by Alyssa Cole
I thought the old place was more chill than this prefab dive bar, but I’m annoyed and don’t feel like talking to this kid anymore.
“Right.” I scrub a hand through my hair, nod, then point at the door behind me. “I’m going to head out.”
She leans forward a little more, and the heads of the dudes lining the bar swivel to check out her ass. “See you around.”
I heave a sigh and walk back, the humid air clinging to me along with an even crappier mood. I’m not drunk, or even buzzed, but the two glasses of bourbon paired with the disappointment of the night were just enough to leave me feeling sullen. I glance into dark windows as I walk, noticing how almost all the newly renovated places I pass have cameras pointed at their front doors now. Kim had wanted to get one of those systems, too, but I’d told her I didn’t want her to be able to monitor when I leave and enter the house from the comfort of her phone—though I doubt she cares enough to bother.
I’m passing by the old hospital, and stop to casually look through the fence surrounding the building—there’s all kinds of construction equipment littered around the place, and I wonder what’s inside. Had they already cleared everything out? I hear a noise like scraping metal and lean closer.
The building is dark and the weak yellow-orange glow filtering from the streetlights barely illuminates the area past the fence. The windows are nothing but uniform black, but then a thin line of light flickers somewhere in the depths of that darkness, on the floor that’s slightly lower than ground level. I blink a couple of times and lean closer, squinting to try to catch sight of that weird flicker again . . .
A hand clamps down on my shoulder and, a second later, is followed by a heavy weight slamming me into the fence.
A body.
The chain link rattles as instinct kicks in and I struggle to pull my hands out of my pockets to fight back, but my attacker is big and wraps me in a bear hug. Thin strips of warm, grimy metal press a diamond shape into the side of my face as the weight slumps against me, a heart hammering against my shoulder blade and breaths coming fast and shallow.
Whoever it is smells like pissed pants and body odor, and I suck in breath through my mouth to avoid gagging.
“M-m-mo—” A deep voice stutters in my ear, but the end of the word is clipped as a violent shudder passes through the person, vibrating through me and the chain link.
I force myself to relax, sagging into the fence, then push back hard as soon as the grip loosens in response, catching them off balance so they stumble away from me.
When I turn around, already squared up and with a rage in my veins that I’ve avoided for years now, I see a heavyset Black guy in a T-shirt and jeans reaching for me as he sways on his feet. He grasps at me a few times, but comes away with palmfuls of air as I step out of reach.
I imagine Kim giving me a smug look and telling me she tried to warn me. I knock his hands away as he reaches for me again.
“What the fuck, man?” I grit out.
He lists sideways, then struggles to right himself, the streetlight glinting in his dull eyes. It’s then that I notice how delayed his motions are, how his dark irises have been eaten by the blown-out black of his pupils.
He squints at me and slurs something that sounds like “Mummy.”
“What?”
He thrusts his hand toward me, closing and then opening it, and I finally understand.
“Money?” I snort a laugh of frustration, and he shakes his head, then nods. “Sorry, pal.”
He talks again, still sounding like he’s speaking around a mouthful of marbles. “Bring money. Help me, man.”
I sigh and drop my guard a bit. “You can’t just grab people like that. And sorry, I can’t help you.”
His eyes widen in confusion, shining with tears. “Please. Please.”
He really isn’t in good shape.
“Do you want me to call an ambulance? Get you to a hospital?”
He stares at me for a moment, his eyes briefly focusing, and then he grabs me by the collar and slams me against the fence again.
“No! No! No!” he shouts directly into my face, so close that I can tell he hasn’t brushed his teeth for days just before his spittle lands on the corner of my lip.
I’m about to land a blow to his kidney when the sudden high-pitched warning blip of a siren down the street drags his attention from me. When red and blue lights wash over us, he lets me go and tears off running, ungainly and stumbling.
A black sedan, an undercover car, pulls up to me as I’m adjusting my collar, and the man in the passenger side, a white guy with a beefy face and a buzz cut, rolls down his window. The barest hint of cold air passes over my forearm as I step closer to the car.
“You see a big, crazy crackhead around here?” he asks. “Giant Black guy? We got some reports of a man hassling people.”
His partner, an Italian-looking guy with a mustache, leans forward and fixes me with his stare.
I point down the street and see that my hand’s shaking from the adrenaline rush. “He went that way. Attacked me when I wouldn’t give him money.”
“Is that so? Can’t help themselves, I guess.” The buzz-cut cop chuckles mirthlessly and gives his head a shake. “All right. We’ll bring him in.”
He reaches for a walkie-talkie.
“You know it’s dangerous for you to be out around here this late, right?” the mustache cop says. “Give it a year or so.”
They blip the siren again and then take off fast down the street in the direction of my attacker.
My heart is thumping furiously in my chest and my legs feel shaky from delayed adrenaline as I walk toward the house, but I keep thinking about the attacker’s eyes. Even when he had his hands at my throat, he didn’t have the look of someone who wanted to kill me. To hurt me. To be honest, he’d looked . . . scared.
Addiction is a hell of a disease. I can’t even feel good that the cops showed up because jail won’t help that guy, either. I regret letting them know he attacked me and sending them after him, though maybe I’ve saved the next person the guy might have encountered.
I’m a few yards away from the house when I see Kim sprint down the stairs into a car waiting at the curb, an overnight bag on her shoulder.
I don’t call out her name. I just take the additional gut punch, though it feels like a light tap at this point.
After the car pulls away, I walk up the steps. As I unlock the door, I look up and to my left, into the black square lens of a doorbell camera. What the hell? I head to my apartment, scrub the hell out of my face and hands with hand sanitizer, and stare out the window.
Across the street, TVs flicker in various windows, a checkerboard of blue lights, and in the distance, a police siren wails.
Gifford Place OurHood post by Derek James:
Anyone been feeling the ground shake at night sometimes? Feels like when I used to live on Nostrand over the A train line. You think all this construction is messing with the already fucked up infrastructure? I’m not tryna die by sinkhole.
Angie C.: Does it always happen at 2 am?
Derek James: Yes!
Angie C.: That’s the witching hour, my guy. Get you some holy water and some sage and you’ll be straight.
Chapter 5
Sydney
AS I BRUSH MY TEETH WITH ONE HAND, I HAVE MY PHONE IN the other, web browser open, scrolling through search results for “why does it feel like my bed is shaking when I fall asleep?”
My other searches this morning have been “earthquake + Brooklyn” and “do demons shake your bed,” so whichever NSA Brad is collecting my Google searches is probably having a good laugh.
I, on the other hand, am so tired I want to throw up.
The only nonsupernatural explanation in the results is that high stress levels and overconsumption of caffeine can create the sensation that your bed is shaking, like how you sometimes feel like you’re falling even though neither your body nor your bed has moved.
I place t
he phone on the edge of the sink and finish brushing my teeth.
My phone buzzes and a text message pops up: Hello Ms. Green, we’re messaging you with a lucrative offer on your house! Please contact us at 212–555-CASH.
I trash the message, minty-hot rage zinging through me as I spit and rinse my mouth.
These vultures can even harass you by text now? It’s like real estate psychological warfare—they bombard you with flyers, blow up your phone, have people showing up at your door, and now can show up in your text inbox. How many people do they wear down, or catch in a moment of weakness or desperation?
Bastards.
I apply my undereye concealer with shaking hands, not wanting to deal with questions at the hair braiding shop. Five hours of someone tugging at your scalp is bad enough without every other person who comes in commenting on how tired you look.
I head into my room and open the sealed plastic bag that contains my clothes—after the first couple of bedbug scares, I’m not taking any chances. I check the baseboards of the apartment and the furniture every few days, too. Drea says I’m being crazy, which isn’t my favorite descriptor after what happened in Seattle, but she’s seemingly immune to them. She doesn’t have clusters of cocoa butter–resistant scars marring her neck and ankles. She doesn’t start itching every time she sees a tiny dark mote from the corner of her eye. And she doesn’t lie in bed at night wondering why the mattresses out on the curb are quickly being followed by moving trucks.
I do.
I lock up the house, cringing as Josie yells at her kid, or her dog, or her husband, and head to the community garden to make sure everything is good.
By the time I get there, I’m already sweating through my T-shirt. It’s hot and humid and there’s no way I’m walking all the way to the salon in this heat.
Ms. Candace is in there with Paulette. She’s picking some tomatoes, lettuce, and peppers from her plot, dropping them into a basket in Paulette’s lap. Paulette’s dark eyes lock on me as I stop at the entrance, but she doesn’t say anything. Her gaze strays toward the toolshed, then she looks down.
You’re imagining it, I tell myself, though more beads of sweat pop up along my hairline. The shadows of the sunflowers sway back and forth over the two women.
“Everything good? You need anything?” I ask.
Candace looks up at me and gives me a warm smile. “Everything’s good. We’re getting some salad makings for the Day Club Crew’s lunch later, isn’t that right?” She glances at Paulette, who doesn’t respond, then looks back at me. “What you up to?”
“Heading to the beauty supply, then the braid shop,” I say. “And then working on the tour some more.”
She rests her hands on her knees, examining me, and I know the concealer isn’t doing its work. “Stay safe, okay?”
She’s told me this countless times since I was little, but this time it seems like an actual request.
“I will.”
I look over the garden one more time before I turn to leave; all the plots, except the one I’m tending, are thick with green and red and orange foliage. Honeysuckle climbs over archways, shading the gravel pathways. Sunflowers, Mommy’s favorite, stand tall and heavy-headed along the back edge.
The three-block walk to the beauty supply to pick up my hair feels like I’m moving underwater. It strikes me when I’m walking that several of the stores on just this short stretch are new. The West Indian fruit and veggie store is still here, as are the patty shop and the nail salon, but the pet store where I got my first goldfish is gone. The barbershop where older men used to congregate and play jazz records is now a home goods boutique. And the halal market is a thrift shop that has price tags more expensive than neighboring stores that sell brand-new items.
I start walking faster, pushing through the fatigue as a single terrifying thought possesses me: What if the beauty supply is gone? I passed it two days ago, but . . .
I speed walk that final half a block and feel a sense of disproportionate relief when I catch sight of the pink awning with BEAUTYLAND written across it in bold white letters.
I step into the air-conditioning, out of breath and out of it. I wander through the aisles, my pulse racing for absolutely no reason and the panic trying to get a tight hold on my sweat-slick body, but eventually it loses its hold on me.
“Hey. You okay?” the older woman behind the counter asks as she rings me up, then gestures toward the fridge near the register. “Want to add a Red Bull?”
This store has been here for years, and this woman has never asked me how I was doing. I must look a mess, but Red Bull is the last thing my jackrabbit heart rate needs right now.
“No, thank you. I’m fine.”
She nods, though her expression shows she disagrees.
The salon is a fifteen-minute walk from the beauty supply since my stylist moved to a cheaper storefront, and I decide to do myself a favor and order an Uber. I’ll have to wait . . . six minutes for Terrel in his Nissan Altima, but it’s hot as balls and I already feel dizzy from the short walk to the main drag of stores.
My phone vibrates and I check it.
Terrel has canceled the ride.
“Okay, fuck you too, Terrel,” I mutter, wondering if I really need my hair braided. Then, in what feels like a miracle given the general bullshit that has been my life lately, I immediately get a new alert.
Your driver is arriving in 1 min. Look for Drew in a black Ford Crown Victoria.
Someone lays on the horn, and I jump and look up to see the Crown Vic idling at the curb in front of me. He honks again, then again, and I hurry over and pull open the rear door.
“Drew?”
An older white guy wearing a Red Sox cap and reflective aviators looks back over his shoulder at me. “Yup. Sydney?”
I get in and he jerks into traffic, making me almost fall to my side before I can finish getting my seat belt on.
I snap it into place and shoot him a look in the rearview mirror, but he’s staring resolutely ahead and his aviators reveal nothing. My annoyance starts to grow as I realize there was no damn reason for him to be honking like that when he arrived.
I look around the car’s interior. It’s old, with no decorative accents. Instead of the usual air freshener scent, it smells . . . antiseptic. The hairs on my arms rise. When I glance at him again, I notice how the hair at the back of his thick neck is cut—shaved close to the skin with brutal efficiency, like a crew cut.
“Man, things have changed around here,” he says as we roll to a stop at a red light, pointing to a billboard for an upcoming luxury condominium. The ad features a white woman with sleeve tattoos relaxing in a luxurious bathtub, and the BVT Realty logo that can be seen on most new builds around here is stamped in the corner.
“Yeah,” I say tersely, wishing I’d had time to put in my earphones.
“You don’t like the change?” he asks.
“I grew up here. I don’t like people getting pushed out of their homes by rising rent and property tax,” I say, even though I should keep my mouth shut.
“Ohhh,” he says as the light turns green and he starts driving again. “Were you one of the people who protested?”
“No.”
He laughs. “Good. It didn’t get them anywhere, did it?”
Everything about this conversation is making me regret my life choices, so I decide to bury myself in my phone. When I try to navigate away from the app screen my phone doesn’t respond. I stare at the picture of the man in the driver photo—if it’s my current driver, he’s put on a lot of bulk since the picture was taken. There’s a license plate on the screen, but I realize I didn’t have time to check if it matched, since he’d hurried me into the car.
“The way I see it, it’s just . . . Darwin,” Drew says easily. “Survival of the fittest. You can’t protest that shit.”
The click of the doors locking echoes in the car as a punctuation to his statement and my hands reflexively curl into fists.
“Why
did you lock the doors?” I ask.
“Those are the child safety locks, they kick in automatically after a while,” he says.
I glance through the window, willing myself to calm down. This feels wrong, all wrong, but after we pass this corner we’ll be just a few blocks away and it’s a straightaway on a busy Brooklyn thoroughfare. I’ve been extra jumpy lately and I had an unprovoked panic attack over a beauty supply shop. I’m probably just being paranoid.
“You find something nefarious in everything,” Marcus’s voice echoes in my head. “Then you wonder why I call you crazy.”
Drew suddenly whips a left onto a side street.
“What are you doing? The beauty shop is straight down this street.”
“My GPS said there was an obstacle on Fulton, so I decided to take another route. Don’t worry about it.”
There’s no damn GPS in this car. It has a radio with a cassette deck and his cell phone is facedown in the cubbyhole below it.
“Pull over,” I demand in the steadiest voice I can manage.
“We’re almost there,” he says in a calm down tone. “But like I was saying, it’s survival of the fittest. This part of Brooklyn has been riddled with crime for decades: drugs, shooting, theft. We don’t have those problems where I live because we understand the order of things. We follow the law. Back when I was a cop, I hated patrolling this neighborhood.”
“Pull. Over.”
I search for the lock on the door next to me, but there’s a hole where it should be sticking out. Sick fear pools in my stomach as I jiggle the handle, but Drew keeps talking.
“I always thought it would be a great place to live if there were just more . . . civilized people. Right?”
He makes a right and the car glides down a street with barely any traffic that’s lined with garages, industrial buildings, and half-erected condos.
My phone’s screen is still frozen and I try to force restart, but the app stubbornly resists.
We pass a couple who’ve stopped to kiss in the middle of the sidewalk and I bang on the window as we fly past them, but when I look back they’re laughing and she’s giving me the finger. They didn’t see that I was trying to get help, not judging them for their PDA.