Memphis Noir

by Laureen Cantwell

  “I don’t think so. Were you going to the gym today?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Nelse stared out at the gloom, shivering. She could only imagine the commotion downtown at Buckman Labs, or in the hood, whose footprint was getting larger with every wave of white and hanging-by-the-skin-of-their-teeth black middle-class flight. All down the street, on the other end of the city, the young people wandered beneath the still-unlit streetlights, some with flashlights or lanterns, laughing. No old people out on the street at all, not in this kind of confusion, not with the sidewalks as loud as the Memphis in May festival and the flash of police lights like Cops everywhere. The Chargers speeding up and down the expressway, menacing and panicked, sirens blaring. In the house across the street, Nelse could just make out a couple sitting down to a candlelit breakfast. And below, in front of the neighborhood eyesore, a mango-colored house in the cove, stood a Haitian woman and her daughter, hand in hand, nearly indistinguishable in head wraps, talking quietly, looking straight up at the black sky. It was ten in the morning and as dark as the inside of an eyelid.

  And Nelse hated it.

  “We’ll be all right,” Nelse said, trying to sound like she believed it. “Not time to worry yet.” But she looked over at Marva rubbing an ink spot out of the sofa’s upholstery, and though it was not time to worry yet, Marva began to cry. Finally the woman announced they must call family and friends. No one should be alone. Nelse, who had no friends beyond her work at the lab, pretended not to hear as Marva desperately called one adult child after the other, until there was no one left to call. And so Nelse found herself doing the unthinkable. She agreed to invite Marva’s friends over for lunch and make what they could from the pantry. For some unspoken reason they dared not go outside, though the city had finally put the streetlights on. Nelse imagined that the throngs of young people downtown had lessened with the dimming novelty of it all. Perhaps they’d gone inside to make love, busily conceiving the population boom they could look forward to, if and when the darkness finally lifted. No-Show Sun Spawns Blackout Babies, the Memphis Flyer might announce.

  Marva made Caesar salad and pasta by dropping eggs into the crater of a flour volcano. She did this in silence, flour puffing into the air as if she had burst the seeds of a milkweed. Nelse thawed and roasted a chicken with cilantro, lemon pepper, honey, and herbs.

  As she worked her stomach groaned, not from hunger but from fear. The idea of strangers rambling through her kitchen, rifling through her silverware, put her teeth on edge. And most importantly, she had no idea what she should wear. She had long since stopped worrying about style, or the mysteries of her hair that broke combs and spat out plastic teeth and grease, or her problems knowing when folk say what they mean or when they mean what they don’t say.

  At noon, she heard a rattle from the living room, Marva drawing the curtains. Nelse understood. They were not chosen, they could not bear witness to the constant night. Then she heard—like an exhalation of relief—the sound of a match. Candles. The scent of vanilla and pears filled the air. Only two neighbors came, those who had heard of Nelse’s work in “the sciences”: an elderly colleague of Marva’s who’d also retired from the college and a kindly, nervous painter Nelse had once met briefly at an artist’s reception at the Brooks. They were good, intelligent small-talkers at a party; neither was suitable for the endless night. They had clearly come out of loneliness. Nelse and Marva found themselves smiling and dutifully filling dusty wineglasses and listening for a doorbell that never rang. What was meant as a time of solace had become one of civic duty.

  “I hear they are turning to rations,” said the colleague, a professor of magical realism with a graying Afro. Nelse wanted to know what kinds of rations. “Gas,” he said. “And fresh food and meat. Like in the war.” He meant World War I. The helicopters hovered, dropping water bottles and energy bars from the dark sky. Marva had stumbled on some, after raiding Nelse’s water hose. “Who knows? Maybe nylons, Marva.”

  Marva would not have it. “Ridiculous,” she said, regretting the company of this pompous man. The curtains blew open to reveal the unearthly blackness. Nelse said she could not remember much about the war, nor anyone who had ever been in it.

  The painter spoke up, and what she said chilled them: “I think they’ve done something.”

  Nelse quickly said, “Who? Done what?” Marva gave her a look.

  The painter winced at her own thoughts, and her brass jewelry clanked on skinny wrists. “They’ve done something, and they haven’t told us.”

  The professor seasoned his salad with a practiced flick of his wrist. Nelse feigned indifference. The chicken still sat in the kitchen, glistening and uncarved, smelling like burnt sugar.

  “You mean a bomb?”

  “An experiment or a bomb or I don’t know. I’m sure I’m wrong, I’m sure—”

  “An experiment?” Marva said.

  Just then, they heard a roar. Instinctively, they went to the window, where in her haste to open it, Nelse knocked a little sandstone elephant over the sill and into the afternoon air, which was as red-dark as ever, but they could not hear it breaking above the din: the streetlights had gone out, and now the city was alive with cries. Nelse wanted to kick them all out and listen to her father’s albums. Why did the streetlights go out? It’s unclear. Perhaps a strain on the system, perhaps a wrong switch thrown at the station. But it was a fright to people.

  That was when the blackouts began, the rolling blackouts, meant to conserve electricity. Two hours a day—on Marva and Nelse’s block it was at noontime, though it made little difference—with no lamps, no clocks, no Wi-Fi, just flashlights and candles melting to nubs. It was terrifying the first few days, but then it was something you got used to. You knew not to open the refrigerator and waste the cold. You knew not to open the window and waste the heat. You knew not to open your mouth and waste your breath.

  “Temporarily,” the mayor said, now composed. “Until we can determine the duration.” Of the darkness, he meant, of the sunless sky. When he said this over the radio, Nelse glanced at Marva and was startled. As a child, she had noticed how sometimes, in old-fashioned books, full-color illustrations of the action would appear—through some constraint at the bindery—dozens of pages before the moments they were meant to depict. Not déjà vu, not something already seen, but something not-yet-seen, and that was what was before her: a woman in profile, immobile, her hair a wild puff like a demented dandelion; her face old-fashioned, last century’s features, resigned; her eyes blazing briefly with the fire of a sunspot; her hand clutching the wineglass in a tight fist; her lips open to speak to someone not in the room. A song in reverse, played much too fast.

  “Marva?” she asked. Then it was gone. Her neighbor turned to her and blinked, and Nelse continued, “What on earth does he mean by duration?” What she really wanted to ask was why didn’t Marva’s children ever come? She didn’t ask, because she already knew the answer. They all did. They were afraid. They all were. They were all waiting for someone or some answer to come to them, to help them figure this all out. They sat alone in the darkness, reading by candlelight, as Nelse had done as a child, panicked as pigeons, waiting for someone to come, and yet they would not stir an inch. Why, the children had asked, didn’t Marva just drive in her Benz and come to them? They were closer to the authorities and could take care of her better from their homes in Harbor Town. Why wouldn’t she when she’d always done so before? They were busy with their own children, trying to keep them calm, entertained. No, they weren’t afraid, just . . . The adult children finally decided to leave without Marva, when they’d run out of reasons not to come to her. After the riots began, about two weeks later. She’d be all right, they rationalized. She was staying with a very responsible neighbor. Didn’t matter that they didn’t know Nelse from Booboo the Clown.

  Unused to company, unused to another mind living and breathing and tidying and, goodness gracious, commenting on her things in her personal
space, Nelse doubled the doses of the sleeping pills, began floating through her day in a fog. It made the time huddled in the darkness go faster.

  One night-day Marva convinced Nelse to drive out with her to the farmer’s market in Klondike. Surely there must be ripe tomatoes still there? It was only the second time they had gone out of the cove since that first day of the darkness, and they were still unsure if they were right to do so—if it was frivolous to be seen in a tiny market with overhead mirrors to discourage the thieves and poor people jostling against wealthier ones, all grasping at the last remnants of normalcy and good health. Marva felt everyone should be in mourning. She had taken to wearing her pearls and best black dress, just in case.

  “The mirrors should be covered,” she had said to the artist and the professor at that first gathering. “Mirrors are portals to the spirit world. There are enough haints here now, don’t you think? Shouldn’t there be wailing somewhere? Nelse, put on one of those whining, crying, hiccupping records you call ‘classics,’ why don’t you?” Nelse could hear the exaggerated sniff from the kitchen.

  “If you covered the mirrors, we won’t have nothing,” the Graying Afro had said, anxiously glancing at a reflection of himself. As the darkness hung over the city, unmoved, he had slowly begun to lose the iron grip he held over his tongue. He was a parody of a parody, a kind of Cornel West gone to seed despite his fastidiousness and absolutely pristine pedigree; he seemed to be losing his diction and his battle with the belly, and each day his ability to code switch effortlessly seemed to slip and fade. Despite the gray in his goatee, and the lines now permanently tooled across his forehead, he appeared all the more goatish as his tongue failed him. “Don’t matter no way. They still gon’ blame You Know Who. I can hear them now, Black president done burnt up the sun! Mark my words, we’ll be reading about that in the paper come Sunday.” The artist shook her head. Light gleamed off her gold-rimmed glasses. Light gleamed everywhere: off cutlery and plates and crystal, sequins and earrings and pearls; it was indescribably beautiful to Nelse. Perhaps like the discovery of some rare bird, the last of its kind.

  “I have a blind friend,” the Graying Afro said, then suddenly, hopefully, as if he’d only been waiting politely to ask, “Hey, aren’t you a scientist, a physicist working with lasers? Why don’t you know what’s going on?”

  For the first time that long night-day, Nelse found herself laughing. “Oh, I just study light theory,” she said. “I don’t actually do any blockbuster movie–type experiments. I think . . .” As she struggled to describe her work, the group stared at her as if she’d suddenly sprouted wings. For a moment she felt panic. Did she misunderstand? Did she make a mistake? Did the professor mean for her to answer or was he just being polite? Nelse stood, pondering this, feeling once again like an imposter, a faux human being.

  “You mean, you don’t do anything?” the Graying Afro asked, incredulous. “They pay you to just sit around thinking up ideas?” Nelse wasn’t sure if he knew he had said thankin’ instead. The professor’s speech was shifting, like Nelse’s grasp on social decorum.

  They stared back at her expectantly. “Yes,” she said finally. “A little like what you did at the college. You didn’t actually do anything yourself, did you? You thought and discussed what other writers did. You didn’t actually create anything original, did you? That’s not actually doing anything, is it?”

  While his mouth opened and shut like a fish without air, Nelse found herself thinking about his friend. She hadn’t thought about the blind. Aren’t they lucky? she thought, and absently drank from Marva’s wineglass. Marva gave her a look. Nelse ignored it. She couldn’t possibly know what it could mean. She couldn’t possibly explain to them that the star they’d once loved had an iron heart and was dying, had died ages ago.

  The professor continued on about his blind friend: “She says she can’t help it, but it’s satisfying. She says she hates herself for feeling it, but it amuses her that the rest of us think the world is going to end. Because it’s the same world for her. Ain’t nothing changed,” he added and frowned, as if he’d only just heard himself. “Nothing has changed.”

  “It can’t be,” Marva said. “She can’t tell there’s no sun, and the plants . . .” She thought of her dahlias.

  “For her, it is the same world, dark as it’s always been.”

  Nelse relaxed her grip on the glass and pursed her lips. “That’s stupid,” she said. “I’m sorry, Marva, but it is.”

  Marva turned to Nelse. “Child?”

  A moment later there were splinters of glass all around them, then great shards, and then what seemed like a thousand dark-robed men running down the street, filling the cove, spilling into their manicured yards, and . . . torches, and lanterns, and certainly things were already set on fire in the street before the awestruck neighbors had the sense to stand up and run to the back of the house. It happened all at once, as if in a dream, and yet took an extraordinarily long time. There was no way to remember it right. First came the shapes, then came the colors, and when they moved, Nelse had to focus all over again to comprehend it, like a kaleidoscope. Without pen or pencil, all Nelse knew was that, when she awoke, wiping sleep from her eyes, she found herself shoved against the wall with Marva and all of them, her napkin in one hand and the wineglass in the other.

  They spent the night at Nelse’s place on an inflatable bed and the lumpy but irresistible cobalt-blue love seat she’d bought at an estate sale. Marva had sensibly found one of Nelse’s throws and tossed it over the wretched thing. Alvin, the Afro-Am prof, slept on the living room couch. Nelse stayed awake, figurin’ and figurin’, clutching her father’s albums and running fresh equations through her head. They had always been so beautiful, now they were useless. Six billion years before they would even notice that the sun had burned out, six billion years, eight minutes, and nineteen seconds. Could the six billionth year be now? If so, why only in Memphis? Outside, the darkness seemed to deepen. They could hear the low moan of the rioting streets as if a great monster, Godzilla or Ultraman, were being tamed.

  “It feels like World War III,” Nelse whispered, tracing the outline of the painter’s Minnie Riperton haircut. “I’ve never felt so dumb before in my whole damn life, not even when I was a child.”

  “Enough. You too hard on yourself,” Marva said, yawning. “You’ll figure this out. And if you don’t, somebody else will. They have to. They always do.”

  “Do you know any blues songs?”

  “Get some sleep, girl. We’ll see how things are tomorrow. If they ain’t blocked off all the roads, we can drive out to the river, think about crossing that bridge. Get on out of here. Hell, there’s still sun in West Memphis.”

  “Well, shit, that’s all,” the professor muttered, then laughed in hyena bursts.

  This was Nelse’s turn to sit in silence. Then, after the numbers stopped turning in her head, “I had a dream,” she said quietly, “which was not at all a dream. The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars . . . I can’t remember how it goes. No,” she shook her head, as if to erase the poem, and began to sing, “Well, all last night, I sat on the levee and moan . . .”

  “Hush, child. It ain’t yet time for no Negro spirituals.”

  “I had a dream, which was not at all a dream . . . Oh, what is it?” Why couldn’t the words come to her as surely as the math? The numbers were racing faster and faster now.

  “Hush,” Marva whispered, pulling the throw overhead. “Close your eyes, child. At this hour, even haints sleep.”

  Nelse turned to look at her, but in that moment the bay window crashed and the room was filled with glass and splintered screams. In the darkness, the women reached for each other. Nelse snatched Marva’s hand and dragged her into the pantry.

  They spent the night wide awake, afraid to speak.

  In what should have been morning, things were no better; debris lay everywhere. The others had gone. Outside, the quiet street looked worse. Rattled, Nelse and Marva p
repared to leave too.

  “Do you want me to take you to your children? I’m sure we can find them. They couldn’t have gone too far. Just over the bridge.”

  Marva bit her lip, finally gave a grateful smile. “Yes, I would like that. Thank you.”

  Nelse had just started the car, filled with the last of their food and water, and had barely made it down the street, when Marva grew still.

  “Turn back,” she said.

  “What is it?”

  “Turn back. I can’t leave . . . without it.”

  Annoyed, but thinking Marva had forgotten yet another of her endless bottles of medication, Nelse steered the sensible gray sedan back into the cove, parked halfway in the drive, the engine running.

  “Do you want me to go look with you?”

  “No.”

  Nelse did not like the flatness in that word. Something in the back of her throat, an itch like the beginning of a cold, disturbed her. This time, Marva’s voice was devoid of its music. There was no echo, only that unspoken Hush, child, please.

  Confused, Nelse waited in the car. And waited. Then waited some more. Finally, when the engine started to rumble, sputter in protest, she decided to go in. She had never been invited into her neighbor’s home, never thought anything of it, but what she saw reminded her of that last, recurring dream.

  In her dream, it is another night-morning and Yaya has gone to park her cart, lay her head on the steps of the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus. It is three in the morning, but the hours mean nothing here, and the child is not tired, though circles like half-moons border her eyes, ashen her cheeks. From the window the child watches the elder asleep on the stone bed. Yaya is so still, so very still, like a statue. There is so much the child wants to say. If she could, she would call out to her. Instead, she is drawing strength from the numbers, the mathematics pouring into her like breath, drawing strength from the stillness inside her.

  Nelse stumbles, pushes through Marva’s front door, and steps into the living room. It is dark and still and almost as silent as the dream. Forcing her mind to take control of her feet, Nelse walks up the stairs to the second floor. In the time it takes her to reach the bed, to grasp Marva by her thin shoulders, to hold her damp head, Nelse is certain she has lost her ability until she hears herself speak.