off to whatever other closet of uptown nowhere the rest of That Maurice’s party was to take place in.

  ■

  Leaving big-eyed Melvin and his grandmother or whoever she was behind, Ndiya continued walking as the business strip gave way to residential buildings rimmed with lawn and living room furniture and old people to nod and smile at as she passed. In her mind, she continued on with her self-promised reckoning with date number two. The incident. She remembered riding the bus up South Michigan Avenue, awestruck by the unfamiliarity
of the city and bothered by a strange feeling that she knew all of the black people she saw personally. Coming back to Chicago felt like returning to a family of two million people who lived in, or near, a city that’d embarked on an aggressive campaign of cosmetic surgery. “Way too aggressive,” she thought, as she wondered if what happened to Michael Jackson’s face could happen to a city. She knew it could. She’d been to Phoenix, an experience—or, more accurately, the utter lack of—which changed USA in her mind to ABP: “Anywhere But Phoenix.”

  Still, this was Chicago. She thought, “It is still Chicago, right?” The miles of empty lots, abandoned blocks, and defunct train tracks that she’d known south of Grant Park were one place of massive change. And she knew that what she’d known was itself—for someone else—a bit of blur that wasn’t designed to last either. “Chalk it all up to America’s War on Time,” she thought.

  Thoughts like these made Ndiya half regret her youthful, vengeful lack of patience and half wish she could feel it again full force. Then she remembered Art. After college they’d moved back to New York City where he’d grown up. She saw herself smile and wince and shake her head in the window as post-op Chicago wheeled past like it was on a gurney outside the bus. She remembered, though, how her youthful fire had delivered her to dangerous dead ends. “Look at me,” she’d told Art. “I can go anywhere in the world and never be mistaken for anything but exactly what I am, NAF, Negro American Female. All I have to do is open my mouth and say a word or two. A person, a language with origins nowhere, no history. Certainly nowhere and no history the world will admit to.”

  She had looked in Arturo’s eyes as they opened up and fell through the back of his head like someone had kicked through the scrub and knocked the lids off of two long-abandoned wells in a ghost town. This had begun to seem like a weekly ritual. Aggravation building, she had thought, “He better not cry because I’m not sure if I’ll cover his wide, ever-earnest face with kisses or bust him in his no-irony-having mouth.” His tone as cold and clear—and, Ndiya thought, poisonous—as the abandoned water in his welled up eyes, Art had said simply, “You’re lucky.” And with her response, what had already become a kind of code-phrase for her life knowing Art began to feel like some kind of secret name or destiny; “Maybe I am.”