She’d been enamored of Lucien even before moving into the basement. While doing Marie-Ange’s hair in her salon, she’d indulged in fantasies of being married to a stable, respectable man with a house he’d bought legitimately with his hard-earned money.
Asante hadn’t really hated Marie-Ange. She’d just thought that she was oddly stuck-up for someone who willingly displayed her vulgarity, discussing sex with beauty shop workers and patrons. She’d hated the way Marie-Ange would enter her shop on 135th and Rockaway Boulevard as if she both owned it and was embarrassed to be there. Asante’s shop was in the black section of SOP, the poor section, the deep hood, close to the Van Wyck Expressway. A few blocks down, one street over from P.S. 96, was where the nicer part of SOP began. Once you hit the 120s, you were safe. You were in mixed Caribbean, hanging-on Italian, misplaced Latino, dislocated Indian, solid, confirmed hardworking immigrant territory. La Kay territory.
Her boyfriend had used her place and her body to satisfy his cocaine customers who needed a safe place to get high. She’d had so many men before and after her baby daddy, but Lucien had been her last. As far as Asante had known, Lucien had been Marie-Ange’s only lover. She’d become jealous of Marie-Ange in earnest then. Feeling pretty and envious at the same time, she’d started strutting in front of Lucien’s wife. Asante upped her game and styled her hair in drastic and dramatic coifs pulled back to accentuate her widow’s peak, lengthened with horsetail weaves that slapped her ass. Her chiseled facial features and perfect skin looked severe and almost masklike. She couldn’t accept that she looked like a Nigerian princess, not after years of booty-scratcher teasing, not after being dropkicked onto a broken bottle by a schoolyard bully, not after the five-inch keloid line she still boasted on her left triceps from that event. She got a snake tattoo to leverage and embellish the shape of her scar.
Sol saw clearly how Lucien had robbed Asante of what remained of her beauty. Just as her looks were becoming fashionably and acceptably pretty in the eyes of the dominant society and its subcultures, Asante had had to go underground to shake the cops who had been tipped off about the drug activity in and above her salon. She’d turned to Lucien for a place to rent, since it was no longer safe to live in the apartment above her shop. She’d left her boyfriend there but whisked away her grandson and her daughter to the safety of Lucien’s basement. With money tight because the DEA was watching, she’d paid the rent with blow jobs, fast fucks from behind, and the occasional in-home wash-and-set and mani-pedi for stubborn and wise customers who would have no one else touch them but knew better than to go to her narc-surveilled shop.
Asante had been smart enough to know when the DEA would descend on her shop. She asked Lucien to hide her somewhere farther and deeper than the basement. Did he know anyone in Haiti who would be willing to put her up while things cooled down on the boulevard? Lucien said yes, but she would have to give him a couple of days, maybe a week. In the meantime, she might want to send her daughter and grandson down south where they had family. Asante had not seen her daughter and grandson or the light of day since. Only candlelight.
One, Two, Three, and My. I am not and can never be Zero. She is silent, empty. But she can scream. I used to hear her. Scream only when he says so. Be his Zero. Come! Scream now! Because I have no scream left in me. Only cough. I want to yell like I want to see the sky again. Even if I have to bring him flowers for the grave again. I want to go where I don’t burn or sweat or ache. I want to see and be seen like the sky.
They had been invisible, Sol and her mother, but never as invisible as My. He was truly undocumented—no fabricated name to attend school under, no dilapidated passport with a fading visa stamp from a border crossing. No, they’d been nearly as invisible. They’d crossed undetected. No one had known they’d existed except the coyote who’d introduced them to their employer and landlord. In New York, they’d been seen in the one-room where they’d rented a bed, on the street where they’d sold flowers and fruit, in the classroom where English had seemed impossible. Sol had spent her time looking at the sky for herself, never even looking at the flowers she sold alongside her mother on the weekends. They would go out with the pretty buds, bottles of water, and peeled oranges neatly halved and bagged for drivers at red lights. Lucien and Marie-Ange would patronize the roadside bodega.
Lucien had seen them. He had a knack for seeing the invisible. He was always looking down at the ground for treasure.
Sol had believed that she’d been invisible to him. Just a barterer, a faceless girl, a hand stuck into his car window to give him change, flowers, water, oranges. A hand pulling back with bills, coins, the odd bag of new-like old clothes, some with tags. Things his wife had bought for their daughters but they’d never worn. Lucien would have Sol reach in instead of him reaching out. Sol had thought that meant he was passive, harmless, welcoming. He had drawn her in one exchange at a time for nearly a decade. He was just a middle-aged man, the color of butterscotch, with hair the same curly texture as hers. He could have been her father. He could be. Who knew? Not her mother, who could no longer recount the story because she had disappeared into the custody of INS. No Department of Homeland Security, the immigration abyss since 2002. She had vanished and been made invisible to Sol. But, having been captured, she would continue to be visible to and illegal in the eyes of DHS. It was better not to be seen, to be more invisible than My.
The stories of who they had been—Asante, her mother, herself—mixed together like swill in a bucket. Sol kept herself from tearing up at the knowledge that he’d contorted them into unrecognizable and then utterly unseen figures.
LA KAY
Sweet La Kay. There had been a tropical fruit cola named after It. At least, that’s what It liked to believe. Sweet Home. It didn’t feel like a home, just a house. Just any old house on 123rd Street between Rockaway Boulevard and Sutter Avenue in Queens. It was a cookie-cutter two-story structure with a basement, of course. It had white aluminum siding with red trim. Its favorite feature was Its six brick steps that rose to Its front door. It had always wanted a red door to match, but Its owners had placed and replaced the same ugly wooden door with an even tackier screen door that didn’t match anything. Not that It could see Itself from the outside. It had only caught glimpses in the windowpanes of the house across the street.
As much as It liked to hear about the goings-on at the other houses, It never let on that there were maddening things happening on Its insides. But even though Its neighbors told only rose-colored versions of their inner disturbances, It guessed that they had their own troubles. How could they not? Every house was on the alert for sad news. La Kay listened as the entire neighborhood, borough, and city shook under so much trouble. New York’s blackout had practically turned looting into a competitive sport. The Howard Beach Incident had confirmed that lynching was not dead and could and did happen north of the Mason-Dixon. Later, similar horrors befell immigrants like the ones who had taken over SOP.
The chief evil inside La Kay had unfolded on a sunny day, proof that darkness was not necessary for malevolence to overrun a place. It kept Its mouth shut and Its eyes peeled only because of the music. It had always believed that the tunes had been the only reason It hadn’t tried to kill Itself sooner. It would stay up late on Friday nights and rise early on Saturday and Sunday mornings to hear the sounds Lucien would play from around the world.
Three artists had kept It alive in the eighties—Michael Jackson, Kassav’, and Rakim. Every song on Michael Jackson’s Thriller moved It to convulsive catharsis. It listened as Lucien’s eldest daughter, Veille, played “Human Nature” until the record skipped from scratches. It understood what she was trying to understand and cried with her every time. It knew why she’d never let the record get to “P.Y.T. (Pretty Young Thing).”
It had found relief when his second daughter, Clair, caught the vibe of zouk from Martinique and Guadeloupe, because It could dance instead of commi
serating. It also got to see the Louvertures in action as a family. It watched and sighed as Lucien would snatch Marie-Ange or one of the girls from the kitchen. Zouk really was medicine, as the hit song said. It preferred this to the kompas records that seemed to never end, leaving It feeling sorry for whatever daughter Lucien insisted on dancing with. Long gone were the days when he’d have his partner’s feet on his, teaching her how to step and sway to Haiti’s signature music genre. But, mercifully, fast-paced zouk allowed for separation between the dancers unless they chose to come together to zouké.
Most of all, La Kay had fallen in love with rap music that had yet to go mainstream as hip-hop. It preferred the rebelliousness of a music still defining itself while resisting definition or even acceptance by the dominant culture. It learned about the hardships of the poor while listening to Rakim rhyme about his hunger for a plate of fish and resisting the past devious deeds he’d done to acquire it. It heard him make his DJ Eric B. president while Jesse Jackson forcibly etched his name on a ballot. It got a taste of what it must have been like to be inhabited by black poets in the 1960s. It applauded as Veille, Clair, and even Whitney Houston–crooning Dor made up dances to the new music. Their bounces, their hip-hoppin’ poppin’ and lockin’ were better than anything they could have learned via formal dance lessons because it broke them out of the imprisoning expectations of their parents. La Kay tried to help by sealing the holes in their bedroom walls, so they could dress in their pin-striped Lee jeans and double-laced Adidas unobserved.
It would have shut down Lucien’s weekend card games if not for the sound track. But even while appeased by the music, It had still tried to force him and his card sharks out. For three months straight, It conveniently sprung leaks in the bathroom pipes directly above the dining table–turned–card slab. From Friday night until Sunday midmorning, It had rained over the heads of delinquent dads, wife-beating husbands, and mortgage-gambling louses who played poker under beach umbrellas rather than go home. It finally succeeded at getting the gamblers out of Marie-Ange’s house by forcing Lucien’s casino into the garage in the middle of December. He had pleaded with Marie-Ange to let him host his low-rollers in the basement, but she refused to displace Ezili’s temple. The basement was out of the question. His only option had been the garage, which was another matter altogether. Not all the houses had garages. But, regretfully, all of them had basements and some of those basements had safe rooms.
Over the years La Kay had been too busy trying to protect Its female visitors and inhabitants from Lucien’s advances. It also saw no need to secure what had already been protected by the goddess Ezili. It wasn’t going to mess with the perfection of a spirit who, when properly worshipped, had the power to boil and dissolve enemies into syrup where they stood. Even Lucien seemed to bow to Ezili’s powers—that was, until Marie-Ange got sick. Their declining fortunes forced her to accept a basement tenant whom she knew was one of at least a dozen of his voluntary or coerced mistresses. With Ezili in the boiler room struggling to be seen under a single dangling lightbulb, Marie-Ange let Lucien have his way. She had already warned him of Ezili’s revenge for his vilest violation, the line he had not only crossed but permanently stripped away. She had already told him that Ezili would whip him with his own strap. There had been no need to warn him again. La Kay agreed and went about Its business minding their teenaged daughters, who had been preparing to get the hell out of Lucien’s house for their own safety and sanity. Fortunately, they were gone by the time Lucien’s madness had reached its peak.
With two women and a baby boy inhabiting the basement, La Kay had to turn Its attentions downward. It had watched as Lucien breezed through at all times of the day or night to be serviced by a willing, even eager Asante.
La Kay had heard about her from KAM’s gossiping patrons. But it wasn’t until the first time she’d visited that It had seen for Itself that, even at her best, she couldn’t compete with Marie-Ange. Even when Marie-Ange had gotten sick, even when she’d been a couple of years from dying, Asante had not been able to outdo Marie-Ange’s elegance and had had nothing to rival her smile. Asante’s own teeth were crooked and rotten from decades wearing gold fronts and caps as well as the occasional hit from her boyfriend’s customers’ crack pipes. The only thing Asante had ever had on Marie-Ange, post-sickness, was her walk. Men and women alike hurt to see Asante walk—sexy, coquettish, swishing and swaying in the highest heels possible. She had been determined to look five foot something. A hand on her hip with one holding a cigarette to her mouth had injured the egos of wannabe divas who just couldn’t outdo her Marilyn Monroe–Olivia Newton-John bad-girl cigarette drag. A true beautician, Asante never sat down, not even on a high stool that would have kept her at the same height as her heels. Her walk did not suffer until the basement.
La Kay had devoted half of Its attention to watching the basement, while focusing on Marie-Ange, whose health had been declining. In the blink of an eye Asante’s daughter and grandson were gone. Before It could properly search, Asante had also vanished into a corner of Itself It had always neglected. It had felt an itch like a mosquito bite in an unreachable, unknowable place.
Before It knew it, the music had started to play less often and more quietly. La Kay had settled into Its sadness, not wanting to kill Itself while Marie-Ange lay dying.
Three
LUCIEN
Lucien awoke to the odor of Leona’s cooking and mentholated ointment. The latter was an up-close, almost pleasant smell emanating from his body. The former was yet another of her attempts to make her cooking palatable. Her profound care and immense effort were as futile as her attempts to coax him into conversation. He could smell her eggs, nauseatingly fried in butter and oil despite her use of a nonstick pan. To give him a taste of home, she had bought ready-made coffee from a shop near his house earlier that morning. It was the closest thing to the Café Bustelo he preferred. (Later, he would be grateful that she even allowed him full-fat evaporated milk and genuine white sugar to make up for having dragged him away from his perishing home.) He knew that what he really needed was tea with lemon and honey to help his cough but appreciated that she’d resisted her natural inclination to forcibly nurse him. On the nightstand on her side of the bed, he saw the NyQuil she had not bothered to make him to take the night before. He never had trouble sleeping anyway.
Since all he smelled of himself was the vapor of Vicks, he figured that he must have acquiesced to the long hot bath she’d insisted on the night before. He knew that he must have first fallen asleep in the tub. The bathwater seasoned with VapoRub had been augmented by what she’d rubbed on his chest, his back, and the soles of his feet. It was clear to him that she was running out of genuine Haitian luile maskreti that was neither cheap nor easy to find in New York. Lucien rubbed his nose, feeling the greasy stripes of menthol on either side. Somehow, he recognized her efforts as love.
How Leona could love someone she didn’t know was a mystery to him. Yes, she had practically lived with him during Marie-Ange’s illness. But Leona didn’t even know his actual age and had not met any members of his family except for his daughters, who’d barely spoken to her at Marie-Ange’s funeral. He wondered: How could a woman not know, not ask, why his daughters wanted nothing to do with him? She doesn’t want to know. Why tell her what she doesn’t want to know? Why scare her with the truth? Let her sleep. Let her dream that Marie-Ange had placed her hand in mine as a blessing. He had no intention of disclosing or explaining anything. Some of his past would have further endeared him to her. The other parts might have sent her running but would have explained why he was still such a good lover in his sixties and so agile after two strokes. She knew and believed what he wanted her to know. That he came from a well-to-do family in Jacmel. That his parents had left him in the care of his aunt when he was a baby. That they had not sent for him until he was in his twenties, married, with one born child and twins on the way. Who he’d been back home wa
s either a mystery or a falsified memory packaged as selective personal history.
Lucien had had many girls before Marie-Ange had given him three of his own. The doorway she’d always seen him leaning against after school on Fridays had been his bar. Not because he’d owned Bar Caimite outright, but because he’d owned all the women and girls who’d brought in customers for drinks that had helped fill the true proprietor’s coffers. A small commission from the profits the girls turned over had helped Lucien maintain the façade of a legitimate proprietorship of an established watering hole. But that was just a snippet, a blip, an aberration, in an otherwise crimeless life, he would explain to Leona if she ever found out about that time. His Caimite girls had been his everything because he could count them. He could cry in front of them. He could let them hear the whispered words that they knew were true: I am nothing. I am nothing without you. He even let them hear him count as he took them in the darkest corners of the bar. Nothing until I take, until I count, until I make you mine. He found a more permanent way to push the tears and words down into the void inside himself. He turned himself into a family man in earnest, thanks to Marie-Ange, his parents, and a few exploitative lenders.
Lucien had chosen to become what he’d wanted to be, but had allowed his wife, his parents, and even his creditors to believe that they had made him. He’d done the same with Leona, who still held the conviction that she was a savior who’d been sent by Marie-Ange to care for him. He let her believe that her son, who looked more like him than his own, and granddaughter were the family he’d always wanted. That had always been his game—architecting false families, playing house, and appeasing women with believable lies and terrific sex.
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