Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  Another dim flash. Until he saw the second flash he’d forgotten the first, if he’d seen it at all. Then, at the red light, from the car on his bumper, the flash strobed again and again. Two black men in the front. Shame couldn’t see the back seat. The flash kept on. It pulsed through the windshield of the car following him. When the light changed, he decided to go through the intersection and pull over. If anything happened and the driver stayed behind the wheel, he planned to take off.

  The flash continued, the light turned green. Shame drove through the intersection and pulled over in front of a small crowd waiting for the bus. One eye in each mirror. The car behind him pulled over too. The two men bounced out of the car, left the doors open, and approached. Shame saw they wore baseball hats and jeans, which was all he had time to notice. He was partly amazed and partly in disbelief—pulled over with a flashlight? Robbed on the way to work? One man stopped at the back of the truck. The other paused just behind the driver’s window and knocked on the glass with the flashlight.

  –Get out of the truck.

  –What? Who are you?

  The man stepped in front of the window, reached down and pulled up his coat, revealing a gold badge fixed to his belt buckle.

  –Five-O, motherfucker, get out of the truck!

  For about five seconds, Shame very consciously didn’t move his hands from their position on the top of the steering wheel. Slowly, he checked the rear to the left. The second man—were they really police?—had his weapon drawn. Shame opened the door, slowly, and began to step down. Midway to the ground, the man grabbed his coat behind his neck and led him to the front of the truck where he was cuffed and placed leaning over the hood with his legs spread. The left side of his face pressed into the hot metal. He faced north into the headlights of southbound traffic. The officer, if that’s what he was, made sure to pop Shame’s head when he let go, punching his mouth into the hood. This made Shame confident that they really were cops. He tasted a slow trickle of blood in his mouth. The inside of his lip was cut, or possibly he bit his tongue. Then he heard the first man’s voice:

  –If you raise your face up off of the hood, it will constitute an aggressive act by the criminal code. That means he will shoot you. Am I clear?

  –Yes.

  –What?

  –Yes!

  –OK, check the cab.

  –Mind telling me what I did?

  –Sport, we don’t give a fuck what you did.

  The left side of Shame’s face burned, but the hood was cooling. He felt clicks from the engine block in his teeth. His head faced away from what was going on. He thought he was bleeding from at least one of his wrists. He couldn’t tell which one. Warm liquid dripped off his fingers. “It might be sweat,” he thought. The cuffs pinched his hands. Tingles feathered up his arms. His hands would soon be numb. He heard the truck door open. Someone at the bus stop behind him said,

  –Is all that called for?

  –What? Oh, you want some too? Someone, please, have some more shit to say.

  Shame heard the contents of the cab being thrown on the ground. Something solid hit the curb—a boot? Something plastic broke and slid across the sidewalk. The searching officer:

  –CDs, some tools, pants, boots, pair of drawers, a few books …

  Most of these nouns matched the sound they made when thrown in the street. Shame heard an open book flip and flutter across the concrete. A few things listed hadn’t made any noise. He figured they were stuck in the snow bank, or they were being stolen. The engine clicks in his teeth slowed down. His cheek measured the falling temperature of the hood while he waited to hear the name of the thing that wasn’t his. The thing that wasn’t in the cab of the truck would bring all this into focus. He thought about how strange this felt, how used to it he’d been years ago. It was as if someone he used to be had been pulled out of limbo and reattached to his body in the present. Still, something here felt different. Shame wondered if it was just time.

  One of the police kicked his feet further apart and his face dragged back across the hood. He felt like he might fall backward. A hand pressed against his back kept him upright while another hand slid down his legs, around his waist, and up under each arm. His wallet flopped on the hood like a fallen bird. It lay unopened next to his face. The pat down paused at his crotch. A thigh pushed up between his legs from behind.

  –Ever done time? You going to see your other woman or your boyfriend, champ?

  –Going to work.

  –Where?

  –Bottling plant over near Midway.

  –What’s it called?

  –Don’t have a name. They do work for McDonald’s but I’m told there’s no sign or name on the place …

  –Well, you better get going. You going to be late.

  Shame thought, “I’m already late.” But he said nothing. He didn’t move. An open hand popped against the back of his head. His face hit the hood. He wondered again if his wrist was bleeding. His hands came free of the cuffs. He heard:

  –Champ, you bleeding, baby. You should get that looked at. But don’t move until we’re gone.

  Shame attended any and all available rhythms. A cross-rhythm of headlights came at him. He didn’t move or speak. He knew most of this was an attempt to provoke him into doing something the police could respond to. He concentrated on the metal cooling against his face. He heard car doors close; tires spun. He thought, “A U-turn. They went back south.” This kind of thing used to be so common it felt, just then, like it used to happen to someone else, a different life. He thought the timing was suspicious. He also knew that warnings came in threes, or twos, really, the third time not being a warning anymore. He wondered if that was true.

  Less than forty-eight hours after Junior’s sudden appearance at Inflation and his strange behavior, the timing was troubling. It was intentional trouble. Shame listened to the clicks of the cooling engine, the warmth of the hood almost totally gone. He let the streetlights pour themselves out onto his back. It felt like the light collected there, as if it would all roll off into the street if he stood up. There was no weight on his back, but he felt a pressure as if time had boiled down into a physical substance deposited by light. But what time? The short time he’d been facedown on the hood of his truck? Or the collapsed time since the last time this had happened to him? No, the pressure signaled another time. He could almost hear a stopwatch engage and begin to tick. He was aware of faint sweepings and swoopings, but he didn’t listen to that. He didn’t know how long he’d been there—five minutes? Two days? He stood up, his back stiff under the pressure. Two young men appeared to his side. They each carried one of his duffel bags.

  –Here’s your stuff. They didn’t take nothing.

  –Don’t stress it, brah. They just doing what they do.

  Shame nodded in thanks. Then he was driving to work. Late. Lip swollen. A clotted cut on his wrist. One side of his face felt creased like the metal of the hood, the other side felt scraped by the streetlights as he drove. He knew where he was headed. But that didn’t feel at all like where he was going. It felt like a swift tide going out. It felt like if a body was immersed in cold water and the blood left the limbs; the blood called in to keep the body warm, to keep the core alive.

  Maybe it was loneliness, that old friend, or solitude, that rather recent acquaintance. Shame watched the alleys of Lamu Town, this medieval trading port just off the northern coast of Kenya, the place Kima told him to go when he’d said he needed to leave. Kima described Lamu as a town poised at the threshold between the beyond and what lay beyond the beyond.

  Shame wandered, thoroughly lost, in the narrow alleys of the town, which led up and across the hill from the water. As the breezy morning warmth condensed up into a thick blanket of equatorial heat, he’d situate Ndiya, Junior, Muna, Cass, Colleen, and them in his vision. He wondered: Who was doing what? And then he’d turned each vision on himself. Finally, he imagined how the people he knew looked at each other. He kept coming back
to Ndiya and Junior, the night at Inflation. Something at that table had been as thick and hot as this dry-season coastal weather; Shame felt it hover above him now in this unthinkably heavy sky.

  Shame had never “traveled.” He’d gone from job to job, town to town, for ten years; there was always a focus for him, a sun for his life to orbit no matter where he’d gone. It didn’t really matter where he’d gone as long as there was a job to sell his body to for eight or ten hours. He’d lived in workingmen’s motels, paid the weekly rent with the meager expense checks the company dispensed. That covered his body during the hours it was on loan back to him. Here he was, thirty-six years old and, for the first time, in a totally foreign place: foreign mostly meant that he was without a buyer for his time. No job owned his body. For the first time that he could remember, he walked through a place without a reason to be there that he could consider real.

  So he had no idea where he actually was. He felt as though he’d lost his sense of his body’s extent. Everything felt inexact. Maybe his arm was too short to scratch his knee; maybe he could reach down the street and around the corner? All the stone alleys looked mostly the same to him. There were no cars. None of the passageways were wide enough. In fact, there were no motorized vehicles on the island at all. Planes of bad plaster covered the walls. That pattern was broken, here and there, by a pristine, newly renovated building. The old walls bowed out and almost visibly swayed under the weight of the time—centuries, Shame imagined—gathered in structures. A shallow gutter for rain and wash-water cut down the middle of most alleys. Donkeys roamed free in the streets until indentured into work carrying supplies through town. Children were everywhere: boys in robes and embroidered caps. He’d learn that the caps were called barghashia. Girls, in gowns he’d learn to call leso, wore scarves. Most of the children ran barefoot. Older girls and women, covered in full buibui, with just their eyes visible, appeared across an uncanny impression of vast distance. Their eyes tracked him. He felt exposed and on display. He thought he’d been walking generally downhill for some time and, all at once, found himself on the main street that led along the water, one block in from the docks.

  In a way that amplified his disorientation, Shame felt the whole scene was also very familiar. It was a street that didn’t just let anyone pass through anonymously. After a few trips up and down a street like this, it knew your name. Familiar or not, he suspected he’d better be careful about the food. He walked down the street past barbers, tailors, food stalls, carpenters, jewelers in silver, a blacksmith. He paused every fifty feet and pressed his back into a doorway to allow a caravan of donkeys to pass by. Donkeys trafficked the streets wearing two-sided baskets across their backs. They carried stone bricks, grain, bags of sand, doors, fruit, chickens, fish, a thick snake, anything that needed transport through town. All at once, Shame felt intensely hungry.

  He passed a relatively upscale-looking African art gallery with two brilliantly dressed Swahili women sitting inside the door. Next to the gallery was a sign: Echoes Café. These two places stood out. The café advertised cappuccinos and smoothies on a chalkboard that stood in the street. It was a good sign, he thought. He decided to go in and give it a try. A second caravan of donkeys passed, followed by a tiny barefoot boy wearing a hat and white robes. The boy cut the thick, smoky air of the street with a thin stick and prodded the last donkey forward. Every third slice of the air ended in a crisp snap, at the boy’s eye-level, on the rear donkey’s ass.

  Upon entering Echoes Café Shame passed through a narrow room with tables to his right and a case full of pastries to his left. Behind the case was a small kitchen setup and a bright red espresso machine that looked like a vintage Ferrari double-parked on the counter. At the end of the room was a set of shelves packed haphazardly with books and magazines. Shame waved hello to the young man behind the counter, who wore thick glasses. He paused at the shelves and randomly picked up a small, gray paperback book. Continuing out the back door, he entered a courtyard with high walls at the back. There were several tables, all, it seemed, full of foreigners. “My people,” Shame thought wryly. Large umbrellas and two palm trees did their best to make shade. In addition to the high coral stone walls at the far end, the courtyard bordered upon a set of French doors leading to the back of the art gallery he’d passed in the street.

  Taking a seat, he encountered the changed reality of shade. He noticed that his body sought it, leaned into it. He also noticed that it didn’t feel any cooler in the shade than it did in the sun. The sun created a lightness that made him conscious of breathing. That was different too. It wasn’t hard to breath in the sun but it made the space around him feel weightless, like a vacuum. In the shade, there was a sense of being surrounded, almost suspended, much like being immersed in water. In the shade, he breathed without effort. That seemed the only difference. As he breathed deeply, he felt the pressure build. He sat there savoring effortless shades in the pressure of breath. It wasn’t static pressure, this shade. It felt like being submerged in a turbulent complex of currents.

  There he sat. He opened his eyes and turned the pages of the book not reading as much as verifying that the script was in English. It was. He saw the name Marco Polo flip past. He remembered knowing that Polo, usually known as a Venetian, was actually born on Korcula, an island in the Southern Adriatic. This meant, he thought, that his name likely wasn’t “Marco Polo.”

  That made him think about names and how they stuck to people, or didn’t. How they were given, taken, hidden, and how, at times, they evaporated off a person. Three days earlier, when he met Muhammad on his rooftop, he said people called him Shame.

  –Shaheem?

  –No. Shame.

  –As in ashamed Shame?

  –Yeah, as in ashamed Shame.

  Muhammad made a series of clicks somewhere in his throat and shook his head.

  –Never tell people here to call you that.

  –OK, Mr. Timex. What should I tell people to call me? Rolex?

  –No. That’s taken-o.

  –I was joking.

  –Tell that to Azir.

  Shame didn’t know what to say to that. He certainly didn’t know Azir, so he asked again,

  –Anyway, so what?

  “You Americans,” and when Muhammad said that it sounded like Amay-dee-khans. “Who taught you lot to assume you need only two or three names?” More clicks erupted from Muhammad’s throat, this time with a slight melody that sounded to Shame like air in a radiator when a furnace starts up.

  –Well, when I was younger, people called me AS.

  –Oz? Like the Wizard?

  –No, that’s where the wizard lives. AS.

  –Yeah, Oz, like the Wizard?

  –AS. Spelled A-S.

  –OK, right. Oz.

  Shame shook his head and gave up. He ventured,

  –Well, what do you think?

  –Shame is not an option. Shaheem is a little too much. Maybe Shahid. Are you Muslim? Clearly not with people calling you Shame.

  –Shahid.

  –Yes. It’s the name for a person who’s “dying to live.” I mean, what does it really matter, I’m not really much of a Muslim and my name’s Muhammad!

  Muhammad laughed and his eyes sparkled. Shame heard Muhammad say that Shahid means “a person dying to leave.” He thought that was so close to perfectly backward it fit.

  –That’s close enough. But you can still just call me Shame, right?

  –Of course. Oz you like, Mr. Wheeze-hahd.

  Interrupting Shame’s shade-dream about names, the young man from behind the counter appeared. He wore dark shades and handed Shame a menu. The man stood still and stared at Shame. He ordered scrambled eggs and sausages, coffee and a juice. Across the patio, the two women he’d seen in the gallery sat at a table. Their brilliantly colored scarves loose over their heads. The scarves were sheer, so thin they floated when even a slight breeze made its way through the courtyard. The women talked quietly. Their hands moved constantly
, as if subliminally, to adjust the flow of shade and scarf around their heads in the breeze. Shame caught himself staring, which must have been obvious.

  It didn’t matter, because the women took utterly no notice. He felt as if he’d be hypnotized if he didn’t look away from the calligraphy of shade, scarves, breeze, and hands. A sound like a jet taking off emerged from the interior room. He flipped a few more pages until the young man passed him carrying a tray with two clear glass flutes filled with an electrically bright yellow substance. He placed the flutes in front of the women. The yellow beamed. It seemed to displace the shade and cast a golden glow onto their faces. Then the man handed them two long-handled spoons. The women added the spoons to their choreography and, when the man passed by, Shame asked him what they were eating. Fresh mango sorbet, he was told. Shame filed that away for later. The young man left the courtyard.

  An actual breeze scaled the walls and came through the pressure of the shade like an invisible wing. Anticipating the choreography of scarves and spoons to his left, but conscious not to stare, Shame forced himself to focus on the book in front of him. He let the breeze flip a few pages and placed down his thumb on a page titled “Cities & Desire 2.” His eyes fell to the bottom of the page and he forced himself to begin reading wherever his focus came to rest:

  Such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the treacherous city, possesses; if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave.

  The passage carried an almost ceramic symmetry that reminded him of work, words arranged like a complex of brick cut precisely to fit around a drain. He looked back: “Your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form”—he read the strangely off-balanced fragment again and again. The image of work blurred into music. It reminded him of a phrase he might run back and forth on the piano. The playful passage of “form” to “from” and back to “form,” the myth of return. The naïve trust, the faux balance, between “gives” and “takes.” These were the conceits of the city. Any city. Shame could feel the lure search the stream of his eye, he could taste the steel hook hidden in its pretty feathers. He closed his eyes and repeated the phrase, “Labor that gives form to desire takes from desire its form.” The twin appearance of the word “desire” stared back at him like a set of eyes in the line. He thought about aces up sleeves, about Leonardo da Vinci winning drinks from barkeeps by drawing flawless circles in one freehand sweep of soft lead on the bar.