by Steve Berman
Tarif broke into a broad grin, all the stars missing from the night sky right there in his smile. “Her name’s Shawna,” he said, then laughed and rubbed the back of his neck. “What? Why you looking at me like that?”
“You goddamn well know why.”
“I got a weakness, okay?” Tarif ducked his head. “Girl thick.”
“Sure,” Asad said dryly. “You know this how people die in horror movies, right? Split up when we ain’t supposed to.”
“You scared?”
Asad said nothing. He wasn’t supposed to be afraid. He was supposed to keep the fear away for other people, which meant he couldn’t give in to the brittleness in his thigh-bones or the way his chest folded in like it would snap right in the middle faster than a greasy wishbone at Thanksgiving.
Tarif clapped both thick, heavy hands to his shoulders, weighing him down, grounding him with a touch and warm brown eyes he’d known his whole damn life, as constant and steady and right as Gam and her electric palms.
“Nothing gonna come through, baby brother,” Tarif said. “Nothing ever come through, ’cause we do our jobs. Because all the others do their jobs.”
“Louisville. You said it—last night, Louisville went dark.”
“Because they didn’t do their shit. Because it was too big for them. It’s not like that here. I won’t let it be. It’s gonna be all right. Promise.” Tarif squeezed his shoulders, his heat soaking through Asad’s jacket, his fingers pinching Asad’s collarbones in a way that always hurt but he’d never let go of in a thousand years. “I’m gonna help Shawna check her block, then come back and find you. Okay?”
“Okay.” Asad nodded, pressing his lips together and biting back the taste of ash and fear souring in the back of his mouth. “Be careful. Don’t fall through.”
Tarif stepped back, that broad grin back, blush so deep, and Asad wondered how it must feel, to be so deeply in love he would brave the dark, the unknown, the places where people fell through the cracks in the world and never came back.
“Nothing gonna happen to me, baby brother,” Tarif said, with his confidence that filled up his thick barrel chest like a keg that never ran dry. “We the superheroes in the dark, man. We the ones who hold the world together.”
Then he was turning away, already half-gone. Wasn’t hard to see Tarif was somewhere else, his thoughts on Shawna, on kisses, on thick lush thighs and the way girls had of changing the way the air of a room breathed, like it went down smoother because they were there. Tarif’s back grew smaller and farther away, words drifting over the night in laughing, light promise.
“One way or another, baby bro…we gotta pull through.”
3
It wasn’t the first time Asad had walked their block alone. Technically seven blocks; the Johnson family owned the world-ways down Floyd from the curve of Callender to Blue Hill, where Callender became Greenrock Street and Floyd became Donald Road and those streets became someone else’s responsibility. Asad and Tarif would start at the point where Floyd and Callender met, then follow the curve of Callender around until it ran parallel with Floyd again, stopping to peek in between, down the cross-street of Lucerne before moving on until they hit Blue Hill and circled back around.
They’d kick rocks as they walked and shout GOOOAAAL! when they snapped a hunk of asphalt into a sewer grate, then laugh and hush each other even though no one would be brave enough to open their windows and look outside. They had to be quiet, because they had to listen. Cracks didn’t always open outside, and if they caught that feeling, if they heard those cries of fear, they had to be ready to bolt in like the fire department, all shoulders and bluster, and break down doors and do what they came to do.
But tonight, Asad kicked rocks down Callender Street alone because Tarif had run off to chase a girl. Last time he’d run off to chase some boys who wanted to form a sundown baseball team, though it had fallen apart when their parents had caught wind and said if they had time to play ball, they had time to work runes. Before, Tarif had been thinking about going dayside, sleeping nights and waking up days to look for a job when not many dayside jobs needed the kind of skills nightsiders learned in school.
But Tarif still tried, while Asad watched and held his tongue because he wasn’t gonna be the jackass shitting on the weird hope Tarif held onto, a hope that made him the younger one though he had four years on Asad. Somehow, Asad always ended up playing the older brother. The voice of reason. No thick girl was gonna turn his head ’cause girls didn’t turn his head at all, and the odds of finding someone like him—someone with the eyes, someone who saw, someone who knew the runewords and closed the cracks and kept the nothing at bay—who was also someone like him?
Never gonna happen. Not today, not tomorrow.
So he did his duty, he did his homework, he followed the old ways, and he let Tarif be young and joyful for both of them, optimistic and hopeful and full of things Asad didn’t think he’d ever possessed.
That was the way things were. The way things had always been, and always would be.
So why did the silence tonight feel different?
He knew every corner of his blocks, and he traced every square of sidewalk, peering into the chips and crevices in the concrete to make sure they were just concrete, and not a rift taking advantage to fit itself into the ready-made shape. He climbed ladders that had become law since the first split—not having one installed was punishable by fines from city inspectors. Couldn’t risk it. Couldn’t risk that one rooftop passed over might be the one place a crack opened big enough to swallow the whole city.
He crept along rooftops, peered between apartment buildings and weathered brick-fronted houses, inspected beneath dumpsters, scaled street lamps, ran his fingers along awnings, tried not to flinch when motion-sensor lights on porches snapped on. He knew most of them—from the Norfolks’ blinding strobe spots to the dim little yellow light that always drew mosquitos and moths to the Hernandez porch—and they knew him, knew the boy creeping silent around their houses weren’t trying nothing but to hold them all together.
Yet he still felt like a thief, if only because he didn’t want to be seen. He didn’t like the way daysiders looked at him, when they recognized what he was. Like they needed something from him.
Like he actually gave them hope.
Sometimes they peered at him through the blinds, but tonight brought no cautious, frightened eyes; nothing but the occasional sound caught through glass and brick and wood, close-held murmurs and television channels flicking and dinner plates clanking. He was alone, unseen, and maybe that was what had him so uneasy.
He wouldn’t mind being seen, for once. By someone. Tarif had Shawna, had his baseball team boys, but Asad was the quiet one, the responsible one, and even in school the other nightsiders never much looked at him when Tarif’s bright personality took up enough space for both of them.
“You getting yourself all messed in the head,” he muttered to himself. “You mad Tarif ain’t here, or you mad at the space he take up when he is here?”
No one and nothing answered. Not even the dog he heard rummaging in the trash as he drew up on Lucerne; not the wind wobbling the power lines until they made strange, warped, wailing sounds as they bounced and jostled. That wind hit hard for a September evening, and Asad pulled his hoodie up and hunched into it, zipping up the neck until it covered his mouth. Wind in September shouldn’t be like this. Wind like this came with summer storms, then left and didn’t come back until the winter snows.
The back of his neck prickled. What had Gam always said? If things ain’t right, things ain’t right. The wind was wrong. This whole night was wrong, and that was why Asad was really mad:
’Cause he was afraid he would find something, and he was never afraid when he walked the blocks alone. ’cause Tarif never left him when things felt off, but he’d been too fucked in the head to even notice the air tasted like flat stale cola and wet quarters, and he’d left Asad to handle what was supposed to be both the
ir shit when Asad shouldn’t be closing seals solo until he was eighteen, maybe twenty.
God damn it.
Just find it. Now that he’d stopped ignoring his screaming instincts, there was no mistaking: it was close. He didn’t think he’d passed it yet, but if he didn’t find it by the end of the sweep he’d circle back. Crawl under houses if he had to. Use the block key and go sniffing inside. If he followed the direction of the rising hairs on the backs of his arms, he’d at least be able to narrow it down to a few buildings before he had to go door to door, slipping inside and creeping unwanted among people’s lives, bringing fear into their homes until he told them it was safe, they were safe, they wouldn’t fall between tonight.
He palmed the skeleton key in his pocket, held it close until it printed hot against his palm and he smelled the tinny stink of brass soaking in the sweat of his skin. He kept his eyes keen with every step, listened for the tingle and pull that was as much sound as sensation, a buzz on the back of his scalp, that weird naked crawl like he’d just gotten his edges done and everything felt prickly and too cold. It wasn’t on Lucerne. He wasn’t being drawn there, and the scent was fainter, buried under dumpster rankness and a little gift that dog had left behind. Had to be close, if the dog had run. Strays didn’t run from one boy on the street, but they ran when something shifted in the polarity of the world, when their instincts told them a disaster was on the horizon and they had to seek high ground.
Maybe that was what made people like Asad, like Tarif, like Gam. They hadn’t lost their instinct. They’d long ago forgotten being animals and become men, the first men, the men who became all other men…but some men, some women, some humans didn’t lose what connected them to what they once were.
That connection drew him down Callender, right up on the Blue Hill crossways. He stood on the center median of the deserted street and listened to the howling silence: the lonely keen of the wind coiling serpentine between buildings, caressing the walls, begging to be let in. The trees planted along the median whispered, as if they could tell him what to do, how to do it. He toed out of his Adidas, pulled his socks off, and balled them up before stuffing them into his left sneaker. Feet bare and planted on the dirt, grass tickling between his toes, he closed his eyes and tried to shut everything out and just feel where that wrongness, that prickle, pulled stronger.
It was like standing in the ocean and feeling for the changes in current, where once you got out deep, deep enough to drown, the water had layers—some hotter and some colder, making them move past each other at different speeds. Tarif said it was like swimming through the pee-patch in the public pool, but pee in the pool didn’t make currents that pushed Asad one way, then the other, then the other again. He stood with his hands at his sides and his fingers spread like bracing them on a table, bracing to keep from coming unmoored when, eyes closed this way—shutting down one sense after the other until he no longer felt the cool itching grass or the ice-biting breeze or the scratchy threads of his hoodie, until he no longer smelled pavement still baking from the sun and stinking of used bubblegum and exhaust, until he no longer heard the trees’ curious whisperings—he could easily lose himself, in the black space behind his eyelids. He could easily become nothing, abandon all connection with the world as it was, while he cut himself free from his senses to feel the one place where an electric wound had been cut into the skin of reality.
The currents pushed him to and fro, swaying on his feet with a kind of dreamy vertigo. He stopped trying to keep his balance, stopped trying to focus on his body, and gave into the draw, until he leaned over and over and over and almost fell. He caught himself as that lurch started in his gut and everything rushed wrong-ways, eyes snapping open and arms windmilling as he pivoted himself around and rocked forward onto the very tips of his toes until gravity righted itself and he knew up from down. He stood up straight, and looked.
He faced across Blue Hill Avenue, his body an arrow pointing across the street. Next to a three-story pastel blue house with white trim, with an empty lot’s space between, stood a long, low, rectangular building: two stories, a storefront painted over with a mural of Black folk dancing and playing music below, tape-marked rectangular windows up top, pale gray cement in the front, red brick in the back. Metal stairs ran up the side to the second floor. Both the wall and the second-floor wooden access door had been painted over with graffiti tags in shades of blue, the letters so fat and stylized it was impossible to tell, at this distance, what they meant to say.
Asad bit his lip. Over on that side of Blue Hill belonged to the Roberts, old Marsha and her cranky nephew Jonas with the gold stud in his nose, and they didn’t like people stepping in and doing their job. Technically the Johnson block cornered right there on the bus stop where, by day, people waited for the 28 and 29 and hoped this wouldn’t be the one day they got stranded when the buses ran late and took everyone back to the transit center to wait out the night behind shuttered windows and doors.
But he didn’t see Marsha and Jonas around. And the Roberts hadn’t been in Boston as long as the Johnsons anyway, and when shit hit the fan everyone from all around—the Roberts, the Gurneys over in Dorchester, the Ndiayes from Roxbury, everybody from everywhere—came to Gam to make the hard choices. And Asad was Gam’s grandson, and a crack had opened somewhere in or around that building, reaching for him like it had put out feelers and knew how hard to pull to make him twitch.
So he had to be like Gam, and make the hard decision to do something about it whether old Miss Marsha would like it or not.
Right?
He balled his fists up inside his pockets. The skeleton key bit into his knuckles. Gam trusted him with the skeleton key, not Tarif. The key that would open every door in Boston. She trusted Asad to have this key and not abuse it, not do stupid shit, not run around fucking everything up just because he was seventeen and he fucking could. So she’d trust him to do the right thing now, and the right thing was to cross out of his territory and take care of that fucking crack before it spread large enough to swallow something up.
He rolled his shoulders, again and again and again. He’d learned the trick at school, one of those things they taught the nightsiders and not the daysiders: how to loosen the body to be ready to run, to fight. It worked the tension out of the neck, stopped it from radiating up into a headache that would cloud his thoughts and his perceptions, calmed him with the familiar and the routine. One more time, he rolled and rolled and rolled, until his muscles were putty and his head went light and a soft burn sank in at the base of his skull and nape of his neck, pleasant and deep.
Then he pushed his feet back into his socks and shoes, stepped off the median into the street, and crossed Blue Hill into the vacant lot.
The moment he set shoe rubber to the pavement of the lot, a charge shot up through him, crawling up his legs and pulling in his groin and making his bladder go loose even as his ass clenched up.
“Damn,” he gasped, then let out a nervous laugh. “Damn.”
Fucking strong. He’d never been close to a crack so large he felt the charge of its edges before he even saw it, but he had to be careful. That much potential energy meant the crack might be unstable, its edges fluctuating and malleable, and lowering his guard for even a blink could leave him chewed up and spat back out in particles compacted denser than a neutron star.
He circled the building slowly, casing the entire lot first; the pull came from straight inside the shop, but he did his job and he did it right. He walked every inch of the lot, hissing now and then as another step surged those weird shocks up his legs and left his knees numb and his butt tight and tingling as if he’d been sitting on a hard chair for five straight days.
Nothing in the lot. Nothing when he circled the building, either, unless it was up high where he couldn’t see. He ran his fingers around and around the walls, tracing circles, feeling for anything that would sizzle through him like sticking his fingers in an electrical socket, pausing to follow the contours o
f the painting on the storefront, the rounded limbs and stylized shapes catching people in motion. People in life.
He wondered if this had been painted before the split as a promise of what could be, or after—as a memory of what never would be again.
No cracks outside, that he saw. No ladder on the building. Marsha had probably reported it, but he should say something to Gam. Asad fished a pair of folding miniature binoculars from his pocket, pressed them to his eyes, and circled the building one more time, scanning the high places. Nothing. He’d have to get up on the roof, climb from the staircase maybe, but first he’d check inside.
The skeleton key unlocked the storefront, and the faint jingle of a little brass bell dangling down over the door from a colored ribbon announced his entry. He caught it in his palm, stopped the clapper, then crept inside and locked the door behind him.
“Hello?” he called. In the silent, darkened shop, floating over the silhouetted racks, his voice sounded soft and scared, because he was soft and scared. That charge raised every hair on his body and prickled his scalp like a coming storm, and he was scared all he would find were the remnants of the people who should’ve been here, because he’d come too late.
No one answered. Probably home for the night, unless they lived upstairs. The silence in here was wrong, when the tension of a nearby rift felt so loud—like it should come with the crash of rending seas and clouding skies and shaking earth. Asad moved slowly through the racks: magazines and Little Debbie cakes, mini keychain lighters and frizzy ten-dollar sew-ins in plastic bags, lit faintly by standing fridges full of Coke and Sprite and Mountain Dew and box milk. The pale blue of the refrigerator lights glowed the same color as an open crack, and even though he knew he was being paranoid, Asad made himself lean in and check, probing around the cold misty insides with a trembling, outstretched hand, brushing up against nothing but the stinging heat of the rows of bulbs along the top.
