had looked in Arturo’s eyes as they opened up and fell through the back of his head like someone had kicked through the scrub and knocked the lids off of two long-abandoned wells in a ghost town. This had begun to seem like a weekly ritual. Aggravation building, she had thought, “He better not cry because I’m not sure if I’ll cover his wide, ever-earnest face with kisses or bust him in his no-irony-having mouth.” His tone as cold and clear—and, Ndiya thought, poisonous—as the abandoned water in his welled up eyes, Art had said simply, “You’re lucky.” And with her response, what had already become a kind of code-phrase for her life knowing Art began to feel like some kind of secret name or destiny; “Maybe I am.”
■
As she traveled toward date number two on the bus up Michigan Avenue, still trying to admit to herself that she’d decided to go to That Maurice’s birthday party at all, she looked down to her left and into the sun. Where once lay strewn and tangled abandoned railroad tracks, she saw new, sapling-studded rows of townhouses and signs: 2 Bdrms of Brilliant Light Starting from the Low-400s. She thought to herself, “Botox and a nose job, and what the fuck does low-400s mean?” In the end, she couldn’t file the altered landscape under anything resembling “change” in her thoughts. She knew ripples would pour out of the money changing between the same hands and shift the gravity of things. Maybe that is change?
Everyone else would be forced to react. At the same time, she wasn’t inspired by the, in her ears, delusional howling about gentrification either. “Who the hell got to keep their neighborhoods?” she thought, with a force that made her look around to see if she’d actually said it out loud. If she had said it out loud, no one on the bus cared. She hadn’t invested in either position. She’d opted out or tried to. So she figured her thoughts didn’t really count and that’s exactly the way she’d wanted it. For a minute, she even thought about giving brothers like Maurice Thomas a break. Maybe she would. She thought, “Who knows, maybe this party would be OK.”
Maybe it was all the maybes. She thought of Arturo again. She’d gone home with him and she’d seen the gentrification wars up close and impersonal in New York City in the summer of 1991. Art had told her about growing up in Alphabet City and it had sounded like Mister Rogers. Of course, it wasn’t that way at all but you couldn’t tell him that. She remembered the banners and fliers from that summer: Save Tompkins Square Park. The first time she saw one of the placards, she’d asked Arturo, “Where is Tompkins Square Park?” He pointed across Avenue A into a tangle of weeds and bent iron fencing behind which she’d seen all manner of makeshift dwellings and the rhythms of the homeless men and the thin-boned, addicted white girls who, from what she could tell, lived in there. “Save that? Too late, baby,” she’d said. Art shook his head: “They just want to clean up the place, Ndiya, are you mad at that?” And she: “Yeah, and clean you right up and out of here along with it.” But she didn’t mean what he thought she meant. As always with Art, she meant, “Maybe I am.” She’d walked through the park with him several times already. She’d certainly never had the impression that it was a place to be saved.
She’d recognized the people living in that park. Mostly they were dangers to themselves. Most of the men were vets and other fugitives cured when Reagan cut the funding and “liberated” them from the VA or whatever other kind of care they’d been getting. The girls and their paramours were all, she suspected, from Milwaukee and they couldn’t seem to tell if they were being saved by dope or punished by life in New York. “Saved or punished,” she thought, “it beat Milwaukee.” By Milwaukee, Ndiya didn’t mean the town itself. She’d never been there, after all. She thought of it, instead, as the paradigm town of Happy Days white amnesia and numbness that silently, somehow, seemed to work like quarantine for the however many hundred thousand black people who lived there. That could be any number of American cities. In Milwaukee, as in Chicago, as elsewhere, it all happened under the banner of the stolen American Indian name and that clinched the cynical deal and made most of what she saw burn down her arms from her young and half–numb struck flamethrower of a brain.
Riding the bus to Maurice’s party, she could see that she and Art both had had it all wrong back then. The placards and petitions and protests weren’t meant to save or clean up the park. They were meant to prevent the police from occupying it in order to clean it up. The white girls she saw who’d left Milwaukee to grow mats on their heads and convince themselves that “life” meant forgetting to change your T-shirt, they didn’t want the park cleaned up. They wanted it preserved so that the twisted thicket could remain just like it was. All this was far beyond Ndiya at the time. In retrospect, she was happy to have misjudged it like she did. In a way, by then, her own private pain and the numbness she guarded it with had made her conservative. If it hadn’t, she might have really hurt somebody. Likely, she’d have hurt Art, even worse than she did. Art who ordered and gathered his own thoughts by disagreeing—albeit always in the most agreeable terms—with whatever Ndiya said. Art said he wanted a “good life for himself.” Somehow this meant he’d convert all memory and things he saw in the present into models of such a good life to be replicated.
Outside Tompkins Square Park and down the block were huge, would-be empty lots full of fragments from broken bricks and pieces of broken window frames. Arturo explained that the buildings had been abandoned and then demolished and the bricks had been mined for use in suburban housefronts all over the country. Not always in that order, either. Often bricks were mined while the buildings stood. He said white men used to come to the neighborhood and offer a dollar for every hundred bricks the kids could load on their pickup trucks and flatbeds. A penny a brick. Arturo and his friends had worked many summer nights until dawn loading down those trucks with bootlegged bricks. The buildings leaned, floors bowed, the walls in the hallways curved. Slats under the busted plaster protruded like ribs of an animal left for vultures on some Sunday afternoon wildlife show. In the basements, the whole structures of shifting, diminishing weight made low moans and sharp coughs. Art said he knew two boys and their sister who were killed when a floor and ceiling collapsed after too many bricks were mined from weight-bearing walls in the basement. At dawn, after those nights, their hands were hot and raw, forearms scraped from carrying bricks stacked in each arm. When the light came up, the trucks drove away up First Avenue loaded down so that the front wheels looked like they barely met the pavement.
Ndiya was always amazed that Art could relate stories such as these and retain a sense of optimistic detachment, as if the moral of all of these stories was that everything happened for the best. At school she’d admired this in him, and she had thought it was a radical kind of focus; at home it seemed much more like a determined blindness.
In these lots cleared by Arturo and them, Ndiya saw where hundreds of people had built shelters. Families lived there. She could see the World Trade Center in the background, and in the foreground lived a shantytown. There was another down the block and there was another around the corner from there. She identified with these people somehow. She’d prayed for the buildings she grew up in to be vacated and destroyed. On a bad day she just prayed for them to be destroyed. She felt something familiar in the dissembled misery she witnessed in these lots. She saw kids playing much like she’d played, getting pain and fun and joy and bitterness and togetherness and betrayal all tangled up with each other in their bodies until, she thought, no one could get them untangled. Anyone who suggested that they could be untangled was an enemy. They’d grow up like she had, until she hadn’t. They’d be afraid of all the people they loved until they didn’t know if they were in love with fear or afraid of love itself.
Remembering all of this on the bus to Maurice’s party made her feel it all again. Most powerful of all those feelings was the truly strange rain of realization that happened when she began to learn that this inseparable tangle wasn’t true for everyone. Or that’s what they said.
Some people she saw on her walks through Art’s neighborhood were addicted already. She recognized them because they were the only ones who walked like they knew where they were going in the morning. Others
