he couldn’t see was watching him take apart and reassemble his life.
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South Rhodes Avenue. The building is three floors, two apartments on each floor. Red brick. Shame lived on the third floor next to a retired man called Luther B. People in Chicago know the neighborhood as Woodlawn. People in Woodlawn know it as the Washington Park Subdivision, which is where the old Washington Park Race Track once stood. People in Washington Park know the first three of the five buildings (6309, 6319, 6329, 6339, and 6349) south of Sixty-Third Street and before the vacant lot on the west side (yes, on your right walking toward Sixty-Fourth Street) of Rhodes Avenue as Juniorville. Sixty-three twenty-nine had been built in the 1950s when that particular piece of the ghetto had been razed and rebuilt to house old black people who weren’t allowed into the new subsidized and segregated “retirement” housing in nearby Hyde Park. The building had an elevator which quickly went out of service if it ever, in reality, made it into service. When the neighborhood hit its low point in the mid-1980s, the hydraulics, the stainless post, even the elevator carriage itself had been either sold, stolen, or both. It didn’t matter much to the old folks. Most had either died or otherwise left the building and or the block. All had vacated the top floor that was dangerously inconvenient most of the year and deadly in the summer heat.
A market abhors a vacuum. Ad hoc drug trade moved in and made a bad thing worse. In the late 1980s, Junior came up the ranks in the Black Swoosh Syndicate that replaced the demise of Jeff Fort’s El Rukn empire. The BSS sold franchises. Junior took a lease on the north part of the block. He gutted and rebuilt the buildings. Then, inexplicably, he moved other aged residents back into the buildings. Many of these people were retired police. Among other things, he’d decided to move the oldest residents into first-floor apartments and give up on the idea of an elevator altogether. He closed off the shaft and left the space empty. Instead of security cameras, payments to the police, and bars on the windows, Junior and his minions circulated an invitation to any thief who thought he could rob residents or burglarize residences in Junior’s three buildings and live to fence the proceeds. As a kind of punctuation in the warning, the locks had been conspicuously removed from the front doors of his buildings.
Junior didn’t pay the police because he thought he didn’t have to and so did the police. A series of half-truths spliced with incontrovertible facts no one could figure out how he knew signaled that something was up. Finally, by a few key bold and imaginative leaps, which had to be real because they made no sense, he’d convinced everyone in Cook County Detention that he knew and could prove valuable things about powerful people. The formal precision and logic of Junior’s mix of information and isolation alone could have provoked serious doubt but the people he needed to convince were very narrow-minded realists; they didn’t give a shit about form. Their language was a grammar of powerful and powerless, the visible and the invisible. Junior’s brain contained a portfolio of documented relationships between very visible, officially powerful people (police commissioners, district attorneys, members of the Mayor’s office) and other very powerful, officially invisible ones. He had a clear chart of how the visible power of the official ones offered an official invisibility to the interests and operations of the others.
When he came out of Detention, Junior became a charter member of the latter group at an opportune time. Which brings up two reasons that I’m the one telling this story: 1) my family was at the center of the officially invisible web of power on the South Side; 2) the worker-piano player now known as Shame Luther was my best friend. We were best friends, that is, until the day I died and he split and stayed split. I’d say he split town, left Chicago, but the split was far deeper than geography. I died a week before my twenty-fifth birthday. Shame was actually in Los Angeles on a job, the last day of a job to be precise. We’d had very specific plans for my birthday and thereafter.
So all the splitting started there. The point is he never came back to Chicago. Because we’d been inseparable for years, Shame’s prolonged absence raised a few invisibly powerful eyebrows. About ten years later, when Junior heard that Shame had come back to Chicago, the gears of our present story had locked teeth. All they needed was one of those everyday accidents in life—the kind often blamed on form or on the logic of fiction—to set it in motion. Meanwhile, Shame had returned to the city all but consciously guarded against knowing anything about the gears or the story. He’d returned as he had from an isolation that masked his outrage about being alive at all. So, in other words, he was an accident waiting—maybe begging—to happen.
During his first weeks living there, Shame had extended the bedroom in his apartment. He’d taken out the wall and added joists, subfloor, and flooring to make an alcove where the elevator shaft had been. It was a perfect place to put the bed. He’d added what he called a wall of light in the wall facing the street across the vacant lot to the south. This was useful in walls that couldn’t support a real window of any meaningful size. Instead of a window, he rebuilt one alcove wall using frosted glass blocks to allow light in without taking down the building and without putting his bed on display to everyone in the street. He added a pattern of clear glass block in the wall as well. This became Shame’s wall of light on the third floor of 6329. The clear blocks were perfectly transparent but telescoped objects indirectly in the viewer’s sightline by several orders of magnitude. The effect was startling, and Shame thought the volatile but precise optics had to be an accident incidental to the rigor of the clear glass blocks’ integrity as weight-bearing building material. In other words, the view was weird and it wasn’t the point. In ways similar to Junior but to drastically different effect, Shame had a knack for fixating on details others passed by. Junior used this to accrue power over people’s blindnesses and fears. Shame did the opposite. He rode those fixations; often this made him oblivious to his own blindnesses and fears.
Nonetheless, in this case the effect of the glass blocks turned out to be crucial for Shame. In whatever direction he looked, focused by one of the clear blocks, the thing just to the top right of his focus was enlarged as if seen through a telescope while everything else appeared to slide down a convex dome out of sight. When the angle of vision shifted, the dome revolved. Images from the street in front of the building slid upward toward and downward away from the point of intended focus as if the world rode on an off-center carousel. So Shame thought he had the best view in the city from his bed facing east across Rhodes Avenue.
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Another thing Shame had at 6329 was a roommate that he was unsure about. The roommate made him self-conscious about guests, especially ones who threatened to invite themselves to stay the night. In late April, he began to wake up with spots on his ankles. One, maybe two per month. He’d moved in and immediately used steel wool, excess expansion rope he took from the job, and a dozen tubes of construction foam and caulk to close cracks along walls and inside closets. The roommate situation wasn’t about mice or rats, that he knew. The first spot on his ankle was thick in the center, almost as if a tiny marble had been placed under his skin. It itched and stung a little when he sprayed Benadryl onto it. Over the next week, the thick dot disappeared as a halo or a kind of atoll appeared around it. The marble had become an island on his skin an inch or an inch and a half in diameter. Shame decided that he had a large spider living with him who visited him in the night. Over the summer the bites moved up his body.
For ten years he’d lived on the road with the company’s traveling crew. He’d lived intensely alone, worked at least six days a week, studied after work and on his half-day off in his endless series of cheap motel rooms. On his half-days off he almost never talked to anyone. Ten years. Then, upon his return to the city, his first company had been a spider he’d never seen.
He’d come off the road last year and taken up Junior on his offer. He didn’t know how Junior knew he’d come back or why he’d offer him a place to stay in exchange for “services to be named later.” Upon returning to Chicago, Shame had found that, without his noticing, all of his senses had begun to work basically like the glass blocks he’d installed in the bedroom wall. Maybe it was only like this in
