A week ago Sonja had proudly told Ndiya that young Latino brothers from Washington, DC, called it a Youth Map and they paid her a hundred dollars per week to do it. Several of her friends were doing their own Youth Maps as well. At the end of the summer, they’d receive a final payment after submitting their finished maps and a written report describing what they’d learned making them.
“Recon,” Ndiya thought. The little girl was a doubleagent and she didn’t even know it. Who would pay how much for the information these kids come up with? What would it be used to do? Despite all that, the love in Sonja’s mural had calmed Ndiya before. This time, as the pieces fell together, it felt like the eye, the camel, the needle, and the last straw. Then her face folded into itself and splintered when she smashed her hand into the mirror as she spit out, “Squatter’s rights? It doesn’t age well, you know.” Then her body broke into convulsive sobs and a sound filled the room that had no room in it for anyone’s maybes. She pictured the woman with the petition, “I’d pay to see her petition for her own family’s rights to squat in an abandoned building while kids mine the walls for bricks. Her family probably lives in a house, in Connecticut no doubt, made of the damned bricks themselves. Of course they do, it’s perfect. I wonder why she won’t squat in that house?”
An hour later, she came out of the bathroom feeling clean and elegant as brushed steel and sharp and mean as the ivory-handled knife her father had used to cut her slices from his apple. He told her it was a gift from his father. At once, in a clear sweat, Ndiya understood that gift. “Maybe I am” was slashed and lay dead on the tiny, white, nicotine-tinted octagonal tiles of Art’s mama’s bathroom floor. He knew better. But Art asked anyway. And she: “It was about, Arturo, what kind of people could imagine what other kind of people, families, kids, Art, kids, deserve squatter’s rights.” Then she lost it and screamed, “And it’s about having clue-the-fucking-first and, so, not jumping up in my face with no white-ass-uptilted-seesaw voice, period. Ever!” Even then she could feel that this was about much more than that but she defended herself by blaming that feeling on Art.
With her voice echoing in his screamed-at eyes, Art said that she didn’t understand, and she thought to herself, “You’re damned straight I don’t. No maybe about it.” Art held her hand but she could see him try and fail to well his eyes. She asked him, “What if they’re people, real people?” In that moment of intense and reductive focus, she told herself that she could see Art had no idea what she was talking about. And she could see more clearly than ever that he was determined not to know. At that time, she couldn’t admit what all she, too, was determined not to know. As for Art, if he’d known that much, she’d have respected that. He didn’t and she could see then that he wouldn’t. Blind to herself, she could see that Art was determined to be a certain kind of American, the kind that wants to be an American. Ndiya was equally determined to be another kind of American, the kind determined not to be Arturo’s kind of American. As soon as she realized this, of course, she’d need to find another Arturo somewhere, or she’d need to be alone.
She’d heard about medical training and how doctors needed to insulate themselves against all the kinds of caring and feeling that sent them beyond their clinical abilities. This enabled them to perform the technical features of their work. From college English, Ndiya remembered Hemingway’s doctor saying of the American Indian woman, “Her screams aren’t important. I don’t hear them because they’re not important.” She’d been afraid to ask the professor about it in front of all those whitecaps in the class. But she remembered wondering if the doctor would have said that if the woman was white? What if she was his daughter? Suddenly she saw the answer: especially then. The answer was yes. If it wasn’t, that staccato white girl down 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
