The absurdity of it all.
“She’s my dog,” Carlos said, a little defensively. “She’s my only friend. I’m going to bring her home.”
“Your home is gone,” she said, the thin stream of giggles reaching its end, giving way instead to a huge sadness, the kind that did not seem to visit her but instead emerged from within, as much a part of her body as a liver or a spleen. She wanted to hate the old man but what she felt for him wasn’t hate. It was something complicated and awful and unknown to her, but hate was too simple a word to describe it. If she had ever loved a child still innocent of its first heartbreak, she might have known the feeling. But she wasn’t a parent; and anyway, she couldn’t remember love.
“A dog,” she said.
Carlos stood beside her, the aesthetic of Hell manifested around him, an abyssal acoustic being built by its wretched servants, and he looked like what he was: a slumped, fading old man, lonely in the world but for one simple animal, and fully aware of the impossibility of retrieving it. His speech was defiant but his mind had already recognized the truth, and she could see it erode him even as she watched, like a sand dune in a strong wind.
Somewhere in this bloody tangle of bone and flesh, maybe even some still-muttering faces affixed to a wall with an unguent excreted from the lungs of the surgeons, were her parents, their cold anger still seeping from their tongues, their self-loathing and their resentment still animating the flayed muscles in their peeled faces. She could hear them as clearly as ever.
Stupid girl.
God damn them anyway.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s go get your dog.”
4
The girl was careful, but there was no need to sneak. What could they do to him? Death wasn’t shit. Carlos knew he should tell her to leave—it was obvious he wasn’t going to be coming back, with or without Maria—but it was her choice to make. Life was long or short, and it meant something or it didn’t. It wasn’t his business to tell her how to measure hers.
The walls of his old apartment building bowed slightly, as though some great pressure grew from within. The doors had been torn off and the windows broken, though, and he could see nothing inside but shadow. Pacing the perimeter of the building were three dark-robed figures, their heads encased in black iron boxes. They exuded a monastic patience, moving slowly and with obvious precision. The lead figure held an open book in his left hand, scribbling busily into it with his right. The one in the middle swung a censer, a black orb from which spilled a heavy yellow smoke. The scent of marigolds carried over to him. The figure in the back held aloft a severed head on a pole, which emitted a beam of light from its wrenched mouth.
Carlos waited for these figures to pass before approaching the doors as casually as if he belonged there. Mix made a sound of protest, but he ignored her. A surgeon emerged from the doors just as he reached them, stooping low to fit, but though it cast him a curious glance, it did not interfere with him, or even break its stride. It stretched itself to its full height and walked away, thin hands trailing long needles of bone and bloody thread. It moved slowly and languidly, like something walking underwater.
He moved to enter the building, but Mix restrained him from behind and edged in front of him instead. She held her left arm across his chest, protectively, as they crept forward; in her right she held the knife she’d stashed in her backpack, unfolded into an ugly silver talon. He didn’t know what had changed her mind about him, but he was grateful for it.
Though barely enough light intruded into the building to see anything by, it was immediately obvious that the girl had been right: the building’s expansive interior had been scooped clean, leaving nothing but the outer walls, like the husk of an insect following a spider’s feast. A great, wet hole had opened in the earth beneath it, almost as deep as the building’s foundation. The hole looked like a gaping wound, raw and bloody, its walls sloping inward and meeting a hundred feet down in a moist, clutching glottis. Above it, the walls and ceiling had been sprayed with its meaty exhalations, red organic matter pasted over them so that they resembled the underside of a tongue.
Bodies of residents who’d been unable to evacuate were glued to the far wall with a thick yellow resin; even as they watched, one Carlos recognized as a young cashier at a local take-out was peeled from his perch and subjected to the attentions of a cleaver-wielding surgeon, who quickly quartered him with a series of heavy and efficient chops. The cashier’s limbs quivered yet, and his mouth gaped in wonderment at his own butchering. But instead of a cry or a scream, what emerged from him was a pure note, as clean and undiluted as anything heard on Earth. Tears sprang to Carlos’s eyes at the beauty of it, and ahead of him Mix put her hand over her lowered face, the curved knife glinting dully by her ear, a gesture of humility or of supplication.
“Maria,” Carlos said, and there she was, snuffling through piled offal in a far corner, her snout filthy, her hair matted and sticky. The laborers of Hell walked around her without concern, and she seemed undisturbed by them as well. When she heard Carlos call her name, she answered with a happy bark and bounded over to him, spry for the moment, slamming the side of her body into his legs and lifting her head in grateful joy as he ran his gnarled fingers through her fur. Carlos dropped to his knees, heedless of the bright pain, of how difficult it would be to rise again. His dog sprawled into his lap. For a moment, they were happy.
And then Carlos thought, You left me. You left me in the end. Why? He hugged his dog close, burying his nose in her fur. He knew there was no answer beyond the obvious, constant imbalance in any transaction of the heart. You don’t love me the way I love you.
He forgave her for it. There really wasn’t anything else he could do.
5
Mix watched them from a few feet away, the knife forgotten in her hand. She knew why the dog had come here. She could feel it; if the old man would leave the animal alone for a moment, he would too. The sound coming through that great, open throat in the ground, barely heard but thrumming in her blood, had called it here. She felt it like a density in the air, a gravity in the heart. She felt it in the way the earth called her to itself, with its promise of loam and worms, so that she sat down too, beside them but apart, unwelcome in their reunion.
Stupid girl. You weren’t invited. You don’t belong. You never did.
The sound from the hole grew in volume. It was an answer to loneliness, and a call to the forgotten. It was Hell’s lullaby, and as the long tone blew from the abyss it filtered out through the windows and the doors and it caught in the reedlike parchments of skin and set them to keening, it powered the wheels of bone so they clamored and rattled and chimed, and it blended with the chorus of notes from the suspended bodies until the whole of the city became as the bell of a great trumpet, spilling a mournful beauty into the world. Every yearning for love rang like a bell in the chest, every lonely fear found its justification.
The clangor of the song kept rising, until it filled the sky. Their ache stretched them until their bodies sang. In dark fathoms, something turned its vast head, and found it beautiful.
FIELD TRIP
by
TANANARIVE DUE
Tonya counted the bouncing heads as her sixth graders raced into the subway car.
Nine… ten… eleven… twelve. She finished just as the door shooshed shut behind her, and the car was already lurching while she did her second count, trying to pick them out from the office refugees hoping to beat rush hour. Most of her kids had worn red, or tried to, as per the letter she’d sent home to all of the parents: Red T-shirts will both instill school pride and make them more visible in a crowd. She hoped they hadn’t inferred what she’d left unspoken: This will make it more difficult for me to lose your children, or for someone to snatch them on the street. Only three of the twelve were wearing the requested red shirt— the girls always stuck at the hip—but most had made a gesture: a red scarf, a red belt, a red baseball cap. (Red sneakers, one of them—Kai, the group s
mart-ass. Of course.)
“Kai, nobody’s going to notice your feet,” she’d said before they left.
“My mama said she can’t afford no red shirt.”
And that, she knew, was true: she’d made another middle-class assumption, one of a string since she’d been hired as a permanent sub at Ida B. Wells Middle School deep in the heart of the inner city, worlds away from the suburban science magnet school she’d attended back when she thought she wanted to be an astronaut. For these kids, a future in aeronautics was just as unlikely as new clothes on a whim because the clueless sub sent home a note.
On their ride downtown to the theater, the kids had followed her instructions to stay close enough to link arms, and with no crowd at mid-morning, she’d felt only relief when the doors closed and sealed out any complications. Now, the kids had scattered: the Red Shirts near the back, giggling as they’d been all day, Kai showing off for them by hanging on a strap as if he were doing a trapeze act, Diego and Jaxon wrangling over best hand positioning at a center pole, and the other six invisible in the crowd of at least twenty other riders.
A flash of red scarf near the window: Good. Sharmanita had found a seat. That was Sharmanita: quiet, off to herself. Police had mistakenly shot her brother dead at a playground over the summer and she barely spoke a word. Tonya had begged Sharmanita to come on the field trip. Sharmanita hadn’t submitted a five-sentence essay, one of the requirements, but screw it. That kid needed a field trip from her whole life.
Tonya eyed the unshaven thirtyish man sitting beside Sharmanita, a bear in a mountainous coat, and quickly wished she were closer to the girl. Maybe profiling by size was wrong, but this guy worried her. His coat practically swallowed Sharmanita; he could carry her off under one arm. Just because he’s big doesn’t mean he isn’t a sweetheart. This was the reasonable voice that had guided her through her day, talking down her various panic attacks. A kid about to cross a street too soon, in a bus’s path. A too-long visit to the bathroom that conjured fantasies of abduction. All fine, in the end. But Sharmanita was a special case: her photo at her brother’s funeral had gone viral. Strangers might recognize and harass her.
“Diego—Jaxon—go stand by Sharmanita. I told you guys to stay together.”
Diego cupped his ear like he hadn’t heard, mouthing What? Jaxon copied him.
They tested her every day, never letting her forget how much more they loved their sainted Mrs. Lopez, who was recovering from a hysterectomy with her sister in the country.
Tonya gestured to direct the boys, firmly. “Go on.” By now, she was hoarse.
The field trip was blackmail, plain and simple. The biggest troublemakers in her class were also her brightest students, mostly—those with enough creativity and curiosity to write an essay to win a chance to go see The Lion King at the Regal movie theater downtown. Most of them had seen The Lion King, but none had seen it on the big screen. The movie barely mattered. The breadth of it—the hours off from school, a cafeteria-packed lunch, a ride on the subway, a trip downtown—was enormous to sixth graders from the projects. Tonya was constantly amazed that they lived in one of the biggest cities in the country and rarely saw the world beyond their school bus routes. They had squealed, giggled and pointed the whole day like tourists.
Both parent volunteers who’d signed up had canceled at the last minute because they had to work, so that morning Tonya had stood with twelve students outside of the school and realized it was up to her alone to create this memory that might breathe life into one of these kids in the harder times to come. But how could she handle it alone?
Almost there. Almost finished.
The train speaker exploded gibberish.
“What?” Jaxon and Diego yelled in unison, as they had following every previous indecipherable announcement. Other students laughed. Was that Blake she’d heard? Good.
“We get off on Fifteenth!” Tonya called. “I’ll warn you at the stop before.” She held up three fingers high above her head for all to see. “We have three more stops.”
Tonya scanned the car for signs of red or nodding heads. The Red Shirts had ended their conference, paying close attention as they felt the subway car slowing. Diego and Jaxon were no longer jostling, hovering close to Sharmanita. Where were the others? Check: Yoshi in a red jacket in the corner, buddied with Kateisha, whose braided scalp swarmed with red butterfly barrettes. Amir chewing gum, wearing no red, but it was impossible to miss his woven white skullcap. Amir’s buddy was… who? Tonya began her frantic count again.
Five… six… seven… eight…
The train entered a tunnel, all light wiped away. “Movie Club—you need to move closer together. I can’t see all of you!”
The brakes screamed over her in the tunnel as the train car rattled around a corner, slowing. Ahead, light from the tunnel’s mouth allowed her to make out Jonah, Kofi, Marisol. (Or was it? Marisol was tall for her age, and the girl Tonya thought was her might be a teenager. Hadn’t Marisol worn something red?) The train shuddered as it struggled to slow. Kai led the laughing at the train car’s jittering, pretending he might fly free.
Tonya heard a deafening clank beneath her and felt an impact beneath her feet, as if a piece of the machinery had fallen free and had knocked against the subway car’s underbelly. The errant piece rattled down the length of the car beneath the wheels. Hope that wasn’t the brakes.
“No one get out here!” Tonya shouted, and strangers glanced over their shoulders to see if she held authority over them. A few gaunt faces were streaked with grit, as if they were fresh from a coal mine. The strangers’ plaintive, bottomless eyes startled her. These faces might have stared at her from a prison cell. And the car was more crowded than she’d thought at first glance—not twenty people, more like thirty-five.
“Movie Club—we’re in three stops.”
What had she been thinking to propose a field trip, expecting help from parents who couldn’t take time off from work? The principal, Mr. Johanssen, was always flirting with her, but he should have known this field trip was too ambitious for a sub. Your enthusiasm is so refreshing, he’d said, and warned her again to stay clear of the “moaners” in the teachers’ lounge who would counsel against it. Oh, plenty had warned her, but she’d written their warnings off as resentment, since most of her colleagues were suspicious of do-gooders.
Here today, gone tomorrow, someone had muttered to her in the hall.
Tonya was trying to save the world, as her mother put it: if not for Tonya’s vow to spend two years teaching in the city, she would be in law school by now. Her grandmother’s Selma activism gene had skipped a generation and left Tonya making up for lost ground. Tonya would go to law school, but not before she did something. Grandma Pat had lain down in front of garbage trucks and gone to jail. How hard should it be to teach a couple years? Plan a field trip?
The train finally slid to a stop, and the doors opened to a crowded platform. Tonya had hoped to lose riders, but everyone stepped back to let new ones on. Passengers crowded the doors, jostling with their elbows. They showered each other with expletives. An aged woman swung her hip to dart in front of a man as if she were half her age. One man’s beard was so full that Tonya could only see his glowering eyes.
“My kids, remember—no one get off here. Only get off when I get off!”
“Miss Stephens!”
The thin, reedy voice seemed to come from everywhere, laced with panic. Behind her, in front of her. Tonya didn’t know the voice—couldn’t say for sure if it was a boy or girl, or even one of her students—but she stood on her toes to try to see who was calling her. No red in sight.
Tonya almost missed the worn sign on the platform as the doors closed: MARKET, it read. What? She peered through the dust-coated window: Market Avenue. Where was that? She had never heard of a Market Avenue on this side of town. She’d taken the train a dozen times since she moved to her dreary one-bedroom with bars across the windows to be close to the school. She loved the Regal the
ater’s old opera-style seats, and she rode out at least once a week to see a movie and remember sushi and bagels. She couldn’t have taken the wrong train.
“Miss Steeeeeeeephens!”
“Who is that?” Tonya said, but her eyes searched for the subway route map above her.
On the map, the top line was red for eastbound, the bottom blue for westbound. But that was all she could make out. The writing was illegible, the words blurry, just out of focus. She inched closer, brushing past the screaming B.O. from an impossibly thin woman in yoga clothes, but the words were no less blurry. The closer she got to the sign, the more obvious the blurriness, like a dirty camera lens.
The sign’s blurriness looked and felt utterly wrong—like knowing she had brought the kids to the westbound platform, which had no Market Avenue on its route. Like the possibility that the voice calling for her was not one of her kids—that she was just losing her mind.
The train was gaining speed, but it didn’t sound the way it had before, gears grinding.
The car rocked back and forth, also a new development. Did she smell something burning? Maybe a necessary piece had dropped off before the stop and no one had noticed. When the train jolted so hard that it seemed to jump from the tracks, a child screamed. Tonya’s heart raced.
One of her kids playing? Or as scared as she was?
And there was no red. No red in sight.
“Movie Club, call out your last names in alphabetical order!” Tonya shouted. “Then say ‘It’s me’ if you were calling for me just now.”
The loudspeaker belched nonsense above her. A blink of clarity—“Next stop…”—and then formless ranting, an intercom system glitch that sounded half man, half machine.
Tonya could not hear if any children were trying to say their names. The faster the train sped, the louder the gale in the car. Had it been this loud before? Had someone opened windows? She craned her ears for the frightened voice that had called out at the platform, but the chunk-chunk-chunk of the train drowned everything.
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