The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing: A Novel

by Mira Jacob

  Blood money for blood money, huh?

  “Fuck off.”

  She tried to always keep a cigarette lit now. Knowing that she would burn down the apartment if she slept kept her in a dull panic, ensuring that she stay awake. Sleep was to be avoided, if possible. She had begun to have dreams, and they were obvious, and the obviousness of them infuriated her. Bobby McCloud war-painting himself with batches of tempera. Bobby McCloud reading her the entry for the Spanish-American War from the 1979 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Bobby McCloud standing in high branches of a cottonwood tree, showing her the wingspan of a full-grown man.

  The protestors were the first nonpublication to use the picture. They marched across the Aurora Bridge, each wearing a single feather, poster boards proclaiming OUR BIRTHRIGHT IS TO LIVE raised high.

  Then came the counterprotestors (THE SINS OF OUR FATHERS, AGAIN, The Wall Street Journal, September 19, 1992).

  Then came the liberal hand wringing (PROBLEMATIC PATRIOTISM, The New York Times, October 10, 1992).

  But what was there to do, really? What was there to do in a town that had itself been wrested from the Duwamish Tribe, where liberalism was cherished but most of the black population lived behind a Wonder Bread sign, where there were rumors that the university had been built on sacred burial grounds? As debate over the meaning of Bobby McCloud’s death built momentum, his figure leapt out of the photograph and onto the silkscreen, showing up like a Rorschach blot on everything from T-shirts to mugs to pins. NEVER FORGET, these items said, and THE CHOICE IS YOURS, and BEGGARS CAN’T BE BOOZERS (this last put forward by the Students for Deliberate Misinformation, a group whose “consciously confusing message” was part of a mission to “expose the unreliability of the media”).

  Amina had wondered briefly at the irony of receiving the message with a morning beer in her hand before she unplugged the television and placed it on the stoop to be stolen. She had had enough. It would stop now.

  And it would have stopped then had it not been for the op-ed piece written by Bobby McCloud’s aunt Susan, a comparative literature professor at UC Berkeley. It ran three weeks later in The Seattle Times for all to see:

  That we even have this image says a lot about our ability to disassociate from the pain of others around us. It takes a certain lack of feeling, an internal coldness, to capture a shot like this. That it was taken by a photographer covering a Microsoft gathering is a perfect, if horribly sad, metaphor for how quickly we will trade in our humanity for financial gain.

  “I’m sorry, but this passes for intellectual discourse?” Dimple fumed, raising the blinds with a rattle. “Blame the fucking photographer? Ridiculous.”

  Amina watched her cousin swoop across the bedroom to the other window, hair pulled into a tight bun, swaddled and cinched into a black drapey dress that made her look like a vampire bat.

  “I mean, it’s a stupid fucking argument, you know that, right? A free press depends on photojournalists providing an unblinking account of what’s out there.”

  Of course she goes straight to censorship.

  “And what’s Professor Genius going to demand next?” She grabbed the ashtray on the sill and emptied it into a trash can, sending up a puff of gray. “That we put pictures of puppies and kittens on the front page so no one gets their feelings hurt?”

  Jesus. She hasn’t changed a bit, has she?

  “Not really.” Amina’s voice was a scratchy whisper.

  Dimple wrinkled her nose at the mound of clothes by the side of the bed. “I mean, listen, is it a shocking photo? Yes. But it wasn’t taken for shock value. And it wasn’t orchestrated, for fuck’s sake! The whole idea that somehow you’re lacking empathy or even thriving on this is so—” She picked up the half-empty tumbler on the nightstand, sniffing at it. She frowned. “Wait. Really?”

  Amina shrugged. “Our dads drink whiskey.”

  “Exactly.” Dimple laughed uneasily. “So what, you’re going to take up the Suriani habit of drinking yourself into a nasty middle age?”

  Still hating on the race, huh?

  “More or less.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “No, what did you say?”

  “I’m not talking to you.”

  Her cousin’s eyes blazed with some combination of anger and concern, and for a minute Amina felt the hot shame of causing it. She shut her eyes. She did not need to look around the room to see it as Dimple must have—graffitied with clothes, bottles, ashtrays, plates of uneaten food lying across the dresser.

  “Ami, what the fuck? What’s happening to you?”

  What does it look like?

  Amina shook her head, the prick of guilt between her ribs redirecting into disdain with surprising alacrity. Because really, wasn’t it easy to be Dimple? To be able to talk about what was and what wasn’t appropriate, to sell it regardless, to live on what you made without thinking twice? To be floating in such a steady stream of self-righteousness that you never had to face the muck under you?

  “I took the picture,” Amina said.

  “So what?”

  Don’t say it.

  “I knew what I was doing.”

  “Because you’re a photographer. Because it’s what you do.”

  “Because I wanted it. That’s why my fingers tweaked the settings before anything even happened.”

  “Amina, you didn’t make Bobby McCloud kill himself.”

  “Because it would make a good picture,” she explained. “I thought the man falling would make a good picture, that it would be beautiful, like that was the important thing?” She laughed to cover up the way her mouth had begun trembling. “Can you imagine? Like he was some bird for the National Geographic, some fucking animal, some—”

  “Ami, stop it.”

  “Because I needed to see it. After all these years, I needed to see what it looks like to fall that far down!”

  “No.”

  “And did I tell you I didn’t look afterward? I didn’t even look! I heard the noise of the hit and turned and walked away because I’d already gotten what I needed.”

  “Stop it!” Dimple grabbed her arm. “Enough! Stop with this shit and listen to me! You did not make this happen. It was a beautiful picture. It was a horrible moment. Both.”

  Amina began to cry.

  “Both, Ami.” Dimple’s nails dug into her wrist. “That’s what you have to live with. Okay? That.”

  Amina pushed her away. “Get off me.”

  “Are you the photographer?”

  “Who is this?” This was not good. The woman on the phone had already said her name twice. Identified the publication she was working for. The Times? The Chronicle? Why was the phone in her hand? Amina stared at the receiver. The little black dots looked like poppy seeds. They cooed.

  “What?” she asked them.

  Careful, kid.

  “Careful yourself!”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Hi.”

  “Am I speaking to Amina Eapen?”

  Amina put the receiver back to her head. “You are.”

  “Do you have a response to the charge that the picture you took exhibits a lack of humanity?”

  Oh for the love of—it all lacks humanity! Fucking HUMANITY lacks humanity!

  Amina thought about this for a while. About humanity, but also about hubris, that weird word that made her think of a compost made of human souls.

  “The checks keep coming, though,” she said.

  “The checks?” the woman on the phone asked.

  “And I keep cashing them!” Amina said, her voice registering her surprise. “So that’s something, I guess.”

  “You are talking about the reprinting fee for the picture you took of Bobby McCloud?” Amina heard the chattering of a keyboard in the background. Robots. Computers were turning humans into robots. The tongue was connected to the fingers to the keyboard. “Do you feel implicated by the money you are making from this?”

  YES. />
  Amina looked around. She found some water, gulped half of it down. “I knew what I was doing.”

  “Ms. Eapen?”

  “I knew he would go.”

  “What do you mean?”

  What did she mean? She saw the high school parking lot, the spray of late-afternoon sun, Akhil walking toward the station wagon, his shoulders hunched under his leather jacket. The words formed loosely in her head and then rolled out her mouth like pebbles. “Hide-a-key.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I was the only one who knew about him. Really knew. I’m the only one who could have stopped it. I guess I just … fell asleep at the wheel, you know?” It was a horrible pun. The hideous noise, the laughter, was coming from between her throat and her heart, some place that if stepped on would paralyze her instantly and forever.

  Hang up, Ami.

  “Did you have dealings with Bobby McCloud prior to his suicide on Wednesday?” the woman on the phone was asking. “Did you know him before this encounter?”

  “But are you supposed to believe everything he says? Ben Kingsley, for the love of God!”

  “Excuse me?”

  Hang up NOW.

  “Ben Motherfucking Kingsley,” she gasped, her shoulders shaking.

  “Ms. Eapen, did you or did you not know Bobby McCloud before his death on August twenty-sixth?”

  Amina laughed and laughed and laughed. She needed to hang up the phone, and she did, but not before whispering, “I’ve known him all my life.”

  BOOK 3

  THE INDIGNITY OF BEN KINGSLEY

  ALBUQUERQUE, AUGUST 1982

  CHAPTER 1

  August 29, 1982, was full of promise. Clear and sunny and just a little too warm for the teal corduroys that Amina insisted on wearing, the day swam brightly in front of the car as Akhil pulled down the driveway, beckoning them toward the first day of school. The air smelled sweet and green; the rearview mirror held their mother at a safe distance at last. Amina watched Kamala recede, small and jittery in a pink nightgown that all but swallowed her.

  “Do you think she’s going to be okay?” Amina asked. The trees curled in, obscuring the front door.

  Akhil frowned, thinking this over. He thought it over the entire length of the driveway, and the dirt road after that, and then the main road. He stopped at the intersection that would lead them to the west mesa, to school.

  “Who fucking knows anymore,” he said.

  Mesa Preparatory was unquestionably pretentious. Just what pretense it was operating under was not apparent to most of its inhabitants—the progeny of New Mexico’s elite—who, despite their supposedly cosmopolitan upbringings, knew very little about Andover or Exeter or Choate, much less what their brick-building campus, nestled into the west mesa of Albuquerque, was striving toward. What they did know was that they went to the most expensive private school in the state, that the soaring expanse of their green soccer fields drew the envy of other schools choking on dust, and that uttering the word Mesa when pulled over by Albuquerque cops had a beneficial effect on anything from a speeding ticket to a DUI.

  “Welcome back to Athens in the desert!” Dean Royce Farber crowed at the morning assembly, releasing a flurry of eye rolling but also a sense of self-importance that defined Mesa students for better and worse.

  The summer of 1982 had been about as long and hot as any in New Mexico, and the gymnasium sweated scents of overly chlorinated pool, recently varnished floors, new jeans, pencils, erasers, sneakers, notebooks, and hair shampooed with Vidal Sassoon. Under the darkened scoreboard, administrators and faculty sat erect in their folding chairs, legs crossed and ties knotted. Sports coaches stood behind them, green-and-black tracksuits gleaming like beetle shells.

  “No matter where you were this summer,” Farber said, raising his head and pausing, as though weighing the air with the bridge of his nose, “chances are that if you’re a Mesa Preparatory student, you were making a difference.”

  Amina stared at the legs of her new cords, already hating everything. Why hadn’t Akhil mentioned that she was supposed to be making a difference this summer? Memorizing the words to every Air Supply song ever written was hardly interesting. Roaming from one end of the Coronado mall to the other while waiting for Dimple to come home from camp in California was borderline pathetic. Even her outings to the Rio Grande with her father’s old Nikon seemed painfully tame for something she had just an hour ago considered adventurous. She scanned the faces framed between upturned collars, the hair side-parted and gelled, the eyes searching out one another’s flaws without ever seeming to leave Dean Farber. She looked for Dimple.

  “I know that many of you spent your summer embroiled in activities with your family, taking vacation in a variety of locales, and I imagine it is hard to come back to campus. Nonetheless, I’d like to welcome you back to the Mesa Preparatory family, and introduce a few new members of our faculty and staff.”

  Embroiled in activities? There was a beehivey quality to the phrase that made her think of thin limbs working in unison for some greater, sweeter good. As for her own family, Amina couldn’t even remember the last time they had eaten dinner together, much less embroiled themselves in any activity that didn’t involve a television set. Which was not to say there were no family activities at all. In June, for example, she and Akhil had witnessed a spectacular fight that left her parents haunting opposite areas of the house (mother, garden; father, porch). All of July there was father hunting, an activity never mentioned aloud but practiced with alarming diligence, whether it was Kamala staring at the clock at dinner or Amina checking for the balled-up men’s socks left in the bathroom hamper, or Akhil staring furiously down the driveway. By August there were even sessions of group longing, a sort of inverse Quaker meeting, in which all three remaining Eapens sat on the couch and didn’t say a thing about his near-total absence.

  Amina looked around the gymnasium to the other dark heads nestled in with the lighter ones. Jules Parker, the black kid, was staring at the scoreboard with an open mouth that suggested hunger. A few rows beneath him, Akhil looked half asleep. It was a blessing, really, the reality of her brother blunted by something as tame as boredom. Akhil had become intensely articulate and demented in puberty. A deadly combination of political conviction, quick temper, thick chub, blooming acne, and antagonistic views he would defend until hysterical had made him nearly impossible to have in the house.

  Outside the house was worse. In the previous spring alone, he had become engaged in an “abusive interaction” with the PE coach over the merits of running, a heated exchange with his French teacher over the country’s “limp-wristed approach to democracy,” a locker room fight with four boys who called him Tonto, and a time-intensive protest of Reagan’s nuclear-arms policy, in which he chained himself to a desk at school and had to wait the eight hours it took the superintendent to locate the bolt cutters.

  “Those of you entering your freshman year might feel uncertain about your future,” Farber was saying. “Perhaps you’ve heard about the rigorous course load here, or the demanding schedule we keep, or our standards of academic and athletic excellence.”

  A derisive murmur came from a few rows behind Amina, followed by a burst of laughter. Amina turned to see Dimple tucked like a chick between the preening bosoms of three sophomore girls who’d apparently decided she was too cool to endure the usual freshman awkwardness.

  “I say this to you: There are times that you will be scared. There are times when you will question your ability to take on the day. But I would ask that you remember in those times that more is expected of you at Mesa Preparatory because you are simply capable of more. And now, I’d like you all to rise for the school motto.”

  Four hundred Mesa Preparatory students rose to face the flag emblazoned with their school seal. Akhil had at least prepared her for this much. He had even gone so far as to imitate it, face glazed, voice psychotically pleasant.

  “Timendi causa est nescire,” the students chorus
ed, and Amina mouthed along the way she sang church hymns, uncommitted to the sound of her own voice. It left her feeling like a traitor, though who she was fooling—God or Dean Farber or herself—was a mystery. Ignorance is the cause of fear, indeed.

  “He’s totally been checking me out.” Dimple jostled the load of books in her arms, trying to smooth them into an orderly pile. They were walking back to the freshman building together, Dimple having detangled from the sophomore girls to catch up with Amina.

  “Dirk Weyland?” Amina asked.

  Dimple’s face slid into the cold look she’d picked up at camp, along with an entirely new vocabulary, bleached hair, loads of string bracelets, a vague disdain for everything but the beach, and familiarity with the bases as applied to the human body (she had been to third twice in July).

  “I just didn’t know that you guys had talked or anything,” Amina said.

  “We haven’t really, but I’ve seen him watching me. And Mindy said that he’s going to be at David Lewis’s party this weekend. So.”

  Mindy. It was strange that a name Amina hadn’t even known until a few weeks earlier could have become a constant pinch in her breathing. Mindy Lujan, the sophomore who’d taken freshman Dimple under her wing; Mindy Lujan with her feathered hair, bullying blue-lined eyes, and potty mouth that rivaled Akhil’s, managing to use fuck as a verb, an adjective, and a noun, often in the same sentence, as in, “Who the fuck does that fucking fuck think she’s fucking with?”

  “Doesn’t Dirk have a girlfriend?”

  “Ami …” Dimple sighed. “They’ve been seriously breaking up all summer. You know.”

  Amina did not know, nor was she under the delusion that she suddenly would know if she were invited out with the volleyball team and given the opportunity to glean the kind of details that passed for currency at Mesa.

  The crowd was thicker as they neared the building, everyone trying to squeeze through the glass doors like salmon in a fish run. The tide of students pushed them into the locker bay, where Dimple stopped and fished around in her bag with one hand, pulling a crumpled schedule from it. “What do you have now?”