Shadowshaper

by Daniel José Older

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “He has a Wikipedia page.”

  Sierra bit her lower lip. “You’re no fun at all.”

  “Believe me, whatever you were gonna say, I already thought of it. Anyway, there’s not much on there except that he’s a big anthropology whiz, expert in something called urban spirituality systems, went to Harvard, worked at Columbia, and then fell off the side of the earth. Dude’s old-fashioned for his generation. It’s not like he was out there liking people’s angry gerbil videos or nothing. So that’s as far as it goes, at least on the Internet streets anyway. There is, however, one place where there’s quite an extensive collection of Wick memorabilia. Or Wickabilia, as we say in the field …”

  “Bennie.”

  “I made you promise no corny puns. I made no such promise.”

  “That wasn’t even a … You know what, just go on.”

  “He has a paper trail. I know, seems so archaic, right? It’s at the Columbia anthropology archive.”

  “Sweet!”

  “Good luck getting in, though. Not like you can just dougie on through the front gates.”

  “Ha. I got people that are experts at these things. Thanks for the help, B.”

  An anthropology expert. Maybe Wick had been studying Grandpa Lázaro’s shadowshaper thing, whatever it was. If she could find him, maybe he could help her figure out what was going on. Maybe he’d know how to find Lucera.

  Robbie had started painting another intricate Robbie-design, some kind of skeleton woman unraveling across the Tower wall. It was perfectly creepy. Sierra sized him up. “I’m not through interrogating you, bro.”

  Robbie kept his eyes on the painting. “I know, sis.”

  “I’ll be back later.” She shook her head, scrolled quickly through her contacts, and made a call.

  “What it do, Sierra baby?” Uncle Neville sounded chipper as ever.

  “How you feel about doing your goddaughter a solid on this lovely Saturday morning and taking a quick ride uptown?”

  “So when popo came around the block, we just laid low,” Uncle Neville said, smiling at his own memories with those big, nicotine-stained teeth. “You know, acted like we was all some dumb stoop Negroes with nothing better to do.”

  “And what happened?”

  “Well, Hog knew better than to make a move. He was scared of us but he was just as scared of the cops. But when they rolled past, he tried to break out. T-Bone tripped him and we let him have it.”

  All the windows were rolled down in Neville’s dark blue 1969 Cadillac Seville, and the wind whipped across Sierra’s face as they zipped north along the FDR. Manhattan was a towering mass of skyscrapers on their left. To the right, the East River sparkled orange in the midday sun.

  “You killed him?”

  Neville exploded with laughter. “Naw, girl! What kinda gangster you think your ol’ godfather be?” Sierra wasn’t sure how to answer that, but fortunately he just kept talking. “We’da never done that to the brother. Then we’da been just like the police, and that’d defeat the whole point. We just turned him upside down a few times, you know, and sent him on his way, never to be seen from again. Think he landed in Tennessee or somethin’.”

  “He hurt Sheila pretty bad?”

  “Spent three weeks in the hospital. And she never spoke to a single one of us again.”

  “Dang …”

  When Neville smiled, his narrow cheeks seemed to fold into themselves to make room for that great wide mouth. He always got happy talking about the good ol’ days, even though most of his stories ended with people getting messed up. Sierra and Bennie had stayed up entire nights trying to work out what exactly it was Neville did for a living. Asking directly seemed like a breach of some unspoken protocol. Anyway, it was more fun to guess.

  “What is it we doin’ up at Columbia again?” Neville asked. He gripped the leather steering wheel with one hand and fished around inside his jacket for another cigarette with the other.

  “It’s hard to explain,” Sierra said. “But basically, I need to do some research on something. Kind of about my family — my grandpa Lázaro, actually.” She shot a meaningful look at him to see if he’d take the bait. Neville kept his eyes on the road. “It’s about some missing Columbia professor he knew, so I gotta get into some files. But I don’t think they’ll let me in.”

  “Family history, breaking and entering, weird secrets locked up in a Ivy League fortress,” Neville said. “Sounds like my kinda mayhem. You got a plan?”

  Sierra shook her head. “That’s why I brought you along. That and the Cadillac, of course.”

  “Of course.”

  It was hard to believe that the wide-open, ultramanicured campus of Columbia University was in the same city as Bed-Stuy. Sierra actually gasped when they walked in through the front gates and stood surrounded by all those pillared temples of knowledge and lush lawns. Summer-term students milled around in small clumps, chatting excitedly.

  “So we’re on a college visit,” Neville said.

  “In June?”

  “In June.”

  “Alright,” Sierra said.

  Neville steepled his fingers. “And you are a bookworm.”

  “I like books.”

  “You love books, so you wanna see the library. Got it?”

  “Got it.”

  “Now, get into character, pick yourself a Ivy Leaguer, and ask directions.” Sierra took a step toward a cluster of chatting students. “Make it a boy, Sierra,” Neville said under his breath. “And smile.”

  She forced a cheeseball grin across her face and walked up to an Asian kid in a baseball cap. “Hi, I’m a visiting student and I love books. Can you tell me where the library is?”

  Behind her, Neville put a hand over his eyes and cringed.

  “Um … it’s that huge building across the lawn,” the kid said, eyeing her.

  “That was a disaster,” Neville said when she walked back over.

  “Look, we found out what we needed to know. I never said I was a good liar. That’s your department.”

  “Fair enough. Lead the way.”

  “Where’s your ID?” the security guard at the library entrance demanded. They were standing in an imposing marble foyer, and Sierra felt tiny, a crumb in a giant, pristine oven.

  “I left it at home,” she said.

  “Then go get it.” The guard was about thirty, with greasy black hair slicked sharply against his skull and a shadow of stubble around his chin. He looked as if he had this conversation at least fifteen times a day.

  “I can’t,” Sierra said.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m locked out my room.”

  “Then call the main office. They’ll send one of our guys to let you back in.”

  “I can’t,” Sierra said again. And then her mind went completely blank. “I gotta … go.” She gritted her teeth and walked outside to where her godfather waited by a low stone wall.

  “Didn’t think so,” Neville said.

  “I tried.”

  “Okay, my turn.” He strutted off toward a grassy area where students were gabbing in small groups.

  “Where you going?” Sierra called.

  “Watch and learn, child.” Neville was getting more than a few suspicious glares from the mostly white students. His towering frame, slick suit, and dark skin put him in stark contrast to everyone else around. He carried an old-fashioned leather briefcase in one hand and a smoke in the other. Sierra felt her ears get hot as a wave of whispering and snickers erupted in his wake. She lost track of him for a second, and then caught sight of his bouncing Stetson hat making its way back to her through the crowd.

  “What was that all about?” Sierra said. “And where’s your briefcase?”

  Neville, now empty-handed, walked past her without stopping. “Stay here,” he said quietly. “Wait for the right moment. Imma be in the car.”

  Sierra wanted to go with him. The whole situation was making her more and mor
e edgy, but there was no turning back now. Neville had gone and done whatever it was he’d done, and that was that. Besides, finding Wick was her best clue for figuring out the rest of Lázaro’s riddle. She plopped miserably on a bench and waited.

  Less than five minutes later, a commotion erupted from the picnic tables. Students scattered hurriedly away and campus police emerged from all directions, faces and bodies tensed for a fight. Can’t take Uncle Neville anywhere, Sierra thought, but just then the greasy-haired guard came out of the library alongside a few others and ran toward the ruckus on the lawn.

  Sierra stood up and poked her head through the glass doors. No one was watching the entrance. Ignoring the tap dance her heart was doing in her ears, she ducked quickly through the low security arch, past the guard post, and into the library.

  Sierra had never seen so many books. Economic Development in the Third World, one title proclaimed loudly from a display table. Studies in Puerto Rican Literature said another. It’d never even occurred to her there was such a thing as Puerto Rican literature, let alone that it would be worthy of a thick volume in a Columbia University library. A smaller paperback was called Debating Uncle Remus: An Anthology of Essays and Stories about the Historic Southern Folktales.

  Stay focused, girl, she told herself, imitating her godfather’s voice. Do what you came here to do. She found a sprawling map and ran her finger along it till she found the area called Anthropology Archives. “Subbasement Seven?” she said out loud. “Great.” She passed through a loudly clanking doorway and went down two flights of concrete stairs that reeked of clove cigarettes and perfume.

  Subbasement Seven looked more like a warehouse than a library. Metal shelves stretched into the darkness of a vast gray hall. Churning machinery hummed somewhere close by. They must’ve had the AC cranked up all the way, because Sierra had to wrap her arms around herself for warmth as soon as she walked in.

  “Can I help you?” said a girl sitting behind a desk. She looked only a few years older than Sierra. She had a scarf wrapped around her neck and a knit cap pulled over her curly black hair. The name tag on her button-up shirt said NYDIA OCHOA.

  “I’m doing some research,” Sierra said. “For a project I’m doing in anthropology class. For summer session.” She fished a little scrap of paper from her jeans pocket and put it on the desk. “I’m studying a professor who used to work here? His name was Jonathan Wick.”

  Nydia’s face lit up. “Oooh!” she said, smiling conspiratorially. “Dr. Wick! Juicy stuff.”

  “You know Dr. Wick?”

  Nydia shook her head. “No, he’s been gone since, like, two semesters ago. He, um …” She leaned over the desk and lowered her voice. “Well, no one knows what happened to him. No —” She threw herself back into the swivel chair. “Check that. He completely vanished from the known universe. Like, poof. I asked everyone. I can’t help it that I’m curious, you know? But Ol’ Denton — the guy I took over for when they brought me in to run the archives —”

  “Wait.” Sierra put up a hand. “You run the archives?”

  “Well, the Anthropology Archives, yeah.”

  “But aren’t you like … twenty?”

  Nydia let a warm smile spread over her face. “Thirty-three, sweetheart.” She held up a framed photo of two grinning boys with dark brown skin and big afros. “And I got a seven-year-old and a nine-year-old. But thanks for the compliment. Black don’t crack, ya know? And anyway, we Boricuas age at our own dang pace. You Puerto Rican, right?”

  Sierra nodded.

  “I love books and I wanna be around ’em all day, even if it’s in some dingy basement at a stuffy old university on the Upper West Side.” True to her heritage, the head librarian talked a mile a minute. “Eventually, Imma open my own library up here in Harlem, but like a people’s library, not just for academics. And it’ll be full of people’s stories, not just jargony scholar talk. This is like practice, really, and to boost my standing in the eyes of certain potential funders.”

  “You have a whole plan, huh?” Sierra said. She’d never met anyone like Nydia before.

  “Yeah. Anyway, Ol’ Man Denton told me all kindsa mysterious crap about this Wick guy. He was a big anthro dude, specifically the spiritual systems of different cultures, yeah? But people said he got too involved, didn’t know how to draw a line between himself and his” — she crooked two fingers in the air and rolled her eyes — “subjects. But if you ask me, that whole subject-anthropologist dividing line is pretty messed up anyway.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Ugh, you ask me these questions like it won’t end up with me unloading a dissertation into your ear until three o’clock in the morning. Imma control myself, though, because I’m sure we both have other things we need to be doing. I’m just saying: Who gets to study and who gets studied, and why? Who makes the decisions, you know?”

  “I don’t know at all,” Sierra said.

  “Right! Most people don’t. It’s a whole messy bureaucracy of grants and … oy, see? Anyway, Wick was sort of beyond that for a while, the way I understand it. Or he thought he was. He’d go in and learn a whole bunch about some group and their rituals, and then, like, disappear for a while and learn actually how to do … you know …”

  “What?”

  “Magic. Stuff with the dead. Whatever.”

  Sierra’s eyes widened. “Word?”

  “I mean … That’s what people say, yeah.” Nydia shrugged. “Me? I dunno. People side-eye guys like Wick on account of all that old-time medical anthropology type of research way back when, and you know that’s some icky ish this grand ol’ institution was into, grave robbing and worse …”

  “Um … I didn’t know that.”

  “But Wick was against all that, from what I hear. He was like, down for the cause or whatever. But lemme stop runnin’ my big mouth and get you your files.” Before Sierra could even digest the avalanche of information she’d just heard, Nydia had turned and disappeared into the stacks.

  She came back a few minutes later and placed a thick file of papers on the counter. “Here you go, hon. This’ll give you a good introduction to Wick’s work. Thing is, you gotta photocopy ’em. You can use the copier over there, just swipe your ID like a credit card.”

  “Thing is …” Sierra mumbled. “I don’t have my ID.”

  Nydia stopped sorting through the file and took a long look at Sierra. “I thought you looked kinda young.”

  “I can explain.”

  The librarian held up a hand, which Sierra was grateful for because she really had no idea how she was going to explain. “No need. I see you’re up to something interesting. And I’m curious. And I like your style. Here.” She fished around in some hidden desk drawer and then handed Sierra a laminated card with a pin on the back. “It’s a temporary ID, the one I give to my interns. We can get you a real one later if you wanna keep coming through. You can use it on the copiers and it’ll get you past security.”

  “Wow,” Sierra said, admiring her gift. “Thanks. I don’t know what to say.”

  “De nada.” Nydia smiled. She separated a smaller file of papers from the rest. “This is the good stuff anyway — his journals and notes. Most of the other crap is like research and equations and blah blah. Anyway, here’s my cell.” She scribbled a number on a yellow Post-it note. “Lemme know if you find out anything interesting about Wick.”

  “What was in the briefcase?” Sierra asked her godfather.

  Neville either ignored her or couldn’t hear her over the old funk song he was happily singing along to as they cruised down the West Side Highway.

  Sierra clutched the file to her chest. The world seemed to get stranger and stranger by the hour, but the waning afternoon stayed stubbornly beautiful. The setting sun played hide-and-seek with some purple clouds stretched out along the Jersey City skyline, and a warm summer breeze swooshed in through the open Cadillac windows and made a mess of her hair. “Neville!” she said.

  “Ge
t up get up get up!” he yelled, honking the horn on the one.

  Sierra clicked off the radio. Neville shot her an irritated glance. “What was in your briefcase?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What you mean nothing?”

  “I mean not a damn thing. I emptied it out before we left.”

  “Why?”

  Neville looked proud of himself. “I always roll with a empty briefcase. In case I gotta leave it somewhere.”

  “Why’d everyone go running and security get all upset?” Sierra said.

  “Cuz a black man put a bag down and walked away.”

  “But …”

  “It worked, didn’t it?”

  “But you coulda got arrested, man!”

  Neville scoffed. “For being forgetful? For needlessly troubling the good people of lost and found? I wish they would. Did you get what you needed?”

  “I mean, yeah … But you were sittin’ out in the car that whole time. They coulda …”

  “I woulda left if it got hot and just called you to meet me somewhere else. I do have a cell phone, you know. But it’s a good thing things didn’t come to that. Got my sawed-off in the trunk.”

  “Sawed-off shotgun?”

  Uncle Neville just laughed and turned the radio back on. Sierra could never tell when he was kidding about things like that.

  Uncle Neville screeched to a halt on Throop Avenue. Sierra thanked him, grabbed a pack of gum and an icey at Carlos’s bodega, and then leaned against the wall in the shade of the red awning. She pulled the Wick file out of her shoulder bag. Most of it looked to be journal entries, all scrawled out in elegant script. There were a few pictures and diagrams — a lot of the human body, and some overlapping circles that Sierra couldn’t make heads or tails of. She skimmed through some more pages. Somewhere in here was the hidden history of her grandfather’s weird secret society, she was sure of it.

  Sierra’s eyes caught the word Lucera and she flipped back to that page. Back in Brooklyn. Amazed, humbled by the beauty and devotion of this community to its local spirits. The art of commemorative regeneration is strong here, a thrilling collision of artistry and spirituality. The shadowshapers’ mythology revolves around an archetypal spirit named Lucera, who apparently vanished mysteriously a few months back, not long after I entered the fold. There are whispers that without Lucera, the murals that are touched with shadowshaper magic will eventually fade and the connection to the spirits will be obliterated.