Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  Shame came back into the kitchen just as the song was fading out. Ndiya stood with her two fingers wrapped in the dishtowel, still inside the first wineglass. Her mind was a score of the little boy’s voice in the alley of her memory. Over and over she heard him: “He wasn’t gonna die off a trippin’ off a no piece a ice. Off a trippin’ off a … off a trippin’ off a no … he wasn’t gonna die off a trippin’ off a no piece a ice … no piece a ice. He wasn’t gonna die off a trippin’ off a no piece a ice.” Then she heard again how Niecy’s song made it so you couldn’t tell the difference between the word “me” and the word “free.”

  Just then it struck her with a new shock that her favorite song had absolutely nothing to do with what it said it was singing about, that songs never sing what they say. If they did we wouldn’t need songs. And singers wouldn’t exist.

  Niecy’s song, like all songs, was simply a way of making a certain sound. And in that sound Ndiya heard things that were at once singular and anonymous. It was both curse and blessing, prayer and oath. The song was a thin veil of words dropped in front of a speechless howl. But which was which? Was the curse anonymous, or did it have a name? And the blessing? The prayer? The howl? The song was over and Ndiya heard the boy’s voice from her memory like it had been etched in bone on the inside of her skull. “My skull?” she thought. Curse or blessing? “Thought?” “Who the hell put that sound in that boy’s head? What brought about that voice? What happened to the anonymous perfection of his sound? Where are those boys now?” She heard Niecy’s song again:

  –And that there-ere’s nothing too good for us …

  She felt Shame behind her. Ndiya, trains in her arms, bullets for eyes, pendulum in her pulse, stuttered,

  –That’s an old song.

  –I heard it again a few days ago and it reminded me of you. I don’t listen to music in here much anymore. I can’t really hear it right.

  Ndiya felt like someone was wringing out a soaked rag inside her belly.

  –What if I want to go?

  –I’ll shoot you home like before. No troubles. Just say so.

  She winced, invisibly. Shame left the room. The music changed. Instrumental music. A drummer, a violin, and a string instrument Ndiya didn’t really recognize. It wasn’t a guitar, wasn’t American. She knew that. She allowed herself until Shame came back in the kitchen to decide whether to go or stay. Which is it, she thought, “free” or “me”? She turned around to put up the glass and heard him step back into the room behind her.

  ■

  They fell on his bed about eleven. Music playing in the next room. Music he couldn’t really hear. Music she said she didn’t know. They brushed the books off the bed onto the floor. The books hit the wood and sounded like a waterfall applauding itself with heavy gloves on. His hands lost songs on her skin. Under her shirt. His shirt. And a light tug and her body a rising S of movement and then no shirt. The cursive M of her shoulders leans into his view, cuts the room. His left hand an eight-fingered chord on keys in the other room. Keys he can’t name. His right hand almost still. She stares past him. He holds on to his jeans with a finger in the belt loop and she slips up out of them, invisible, leg-by-leg appearing back under his hand.

  And as she arches up, to the side, his touch runs down the way gravity wants. Touch like beads of the heaviest liquid collects at the low spot of her. She breathes even and long, her breath an invisible glove on his hand.

  The streetlight broken by the pattern of glass blocks in the wall. The blanket thrown back, the shadow of an unmade chessboard covers them both. The empty elevator shaft beneath the floor. An ambulance passes in the street followed by a police car. The red flash from eye to eye, a blue riot along her neck, over her hip and across the floor.

  –Tell me your name, Shame.

  –You just said it.

  –You know what I mean.

  Her belly a downward curve and his right hand on along—

  –Remember you said I’d waited my life for this?

  –I never said that.

  –You know what I mean.

  By measures that don’t exist, his fingers disappear and her voice changes back into breath on his hand. Her voice moves like smoke through his fingers. He feels her thumb pause into a question on two smooth scars high on his shoulder. One finger back and forth between, circles in the two pools, one twice the size of the other, where the acid had dripped on his neck. Each touch makes the numb pools boil. It’s as if the liquid escapes the pools. Pain runs down his arms into his hands. Acid in her fingers, and a trace of fresh ginger.

  –Your breath tastes like smoke.

  –It’s the tar.

  –Your skin tastes like dust and salt.

  –It’s the mill in my sweat.

  –You showered.

  –It’s in there beneath the skin.

  A sharp sound. A loud crack shoots through the room. Ndiya tenses up and draws back.

  –Shhh. Easy. It’s Luther B next door, teeing off.

  –On who?

  –He golfs in there. It’s a late start, probably won’t be more than three holes.

  She laughs and Shame pushes himself until their hips meet. She feels a swell lift her, the wave moves and passes her off down its back. Another, and as she rises she grips his neck tight, her fingers press into Shame’s acid wounds on the way down. He winces at the touch, sucking breath through his teeth with his mouth closed. She thinks it’s pleasure. Three more quick cracks next door.

  –That’s the wedge. First hole, par three.

  –What?

  –Luther B. Tee shot probably landed between the cushions in the couch. The bunker.

  They both laugh.

  He pulls back and rises up. She closes in front of him. He stays there, tangent.

  –You winking at me?

  –Oh, shhhh-it—

  Her hand to his thigh, pulls him. Their hips back together and she holds on, eyes shut. He tries to draw back but she holds him down inside her eyes. Her eyes are already shut, but he watches her try to shut them more. Then more. Shut eyes shut again. Her other arm pulls him down and her face vanishes from his view. Someone’s shaking and at first he can’t tell who it is. There’s a loud crack and he almost ducks; Luther B’s second tee shot.

  And the tremor rises. Ndiya holds him by the thigh and around his back. He’s so still she can feel the bed swing at the end of a long wire. She feels the ceiling holding back the sky. Something heavy arcs past just above his back. The shaking leaves the surface and he feels a vibration in his chest. Neither of them move but he feels the tremor in the subtle, double grip and give of her pulse. Grip-grip, give. A bottle breaks, a lamp or something tips over and they hear Luther B next door:

  –Sit, dammit. Sit!

  No one moves, no one pause. The vibration continues. They’re beyond where they were. Shame begins to feel that this is not intimate, isn’t about them. He wonders if it involves him at all. Or her. He can feel her move again but when he draws up she’s there. She’s still. Eyes closed, chin up and to the side. He moves in that underwater weight, that strong slowness that people can suddenly, without warning, become to each other. That brief, focused endlessness. He sees her through a dark, liquid clarity where pressure closes vision down into a focus that’s also blindness. She feels to him like a current has flashed into motion, like still water he’d waded into come alive. A slow, strong wind. Somehow he knows it’s not private; they’re not alone. This is nothing intimate. They’re barely here at all. He feels the tremor pass beneath their bodies and he knows it’s her, not hers as much as something she belongs to.

  He feels Ndiya Grayson shaking inside. She moves without moving beneath him, around him. And she’s elsewhere. Anywhere. She’s anywhere and he’s everywhere else. There’s a sudden, universal slowness. The river of passion Shame has put his body near grows wider, wide enough that the narrow channel of pleasure disappears. Then a risen depth announces its pain. Ndiya’s pores open. The room turns cold and
he knows that this is pain, this body beneath him, whatever swings above him, an anguish nowhere near him. A vein of something that’s nowhere near anyone. It’s right beneath the palm of his hand. This is something you can’t get near and can’t see from a distance. Yes, you. If you come close to this, he feels, you’re in danger. Back away and you’re lost.

  –Jesus.

  –Shsssssshss.

  –Come on, girl.

  No one moves, no one pauses. Her pulse shifts his vision toward her. He can feel himself approach and hears the quick upsweep of her voice—

  –Don’t. Don’t.

  –OK.

  Then nothing. He tries to move away and catch her eyes, and her arms close down on his back. Sweat floods the bed, more like a cold bucket of water than sweat. A broken fever. And more. He doesn’t move; neither does she. The sweat pours between them, runs down his arm onto the sheet. He tastes it from behind her ear and tastes it again to make sure it’s sweat not water. Not fire. Or blood. It’s sweat. Ndiya, mouth closed, begins to hum m’s into his neck. Holding on. No one move. The tremor doesn’t stop. It dives again beyond them both. He can feel her pulse around him, a half beat behind her heart. Grip-give, give. Then she begins to move again. She says,

  –Shame, I’m not leaving.

  –Yes, you should stay.

  –I mean I’m not leaving.

  –Stay. OK. Don’t go.

  –Shssshs. Not going. Not leaving.

  –So come on.

  They’re both over. Ndiya looks at him and it’s like when you drive up a mountain and then look back, down on the impossible ribbon of road, the route you’d come. There’s always a thin thread of a stream headed somewhere, on its way elsewhere. A vein of something clear and cold that never noticed you at all. He leans over and she leans along with him. They lie on their sides, her leg draws up into the number 4 laid down on its back with his. Under his ear, she whispers,

  –God, I love this song.

  A song she doesn’t know. A song he can’t hear.

  BOOK THREE: INFLATION

  Shine like diamond ice.

  —JOYCE SIMS

  541 East Sixty-Third Street. Inflation was a lounge, one of dozens on the South Side. Lounge meant fifty customers in two and a half shifts. Inflation opened at noon and closed at 2:00 a.m. when the back room, along with its card table, opened. There were eight stools along the bar on the right of the lounge. Three tables for two placed in the middle and six booths for four, maybe five, on the left. A hall at the end of the bar led to restrooms, a storeroom, and a back door to the alley behind the building. Relic from a bygone age, an upright piano, set diagonal to make room for a jukebox, sat at the back wall along the left.

  That’s where Junior Keith was headed Saturday night at nine o’clock when he left his two-bedroom condo at Seventy-Third Street and South Shore Drive. He blew a glow-blue kiss goodbye to Lexi, logged out of the chat room, and grabbed his coat. He glanced back before the screen blinked to aquarium gold and angelfish began to float through the room. Alexis hadn’t moved. She stood behind the chair in a floor-length emerald robe as if Junior was still seated there. The screen beamed with the familiar colors of the Erotic Neighbor log-in page.

  Member Name: ______________

  Password: ______________

  Junior closed the front door, texted P. W., who was surely circling nearby, and doubled back to the rear of the building to wait for P. W. to show up and for the Lexi buzz to wear off.

  Lexi was Junior’s online girl. As far as he knew, she lived in Miami. He considered her the perfect woman. They’d never met. She was bisexual, confident, outspoken, and all about business. He texted a message to Alexis and Valerie upstairs: he would be back about two. The snow had begun to fall. It quieted the night. He heard the briiiing of his text light up Val’s phone upstairs.

  The debate this evening in the EN chatroom had been as to whether, no matter what, by its nature, sexual desire was androgynous. And so, argued Junior, when you’re hot enough, you’re not really either a man or a woman. You became pure person in a way so you could feel the fork in the road between the sexes. Junior concluded that eroticism was really a matter of how far you could go back on the single road before the fork, that is, how long one could stand it, the road upward, until you pass over the top and return to the present, half person that we’d all been condemned to be in the world of the sleepwalking. Junior hit submit and waited. He thought his post would get a few woke and up out the woodpile. Right he was.

  Strictly Soul: Not man or a woman? You best stay in your lane. When I’m ready to go, the kid’s ALL MAN. Bet that.

  Juniphyre: Touchy touchy now, S. S. Come to tell me that you never felt a woman’s shimmy-shimmy staring at a man, another man in your brain. You must know that you’re never alone when you’re loving the one you’re with. Never. Otherwise, you’d never know you were there.

  Strictly Soul: Man, what?

  Junior had thought to himself, “This is too easy.” He typed: Well, then. Do you like sex?

  Strictly Soul: I gets mine.

  Juniphyre: And it feels good to you?

  Strictly Soul: All night long.

  Juniphyre: And so you want more for yourself?

  Strictly Soul: Can’t stop, won’t stop.

  Juniphyre: By what you’re saying, then, S. S., you’re, as you wrote, “ALL MAN,” and you want more of what you feel when you’re with a woman. So think about this. You don’t just want her, you want you with her. So you, in fact, at least in part—which is the closest part—want a man. Yourself. The experience of yourself; ’cause that’s what you feel. You never really feel her at all. If you think about it, all you really feel is a man, you, feeling her. You are the one you love when you love the one you’re with. And if you can’t be with that—

  Strictly Soul: You must be crazy.

  No Man’s Hand broke in: Strictly Soul. I think he’s got you here. Take a moment to think about it. What do you have to lose? Intellectual virginity? Emotional adolescence? Love thyself, brotherman. For only then can you live—

  Juniphyre: I suggest you reread what I wrote above. Maybe reread it twice. And then continue here: So if you like sex, and you are a man (and exactly to the degree that you think you’re “ALL MAN”) the only way to stay heterosexual at all is to become, at least, part woman when you feel your own pleasure. Because, if you stay all-man while feeling yourself, a man, I don’t care how many women you conjure up and try to put between you and yourself, well, I think you can see where this leads. In fact, the only way to retain any contact with the false myth of the strictly “heterosexual” is to accept the basic androgyny of your desire.

  No Man’s Hand: I think what J’s getting at is that you can’t be with anyone else as long as you’re repelled by yourself. May I ask how you feel when you see another man nude?

  Strictly Soul: You better hope I don’t see you in life, in the world.

  Juniphyre: No Man’s Hand doesn’t mean any harm, S. S. Easy, now. Such words? May I ask, then, simply, seriously, what are the odds that out of all the men in the world, you, Mssr. S. S., are the only man you’re not repelled by? Long odds. Long odds, wild repressions, and threats made in words. Not what our people died for! Think about it. Singing off. In sister-brotherhood.

  Junior rehearsed the checkmate paradox in his evening’s discussion with the EN community. He heard the Range Rover enter the alley over the snow bank. During the winter, he paid the city’s plow driver to keep a deep snow bank at both entrances to the alley to minimize traffic behind his building. It was still early, but the plows had already been out.

  Text from Valerie: wait up. am dressed. coming w/you.

  Junior Keith had two older sisters and one younger brother. His sisters were in prison for assault and armed robbery. His little brother was in college in Evanston. He himself was in business: pharmaceutical heroin out of the UK, sent through Nigeria. The tabs came wrapped in plaster casts and splints: arms, wrists, an occ
asional ankle. A full leg cast could be laced with enough doses to supply Junior’s clients for six months. Junior employed a set of wayward but functional, clean-cut, suburban addicts as couriers to bring the magic home.

  Junior called them import specialists and marketing associates.

  P. W. pulled through the untouched carpet of new snow in the alley, leaving two ruts behind the Range Rover. Before the car reached the back steps of the building, Junior could hear the bass and a long-held, high note from a woman’s voice. He opened the door and Joyce Sims’s Come into my life, I’ve got … spilled out into a triangle of light on the snow below the door. With a thumb on the left side of the wheel, P. W. turned the volume down. He knew all about Junior’s objections to loud music. Junior climbed into the passenger seat.

  –Hold up, Val said she’s coming.

  –What’ve you been into?

  –The usual—enlightening the masses. Taking it to them.

  –Show you right.

  –How about you?

  –Same as you, a discussion with our neighbors to the south, Bliss 70s. No pressure. I assured them that that wasn’t our work in the dumpster over on Cottage Grove. I told them if it was our work, they wouldn’t have to ask.

  –That’s right. “Don’t ever wonder.” And our line in the sand?

  –Good for another day.

  Without turning his head, Junior watched P. W.’s wide, freckled face under his crushed suede driver’s cap. A light from the building’s rooftop poured through the windshield and sunroof. The music was low enough so the men tracked the intermittent pace of the wipers and the way the flakes dissolved into granular liquid spots when they hit the warmth of the glass. Each flake fell on the glass and boiled itself clear. Junior watched P. W. watch the liquid from the separate flakes find each other. Just when there was enough for a pool of drops to run like a rumor down the glass, the shadow of the wiper swept across P. W.’s face. Ms. Sims’s song faded out, the iPod shuffled and a snare drum and guitar were followed into the air by an organ. Junior leaned back in his seat as a voice sang, When I give my love, this time, and Valerie came down the steps in black jeans, high brown boots and an open silver lynx coat almost long enough to touch the deepening snow she stepped into. Valerie opened the back door. She got in where she normally sat, in back of the driver.