by Ed Pavlić
■
Fifty yards from Shame’s door, Ndiya said to herself, “Just get it over with.” She held Melvin by the hand while they walked. An instant from the first date at Earlie’s hung in her mind like a portrait. For the rest of that evening they’d talked. They did all the things that couldn’t be avoided. Ndiya watched herself listen while Shame talked around things, trying as she did, to fill space but reveal nothing. The kind of things people say when they first talk. Granted that those conversations don’t usually begin with a ruptured house-arrest bracelet plummeting its way through the sugar bowl and toothpick box and into your date’s lap. But still, that was the kind of conversation they’d had. She hoped it was anyway, because she couldn’t remember a word of it. The first time, then: a bassline like a thumb in her mouth and down her spine, Malik’s damned bracelet, an open triangle in Shame’s face, and that one phrase, “Bic lighter.” All of that and “maybe I am” hadn’t come near the place. Then the fucking battle of Jericho, date number two when her tongue found a notch in the skin over Shame’s third rib and she felt music smooth as a heavy stream of mercury poured over her waist and down her legs. Afterward, she nearly stepped on a seemingly self-sacrificing spider, which she’d murdered with a huge, hardback biography of Miles. Her thought echoed from when she’d first met Shame, when they first shook hands on the porch outside Renée’s party. Her first thought had been, “Whose hand is this?”
Then, at home, the email she sent to Yvette-at-work. Ndiya wrote: “Didn’t make Maurice’s party, regrets. Ran into Shame. Went home with him. Ran into Shame, girl. Never been anywhere like that. Where have I been? Where am I now? Please advise.” She thought about ending the note there but continued: “Told him: it felt like he’d waited his whole life to touch me. When he dropped me back home, he smiled looking down at the ground and said, ‘That was a risky thing to say to me, Ndiya Grayson.’ I didn’t know what to say, I could barely hear him over the vibrations in my legs. Don’t know why I’m telling you? What now, Yvette? What now?” Send.
Ndiya stared at the screen. She could still taste Shame Luther’s salt when she suddenly regretted writing anything to Yvette. Open confession wasn’t her style at all. It seemed so strange to confide things to someone before she’d really confided them to herself. She was just about to click the screen to reread her sent message again and ease her mind when a new message appeared. There was the sender’s name in her box. She thought, “Even Yvette can’t be this quick.” The new message wasn’t from Yvette. For an instant she looked at the words in the inbox and it was if she knew no one by that name. She blinked hard and looked again at the sender’s name: Ndiya Grayson.
The message Ndiya had replied to had been sent by Yvette to the SnapB/l/acklist, not to her. So, her reply had been to—there it was. Date number one might have been a hot, sweet, last bite of oatmeal. No one knew. Date number two wasn’t supposed to be a date at all, turned out hotter and sweeter than number one. And now everyone knew. Ndiya’s forehead touched down on the keys. “When a fever breaks,” she thought, “it’s like being hit with a bucket from a cool mountain stream. Forget ‘maybe I am’ and the ABP. Here she is everyone: Ndiya Grayson has come back home.”
■
Ndiya and Melvin stood on the steps. This was, indeed, date number three, which everyone but her seemed to know about. Sixty-three twenty-nine in chipped, cursive gold script painted across the top of the glass double doors. She looked at her reflection, soaked skirt, foaming pumps and all. As she reached for the bell she whispered to the window,
–No there or maybe about it, here I am, both of us.
She smiled at Melvin with his goggles on his forehead. He held her hand and pulled it in front of his face. She thought they looked like they’d been playing together in the deep, hydrant-puddle of twilight. Ndiya whispered to the glass,
–Tsunami it is. But he’s going to have to tell me his real name.
She pushed the doorbell with her index finger and they heard nothing. After a moment Melvin said,
–It’s never locked. I think we should go on up.
BOOK TWO: STOLEN HANDS
One day you’ll realize we’re not strangers.
—CHAKA KHAN
He had work and plenty of it. By some measure, at least two jobs. Probably four and maybe more than that. Work was about all he had and that’s how he’d wanted it. And money, he’d saved ten years of wages. Good wages. By the summer we’re talking about, the summer that had waited almost until it was over to begin, when he met a woman named Ndiya Grayson, Shame Luther had steady work during the day around Chicago. The small construction company he worked for as a laborer had found a way to downsize its scale and insinuate its specialty into a wide range of factories and mills in Chicago’s rapidly changing—meaning quickly evaporating—industrial sector. So he had that. That particular summer, the job repairing the acid tanks at Joycelan Steel looked like at least a few months’ worth. Steady, if irregular, work. The mill was operating at as near as possible to full capacity during the repair. So the schedule fluctuated from week to week: four days on, three days off; seven days on, no days off; three and four; five and two; and so on. This was the way it was in the twenty-first century. The days of long jobs on newly constructed factories were, as far as he’d seen, over in Chicago. He’d spent ten years of his life chasing that kind of work through the South and Southwest until it crossed the border and disappeared into Mexico, the Philippines, Vietnam, or elsewhere. Ten years living on out-of-town expense checks, banking his wages. He’d worked out of his twenties and into his thirties: ten years in orbit. Then back to Chicago to work as he would or wouldn’t in the city. So, that was one job, which he’d decided would be a rhythm around Chicago, or nothing. That was all he wanted, all it made any sense to want.
He had a job as house piano to the alley cats in “the green zone” behind 6329. An hour of twilight, a few nights per week. That paid whatever rent he’d otherwise have owed Junior. That wasn’t exactly true, but that’s all he knew at the time. He had the deal with neighborhood parents, that is, the mothers, to cook dinner weekdays for an ever-fluctuating rack of kids. That didn’t pay anything in cash or otherwise, a fact that the mothers were still trying to figure out. In fact, far from charging, Shame regularly loaned the mothers and their families money. Then, after he’d taken the dare, he had the new job at the Cat Eye across from Earlie’s Café on North Broadway. He played Wednesday nights, one hundred dollars for three twenty-minute sets. He’d insisted only that it be Wednesday. The piano a job? Work? Not hardly and, he thought, it wouldn’t last whatever it was. It didn’t matter. He didn’t need the hundred dollars. He did it for the simple dare of it. And that wasn’t exactly true either.
Soon he found another reason to play at the Cat Eye. After the first two weeks, he decided he should sit down at 6329 and plan out three sets’ worth of music. Not a play list—he didn’t play “songs”—but at least a set of chords or basic motifs to concentrate on during each of the twenty-minute windows. He couldn’t read or write music but he could, so he thought, at least make a plan. The time went by in a flash. It was over almost before he’d started. Planning a few things out seemed simple enough. He couldn’t do it. When he tried to keep conscious track of the music all hell broke loose: ideas spiraled from the chords and chords from the ideas until he was paralyzed and dizzy. More than that, he found he couldn’t remember anything at all about the previous six sets’ worth of music he’d been told that he had played at the club. The sets were empty windows in his memory.
He remembered the surroundings and conversations going on around him and a few loosely involving him between sets. He remembered people telling him that they liked the music. He remembered that there were more people there on week two than the first week. But the time at the keys was perfectly—almost too perfectly—gone. At this particular time in his life, recently returned to the city, the city that for him had been rebuilt around the one grave in his life, my grave, h
e’d have paid a hundred dollars for a blank hour, an hour beyond biography and its endless ventriloquisms. Of course, that hour was far from blank, but he didn’t know that either.
So those were the jobs: Joycelan Steel, the alley music, the kids, and the Cat Eye. When, rarely, he thought about it, it seemed like a lot. It seemed like he should be a busy man. He wasn’t. Or maybe he was, but he never felt like what he heard people call busy at all. He never felt like he was in a hurry. Mostly, he felt like something he couldn’t see was watching him take apart and reassemble his life.
■
South Rhodes Avenue. The building is three floors, two apartments on each floor. Red brick. Shame lived on the third floor next to a retired man called Luther B. People in Chicago know the neighborhood as Woodlawn. People in Woodlawn know it as the Washington Park Subdivision, which is where the old Washington Park Race Track once stood. People in Washington Park know the first three of the five buildings (6309, 6319, 6329, 6339, and 6349) south of Sixty-Third Street and before the vacant lot on the west side (yes, on your right walking toward Sixty-Fourth Street) of Rhodes Avenue as Juniorville. Sixty-three twenty-nine had been built in the 1950s when that particular piece of the ghetto had been razed and rebuilt to house old black people who weren’t allowed into the new subsidized and segregated “retirement” housing in nearby Hyde Park. The building had an elevator which quickly went out of service if it ever, in reality, made it into service. When the neighborhood hit its low point in the mid-1980s, the hydraulics, the stainless post, even the elevator carriage itself had been either sold, stolen, or both. It didn’t matter much to the old folks. Most had either died or otherwise left the building and or the block. All had vacated the top floor that was dangerously inconvenient most of the year and deadly in the summer heat.
A market abhors a vacuum. Ad hoc drug trade moved in and made a bad thing worse. In the late 1980s, Junior came up the ranks in the Black Swoosh Syndicate that replaced the demise of Jeff Fort’s El Rukn empire. The BSS sold franchises. Junior took a lease on the north part of the block. He gutted and rebuilt the buildings. Then, inexplicably, he moved other aged residents back into the buildings. Many of these people were retired police. Among other things, he’d decided to move the oldest residents into first-floor apartments and give up on the idea of an elevator altogether. He closed off the shaft and left the space empty. Instead of security cameras, payments to the police, and bars on the windows, Junior and his minions circulated an invitation to any thief who thought he could rob residents or burglarize residences in Junior’s three buildings and live to fence the proceeds. As a kind of punctuation in the warning, the locks had been conspicuously removed from the front doors of his buildings.
Junior didn’t pay the police because he thought he didn’t have to and so did the police. A series of half-truths spliced with incontrovertible facts no one could figure out how he knew signaled that something was up. Finally, by a few key bold and imaginative leaps, which had to be real because they made no sense, he’d convinced everyone in Cook County Detention that he knew and could prove valuable things about powerful people. The formal precision and logic of Junior’s mix of information and isolation alone could have provoked serious doubt but the people he needed to convince were very narrow-minded realists; they didn’t give a shit about form. Their language was a grammar of powerful and powerless, the visible and the invisible. Junior’s brain contained a portfolio of documented relationships between very visible, officially powerful people (police commissioners, district attorneys, members of the Mayor’s office) and other very powerful, officially invisible ones. He had a clear chart of how the visible power of the official ones offered an official invisibility to the interests and operations of the others.
When he came out of Detention, Junior became a charter member of the latter group at an opportune time. Which brings up two reasons that I’m the one telling this story: 1) my family was at the center of the officially invisible web of power on the South Side; 2) the worker-piano player now known as Shame Luther was my best friend. We were best friends, that is, until the day I died and he split and stayed split. I’d say he split town, left Chicago, but the split was far deeper than geography. I died a week before my twenty-fifth birthday. Shame was actually in Los Angeles on a job, the last day of a job to be precise. We’d had very specific plans for my birthday and thereafter.
So all the splitting started there. The point is he never came back to Chicago. Because we’d been inseparable for years, Shame’s prolonged absence raised a few invisibly powerful eyebrows. About ten years later, when Junior heard that Shame had come back to Chicago, the gears of our present story had locked teeth. All they needed was one of those everyday accidents in life—the kind often blamed on form or on the logic of fiction—to set it in motion. Meanwhile, Shame had returned to the city all but consciously guarded against knowing anything about the gears or the story. He’d returned as he had from an isolation that masked his outrage about being alive at all. So, in other words, he was an accident waiting—maybe begging—to happen.
During his first weeks living there, Shame had extended the bedroom in his apartment. He’d taken out the wall and added joists, subfloor, and flooring to make an alcove where the elevator shaft had been. It was a perfect place to put the bed. He’d added what he called a wall of light in the wall facing the street across the vacant lot to the south. This was useful in walls that couldn’t support a real window of any meaningful size. Instead of a window, he rebuilt one alcove wall using frosted glass blocks to allow light in without taking down the building and without putting his bed on display to everyone in the street. He added a pattern of clear glass block in the wall as well. This became Shame’s wall of light on the third floor of 6329. The clear blocks were perfectly transparent but telescoped objects indirectly in the viewer’s sightline by several orders of magnitude. The effect was startling, and Shame thought the volatile but precise optics had to be an accident incidental to the rigor of the clear glass blocks’ integrity as weight-bearing building material. In other words, the view was weird and it wasn’t the point. In ways similar to Junior but to drastically different effect, Shame had a knack for fixating on details others passed by. Junior used this to accrue power over people’s blindnesses and fears. Shame did the opposite. He rode those fixations; often this made him oblivious to his own blindnesses and fears.
Nonetheless, in this case the effect of the glass blocks turned out to be crucial for Shame. In whatever direction he looked, focused by one of the clear blocks, the thing just to the top right of his focus was enlarged as if seen through a telescope while everything else appeared to slide down a convex dome out of sight. When the angle of vision shifted, the dome revolved. Images from the street in front of the building slid upward toward and downward away from the point of intended focus as if the world rode on an off-center carousel. So Shame thought he had the best view in the city from his bed facing east across Rhodes Avenue.
■
Another thing Shame had at 6329 was a roommate that he was unsure about. The roommate made him self-conscious about guests, especially ones who threatened to invite themselves to stay the night. In late April, he began to wake up with spots on his ankles. One, maybe two per month. He’d moved in and immediately used steel wool, excess expansion rope he took from the job, and a dozen tubes of construction foam and caulk to close cracks along walls and inside closets. The roommate situation wasn’t about mice or rats, that he knew. The first spot on his ankle was thick in the center, almost as if a tiny marble had been placed under his skin. It itched and stung a little when he sprayed Benadryl onto it. Over the next week, the thick dot disappeared as a halo or a kind of atoll appeared around it. The marble had become an island on his skin an inch or an inch and a half in diameter. Shame decided that he had a large spider living with him who visited him in the night. Over the summer the bites moved up his body.
For ten years he’d lived on the road with the company’s trave
ling crew. He’d lived intensely alone, worked at least six days a week, studied after work and on his half-day off in his endless series of cheap motel rooms. On his half-days off he almost never talked to anyone. Ten years. Then, upon his return to the city, his first company had been a spider he’d never seen.
He’d come off the road last year and taken up Junior on his offer. He didn’t know how Junior knew he’d come back or why he’d offer him a place to stay in exchange for “services to be named later.” Upon returning to Chicago, Shame had found that, without his noticing, all of his senses had begun to work basically like the glass blocks he’d installed in the bedroom wall. Maybe it was only like this in Chicago? He didn’t know. He’d had enough of the road and didn’t plan on leaving town again. He didn’t know what his life would be about. He meant to figure that out here. As soon as he’d returned, he noticed things and, even more, people would approach into magnified focus and bend out of range in a rhythm that changed constantly but didn’t seem to alter in response to anything he could determine or control. On the job, no problem. Everthing fit in place. Off the job, things slipped and slid. Since moving into Junior’s building, the intensity of his perceptual exile was easing up bit by bit at Earlie’s.
The first step had been Earlie’s Café all the way up on North Broadway. He’d heard an interview with the manager who’d said they opened the place “because we love music.” Shame thought that was a place to start. He’d begun to go there after getting off work and cleaning himself up. Shame was clearheaded at work. But everything else he looked at appeared to him as if it was behind thick aquarium glass. He’d allowed people—he guessed they were people—to talk to him at the bar: Lester, Than-ha, JiLisa, Wayne, Reg, Karmen, the four Kims, and maybe a few others. He trained himself to sit still and listen while their faces slid in and around folding over on themselves. For weeks he watched people talk.
