Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  With her voice echoing in his screamed-at eyes, Art said that she didn’t understand, and she thought to herself, “You’re damned straight I don’t. No maybe about it.” Art held her hand but she could see him try and fail to well his eyes. She asked him, “What if they’re people, real people?” In that moment of intense and reductive focus, she told herself that she could see Art had no idea what she was talking about. And she could see more clearly than ever that he was determined not to know. At that time, she couldn’t admit what all she, too, was determined not to know. As for Art, if he’d known that much, she’d have respected that. He didn’t and she could see then that he wouldn’t. Blind to herself, she could see that Art was determined to be a certain kind of American, the kind that wants to be an American. Ndiya was equally determined to be another kind of American, the kind determined not to be Arturo’s kind of American. As soon as she realized this, of course, she’d need to find another Arturo somewhere, or she’d need to be alone.

  She’d heard about medical training and how doctors needed to insulate themselves against all the kinds of caring and feeling that sent them beyond their clinical abilities. This enabled them to perform the technical features of their work. From college English, Ndiya remembered Hemingway’s doctor saying of the American Indian woman, “Her screams aren’t important. I don’t hear them because they’re not important.” She’d been afraid to ask the professor about it in front of all those whitecaps in the class. But she remembered wondering if the doctor would have said that if the woman was white? What if she was his daughter? Suddenly she saw the answer: especially then. The answer was yes. If it wasn’t, that staccato white girl down on Avenue A could have squatted at home in Milwaukee, CT or wherever-the-fuck.

  The police, the protests were all part of the same stage. No one had a home here. That was the way it was supposed to be. She was mad at Art for accepting that. She was mad at him, mostly, because she silently insisted upon an essential homelessness. At bottom, she was mad because she was lying to herself. But all of that was far, far ahead; in a way, all of it led her to where she was.

  On her walk to Shame’s apartment, buried in her assessment of date number two, she saw for the first time how she and Art were in denial about almost everything. And how they’d covered up those denials by blaming pieces of each other they’d surgically isolated in order to focus upon. Almost none of it was conscious, she thought. In that moment, she decided, it wasn’t surgical either. Surgery was conscious; this had been a kind of unconsciously agreed-upon mutual mutilation.

  That summer afternoon in 1991, Art, bless his blesséd heart, tried to hold her bandaged hand and she felt all of it getting away from her as the waves of panic turned into motes of flame that strung into lines. The lights lighted up beautiful rounded lines in faces she’d known and faces she knew that she never got to know, faces that never got to know. And she saw the world turn over and all the mirrors began to glow and the heat raged from behind the smoke-blackened glass that hissed when you put your ear near it and, if touched, would have made your hand wish it didn’t have fingers.

  She remembered seeing Art’s mouth moving but she couldn’t recall, probably never heard, a word he said. She smelted this anger into a kind of pain. Then she made that pain into the platform of her reality; the pain was safe, the violence in her remained distant. This worked as long as she could see threats in the distance as they approached. It was how she survived her twenties. She made herself impossible. This impossibility of self made her impermeable to surprise.

  She left Arturo’s house the next morning at 6:00 AM with her mother’s voice singing in her ear: I’m going to lay my head on that lonesome railroad iron. Let the 2:19 train ease my troubled mind. She was surprised to find Manhattan still asleep and the streets to the Port Authority empty as she made her way along the long blocks west. “Somewhere, anywhere, everywhere else,” she’d said to herself at the time.

  “What the hell does all this have to do with date number two?” she thought. Still not really wanting to know, Ndiya asked herself this as she replaced the layers of time and came back from Manhattan through the bus ride through post-gentrified Chicago and returned to her soaked skirt and cool legs in the Sixty-Third Street of the twilight present. Then, before a beat, back to the uptown bus of her memory.

  ■

  The danger signs had been clear on her way to Maurice’s party. The trip back to 1991 had made it worse. But when the mirror started to smoke, Ndiya knew how to stand with her back to the wind. She knew how to survive herself. She’d gotten good at it. “Hell is where the heart is,” she told herself. And she calmly closed her heart’s eyes. She pictured the map and told herself where all this had happened and that, yes, it had happened to someone—but it hadn’t happened to her, not to this her. She pictured a calendar, slowly turned the pages, and confirmed that it wasn’t happening now.

  She kept it together. The goal was to recall things without experiencing them. She couldn’t always do that. But it helped to know the goal. She kept her eyes closed but eased up on the pressure so the tears stayed where they were. She kept her full eyes closed. The way she saw it, things in Chicago and elsewhere in the United States would continue to slosh about, unanchored, and in the end everyone needed it to happen and in the end no one really had any idea what it could mean to them. “Other than the pain,” she thought. “We’re all squatters,” she allowed. “Maybe, finally, that’s what ‘Maybe I Am’ was so enraged about. Let’s just admit it.” It was gentrification, after all, that had brought down The Grave and brought her back to Chicago. “Gentrification had torn down all those projects, it sure as shit wasn’t no squatter’s rights,” she thought. Gentrification, greed, and a good dose of pure sha—that name again.

  She opened her eyes and let the sun pour into her pupils from beneath a gray bank of stratus clouds somewhere out west over Cicero. When her eyes adjusted and her sight returned, she saw a beautiful, perfect, empty beach. The copper, gold, and blue on her eyelids reflected in the window. The sight replaced the city and her pointless and personal analysis of the politics of gentrification. She knew she couldn’t help it; and more importantly she’d learned that the intensity of her reaction to things didn’t often match up well with other people’s views and ambitions. She called that fact “privacy.” So, she went to the beach. The private beach. Her eyelids.

  The high and low dust of the metallic colors on her eyelids had perfectly set themselves off against each other. Even though she had added it last and wished she put it on first but didn’t have time to start over, she saw that the clear-sky-meets-cold-lake of the blue had somehow found its place beneath the bronze and copper dust; the result was the perfect set of illusions. Water and metal, sky and dust, matte and gloss, surface and depth, sunrise and sunset moved over and under and around each other on each eye as she winked at herself—right eye, left eye. Then she blew a kiss at the perfect pain-beach of a face in the window.

  “Pleasure to meet you, my name is Ndiya Grayson,” she whispered. “Happy birthday, Maurice.” She smiled, “Pain-beach, gosh, haven’t been there in forever.” Maybe it had been since Phoenix? “Put the pain in the water and stand on the beach. Wade in when you want. Small victories,” she’d thought. “A little run of those and some luck, I might survive this dinner with the SnapB/l/acklist folks. I might even have some fun. Is that a crime?” She knew she’d asked herself this out loud and she didn’t care, even though somewhere she knew perfectly well that she thought it was a crime.

  As she made her way step by quietly sloshing step east down Sixty-Third Street, on the third and—according to his directions—final block before arriving at Shame’s place, Ndiya approached an alleyway that led between the backs of the buildings facing Eberhart to the west and Rhodes Avenue to the east. Most old-time blocks in Chicago had one. She knew what was down there. Broken pavement pulled up by neighborhood plows, chain-link fences leaning one way and their gates leaning the other, maybe stray dogs, a
n old garage or parking for apartments, maybe a bike thrown down in the middle, trash cans and, starting right about now, she thought, the rats that came with them. She started not to even look. She did. Then she looked again.

  Just off the sidewalk, there was a row of black iron bollards with a thick silver chain hanging between them. From the middle of the chain hung an upside-down orange triangle and centered within it was a black exclamation point outlined in day-glow yellow. Part of the alley was grass. Not grass. It was a manicured lawn with ivy at the edges climbing up the walls on either side. Twenty feet from the sidewalk, a picnic table sat crossways in the middle of what should have been an alley. But this wasn’t an alley.

  Two old men sat on the near bench with their backs to her. Beyond them she could see a basketball court with one hoop. Strings of white-and-blue holiday lights lighted the court area from around the edges and beyond that the far side was a mirror of the nearside complete with two old men facing her from the distant picnic table and Sixty-Fourth Street to the south behind them. Was it a mirror? She looked for her figure on the opposite street but couldn’t decide if she could see her reflection or not. She’d never seen anything like it. She’d seen abandoned lots turned into rock gardens and even broken up into plots for neighbors to grow their greens, turnips, tomatoes and peppers in. But a beautiful grass alley, she thought as she kept walking, and a basketball court for old folks? What had Shame done, lied about his name and his age and taken up in subsidized housing for the aged? She stopped walking. Those hadn’t been old people on the court. Then she did something she never did in unfamiliar territory of any kind. She took a step backward, stopped, and stared directly at what she was looking at. They were young people on the court. Or maybe they weren’t all young but they weren’t old. She saw the boy with the jean jacket and his two associates from down the block sitting against the wall in the grass. She wondered why she’d thought it was for old folks when someone took a shot and the others turned to watch the ball in the air.

  It struck her like it had when she’d gone to Comiskey Park and sat in the bleachers. You saw the pitcher throw, the batter swing, the ball react. But you didn’t hear the crack of the bat for a half a beat or so. And you could hear each word the announcer said several times. She’d gone first with a group of spelling champions from Chicago elementary schools. They were paraded out onto the field while the crowd had recognized “these Chicago youngsters for their hard work and the excellence they’d achieved in spelling.” She could still hear the phrases circle through the stadium like they were surrounded by twelve announcers. She’d never heard the word “youngster.” It sounded to her like some kind of furry pet that ran on a wheel in a glass tank. She looked around to make sure the voice was talking about them. And she didn’t know anything about baseball but she immediately loved the open arena in the night air. The solidified glow of the false daylight fell dim and bright at the same time. The smooth diamond, the precise line between the brown dust and the green grass. And, most of all, she loved the overlapping and askew play of sight and sound laid out in space so she could examine it. This seemed like the whole point of the game to her.

  Inning—another new word—after inning she sat there knowing that the laws were the laws. Sight and sound must behave in this strange way all the time. She knew about thunder and lightning and one-Mississippi, of course. But still she wondered why she’d never been in an arena where you could watch it happen like this in so many ways at once. Who’d hidden this from her? This was what “education” was to mean to her always. There was a rush of discovery followed by an immediate, accompanying, cutting sensation that it had been hidden from her on purpose. The thing whirred in her, a tornado of elation from the discovery and rage at the withholding. Later, she’d wondered if this belly-twisting sensation happened to all the kids she knew. If it had, they’d certainly kept it a secret from each other. She couldn’t remember learning how to do it, but she’d converted the hot twists in her belly into a kind of tutor, a partner with whom she rehearsed all the hidden, secret things she learned. Even when Ndiya found that facts in history or certain characters in books were common knowledge to many people, she retained the feeling that, in fact, she and her twisting partner were acquainted with these things in ways only they could understand. “Hide it from me, from us, we’ll find it and make it into something only we can recognize,” she declared. Staring at the dim-bright distance while the sounds and sights dove and arced, she thought, “If everyone had their own night and night was a fruit and you could split it open when it was ripe,” this was exactly what the inside of her ripe night would be like.

  The basketball game down the designer alley and Comiskey Park and the tornado effect she’d learned to quell enough to hide from everyone but herself roamed through her again. She couldn’t really hear anything from the scene down the alley. She tried to summon up her almanac of ways to “here” and “there” herself and found no familiar cues. The ball didn’t seem to make noise when it bounced. She assumed it bounced but she hadn’t seen anyone bounce the ball. The shot was the first action she’d focused on. The ball hung there and she got the roller coaster–belly feeling she had waiting for the sound of the hit to catch up to her vision of the swing. But unlike the split-open instant inside her ripe-fruit night at Comiskey Park, this thing went on and on and on and on. The ball was like a singer holding an impossibly long note. It hung in the air like a question no one could answer. From the career described by the ball and the rate of its diminishing speed, she sensed the shot would probably make it to the apex and go down the other side. Then again, it might not.

  Three figures sat against the wall. They all focused on one of their outstretched arms. Ndiya couldn’t tell whose arm it was that warranted such scrutiny or why. She looked back and the ball was still slowing down, traveling upward. From the first moments of their first meeting, she’d had this sense that things involving Shame Luther took a long, long time to happen and then they seemed to have happened while they never had actually been happening. Still, this was another level. The other people on the court walked around each other, placed their hands on the back of the person in front of them; those in front seemed to hold their arms out to their sides like wings as they backed up into the ones behind. They all moved in a two-step, four-beat rhythm.

  The players didn’t move nearly as slowly as the ball suspended in the air. Suddenly, one man broke the spell and moved more quickly than the rest. He took off his hat, dropped it on the ground, stomped his foot firmly on top of it and walked off the court to talk to the three sitting against the wall. He gestured easily and slapped the hand of the young man with the beard and the deep-set eyes she’d seen on the street. She thought, “They all move like Sunday morning.” Easy like her uncle Lucky’s voice sounded when he drove her around in his loping ninety-eight, like she remembered watching the trees move from the front porch down in Greenville on a thick summer night full of her great-uncle Clem’s music and the electrified skeletal glow from thunderstorms in the distance. The South. Everyone in the alley laughed at something the woman sitting on the ground said and the basketball player bowed to her and ceremoniously removed the hat he didn’t have on down to his waist and back to his head as he straightened up.

  “Jesus,” Ndiya thought, “they’re all high? All of them? Always were? Lucky, Clem, those splayed-out pecan trees too? Southern thunder is high? Even the ball’s high?” Normally, stopping to look at anything in an unfamiliar neighborhood like this was out of the question. The trick was to stare twenty miles off and always, always, look like you had somewhere to go and not quite enough time to get there. At the same time, you never made a rushed or sudden move. Ndiya realized she’d just broken all the rules at once. She was soaking wet up to her knees, in high heels, starstruck still and staring, blind to everything else, at the slow-motion scene down the alley, a scene no one else on the block seemed to think noteworthy at all. “Here I am,” she thought, “an easy mark, an open wound.�
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  The player went back to the game. He slowed down as he returned to the court, making exaggerated motions with his arms and hips so that it looked like he was wading out into deepening water when he crossed under the lights at the court’s perimeter line. He waded back to his hat and the player dancing in place behind it. He picked up the hat, put it on, and resumed his movements with what, just then, looked like his dance partner in the area just to the right of the hoop.

  As she watched the other players, Ndiya wished she’d paid closer attention to basketball once or twice so she could judge what was going on here. They clapped their soundless hands, rubbed them together and held them out, palms up, at arm’s length so that they looked, from the waist up at least, like they were about to meditate. One knelt down low as if to pray, then untied and retied both his shoestrings. One swayed back and forth, holding on to the pole beneath the hoop. Ndiya thought she saw one kiss the neck of the player in front of him. Another, off to the far left by himself, stood in place watching the ball while his right hand worked its way into his back jeans pocket. He removed a pack of cigarettes while his left hand produced a lighter. The decidedly unathletic gesture made her notice that none of them had on gym clothes of any kind, though a few at least wore sneakers. Then she checked quick to make sure the gym shoes weren’t all the same like the black Nikes of those crazy Comet Hale-Bopp folks who’d followed that comet up out of here a few years ago. Nope.