The Decameron Project

by The New York Times

  Then later she’d accused him of wanting to have sex with the girl, which was ridiculous, ri-dic-u-lous. It was she who’d imposed her body on him, and if he’d taken her, which, yes, he admitted he had, it was not a matter of want but senseless provocation.

  His wife had shoved him and called him a pervert, which was, in its own way, verbal abuse.

  Blackmail was like the prison system itself. There was just no getting out of it without a little blood. When a stranger sends a video to you anonymously and in that video you’re murdering your wife, well, there was nothing to do but meet the stranger’s demands.

  To a point. Warden Pierce would orchestrate Rochelle Hayes’s escape, but he would follow her until the blackmailer was revealed and end it himself.

  * * *

  Jerry set the table with Kool-Aid, salmon croquettes, instant mashed potatoes, green beans, and crescent rolls. “Well, look at this,” Aint Rita said.

  “I froze extra, too.”

  “You been cooking up a storm these last few weeks. The chest freezer out back is gonna burst. The virus got you all scared?” Aint Rita asked.

  Jerry got the roll of paper towels and set it at the center of the table. “I’m not scared. Jehovah provides for the faithful. Days of peace are coming,” she said.

  “Amen to that. Will you do the blessing tonight, or shall I?”

  Jerry sat across from her great-aunt for the last meal they’d share together. “I’ll do it,” she said. Aint Rita’s prayers tended to drag. “Jehovah, we thank you for the bounty before us, and we ask that you bless it to the nourishment of our bodies. In Jesus’s name we pray, amen.”

  “Amen.”

  Jerry had packed two portions of the evening’s meal in a cooler to bring with her tonight. It would be her mother’s first taste of real food in almost a decade. There were also nuts, fruit, bottled water, crackers, bread, and packs of seasoned tuna set aside. Stores were empty, but the Witness in Jerry meant that she always found herself prepared.

  “You’re quiet tonight,” Aint Rita said.

  Jerry spooned a second helping of mashed potatoes onto her plate. “Just thinking.”

  “About?”

  “The end of the world,” Jerry said, meaning the end of her life here with Aint Rita. “My mother said when I was born, I heralded in her own personal End of Days, but that that was good. She says I’m the reason she left Jehovah.”

  Aint Rita’s cutlery clanked against her plate. “Shameful.”

  There was a picture of Jerry’s mother with a freshly shaven head taken the day after her daughter was born. She’d told Jerry she’d been overtaken with the urge to cut it all off. Maybe it was hormones, but seeing Jerry born, she realized she could not begin a new life without destroying the old. Rochelle divorced her husband, left Jehovah, and became a lesbian. Shot Jerry’s father in the heart when he came for their little girl.

  Sometimes killing was what was required, and to leave yourself at the mercy of your old life was imprudent. One had to think these things out. One had to let the new life in, deaths and all.

  After dinner, Jerry checked her bags one last time while Aint Rita watched Jeopardy! in the living room. She had ten pairs of panties, five bras, five undershirts, three blouses, and three skirts, fourteen socks, toothpaste, a toothbrush, floss picks, mouthwash, deodorant, her Bible, her birth certificate, and a gun.

  She rolled her suitcase down Juarez Street, then onto Embarcadero, past the storefront that used to be a GameStop but had been boarded up for four years. She passed the Dewey James Memorial Bench, which some Black mamas had fund-raised to install, in honor of the man who was dragged to death by a pickup truck driven by white teenagers back in the 1980s.

  The city was falling apart, yellow and brown weeds erupting from the asphalt. Paint flaking off walls. Before schools closed, the students of Caddo Elementary were moved into trailers because the main building had been infested with mold. The billboard advertising acreage for sale had been peeling since December, only the last two digits of the phone number visible.

  There was a beauty to a place as ugly as this, because when one realized it no longer nurtured, it was easy to let go.

  Upon discovering her great-niece missing in the morning, Aint Rita would wonder if they had been secretly at odds, but Jerry and her great-aunt had always agreed on one essential truth, that everything around them needed to crumble. A new world was coming if only you were willing to do what it took.

  Jerry’s mother met her at the water tower, as instructed on the phone. “Did you walk all the way here?” the woman asked.

  It was nine miles, but Jerry had worn practical shoes. “He followed you?”

  “Just like you said he would. There. See. His lights are off,” she whispered, and pointed to a spot 30 feet up the road. There were those who couldn’t leave the well-enough that was one dead body alone. He could not have seen her approach in the hazy dark of a gray March.

  Jerry walked toward him, her hand on the pistol. There was no abiding a man who’d done the things he’d done to her. Tonight was not her mother’s salvation, but her own.

  As was the way of the shrewd man, she hid from her enemy’s sights, sidled up, then fired. Jerry had wrought her own Armageddon, and liked it.

  rom rationing and desperation, greatness can arise! In 19th-century Louisiana, during a wartime shipping blockade. In 20th-century Japan, during a devastating economic depression. Or here, in 21st-century Detroit, during a global pandemic, in a squat pink house. Astonishing to think, for all of the drama that went down during those months in the house, afterward it was all eclipsed by that one event.

  “I’ve had a breakthrough,” Beverly announced, appearing in the doorway to the living room in a pink nightgown.

  The entire family was there for the lockdown. Her children, her grandchildren, her great-grandchildren, somebody’s exchange student from Scandinavia. Beverly’s house was the smallest, but she had refused to go anywhere else for the lockdown, and so the family had come to her, bunking on couches and recliners and the spare bed in the guest room. Air mattresses in the basement. Beverly was a 90-year-old widow with a high school education, and though she was grumpy and gossiped constantly and often embellished stories with scandalous details that were obviously invented, the family was devoted to her. Everyone, that is, except for Ellie. Nose-ringed and tattooed, Ellie was a freshman in college, and although the two of them had adored each other when Ellie was younger, as Ellie had gotten older the relationship between the two had soured, and for years she and Beverly had hardly spoken. Perhaps it was precisely because the two had once been so close, inseparable at family gatherings, that the rest of the family found the conflict so troubling. The feud had only intensified during the lockdown, now that the two were forced to coexist every waking moment, to share a kitchen and a washing machine and a bathroom with a finicky toilet. Ellie seemed especially bitter about the ice cream. The space in the fridge was limited, the supermarket had been rocked by shortages, and, in order to make the supplies last, Beverly had instituted a strict rationing system. The daily allotment for ice cream was meager: for each person in the house, only one scoop a night. It was that or run out of ice cream immediately and have no ice cream at all, and so the rest of the family had accepted this as the best solution, albeit a sad one. Every night for a week the family had sat around the living room together, eating single scoops of ice cream with a sense of deprivation. Ellie had been particularly vocal about how frustrated she was by the situation. But now the family saw that Beverly stood in the doorway with a bowl in her hands.

  “What the hell is that?” Ellie said.

  “An innovation,” Beverly said.

  In the bowl a scoop of ice cream sprinkled with crushed ice sat atop a heaping mound of crushed ice. Beverly explained that she had made the crushed ice by filling a plastic bag with ice cubes from the fridge and then beating on the ice cubes awhile with a rubber mallet. This, she said, would be a game changer.

/>   “Please tell me you’re joking,” Ellie said.

  “Now each of us can have a full bowl,” Beverly said.

  “Nobody wants to eat watered-down ice cream,” Ellie said, disgusted.

  “I would be happy to try,” the exchange student said.

  “I call it ice ice cream,” Beverly said.

  “Ice ice cream,” the exchange student repeated, with a sense of wonder.

  “That is the dumbest possible name you could have given it,” Ellie said.

  “I actually spent a lot of time deciding what to call it,” Beverly said.

  “Saying ‘ice’ twice is redundant,” Ellie said.

  The exchange student, whose name honestly most of the family could never remember, displayed a masterful grasp of the English language by suggesting that in fact the repetition of ice might serve a valuable purpose, syntactically, in that what English speakers referred to as ice cream didn’t literally contain pieces of ice.

  “I’ve never hated anything more in my life,” Ellie said.

  Beverly made ice ice cream for everyone that night, shuffling back and forth from the kitchen, and although nobody in the family liked having to eat watered-down ice cream, the appeal of having more in the bowl was undeniable. For the rest of the lockdown, the family ate ice ice cream in the living room together every night, carefully getting some ice cream and some crushed ice in each spoonful. Only Ellie refused. She wouldn’t even try it. Instead, each night she ate plain ice cream, a single scoop in an otherwise empty bowl. After she finished, she would glare stubbornly at the carpet while the rest of the family continued eating, savoring every bite.

  “You know, there’s something about this that’s kinda nice,” Beverly said thoughtfully one night, moments after swallowing a spoonful.

  Across the living room, Ellie snorted in contempt.

  Beverly died in her sleep a month after the lockdown was lifted, and not until decades later did the family learn about chicory coffee and rice tea. In 19th-century Louisiana, forced to ration supplies during a blockade, people had begun adding chicory root as a filler to coffee, but by the time the war ended the state had developed a taste for the drink, and chicory coffee remained popular there to this day; in 20th-century Japan, forced to ration supplies during a depression, people had begun adding roasted rice as a filler to tea, but by the time the economy recovered the country had developed a taste for the drink, and rice tea remained popular there to this day. Nobody in the family had ever even tasted chicory coffee or rice tea, and yet the family came to feel a powerful sense of connection with those events, because the same phenomenon had occurred with ice ice cream. Even after the pandemic, the family continued to eat ice ice cream—at first occasionally, out of nostalgia, but then routinely, until finally with some astonishment the family actually came to prefer it. The wonderfully gritty texture of the crystals of ice in the ice cream. The gloriously smooth feel of the shards of ice in the ice cream. How the ice would make the melting ice cream glitter beautifully in the light. Eventually the creation was introduced to friends of the family, to co-workers and classmates, and from there even to total strangers. One summer a café in the old neighborhood added ice ice cream to the menu, and by the next summer there were stands serving ice ice cream along the river. A local news program did a story about tourists trying ice ice cream for the first time. In a newspaper article, the mayor referred to ice ice cream as a cultural treasure. The family experienced all of this with a sense of awe. Beverly had lived for 90 years, and to be honest, by that final decade of her life the family had come to think of her as a relic. Even she had spoken that way, as if the great events of her life were behind her. And yet only then, at the very end, shuffling about the house in pink slippers and a matching nightgown with her hearing aid chirping from a low battery, had she done the thing she would be remembered for. She had created a sensation.

  Yet the greatest surprise in the whole saga was an incident that occurred before the family ever even left the house. On the day the lockdown was lifted, before she would allow Ellie to leave, Beverly forced her great-granddaughter to sit in a chair in the kitchen and eat a bowl of ice ice cream. Ellie ate each spoonful with a bitter scowl, grimacing with every swallow, commenting between bites on how the ice absolutely ruined the ice cream, how there had never been a greater atrocity in the history of the culinary arts, how the very concept was so utterly abominable that angels were probably weeping in heaven, and how, by the way, she still thought the name was dumb. When she finally set aside the empty bowl, she looked at her great-grandmother, who was staring at her with a neutral expression.

  “What?” Ellie said.

  Beverly suddenly began to laugh, putting her hand to her forehead with a look of helplessness, and Ellie smiled in bewilderment.

  “You can’t fool me,” Beverly said.

  “I’m being serious,” Ellie insisted.

  Beverly had to lean back against the counter for balance, laughing so hard now that her shoulders were shaking, and seeing her cracking up, Ellie began to laugh, too, at first attempting to keep the laughter from breaking out, her mouth quivering from the strain of keeping a straight face, but then finally bursting out laughing with her face in her hands.

  “You only came up with the idea to mess with me,” Ellie said.

  “I was just trying to help,” Beverly insisted.

  The two seemed caught in a loop. The harder that Beverly laughed, the harder Ellie would laugh, until eventually there in the kitchen the two were doubled up laughing together, in tears.

  “What are we even laughing about?” Beverly said.

  Afterward neither of them had been able to explain what was so funny. In that moment, though, something seemed to have been released between them. Ellie even let Beverly hug her, one last time, on the way out the door.

  our years before the outbreak, I traveled into the snowbound hills west of Beijing with my first husband, Tomas.

  He was an installation artist from Lima who was working at the time on a replica of a 10th-century cloister. Years before, he became obsessed with the story of a nun in medieval France who awoke screaming one morning and couldn’t stop. She was joined over the following days by another sister, then another, until the whole convent echoed with their cries. They only quieted when the local soldiers threatened to beat them. What compelled Tomas, I think, was the lack of choice in these women’s lives, in their fates, placed as girls in convents by parents who didn’t want them, or couldn’t support them. The screaming seemed like a choice that they could make. In any case, he was struggling with the project. At the time of our trip, he didn’t think he’d finish it, and neither did I. Already then, something was going out of him.

  But that morning of our journey out to see the Great Wall, the hours felt whole and unspoiled. We had been bickering for weeks, but the novelty of the Chinese countryside, with its strange textures and weather and food, had shifted things between us. Tomas grinned as we arrived at the tourists’ entrance, his teeth very straight and white in his narrow face.

  Vendors along the stone path called to us, their breath clouding on the air. A woman hollered for us to buy polished jade paperweights and shimmering cloth wallets, fake money tied with red string and transparent pens in which small plastic boats floated through viscous liquid as if journeying up the Yangtze. The wind was sharp and fresh, with an almost grasslike scent you didn’t get in the city.

  We crawled into the glass cable car that would carry us to the upper paths. As it began to lurch its way across the canyon, above trees black as night water, we laughed nervously. Then we were up, finally, walking the ancient stone corridor, the pale light cold on our foreheads. The air tasted faintly of metal.

  “Should we have bought something back there, from that woman?” I said. “For my mother?”

  “Gabriel wants Chinese cigarettes,” Tomas said, his dark eyes watering in the strong wind. “I don’t know. Somehow it’s more stylish to smoke foreign ones.”

/>   “You’re hard on him,” I said.

  I shouldn’t have said it. Tomas glanced at me, quiet. He didn’t like to talk about his brother much in those days. Between them lay a gentle hatred whose childhood roots were still murky to me, despite a decade of marriage. It could only be made worse, later, by the accident that happened two years after we returned from China. Tomas would strike his nephew with his car, killing the boy. The child just three. By then Tomas and I had entered the era of our disaffection. What I’d know I’d learn through a mutual friend. The death would be a barrier through which nothing could pass, and everyone connected with it would disappear on the far side, lost.

  But that day, over the coming hours, the twisting rock path stretched out before us into the distant fog. We walked along a section that had purple veining on the stones, as well as starker, whiter rock, and stone of such muddy gray you felt intensely how ancient and elemental it was. And though we spoke easily, laughing, I could feel—we both could—the shadow of my earlier remark.

  The fog grew heavier. Snow began to fall.

  It seemed the right time to leave. We retraced our steps back to the glass cable-car entrance, but it was nowhere to be found. We tried another path, but it ended in a lookout. We stared at each other. The snow got thicker.

  Behind us, a sudden figure was striding away. Tomas called out to the man, but as we rounded the corner, he was gone.

  The afternoon was growing darker. A strong smell of soil filled the air. We ascended a set of crooked steps that led onto a landing that stopped abruptly at a barrier. Another set descended to a solid wall. One path seemed to stretch into nowhere, and we gave up following it. My fingertips began to burn with cold. I pictured Beijing at this hour, the bright restaurants on the street near our hotel, the air smelling of exhaust and fried meat and sun-warmed blossoms, their fallen petals like drops of pale wax on the pavement.