Bright Lines

by Tanwi Nandini Islam

  Malik looked down at the floor. “Sure.”

  “Or, whatever, please visit, anytime. Su casa es mi casa.”

  “Other way around,” said Bic.

  “Oh, yes, of course.”

  Malik turned to Rashaud and said, “So, how’s business, Rashaud?”

  “Same shit—sell a record here, a trinket there. Shall we spark another?” Rashaud held another Dutch cigar, teetering on his fingers like a seesaw, this way and that, waiting for Anwar’s response.

  “Yes, let’s.” Anwar sighed, glancing at Malik, who kept his gaze on the shelves and away from him.

  As Rashaud rolled another smoke, Anwar grew quiet. Malik told Bic about a band he had just formed. Anwar couldn’t quite hear them. The boy’s arrival had broken the synergy and flooded him with a hazy paranoia. Would the boy tell Charu? Or worse yet, had Malik invited Charu to partake? Anwar rocked himself with guilt, his daughter’s innocence lost. Medicating oneself against life’s troubles birthed a new bundle of troubles. He kept business strictly word-of-mouth and Bic had opened his mouth, unbeknownst to Anwar, to a boy he trusted his daughter with. The radio broke his thoughts and he cocked his head to the side, listening closer. “What is this song?”

  “‘Mo Money Mo Problems,’” said Malik. “It’s an old Biggie Smalls track.”

  “By ‘old’ he means more than five years ago,” said Bic.

  “Should be no money, mo’ problems,” said Anwar, giggling. “Or no honey, no problems.”

  “That’s right,” said Bic, taking a toke, then passing it to Anwar. Bic coughed long and hard, beating at his chest, and Anwar felt his own chest constrict watching him hacking and wheezing like an old man. Bic spat into his handkerchief.

  Anwar heard a loud crash coming from the apartment upstairs. It was Sallah S., the girl Maya’s father, having one of his tantrums. “Sorry, my friends. It’s my neighbor. He has some . . . anger management issues.”

  “Damn.” Bic shook his head. “Too many fools with a loose fuse like that. He needs to chill the fuck out.”

  “Tell me ’bout it,” said Rashaud. “Just lef’ my house, matter of fact. Mama’s gone mad. She scream just like dat man, if not worse.”

  “Where will you be staying now?” asked Anwar, concerned for his friend. Rashaud made decent money with his street side hustles, but was it enough to support his own apartment?

  “I’ll live in my grow house, I guess. Don’t know yet.”

  “You Trini? You sound it,” said Malik, blowing a thick sheet of smoke from his nose like a dragon. It was remarkable how naturally it came to the boy.

  “Mama come from the Indies, born in Essequibo Guyana; Venezuelans been pilferin’ the lands since God knows. My father, he Muslim and Indian, got himself two wives, and one day Mama found this out getting her nails done in a Georgetown beauty parlor. Miracle of miracles, the other woman, Irma, was getting an acrylic set, while Mama kept hers natural. Thas just how she is. I was a boy of six. Never to this day do I forget her face, all consumed with hatred for my father, for foolin’ her in front of all those women in the parlor. She had a brother livin’ in Flatbush, and he brought us to live with him. But Mama, she never been the same after all that; she been sinkin’ and she been drinkin’. And when she drink she beat the one man she know who love her with his whole heart. Can’t hit her back—she more wiry than me, and she my mother, so I wouldn’t do that. Suppose I’m just another man she can’t ever have,” said Rashaud. “In Guyana, they say: One people, one nation, one destiny. But everything I know is split . . . in two. . . .”

  “Take a puff, son, please.” Anwar patted Rashaud’s shoulder.

  Rashaud chuckled, sounding as hollow as a laugh track. Anwar handed him the cigar.

  “I hardly see mine,” said Malik. “She works all the time.”

  “Money and women steal men’s thoughts the world over,” said Bic, shaking his head. “My memory’s spent. All these years thinkin’ on the same girl.”

  Anwar coughed up smoke. “My god, man, it is a common ailment, it seems.”

  “It’s why I can’t come by your house, Anwar; you know that,” said Bic.

  “This is why you never make our Fourth of July barbecue?”

  “It is. Thank you, son,” Bic said to Rashaud as he took the smoke into his lips, whistling a note outward like a faraway train. “Back in ’64, I used to play in that house when I was a boy of ten, with a girl named Tasha, the only daughter of a police officer named Abraham Bright.” He paused to take another toke, and looked at his ring finger, which swelled around a gold band. “Mr. Bright was a known man in the neighborhood, one of a dozen Black patrol officers in Brooklyn. He was a good man, in those days. Happy. Well-read and well liked. No easy thing, patrolling the neighborhood, streets hot, ready to ignite. Whenever a boy was killed by a policeman’s hand, Abraham Bright’s house suffered. Rocks and milk bottle bombs thrown, and once, an old lady’s rocking chair, right through them bay windows, right when the first riot broke. Boy’d been shot up in Harlem and we all felt this remarkable indignation, even me, a kid, a gap-toothed toothpick, before I was Bic. And man, did I have a crush.

  “Tasha Bright had a curl in her bangs and in her pretty lips, when she grew mad at me for discovering her in hide ’n’ seek. She preferred pants to skirts against her mother’s wishes. Her mother was a lady named Omalia, and she was just that, a lady, who met Mr. Bright when he visited his grandmother in Montgomery before he joined the police academy. They married right over at Emmanuel Church on Lafayette.”

  “There’s more churches here than any other city in the world,” said Anwar. “Everywhere you look there’s a chapel of some kind.”

  “True. Within a block you might find a Lutheran or AME chapel, a Masonic temple, or a Rastafarian Nyabinghi. If you want to know barbecue, Anwar, Mrs. Bright’s was the best I’ve ever had. She was slender with lips drawn and full; her last name was Sunny. Tasha had this joke that the reason her parents had married was to say it was a marriage of Bright and Sunny. But Mrs. Bright was miserable in Brooklyn. Summertime madness set her on edge. Winter crushed her spirit. The cycle of seasons to us natives ain’t new; we used to it. But for Mrs. Bright it was cause for dread.

  “By ’67, Tasha and I had become more than playmates—we were teenagers, after all; we went from playing chase to stealing kisses in the park. Thirteen years old and a mack. It was the year before I started selling pens, four for a dollar. But I was foolish to think it’d last. No one knows how Mrs. Bright died. Heard she killed herself drinking an overdose of a poppy tea from flowers she grew in her garden. But when she died, Abraham Bright became distraught, disturbed. Now, in that house on Cambridge Place, light comes from all sides, and it is hotter than hell in summer.”

  Anwar nodded. It was true about his house. The light was wondrous.

  “She died on a June morning, just days after we’d finished seventh grade. And he decided to set her up on a cot in their backyard so that he and Tasha and their neighbors could say good-bye. I remember . . . I remember seeing them flies frenzy on her. Buzzing over her eyes and mouth. I swear I smelt her skin burning.

  “He didn’t have her buried. Not at the Weeksville cemetery; no, he left her outside, for a good week, day and night, rocking in that chair, courtesy of ’64’s riot. Watching her ravaged by heat and maggots and butterflies.”

  Bic paused, noticing the embers had turned to ash in his fingers. He looked around, embarrassed for having held the cigar so long that it burned out. He shook the ash and lit the cigar once more. He dropped his voice so low that the rest of the men had to lean in to hear him.

  “I saw Tasha for the last time on the day Mr. Bright was caught by his own officers. The smell of death had grown so bad that the neighbors called him in. He signed his daughter over to her aunt in Montgomery. Never saw him again. Might have gone back up to Harlem, where his brother was a po
liceman. Or maybe out to the West Coast, to work in defense. Nobody knows. There was a looting of the place during the 1967 riots and all the fine old mahogany furniture, ceramic plates, Omalia’s wedding jewelry and silk kerchiefs, dry beans and flour and rice, the doorknobs, the light fixtures, anything and everything was gutted from that house. And then the house slept, for a long minute. Nobody wanted to live there. No one but hustlers and whores searching for a place to hide. As folks say: ’Twas a good place to freebase. I didn’t go back there again until sometime in ’75, in need of a fix, not sure what I was looking for. Got a fucking concussion tripping on a full-length mirror. I fell on the floor. Stared right into a shank shaped like the Empire State Building, covered in white residue. I was a man eye-to-eye with his own depraved soul. It was the night I met my wife.”

  “You married a whore?” asked Rashaud.

  “Naw, man. I married the nurse who picked out the glass shrapnel from my face.”

  Anwar pulled out a bag of spicy corn chips and passed it around. The men grew hushed, crunching their chips.

  Anwar daydreamed about the history of his home. Images flashed in his mind like skipping across channels on the television. He saw woman’s corpse blackening under a hot sun. Fires and mobs justified in their anger. Abraham Bright in his policeman’s uniform. Tasha, living in Atlanta with her kids, a husband, maybe. A 1970s pimp fitted in a fox-fur coat, holding a rose, a revolver, a dead girl’s hand.

  Anwar stared up at the paper lanterns overhead, wondering how such a simple thing, paper bent into a sphere, could be so beautiful.

  * * *

  “This morning I got attacked by my tenant’s lover,” said Anwar, breaking the silence.

  Bic raised a brow. “How’s that?”

  “Oh, god.”

  “She’s gorgeous,” said Rashaud. “I seen her doin’ laundry at Miss Hashi’s, just today.”

  “You saw Miss Hashi today?” asked Anwar. “And Ramona?”

  “This morning,” said Rashaud. He traced his thin eyebrows with his fingers. “She shapes me up. I also seen that woman Ramona before at the hospital.”

  “You have?” It had not occurred to Anwar before to visit her at the hospital under the pretense of ailment—a brilliant idea. “Why were you there?”

  “Oh you know, she work at the free sexual health clinic.”

  “I think I know who you talkin’ about. That pretty nurse—man, I was embarrassed. That godforsaken prick in the prick,” said Bic, wincing at the memory. “She’s fine as they come. Why bother renting without the perks?”

  “You all know Ramona?” asked Anwar. “And you are all getting tests for VD?” Going to get a VD test from her was not the way to impress her.

  “Can’t have that VD,” said Bic. He cleared his throat and looked at Malik, who looked shyly down at his sneakers.

  “Your wife?” asked Anwar. “But you took the test—?” He stopped himself and raised a hand. “Understood.”

  “Games change,” said Bic, laughing. “Good ones, at least.”

  “I suppose you are right on.” Anwar continued, “Anyway, Ramona likes to argue with this man, a shouting man, who I presume is her lover. This morning was the usual fight and like a terror he bolted downstairs from her apartment, jabbing me hard in the elbow, as I was locking my door, so hard that I almost fell over. From the back side the man had the figure of a wrestler, stacked and burly, and a strange long braided strip of hair down his neck.” He let the last embers of ganja die in his fingers.

  “Motherfucker had a rattail?” asked Bic. He looked over at Malik and shook his head. “I feel high as fuck, gentlemen, but now I must get home and cook my wife some dinner. Here you are.” He handed Rashaud a wad of twenty-dollar bills.

  “Gentlemen, it’s been fantastic,” said Anwar. He sighed with pleasure. He was content to be with these men. There was no other company he’d rather smoke ganja with (well, perhaps he could do without Malik). He felt a faint glimmer of paranoia—Bic’s story about the Brights—did he live in a haunted house of some kind? He shook his head. No use thinking about it now. “Gentlemen,” he said, “next time, I will make bhang.”

  “Sounds real dutty.” Rashaud giggled.

  “It’s quite clean. It’s a drink of hash, water, millet, and cinnamon and honey. The trouble is that there is no telling when the high begins and when it will stop.”

  They all laughed. Anwar turned off the lights in his shop and they walked outside.

  Rainfall had subsided to a languorous sprinkle. Steam wafted up from Atlantic Avenue’s sewers. Silhouettes of shopkeepers heaving closed their store gates. A yellow taxicab skidded across the slick road and braked hard at the traffic light. They heard the traffic signal click from orange halting hand to white running man. Ye Olde Liquor Shoppe’s neon sign hissed. Without the fire between their lips, the summer evening chilled their bones. Bic hailed the taxi and the driver pulled over.

  “Will you join me, Malik?” he asked, getting into the cab.

  “Yes, sir,” said the boy. He propped his skateboard in the backseat, getting in first. He waved good-bye to Rashaud and Anwar. “Thanks, sir. Bye, Rashaud. See you soon.”

  “Good night, friends, and be careful,” said Bic. He got into the car, which sped off following a chain of ticking green lights, changing one after another.

  “Where are you off to, Rashaud?” asked Anwar.

  “Just meetin’ some guys in the city.”

  “Will you take the train? May I walk with you?”

  “Sure thing.”

  Anwar wanted to tell Rashaud something to hearten him, but he couldn’t find his words. They walked toward Flatbush Avenue, and no one was about. Anwar felt like they were the last men on earth. A strange idea, being stranded with another man.

  “It is always good to see you, Rashaud.”

  “The pleasure is mine, Mr. Anwah.”

  “Please, Rashaud, no more Mr. Anwar business. I have known you for years!”

  “Habits don’t die,” said Rashaud. He leaned over and gave Anwar a hug.

  Anwar hugged him back, surprised. Though hugs and hand-holding were common between men back home, he felt himself stiffen. He patted Rashaud’s back one more time and said, “Home safe.”

  He watched his friend walk in through the glass doors of the Atlantic Avenue station, waiting until Rashaud was no longer visible. Anwar worried for his skinny friend, worried if he was taken care of. Some jackals out there were keen on hurting an innocent fellow.

  * * *

  It was eight o’clock. Hashi would be waiting, sitting at the dinner table, unwilling to eat without Anwar. He took a different route home that evening, longer and roundabout. He walked down Atlantic Avenue, toward the bright lights of the mall, past the auto body shop and monstrous storage facility, where the world became darker and quieter. As he crossed over to Fulton Street, partygoers emerged from the subway. A legless man zipped around in his wheelchair, in the middle of the street, paying compliments to women. Despite the new culinary developments the busiest establishment was Happy Heavens Chinese restaurant. A new Trinidadian roti shop, which made boneless fluffy chicken roti slathered in yogurt, had become a neighborhood favorite—Anwar had yet to try it. The B26 bus dropped off a few nurses who were about to begin the night shift at Woodhull. They shook their hands to fan their faces, assaulted by the muggy air after their thirty-minute air-conditioned ride. It amazed Anwar how in a few minutes you could be in a different world. South of his shop, reggae blasted from a minivan stereo and somehow the horde of women leaning on it talked fast and slow at the same time, because of the lilt in their voices. Yet, on this side of Atlantic Avenue, the store signs had none of the Caribbean neon or Arabic scrawl; instead there were Black-owned hair salons (more churches perhaps meant more barbers per capita, too) with alliterative names like Cool Kutz and Burkina Beauté, and, of course, one that
strayed from conventions of naming: Bic’s Razor.

  Their own neighborhood, between Fort Greene and Bedford-Stuyvesant, was now considered Clinton Hill. Newcomers remained blissfully oblivious of the longtime residents who lived in prewar buildings and brownstones and housing projects nestled amid tall brick churches and storefronts.

  Anwar turned left onto his block, half-expecting to see his home haunted by the Brights. But it loomed the same as it always did, alongside sister row houses, each a slight mutation of the other. On his brownstone were simple rose engravings; on his neighbor’s, the head of a lion; wrought iron fences twisted into fleur-de-lis spears. Anwar sat on his stoop. The summer shower had heightened the scent of the trees on his block, and on humid nights like this, there was no place he’d rather be.

  8

  They celebrated Maya’s golden birthday, her eighteenth, on the eighteenth of July, with a small picnic at Fort Greene Park. Despite having to witness Charu and Malik making out on a blanket for much of the afternoon, Ella was impressed at the small, devoted group who came out to celebrate with Maya. They came from wholly different parts of her life—her friends from Bushwick High School, friends from her volunteer stint at the local daycare, friends from Arabic school (where she and Charu had originally met, during Charu’s failed two months of Quranic study), and Maya’s ex-boyfriend, who was now gay. They’d known each other since they were in fifth grade; their mothers had been friends back in Egypt. Halim’s hair was a crown of black ringlets doused in peppermint hair gel. He wore a tight black tank with an even tighter pair of acid-washed jeans. He was lying on the blanket, propped up on his elbows. His boyfriend, a silent young man in retro sunglasses named Marque, was resting his head on Halim’s hip. The boy gave a faint smile, and went back to playing his Game Boy.

  “We were fast friends, yeah, until I broke down during My Own Private Idaho, and was like, I am so gay,” Halim told Ella, laughing. “But now, she’s my wife for life.” He swatted Maya’s knee. “I don’t see you anymore.”