Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  ■

  Shame stepped into Echoes thinking he’d say hi to Kate, maybe toast his gullibility with a cup of something. He felt too light to be standing on his feet. He felt like he needed to sit down. He was in shock but he didn’t know that. He was shaken by the momentary violence and thought maybe his career as a stevedore was over. Maybe he’d been fired? This all for some reason made him newly fearful about Ndiya’s situation, wherever she was. That fear suddenly felt close by.

  He entered the courtyard carrying his plastic bag, wearing his jersey. Kate was at the back table talking with Amina, the woman from Buraka, the gallery. The look on their faces when he entered made it clear that he’d made a mistake. He immediately wondered what mistake it was. In that moment, errors of all sizes and shapes rained over his head like a dome of heat lightning. He was numb to them, unable to measure what he sensed in the women’s reaction to seeing him. Kate’s face, her uncharacteristically hesitant greeting, clearly signaled something Shame hadn’t recognized. The women stared at him as if his arm had been severed and he’d hallucinated a flesh wound. He could also feel that they weren’t seeing what they were staring at. They were both staring straight at him. So what were they seeing?

  His first thought was to reassure Kate that the injury wasn’t that serious but Kate’s hesitation wasn’t exactly about his arm. He thought back, carefully and slowly, about his reaction to seeing the wound, the vibrations in his arm, his blood-washed hand. After the murder of the fish, he’d rinsed out the wound in the water. The inside of the incision was the same color as the inside of the fish’s mouth. After rinsing it out he watched as tiny spots of red appeared, then they grew together, filling the channel with blood. For a moment the opening looked like it was lined with teeth. Maybe teeth had come out and stuck in his arm?

  In response to their reactions to his wound, the scale of errors roared up against the eroding emergency barrier Shame had erected between himself and his previous life. Those images didn’t splash like a hallucination. His arm was real. It was still there. He focused on the scene Kate had framed. He tried to see what she saw.

  –Is something wrong? I know I’m a little …

  –Maybe more than a little, sweetie, no?

  –I don’t know, maybe so.

  –What happened?

  –A fish—at work—

  –A fish? Have you been home?

  –No.

  With this Kate emitted an inaudible sigh and said something to Amina under her breath. The women reclined back into the sitting positions they’d been in when he’d first seen them. They smiled privately at each other. Amina said, “Pole, Shahid, pole.” Kate looked back at him, now calmly, openly. Kate wasn’t seeing whatever she’d seen when he’d first approached the table a few moments ago. But he could also tell that she still wasn’t really looking at him, either.

  –Have you talked to Su lately?

  –No. Not in weeks. Why?

  –No reason. Just wondering.

  Shame knew that was a lie. Kate wasn’t a woman who asked things for no reason.

  –Just wondering. Deary, if you haven’t been home, I suggest you go there. You don’t look like you’re in shape to be—

  Now he could feel that none of this had to with his arm, at least not anymore.

  –It’s not that bad, really. But, true, I should wash and change the—

  He glanced down at the bloody shirt tied around his arm.

  –bandage.

  Holding up the white plastic bag, he turned to leave, then turned back.

  –Is something wrong with Su?

  –No, oh no. I was just wondering, no reason. Su’s fine. You be off. You’re sure you’re OK?

  –Yes, I’m OK.

  So, that was twice Kate had insisted she’d asked something for no reason. Her concern about his arm was clearly not a reason. Her tone was still not her usual voice, but it wasn’t the truly strange veil he’d greeted upon entering. Something about his not having yet been home had rotated the scene. Around what? He could still feel the electric charge in the air he’d entered. It hadn’t begun with him. Something had already been in the air when he arrived. Whatever it was changed abruptly when they’d seen him. He felt the jolt; he hadn’t recovered.

  With that his mind spun outward: “Recovered from what?” The possibilities roared, again, against the barrier between where he was and where he’d been. He’d learned long ago not to think about things at a distance, which made them general. He’d kept to details, even abstract ones, even absurd conjectures, anything but general thoughts. Far more than he knew, his life had depended, had long depended, on his body’s insistence on being where it was and on his mind’s eagerness, its thirst and need, to start there and deal with whatever followed from that position. That way no matter how wrong he was, it was still him that was wrong. He could take it from there.

  Shame stepped back into the street behind three donkeys saddled with baskets of sand. Ali King was closing his tailor shop and the ochre dust of dusk had thickened into a low-chord, black-powdered sky filled, as if by some unseen right hand high on the keys, with bright sparks.

  ■

  A huge red evening star was setting to the east over Manda Island. The floating bar was adrift closer than usual to Lamu Town, a string of lights along its perimeter shone like a distant suspension bridge. It was still early. All the booths along the edge were empty. The lights twitched in sync with the faint tones of the music blown ashore by the breeze. His left arm tight to his chest as if held in an invisible sling, Shame had taken his time, strolling, eventually, uphill to his room. Later for Kate and them. His mind felt loose in time, dangling from the world, the events of the day, and the roar beyond that. Somewhere close, as if following him, taking a shortcut and waiting for him to pass and then falling in behind to follow again, a vivid cross-hatching of static and color played with the edge of Shame’s peripheral awareness. Something had come along with him when he left Echoes. Or maybe it had preceded him through the alleys. He felt it, could almost hear it. It was like being conscious of the frayed edge or broken border of his own mind; he wondered if he was still in shock. He was in a lot of pain. He felt that. But maybe for the first time since the you-don’t-exist parade, he felt good, alive. As if those surgeon fish had been messengers or guides, as if Kubwa had been offering him a favor, he felt obscurely delivered, into what he wasn’t sure.

  As it did each night, the dusk had emerged from the open ocean to the east, collected over Manda, and sifted itself into the air of Lamu Town. The swallows disappeared. Bats replaced them in their paths as if substituting nighttime calculus for daylight algebra. Light from the American base would soon be visible to the north, its cloudy claims of possession sprayed into the night sky.

  Shame entered his building. The smell of Mrs. Azir’s curry and vegetables trailed up the stairs as he reached the lower landing. He paused and looked down at the blood-doused shirt tied around his arm. A breeze from the stairway window chilled the skin on his right shoulder, its fingers trailing diagonally across his back. Trade winds were rising; elsewhere that meant monsoon. Here it meant a season of sun splayed by dark towers of distant clouds. Shame loved the rain here, it canceled out all wind, revealing a world of perfectly perpendicular motion. “Plumb showers,” he’d thought. A bazillion raindrops all aimed at a single point at the center of the earth. A silver stillness painted beyond his eyes.

  His key was tied with a red string, given to him by Mrs. Azir when he’d paid her six months rent, three hundred dollars, upon arriving. With some distant sparkle in her eyes, Mrs. Azir had made a point to Shame that she’d charged him much less than others she’d rented to before. Muhammad, smiling, had told him it was more than double what he’d paid. In a way, like the silver stillness of the rain, Shame could see that Mrs. Azir’s lie was true.

  The key was in the left rear pocket of his shorts. It was fastened with the string wound around the button so it wouldn’t fall out in the water. He
stood before his door, reaching around his back with his right arm, undoing the flap and unwinding the string while his shoulder blade flirted with a cramp in the muscles beneath it. As he grasped the loop and removed the key he thought he heard a sound from behind the door. He assumed it was Muhammad on his roof across the way. He was wrong. He thought he should go see Muhammad; maybe Muhammad knew how to dress a wound properly. Maybe Shame would. Later. Just as he put his key in the door, the latch unlocked. Shame couldn’t tell if the key had turned on its own.

  He pushed the door but it didn’t move. It was bolted from the inside. He twisted the latch again and it came to life, the knob turning against the motion of his hand. He closed his eyes and said nothing. He whispered it to himself:

  –Nothing.

  Then, at eye level, he heard the iron bolt slide from its socket on the inside of the door.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  After beginning to write this novel on our front porch in Athens, Georgia, I worked on it over years when I could go live alone, mostly in cities (or parts of cities) that were unknown to me: Montréal, Mombasa, Nairobi, Istanbul, and the Bronx. But I wasn’t alone, of course; the characters would show up wherever in the world I was. And they’d bring Chicago along with them. We walked, cooked, ate, argued, and dreamed together. Over the course of the years, often walking backward in time, we found our way to and through this story. And I was also never alone because my family was and is always with me, which is always work, the best work, at times the only work; I first want to thank Stacey Barnum for all of it, and always a little—and sometimes more than a little—more than that. And, along with their mama, thanks to Milan, Suncana, and Mzée for life, ours.

  After that, I’d like to thank a few people whose presence informed this story as well as making the writing possible through every kind of support there is: Riccardo Williams, Jr. (1965–1987), for narrating, for never never leaving; Eric Lassiter, for seeing that; Binyavanga Wainaina, for bristling, for brilliant beaming-being; Martin Kimani, for good company, for the bassline; Craig Werner, for the world of teaching; Ntone Edjabe, for a galaxy of vinyl, soundings; Tim Tyson, for soul and the paint thinner; Michael Ondaatje, for the note, surgical; Valerie Babb, for the rail at The National; Yusef Komunyakaa, for two decades of sound and / as guidance; Mikhail Iossel and Ysabel Viau, for Montréal; Billy Kahora, Angela Wachuka, Wambui Mwangi, and Sheba Hirst, for Nairobi; Suhaila Abu Cross, for Nyali / Mombasa; Peter Wheeler, for Lamu; Malik Weaver, for laughing; Tugce Mahyacilar, Shale Turkeli, Kim Fortuny, and Gulen Gulen, for Istanbul; and Jeffrey Renard Allen (and also Terrance R. Young), for the Bronx.

  Many thanks, also, to the first readers who talked to me about this manuscript in parts or in the whole—Adrienne Rich (1929–2012), Jess Row, Craig Werner, and Milan Pavlic—and especially to those readers who so generously wrote notes for the book cover: Jeff Allen, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor, Kiese Laymon, Reginald McKnight, and Emily Lordi. And thanks so much to Barbara Bendzunas for solid company in Park Hall 254.

  Many thanks to many many singers and musicians, those named and unnamed, but, firstly, to Ms. Chaka Khan, whose work in song provides the basic and most fundamental—but also bottomless—logic into which the telling of this story leans for shape and direction.

  Finally, thanks to the organizations that supported this work: the MacDowell Colony, the Lannan Foundation, Nicholas Allen and the Willson Center for the Humanities at the University of Georgia (UGA), the UGA Provost’s Travel Grant. Most of all, thanks to Milkweed Editions, especially to Daniel Slager, who saw a horizon with this story on it and helped steer me there, and to Joey McGarvey and Mary Austin Speaker, for seeing the work into being between these covers.

  Sunčana Rain Pavlić

  ED PAVLIC is the author of eight collections of poems, including Visiting Hours at the Color Line and Let’s Let That Are Not Yet: Inferno, both of which were winners of the National Poetry Series. He has published essays, poems, fiction, and dramatic pieces with dozens of outlets, including the New York Times, Boston Review, Harvard Review, Ploughshares, and Callaloo. His critical work includes Who Can Afford to Improvise?: James Baldwin and Black Music, the Lyric and the Listeners and Crossroads Modernism: Descent and Emergence in African American Literary Culture. A recipient of the Georgia Author of the Year Award from the Georgia Writers Association and a fellowship from the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University, Pavlic is Distinguished Research Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Georgia.

  Founded as a nonprofit organization in 1980, Milkweed Editions is an independent publisher. Our mission is to identify, nurture and publish transformative literature, and build an engaged community around it.

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  Interior design by Mary Austin Speaker

  Typeset in Caslon

  by Mary Austin Speaker

  Adobe Caslon Pro was created by Carol Twombly for Adobe Systems in 1990. Her design was inspired by the family of typefaces cut by the celebrated engraver William Caslon I, whose family foundry served England with clean, elegant type from the early Enlightenment through the turn of the twentieth century.