Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  In a glance toward Ndiya:

  –Good luck with the word, Shame.

  And with a glance tossed across the room and back to Ndiya:

  –And with the snow. Because, baby, do it drift.

  They pulled up to the back of Junior’s building. Standing at the window, Alexis watched the car below. She could see the amber flare from a lighter through the tint in the sunroof. She saw Valerie get out of the seat behind P. W., hike up her coat, and tiptoe through the deepening snow around the car to the back door. Now she heard her stomping up the steps. Alexis twisted the blinds shut and sat down in a chair at the table. She looked at the computer. 2:05 a.m.

  Junior smoked his cigarette with the window cracked. He didn’t need to exhale. Suction created by the heat inside and the swirling winds in the alley removed the cloud from his mouth in thin tornadoes. He asked,

  –What time you got?

  –“Sweet Love.”

  –That time already?

  –Yep. Do you feel that?

  –Nope.

  –Me either. None of it.

  Silence. Junior nodded in response, touched his gloved fist gently to P. W.’s big hand on the gear shift and exited the vehicle, which disappeared down the alley before he could trace Valerie’s steps all the way to the door. To his right, he wasn’t sure if he heard what remained of the opening drums and cymbals. P. W. had turned up the volume. In the chaos of snow and wind, he saw the red glow from the taillights gather at the corner and slip off to the left like a long neon tail following a cat caught in the night vision of another cat. Junior’s body was tired and tense. His arms and legs hummed with needles. He felt like he was floating above himself, like he was staring at all this from high above the alley. He opened the back door and headed up the stairs humming Hear me calling out your name….

  ■

  After the shock of recognition, Junior felt almost impossibly high. He hovered above himself, as if trapped in an invisible elevator. His note to the Erotic Neighbors had touched a nerve; when he checked on his phone between Shame’s sets, or whatever they’re called, there were 620 responses. He didn’t read them, but he could see that most of the comments were shouting down Strictly Soul. When it came to his writing, Junior only cared about numbers. He didn’t read reviews. On Val’s phone: 2:32 a.m.

  He stood in his living room, two feet from the window, in full view of the black lake across the terrace and the Drive. The blizzard flashed through the headlights and streetlamps and hurled itself into the waves. Sixteen inches and counting, reports were it could be thirty-six by sunrise. The wind hit the glass in front of his face and the air in the room fell down his legs and over his feet. The sill at his knee and the heat vent he, nude, stood above created a squall around his thighs and in the space between his thin legs. He was high off the Erotic Neighbor numbers, the music (or whatever it was called) that propelled his doubts about Shame and, above all, about the company he kept.

  –Who is she?

  Valerie asked, as if from ten miles away, behind him. Her hands on his shoulders, she knelt so her arms reached straight up. Her face fit the curve at the small of Junior’s back. Valerie stood up and Junior reached back with his left hand. He felt the harness around her waist and her slippery fingers.

  –Who is she, Junior?

  Alexis’s voice bent in his ear as she moved between Junior and the window. She faced out into the weather, both palms open. She felt the wind push against her hands on the glass. Junior was high, and, minute by minute, was losing track of exactly why. He added up and subtracted what to do from the storm of air underneath the tent of legs, the smell of himself and the women who surrounded him. Whatever happened would be decided here. Alexis’s open hand left a print of steam on the window when she reached behind herself to collect him. The touch of ice, the crystals spidered in the hand-cloud left on the pane. Valerie’s face reflected in front of him, Alexis reflected behind, Valerie behind him, Alexis in front of him. His back reflected back to him, his shadow’s strobe in a landscape of shoulders. He watched their faces with his eyes closed, lost track of who was who and who was high and waited for such sounds as appeared to take the air in the room. Junior knew these things didn’t happen one at a time. Nothing did. Whatever was most important had already happened, that couldn’t unhappen. But an envelope had been slid under his door, a cause that was older than his only crime, a kind of molten wound that lived beneath the scars he’d molded his life into.

  ■

  Things emptied themselves and other things entered the space they left open. Junior knew that. Knew the goal of the equation is zero. Behind his knees, which had almost failed him earlier, and up his legs, tiny follicles twitched alive on the back of his thighs. Everything happened instantly. And an instant was the time it took a bent mirror of the time it took to take it. Alexis sat on the windowsill and faced Junior’s waist. She aimed her mouth, left him wet, and blew on the spot. Heat from the vent cast off the last mask from his face, an invisible silk face fell back into the air it was made from. Both Junior’s hands covered the frozen, eel-skin prints Alexis left on the glass. He reached one hand down and everything froze. Alexis:

  –Ah. Don’t touch my hair.

  –OK. OK.

  Empty things resumed. Alive between breaths, Junior’s body felt like it had been lowered into a clear, heavy solution from an airless chamber, a riddle of pride. The solution pressed his body from all sides as if it was the center of a gravity field, which it was. As if he bent time, which he did. He felt formal, controlled. He was an open instant in closed quotes, a silver thimble full of venom. He saw a spigot pour a twist of sunlight into spring water in a stone basin. It was a trick, a flick of a wrist at best. It was a strip with no tease, a discarding down to a disguise more real than his actual face. Junior knew his fate was vanity, and he wore his last disguise to cheat that fate, the mask left after the final mask fell as well. Junior knew that the last petal was loves-me-not. Desire and the illusion of precision, this was target practice. More than to cheat fate, the disguise was there to starve his fate of what it needed. All vanity required a series of disguises; he knew that too. Vanity required a crew to switch out sets behind the actors. Junior avoided all the stages. But damned if disguises didn’t keep turning up in new ways, on new faces.

  Valerie’s left hand on the curve of his belly, he caught his breath when his knuckles accidentally grazed a sweep of Alexis’s permanent hair. Valerie’s right fingers spread wide, slowly’ing their slowness on the curve of his back. Junior arched back, opened back into her hips. Junior felt his skin beneath the tip of Alexis’s upturned tongue. His mind unspooled. He thought, “This is how a snake climbs a tree.” Thought if he’d ever recovered even an inch from the twin disasters that had become of his sisters, he’d never have stood even the fool’s chance of a flame-swallowed moth. Junior felt beads of sweat on his wrists and ankles. He wondered if his hands had frozen to the window. Imagined pulling his hands back and the blizzard blowing bits of glass straight through him. Sparkles of snow and glass, diamond ice in Alexis’s hair. Junior heard a hollow-tipped voice, a falsetto howl that could take his glass hands apart and be on its way.

  He came down from his high the only way he knew how, immersed in one of people’s deepest needs: the need to feel taken apart.

  BOOK FOUR: ARCHIPELAGO

  Swim me no ocean, long, deep, and wide.

  —CHAKA KHAN

  Each morning Shame awoke with no idea where he was. Each night he fell into sleep not exactly sure where he’d been. His life—if it could be called his—at this point confronted him with a very strange and very real fact: exile doesn’t happen all at once. You don’t just pick up and leave somebody. You can’t pick up and leave a city like easy as A, B, C. Shame arrived where he’d gone before he left where he’d been; so here he was, in pieces. Whatever it meant to be here was something he’d have to find out in pieces, pieces of his past that had, in effect, vaulted into the future. So we’ll en
counter them there as he did. He landed in a next place and then, somehow, still needed to tear himself out of the former; we’ll get to that. As he encountered it, exile didn’t operate according to the mechanics of clocks and calendars. It broke clocks and burned darkness into daylight. Shame found that exile was a little like playing chess on a calendar. The present leapt over days, even weeks. Then time could draw back, veer diagonally, turn corners. Due to this fact of exile as he experienced it, we’ll trace the rest of the story in the exact sequence of events as they happened to Shame Luther, an achronological chronology. What Shame’s experience of exile proved can—in a way, must—be as challenging to us as it was to him: often enough, in order for events to take place in the present, things in their future must have already occurred.

  Properly speaking, Shame thought he knew the distinction but found he couldn’t figure the difference. But that was while he slept. He knew there were dreams caused by isolation, and he’d learned there were others caused by solitude. Awake, he found, again, that he knew the difference between these conditions, but he couldn’t touch the distinction. Awakened each morning, Shame opened his eyes into a dim light that bore the texture of spiced, roasted meat. Each morning he woke with the impression he was in prison. The difference between being in prison, as he imagined it, and being where he was, as he found it, came into focus with the scent coming through the bars on his window. The distinction orbited him all day, refusing to come within reach.

  Next door, or actually across the alleyway, lived another migrant, a Hausa from a village in northeastern Nigeria. Like many of the alleys in Lamu Town, this one was narrow enough that neighbors could almost touch fingers by leaning out their windows. Shame’s neighbor began to prepare a signature barbeque before dawn. He called it suya. All the Hausa and almost everybody else in Nigeria knew suya. But according to him, here it was exotic, a valuable feather in his cap, the finger on his side of the scale in trade. His name, Shame found, was Muhammad, like about half the other men here. He cooked atop a tiny iron grill he had placed on a six-by-eight-foot piece of concrete, the roof outside his window. The roof was so close to Shame’s window he could hear Muhammad’s morning prayers beneath the amplified, guttural call of the muezzin on the other side of his building.

  Muhammad sold suya and hot tea from a cart at the waterfront. The dry meat traveled well when wrapped in newspaper and was a favorite of the men who worked on the boats, as well as those who worked unloading them by hand. Muhammad kept a chart of the tides tacked to his wall as a guide. His schedule fluctuated during the months as it followed the moon around the clock. “My monthly cycle!” he’d announced to Shame, explaining it when they’d first talked between their windows. He also hired out to captains who took visitors and various cargoes between the islands to the north, sometimes as far north as Ras Kamboni. On the boats, and with the visitors, Muhammad used another name, Timex.

  Shame had arrived three days ago to this town everyone had assured him was poised at the edge of the beyond. He’d spent most of his time feeling drugged and recalling splices of dreams. In his life, Shame rarely remembered dreams. Now he walked around summoned by dreams such as one related somehow to Ndiya’s shyness about a tattoo: symmetrical tracts of text on both her breasts. The passages tapered off toward her shoulders like wings of words. She wouldn’t admit it, but she was sorry she’d done it. Shame was too, and he wouldn’t admit it either. The dream was a cloud of unadmitted regret. He didn’t know what the texts stated, but he had a close-up flash of two or three of the gray-beige sentences that clashed with Ndiya’s new-suede skin tone, making it look like they’d been written in dried mud. They read like the institutional prose of warning labels and machine-gun disclaimers that ride the tail end of late-night pharmaceutical commercials. In a kind of stupidity that took root in Shame’s gorge, the sentences counseled against the wisdom of tattoos in general and their illegality for minors.

  The dream was nonsense but its tone haunted Shame for days. There were no streets per se in this town. Out his east-facing window and across another alley was a midsized madrassa. Twenty paces from the door to his building, the neighborhood well was at the corner. He could watch from his third-floor window as small children played around its rim all day. The students at the madrassa were all young children—preschool to elementary age, Shame thought. During the day, the school was full. It hummed in the neighborhood like beehives embedded in the thick stone walls of the buildings. It was audible, or at least the rhythm of its sound was tangible, everywhere he went. At midday the children all prayed on woven mats on the flat, concrete roof of the school’s large second floor.

  As he watched the children out his window, the dread-sense of the tattoo dream felt like a carpet on which he lay. The mat wasn’t as easy as regret. It wasn’t a search for self; it wasn’t remorse. The obvious connection didn’t correspond to his sense of the dream at all. He stood watching the children touch their heads to the patches of fabric checkering the smooth, clean-swept surface of the madrassa’s concrete roof. He focused upon the fabric mats themselves. Thousands of threads had accepted the dye that colored their strands, soaked into the texture of each fiber. Before his eyes appeared the physical logic of touching one’s forehead to mats that bore witness to the intricate structure of the intimate. The singular nature of thirst, a thread’s thirst for color, or was it the color’s search for structure? He guessed both were necessary to the action of acceptance and the scene of the children across the alley spun into an emotional focus, a mirror.

  In another dream he was eating a long meal with Muna and her man. There was a carefree feeling that hovered over a flame somewhere. It felt like a celebration. After the sensation of hours, Muna took her man’s hand, and said,

  –Well, that’s the best we can do having lost our babies …

  In the dream, Shame, lacerated by the news, came around the table and held onto them both and, in a blurry spasm, he’d wept stupidly. With his convulsions he felt sentimental. He felt he’d disgraced the physical tone of Muna and her man’s grief, the way their restraint hadn’t held them back, the way their control had allowed them to move through a depth in what they said while Shame flailed and splashed like a drowning man in the shallows of sadness, of self-indulgence.

  In another dream, he’d kissed Ndiya goodbye after a playful and buoyant time together doing something he couldn’t recall. The buoy sensation was all he could feel. In the dream he knew they’d be back together later that day. Ndiya smiled and walked away, the frayed tassels on a loose, blue cord she wore as a belt dangled at her knees and danced as she moved her legs. He watched her back, the slow roll of her wide hips. The edges of her orange, sleeveless top fit her shoulders like open parentheses or pieces of an hourglass. Shortly, in the dream, he was thirsty, so he took a seat at a café, outdoors, next to a man in a blue suit. The man’s phone then rang. On the other end of the call, clearly audible to Shame, was the frantic and desperate voice of a woman describing her impossible love for a man named Tony something. She was inconsolable, screamed at the top of her lungs. This went on and on. Irritated and increasingly thirsty, Shame waited for his dream-drink to appear. Fighting the impulse to tell the man that the world wasn’t a phone booth, Shame heard the man say,

  –He’ll come around, Ndiya, that’s just how Tony is. You knew that when you got involved.

  The man’s voice was the sun rising in the west.

  The man rudely dismissed the desperate woman, saying that she’d simply have to handle it. Immediately his phone rang again. Shame watched the man lift up the phone, switch off the ringer, and set it down on the table. Shame:

  –Excuse me, was that Ndiya Grayson you were talking to?

  –Yeah, crazy as she wanna be. Do you know her?

  Carrying these dreams through the waking world left Shame’s hands feeling as if he was holding onto an electrified fence.

  ■

  The first step was simple enough. Shame’s mind was the exact physic
al situation of his room, concurrent with chipped tile surfaces. “Here I am again,” he thought. The single mattress was raised on a concrete platform in the corner under a high, paneless window. The mosquito net dropped from a ring strung to a bolt in the ceiling. A window across from the door faced the madrassa. To the left, another window faced the waterfront about half a kilometer’s walk down through a labyrinth of alleys. There was a gas burner on a wooden shelf and a shower area in the corner with a drain in the floor and a shower-head in the ceiling. In the corner near the window facing Muhammad’s rooftop was a small, round coffee table and a low-slung wooden lounge chair strung with twisted cords of fraying rope.

  Shame stared at the shapes in the room, moved his vision between them. He closed down his focus and traced the shapes, their relationship to each other. Everything was surface. The light fell through the window onto the coffee table with no reflection at all. The mosquito net caught the tail of a breeze, turned slowly in the wind over the bed. If he struck a match to the gas burner at night, an instant became an outward gasp of yellow light. Then his mind became a cool ring of blue flame. Until he recovered the ability to take a deep breath without feeling washed away in a whitewater of chaos, until he could find a place to put his feet and his breath, the future of each wooden match in the box next to the burner and the moving net of a breeze over the bed would have to serve as enough of the invisible world to depend upon.

  Aflash caught Shame’s eye in the rearview mirror of his truck. He was driving north on King Drive toward Washington Park. He was told the job was in a bottling plant out near Midway Airport. It turned out to be a run-down brick building without any external suggestion of work going on. Inside, McDonald’s insignia lay everywhere. He was told the plant mixed the concentrate for McDonald’s-brand orange drink. It closed down at night. It was a small repair job. A section of floor had buckled. The hours were eleven to seven, a week’s worth of nights. There’d been a pause in winter, fifty degrees at 10:30 p.m. The streets steamed with melting snow. Pools of black water patterned the surface of the road. Potholes full of the dirty water reflected the streetlights and looked like wide-open mouths with gold teeth.