on her eyelids reflected in the window. The sight replaced the city and her pointless and personal analysis of the politics of gentrification. She knew she couldn’t help it; and more importantly she’d learned that the intensity of her reaction to things didn’t often match up well with other people’s views and ambitions. She called that fact “privacy.” So, she went to the beach. The private beach. Her eyelids.
The high and low dust of the metallic colors on her eyelids had perfectly set themselves off against each other. Even though she had added it last and wished she put it on first but didn’t have time to start over, she saw that the clear-sky-meets-cold-lake of the blue had somehow found its place beneath the bronze and copper dust; the result was the perfect set of illusions. Water and metal, sky and dust, matte and gloss, surface and depth, sunrise and sunset moved over and under and around each other on each eye as she winked at herself—right eye, left eye. Then she blew a kiss at the perfect pain-beach of a face in the window.
“Pleasure to meet you, my name is Ndiya Grayson,” she whispered. “Happy birthday, Maurice.” She smiled, “Pain-beach, gosh, haven’t been there in forever.” Maybe it had been since Phoenix? “Put the pain in the water and stand on the beach. Wade in when you want. Small victories,” she’d thought. “A little run of those and some luck, I might survive this dinner with the SnapB/l/acklist folks. I might even have some fun. Is that a crime?” She knew she’d asked herself this out loud and she didn’t care, even though somewhere she knew perfectly well that she thought it was a crime.
As she made her way step by quietly sloshing step east down Sixty-Third Street, on the third and—according to his directions—final block before arriving at Shame’s place, Ndiya approached an alleyway that led between the backs of the buildings facing Eberhart to the west and Rhodes Avenue to the east. Most old-time blocks in Chicago had one. She knew what was down there. Broken pavement pulled up by neighborhood plows, chain-link fences leaning one way and their gates leaning the other, maybe stray dogs, an old garage or parking for apartments, maybe a bike thrown down in the middle, trash cans and, starting right about now, she thought, the rats that came with them. She started not to even look. She did. Then she looked again.
Just off the sidewalk, there was a row of black iron bollards with a thick silver chain hanging between them. From the middle of the chain hung an upside-down orange triangle and centered within it was a black exclamation point outlined in day-glow yellow. Part of the alley was grass. Not grass. It was a manicured lawn with ivy at the edges climbing up the walls on either side. Twenty feet from the sidewalk, a picnic table sat crossways in the middle of what should have been an alley. But this wasn’t an alley.
Two old men sat on the near bench with their backs to her. Beyond them she could see a basketball court with one hoop. Strings of white-and-blue holiday lights lighted the court area from around the edges and beyond that the far side was a mirror of the nearside complete with two old men facing her from the distant picnic table and Sixty-Fourth Street to the south behind them. Was it a mirror? She looked for her figure on the opposite street but couldn’t decide if she could see her reflection or not. She’d never seen anything like it. She’d seen abandoned lots turned into rock gardens and even broken up into plots for neighbors to grow their greens, turnips, tomatoes and peppers in. But a beautiful grass alley, she thought as she kept walking, and a basketball court for old folks? What had Shame done, lied about his name and his age and taken up in subsidized housing for the aged? She stopped walking. Those hadn’t been old people on the court. Then she did something she never did in unfamiliar territory of any kind. She took a step backward, stopped, and stared directly at what she was looking at. They were young people on the court. Or maybe they weren’t all young but they weren’t old. She saw the boy with the jean jacket and his two associates from down the block sitting against the wall in the grass. She wondered why she’d thought it was for old folks when someone took a shot and the others turned to watch the ball in the air.
It struck her like it had when she’d gone to Comiskey Park and sat in the bleachers. You saw the pitcher throw, the batter swing, the ball react. But you didn’t hear the crack of the bat for a half a beat or so. And you could hear each word the announcer said several times. She’d gone first with a group of spelling champions from Chicago elementary schools. They were paraded out onto the field while the crowd had recognized “these Chicago youngsters for their hard work and the excellence they’d achieved in spelling.” She could still hear the phrases circle through the stadium like they were surrounded by twelve announcers. She’d never heard the word “youngster.” It sounded to her like some kind of furry pet that ran on a wheel in a glass tank. She looked around to make sure the voice was talking about them. And she didn’t know anything about baseball but she immediately loved the open arena in the night air. The solidified glow of the false daylight fell dim and bright at the same time. The smooth diamond, the precise line between the brown dust and the green grass. And, most of all, she loved the overlapping and askew play of sight and sound laid out in space so she could examine it. This seemed like the whole point of the game to her.
Inning—another new word—after inning she sat there knowing that the laws were the laws. Sight and sound must behave in this strange way all the time. She knew about thunder and lightning and one-Mississippi, of course. But still she wondered why she’d never been in an arena where you could watch it happen like this in so many ways at once. Who’d hidden this from her? This was what “education” was to mean to her always. There was a rush of discovery followed by an immediate, accompanying, cutting sensation that it had been hidden from her on purpose. The thing whirred in her, a tornado of elation from the discovery and rage at the withholding. Later, she’d wondered if this belly-twisting sensation happened to all the kids she knew. If it had, they’d certainly kept it a secret from each other. She couldn’t remember learning how to do it, but she’d converted the hot twists in her belly into a kind of tutor, a partner with whom she rehearsed all the hidden, secret things she learned. Even when Ndiya found that facts in history or certain characters in books were common knowledge to many people, she retained the feeling that, in fact, she and her twisting partner were acquainted with these things in ways only they could understand. “Hide it from me, from us, we’ll find it and make it into something only we can recognize,” she declared. Staring at the dim-bright distance while the sounds and sights dove and arced, she thought, “If everyone had their own night and night was a fruit and you could split it open when it was ripe,” this was exactly what the inside of her ripe night would be like.
The basketball game down the designer alley and Comiskey Park and the tornado effect she’d learned to quell enough to hide from everyone but herself roamed through her again. She couldn’t really hear anything from the scene down the alley. She tried to summon up her almanac of ways to “here” and “there” herself and found no familiar cues. The ball didn’t seem to make noise when it bounced. She assumed it bounced but she hadn’t seen anyone bounce the ball. The shot was the first action she’d focused on. The ball hung there and she got the roller coaster–belly feeling she had waiting for the sound of the hit to catch up to her vision of the swing. But unlike the split-open instant inside her ripe-fruit night at Comiskey Park, this thing went on and on and on and on. The ball was like a singer holding an impossibly long note. It hung in the air like a question no one could answer. From the career described by the ball and the rate of its diminishing speed, she sensed the shot would probably make it to the apex and go down the other side. Then again, it might not.
Three figures sat against the wall. They all focused on one of their outstretched arms. Ndiya couldn’t tell whose arm it was that warranted such scrutiny or why. She looked back and the ball was still slowing down, traveling upward. From the first moments of their first meeting, she’d had this sense that things involving Shame Luther took a long, long time to happen and then they seemed to have happened while they never had actually been happening. Still, this was another level. The other people on the court walked around each other, placed their hands on the back of the person in front of them; those in front seemed to hold their arms out to their sides like wings as they backed up into the ones behind. They all moved in a two-step,
