Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  –Where—Ohh, this my song. Where we going?

  P. W. and Junior together:

  –Inflation.

  –That old place? What for? And why so close to the block?

  Junior turned to her in the back seat. As always, her hair was pulled back tightly into a ponytail. Snowflakes in her hair glowed in the light from the sunroof as they disappeared into the warm, leather-scented air. Looking past him at her reflection in the rearview mirror, Valerie did that beautiful, getting-ready-to-go-near-my-eye-without-disturbing-mascara thing with her mouth. She removed a large, single flake from her eyelid with her left ring finger and looked back into Junior’s eyes. Her smile flipped her face open like a freshly polished pocket watch.

  Junior: Word is, the place is changed.

  Valerie: How so?

  P. W.: That’s what we’re going to find out. Junior:

  A little recon.

  Valerie nodded to her reflection in the side window, the distant star of a nickel .38 steady in each eye.

  ■

  Ndiya stood at the window with her coat on. She felt the cold air on her fingertips as they tapped the wooden sill. She watched the street beneath the swirl of snow going past the streetlight. A snowless, black Range Rover rolled by, the only car that passed in the minutes she’d been standing there. A glimpse of a woman’s hair, something silver shining as if under a spotlight, flashed up to her through the sunroof as the car passed below. A blizzard in November? She twisted the bracket and lifted the window. She leaned and blew a deep breath out the window. The cloud blew back past her face and disappeared into Shame’s living room. The cold fit like a custom mask of clear ice, the snow zazzled in the street. The warmth from her breath felt like the features of her face vanishing into the open collar of her shirt.

  The phone buzzed in her coat pocket. She held it up. It was Cass.

  –Hey, Cass.

  –He coming?

  –I’m coming down there right now. He said he’d be there by nine.

  –Set starts at eight thirty.

  – … You know he says it’s not a set. That people shouldn’t be there for a “show.”

  –Right, whatever. He’s coming though?

  – …

  –Well, where is he now?

  –He took a walk. You know this isn’t my job, Cass.

  –Well, you set it up. Now, all kind of people showing up down here. Don’t know most of them. Doesn’t even look like my place!

  –Well, you don’t have a problem making money, do you?

  –Look, there’s money and then there’s money, you know?

  –I’ll see you in a few.

  ■

  Junior sat in the passenger seat. Ms. Hyman’s voice threaded needles through the speakers. P. W. guided the Rover through the heavy snow. The ruts deepened. The streets narrowed to one set of tracks. The parked cars were soon to be snowbound. It was the beginning of an early winter. Bikes chained to signposts would disappear into snowbanks and reappear in April, bent into hieroglyphs. Bodies recovered along the train tracks or mummified in abandoned basements and rooftops. Snow provided cover for all kinds of invisible action.

  Junior’s life was a capsule. He was an accident that forced ever more purposeful behavior, which caused what many people thought were mystical results. He was nine when he was sent away from his grandmother for the first of his crimes. To Junior’s mind the first one was the only crime. He considered nothing he’d done, or even seen, since his years in detention illegal. In fact, he’d almost done away with the category altogether. “Illegal,” he thought, the word described a realm of behavior where one did things like stop at an intersection because a light said to do so. If illegal didn’t mean that, it didn’t mean anything. Not to him. He thought his one and only crime involved only looking. The crime was that he’d really done nothing, he’d just seen. Only that. He hadn’t even been seen.

  He could still feel his childhood, criminal attention crawl in him. The way what he’d seen had found a crack in him and blew through it like some kind of winter wind tunnel. That narrow passage flayed open under his skin. He’d been immobilized by what he’d seen. He returned for three nights to watch, frozen still, on fire, perfectly still except for the motion of what he witnessed being done to that girl. He knew now that that kind of attention to anything was criminal. One had to move, had to make anything seen see you back. As long as what you watched watched you back, no crime was really possible. He thought this through slowly, used his whole body. Curving his arms into commas, parentheses, slashing a karate hand for dashes. That was his crime, only seeing. That was his only crime. The only other crime possible after that would be to say anything about what he knew to anyone. So it was. One crime: he’d only seen, watched only with his eyes. Doing that, he thought, meant he’d already been in prison.

  Since detention Junior had a concrete awareness of the sky of accidents called “on purpose,” and the certified deliveries often mistaken for accidents. “Unbelievable,” he heard people say. Criminal behavior, he’d learned, is about following rules; following rules inevitably made a person imprecise. After he had been made imprecise by rules, the rest might as well be fate. So what people called unbelievable was to him inevitable. What he’d seen done to that girl, not much older than he was at the time, in the abandoned elevator of The Grave had blinded him to the operation of any single force. There was the force holding the elevator between floors in the dead wing of the building. There was the pull of the weight straight down the shaft to the center of the Earth. He watched from above through the crack between the doors from the eleventh floor. There was the blurry pine scent of smoke and the tight laughter of needles scattered on the floor. There was the stained chair the girl was tied to. He remembered the metal wind in his brain and slow-motion lightning in his arms and legs when he watched from above what the boys did with her. As always, Junior felt a pulse of that storm in his body tonight as the wipers plowed the snow into a perfectly straight reef at the bottom of the windshield. As always, he kept that pulse locked up, closely guarded in the hole. At his side, his fingers drummed a rhythm of real accidents on the smooth brown leather of the seat.

  At the hearing that put them all away, he’d observed the city lawyers split things into single pieces. Lies. They took all those forces apart and handed the boys their “individual” lives according to what he’d heard called “purposeful behavior,” “malice,” and “forethought.” It was Greek to him then; it was clear to him now. Plural lines to singular effect, or vice versa. That lie was the law. It was the only law. He didn’t care what all those people said around him. He knew that his crime was stillness, a detached attention. He’d been invisible to motion, moved by what he saw without moving, seen without being seen. He knew he didn’t have any forethought or malice. But he knew that was wrong. If anything, he thought, now, “malice” had seen him coming from a long way off. In fact, plenty ’fore-had-thought of him long before he was born. At the time what the lawyers said happened had happened, he was nine years old.

  Far as he knew, the girl lived. He forgot the name. She was shipped out of the city by sponsors and private schools. Some said she was lost, others said she’d been saved. Years later, there’d been a story about the girl, grown, on her way to Harvard. All this, he imagined now, after she’d survived a razor-spiral of detox and who knows what else. Back then it was a high-profile case. The publicity brought calls that the buildings be emptied and demolished. There was a series of spectacular cases over the years, all according to the law: babies in the trash incinerator, bodies thrown from rooftops, police shot by teenage snipers. Below all that proceeded the slow grind of anonymous destruction. And, every election, ten thousand votes delivered to the Democrats’ safe. None of these crimes brought about the closing of the buildings. Meanwhile, Junior knew, the real crimes were continual and all of them were legal. Everyone was guilty. Finally, when it did happen, when those buildings did come down, it seemed like there wasn’t a
reason anymore to do it at all. The law had its reason.

  Junior’s business was small and secure. He knew better. But P. W. and his young corporals went ahead anyway as if tomorrow was on homemade ice. Diamond ice. Junior figured it was no different from how he’d read that Columbus had lied to his crew about the basic facts of their journey. Junior had studied captains: Ahab, Kirk, Columbus. He saw their mistakes. Ahab got caught up. It was too personal for Kirk. Columbus believed. Junior’s aim was to keep things simple so that the law could be used precisely by him. The law must be led; only a fool followed the law. He’d learned that much in court, in a pre-trial hearing for a trial that never happened, when he was ten years old. He believed in clear poverty, and clean dope sold to people, and sold by people, by people who were loved by people, who had a lot to lose. Somehow an invisible weight swinging from the necks of people with things to lose made their behavior easy to predict; it was as if no matter what random way they might decide to go, the weight swung them in a direction of its own. They couldn’t help it; that meant Junior could use it. Junior’s life was remarkably simple and he aimed to keep it that way for as long as the law, his law, would allow. After that, he’d bounce. He loved his people, good music, and bad money. He hated racism, suburbs, sexual stupidity, and hip-hop.

  ■

  The whole Inflation thing had been Ndiya’s idea. The old, half-empty lounge was there just down the street from Shame’s place. The piano was in the back already. It seemed obvious to her. But it wasn’t to him.

  –I only do that, OK, I only play, at the Cat Eye because someone at Earlie’s dared me and, really, no one listens anyway. People come there as an excuse to hear themselves talk, to look at themselves in the mirror. They’re not there to see and listen to each other. All that’s just cover. So they’re sure not listening to me. It was a goof. That’s all.

  –Was, yes. And what is it now?

  –Nothing, really.

  –Well, sir Shame, I’ve listened. And I’ve watched. I know what nothing looks like … and what you’re doing ain’t it. And anyway, why all the long-ass way up on North Broadway? If it’s nothing, there’s a piano right around the corner.

  –Please.

  –Please, yourself.

  That was six weeks and four shows at Inflation ago. Shame said they weren’t “shows.” Ndiya felt the deepening snow collapse beneath her boots as she walked up Rhodes Avenue toward Sixty-Third Street. A maze of yellow flakes dazzled the street lamp. What she knew of the sky was blackness. What she saw in the sky then was the glow of city lights. What she felt on her upturned face were pieces of a broken maze melted by body heat that pushed through her skin. She was a pressure alive under a blizzard of details. Without that heat, she thought, like the cars parked on both sides of the street, she’d be covered already. She thought back to their argument.

  –And, FYI, people up there have started listening, I’ve watched that too.

  –Exactly. But they can listen to me all they want and still only hear themselves.

  –So what’s the difference?

  –Exactly, again. So “what” is the difference. Folks down at Inflation are already hearing a bunch of shit they trying not to listen to. And it ain’t themselves!

  –And again, I say so what?

  –Well, adding me to the mix of shit they trying not to hear can only cause trouble. That’s what’s so …

  –Trouble for you or them?

  –Neither, trouble for everybody. And most of all for us.

  Ndiya wouldn’t be surprised if Shame just didn’t show up one of these nights. Maybe tonight. It was obvious by now that more than one person lived in his skin. She’d watched him move in the mornings before work. Back and forth from room to room. Nothing about him suggested he knew the person he’d been the night before, or who he might be later that afternoon. No radio. No music. One morning during the first week she was staying with him, she wrapped herself in a sheet and stood there in the middle of the living room waiting to tell him goodbye. He passed her three times, then finally on the way to the closet near the door. It wasn’t simply that he acted like she wasn’t there that prevented her from saying anything. It was the heavy weight in his pace. Apart from his face, masked in a surgeon’s neutrality, she didn’t recognize the way he moved at all. She decided there was no reason to stand there, so she went back to bed, wondering if that might snap him out of it. She said, “Bye,” when she heard him lacing up his boots at the door. The door closed and the place was quiet until she heard the motor jump to life and disappear down the street. 6:22 a.m. on her phone. She heard herself, arguing with Shame:

  –Well, according to the Gospel of Shame Luther himself, trouble’s what everyone’s got anyway, so—

  –What? Listen, we’re all better off with songs. Songs no one listens to because they’ve all been tunneled under like border fences. People listen to radio and plug jukeboxes for the same reason they pay a toll on a bypass to go around a traffic jam.

  –What people? Most of those Inflation folks don’t look like tollway types to me.

  –Woman, how can someone who is always right get everything so wrong?

  Ndiya stopped walking. She tried to remember how exactly Shame had changed his mind, if he had. Or how he had relented, if he had. She couldn’t. She doubted that he’d done either. All she could remember was:

  –What about the alley cats?

  –That’s eavesdropping, unofficial, bootlegging. It has to stay that way.

  But he’d begun to play that piano at Inflation. He played music unlike anything she’d heard him play before. She didn’t know what they heard. But people listened. Still, something in Shame’s blank, before-work face kept her from gloating about being right; she held back.

  The temperature was supposed to drop overnight. At this point, it hovered around freezing. The snow carpeted the dead parts of the street. Ndiya’s eyes scraped along the rooftops to her right on the east side of Rhodes Avenue. Each flake that hit her face made her blink. She pretended that her face was a clear, glass bowl of water. She remembered the first time she heard Shame play the piano. She was upset. The cover-up and cul-de-sac of her life wouldn’t be denied any longer. She was also buzzed from the shots of Scotch she’d slammed uptown and a little dizzy from the ride on the cycle along the lake. This was the infamous date number two. She stood behind and above him as he played. He wandered toward a melody that never seemed to actually happen. She watched the delta of veins on the back of his wrists and hands. No watch. No rings. Dark crescents under his tar- and mortar-stained fingernails. Those hands. That was when she’d caught a brief, first moment of his scent, a distant whiff that made her think of her father.

  –Shame, do you smoke?

  –No, my life does.

  She put her hands on his sides, his ribs opening slightly with each breath. She hadn’t noticed it at first, but with her hands on him, she felt how the tempo of the notes breathed when he did. She had never thought of a piano as a wind instrument; in a way it was. She didn’t realize that her breaths had fallen into the opening and closing rhythm of Shame’s song too.

  She couldn’t tell where the song was headed. Each right-hand phrase popped into motion like a sleeping dog falls into stillness, over some dream-reef into nameless sleep. “How do you do it?” she asked. He said he didn’t know. They weren’t songs. He knew that. They weren’t his and neither was the piano. He knew that too.

  –When I started to play, I thought of it as a kind of drumming, really. I found I was full of rhythms, and certain keys made them possible. It felt like anonymous precision. It felt like self-defense.

  –Defense from what?

  –From names, naming, namelessness.

  –And from what else?

  –From questions!

  That first night, they’d half stripped and fucked on the rug. One arm still in her sweater, neither of them had meant it; they just didn’t know what else to do. Shame’s touch seemed to come from somewhere far
away, too far to be so close, so fast. A cloud of static, and heat. Their ankles knocked against the legs of the piano bench. There they where. She remembers the feeling like just before a plane takes off and the sense that the ground speed is lethal, the only thing left to do is look up and let go. Shame cursed under his breath when he came and bit her shoulder. She felt the seam of skin close into a slip of heat when she pulled him down on top of her with both hands. He rode her home on his cycle and she cursed herself silently, vowing not to see him again, ever. Her precisely anonymous self-defense failed. Since the first, her time with Shame felt like a question faced off with itself in the mirror.

  ■

  All of it, no matter. Junior’s romantic criminality made it possible. Sentimental psychopath. P. W. too. They’d met in the Cook County Juvenile Detention Center. Jaded social workers and racist family lawyers in Chicago called it the Chocolate Factory. It was a city of children, mostly brown. They’d lived there together for eight years, until they were eighteen and could no longer be tried, back then, for the crimes of ten-year-olds. Junior had attempted to play the piano in the recreation room their teacher, Miss Lisa, had set up in the Center. P. W. sang abstractedly to the radio. The piano never took with Junior. Now, as adults, P. W. was as much a DJ as he was a driver, as much confidant and metaphysician as he was a killer. And he was all of that. P. W.: rare groove aficionado. Junior: connoisseur. Junior was the steel sight in front of P. W.’s trained eye.