Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  Then he went back and read the whole passage over and over, then the whole page for the first time and again. It was a mirror of where he’d been. A canal connecting work, music, and theft. He turned the book over and looked at the cover for the first time. It was black. The pastel-textured letters of the title formed the shape of a skyline at the bottom: Invisible Cities. High in the slate sky, over the city, rode what Shame took to be the author’s name: Vintage Calvino.

  The food arrived on three plates: eggs, sausages, fruit. The juice and coffee followed immediately. Shame ate his first heavy meal since he’d been away. The eggs in a light oil were the color of fresh orange juice. The juice was the color of an autumn sunset. Placed in the pressure of shade and surrounded by a riot of sunshine, the meal looked permanent, a still life. An old blonde woman in a huge, floppy black hat and thick eyeliner exited the gallery, greeted the women warmly and walked toward his table. When she reached his side she paused. She looked at the book, and then looked at Shame.

  –Are you a writer?

  –No, I’m a … well, a traveler.

  –Ah. Passing through?

  –Well, I thought I’d stay for at least a while.

  –At least a while, hmm. I know that calendar, the one where the reasons you’re here haven’t happened yet, the one according to which things keep happening to you in places you’ve already left.

  Shame didn’t know what to say to this. He stared at the woman whose eyes searched to meet his gaze. She looked around the courtyard and turned back to Shame.

  –“At least for a while,” that’s the phrase I had in my bags when I arrived here. I came from Australia. I sat down not far from where you’re sitting now, if that’s where you are? That was forty-two years ago. I’m Kate.

  She raised the brim of her hat with one hand and with the other gestured at the café and the three-story building of windows that rose above the ground floor.

  –This is my place.

  –It’s great.

  Kate smiled, again, in tolerance for things people say that they know nothing about. Then she looked back at the book and smiled a totally different smile.

  –You know, most people think of Calvino as an Italian, which I suppose he was, of course. But I think about his being born in Cuba, about all the things that happened to him there after he’d moved away. I mostly think of him as a genius. That’s enough for me. Genius. It’s certainly no one’s nationality, is it? And it’s its own kind of island, I suppose.

  Shame nodded and looked down at his hands.

  –Sure. I picked this off the shelf inside. I hope that’s OK? It’s great you have books in here.

  –Yes, well. Possibly one of these days we could have a proper chat?

  –I’d like that.

  –Very well then. Until then … I didn’t get your name.

  –People call me Sh—they call me Shahid.

  –Ah, I see. What a shame. OK. Until then, Shahid.

  Shame felt a little dizzy. Kate squinted her eyes and then they widened just past open. She walked off. Shame turned to look at the first pages of the book. Vintage was the name of the publisher’s series. Vintage Classics. Italo Calvino was the name of the author. Indeed, Shame found, born in Cuba, 1923. Died in 1985. Shame thought about 1985. He wondered what he’d been doing then. He wondered what right he’d had to be anywhere, doing anything, while a genius was busy dying.

  Shame leaned back in his chair to let the slight breeze blow down his shirt. Vines bloomed and grew out of pauses in the red stone of the walls at the back of the courtyard. His eyes crawled the porous surfaces, looking for places to hold on to. Concrete had been applied at the top of the rear wall of the courtyard. Before it dried, clear splices of broken glass had been fixed in the cement. He caught himself looking very carefully at the jagged ridge atop the wall. His eyes moved slowly as if he could slip in his looking and slice his vision. Above the rock edge of the wall, the sky shot off between the lazy dry-season clouds like a huge blue rocket. He shut his eyes and felt as if he could almost ride along as the sky blasted, peacefully, universally, into that distance that was its vastness, that rimless vastness that was itself. He thought, again, abstractly, how “sky” was that element whose center existed only in the periphery of itself; it was invisible in itself, blue only in its being. And that, being itself, was always far from itself. He imagined a solid core made of endless opening. This was in the word itself, appearance in vanishing. He looked up toward the sun and spelled it out against the flamethrower splashes he watched with his eyes closed:

  SKY

  The oil and salt, the sweet juice cut by the coffee roiled in his mouth. He cast a thought back to Chicago but he couldn’t get it free of the taste in his mouth and the seductive sphinx of Calvino’s passage in his eyes. Then another phrase occurred to him. He wondered if it was in the book:

  – … of sky, we’d now consider the relative velocity of stillness.

  And Shame’s vision flipped like a coin. To think about it, he noticed, felt like rubbing his finger on the soft, serrated edge of a thin silver dime. He turned back to the page.

  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.

  He felt a shadow pass across him but he knew he was already in the shade. Kate’s phrase appeared again: “Where you’re sitting, now, if that’s where you are.” No, it wasn’t that phrase, it was the way her eyes went squint and just slightly past open and made him feel that her walking away was her way of sitting down at his table. The way “at least a little while” became forty-two years; the way her “until then” felt like this, felt like right now.

  SKY

  Four days after the incident with the police and the flashlight on King Drive, Shame and Ndiya met Colleen at the gallery to discuss what she’d found out about the painting. As she’d suspected, the piece was authentic, one of Bedia’s earliest privately owned pieces, an early instance of his interest in the African dimensions of Cuban/Caribbean consciousness. Oyá, Colleen explained, was a feminine spirit of linear force in the belief of Yorùbá people in West Africa, Nigeria, Togo, and Benin, as well as in places like Haiti, Brazil, Cuba, Panama, and elsewhere. In Africa, this spirit was represented by the surging waters of the river Niger. In the West, believers found her in the winds of hurricanes and thunderstorms. The Yorùbá god Shàngó, basically the Zeus figure in that cosmos, was found in thunder itself. Oyá was Shàngó’s wife, or one of them. This explained the violent weather depicted in the painting, as well as the vectors or arrows in the head of the looming godlike figure.

  And, also as she suspected, the painting was valuable. If he was interested, the gallery could offer him thirty thousand dollars for the piece and a contract for 50 percent of its value above thirty thousand dollars if and when the gallery might decide to auction it. The auction would likely take place through an affiliated gallery in New York City or, possibly, Miami. The thought of the piece as it had been, pinned to a wall in an unlocked building on Rhodes Avenue, made Ndiya shake her head. She said,

  –Well, I won’t suggest what I think you should do, baby. But I will say that I don’t think it’s a good idea to bring the piece back home. Oyá or no Oyá.

  Shame had been increasingly irritated by the blank spot left on the wall in the absence of the painting which, when it had hung there, he hadn’t ever looked at. For years, he’d carried it around behind the seat of a company truck in the tube they’d given him when he won it. Strangely, he thought now, upon returning to Chicago he’d put it up immediately, even before he’d wheeled the piano in from the hallway. He hadn’t opened a box. In his mind, the painting was part of the wall, a mural, a window.

  Something was turning over in Shame’s belly. He felt obscurely surrounded. Ndiya and Colleen asked if he was hungry. He said he didn’t feel hungry. They decided to get something to eat after this business at the gallery. Maybe one of the Greek places just to the so
uth down Halsted Street? Maybe the Ohrida Lake? Maybe. But Shame knew the stirring wasn’t hunger. It had begun after the flashlight night with the police, and he’d been on a steady diet of Tums ever since. He felt sick, as if it was always early in the morning before work when he had to force himself to eat.

  He hadn’t said anything about it to Ndiya, not wanting to lend it more reality than it deserved. Or so he’d hoped and his doubts were now snowballing. Sooner or later—he guessed sooner—some invisible thread was going to snap and things would go from zero to impossible before he sensed any motion at all. That’s how it worked; he knew that. Any reactions that mattered had already happened, they’d play out in the future almost without him. It wasn’t just the flashlights and the abuse by police. That’d been there like rain, or like constant minor tremors, as long as he could remember. The strange part had been the almost two-year calm since he’d been back. Why? He’d grown up? I was dead? Junior really had the kind of pull he acted like he had? Like juggling oranges, he’d tossed these ideas around in various combinations. Until the flashlight thing, he hadn’t really cared. He’d had a deep hole to dig his personality up out of. Dying to live: Shame. Grief and despair, all of that. And he had the kids, the place, the jobs, and the piano. Then he looked at Ndiya’s profile as she chatted with Colleen.

  There was this unexpected person who appeared a few times like a moth and then walked through his door soaking wet and never left. Sooner or later, he thought. His belly churned. And he thought about an invisible strand in a web he’d sensed between Ndiya and Junior. The web had no name. He knew that for certain. No question about it, it would be sooner or never. Either that or he was getting paranoid. And before that he’d have to talk to this unexpected person. He had his doubts.

  Shame also sensed what he had to say would lead quickly to things he had to ask. Junior didn’t show his cards willingly, or knowingly. And Junior had been calmly irate about the publicity at Inflation, about the blizzard during the blizzard. The weather that night, Shame thought, had been a sick joke. Junior thought he could control the alley cats he had. But those others out there all with eyes and ears and—who knows?—habits of their own? It was too much. And the press? It did seem paranoid. Maybe it was? Shame really didn’t want to know.

  But Junior’s tone had been about more than that crowd. That was also clear. And it had something to do with Ndiya Grayson. Or maybe not her. But it had to do with something Junior had seized upon in her image, in her place in the room, across from him at that table.

  The live wire, Shame sensed, however, in all of this, didn’t really have to do with just Junior, either. The shock in the wire was that, when Junior pivoted around and left the table, Ndiya Grayson all but audibly sizzled. Shame felt the hairs on his arms stand up. He put his hand on her back and he felt her sweat through her blouse. He trusted her. But as he sensed often enough with Ndiya Grayson, he felt this was beyond her. And the prospect of a conversation about something he felt but couldn’t think or talk about scared him. He could feel that too. Whatever was going on with those police flashlights—if they were police—had to do with her in some kind of way that left her out of it. How? He had no idea.

  Ndiya and Colleen discussed the dinner possibilities. At once, all of this poured out of his mouth like a drink knocked across the table:

  –I think we should sell the piece. I’ll take the $30K. And we can see what the gallery does when the auction or whatever comes around. I’m not worried about that. I imagine the money can stay here? In a gallery account of some sort?

  Colleen nodded and tilted her head as a cloud of concern built behind her eyes. Seated beside her, Shame looked again at Ndiya’s profile. He remembered that she called what she did with her eyelids “pain beach.” She’d told him that. She’d been embarrassed. He’d been surprised by his impression that that was really all she knew about it. He hadn’t asked: Why the beach? What’s offshore? Now, for an instant, when she curled up her lips, one at a time, and scraped them with her teeth, he thought he glimpsed a flash of the “beyond-her” that had Oyá or whatever it was blowing on this house of cards. In an instant he felt the impulse to pull back from her and whatever all was offshore beyond her and, in that instant, he knew that pulling back was the trap. So he plunged in, instead, in the only way he had at hand:

  –And I want the account and the money in her name.

  Ndiya stared at Colleen. Colleen stared at Shame. Shame’s eyes moved back and forth between them.

  –I don’t know. That painting is yours. You’ve had it for years.

  –I know. But that’s the deal. If you don’t want the money, and something happens so we can’t share it like we’re doing anyway—

  –Like what “if something happens”?

  –It doesn’t matter what—if something, anything—well, you just give it back to me then, if you want.

  –I still don’t know.

  –Well, you don’t know till you know. I know. That’s the deal—

  He could feel a calm pressure behind his face. His words felt full. They pulsed like veins in your hand if you hold your wrist tight for a minute. Shame shook his head faintly and shrugged. It looked to Colleen like a gesture of certainty. It was. He was absolutely certain that he was forcing himself on Ndiya, that he was thereby, somehow, forcing her into whatever was there beyond her. And he was forcing his trust for her, and his doubt, on himself in a way that would, likely sooner than later, press this tangled situation beyond them both and into view. Once they could see it, he thought, they could deal with it.

  It wasn’t the money. But money had a magnetic kind of force that acted on all kinds of invisible things. As soon as he’d said what he’d said, he knew he didn’t care about the painting, or anything else in that apartment. The money was money. Lost in grief, on the road for a decade, trying blindly to dodge despair, he’d unknowingly ordered his life so that he had enough money and almost nothing else. Then he’d forgotten the money, because “nothing” had been his goal—

  The electrical network that had begun to reveal itself, the circuit wired invisibly between pieces of his world, he feared, was life and death. But out of this sense, he knew one thing: the death part was behind him. There was no going back to “dying to live.”

  Shame kept it together and they agreed to leave it at that. The two women seemed alert, concerned but not alarmed. Colleen would have the official papers for Ndiya to sign in the morning. They decided to forgo Ohrida Lake and go up to Earlie’s. Shame hadn’t been there in months. It wasn’t far from Colleen’s place off Fullerton. The dinner was good. It felt good to be in there again. Most of all, it felt good to sit silently while Colleen and Ndiya talked. He knew they’d been talking, had met up a few times. He hadn’t known they’d become real friends. He knew now. In ways he couldn’t account for, this made him feel good, almost safe, which was insane, he knew, but there it was. Being near their conversation, it felt like being on a beach, near a coolness he didn’t need to enter. Maybe these two were his pain beach, he thought. The breeze was enough. The pleasure of the sun reflected off the sand. He ordered three Black Labels and a glass of ice. When the drinks arrived, he proposed a toast: “To Bedia, to Oyá, and”—looking back and forth between the women, and then dropping his eyes to look at the table—“to friends.”

  ■

  –Who’s the blonde?

  These were the first words the police said when he reached Shame’s window. Here they were, having dropped Colleen off on their way back home after dinner at Earlie’s. Shame felt like the truck was floating away, like he could watch it all happen from above. About a mile from Colleen’s, back on Halsted headed south, police lights appeared and a voice in a speaker told them to pull over. The officer’s first words to Shame announced a change.

  There are times when a city moves, time becomes a rhythm you catch on to, and you move along with it. There are other times when you seem to move independent of each other. A city goes its way, you go yours. And t
hen there are those times, moments really, or lifetimes, when it seems like no time exists. The urban polyrhythm: a pin bent over a flame until it snaps, gears break each other’s teeth, the spring wheel sprung loose from its axle hovers, mad, whirring at eye-level. A squall line between these time zones, or pressure systems, severs the living air from a sky that’s dead.

  This was one of those moments. It had actually been a series of them. Shame felt nailed to a board. Meanwhile, some part of him floated away. The city jeered and danced its dance of indifference. Traffic of faces turned toward or away, the way, in traffic, it doesn’t matter which way is which. The no-time kind of time when all arrivals are made of departures. And the you you knew a minute ago? Turns out, it never existed. A city is real; you’re not. And power appears as if out of nowhere—though it’s been there all along—to check IDs at the crossing between who exists and who doesn’t.

  It isn’t like the movies. That severing of living from dying, the separating who exists from who doesn’t, mostly doesn’t happen in precinct basements, under bridges, and aboard cavernous cargo ships along foggy, abandoned docks. It goes on every day, all day, in crowded streets with hundreds of witnesses who never see a thing. Of course, this is the whole point.