Another Kind of Madness. Ed Pavlic
“No. No car door. I, I ride the bus.” He: “I know, remember, said I liked your ride, your carbon footprint?” He laughed. She: “It’s not mine, it’s my brother’s.” She saw Shame’s lips move but she didn’t hear him. She felt the music again, nearer. She nodded at whatever he said while a song too far off for her to hear chimed: Just as sure as I live, I will love you alone….
■
Since that first house-arrest bracelet night, Ndiya kept a still shot of Shame’s face looking up from the table to hers. Obscure details like this burned into her memory. She replayed the instant between the points of his eyebrows and the tone of his voice, “Hey now … Bic lighter.” It had happened a thousand times: Shame’s voice with sunspots in his eyes, some far-off song holding on to her by her shoulders. She listened for the Doppler effect. She looked hard into the from-somewhere memory. She searched for Shame’s retreat but found nothing. There was only his wide-open face.
The way that tangle of wire and plastic hit the table and Shame’s face fell through those pulled-apart lines and into itself, it was as if he appeared from nowhere. Ndiya had much too much experience with nowhere to trust it. And she prided herself on not being taken off guard. She depended upon that forewarning. She didn’t appreciate things like beautiful faces falling through themselves and appearing, unannounced, before her eyes. She searched his face again for the way people do their eyes, the eyes behind their eyes, like they’re pushing back from a table getting ready to stand up and turn away. It wasn’t there. Each time she recalled the scene her thought was, “OK, I’ll catch him this time.” But she couldn’t. The expression, the voice, the bit about his cousin with the Bic lighter, none of it added up. The shape of the instant appeared as itself, different every time.
If she were paranoid, she thought, she’d be sure he’d planted the bracelet in her bag. If she’d gone crazy, she’d remember that happening very clearly. There’d be evidence filed in the precinct of certainty. She wasn’t crazy because nothing was certain. Or almost nothing. Later that week, she’d gone into a corner store and checked; there really is what looks like a little dude with a huge Afro on a Bic lighter. It was an instant in time. She had proof. So she halfway thought her sanity, or at least a kind of clarity, depended upon her ability to make one instant in time be itself. Be still.
She tried but she couldn’t do it. What scared her was elsewhere. Somehow, despite all of her expert deployments of abstraction, it took no effort, in fact, for her mind to fix itself on the image of a man who looked like Shame—that damned name—who could watch a house-arrest bracelet tumble out, catch a shower of toothpicks in his lap and the first thing that comes to mind is a description of a tiny blip of a mark with an Afro on his cousin’s Bic lighter? No matter the abstract expert, there was no man like that. What appeared was him, every time. Shame. His apparent ease, the clarity and concision disturbed her. The timing. But there it was, undeniable. No, she hadn’t known anything like it, like him. And she told herself out loud, repeatedly, she didn’t want to.
She began to wonder what that cost him and where he’d paid. Then she banished the thought before the pressure had a chance to do its thing. “Wonder be damned at the bottom of the lake,” she thought. “Dolphins and parrots can go on and live wherever they want.” Somewhere else—or in the same somewhere, it didn’t matter—she didn’t want to know such a person existed. Not in Chicago, not across town, and certainly not with no random sun-spots happening at the bottom of a clear pond just across a table from her.
■
Ndiya had accepted that it was some kind of personality trait she’d come by through genetic mutations. She had a knack for getting into bets with herself that forced her to sacrifice pledges and vows she’d made in the mirror. Here was another one. In no uncertain terms, she’d pledged, however impossible she knew it was, to erase all evidence of date, meeting, whatever-it-was number two with Shame Luther. She’d also vowed a new level of self-scrutiny that, she reasoned, was the only way to avoid disasters in her personal life. This was necessary now that she apparently had a personal life in which she wasn’t the only person. She’d promised herself that she’d go over all impressions of her brief and catastrophic times with Shame Luther before she’d see him again.
Partly because she feared if she did it sooner she wouldn’t show up at all, she’d put off the emotional inventory until she was actually on her way to his place. Then, the splashdown off the bus. She’d had the impulse to cross the street and get on the next thing smoking that would debit her metro pass. Right then and there, as she stood in the water, Ndiya shook her head at her soaked Nine West heels and her sodden skirt. “Ain’t this just a crying sha—oh hell, OK, here we go, step number one, date number two.”
The second date hadn’t begun as a date. Fact. That was true as trouble in mind. It had started like sudden sunlight through the back door. If not a fact, it was at least a fluke. A chance meeting that caught her in a bad way, followed by a bad decision that precipitated a personal, public relations disaster. That disaster set a system in motion that would change her life, then several lives. Still, as she stood on the sidewalk, soaking wet, Nydia felt like she was over most of it now. That was another troubling pattern about the time since knowing Shame: the bigger the disaster the easier it was to put away. But little incidents and impressions of incidents would dog her. Yvette-at-work said, “Ndiya, you should talk to someone, you know, a professional.” She figured date number two must have been bad because, as she sloshed away from the puddle and down the block toward Shame’s building, she found that almost none of what she recalled had to do, strictly speaking, with him at all.
She remembered his unzipped jacket as she’d seen it from across the street, his cycle. U-turn. His offer and then his shoulder against her chin as she sat behind him and watched Chicago lean away from them with the high-pitch, first part of the S curve and then back toward her as they leaned away from the lake on the second curve. The engine cleared its throat, lowered its voice, and the city disappeared behind her back and into the wind. She remembered the sweet-salt smell inside his helmet that she wore and the texture of the way tiny points of hair lay down smooth against his shaved head. She felt her hips learn how to balance on the cycle without falling off the back. Meanwhile her arms tried to avoid holding on to his waist tight enough to feel his belt buckle and his torso beneath his jacket. She feared if she got too close and he hit the brakes she’d butt him with the helmet in the back of his bright, bald head and they’d crash. She remembered biting the upturned collar of his worn leather jacket.
Memories flipped in a series of images, some of them blank. Sunpool on his scalp. Burnt-down candles on an old piano. A Frank Lloyd Wright–looking daybed with mat-thin cushions. The warm, amber-and-blue glow from the thing he called a tube amp on a low table across the room. She remembered almost nothing else about the room except that it was filled by the sound of some oud player Shame seemed to worship. She thought it was strange that he turned off the music when he got home. She can’t even remember exactly what he’d said an oud was.
“You gotta love that, playing tsunami,” Ndiya thought, as she walked down the block beyond the old woman crocheting prophetic comments into a doily in her brain. She passed Melvin with his plastic boats in the gutter. A young man slipped through a set of double doors across the street. His denim jacket opened in the warm breeze and interrupted her recollection. Surprised at her pleasure in the even rhythm of her memory through which flowed a level of detail she could taste, she noted the slightly electric, morning-coffee and cigarette effect. She decided date number two couldn’t have started out as bad as she’d recalled. Maybe. But it got that way. Then she wondered: Maybe disasters happen in reverse? They wash over you, move back into your past and then flow forward dragging it all along with them like historical flotsam into the future. “Maybe we don’t have a chance, maybe we’re all playing tsunami,” she thought.
Eyes straight ahead, what you do is focus on something about twenty miles away. This allows you to see everything and gives no one the impression that you’re actually looking at them. Having found it an effective way for a single woman to negotiate city streets at night, Ndiya had actually learned to do this confronting dining halls at college. “Whitecaps today,” she’d chant to