Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  –Parenthetical.

  He turned but no one was there. The dark-light of the path laughed. Shame picked up the pack and began to walk downhill toward Shela on the main path that now felt to him like a wide avenue. Wide as Victoria Lake, he thought to himself, is that a crime? He turned around and marked the spot in his vision. Shame turned back and headed down, thinking, “If I’m not a traveler, then what? A spinner? A spider?”

  As he approached Shela from behind, he stopped. The sky was black again, its surface had vanished. The moon was gone. In its place starlight fell from the sky like a translucent wing of dust onto the dunes that led down about two miles to the beach. In the distance, in a subtle ink of night, he saw a tiny cluster of stars, seven sisters, first to appear in the sky. The Pleiades. They were his witnesses to all that had been made plain as night. He felt something, maybe possibility, maybe love, move like a crime, like a new dimension of sight, like star-rise, inside his fingers. And, he wondered what—or, really, if—it was. He remembered the other planet where “when” meant “if;” now, he thought, here he was where “if” meant “what.”

  Luther B had left notes for Ndiya at Inflation. After a week with no response, he traced his way up to Earlie’s and left a note for her there too. He said he wanted to talk to her. Word traveled from Earlie’s and, after delaying for another week, she met up with him. She’d come to listen. For these weeks she’d stayed clear of 6329. She concentrated on the messages Shame wasn’t sending. Shame had sent no word. She knew he wouldn’t. Colleen and a few others asked if she’d heard from him. She told them she hadn’t, which, as far as they were concerned, was true enough. She knew different, but there really wasn’t anyone to talk to about that. She knew she’d have to explain. She knew explaining it to someone meant admitting it to herself. She couldn’t do that yet.

  Then, on a quiet Thursday evening, she found herself listening to Luther B tell her things in order to say what he very clearly wasn’t going to say.

  –Look, this life, if that’s what it is, it’s OK with me just as it is. I’ll take it. It’s as much or more, or maybe it’s just longer, than anything I ever expected. If I’d known, or dreamed, I’d be here this long—almost seventy?—I’d have done a little more work to prepare.

  –Prepare?

  –For the way time lies down and rolls over on its back, like a lazy redbone hound in the shade. And there you are in a stillness, in the quiet, in a long-type, quiet stillness.

  When Luther B pronounced that final phrase, he extended his long arms, the sleeves of his plaid flannel shirt neatly cuffed at his thin wrists. All the Southern tones in his voice bloomed open into a bouquet tinged with the Caribbean beneath the American South. Maybe, she thought, she also heard what was beyond the Caribbean and beneath all of it. Luther B looked back in Ndiya’s direction, staring over her shoulder, and traced the arc of something, maybe a palm branch, she thought, with his eyes.

  –Where’d you find this place? Scratch that. I mean, I know where, or who. Do you know where he is?

  –I know where I can find out.

  He stared beyond her into the room. She caught a shiver pass over his shoulders, or maybe it was a short run in the piano solo playing through Earlie’s speakers. He looked up at her:

  –Oh, you heard that too? Different, right? I listened to this song for decades, “Misterioso” from ’57. Sonny Rollins on tenor. I listened for years. And right there, when that shiver crossed your shoulders, I used to think, “How did Monk call hisself turning, like on a well-worn dime, into Wynton Kelly?”

  She opened her ears past his voice and focused on the sound of the air, its slips and dives. She felt like Luther B was toying with her but if that was it, something was wildly out of place. This conversation certainly wasn’t what it said it was, but it still didn’t feel like a game.

  –You know what I mean? That’s Monk? I mean he was funky, now, and could roll like he did on “Bags’ Groove,” but mostly that was just because he was pissed at Miles and taking it out on the keys so he didn’t ring the evil little nigga’s neck like a frizzled, Carolina chicken. But even that’s not this. Not hardly. Two things can be alike, maybe they even one thing, but they still different. You know?

  Ndiya listened to him, but she was really hearing the air of the room and the fear, or something like it. Whatever this was about rode in Luther B’s voice, in his eyes, behind the curtain of musicology. She listened to the bush he was beating around. He was inviting her to figure out why. Maybe it was a dare?

  –Finally, come to find out, and it was Cass who told me when it was playing at his old place before he had Inflation. So we were talking about this and that and the third when this song came on. I let it go for a while then asked, “Cass, you ever wonder how Monk changes hats right here and turns into Wynton Kelly?” and I remember I stopped and had to say, “And this drink,” I said, “it’s got to be the worst tasting-est rum and Coke I ever had.” And Cass said, “Well, one, that’s because you switched glasses right around the bridge and were sipping out of my Scotch and ice. I was waiting to see how long it’d take your drunk ass to notice.” Then, he continued, “And two, it’s easy for Monk to ‘turn into Wynton Kelly,’ you see, when Horace Silver happened to be in the studio that night itching to take a chorus or two—”

  Then he turned back to her and Ndiya switched back to the subject she thought they were supposed to be talking about.

  –Have you seen any of the kids? Muna? Pearlie?

  –Muna’s sister brings them up. She stays in Muna’s place now.

  –And Muna?

  –I’ve heard what they say about those who know—it’s OK. Joine, that’s Muna’s sister, is solid. She’s a nurse. A nurse with a habit, but still a nurse. Pearlie drops off the enchanted twins three times a week. Ghettos don’t abide vacuums, not when they rent-free.

  –OK. Drops them where?

  –With me. What? What else I got to do?

  –Besides golf?

  They both laughed. Luther B’s face lighted up like a kicked-open door in a dark hallway. Ndiya, testing:

  –Should I come back? For a visit?

  Luther stared at her, eyebrows up. He let out a single chuckle and then something in his face darted away. His face turned off for a minute. Door kicked shut, lights off. Luther sipped his drink and stretched. Ndiya asks,

  –Are you OK?

  –Me? Call it whatever you like—

  –You know what I mean?

  –Do you know what I did, I mean, before my present car-rear?

  –You mean before the Tiger Woods routines?

  –Shit. Tiger Woods. Forget that little freak … I ain’t studying his narrow ass. Bet that on Sunday, little girl.

  –Uh. Sorry.

  Then Luther smiled wide.

  –Calvin Peete, now. Now you’re talking!

  –What?

  –I remember when he made it, and reporters had the nerve to asked him that noise about “tradition at the Masters.” Do you know what he said?

  –Um, no.

  –He said, “You might as well ask me how I feel about slavery.” Calvin Peete!

  Luther shook his head and smiled at something far away.

  –I worked in the police motor pool, detectives and vice. Thirty-five years. I never touched a squad car. For the last fifteen years, I only worked on special unit cars. Tactical units, they were called. These were teams with their own funding. Federal and “private.” After a while, as far as I knew, they funded themselves. They damned sure funded me. Ancient history. I was the only black mechanic in the whole motor pool. And I got special units?

  Luther sipped his drink again, and then turned his eyes to Ndiya’s face. Their eyes met and she saw a glassy surface in his stare, thin red rivers stretched toward the elegant slope of his eyelids. From beneath the watery membrane of his eyes and from a distance, a flame of narrowing focus backlit his face. His stare did like when you focus sunlight in a magnifying glass. Ndiya thought she cou
ld feel a spot heat up on her cheek beneath her eye. She touched the spot with her finger in a reflex. Her brothers used to injure ants and moths and then burn them with a magnifying glass on the sidewalk. She remembered watching from above as the twitching insect’s body lighted up bright, squirmed in place, until small threads of smoke twirled up and she turned away. Luther B broke the pause:

  –You know? I, me, I got special units? How do you explain that? Never mind. I did it all. Retreads. Lined trunks. A unit signed out on Friday, come back in Monday with 2500 miles on it. I probably rolled back a million miles off those cars in all those years. I didn’t think about it then, rode it out like time was a runaway stallion. Now, here it is, time, a lazy redbone hound. Little girl, there are very few things as beautiful as a redbone hound at sunset. Cass knows. His old place was a deep pool for special unit officers.

  –Where was it?

  –Just before the tracks on Fifty-Third Street. It’s still there. Cass knows.

  Luther B paused. He stared into the open space in his speech. Ndiya looked into the frame of his stare. After a few very particular instants, she said,

  –I know, “What they say about those who know—”

  –Yeah, well, most times—this not being one of those times—it’s best not to let on you know. You know?

  –Naw, I don’t believe I do.

  Ndiya blanked her eyes and shook her head. Luther smiled with half a chuckle in his throat at something over her shoulder. In that instant he looked twenty-five years younger. He leaned back again, one arm propped up on the chair next to him, the other holding his glass. He tilted his head back and looked up.

  –Love these old tin ceilings. God damn. This song?

  –I don’t know it.

  –Coltrane’s “Slow Dance.” No song is quite like it.

  –I’m not sure I’ve ever heard it. It’s … it’s nice.

  –I know the beautiful, crazy motherfucker—pardon my French—who wrote it. Used to be in Chicago. His woman was an actress, a dancer. He was friends with Oscar.

  –Oscar?

  –Oscar Brown Jr. So, no word from him, I mean, the other him?

  –Not yet. I know he’s OK. Somehow, I know it. If he wasn’t, I’d have heard.

  –Well, that’s one way to listen. And you? Do you have a good place to stay?

  Ndiya knew that question wasn’t a question. It was a test.

  –Luther, did you ever see a cat at night, and the light shines in its eyes and the eyes glow bright amber?

  Luther B smiles, again, and looks back over her shoulder at whatever’s back there.

  –Do you know what makes that glow?

  He shook his head. His smile widened. His face opened as if he was on stage, lighted by an intensifying spotlight. He turned his attention directly to her. Ndiya continued,

  –The pupils open so wide that light goes in and bounces off the back of their eyes, the lenses, I think, and comes out the front straight back at you. The short, bright waves are trapped on the way in. Only the long, low waves make it back out. That’s the amber glow.

  Luther laughed deep and clapped twice before he stretched his arms out to his sides. He moaned loud enough for half the room to hear. Ndiya felt the moan in her chest. He downed the rest of his drink and chewed the chips of ice in the back of his mouth.

  –Ah. Mostly water. Good to see you, little girl. Very good to see you.

  –It’s good to see you too.

  –I’m going to the john and I’m going to pay for these drinks on the way out.

  He lifted Ndiya’s right hand up off the table. He held it in both his hands. His hands were bone dry, smooth, and very warm.

  –Be smart. So long.

  Ndiya nodded blankly. A chord of fear smoldered somewhere near her like a long fuse. Luther was telling her something with or without saying it. At the same time, she realized that she couldn’t trust him. Hell, he was damned near telling her that she couldn’t trust him. Meanwhile, he was telling her something else by not going anywhere near what he was telling her. He was helping her confirm something that she wouldn’t say. Her mind turned to Cass and she turned it away from Cass. Luther’s railroad spike, “Be smart,” while he tenderly held her hand twisted together with her memory of distant smoke and sweet wine on her daddy’s breath.

  “Fathers,” she thought, and watched Luther B’s length as he moved between tables, his cap rolled up under his arm, the worn perfection in the drape of flannel hitched up on his wallet. She wondered at the ridge she thought she could see at the center of his back just above his belt. Or was that a shadow? The wonder disappeared as Luther B swung his jacket on before she could decide if the shadow was under his shirt or creased in her eye.

  She’d only had a few conversations with him. This had been the longest by far; it felt like the last. She wondered if that feeling, itself, had been the point he was trying to make. She remembered a voice. She couldn’t place it—some kind of philosopher, she guessed. Something else, which she dismissed, suggested it was a golfer. Maybe Calvin Peete, whoever he was. She heard a detached voice say,

  –In one physical model of the universe, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. In the opposite direction, Danny.

  That was the voice. She finished her drink, neat. Luther B paid at the front and exited Earlie’s. Ndiya whispered to herself, smiling,

  –Who the fuck is Danny?

  Shame felt the multiplied weight of gravity caught in the sky-colored feathers of a bird of prey. A symphonic web of muscles and a vascular mathematics of tendril-thin pulses exerted their pressure against the approach of an invisible surface. A convex optics in the lens of an eye canceled reflecting waves of light against each other, and so a speckled trout appeared suspended in vacant space beneath. If it was a bird its approach had been measured against a liquid breeze and the low angle of the sun so that the shadow-double trailed like the certainty of hindsight and the inevitability of regret. If it was a bird there was no regret, no need for certainty and the shadow of the attack followed the event.

  But this wasn’t a bird. The wheels of the aircraft touched the runway and Shame’s eyes opened. A message on a small screen read: ARRIVAL NBO. All the content of his dream evaporated, leaving him with an inexplicable expectation that the engines should reignite, the plane veer back into the sky, pinning the passengers in their seats. The plane morphed in Shame’s mind back into the dream-image as it made its ascent with whatever prey dangling from talons of the landing gear.

  Most of the people around him instantly flicked open phones and began to morse brief messages to, he suddenly imagined, waiting family members or expectant colleagues. That thought felt like another takeoff. For now, he permitted himself one backward glance.

  The last thing he’d said to Ndiya was his instruction to her in the truck at the end of the you-don’t-exist parade. At that time, there’d been no way to distinguish concern and fear from paranoia. This was the point of the parade. So, after the night in the precinct, he hadn’t contacted her or anyone they knew. Only Kima. Another consequence of nonexistence, this one nearly immediate, was the suspicion, or realization, that he had massively underestimated the capacity of other people. Though this might be more the result of desperation than paranoia. It didn’t matter.

  Given this chronic and pervasive system of error piled upon error, in a flash of recalibration, the absurdity of which he politely introduced himself to and then banished, he ended his your-one-phone-call’s worth of a backward thought with the certainty that Ndiya would find her way to Kima and from Kima to him. Period. The last, most important part, he knew, was too much but he went for it anyway—fuck it. She’d take her time going about it. And he allowed himself to hope she would—“Would what? Scratch that.” He avoided the answer by refusing himself the right to ask.

  The crowd around him began its flow to the exits. With each step the increasing gravity from their nearing lives diminished the conversation in the aisles. Sham
e stood. He broke his stiffened knees straight, grabbed his worn-out, black backpack, and told himself he was walking. In his pocket were three Kenyan telephone numbers: Kima’s sister, Sarah; Francis, her driver; and a woman in Mombasa named Su. The plane was now regurgitating its passengers into the smudged glass and gloom of an antechamber in Jomo Kenyatta International Airport. Kima had assured him that among those waiting for this crowd would be a man with a sign, SL: PIANO MAN. Kima told him the man would give him a ride and he’d have a cell phone charged with enough credit to call Jupiter. Shame walked through a corridor tinged with the smell of jet fuel and distant cigarettes. He passed two soldiers asleep along the wall cradling old rifles like the spines of ancient lovers. “Jupiter,” he kept thinking, “that’s good. Apart from these numbers in my pocket, there are as many people I can call on Jupiter as there are here on Earth.”

  The weatherworn door opened out onto Fifty-Third Street, the main business street of Hyde Park. On the inside of the door, a small bell hung on the neck of a soft, brass knob with a palm-faded lion’s face patterned into the blond metal. The sound of the bell wavered throughout the space, announcing his entry. Shame was a periodic customer of the store, The Act Is Natural, a new-age toy store and bookshop that replaced a used record and CD store near the corner of Fifty-Third and Dorchester. The door to the store swung shut and chimed, again, throughout the volume of warm air in the rectangular, high-ceilinged space. Shame’s legs felt slightly numb with the vibrations of the previous night’s detention and police interrogations. He hadn’t slept at all.

  He was aware of no decision. He had stopped at his apartment and filled Ndiya’s wheeled suitcase with some clothes, passport, random bathroom items, and his empty backpack. He didn’t know that he knew that he was not going back there. A severed electrical cord moved, slowly, like a rain-chilled snake in the curve of his skull. Call it thinking. When he closed the door of his apartment it seemed as if he could hear a whistle of air disappearing through the space beneath the door. Some crystal of cold spines was growing in his belly. He closed the door as gently as he possibly could. Nonetheless, the sound of the latch had felt like a cleaver through bone and tendon.