Romeo and Julius—as bound together in real life as their namesakes were in fiction. Ramadan had rarely seen one without the other, which was always like seeing double. They wore the same clothes and sported the same haircuts at all times. Lately, tight, nappy twists all over their heads; black T-shirts and jeans, attire that flattered their burnished gold skin. There was something romantic about their alliance. They were as committed to each other as any married couple, as if they had whispered an in utero vow they were powerless to break. Their routine matching silhouettes were like silent soliloquies, daily professions of solidarity. True soul mates, they were linked by one of the few things more passionate than poetry, more powerful than story—genetics. Shakespeare would have approved: a pair whose destiny was more indelible than any even he could compose, for it was written in the blood. And like his star-crossed lovers, they, too, would have died for each other. Unlike them, perhaps, they would have also killed.
Witnessing their rapport, Ramadan wondered what that was like. Always having someone to help balance things out, have your back, pass you the joint. It was clear to him that his twin cousins, who had had years to welcome him into their inner circle, would never do so. He even resembled them. He had the same dark hair (but his would probably never dread). Plus his skin was just a shade lighter—he was wearing a white T-shirt tonight, but he also looked great in all black. Far from begrudgingly accepting him as their cousin, shouldn’t they really have embraced him as their little brother?
Damon stopped abruptly at the door, and the twins, attending to their highs, kept moving forward and bumped into him. “Damn, D, sorry,” Romeo said. Julius mumbled a similar apology.
“Don’t be sorry. Just wake up and stop being stupid! And open your droopy-ass eyes, if you know what’s good for you.”
Ramadan watched the impromptu huddle, which seemed to have turned more serious than necessary. The twins made exaggerated efforts to raise their eyelids.
“We good, D,” Romeo said.
“Yeah, we good,” Julius said.
“Y’all better be,” Damon said. “Now let’s roll. No—hold up.” He smiled at Ramadan, looked at Romeo, who had the joint, and indicated that he should pass it to their little cousin.
Romeo took a quick puff and extended his hand through a patch of cumulus. The generosity took Ramadan by surprise, and he said, to no one in particular, “Me?”
“Yeah, you,” Damon said. “Live a little!”
As Ramadan reached for the joint, the long-awaited thrill of being invited into the Ramsey fraternity flushed through him, and he saw what looked like pride come over his cousins as he brought the damp tip of the joint to his lips and inhaled the way he had seen them do so many times. The smell of burning herb, generated for the first time by his force, and closer to his face than ever before, was warmer and sweeter than usual. More intoxicating, too, of course—but not as intoxicating as the feeling that he was, at last, being initiated into his own family. In the rising swoon, the headiness of that first hit, he reveled in the suspension of his loneliness. He held the smoke a full five seconds, not wanting to release it, preferring to asphyxiate on the vapors of acceptance, for he was afraid that when he exhaled, this kinship might end.
When he finally blew the smoke out, he was laughing, as were his cousins. He couldn’t tell if they were laughing with him or at him, but with his high ascending, it didn’t really matter.
Damon took the joint, and then he flipped up the porch light switch, setting the pale, yellow curtains on the front window aglow. He opened the front door to the celebratory sounds of the brass band and the mass of second liners dancing up the street. Romeo and Julius went out first, shuffling their way to the far left, Clarissa’s side of the porch. Damon stepped to the right and held the screen door open for Ramadan.
The light from the naked bulb above the doorway, set against the blackness of the night, momentarily blinded Ramadan, who was also adjusting to the effects of the marijuana. He closed his eyes to relieve the harshness of the glare, but the music, more seductive than ever, was his guide. Drumbeats came to him as a pulse, as if the parade were something large and incarnate. He was always a little afraid at first, but then he let it take him by the hand. And he stepped forward, ushered into the presence of this living, breathing thing that promised, as always, to feed his spirit by devouring him whole.
He would later recall, in nightmares that replayed the memory, the shots that rang out sounding like some off-kilter, syncopated drum riff. Not truly sinister. But somehow indicative of a mood change—things going from brightness and revelry to darkness and menace, the rhythmic equivalent of a minor chord. You could have danced to this weird cadence, if the rat-a-tat-tats had followed more of a pattern, if they had repeated themselves with any predictability, if they made sense—and if they hadn’t ultimately turned him into a cymbal or a snare, the thing that gets hit to create the big finish.
Stepping onto the porch, Ramadan had just raised his arms to strut to the funked-up version of “Lil Liza Jane” the band was playing as it reached the front of the house surrounded by more than a hundred people bouncing along, all for Mr. Rock. But before he could snap his fingers, he felt the sharp sting of the bullet piercing his left arm, its heat burrowing into his flesh near the top of his shoulder.
The surprise and force of the shot spun him around and, surely, to a few who saw him he must have looked like a boy dancing to the music with a balletic flair. The bulb streaked down on him like a spotlight, adding showmanship to his freakish pirouette. But his jerky motions didn’t look anything like choreography to most—certainly not to anyone near the dark alley next to the abandoned, vine-suffocated house across the street from which the gunshots had rung out. And not to anyone who recognized the telltale sounds of run-of-the-mill, run-for-your-life street violence, those who knew the difference between avant-garde music and mayhem. To them, Ramadan’s gyrations looked like exactly what they were: a slow drag with death.
The crowd began shrieking and scattering in waves. Those far enough from the band to make out the sound of gunfire had started yelling and running first. Seconds later, the chain reaction of fear spread to the next layer of revelers, whose retreat prompted those in front of them and so on. In less than fifteen seconds, the entire street had cleared. The thrum of escaping masses, huffing and chatter, whistling and scared laughter, echoed through the neighborhood with a musicality of its own, a choir, a Ghetto Chorus, improvising a denouement to disaster. The whining counterpoint of police sirens blew in, pianissimo at first but building fast. Finally, the whole moody, operatic composition introduced its diva, as Clarissa thundered onto the porch with a dramatic, what’s-all-this-commotion-about air, almost slamming her screen door into the twins. Then she took a couple of steps through droplets of her nephew’s blood. She nearly slipped and fell, but Damon caught her—and she looked down and saw Ramadan splayed across the steps. His left foot was hanging over the edge of the bottom step, toes an inch from the ground. He was lying on his stomach, and his wound was seeping, soaking his white T-shirt with rivulets of red.
“Ramadaaaaan!!!” Clarissa screamed. “Ramadaaaaan!!!”
Romeo and Julius rushed from their corner toward the steps.
“Don’t touch him!” she yelled, thrusting her arms out, clotheslining the twins back against the house. “Don’t touch that baby!”
And she screamed his name again.
Some of the second liners, the threat of imminent danger having passed, crept back to the scene. A caravan of police cars glided down St. Philip Street, streaking the night sky with red and blue flashes of lightning, like the approach of a wicked storm or an otherworldly dawn.
Through his withering consciousness, Ramadan heard Clarissa’s cries. He managed to open his eyes, and the last thing he saw was his upturned left palm pooling with his own blood. As his eyelids shut, he strained to make a fist, thinking, irrationally perhaps, that if he could keep his blood clinched there, he would somehow sav
e his life.
Later, in the emergency room, when one of the nurses pried his hand open while prepping him for surgery, the fistful of blood was still there, only now it was as thick as Mama Joon’s roux.
* * *
“AS LONG AS he alive, we gon’ be dead broke.”
Two weeks later, Ramadan was lying on the living room sofa waking up from a nap. His recovery would be quick, the doctors had said. You’re a lucky boy. When this is over, you’ll be a brand-new you. You’ll see. Just take your meds. Antibiotics, painkillers. The latter always put him to sleep. Whenever he woke up, as now, he was never quite sure he wasn’t still dreaming.
“I know.”
“I know you know.”
Two similar voices penetrated his grogginess. Where were they coming from? The other side of whatever divided slumber from consciousness, or from the other side of the living room wall?
“I think we gotta wait awhile before we try again.”
No, he wasn’t dreaming—and the voices, he realized, belonged to Romeo and Julius, who were out on the front porch. In actual distance, only a couple of feet away. He propped himself up on his good arm and leaned toward the window.
“How come? Let’s just get it over with. Wait awhile? Nigga, we broke now!”
“Say, dawg, just think for a second. Dude git shot at a second line, that’s normal. Happens all the time. Nothing strange about it. Dude git shot, then what, git shot again, or you know, just up and disappears. Niggas got bad luck, but not that bad. Now what’s that gon’ look like?”
“Straight-up foul play!”
“Foul play? I’m talkin’ flagrant foul.”
“Mmm, hmm. A upon-further-review, big-ass-fine-from-the-commissioner flagrant-ass foul!”
“Thank you!”
The voices joined in a round of laughter.
When that subsided, Ramadan heard the hiss of a long inhalation, and he knew his cousins were sharing a joint as they plotted his murder. Getting high as they sank to a new low.
“How long we gotta wait, then?”
“I’ma say . . . a few months.”
“A few months? Fool, last time I checked, your pockets was empty as mine. We got a whole gotdam ATM machine right here on the premises, and the PIN number is real simple: P-O-W . . . pow!”
Through a giggling high, the other voice said, “Okay, then not a few months. Call it, like, I don’t know, three.”
“What, three ain’t a few no mo’? When that happened?”
“Bruh, four and five is a few.”
“Four and five is several, muthafucka! Three is a few!”
“Aw, shit. I think you right.”
“I am right. We don’t need to wait nothing but a couple of months anyway.”
“Right, right . . . and a couple . . .”
“. . . is two!”
“True dat. Like me and you. Two months. Perfect.”
“Two.”
“Let’s go tell Mama we figured it out.”
“Nah, nah. She say she don’t want to know nothing about it this time. Just get it done, and she’ll take care of everything else.”
“Ah!” Ramadan gasped. During his crisis, Clarissa had assiduously, earnestly, so he thought, played the mama role: screaming out on the porch; holding his head until the ambulance arrived; staying with him at the hospital; setting him up at home; bringing his meals (including, last week, a little store-bought chocolate cake for the gloomiest birthday he’d ever had); making sure he took his meds; changing his bandages; telling him everything was going to be all right! His aunt Clarissa? His caregiver? As the montage of kindly acts flickered through his mind, what he’d just heard pierced his being, as if he’d been shot again, by a bullet with a better aim.
“No!” he said.
“What was that?” one twin asked.
“What was what?” asked the other.
Ramadan clasped his hands over his mouth. The muscles in his still healing left shoulder ached from the sudden movement, and he grimaced. He slid his right hand from his mouth and massaged his wound. Quieting his hurt, his hurts, he buried his whimpers in the back of his throat.
“I thought I heard something.”
“Uh, maybe it was just the wind blowing some damn money your way. You ain’t heard that in so long your stupid ass forgot what it sounds like!”
He heard the twins laughing again. “Two months,” one of them said.
“Two,” the other responded. “Like me and you.”
Ramadan pressed his face into the sofa cushions, wrapped his arms around himself, and wept in silence, trembling with disbelief.
“Let the countdown begin.”
“Let the countdown begin . . .”
* * *
THAT NIGHT, SLEEP anesthetized him from his aches and anxiety. He dreamed of his tarot card, the red-robed magician surrounded by weapons of survival. He didn’t believe in the supernatural, and Mama Joon’s death had shaken his faith in religion. (Never mind that as he slept, he rubbed his mother’s crucifix.) Mama Joon had prayed; she had died. He had prayed; she had died. But when he thought back to the encounter with Miss Bea, he felt drawn to her way with the truth, however dark. He remembered the subtleties of Mama Joon’s reading, which he knew now had acknowledged her sickness. Maybe some progressions of events—like cards turning over in a certain succession on a fortune-teller’s table—set things in motion. Or tell you what will happen—unless something else happens. Unless you do something. Like catch your lucky card before it hits the ground. No amount of praying would stop his family. He would have to do something, something as different from prayer as he could imagine. His slumber was a mix of rest, deliberation, and resolve. The next morning, he didn’t have all the answers but, armed with a supreme confidence—maybe you could call it faith, after all—he woke up believing he could save himself.
Like many citizens of the stupendously vulnerable community in which he lived, Ramadan was wired with a particular kind of survival instinct. It did not, primarily, involve the police or authorities of any kind. Besides, if he called the police, what would he tell them? He had no evidence. Muted voices heard through his drug-induced haze. And if the police did for some reason believe him and could find proof to his claim, what would happen to his family? He didn’t really want to hurt Romeo and Julius, or his aunt Clarissa, for that matter. He had always felt a complicated affection for them. Much more complicated now. He wanted a solution that, instead of dooming them, would somehow save them, too. From their recklessness. From themselves.
Mama Joon’s words came back to him now . . .
The next time a storm is coming—and believe me a storm is gonna come—you get on the first thing smoking and worry ’bout the rest later, you hear me? . . . and then come back when the coast is clear. Or—or never!
And he knew what he had to do—an evacuation was in order.
He pulled the small black suitcase Mama Joon had bought him from under his bed and began picking through the clothes in his closet and dresser. With evacuations, you never knew how long you’d be gone. Could be a day. Could be a week. Could be longer. Some people had never come back after the storm. But the optimist in him said, “Pack light.” He folded two pairs of jeans, one blue, one black, and tossed them into the suitcase, along with about a week’s worth of white briefs, T-shirts, and socks.
While on his knees in his closet rummaging through his sneakers, he came across the old laptop he had taken years ago from the Quicky Mart. He hadn’t touched it since before Mama Joon died, but today he couldn’t resist. Snapping it open, he revealed the letter tucked inside; he’d forgotten it was in there. Moments later, staring at the screen, at Aleppo, his old boyhood passion flared up again. He liked to tell himself he wasn’t that little kid anymore, the one crazed with longing. But with Mama Joon gone, and his only known relatives out to get him, he felt his heart regressing, aching with boyish need. He picked up the envelope, looking at the front first, and then at the return address on the ba
ck. Aleppo: 6,722 miles away.
He remembered talking to Mama Joon about going there. Yes, there was a war going on in Syria. Damascus, certainly. But not Aleppo yet. Still, it was clear from the news that the country, except for the mad or the brave, was off limits.
But . . . Istanbul wasn’t. Only 6,175 miles away.
Turkey? Ha—You say “turkey” to me and I start preheating the oven!
She was whispering through his memory, nudging him out of his duress, just the two of them watching the ships come in and head out.
No. Like the Ottoman Empire, he had told her.
You say “ottoman” to me and I wanna put my feet up!
Soon he was stretched out on his closet floor, writhing with laughter on a bed of Reeboks and Nikes.
Only after he composed himself did he realize that, like the Magician, he had everything he needed. Money. A passport. An iPhone. An idea . . .
Everything he needed to make himself disappear.
Two months, he had heard his cousins conclude, was the time required to deflect suspicion of their intended crime. Ramadan started a countdown of his own. As advance warnings go, two months was an eternity. He would need only two days.
* * *
AS HE GOOGLED, clicked, and white-lied his way to and through the Delta Airlines online ticket-purchasing process—there were, indeed, no flights to Syria, so Istanbul it was—he learned that, because of his age, he would need the assistance of an adult. Someone would have to show up with him at the airport, according to the information posted under the airline’s “Unaccompanied Minor Program.” Pretending to be fifteen years old allowed him to buy the tickets (New Orleans to Atlanta, from there to Istanbul) with his American Express card, but if anyone at the airport bothered to read the birth date on his passport, he would be exposed as underage. He needed an adult to check him in and send him on his way. Of course, that wasn’t Clarissa or any other Ramsey. Mr. Willie, the lawyer in charge of his finances, would never agree to his leaving the city alone, much less the country—plus he would ask too many questions anyway. Ramadan’s independence would become as endangered as his life. Mama Joon’s secession plan, as messy and tenuous as it had proven, had given him the thrill of autonomy. His entire life was one magnificent “Unaccompanied Minor Program”—and he was not willing to relinquish that, at least not without testing the limits of his freedom. He would probably wind up a regular kid again, once Mr. Willie saw the credit card bill next month. But by then he would be long gone. Maybe already back. Or maybe—who knew—gone for good.
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