Another Kind of Madness. Ed Pavlic
on Avenue A could have squatted at home in Milwaukee, CT or wherever-the-fuck.
The police, the protests were all part of the same stage. No one had a home here. That was the way it was supposed to be. She was mad at Art for accepting that. She was mad at him, mostly, because she silently insisted upon an essential homelessness. At bottom, she was mad because she was lying to herself. But all of that was far, far ahead; in a way, all of it led her to where she was.
On her walk to Shame’s apartment, buried in her assessment of date number two, she saw for the first time how she and Art were in denial about almost everything. And how they’d covered up those denials by blaming pieces of each other they’d surgically isolated in order to focus upon. Almost none of it was conscious, she thought. In that moment, she decided, it wasn’t surgical either. Surgery was conscious; this had been a kind of unconsciously agreed-upon mutual mutilation.
That summer afternoon in 1991, Art, bless his blesséd heart, tried to hold her bandaged hand and she felt all of it getting away from her as the waves of panic turned into motes of flame that strung into lines. The lights lighted up beautiful rounded lines in faces she’d known and faces she knew that she never got to know, faces that never got to know. And she saw the world turn over and all the mirrors began to glow and the heat raged from behind the smoke-blackened glass that hissed when you put your ear near it and, if touched, would have made your hand wish it didn’t have fingers.
She remembered seeing Art’s mouth moving but she couldn’t recall, probably never heard, a word he said. She smelted this anger into a kind of pain. Then she made that pain into the platform of her reality; the pain was safe, the violence in her remained distant. This worked as long as she could see threats in the distance as they approached. It was how she survived her twenties. She made herself impossible. This impossibility of self made her impermeable to surprise.
She left Arturo’s house the next morning at 6:00 AM with her mother’s voice singing in her ear: I’m going to lay my head on that lonesome railroad iron. Let the 2:19 train ease my troubled mind. She was surprised to find Manhattan still asleep and the streets to the Port Authority empty as she made her way along the long blocks west. “Somewhere, anywhere, everywhere else,” she’d said to herself at the time.
“What the hell does all this have to do with date number two?” she thought. Still not really wanting to know, Ndiya asked herself this as she replaced the layers of time and came back from Manhattan through the bus ride through post-gentrified Chicago and returned to her soaked skirt and cool legs in the Sixty-Third Street of the twilight present. Then, before a beat, back to the uptown bus of her memory.
■
The danger signs had been clear on her way to Maurice’s party. The trip back to 1991 had made it worse. But when the mirror started to smoke, Ndiya knew how to stand with her back to the wind. She knew how to survive herself. She’d gotten good at it. “Hell is where the heart is,” she told herself. And she calmly closed her heart’s eyes. She pictured the map and told herself where all this had happened and that, yes, it had happened to someone—but it hadn’t happened to her, not to this her. She pictured a calendar, slowly turned the pages, and confirmed that it wasn’t happening now.
She kept it together. The goal was to recall things without experiencing them. She couldn’t always do that. But it helped to know the goal. She kept her eyes closed but eased up on the pressure so the tears stayed where they were. She kept her full eyes closed. The way she saw it, things in Chicago and elsewhere in the United States would continue to slosh about, unanchored, and in the end everyone needed it to happen and in the end no one really had any idea what it could mean to them. “Other than the pain,” she thought. “We’re all squatters,” she allowed. “Maybe, finally, that’s what ‘Maybe I Am’ was so enraged about. Let’s just admit it.” It was gentrification, after all, that had brought down The Grave and brought her back to Chicago. “Gentrification had torn down all those projects, it sure as shit wasn’t no squatter’s rights,” she thought. Gentrification, greed, and a good dose of pure sha—that name again.
She opened her eyes and let the sun pour into her pupils from beneath a gray bank of stratus clouds somewhere out west over Cicero. When her eyes adjusted and her sight returned, she saw a beautiful, perfect, empty beach. The copper, gold, and blue on her eyelids reflected in the window. The sight replaced the city and her pointless and personal analysis of the politics of gentrification. She knew she couldn’t help it; and more importantly she’d learned that the intensity of her reaction to things didn’t often match up well with other people’s views and ambitions. She called that fact “privacy.” So, she went to the beach. The private beach. Her eyelids.
The high and low dust of the metallic colors on her eyelids had perfectly set themselves off against each other. Even though she had added it last and wished she put it on first but didn’t have time to start over, she saw that the clear-sky-meets-cold-lake of the blue had somehow found its place beneath the bronze and copper dust; the result was the perfect set of illusions. Water and metal, sky and dust, matte and gloss, surface and depth, sunrise and sunset moved over and under and around each other on each eye as she winked at herself—right eye, left eye. Then she blew a kiss at the perfect pain-beach of a face in the window.
“Pleasure to meet you, my name is Ndiya Grayson,” she whispered. “Happy birthday, Maurice.” She smiled, “Pain-beach, gosh, haven’t been there in forever.” Maybe it had been since Phoenix? “Put the pain in the water and stand on the beach. Wade in when you want. Small victories,” she’d thought. “A little run of those and some luck, I might survive this dinner with the SnapB/l/acklist folks. I might even have some fun. Is that a crime?” She knew she’d asked herself this out loud and she didn’t care, even though somewhere she knew perfectly well that she thought it was a crime.
As she made her way step by quietly sloshing step east down Sixty-Third Street, on the third and—according to his directions—final block before arriving at Shame’s place, Ndiya approached an alleyway that led between the backs of the buildings facing Eberhart to the west and Rhodes Avenue to the east. Most old-time blocks in Chicago had one. She knew what was down there. Broken pavement pulled up by neighborhood plows, chain-link fences leaning one way and their gates leaning the other, maybe stray dogs, an old garage or parking for apartments, maybe a bike thrown down in the middle, trash cans and, starting right about now, she thought, the rats that came with them. She started not to even look. She did. Then she looked again.
Just off the sidewalk, there was a row of black iron bollards with a thick silver chain hanging between them. From the middle of the chain hung an upside-down orange triangle and centered within it was a black exclamation point outlined in day-glow yellow. Part of the alley was grass. Not grass. It was a manicured lawn with ivy at the edges climbing up the walls on either side. Twenty feet from the sidewalk, a picnic table sat crossways in the middle of what should have been an alley. But this wasn’t an alley.
Two old men sat on the near bench with their backs to her. Beyond them she could see a basketball court with one hoop. Strings of white-and-blue holiday lights lighted the court area from around the edges and beyond that the far side was a mirror of the nearside complete with two old men facing her from the distant picnic table and Sixty-Fourth Street to the south behind them. Was it a mirror? She looked for her figure on the opposite street but couldn’t decide if she could see her reflection or not. She’d never seen anything like it. She’d seen abandoned lots turned into rock gardens and even broken up into plots for neighbors to grow their greens, turnips, tomatoes and peppers in. But a beautiful grass alley, she thought as she kept walking, and a basketball court for old folks? What had Shame done, lied about his name and his age and taken up in subsidized housing for the aged? She stopped walking. Those hadn’t been old people on the court. Then she did something she never did in unfamiliar territory of any kind. She took a step backward, stopped, and stared directly at what she was looking at. They were young people on the court. Or maybe they weren’t all young but they weren’t old. She saw the boy with the jean jacket and his two associates from down the block sitting against the wall in the grass. She wondered why she’d thought it was for old folks when someone took a shot and