been slashed diagonally across the middle and torn from the book.
All this was trivia, however. The real trouble was that the push and pull of Shame’s stolen faces was totally gone. A familiar play of curves appeared, somehow, from under the angles of his face. Her thought just then wasn’t a thought, it resolved a melody in her body. It was like a sound in her hands or a turbulent feeling around them as if she’d reached into rushing water. She sat down and turned toward a pair of eyes that looked like leaves on the bottom of a clear pond. Light brown, flecked with dark spots. “Sunspots,” she thought, as her brain informed her that sunspots are actually huge magnetic storms. Shame’s voice: “My cousin used to use an electric can opener and a Bic lighter, looks like you just slammed yours fifty times in your car door or something.” He looked under the table and laughed. “Is your ankle OK?” Then he turned to the waitress, who looked as if she was afraid to approach the table with the piece of wreckage on top of it: “Angela, may we have two Blue Labels, please, neat.” Ndiya saw the waitress staring at her out of the corner of her eye. The waitress said, “Right, Shame, sure.”
This date was so blown. Oh so blown. Somewhere, she’d already begun to type the postmortem email to Yvette-at-work. Email. This thought brought with it its own waves of disbelief, but that was the story of date number two and, for now, that was too much. And, remember, date-by-whatever-name number two hadn’t ee-ven happened.
Ndiya felt music around her. A distant song played, something about no mountains and no moving, no tides and no turning. She couldn’t quite hear it. Or maybe it was thunder? Shame’s voice was stuck in her head among the clanging sounds. She heard echoes of the phrase Bic lighter over and over. Then Shame’s voice: “Ever notice the tiny dude with the huge Afro on Bic lighters?”
Shame’s honey and molasses accent. “Here I am,” she thought, “deep, in denied territory.” And Shame: “Let’s have a drink.” And she: “You already ordered.” And he: “So I did. Done! I stay away from expensive liquor, but in this case.” Her eyes focused on him again. She felt like he’d curved himself across the upturned spoon on the table. Her voice answered him as if on its own. It sounded like she’d whispered it into a wind tunnel: “No. No car door. I, I ride the bus.” He: “I know, remember, said I liked your ride, your carbon footprint?” He laughed. She: “It’s not mine, it’s my brother’s.” She saw Shame’s lips move but she didn’t hear him. She felt the music again, nearer. She nodded at whatever he said while a song too far off for her to hear chimed: Just as sure as I live, I will love you alone….
■
Since that first house-arrest bracelet night, Ndiya kept a still shot of Shame’s face looking up from the table to hers. Obscure details like this burned into her memory. She replayed the instant between the points of his eyebrows and the tone of his voice, “Hey now … Bic lighter.” It had happened a thousand times: Shame’s voice with sunspots in his eyes, some far-off song holding on to her by her shoulders. She listened for the Doppler effect. She looked hard into the from-somewhere memory. She searched for Shame’s retreat but found nothing. There was only his wide-open face.
The way that tangle of wire and plastic hit the table and Shame’s face fell through those pulled-apart lines and into itself, it was as if he appeared from nowhere. Ndiya had much too much experience with nowhere to trust it. And she prided herself on not being taken off guard. She depended upon that forewarning. She didn’t appreciate things like beautiful faces falling through themselves and appearing, unannounced, before her eyes. She searched his face again for the way people do their eyes, the eyes behind their eyes, like they’re pushing back from a table getting ready to stand up and turn away. It wasn’t there. Each time she recalled the scene her thought was, “OK, I’ll catch him this time.” But she couldn’t. The expression, the voice, the bit about his cousin with the Bic lighter, none of it added up. The shape of the instant appeared as itself, different every time.
If she were paranoid, she thought, she’d be sure he’d planted the bracelet in her bag. If she’d gone crazy, she’d remember that happening very clearly. There’d be evidence filed in the precinct of certainty. She wasn’t crazy because nothing was certain. Or almost nothing. Later that week, she’d gone into a corner store and checked; there really is what looks like a little dude with a huge Afro on a Bic lighter. It was an instant in time. She had proof. So she halfway thought her sanity, or at least a kind of clarity, depended upon her ability to make one instant in time be itself. Be still.
She tried but she couldn’t do it. What scared her was elsewhere. Somehow, despite all of her expert deployments of abstraction, it took no effort, in fact, for her mind to fix itself on the image of a man who looked like Shame—that damned name—who could watch a house-arrest bracelet tumble out, catch a shower of toothpicks in his lap and the first thing that comes to mind is a description of a tiny blip of a mark with an Afro on his cousin’s Bic lighter? No matter the abstract expert, there was no man like that. What appeared was him, every time. Shame. His apparent ease, the clarity and concision disturbed her. The timing. But there it was, undeniable. No, she hadn’t known anything like it, like him. And she told herself out loud, repeatedly, she didn’t want to.
She began to wonder what that cost him and where he’d paid. Then she banished the thought before the pressure had a chance to do its thing. “Wonder be damned at the bottom of the lake,” she thought. “Dolphins and parrots can go on and live wherever they want.” Somewhere else—or in the same somewhere, it didn’t matter—she didn’t want to know such a person existed. Not in Chicago, not across town, and certainly not with no random sun-spots happening at the bottom of a clear pond just across a table from her.
■
Ndiya had accepted that it was some kind of personality trait she’d come by through genetic mutations. She had a knack for getting into bets with herself that forced her to sacrifice pledges and vows she’d made in the mirror. Here was another one. In no uncertain terms, she’d pledged, however impossible she knew it was, to erase all evidence of date, meeting, whatever-it-was number two with Shame Luther. She’d also vowed a new level of self-scrutiny that, she reasoned, was the only way to avoid disasters in her personal life. This was necessary now that she apparently had a personal life in which she wasn’t the only person. She’d promised herself that she’d go over all impressions of her brief and catastrophic times with Shame Luther before she’d see him again.
Partly because she feared if she did it sooner she wouldn’t show up at all, she’d put off the emotional inventory until she was actually on her way to his place. Then, the splashdown off the bus. She’d had the impulse to cross the street and get on the next thing smoking that would debit her metro pass. Right then and there, as she stood in the water, Ndiya shook her head at her soaked Nine West heels and her sodden skirt. “Ain’t this just a crying sha—oh hell, OK, here we go, step number one, date number two.”
The second date hadn’t begun as a date. Fact. That was true as trouble in mind. It had started like sudden sunlight through the back door. If not a fact, it was at least a fluke. A chance meeting that caught her in a bad way, followed by a bad decision that precipitated a personal, public relations disaster. That disaster set a system in motion that would change her life, then several lives. Still, as she stood on the sidewalk, soaking wet, Nydia felt like she was over most of it now. That was another troubling pattern about the time since knowing Shame: the bigger the disaster the easier it was to put away. But little incidents and impressions of incidents would dog her. Yvette-at-work said, “Ndiya, you should talk to someone, you know, a professional.” She figured date number two must have been bad because, as she sloshed away from the puddle and down the block toward Shame’s building, she found that almost none of what she recalled had to do, strictly speaking, with him at all.
She remembered his unzipped jacket as she’d
