Grand Union

by Zadie Smith

  “I can’t imagine being on the water on a day like this,” she said, brightly as possible, for they seemed to have entered a conversational wilderness. Where were the bread crumbs that led back to small talk?

  “All about will. I really prided myself on my will. Had a little too much pride in it, probably. Then I lost it all.” He twisted right round in his seat again. “Miss Clark, mind if I ask where you’re from?”

  “Not at all. Uganda.”

  When he frowned, two deep ridges appeared in his forehead. Urvashi resisted the urge to put a finger between them.

  “See now, I would have said Pakistan or India or Bangladesh or even Iraq or Iran, maybe. I would not have said Uganda.”

  “Well, there used to be a big South Asian population in Uganda.”

  “Oh!” He turned back to the wheel. “And . . . can I ask how old are you?”

  “I’m forty-six.”

  “Wow, wouldn’t have guessed that either. Can I say you look a lot younger?”

  “Please do. Only Americans get offended by compliments.”

  “And your husband, kids—they here in Boston?”

  She smiled at the sweet simplicity of the attempt.

  “My partner and I live in New York. I don’t have any children.”

  His face fell and she felt suddenly very sorry, for she had presented him with the inconceivable. But it would take too long and be altogether too laborious to put his mind at rest; to make clear all the many ways in which she was happy, how she loved her work, her lover, her freedom. Instead, on a whim, she conjured up two nonexistent stepchildren, girls, in their teens.

  “Ah, so you know the drill,” said Mike McRae, grinning conspiratorially. “So let me tell you something that’ll blow your mind. I got three sons, right? Boston Irish as the day is long. But my oldest boy’s wife is African-American, from Chicago, so his daughter is kinda like your color—and my middle son’s girlfriend is Korean! Now, the youngest is not seeing anybody at the moment, but I’m thinking, what’s next? Chinese? Right? Or maybe the next’ll be an Ind—Native American. Maybe the next’ll be Native American! Point is: we’re all God’s children. Me and my wife—we’re separating—but we’re thrilled. When I first saw my little brown granddaughter”—his eyes teared up as he took a hand off the wheel and placed it on his breastbone— “it was like my heart got larger and there was a new room in it. A new chamber.”

  To this, his beautiful passenger said nothing at all; only bit her blood-red lip and looked out the window. He could not know that her mind had drifted strangely: to her imagined stepdaughters, whom she placed now in rooms of her own design—twin eyries either side of a chimney breast—in a shingled house that sat on a bluff, over a wild beach of dunes and sea grass, in America or in Africa—in some dream combination of the two. Mike, believing he had caused offense, stood the silence for as long as he could. He turned on the radio. Put the wipers on. Spied a meth-faced girl leaving a pharmacy with something stuffed down the back of her pants. The shadow life. He saw it everywhere—it was a kind of second sight—but what use was it? He took a left toward campus. He looked back at his passenger, her face anxious, turned away. Her window misted, a single cloud. What could she possibly see?

  3

  It had cost six million dollars and was described as a “re-imagining,” but to Mike it looked like someone had taken a large box of concrete and glass, put wheels under it and driven it into the side of the old library. On the other hand, it seemed busier than he remembered it, with somebody at every one of the new terminals, and many more waiting to use them. A lot of homeless folks, easily spotted by their shoes: elaborate self-creations, or else combinations of several pairs, wound together with duct tape. A uniform had once allowed him to speak to such people; now he stood, undifferentiated and unnoticed among them, waiting in the “atrium” for a Miss Wendy English, the senior administrator. There were so many possible entrances and exits to the new space he didn’t know from which to expect her, and in the end it was an ambush: the feel of a little finger poking him in the back.

  “Miss Wendy. Now look at you. Wowee. Did you get younger?”

  “I had my seventy-fifth birthday last week and I’ve decided to stop right there. It’s good to see you, Michael.”

  They clasped hands, which required, from McRae, a certain delicacy. She was five foot one, weighed only about eighty pounds in her skirt-suit, and he could feel each vein and bone.

  “Long time,” she said. They stepped back and admired each other. Six months. Evidently she had stopped dyeing her hair, the small, stately afro white as lambswool.

  “Really appreciative of you seeing me today,” he said, and for a ridiculous moment feared he was about to weep. “Means a lot.”

  “Means nothing at all,” she said, gesturing at the high, light space. “As you can see, we’re open to everybody. And I meant what I said: it’s good to see you. Let’s go to my office.”

  But she walked quickly, always slightly ahead, and of the many people who stopped to salute Miss Wendy or ask her some practical question—in the atrium, through the corridors—not one of them did she introduce to Mike McRae. By the time they reached her corner office, back in the old red-brick building, he felt like a pale shadow, chasing this little dark woman through the world.

  “Now, what can I do for you, Michael?”

  She sat behind her gigantic walnut desk, bird-arms folded on the green baize, and McRae thought of Alice McRae—mother of six, admirer of Louise Day Hicks—for whom this image of her son, cap in hand before a tiny old black lady, would have been incomprehensible.

  “Michael—you okay?”

  “Oh, I’m great.” He put his fingers to both eyes as a deterrent. “You know, when the whole community comes around you like people have, well, that just feels great. And after all the stuff in the papers there was a lot of support—a lot of love.”

  “You are a part of this community,” she said, looking directly into his eyes, as few people did these days, and separating each word like she was counting pearls on a necklace. But when she got to the end of the rope, there was nothing further.

  “Right,” said McRae, into the gap, “and I feel I’ve got a lot more to give, to this library in particular. That veterans program we spoke about last year—I would love to help implement that. I feel like a lot of the skills I have—plus the skills I’ve been acquiring recently, because I should explain—look, I haven’t even told my own family this, but that’s the effect you have on me, I guess—” He laughed, a little wildly. “Those eyes, Miss Wendy. You got a bit of witchcraft in those eyes—truth serum! What I was going to say is I’ve acquired a lot of new skills in this program I’ve been in these past few months—and, well, the big reveal is I’m actually training to become a substance-abuse counselor. Yep. So this is a big week for me, I qualify this week—and I really feel that twenty-five years as an officer, plus my own personal experience with substance-abuse issues, and now this training—I really feel I could have a whole new role on the action committee here, a really substantial role, that would bring a lot of added value.”

  Throughout this speech Miss Wendy remained perfectly still. Behind her, snow fell steadily. She looked like a tiny frowning saint, carved into the ebony of an apse.

  “I can’t put you back on the committee, Mike. I’m sorry.”

  Down came the snow. Silent, thick. He leaned forward and gripped the desk.

  “How much money did I raise for this library? I must have run two hundred miles for this library, Miss Wendy. Two hundred miles.”

  “At least. But you were treasurer, Michael, and I suppose—in the light of recent events—the board feels . . .”

  She carried on talking. He looked past her, to the snow, and saw a paltry thirty bucks folded in a wallet—property of some street kid in the cells—and saw this same thirty in his own pocket, and tried now to separa
te his physical memory of these images from the CCTV, unsure any more if he had any real memory distinct from the footage. Thirty bucks. The more he watched it at the tribunal the more random and disconnected it had seemed. What did it have to do with the real life of Michael Kennedy McRae? Why should that misbegotten moment—from so far back in the story, back when it was still just a matter of ten or twelve pills a day—why should that turn out to be the definitive act? You could drive yourself crazy wondering about a thing like that. And then there were other days when he was able, for a moment, to be objective, and see there was no mystery to it, no special fate or particular curse. It was only what he and his colleagues had often casually referred to as the Capone Effect. When you get done, you rarely get done for the right thing.

  “—all of which puts me,” Miss Wendy was saying, “in a very difficult position. The drugs we could get over. But the money . . .” She spread her hands in a gesture of helplessness. McRae rose to his feet.

  “When I was a cop—and I was a good cop for a long time—I operated with discretion. Always. That’s the most important part of the job. Knowing when to come down hard and when to go easy. Miss Wendy, I’m asking you to exercise your discretion. I’m begging you, actually.”

  She sighed and looked away.

  “You’re asking me for a thing I cannot do.” She stood up. Snow. “Mike, you and me go back a long way. And I know you’re one of the good guys,” she began, “but it’s simply—” She had run out of pearls.

  “Am I?” he asked.

  4

  “Mike? That you?”

  He had one of the last boxes in his arms, filled with the random, unclassifiable stuff that didn’t seem to go anywhere else. He had hoped to finish before she got home.

  When she saw him, she put a hand on the flat part of her chest: “You scared me.”

  “SWAT-team feet,” he said, as he had said so many times before. “Silent and deadly.”

  She was holding a gray-blue book of music, Bach’s something or other.

  “It’s fine,” she said, “but Mrs. Akinson’ll be here any minute.”

  “Mrs. Akinson!” said Mike, with a face of marvel. “That old coot? Must have been sixty when she taught the boys. Gotta be at least ninety now.”

  “Oh, she’s not that old. Just has an old way of dressing.”

  She walked forward and looked in his box and drew out a shoehorn shaped like Homer Simpson. She smiled sadly and put it back.

  “Marie, you leave the door open again?”

  She denied it. But a moment later came the sound of Mrs. Akinson walking overhead, then a scale being played in a minor key.

  Mike shrugged: “SWAT-team ears.”

  “Aren’t you glad not to be doing that anymore?”

  “It was a part of the job.”

  “Well aren’t you glad it’s not a part of your job?”

  “Somebody’s got to do it.”

  “Maybe,” she said, and turned to go back upstairs.

  “I got a new thing now,” he called after her and she sighed and stopped. “It’s been kind of a big week for me. I got this new gig, as a counselor—substance abuse.”

  Marie could think of a lot of things to say to that but she wanted to get to her piano lesson.

  “That’s great, Mike. I’m happy for you.”

  “Oh, I’m really excited. It’s a whole new direction for me. It’s like a practical thing I can do with this feeling I got inside me. I’ve had it a long time—I guess I should have listened to it earlier. Would’ve saved us all a lot of pain. I think really it was when I got into my thirties, you know, that I just began to see that God is in other people, and he’s in me. I can’t explain it any better than that.”

  Marie looked at McRae, the familiar welling water in his eyes. She looked right at him. She thought of the various time signatures of her life, as they had played out with this sentimental man, and it seemed to her a piece of music in which they themselves had been the notes. A steady trot at the start, turning so slow in that first year of marriage, when she had confessed to herself the lack of physical attraction. After that, things had gotten so fast—horribly, joyfully fast, almost ungraspable—for there was no way of slowing the children, nor the years of her life they held tight in their sweaty little fists. All the irretrievable hours spent in cars with sticks and balls, ferrying them here and there, cheering them on frozen sports fields, watching them, watching your own breath, walking their dogs, burying their dogs, shoveling the snow out of the drive, and then, a moment later, watching three tall young men, far taller than her—all with their father’s eyes—shoveling snow out of the drive as a courtesy to their aging mother. Sometimes they found a dog turd in that snow, or a pack of cigarettes, or somebody’s ball—but never Marie as a girl. No. Nobody knew where that girl had gone. Fast! But slowing down again—almost stopping—the year they removed the breast. Slow like you move underwater, wondering if you’ll surface again. Then she blinked three times and there were no more jockey shorts on the stairs, no filthy cereal bowls, no used condoms poorly hidden in an empty tube of Pringles, no brushes rigid with dried paint, no rackets and no balls. She loved her grandchildren, and the alien world they brought with them, but her daughter-in-law was one of these women who act like babies start the whole concerto up once more, from the top. A lovely idea, but not true, not for Marie. They were not her babies. Nor had an empty house made her sad, as she had been warned it would. Instead, time began to cautiously reshape itself round her broken body, and she found she wanted to be alone with it once more. That’s just how she felt—and she would have felt that way even if Mike had been clean as the Pope and retired with full honors. In a strange way, he’d made everything easier. And now slowness beckoned again—if she stayed firm, if she managed to withstand that desperate look in the eyes of Michael Kennedy McRae. And what then? First things first. She’d lie down in the springtime grass, ask herself what just happened, looking down at her own body, distinct at last from every other body in the world.

  MEET THE PRESIDENT!

  “What you got there, then?”

  The boy didn’t hear the question. He stood at the end of a ruined pier, believing himself quite alone. But now he registered the presence at his back, and turned.

  “What you got there?”

  A very old person, a woman, stood before him, gripping the narrow shoulder of a girl child. Both of them local, typically stunted, dim: they stared up at him stupidly. The boy turned again to the sea. All week long he had been hoping for a clear day to try out the new technology—not new to the world, but new to the boy—and now at last here was a break in the rain. Gray sky met gray sea. Not ideal, but sufficient. Ideally he would be standing on a cairn in Scotland or some other tropical spot, experiencing backlit clarity. Ideally he would be—

  “Is it one of them what you see through?”

  A hand, lousy with blue veins, reached out for the light encircling the boy’s head, as if it were a substantial thing, to be grasped like the handle of a mug.

  “Ooh, look at the green, Aggie. That shows you it’s on.”

  The boy was ready to play. He touched the node on his finger to the node at his temple, raising the volume.

  “Course, he’d have to be somebody, Aggs, cos they don’t give ’em to nobody”—the boy felt the shocking touch of a hand on his own flesh. “Are you somebody, then?”

  She had shuffled around until she stood square in front of him, unavoidable. Hair as white as paper. A long, shapeless black dress, made of some kind of cloth, and what appeared to be a pair of actual glasses. Forty-nine years old, type O, a likelihood of ovarian cancer, some ancient debt infraction—nothing more. A blank, more or less. Same went for the girl: never left the country, eighty-five percent chance of macular degeneration, an uncle on the database, long ago located, eliminated. She would be nine in two days. Melinda Durham and Aga
tha Hanwell. They shared no more DNA than strangers.

  “Can you see us?” The old woman let go of her charge and waved her hands wildly. The tips of her fingers barely reached the top of the boy’s head. “Are we in it? What are we?”

  The boy, unused to proximity, took a single step forward. Further he could not go. Beyond was the ocean; above, a mess of weather, clouds closing in on blue wherever blue tried to assert itself. A dozen or so craft darted up and down, diving low like seabirds after a fish, and no bigger than seabirds, skimming the dirty foam, then returning to the heavens, directed by unseen hands. On his first day here the boy had trailed his father on an inspection tour to meet those hands: intent young men at their monitors, over whose shoulders the boy’s father leaned, as he sometimes leaned over the boy to ensure he ate breakfast.

  “What d’you call one of them there?”

  The boy tucked his shirt in all round: “AG 12.”

  The old woman snorted as a mark of satisfaction, but did not leave.

  He tried looking the females directly in their dull brown eyes. It was what his mother would have done, a kindly woman with a great mass of waist-length flame-colored hair, famed for her patience with locals. But his mother was long dead, he had never known her, he was losing what little light the day afforded. He blinked twice, said, “Hand to hand.” Then, having a change of heart: “Weaponry.” He looked down at his torso, to which he now attached a quantity of guns.

  “You carry on, lad,” the old woman said. “We won’t get in your way. He can see it all, duck,” she told the girl, who paid her no mind. “Got something in his hands—or thinks he does.”

  She took a packet of tobacco from a deep pocket in the front of her garment and began to roll a cigarette, using the girl as a shield from the wind.