We Cast a Shadow

by Maurice Carlos Ruffin

  I heard the loveliest harp music. Like something you might encounter in a fancy tea room. Or maybe in the garden of a Russian oligarch. The air felt chilly.

  “I understand now why you’re doing it.” Penny poured me more Marnier. Her hair was shortened to a pixie cut, a style she’d given up after we married. In the burgeoning light, she seemed to wear a red halo.

  “You do?”

  “Oh, I was a fool to stand in your way.” She tilted her head to the side and batted her lashes. “It’s such a dangerous world for the great-great-great-great-grandchildren of slaves. How could I ever hope to understand?”

  “There’s no reason to be sarcastic,” I said.

  She sauntered into the hallway.

  “Wait, I’m sorry. Can we just talk?”

  She continued into the dining room, sat on the table, and folded her legs in front of her. She grabbed one of her old paintbrushes. Neither Nigel nor myself ever touched that little shrine of arts and crafts materials, a shrine to Penny.

  She flicked the brush at me. “You didn’t want to become your father. Hollowed out. Forgotten.” She twirled the brush like a baton. “What happened to Sir changed him. But it changed you, too. Sent you right down this water slide.” She motioned with her free hand. “You don’t really think you’ll win, do you?”

  “I’m winning!” I said. “We’re winning. All of us are this close—”

  Penny grabbed my chin. “You can level with me, babe. I know you feel it in here.” She patted my chest. “No matter how hard you fight to protect our son, you keep going down down down and taking him with you.”

  “I’m doing the best I can.”

  “But the best isn’t good enough, is it? You’re making him worse.”

  “I—”

  “What’s that?” she asked.

  “I know.”

  Penny laughed, halfway between a giggle and snort. “Don’t cry, kiddo.” She climbed off the table and padded toward Nigel’s room. The heel of her bare foot receded into the darkness of the hallway. She peeked into Nigel’s room. She tsked. Then she smiled at me in a way I can only describe as malevolent.

  “You’re not my Penny,” I said, suddenly fearful.

  “Then what am I?” she asked, and entered Nigel’s darkened room.

  I reached out. My throat was so tight, I could hardly talk. “Don’t go in there.”

  “Shut it. You wouldn’t want to scare our baby.” I dashed into the room and turned on the light. The spirit was gone. Nigel slept quietly, his comforter and pillows all on the floor. I went to the hall window that looked out onto the driveway. Up above the roof of the house next door, a green scarf spiraled on a current.

  I woke up with a start and rubbed my face, which was clammy with sweat. My device said it was around three A.M. Nigel was still asleep. The syringe was on the dresser next to me. I grabbed it.

  34

  Nigel kept disappearing, and I didn’t know how to stop him from going to wherever it was he went. The house had taken on a new aura. A quietude. A somberosity. I swept the floors often to gather up the brittle leaves I sometimes imagined clustered by the baseboards. I could sweep for half an hour and come back with nothing more than a blouse button.

  This dead hollowness was present even when both Nigel and I were present. It was a kind of cold damp, like the feeling I had one time at summer camp when I stepped into a stream while wearing socks and shoes. Even after changing into dry replacements, phantom water crept between my toes.

  But as bad as home felt on any given day with Nigel in his room, talking on the phone or jotting in his journal, it was a trillion percent worse when he wasn’t home. In those off moments when I stopped home for lunch or when Nigel stayed late at school to participate in one club or another (I eventually requested a tracking protocol from the phone company, which was expensive, but at least I knew exactly where he was), I had to force myself to slow down and turn in to the driveway to keep from driving through to the next part of town. A matching herculean effort was needed to climb the short run of steps to the back door. I struggled up the path as though ingots were strapped to my calves. Perversely I had to cling to my mattress to keep from floating away through the kitchen transom in the middle of the night.

  These were necessary pains. If I had one duty on those days when I didn’t drive Nigel home, it was to already be present when he showed up. Someone had to warm the sarcophagus for him.

  I’d walk the halls turning on as many lights as I could, trying my best to eliminate the shadows and odd shapes at the edge of my vision that were neither truly shadow nor object. It never worked.

  Pictures of the three of us loomed over every room. Our past smiles sneered at our present misfortune. Perhaps that was why Nigel began to fade away.

  Somewhere along the way, I lost my ability to read. When I sat on the front room sofa, flipping through the pages of some recent bestseller on the American Dream, my eyes darted to and fro. They locked on the light fixture over the dining room table. The fixture was missing one of its three bulbs. Although I stockpiled fresh ones in the utility closet, I couldn’t bring myself to change it. My eyes locked on the low branches of the trees outside the picture window. The branch ends were like fine hands brushing against velvet, only to reject the diamonds on display. My eyes locked on the faux-antique grandfather clock Penny had bought from a thrift store and somehow carried in on her own.

  I went to the door and scanned our block for any sign of Nigel. He was over two hours late. That was his recent pattern, to show up five minutes, ten minutes, thirty minutes after the promised time. The tracking app said the service was temporarily unavailable, which happened too often for my liking.

  I shrugged on a jacket and trotted to the end of the block. Nigel was approaching from a distance. A City bus rambled up the street, its headlights throwing his body into relief, an afterimage burned into the air following a nuclear catastrophe. He was still skinny as a pen refill, but taller, ever taller. When he got to me, he gave a sheepish smile. I almost grabbed his collar, but I was acutely aware of being watched by various neighborly eyes through window shades and security cameras. Even though everyone on our block knew me, had shaken my hand, quizzed me on the elections (“You’re with Pavor, right?”), etc., there was always a chance one or more of them would call the police because of two big strange black guys up to no good on the street corner. Plotting evil. Threatening the security of babe and grandmother alike. That same desk sergeant would get the call. That same man would become enraged at the audacity. He’d call the Special Ward Unit down and maybe strap on a bulletproof vest for his first ride-along in twenty years.

  These were trying times. Last month they’d arrested an entire family, in one of the houses just outside the Tiko, for being a threat to the general safety. A bulldozer flattened the house.

  That’s why I hustled Nigel into the house and locked the deadbolt and turned out the exterior lights before I grabbed the back of his bubble coat collar.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I asked.

  “Hey! Let go.”

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “You know where I was and what I was doing.”

  “I’ve been dying waiting here for you,” I said—or something similar.

  “I wish,” he said. He looked tired. He always looked tired lately. The bags under his eyes made him seem a little older, like the old soul he was.

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” he mumbled. I tugged his collar. Nigel made a strange face, a mixture of worry, defiance, and anger that was somehow adorable. It was the same face he’d made the first time I fed him strained peas. Aircraft control denied the second plane requesting permission to land. “You act like it’s a big deal. I’m sure you had plenty to occupy yourself.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” />
  “Just leave me alone.” He spun loose from my grip, leaving me with a simian paw full of coat. He went into his room and slammed the door. “I hate you.” Then the sound of that awful new Crown album he had taken to. It sounded like cats yodeling into an oscillating fan. I could have simply walked in—I had disabled the lock on his door a few days earlier. But I had a different idea.

  Hours later, after we both went to bed without dinner, I was startled awake by the sound of a heavy book being knocked on its face. Just as I planned. I had set the book upright outside his door. It fell when he walked by.

  Fully clothed, I climbed out of bed and opened my bedroom door. Just as I did, I heard the front door shutting. I jogged to the den, past the overturned volume one of that Proust book he was reading for school, and watched from a window as he climbed into the back of a delivery van. It took everything in me to keep from flinging the door open and running into the street like a Viking warrior. But I stuck to the script. I hurriedly exited the back of the house, started the Bug, and tailed the van. I would have answers. Intrepid me.

  35

  I recognized the building as soon as I saw it. I’d passed it and ignored it a thousand times: my old school, the school of my father, and the school of his father.

  If Booker T. Elementary was a dilapidated, second-rate public school when I was enrolled, now it was a virtual no-go zone. All manner of goblins stalked its vast grounds: the drug-addled homeless, the restless youth looking for a bad time, the desperate fugitives running to the only place in town law enforcement wouldn’t follow. And that was the state of play just during school hours. Most of the students had been transferred from other schools for misbehavior or for being black, depending on who you asked. Some parents pulled their kids out to avoid the risk of getting the whole kinship locked up for failure to comply. Others gave their kids bribe money to ward off baddies or even pocket knives and mini-Tasers, if no deal could be brokered. Schools like Booker T. were the reason Penny and I never considered submitting Nigel to the public system.

  It was after dark; the streetlights were on. My son was inside.

  Some of the windows had been shot out and boarded over. Bullet holes pocked the bricks. A chunk of the cornerstone was missing, as if some sea monster had risen from the depths and taken a bite out of it. The naked flagpoles on the roof gave it the profile of a three-masted whaler listing toward the Antarctic.

  During Sir’s youth, the campus had been both an educational center and a hive of activity for so-called community activists. From that loading dock, they had distributed pallets of food and leaflets on healthy eating. In that dusty yard, children had gathered, Sir among them, for calisthenics. It was the anti-Reinhardt, run by Grandpa’s cohort.

  By the time I was enrolled at Booker T., the community activists had all been shooed away, locked up, or killed. The fresh fruits and vegetables had been replaced with bags of processed, genetically modified corn chips and artificially colored candy, and the overeducated staff replaced with recruits new to the profession of teaching. No one was crazy enough to drink the light brown water that slurred from the water fountains. During recess, we had to sit in the auditorium and watch films about physical fitness because the gym was off limits—an inspector found the paint was full of lead.

  I crossed through an area of the yard where bike frames and overturned fifty-five-gallon drums had been discarded.

  That’s why I wasn’t surprised when a voice called out to me as I peered into what might have been the principal’s office, or a storage area for mangled textbooks: “Yo, Dice.”

  “Are you referring to me?” I expected to be robbed.

  The voice came from a teenager. Older than Nigel, he wore a hoodie and slouchy jeans. The old “get your attention and chat” setup was a time-honored, traditional method of jacking someone. Score one for the old ways.

  “Sorry, sir. I thought you were my friend.” The boy took off toward a nearby fence. He wiggled through a cutaway section and kept going.

  The front entrance of the school was barred closed for the night, but eventually I found a way in through one of the side windows. I used my device for light but kept it pointed toward the floor, so as not to warn anyone of my presence. I was vaguely aware of people lurking in the shadowy classrooms. The stench of chemicals, familiar from Jo Jo’s house—drugs being processed—assailed me. I focused on the unwashed floors and followed the grid of tiles. I turned off the device and let my eyes adjust to the gloom. The only sound was that of my shoes crunching on discarded things: beakers, plastic rulers, pencil cases.

  I opened a pair of double doors, and a cool, earthy breeze issued from within. I couldn’t see very far into the space, which seemed to expand infinitely into the darkness. It was the gym.

  Like a fool, I entered.

  * * *

  —

  Once, when I was small, Sir and Mama took me on a trip to Appalachia. It was Sir’s idea, I think, to have me experience the kind of expansive and beautiful nature that had been paved over in the City. We rented a cabin on a hill and took short forays into the woods, Sir with a short knife concealed in his sleeve. On the third day of the trip, we visited a historic cave, where holdout rebels had barracked until only a few years earlier.

  I was afraid of the cave and, as the story goes, clung to Sir’s pant leg. In a surprise move, he carried me. I buried my face in his chest and entered an almost hypnotic state as my body rocked to the sway of his gait. For quite some time, I didn’t look up. But I smelled him: the wash detergent Mama used on our clothes, his tangy aftershave, and that jumble of musky, manly scents that all fathers carry.

  Someone tugged the hem of my knee pants. “It’s sure beautiful, isn’t it?” Mama asked.

  I glanced up, my eyes blurry from having been squeezed shut for such a long time. As they adjusted, shimmering lights, like falling spirits, appeared.

  * * *

  —

  In the vast room at the center of Booker T., a current flushed over my head as though huge fans were churning a mile away. I dropped to one knee behind a crate and peered toward what seemed like a platform around which dozens of people gathered.

  A man in an abstract African mask sat on the edge of the platform, dangling his legs. He wore a white linen suit, which I had seen before. I had seen him before. I had feared him before. He’d appeared in streamed news items and as a featured player riding astride my middaymares. But I’d also encountered him in real life without realizing it at the time.

  He was the terrorist leader from the Myrtles attacks and the many other incidents of past months. Of the fifty or so people in the room, a third were children. Everyone wore those spooky, elaborate, coin-slot-eyed masks.

  I shivered. This was ADZE.

  They were loading small packages into the back of a moving van. A tall masked woman videotaped the scene. Somehow the energy in the room was like that of people preparing for a party. There was horsing around and laughter. The movement of their limbs was loose, arbitrary. These people liked each other. One of the children, a dark-skinned girl in a long pointed mask, carried a tray of food to the platform where the leader sat. He looked over it and nodded.

  “Y’all try some of this first,” he said. The others gathered around and began to remove their masks.

  The leader was about to take his off when something happened behind me. Two people entered, a masked man and a woman. “What are you doing?” the man said to me, his voice muffled by his mask.

  “Nothing,” I said. I stood up.

  “Who is that?” the ADZE leader yelled. “Hold on to him!”

  I ran past my potential jailers and back into the hallway. Soon at least ten people crashed through the door after me. I ran full out. I ducked into the room with the purple smell. Three white kids were cooking a brew. They could have been the same kids from Jo Jo’s house.

  “He
y, how are you?” I asked.

  “It’s you,” one of the girls said with a smile.

  “Do you have any, you know…”

  “For one of Jo Jo’s boys?” one of the boys said. Movement in the hall.

  “Never mind,” I said. “Help me through.”

  They shoved me out the tight window. I landed awkwardly on my shoulder. It occurred to me that my pursuers were people from all over town. Cooks, hotel maids, sanitation workers. Some were kids who ran track. My point is that I wasn’t going to get very far. Even if I escaped, they would know me before I knew them. I was at the far end of the school’s parking lot when I saw that same boy in the hoodie from earlier. He was sitting on the trunk of an idling car.

  “Give me a ride?”

  “Ain’t my car.” My pursuers were only about twenty yards away and not very happy that I was leading them on a wild me chase.

  “Help me,” I said.

  “Just step on that.” He pointed at a blanket lying behind the car.

  “What? I’m not crazy. I—”

  “You want to get killed, man?”

  I stepped on the blanket and fell through a hole in the ground. I landed in wet, stinky muck that splattered all around me. I climbed to my feet. I’d pulled something in my leg, but in my purplized state, I didn’t feel much.

  I whipped out a handkerchief, wiped off my device, and lit up the tunnel. It was the sewer system. I had heard that the City’s criminal element used it for transportation and communication purposes. Cables and pipes stretched into the invisible distance. A cardboard sign even told me what street I was under.

  “Why did you let him go?” a voice overhead said.

  “I don’t work for you, and I don’t work for him. I’m just minding my own.” A gunshot.

  There was a light at one end of the tunnel. Hobbling, I went the other way.