by Owen Sheers
In contrast to Caroline’s movements across the globe, all Michael’s previous addresses, except for his childhood home and one apartment in Manhattan, had been in London. Having left Cornwall to study in the capital, he’d stayed on after graduation, joining the Evening Standard as an intern. Over the next five years of jobbing journalism—diary pieces, reviews, news features, and comment—Michael had steadily increased his word length and salary until, in his late twenties, fearing the ossification he’d detected in some of his older colleagues, he’d left the Standard and moved to Manhattan. He’d arrived in the city holding a journalist’s visa and equipped with a list of British editors who’d agreed to use him as a stringer, feeding their publications’ appetites for all things New York. Which is exactly what Michael did. But he hadn’t moved to America to follow the same path he’d been cutting in Britain. The distance he’d flown from London to New York had been about attempting another journey, too: from being a journalist, which he’d called himself ever since university, towards becoming an author.
Michael’s first book, BrotherHoods, was the story of Nico and Raoul, two Dominican brothers from Inwood. A close portrait of their lives and world, the book was a narrative of thwarted ambition, of failure. For Michael it was the consequence of one, too. All through his first year in America, as he’d written reports on parties, observational pieces about the Super Bowl, travel articles on the Hudson Valley painters, Michael had harboured aspirations of becoming a novelist. But fiction had continued to elude him. For reasons he never fathomed, regardless of how many hours he spent at his desk, or in how many cafés he made notes, his imagination kept falling short at the border of the invented. The prose of the writers he admired—Salter, Balzac, Fitzgerald, Atwood—remained unattainable to him. He could register their effect when he read them, he could see how their novels and stories worked, how their moving parts fitted together. But like the engineer skilled at dismantling a plane’s engine, and yet unable to make it fly, Michael found his own words remained stubbornly grounded on the page.
Michael had been convinced that New York would unlock the novel he’d failed to write in London. The Hudson gleaming magnesium of a morning; the taillight rivers on Lexington and Third; the city’s scale, at once intimate and grand. Manhattan already felt like a novel to him, as if all he’d have to do was take dictation from its streets. But he’d been wrong, which is why halfway through his second year of living in the city, in the wake of his failure with fiction, Michael started splicing the taste of it into his journalism instead.
He began on his own doorstep, telling the story of Ali, the Armenian deli owner on the corner of his block, from his early-morning washing of the sidewalk to his midnight serving of condoms and chewing gum to coked-up SoHo models. When this piece was taken by The Atlantic, the editor asked him for another. So Michael moved his attention across the street to Marilia, the black mother of six who’d volunteered at the school crossing every morning and evening for the last twenty years. Through Marilia he’d gained an introduction into the school itself, where he’d found his next subject in its harrowed headmaster, shadowing him as he juggled the timetable, staff shortages, gun detection, and the demands of downtown parents.
In researching these early stories, Michael found his Englishness opened doors for him. Not in institutions, but in people. There was, in all his subjects, an assumption of his integrity, drawn, he supposed, from associations with the BBC and films by Merchant Ivory. Combined with his natural manner—a calm patience laced with pressing curiosity—this cultural assumption allowed Michael to get close quickly. The people he interviewed trusted him, and in return he took their trust seriously, listening, recording, and taking notes as they talked; trying, as best as he could, to see the city through their eyes and feel it through their skin.
With every story he took on, from the Central Park millionaire to the street-sleeper in the Bronx, Michael’s technique was immersive. His initial approach was time: the willingness to spend it, to be there and observe at even the most mundane of events until, despite his height and his accent, people began to forget his presence. He took to cutting hundreds of strips of white card, slender enough to fit into the inside pocket of his jacket. These, he found, were less obtrusive than a notebook and somehow less threatening, too, as if what he wrote on them wasn’t being recorded but merely jotted down and would, like any other scrap of paper, not be around for long.
When, after months of such research, Michael felt he’d seen and heard enough—and it was always a feeling more than a knowing, a sense at the edges of his vision—he would leave his subjects’ lives as suddenly as he’d entered them. Taking their stories to his desk in his SoHo apartment, he’d immerse himself again, this time borrowing a novelistic style to disappear himself not just from his subjects’ lives, but also from the paragraphs he wrote about them. Even though he’d been there at their sides when the events he described happened—when the health inspector had seen a rat, when a kid attacked his maths teacher, when the millionaire’s dog was put down—in the finished published piece, Michael was never there. Just the characters remained, living their lives in third person through the hours of the city as if through the pages of a novel.
His style became the antithesis of Gonzo journalism, an eradication of the writer in the writing. A disappearing act of saturation that was informed by the immersive nature of his research, but unfettered, too, by direct experience. So although he hadn’t been with them, Michael still described Ali waking in bed, Marilia singing in the shower, or the way the millionaire picked up his coffee at a morning meeting in Brazil. Such moments, although unseen by Michael, were written from what he’d learnt about his subjects at other times, in other places, upon not just what he knew was true, but also what he knew to be true. And this is what he’d hoped to achieve in those early New York stories: to find a way of using the freedoms of descriptive fiction to make the real lives he wrote about even more real.
By the time Michael met Nico and Raoul he’d already begun looking for a subject through which to extend his writing from the pages of a magazine to the pages of a book. His desire to be an author hadn’t ebbed when he turned his back on a novel. With a clutch of respected pieces under his belt, and a cast of characters rendered through his immersive style, he was ready to try again.
It was a policeman who’d put Michael in touch with Nico and Raoul. They were chatting outside the subway entrance on Broadway and 201st, a couple of take-out coffees steaming in their hands. It was February and smudged banks of snow still bordered the street. A flat winter light fell upon the storefronts. Men and women commuted to work in padded coats, wearing gloves and hats made for the mountains.
Michael had travelled up to Inwood Hill Park that morning to see the site where Dutch traders first bought Manhattan, trading it from the Lenape Indians for a bag of trinkets worth twenty-four dollars. He’d only recently got to know the area north of Washington Heights, but its rawness had already got under his skin. The street theatre he’d discovered up there in the blocks off Inwood, Dyckman, and Broadway seemed more varied than that a hundred blocks south, more explicitly immigrant in its nature. Dominican men played dominoes outside O’Grady’s, The Gael Bar, The Old Brigade Pub, their walls still painted with shamrocks and IRA flags. Dark-windowed Yukons throbbed with Reggaeton at the stoplights. Puerto Rican drag queens drank cocktails in the salsa clubs, youths in thug nighties to their knees catcalling them from the corners. Farther off, in the park itself, rangy black kids surged between the hoops of basketball courts while Italian grandfathers watched Little League baseball, the hollow punts of a Mexican soccer game filtering up from the field below.
Up there, above 200th, as he’d wandered the streets, Michael had felt he was within touching distance of Manhattan’s original desire. That whatever had driven those Dutch traders could still be tasted in the air, and unlike farther south in the city, where origin had been diluted by money, the island’s history of immigrant fuel was
still on display. Each community he saw up there—the Dominicans, the Mexicans, the Irish, the African—seemed like the rings of a tree to him, ethnic watermarks of the island’s growth and change.
Michael had got talking to the policeman at a coffee stand on the edge of the park. As they’d stirred in their sugars he’d asked him if he’d seen much change in the neighbourhood. The cop had laughed, shaking his head. “Oh, man,” he’d said. “Like you wouldn’t believe. Always changin’ up here.” They’d carried on talking as they’d strolled back towards his position at the subway entrance, Michael asking him if they got much trouble in the area. The cop had shrugged. “Some,” he’d said. “Mostly drugs, domestics.” Then, blowing on his coffee and stamping his feet, he’d told Michael about “a couple of punks,” two Dominican brothers who’d walked the length of Arden at four in the morning the night before, smashing the roadside window of every car. They’d left the street thick with alarm sirens, shirtless men shouting down at the sidewalks from tall apartment blocks swirling with car lights.
As Michael had listened to the policeman describe the scene, he’d known immediately that he wanted to meet these boys, to find out who they were and why they’d landed on such a dramatic gesture of vandalism. He could already sense the hinterland behind the act, the stories emanating either side of the moment. He asked the policeman if he could meet them, these brothers. The cop raised his eyebrows, then sucked in the air through his teeth. He was Latino, broad-faced, with a full moustache. Michael pulled a fifty from his wallet and folded it twice. The policeman looked at it for a moment, then took it, shrugging again as he slipped it into his pocket, as if to say who was he to change the order of things? The following morning, in the office of their caseworker, Michael came eye-to-eye for the first time with the mistrusting stares of Nico and Raoul.
For the next three years, sometimes as often as four times a week, Michael rode the A train north, immersing himself in the lives of the brothers. He began spending days at a time in the neighbourhood, staying at a guesthouse overlooking the wooded slopes of the park. From his top-floor bedroom he witnessed three autumns burnish its trees, among which the island’s original Lenape inhabitants had once made their cave dwellings. After a year of regularly checking him in, the owner supplied Michael with a desk, an old pine table notched and scarred with the cuttings of a kitchen knife. As he wrote up his notes in that room over those three falls, he witnessed the beginnings of gentrification take root in the area. Temporary Sunday market stalls evolved into permanent secondhand bookstores and cafés. Real estate offices moved in to occupy the premises of launderettes and cobblers. Young white couples began painting the exteriors of boarded-up houses. The bright colours of baby buggies and infant slings began dotting the pathways of the park on midweek afternoons.
―
At first, Michael’s ignorance of the brothers’ world in the streets and blocks west of this park was in his favour. He was an oddity: a tall English guy with a preppy haircut and an accent like from one of those British sitcoms. Handy to have around for a word to a social worker, or to touch for money. At times he was like a child to them, eager to learn, to harvest what they knew. But gradually, over the months and then the years, the scales of knowledge began to tip. After the apprenticeship of his magazine stories Michael had become adept at fitting himself to the lives of others. He never blended as such, but he did begin to stick. Among Nico and Raoul’s friends an appreciation for his stubbornness began to grow, and with it an acknowledgement that at least he wanted to listen, at least he wanted to try and see things from their point of view. In the goldfish bowl of Inwood’s street life he even began to be sought after, for advice or confidence. When Nico’s girlfriend got pregnant, Michael knew before he did. When Raoul ran for a rival dealer, he made Michael swear he’d never tell his brother. But his learning of their world was not always helpful. The police pressured him to give them leads, while the growing currency of his knowledge began to unnerve some of the older boys. Michael in the dark was one thing. Michael knowing too much was another thing altogether.
The A train Michael took from SoHo up to Inwood followed the route of a Lenape hunting path that once traced the length of Manhattan’s forests and hills. One morning, as if he’d sensed a regeneration of that route’s purpose in Michael’s visits, Nico had called him on what he was doing. They were hanging out at their aunt’s apartment at the time, a studio high in the projects on Tenth Avenue.
“El tronco’s a hunter, bro, I tellin’ you,” Nico said from the couch, speaking to Raoul but holding Michael’s eye. “Ain’t you, Mikey?” he continued, flicking a toothpick at him. “A lootin’ puta. Ain’t that you? Jus’ divin’ on us wrecks up here.”
Michael laughed it off at the time, but for a few seconds he’d felt the air tighten between them. Not so much because of the threat in Nico’s voice, but because they all knew, whether intentionally or not, what he’d said was true.
―
Five years after first meeting Nico and Raoul in their case-worker’s office, Michael published BrotherHoods. He’d hoped the book would help the brothers, but it didn’t. HBO bought their life rights, for $25,000 each. They said they wanted to make a series. That they wanted to use their characters to build a long-running franchise. Box sets, advertisements on the sides of city buses. But nothing came of it. For a brief period the two of them basked in their newfound notoriety. But in the end the attention, the money, fanned their troubles more than doused them. As the book became the talked-of publication in Manhattan, Nico, its central character, began a sentence upstate for unlawful possession of a firearm. Raoul, in trouble with a dealer and without his brother’s protection, went to stay with a cousin in a one-bed in Pennsylvania. At the same time as they left the city, readers across Manhattan were being introduced to them. On subway trains, park benches, under duvets by the light of bedside lamps. Throughout New York and beyond—in Vermont, San Francisco, across the whole country—students on college lawns, commuters on trains, middle-aged couples on sofas were all embarking on the small tragedies of the brothers’ lives.
Within weeks of publication Michael was receiving requests for interviews and to appear on talk shows. The New York Times, which had once run his pieces, now ran a profile on him instead. While he was researching and writing the book he’d neglected his personal life. Although he’d begun a couple of relationships, none of them had withstood the intensity of his research, nor his split existence at each end of the island. Increasingly his thoughts had been taken up with the brothers, and then with the writing of the book, with their lives in its pages. For five years he’d lived not just alongside Nico and Raoul, but also often through them, his own life becoming a shell of routine and observation. Now, though, on the other side of the book’s publication, women suddenly seemed available to him. He was thirty-five and single, and had been anointed by New York success. He started seeing his publicist. Then there’d been a Dominican journalist. Her interview with him had been challenging, even aggressive. But afterwards she’d invited him to dinner and they’d soon become a couple. When that had eventually ended, in the weeks following a reading at Columbia, Michael had gone home with not one but two of the students who’d been in the audience.
He was aware of the clichés he was living, of how predictable it looked. But, he told himself, he wasn’t harming anyone, and wasn’t this, perhaps, part of what he’d earned during those three years of riding the A train the length of the island and then another two sitting alone at his desk? But above all Michael had known it wouldn’t last, and that’s why he’d given himself so willingly to his unlikely present, half expecting every day to wake and find it already transfigured into his past.
For Nico and Raoul, BrotherHoods and its author became another disappointment in their lives, confirmation, as they’d always suspected, that the world was set against them. Michael tried to keep in touch with them, but with the appearance of the book their already diverging paths accelerated. While
Nico served his time upstate and Raoul sat out his self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, Michael’s publisher sent him on a national book tour. In a series of events across the country, despite his uneasiness in front of an audience, Michael began to discover a public persona—a diffident, dry humour that journalists and publicists billed as “British.” On the underlying issues of the book, though, he was never anything other than serious. The title, he’d explain to smatterings of readers in Ohio and Carolina, and then again to capacity auditoriums in Los Angeles and Austin, referred to us all. Not just to Nico and Raoul and the territories over which they and their peers fought, but also to the cheek-by-jowl neighbourhoods of Manhattan, of America, the world. Look about you, he’d told them. These people and their stories are happening under your nose. Their story is our story. No man, woman, or child is an island. Yes, the book was about two young Dominican men in Inwood, but it was also, through them, about us all, about our ability to live close, and yet so far from one another.
The audiences had nodded, applauded, and afterwards asked for Michael’s signature on the title page of the book. When the paperback was published he donated a percentage of his royalties to education projects in Inwood and Washington Heights. But still, every time he said his sentence about neighbourhoods, about living close and far, he knew he himself was moving further away from the brothers who’d first lent him their lives. As he’d moved across the country on his tour, from hotel to airport to university, so Nico and Raoul had moved, too. Nico from cell to refectory to exercise yard and back to his cell again. Raoul from his cousin’s bedsit in Pennsylvania to another in Albany, to the room of a girl he’d met on the street, to the couch of her friend. Within just a few months the years Michael had shared with the brothers had become undone, unravelled by the publication of his story about their time together.