When she was finished packing, Lydia swung the duffle bag over her shoulder with the grace of a dancer and descended the staircase to make for the world outside.
Marcus watched from the top of the stairs.
He could have shouted something, but his Lutheranism ran too deep. His edges had been filed off and the stumps worn down by a culture that didn’t know how to sin and then repent and so suppressed everything and hoped that God wouldn’t notice.
The screen door slapped the doorframe.
Whap.
And he was alone.
Out the door, down the street, Lydia humped her duffle bag like a soldier who was pissed to learn what the war had really been about.
Marcus stood outside the front door to his pathetic house looking over his poor excuse for a lawn as he watched her grow smaller, with each futile step she took in an effort to get away; futile because there was no escape from what she was fleeing.
Her flight, however, was not about distance but the pure expenditure of energy. She needed to burn everything off. She needed to make tracks. She needed to assert her existence through movement and separate herself from all that was static and unchangeable and inevitable around her. It didn’t matter what might be accomplished. All that mattered was her commitment to the effort.
Marcus was uncertain whether to follow her or not.
He stood there wanting to yell. It would have been inane. What could he have yelled? “Stop”? “Hold on”?
He acted on impulse. He followed her without intent or a plan. He simply felt that their connection couldn’t be allowed to be broken. Not this way. She was walking in the direction laughably called the Financial District. All that was there now, other than the carcass of buildings, was a taxi stand where foreign drivers stared into their smartphones listening to TV shows in their native languages through tiny speakers that made the voices they missed only seem that much farther away.
She trudged down Fourth Avenue like someone fighting against a river, and Marcus pursued. Pale, torn, shredded, and fixated, he walked fast enough to overtake her but he did not run; running seemed wrong, running would have turned him into a pursuer—it was too literal and direct and aggressive. He needed to catch up to her and change her mind about everything, using words he didn’t have and hoped would magically appear, the way they did not with his mother.
He caught up to her outside an unfinished building at 86 Brookmeyer Road.
“Don’t leave like this,” he’d said.
“Leave me alone, Marcus.” Her voice was low. There was nothing conflicted in her tone.
Traffic was light. The glass tower rose and merged with the steel sky above them.
“I’m afraid that if you leave now you’ll never come back.”
“That’s right.”
“It’s because of the verdict. I know, I understand that. But we can’t destroy everything—”
“Everything?” she asked, dropping her bag from her shoulder and waving her hand between them. “You mean us? That’s the ‘everything’ to you?”
“I’m afraid to talk to you. I’m afraid of your anger. It’s bigger than us, and it comes from a place outside of us, and I can’t find a place to talk to you here on the inside.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t owe you that. You don’t get a ‘safe space.’ You have a country of your own, Marcus. Go home. Go to where you belong. Consider yourself lucky that you have someplace else to call home that isn’t here.”
That is when he threw down the gauntlet and decided that—instead of him leaving Lydia to try to come to terms with the seismic implications of the grand jury decision—they should hold hands and, to save their relationship, declare war on injustice.
“We can fight this!” he’d yelled to her.
He actually said that: We can fight this.
What he thought he meant, at the time, was that they could choose to be together, independent of the injustices of the wider world. They would not be the first couple since Romeo and Juliet to try it, and there was a very good chance they’d wind up better off than those two did. An interracial couple in 2008 was a less impossible scenario than the pursuit of romantic love in 1597.
But Lydia wasn’t trying to save them; she was trying to save some part of herself.
By the time Marcus recounted all this to Sigrid and Irv from his rock on Lake Flower, he had come to understand that his declaration to “fight” sounded different to her than how he’d intended it. She heard it with different ears. To her, his proclamation had been a declaration of war against time and history and gravity.
We can fight the winds and the seas, he might have said instead. We can fight against the spread of the continents and the pull of the moon. Let’s fight against the elements, one by one, until we have dominion over them all, and let us establish a kingdom of righteousness and liberty and tolerance and human kindness and give it a name unspoiled by other names. We will speak of our victory in a new language unshaped by power, and sing to each other in poetry untainted by robbery or theft of one culture by another. We’ll do that together, he might as well have said. Just you and me. And we will wash away the old world in a great flood and renew it. Adam and Eve, naked on the Ark. A stateroom for two—the only animals here on a mission from God.
“I want to show you something,” she said in reply to his own emancipation proclamation.
If she’d walked away, if she’d shaken her head in dismay as she should have, if she hadn’t looked at him as someone who needed to be enlightened—if she had simply told him to fuck off and leave her alone—she’d still be alive.
But she didn’t do any of that.
She dropped her duffle bag to the ground and walked directly into 86 Brookmeyer Road and started climbing the stairs, two at a time, like a high school athlete scaling the bleachers.
Marcus considered collecting the duffle, but she had already vanished into the building and there was no way he’d catch up to her if he were carrying it. Something else, something important, was happening.
Why was she going in there? It had never even felt like a place before—only something irrelevant and characterless in his geography that he passed by on his way to someplace else.
Marcus was bigger and taller and stronger than Lydia, and he had a broad chest. He weighed about 190 pounds and stood over six feet tall. He was not athletic, per se, but he lived a clean life and he walked most places out of an aversion to public transport. He caught up to Lydia on the sixth-floor landing, which was already higher than most of the other buildings around it.
“We aren’t supposed to be up here,” he’d said to her.
“Because the authorities won’t like it?”
“It’s private property.”
He had said this! “Private property”—moments after suggesting they reverse the spin of the Earth.
Lydia swung around and stepped from the landing through the plastic sheeting that helped keep the dust from one side from mixing with the dust on the other, and she entered the unfinished space that was—and was not—the sixth floor; a space without purpose or definition or a future.
“Lydia, come back, please,” he implored.
He remembers how there was a wind that collected pigeon feathers from the floor, creating small twisters at her feet. She was wearing a pair of brown shoes with a small heel. Size eight. Nine West.
The wind outside was constant and promised a storm but there was no smell of it yet; only the waft of car exhaust and the permanent sweat of vanished workers, the sweet aroma of rotting wood and sawdust.
There was a sense of height, too. There was no glass where the walls or windows should have been. Neither of them was naturally afraid of heights. Together, he and Lydia had hiked to the top of Mount Marcy, and even taken some rock-climbing classes at Cascade Lakes on grades of 5.3b and 5.4a. He wrote his father about it once in a letter. This place, though, scared him immediately. Marcus did not want to follow her closer to the absent wall, but h
e couldn’t talk to her if he didn’t. He needed to convince her. Of something. Somehow.
Even then he didn’t know what. But it was Lydia who had the plan. Lydia who had brought them there.
“Don’t make me do this anymore,” Marcus says to Sigrid. He looks up at her, craning his neck to keep his shoulders low, the gun hanging and heavy in his long fingers—“piano fingers” his own mother used to call them. “You can reach an entire octave,” she had said to him when he was nine. “Not your father’s hands. Not the hands of a farm boy. You are going to solve mysteries and problems. My little boy with the long fingers.”
Sigrid is still on the ground with her legs crossed. She is hot and exhausted from the long night, the hangover, the long day, the jet lag, the long memories, the stretch of time behind her.
“Irv is right,” she says to him. “You have to say it. I don’t know about reborn this or reborn that, but you need to do this for yourself, Marcus. You were on the landing. You followed her.”
“I thought you came here to protect me,” he pleads like a child.
“I did. And I’m now fairly certain that the only way to save you is to help you face yourself. If you don’t, if you pass this moment without speaking up the way you did last time, you will—in a very real sense—never truly live again. You followed Lydia. What happened?”
Lydia approached the empty space where the wall should have been. There, far above the city, she was exposed to the air and the light and the urban sprawl around her. Marcus saw her squint against the harsh light from the glowing smog above them. Her hands, he remembered, were twitching as if they were meant to be holding something. They looked to him like the hands of a sleeping child, grasping for a parent’s hand.
“Lydia, come back. I love you.”
Her neck jolted as though recoiling from a pungent smell.
“Look, Marcus,” she said, in as soothing a voice as she could manage. “Look at what you want to fight. Come here. It’s easy to see from here. We are not only us. We are part of more.”
Marcus crossed the room that was not a room to the window that was not a window to look out on the city he lived in that was becoming more unfamiliar by the moment.
She waved her arms and pointed. The city was still racially segregated, keeping people separate and unequal. She mapped out the voting lines and called out the streets by name.
Yes. He knew all this. So . . . what?
Was she demonstrating that America was economically divided and racially unfair? No one denied that. It was the analysis about why it persisted that was at issue. And surely the answer to that couldn’t be gleaned by a view over the rooftops.
If they had been standing on a hill in Alabama, wouldn’t they be able to look at rich whites and poor whites? Mansions and trailer parks? There’s economic inequality in America because America likes it that way. That’s how he always thought of it as a Norwegian. How can the winners prove that they’ve won if they can’t have more than the losers? That’s an American problem, he wanted to say. This is a place that has convinced workers that foregoing a holiday is noble and impressive rather than foolish and destructive. And honestly, what did any of this have to do with the grand jury decision against Roy Carman anyway? he wanted to ask. A black man might become president of the United States. Isn’t that evidence of America’s progress, promise, and potential?
“Lydia,” he eventually said, clearing his mind of these tangled ideas. He stepped closer to her and reached out his hand. “Lydia, you can’t abandon us. You can’t leave me behind. Lydia, please. I don’t want to be alone anymore. I can’t be alone anymore. I need you. I love you. I love you so much. We can get through this together. Please,” he said, reaching out both arms to embrace her, “please come to me.”
Marcus did not know how close to the edge she had been. There was no frame behind her to judge the distance. There was an illusion of endless retreat. Lydia had not known either. She couldn’t have known because she was not facing outward but toward Marcus and his needs and his approaching mass. If she had known she would not have extended both of her arms and tried to shove him away with all the force in her diminutive body, a body that weighed so much less than his, that was so much less planted to the ground, but she wanted him away so badly, and she was so intent and focused on not being crowded and overpowered and ignored by everything he was and everything she imagined him to be in that instant, that she slipped.
She had lunged with her palms out and arms straight and used all her weight, but Marcus had more; she only succeeded in pushing herself backwards to the edge. The sawdust and debris denied her left foot its needed purchase and, off-balance, she slipped and fell.
Marcus’s own arms had been extended to embrace her, and hers had been extended to push him away, and in the moment when she lost her balance and her eyes became wide and aware, she tried reaching for him and taking hold.
The nails of her long and slender fingers scraped the tops of his arms, and before he could grasp her she was gone.
Marcus froze there. He heard Lydia slap the pavement.
“I ran down the stairs,” Marcus says from his rock. “I ran out the door and picked her up. She was . . . destroyed. Her head . . .”
“I understand,” Sigrid says to him.
“Her eyes were open. Exactly as they had been while she was falling.”
“You’re done, Marcus.”
“She didn’t call out or scream on the way down. I can feel the fall. The wind of it.”
“You’re done, Marcus.”
“Irving,” Sigrid says. “Don’t shoot.”
“I’m not making any decisions while that gun is in play.”
Sigrid stands, brushes herself off, and walks to her brother. She lays a hand on his head. She reaches down and takes the weapon from his hands, presses the cylinder release, and removes the bullets. She throws the gun into the lake, as far as she can, so Irv can see the arc and hear the splash.
She walks to Irv behind the tree and hands him the bullets.
Handle with Care
Sigrid takes Marcus by the hand and walks her big brother back through the woods to the Zodiac that she had beached on the edge of the lake. The assault team emerges from the surrounding woods and lowering and shouldering their weapons as they fall in line behind them. Irv can’t decide whether or not to cuff Marcus because he isn’t sure yet whether he wants to arrest him. But there is time for all that later. Fortunately, though, the danger of being shot is over and no one is going to have to carry Marcus out of the forest.
On the boat, Irv watches Sigrid sit herself beside her brother, who looks spent. He hangs his head and seems resigned and passive. Sigrid holds his hand and together they are silent. She does not try to speak with Marcus and instead looks out at the distant mountains over the shimmering water.
The wind in Sigrid’s hair looks good. The sun has added some needed color to her face.
“You need a vacation,” he shouts to her over the roar of the outboard motor. And, for the first time, he hears her laugh.
At Lake Flower, Sheriff Frank Allman is waiting for them. He is standing in the same spot and pose in which Irv left him—hands in his pockets, dropped shoulders, utterly put upon by events beyond his control. Alfonzo tosses the mooring line to Frank, who misses it, collects it, and ties off the Zodiac.
“Welcome back,” Frank says to Sigrid as she steps out of the boat. Sigrid pats him on the shoulder. He’s had a hard day.
Irv and Frank retire to the police station, where, she’s certain, phone calls are being made and political matters are being deliberated. Sigrid sits beside Marcus on a bench close to the van she set on fire.
“You did this?” he asks his sister.
“Yes.”
“We are masters of disaster.”
“Yes, we are.”
Ten minutes later Irv emerges from the police station. He claps his hands like a soccer coach. “All right,” says Irv. “We’re going back. Marcus is with us.�
��
“He’s free to go?” Sigrid asks.
“He’s free to go with us. And we’re all going to consider ourselves very lucky.”
They transition to the squad car and make their way back to Irv’s own jurisdiction across the invisible lines that turn one place into another. On the way NPR’s All Things Considered begins its broadcast, but Irv is not in the mood to consider all things and switches over to a jazz station playing an Art Blakey special celebrating fifty years since the release of the album Moanin’.
They listen in silence for more than a half-hour until Sigrid breaks it with a question:
“What does ‘the one percent’ mean?” she asks. “I saw it on a patch at the biker clubhouse.”
“It refers to the myth that ninety-nine percent of bikers are law abiding, but one percent are outlaws. People who call themselves One Percenters consider themselves above the law and are invariably assholes. You should have called a taxi.”
When they arrive, Irv locks Marcus into the cell for the night. There’s no better solution and Sigrid does not object. She has spent plenty of time in this jail and knows it to be the cleanest and safest place he has been in a long time. They don’t even bother to remove her desk.
“I thought you’d insist he stay with you tonight,” Irv says to Sigrid as they leave the station for the Wagoneer.
“I have other plans tonight,” she says.
“When did you have time to make plans?”
“You were pretty good back there,” Sigrid says.
“You’re talking to me?”
“Yes,” Sigrid says.
“This would be the wrong time, I suppose, to tell you that I was right all along and if we’d worked together from the start all this could have ended the same way but without the SWAT team, the pyrotechnics, paperwork, or tears.”
“I think,” says Sigrid, “you need to decide how you want the rest of this night to go.”
“I take your meaning,” Irv says, starting the Wagoneer.
American by Day Page 30
