They’d bear their experience, mostly a series of things that should have but didn’t happen to them, like an unintelligible alphabet written in kerosene on their skin. Their lives would swerve between lighted matches that would touch off sketches of flame on their skin and furnaces would roar in chests, fire in their veins. Then, if they were lucky, they’d scramble around lighted matches and call it life. All her life, Ndiya had found she could recognize these people no matter where she saw them. She’d never been able to make up her mind what, in fact, distinguished them from the crowd. She could feel these people recognize her as well. Their eyes would catch and fall open. There’d be a quick nod and then they’d turn and be off.
That’s what she had thought in her twenties. None of it was true. And most of her sudden flashes of anger were really about the numb wall she’d put between herself and her actual past. In a way that was even less memorable to her than it was visible to other people, she wasn’t one of the spared, to whom things hadn’t happened that the odds said should have happened. In fact, as if in a twisted symmetry, things that should never have happened to anyone had happened to her. In just that way, by changes almost as simple as grammar in a sentence, she’d invented a story to stand beside her. This twin person could negate what had happened to her in that abandoned elevator when she was twelve.
All of this, guarded by a sentry, sat behind a wall no one, certainly not Arturo Almeida, was going to get behind. In a way that was standing right next to her before she’d seen it approach, and in a way her sentry was incapable of dealing with at all, Shame’s reactions to things had awoken something, put something in motion. From the start, part of knowing Shame took place behind this wall in her life story, took place in a part of her life that wasn’t in the story. She could feel he was trouble. Nonetheless, she went along with the string of accidental inevitables that happened after they’d met. She didn’t know why. With Shame, in exactly that unforeseen way she’d armed herself against, she felt alive close up; trouble, for once, felt like distant thunder.
In New York that summer with Art, some of the adults she saw headed and raised families in these thrown-together shanties often comprised of materials stolen from construction sites, two-by-fours and sheets of blue plastic, with portions of abandoned cars and delivery vans. She couldn’t tell how many families lived in a sky-blue US Air Force school bus that had been turned on its side in one of the lots. She’d pass by in the morning as the addicts stalked their singular purposes and the employed adults in the shanties tried to wipe wrinkles from their loose pants and tight jackets. Some stood in line to brush their teeth at the steady trickle from a long-spent fire hydrant near the corner. She appreciated their struggle for dignity, and their misery echoed the wordless and violent melody of her worldview in a way that made her sweat feel like it ran down someone else’s skin.
She remembered the protests and the way the NYPD surrounded the park. She remembered no one seemed to care about the families in the shanties all around or the other families, like Arturo’s, who lived in the projects that loomed over Alphabet City from Avenue D. It was all about that disaster of a park. She didn’t ever see any of the people from the projects or the shanties—too busy dodging matches—at the protests about the park. The protesters were the only ones she didn’t recognize. But, she thought, she knew them all. For all she knew, every one of them had individually passed her in the crowded but utterly empty hallways and pathways of the college she’d attended. Instead of looking at her, they all intently studied the fucking wall or became instantly obsessed by trees in the distance. The scary thing she didn’t learn at college, as she’d find out later, to her horror, was that they basically treated each other and most of all themselves the same way.
And she suspected the difference between the police and the protesters was a matter of competing dialects in the same language. For the people in the shanties and for Art’s mama, and for his little sister, the police and the protests, finally, meant the same thing. The police were getting paid to do what they got paid to do. They looked the part. Most of the protesters looked like, and even more, sounded like, the whitecaps Ndiya had abstracted into “weather blue” in order to survive college. Most of them had the same ratty T-shirts and jeans on and hadn’t rubbed quite enough grime over their suburban accents to cover up their SAT scores. She used to taunt Art mercilessly about this. He’d take her to some newly opened restaurant full of whitecaps and she’d ask him, “How does it feel to be the grime these people rub on their tongues?” His eyes would do the abandoned-well thing and she’d scrape her lip with her teeth.
Neither one of them knew the half of it then. They didn’t know that these hopelessly clean people under their precisely wrinkled clothes were protesting desperately to save the catastrophe in the park. The park wasn’t the point, much less the people. It was the catastrophe that mattered. It was the catastrophe they thought could bleed for them and help them walk on the water of their wants to the other shore of what they needed. Transcendent catastrophe, the dark matter, as ever, of self-reliance. When flashes of all this dawned upon her, Ndiya felt possessed by a violence at once very far off and as near to her as the metal taste of anger in her mouth; Art would shake his head at the ground: “You’re selling them short, Ndiya.” And she: “Yeah?” Her top lip scraped twice on her teeth and then back in the cool air. “Maybe I am.”
■
Ndiya paused in the street. She also paused recounting date number two with Shame so she could focus on the end of the “maybe I am” days knowing Arturo. Split between the scene in the street and her memory, she felt something, maybe sundown, warming her back. Or maybe it was the memory-sun through the window on the bus up to Maurice’s party? It hadn’t come to her in years, and then, just then, there it was.
One wrong afternoon Arturo had to physically prevent her from attacking a staccato-syllabled, open-faced young white woman on the street. Looking at it now, Ndiya thinks the woman had done her best to impersonate the appearance of the addicted girls she’d seen in the park. Somehow she had stepped out of nowhere, directly in front of Ndiya’s next stride. She pushed a squatter’s rights petition into Ndiya’s face. Maybe it had nothing to do with the park, the catastrophe, or the vacant lots, maybe it was just how the woman ended what she said with her tone of voice pointed up in the air like one person riding a seesaw? Maybe the provocation was simply the collision between the dingy clothes, the militant white-straightness of the girl’s teeth and the fashionable angularity of her eyeglasses? Or maybe it was that voice she’d just bought from the Gap? It didn’t matter.
The slashing phrases that erupted from Ndiya’s mouth echoed in her memory. The scratch-the-surface-and-look-what-you-get look on the struck-open young woman’s suddenly old and closed face scared Ndiya all over again for the fresh waves of hatred it inspired when it came to mind. Ndiya prided herself and depended upon her ability to see these people long before they saw her. She’d missed this one and so Ndiya heard herself saying, “You better get your motherfucking hand out my chest, bit—”
Art grabbed her from behind, pulled her back toward the corner hissing, “Hey, hey, hey now, hey now,” into her ear through the siren pulsing in her head. On the bus, Ndiya absently bit through the skin on her knuckle thinking about it.
When they got to the apartment Ndiya went straight to the bathroom and double-locked the door. She took Art’s mother’s hidden cigarettes out from behind the radiator and smoked one and then another, blowing smoke out the small window that stayed open over the chipped tile in the shower stall. Art, bless him, somehow knew better than to bother her with his sapper’s kit of mitigating questions and accommodating disagreements.
She sat, frozen, timing her pulse against the duet of drips from the shower and sink. Her eyes followed the joints in the wall between the cinder blocks north, south, east, and west. That summer, Art’s little sister, Sonja, had created a mural of lower Manhattan using the tile joints on the bathroom wall as the major streets; she’d begun to color in and label storefronts, vacant lots, schools, and churches. All her friends’ apartments were labeled.
