Freeman's

by John Freeman

  Everyone’s seen a dog chase its tail, but we’d never witnessed such a clumsy, frenzied, disorderly pursuit. We started laughing. It was grunting and yelping as it attempted to lick its own tail, and barking when it couldn’t reach it. Eventually it discovered that if it twisted its body violently it could just reach the tip, and soon had licked it clean.

  Xingjian and Miluo held a discussion. Clearly, putting more broth on the dog’s tail was tantamount to simply feeding it directly, and where was the fun in that? Soon they’d reached a consensus: they’d add more broth bit by bit, higher and higher up the tail. How high could he reach?

  This made things difficult for the dog: it needed to bend itself practically in half, and by the end it simply couldn’t manage. The chain wasn’t making things any easier, tripping and tangling it, until it finally fell in a heap and became so frustrated it bit the chain and began shaking it back and forth. Xingjian and Miluo only stood to one side and laughed. I had to admit, it was a rare bit of fun. I stood on the roof and shouted:

  “Take the chain off!”

  They liked that idea. Xingjian flicked a little broth on the ground, and while the dog was busy with it, Miluo undid its collar.

  A new round of tail-chasing ensued. The removal of the collar and chain didn’t actually give the dog much more freedom of movement, but it was certainly an encouragement, and it strove all the harder to bite its tail. I didn’t know what sounds a person in complete despair might make, but as the dog failed to lick the root of its own tail it made a sound of boiling rage that for a moment sounded almost human. The sound caused a chill to run through me, as though it were ice water and not the chill breeze of dusk that was passing over me. The game seemed to have gone far enough.

  The breeze brought the sound of a diesel engine. I cocked one ear, but it seemed to have disappeared. Yet there it was again. It was time to remind Xingjian and Miluo that enough was enough. They were watching the dog twisting itself up like a potato bug, themselves doubled over with laughter. The dog gave a last desperate yelp, folded itself up, and sank its teeth into its own tail. In pain and shock, it levitated straight into the air, body still locked in a circle, and seemed to hang there for a couple of seconds before it smacked down with a seemingly audible crack of bone on ground. It let go of its tail, yelping all the more piteously, and made straight for the gate of the yard.

  It was an old-style courtyard, with an iron gate that opened in two halves. Zhang Dachuan had chained them together. The gate was large enough to admit the three-wheeler directly into the yard. The gap between the locked halves was wide, but not wide enough to let a dog squeeze in and out as it pleased, no matter how skinny. That day, however, it was maddened enough to try, but succeeded only in ramming one half of the gate. It made a turn and tried again, ramming the other half of the gate. It made one more turn, circling into the far corner of the yard to get a running start, and this time went for the stump of a long-dead toon tree next to the courtyard wall. It leaped onto the stump, then successfully scrabbled up and over the wall, landing on the road outside with the solid smack of bone and flesh on concrete.

  “Get out!” I yelled. “They’re back!”

  The sound of the diesel engine had already moved into the alleyway. It was Zhang Dachuan’s three-wheeler, no mistake. Still shocked by the dog’s escape, Xingjian and Miluo stood openmouthed for a moment before vaulting over the wall themselves.

  The dog struggled up and took off running with an unsteady gait. It staggered like a drunk, but going fast. The three-wheeler had just turned into the alleyway and was approaching at a jaunty speed—the fruit had sold well, the back was empty. The dog headed straight for it, as if welcoming long-lost relatives, and Zhang Dachuan was obviously taken by surprise—he didn’t swerve until the last minute. As he did he hit the brakes hard, and the three-wheeler flipped. The cries of dog, man, and woman rose from the alley.

  By the time I’d gotten down from the roof and run over, the front wheel of the three-wheeler had already stopped spinning. The dog was splayed on the ground to one side, still barking. Li Xiaohong knelt in front of the three-wheeler, weeping as she tried to get into the cab from the side. The door yawned open to the darkening sky; on the other side, Chuan had ended up—God knows how—jammed in the door, his upper body inside the cab, his lower body outside it, wedged between the cab and the ground. The weight of the unloaded three-wheeler bore down on the half of him that was caught outside, and dark blood was winding out across the pavement.

  Li Xiaohong cried for Chuan, her voice already hoarse. He made no response. Not the slightest sound. Zhang Dachuan had gotten one shoulder under the cab of the three-wheeler and was trying to heave it back upright. I set my shoulder next to his. The dog was still barking, but somehow still sounded nothing like a dog.

  Night was falling. Two figures approached, as unsteady as the dog: Xingjian and Miluo. They joined us in righting the three wheeler. I heard Zhang Dachuan’s flustered, urgent voice.

  “Stop your crying, Li Xiaohong, all right? Now we can have another! One that’s right in the head, and right in the body. And you won’t have to feel sorry for him. And you don’t have to worry we won’t be able to raise him. Just stop your crying, won’t you!”

  A couple of weeks later, rummaging through a book stall, I found a book that mentioned one of the uses of a dog’s tail: to help it keep balance. “In running fast or accelerating, a dog’s tail will stretch out straight behind it; in turning corners it will swing back and forth; in decelerating it rotates in a circle, similar to a parachute deployed behind a swiftly decelerating aircraft.” So far as I could remember, as Zhang Dachuan’s dog ran, its tail had drooped like a broken feather duster.

  By the time I was rummaging in the book stall, the dog was dead. It had kept bashing itself against the door, until it eventually killed itself. Zhang Dachuan and Li Xiaohong left Beijing, and went back to their hometown. None of us knew where their hometown was.

  Garnette Cadogan is an essayist. He is currently a Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Scholar at the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, a Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia, and a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is editor-at-large of Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas (coedited by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro) and is at work on a book on walking.

  With Nothing to Hide

  GARNETTE CADOGAN

  Back then, hammered upon by fists, I took cover under fantasy. I clung to my imagination in order to survive. A brutal stepfather and bystander mother made life miserable-to-unbearable, and so my wish was to be someone else. As far as I was aware, no one my age was dealing with the outpouring of fire and brimstone I longed to escape, so I had no choice but to take flight in my head. Often, when I got a reprieve from the pendulum crash of my stepfather’s stumpy knuckles, I would daydream a normal life. More often, I’d dream about being Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee the character, he of Fists of Fury and Enter the Dragon fame: lithe, super fit, ready to enact punishment on his enemies with breakneck speed and assured style. I wanted to be a character—the character—that could readily defend himself and inflict pain on the man who entered his home like a wrecking ball, ready to leave it in ruins. Little, puny, bruised me found comfort in the reverie of revenge: scene after scene of me side kicking my stepfather’s face, slamming him to the ground with my extraordinary Kung Fu technique and merciless force.

  But I was nurtured by a grandmother who thought revenge was the worst sort of failure—you were giving too much time to someone who had already taken away too much. Perhaps that explains why my other childhood hero was Charlie Brown. Here was a kid who, week after week when I met him in the Peanuts comic strip, with its funny gang of exuberant kids and their animal companions (plus, an additional delight for me, nary an adult in sight), was teased and mocked and bullied but somehow, insecure and anxious though he could sometimes be, he pressed o
n. Call him “blockhead”; pull the football away from him, time and time and time again; humiliate him—this kindhearted lovable loser would not contort from who he was to hotly confront the world. He would persevere, maybe even kick that ball someday. (Years later I read a remark made by an opponent of eighteenth-century preacher and theologian Jonathan Edwards that reminded me of how my young eyes viewed Charlie Brown: his “happiness was out of the reach of his enemies.” Melancholy might grab the kid, but it didn’t have full hold on him—I looked at lil’ Charlie Brown and saw joy, found joy.) In him was a courage harder to grasp, near-impossible for me to imitate.

  But fearful, flimsy me didn’t have the strength to mount a physical fight. Nor did I have the resilience and generosity to be untroubled by the blows that regularly rained down on me. So, much as I dreamt about becoming Bruce Lee or Charlie Brown, I couldn’t copy either. Who I did become, though, was another fictional character—the Jamaican trickster figure Anansi. This character, a spider who made his way from Ghanaian folktales—in Akan, the word ananse means spider—to Jamaican lore, was the star character in many of the folktales I heard as a child in Jamaica, where he was usually a symbol of resistance and survival, taking on his oppressors with slick talking and sleight of hand. The stories describe a world where Anansi encounters more dangerous animals—characters with aptronyms like Tiger and Snake—and cheats his way out of defeat and death. An Anansi story is a concealed proverb: a wallop of wisdom lies in wait at the end. But that’s not what I took away from those tales—what attracted me was that one could outmaneuver one’s oppressors through trickery. Not only could I get out from under someone’s rough grasp: I could also have the last laugh. I relished Anansi’s nimble deceit, and envied how he used his sly mind to gift-wrap his opponents’ stupidity and cruelty and hand it back to them. By the time his predators recognized they were being fed their own bitterness, Anansi was gone, out of harm’s way with a grin. I yearned to evade like Anansi, and soon enough he became my patron saint. I decided that the burden of imagination, then, was learning how to manipulate: there was safety, after all, in being slippery. Anansi was a mental Bruce Lee, so to speak, and I began to behave like his overeager disciple.

  So it became a cat and mouse game. I’d make a sly move, my mother and stepfather would try to trap me, I’d lie to escape and avoid harm. (My grandmother, the only safe adult, would usually be on the lookout, ready to provide sanctuary.) My home became, in my mind, a torture chamber, and I wanted to be away from it as much as possible. My rationale was that I could get home from school around 3 p.m., like any normal ten-year-old kid, and get humiliated and pummeled for a few hours until bedtime. Or I could get in past bedtime, on the wrong side of midnight, and be greeted by my grandmother who would wait up to sneak me in, hear the truth of where I’d been, share laughter, and help me figure out a story that would sound believable to my mother in the morning.

  Eventually, my mother started to stay up, suspecting that I wasn’t always showing up a few minutes after she turned in. Sometimes, in the wee, quiet hours as I scaled the front gate or scurried up the grill that led to the second-floor balcony by my room, I’d hear a shout: “Yes, Mr. Bloodcloth Tarzan!” Anansi had met his opposition, and would have to talk his way out of a less severe beating than the one the truth would attract. But my mother refused to settle with the fictions I weaved. She would match my trickster with her detective. Days later, like a psychic who had suddenly regained lost powers, she would confidently declare me a liar, unspool my concealed activities, and pile on punishment or beatings—or worse, send me to my stepfather, who was like an executioner who was only sated once he fulfilled his sadistic role. I couldn’t figure out how she knew what I did—I was half-convinced she went to an Obeah practitioner—until my grandmother, who decided to play counter-detective to her daughter’s detective, figured out that my mother would put questions to me about my whereabouts and wanderings after I fell asleep. When semiconscious I had a habit of answering anything asked, only to be unaware of the conversations when I awoke. Now tipped to her device, I began to pretend to sleep for the first hour or so after I turned in; when poked and questioned, I repeated the deceit I told with eyes wide open. Sherlock Holmes was no match for Anansi.

  My lies were armor. They protected me by keeping me a step ahead of my mother and stepfather after my peregrinations got me home late. They protected me from bullies at home and from bullies outside. But they didn’t protect me from the bully within: soon enough, what began as self-defense was now a way of life. Anansi was no longer a persona. I stopped playing a trickster and became one. The truth had painful consequences and being a trickster, I reasoned, was a life-and-death matter. But the delight in outmaneuvering others brought with it a corrosive element: I was all too ready to deceive.

  In my first year of high school I received a bad report card; I had been treating school like a social hangout, and homework and study as suggestions to be ignored, and had the grades to show for it. My stepfather beat me bloody. I was unable to sit for weeks, had wounds that needed dressing, had scars that took forever to fade. As a result, I decided he’d never see a bad report card again. So I did what made best sense to a young slacker—intercepted and hid my report cards. With the help of my grandmother (who stashed them), he and my mom stopped receiving my report cards (and, not paying attention to my schoolwork, they never seemed to miss them). I had gotten report cards that showed such low academic performance and high disciplinary run-ins that I needed a parent to come speak to my teachers at my school’s regular parent-teacher meeting. I paid the neighborhood drunk to come in as my dad. He put on a bravura performance. Weeks later, a teacher bumped into my mother while she was shopping. She expressed sympathy over my mother’s home situation. My mother explained she wasn’t married to a drunk. The teacher assured her that she needn’t feel ashamed; she, too, was married to a drunk. My mother repeated that her husband wasn’t a drunk. The teacher, an embodiment of sensitivity and insensitivity, asked: Why, then, did he come drunk to school to discuss your son’s report card?

  I worried about my lies catching up with me, not recognizing that they already had. In a home where the truth would often lead to pain, I practiced lying—until I didn’t need to practice anymore. I was a liar. I too much enjoyed having the last laugh, too much worried about disapproval, too much cared what others thought. Worse, I loved an audience. (To love the crowd is to love untruth, warned Søren Kierkegaard, a lesson I ignored to my peril.) I lost the thing worth protecting—my very self. The ingenious child became the duplicitous adult. And he couldn’t imagine himself out of this state, dominated by an internal bully. But, thankfully, he made friends who would not put up with the fictions, friends who insisted and reassured him that he could disappoint them with no dire circumstances to follow. Disapproval, they constantly reminded me, was nothing to shirk from—especially not when it meant I would dodge the truth.

  I decided to throw off the trickster because I made friends who demanded honesty from me, and they modeled it beautifully. Around the same time, embarking on my twenties, I developed a love for reading—I finally learned to sit still—and my imagination wandered to new worlds, rushed to new models. My grandmother, who always knew the true stories, who was never made to interact with the trickster in me, and friends who were like family, made me despise and combat the trickster I’d become. And the books I was reading taught me new ways of being. (“Reading makes immigrants of us all,” writes Hazel Rochman, speaking of readers’ imaginations. “It takes us away from home, but, most importantly, it finds homes for us everywhere.” In books I found new homes that gifted me the solitude I craved; reminded me, too, that I was not left alone.) I had grown past Bruce Lee, Charlie Brown, and Anansi. I was now being reshaped by new models, real and imagined.

  Later, when I took to the page to start writing about my life, the old fantasies reappeared—well, not exactly. They came back not as fantasies so much as they came back as potential muses. As I w
rote, I found myself wanting to take revenge on people who had hurt or oppressed me. Bruce Lee was vying to be my muse. (Some days my friend Philip will remark, after reading some intemperate remark of mine that should never have left my brain, “I saw that Bruce Lee wrote on Facebook today.”) But I also recognized myself wanting to write in a spirit my grandmother would have approved of—to write as one with a capacious, generous heart who doesn’t try to get even but who meets the world on open-minded terms. Charlie Brown beckoned to be my muse. And so, draft after draft, essay after essay, Bruce Lee and Charlie Brown duke it out. And perhaps, for the only time in the history of the world, Charlie Brown, that lovable loser, kicks Bruce Lee’s ass.

  Valeria Luiselli was born in Mexico City and grew up in South Africa. She is the author of Sidewalks, a collection of personal essays; the essay “Tell Me How It Ends”; and the novels Faces in the Crowd and The Story of My Teeth. The latter novel, which was written in installments for workers in a juice factory, won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for fiction and was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in Harlem.

  I Is Another

  VALERIA LUISELLI

  A few weeks after I moved to New York, almost a decade ago, I had a medical emergency and ended up in the waiting room of St. Luke’s Hospital in the middle of the night. While I waited my turn with all the other lost souls, I was given a questionnaire to fill in. The first questions were straightforward and easy to answer: “Cancer in your family?” “Any allergies?” In the final section, though, one question took me by surprise. I don’t remember the exact phrasing, but it was a question about race. The only other time I’d been asked anything remotely similar—but it was not even about race—was during my first day in fourth grade, at an all-girls school in South Africa, where my family and I had just moved. The girl sitting behind me in the classroom had tapped me on the shoulder and asked: “Are you Greek or Lebanese?” I’d answered “Greek,” displaying no hesitation but crossing my fingers under my desk. To my relief, in response, she smiled wide. I wiped my sweaty palms on my pleated blue skirt and smiled back. From that day on I was allowed into a group of girls who I later learned were Lebanese and Greek, so I could have chosen either option. In any case, I was able to pass as Greek for long enough that when I finally confessed one day that I was in fact Mexican, the alliances I’d formed had already become friendships, and so withstood my dark secret.