Another Kind of Madness. Ed Pavlic
Doused in daylight, the scars hold fast to the people who wear them. At best, people attempt to steer their scars, to ride them like invisible, runaway trains. They aim the remaining pieces of themselves at whatever they do. Twilight changes that. At twilight, you might not think it’s comic, but it is: no one owns the scars. By night, you might call it tragic, but it’s not: the scars change back into wounds. Wounds do most of the owning. After as much daylight as they can get and as much nighttime as they can take, people, like a vast clockwork of diagonals, javelin themselves into sleep. Listen to a million icicles diving into hot sand, the sound of a city going to sleep. The night-sirens only appear from far away, a map of non-arrival, an otherness, an order. A dark blue depth so deep inside it sounds far away. Distant, that is, until they’re too close, too deep, too quick. Until what’s not you is you and so it’s too late. During such a night, a dead scar opens into a living wound like a night-blooming blossom.
Ndiya was in the aisle of the bus when it stopped at her stop. At once, the distant fire truck turned, another body blink broke the ricochet and the thought vanished taking Yvette-at-work’s warning from her vision before she realized she’d seen it. She didn’t feel it. Distracted by the joust between “here” and “there” for less than the time it takes good luck to turn bad, she missed the worn-chrome handle at the edge of the bus seat. Instead of the handle, for a whole stride, she held on firmly to the slumped shoulder of a sleeping old man. As her left hand reached for the next handle, her right released its hold on the nearly worn-through fabric of the old man’s jacket. Her fingertips grazed his as he reached his arm up from the heavy plastic bag in his lap. He was dreaming. Her hand had sharply squeezed the thick shoulder beneath the thin cotton when Yvette-at-work’s warning about musicians appeared to her like a distant siren. When their fingers grazed, the touch of Ndiya’s hand nudged the man’s dream. His wife’s hand pressed his shoulder at the breakfast table. He dreamed his wife waking him up and handing him a lunch box. Her face in his dream turned into a flock of crimson gulls: it was some kind of warning. Without knowing it, Ndiya had touched a life in whose dreams “here” meant “gone.”
Esther Brown’s lovely face. Half a million black women Ndiya never knew; women she’d refused, without knowing it, to become. It was the first time in years that that man had touched a woman’s fingers. And he’d missed it. If he’d been awake, he’d have magnified and replayed the texture of tiny washboards from their glancing fingerprints in his mind. He’d have chosen a minute and a place in his apartment in which to keep that accidental texture alive. He’d have played that off-chance touch until he could hear her fingers move the air aside and taste them in the ache from the delta of swollen glands in his throat. Where this man lived, to say nothing of where he worked, such a touch from such a woman was a sacred thing. It was a prayer, in fact, a here that’s hardly there at all, a here that tells gone where to go.
If he’d been awake, he’d have had one more thing to hide from his partners at the job. And that’s what he figured he needed, more things in his life that he couldn’t possibly tell to the men at work. While Esther Brown was alive he’d have said just the opposite, “Why don’t we never do nothing, never go nowhere?” But now he knew different. She was right. What he needed was more things in his life he couldn’t tell the men at work, which is why that touch was a prayer. Or it would have been if he’d been awake. As it was, such touch was a dream. As far as he was concerned, that was close enough to a prayer and, anyway, he wasn’t talking about either one to those fools at the job.
Jay Brown, sleep. He rode the bus home two hours late. He tried to pretend he got off work at five instead of three thirty. Jay Brown faked like he got paid on Friday instead of Wednesday. So, he wore an old gray suit, his only suit, and kept his work clothes and boots in a plastic bag in his lap. He rode the number 29 bus with an old briefcase full of work-worn tools wrapped in newspaper under his seat. The kid at the job years ago asked Jay Brown: “Why you wear a suit home from work?” And Jay Brown: “So maybe knuckleheads think I get paid on Friday.” The kid: “Why?” And Jay Brown: “Why? So, rob me on the wrong day, that’s why!”
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With a light touch on the brushed silver of the pole, the rear bus doors jerked open from both sides. Body blink. The first thing Ndiya saw was a little girl. She had bright barrettes for each braid on her head and lay facedown on the sidewalk. Her hands were cupped into parentheses around her eyes and binocular’d her view straight down in the ground. Her toes drummed lightly against the crushed concrete as she lay on her belly. Ndiya, feeling as if she was viewing her own innards through reversed binoculars, thought, “What, exactly, does that to concrete?” Her eye traced the frayed edge of the faded black, cutoff T-shirt. The girl’s face popped up from her cupped hands and she yelled, “Fifty!” In Ndiya’s vision, the orange sky brightened as the broken line of rooftops across the street darkened. Somehow, with no transition, the little girl went from lying still to full stride down the way and around between the buildings, “Get-gone or get-got here I come Imma get you, Lester!”
When the little girl popped to her feet, Ndiya glimpsed the message on the cutoff shirt. She called back the image after the girl had spun and vanished. Above the frayed and curled edge, two stick figures held hands, one with dizzy-circles around her head. In Gothic script it read: I’m Allergic to My Sister! Without moving, Ndiya shook her head the kind of way you do when you agree with something you know is wrong.
Ndiya’s body blinked again. She recalled how it felt when, in the third grade, she tripped little evil little perfect little Tara Davis and ended up giving her a temporarily busted-up lower lip and a permanently chipped front tooth. The diagonal-chipped-tooth effect had somehow perfected Tara’s face in a way Ndiya and everyone else envied forever for always for the way, years later, it made the older boys love her. Now, for the first time, with a shudder, as she stared at the darkening line of rooftops and the brightening night sky beyond them, Ndiya felt the gravity of what all that attention must have been to that perfected, injured, and targeted little girl. A cloud of static sizzled across her body and Ndiya shook her head, again. Avoiding the mirror in her body, she thought, “Jesus, Tara Davis,” said, “Thank you,” to the driver and stepped off the bus.
Her weight shifted just before she checked down for her step to the curb. Inverted directly beneath her, she saw the buildings across the street and the bright sky beyond. She watched the reflected sole of her shoe as it came straight up at her. A streetlight’s glow spread across dusty, liquid skin of the surface. Her eyes told her that she’d stepped from a plane, not a bus. The dream-fall feeling bloomed behind her eyes and she heard Yvette-at-work’s voice: “You a mess. By the way, you do know that was a man’s shoulder you had your hand on back there on the bus, right?”
She rode a ribbon of air for a moment—before she found herself splashing into a puddle with both feet. Even with her heels, the water was over her ankles. Misjudging the step by a thousand feet or so caused her to land with her left leg perfectly straight, shooting pain up her spine and nearly popping her kneecap off. The splash vanished back into the oily murk as the bus leveled itself and went on. The departing bus stirred a wave of hot water that hit the back of her legs just below her knees before it washed over the broken curb and across the ruined sidewalk. She felt the warm wave pull at the hem of her pastel teal, cotton-linen skirt. The dreamer with the long-fingered shadow on his shoulder went away too. He dreamt on in a dream as thin as the camouflage his gray suit provided his life. Rainbows gathered themselves around Ndiya’s legs as she stood beyond-ankle deep in disbelief. “What next?” she thought, “Dolphins fly and parrots live at sea?”
Single drops of oily gutter water ran down her legs. She felt a few ash-colored drops on her arm. A single drop slipped down her neck and disappeared into the collar of her coat. And then another body blink. “There, no, here he was,” she thought, “Junior.” She once knew a strange little boy, Junior Keith, who called drops from these puddles gutter-pearls. “Little nasty, little big-headed, Kodak-glossily-jet-black and girl-attached-to-eye-having Junior Keith,” she thought. Hydrants open. He’d wait on the sidewalk. He always somehow avoided getting wet himself. She had no idea how he stayed dry but she knew exactly why. His Grandmama. Junior loved to sneak up behind girls and, depending on their height, he’d lick their