Breaking the Cycle

by Zane

  Whatever the case, as I walked to the store for Madame Evangeline I was free. Even as the streets began to fill with people going to work (and that segment of people who never worked but instead stood about the streets all day) I went to the aforementioned Arab store (with the porn rack in the back). In front of the store some local youths had gathered, as was usually the case. I don’t know what exactly their relationship with the Arabs was, but like I said, the youths were always there; and several times an hour, cars would stop at the curb and one of the youths would go to the car to make a furtive exchange.

  I had finished my shopping and taken about three steps away from the store (and the gang of youths) when a car rushed around the corner. I turned at the sound of the screeching tires and saw a man lean out of the window with a machine gun in hand. I stood there, frozen, while bullets and bullet-riddled bodies flew all around me. One of the youths (who had been shot in the chest) tumbled toward me and bumped into me as he dropped lifelessly to the ground. I looked around slowly (or so it seemed in my mind) digesting death, consuming the evil of it—yet from the distance of someone impervious to it. By now, all the youths were either dead or writhing in pain on the ground. Only then did it occur to me that it was a miracle that I hadn’t been shot as well. I took out the amulet and stared at it as the car rushed away. I can’t remember if I actually did grin, but a feeling of amazement came over me as I held the amulet and looked at the bodies at my feet. I was indeed impervious to evil, just like Madame Evangeline had said!

  It was the police that finally chased me away; else I might have stayed there forever, reveling in my triumph over evil. The youths at my feet, broken and bloody, had seemed pathetic then, just like everything else in the adult world. I returned to Madame Evangeline’s shop in great spirits. She, on the other hand, was merely annoyed that I had taken so long; then, as my prattle and youthful ebullience began to exhaust the last of her patience, she chased me away.

  Unfazed, I rushed home, thinking that maybe there would be some change in my aunt. She seemed the same, settling into her usual place on the couch, but I figured that maybe the magic of the amulet needed time to work. I smiled at her and left. I walked about the neighborhood again, then went to my playground, the vacant lot and, beyond that, the crack houses that served as my Aztec temples. It was while I was making my rounds of the basement (and imagining ancient dungeons) that I first came upon Tisha. She was about 13 and had transformed one of the basement rooms into a dollhouse. She had swept away the accumulated trash and drug vials, and laid a plush area rug on the floor. Pink curtains had been hoisted over the shattered windows, and as the sun’s rays shone through them, the room was suffused in a pinkish hue. There was a potpourri scent in the air that made me hungry for some reason—probably because it reminded me of cake. And there were dozens of dolls in the place—big, fluffy ones, stylish, diminutive ones—white ones, black ones. With my amulet in hand, this place seemed to be a direct result of its magic. First I had been spared from obvious death, and now I was meeting an angel in a sheltered paradise. Tisha had been tending to the curtains when I entered, but when I stopped in the open doorway the floor creaked, so that she stopped and turned. She was beautiful—so beautiful that I stared in amazement, and perhaps with that strange terror that people felt when they came upon something that encompassed both their dearest dreams and dreams they hadn’t dreamed yet, dreams they perhaps didn’t have the courage and foresight to dream.

  “Would you like to play?” she asked me, smiling. She was from the South and had a melodious drawl that seemed to melt like butter in the summer heat. That drawl had reminded me of Madame Evangeline. It wasn’t that they sounded the same (because they didn’t) but that accents suddenly seemed to be a mark of magic.

  I nodded shyly and entered.

  Tisha was her nickname. She had one of those unpronounceable black names with multiple apostrophes and several capitalized letters inserted in the middle. I learned later that she lived in another neighborhood—in another hamlet where there was a (drug) lord no different from our own. I had seen many girls like Tisha during my explorations of the building, impressionable children taken in by the allure of easy wealth and older men. Even the boys were taken in by the allure, so I’m not entirely convinced that what attracted the kids was entirely sexual. The sexuality of children revolved not around the act of sex, but in finding safety and comfort with those older and stronger than themselves. Anyway, most of the impressionable girls became full-blown crackheads—and were turned out when their usefulness to the lord waned; most of the impressionable boys became low-level drug dealers/enforcers/decoys/messengers and either ended up in jail or dead. Of course, this is my view of it now. Back then, I knew only that Tisha was beautiful. Like I said before, a feeling of joy and panic settled over me—like when you’re walking down the street and unexpectedly come upon a treasure. After the joy of finding it, your second impulse is to hide it away lest someone (like the owner or another desperate wanderer) might take it away from you. Even as I stood there I was hiding Tisha away within myself. I actively conjured the fantasy that we were somehow separated from the outside world. In time, I even think I began to imagine that Tisha and this place were byproducts of my imagination—and that I would be able to conjure them at any time, like all the little childish fantasies that I kept to myself.

  Tisha and I played all that first afternoon, strange games revolving about her dolls and her imagination. She constructed elaborate scenarios, within which the dolls lived full, healthy lives, and in which we were the impresarios of God’s will, righting injustices and bringing happiness to the faithful. We played until it became so dark that the rats began to view us as intruders, and the weird noises of the crack house at night began to terrify us. The building was a couple hundred years old, so we imagined that the noises we heard, and the movements we detected in the shadows, were from the ghosts of countless generations. Now that night had come, these ghosts were arising to continue their eternal vigil through the rooms and passages where they had lost their lives and souls. Over there was that 15-year-old crackhead whose brains had been blown out a few weeks ago; here was that tubercular Russian immigrant from 120 years ago, wasting away in rags and surrounded by the 12 members of his extended family, who had shared the same room, the same disease and, eventually, the same gruesome fate. All these restless souls were wandering the gutted apartments, bemoaning their own wasted lives and the lives of those they had managed to love.

  Yet, as Tisha and I fled from the building, onto the ghetto streets where the first feeble street lamps had begun to flicker on, it was all another game to us. We were actually laughing when we reached the curb—perhaps reveling in our victory over the spirit world. However, the flashy BMW of our lord was parked at the curb. As we ran out onto the sidewalk, the darkened windows of the vehicle rolled down; the music that had been muffled within the closed vehicle now blared into the night. We froze; our laughter ceased. I looked to Tisha uncertainly, but it was as if she were already lost to me, as though I no longer existed to her and had only been something dreamed up during her afternoon playtime. She left me standing there and walked over to the car. Our lord poked his head out of the window:

  “Yo’ mama looking for you, Girl.”

  “Sorry, Binzo.”

  His calculating eyes looked her over in the darkness—seemed to navigate complex algorithms in the three seconds it took him to look her over from head to foot… then his eyes rested on me and he regarded me with the same combination of uneasiness and antagonism I got from most adults. “What he doing wit’ you?” he demanded of her.

  She turned and looked at me confusedly—as though she had forgotten that I was there… as though I wasn’t there at all and she was wondering what the hell Binzo was talking about. I stared at her longingly—desperately needing some acknowledgement of my existence… but she seemed to look over my head, toward the abandoned building: “… I was just playing,” she said.

 
She said, “I”—not “we.” A shiver went through me. I stood there freezing, perhaps seeping into the spirit world I had just fled, with all its desperate, unrealized hopes… and then Tisha was gone. Binzo told her to get into the car, ostensibly so that he could take her home to her worried mother, and I was left on the curb, standing in the deepening darkness.

  When I got home, Williams was at his usual place of honor on the stoop, dispensing advice to children who had long learned to ignore him. They were playing some nebulous game involving hitting a ball with a stick and chasing one another—sometimes with the stick. I walked quietly past and up to my room. Technically, the room belonged to my mother and me, but as she was gone, it was mine by default. In the living room, where my aunt was still on the couch, the baby was crying and the TV was playing full blast, as though to counter those cries. Elsewhere in the building, loud music was blaring. In the apartment one story below me, Mr. Johnson’s loud, belligerent voice rang out; his tirade, either on food that should have been prepared by now, or an unclean house—or one of the myriad rants that seemingly marked his deep dissatisfaction with his wife, but which was only a reflection of the emptiness of his life—joined in the chaos of the night. Similarly, Mrs. Johnson’s tirades on a stingy husband whose toe jam was so bad it “melted her nose holes” joined with the loud music of the neighborhood, and the intermittent gunshots that echoed through the ghetto streets… and the obligatory police sirens.

  I lay in the big empty bed for hours—even though I wasn’t sleepy. I lay thinking about Tisha and that magical room in the basement. I took out the amulet, wondering if maybe it only worked one time, and had to be recharged by Madame Evangeline after each miracle. I don’t believe I slept much that night. Besides my preoccupations and fantasies, the sounds of the neighborhood, which had at times bewildered me—but which had mostly lain on the periphery of my awareness—had seemed inescapable that night. After a while, the Johnsons’ various rants and counter rants ceased and were replaced by sounds of screaming and rattling furniture. Sometimes those sounds denoted a horrible fight and the couple would emerge from their apartment with bruised lips and darkened eyes; sometimes those sounds denoted sex, and after all the tumult my neighbors’ various demons would be hushed and they would go to sleep. I lay there trying to figure out which it was. However, before I could come to a conclusion, all the sounds from the Johnsons’ apartment ceased. The silence seemed ominous somehow and I found myself scouring the air for any sound from them—something that would assure me that they hadn’t disappeared like Tisha. It had been as though those sounds had been meant for me—as though the Johnsons had known that I was alone and desperate for the inadvertent conversation that their brutality provided.

  As I often did during the summer—when the nights were hot and muggy and the fetid air outside my window gave the impression of fresh air and a cool breeze—I went out on the fire escape. The fire escape looked out on the back alley; beyond the alley there was a vacant lot, which was growing wild with weeds, and pockmarked with rusting cars and a treasure trove of human refuse. After the lot, the hazy outlines of my neighborhood opened up like a cheap whore. A block away, a boy was yelling below someone’s window, like a modern-day Romeo trying to catch Juliet’s heart. However, instead of sonnets about the moon and unrequited love, the girl’s mother came to the window and launched into a string of expletives; other neighbors went to their windows to see what the fuss was about; and soon, neighbors began yelling at the mother and one another. More expletives were exchanged; and the modern-day Romeo, seeing that he wasn’t going to get screwed that night, disappeared and left the unromantic adults to their nonsense.

  All night, the realities of my existence kept me up. My mind flashed with images of the murdered youths from that morning—but now I saw those scenes without my feeling of imperviousness. I remembered the demon stirring within my aunt, now figuring that maybe I had celebrated too soon and too boisterously, so that evil was building up its forces in order to put me back in my place. Those thoughts, and thoughts I couldn’t even name, filled my mind with a conveyor belt of horrors. After a while, the real joined with the imagined; the imagined joined somehow with things I couldn’t possibly know about—couldn’t possibly even begin to grasp—but which lurked nonetheless in that shadow world between revelation and delusion. It was within this context that my mind returned to the spirits from the crack house—to all those generations of desperate souls who, like me, had been all too aware of the things that were killing them, yet incapable of formulating the means of overcoming them.

  … Have you ever noticed that no horror movie has ever been staged in the ghetto? The classic horror movie takes place in a mansion or castle, in places of luxury and ease. Today’s horror movies most commonly take place in the suburbs—where dream houses turn out to be haunted by demons and all the nefarious forces that the bourgeois and well-to-do have to fear. Horror is about losing what one has. It’s about thinking that one has something—and is secure—only to discover that one is powerless against the forces of the world. In communities being unraveled by socioeconomic insecurity and desperation, the horror is anticlimactic—mundane. Also, the horror movie is about triumphing over the forces of darkness to keep what one has. In contrast, the story of the ghetto is about struggling to attain that which the forces of darkness, either through their duplicity or their indifference, claim one has no right to have. A horror movie about the ghetto would therefore be, by its very nature, a revolutionary medium.

  When the sun began to brighten the horizon, I gave up my quest for sleep and peace of mind, deciding to get out of bed. I was drenched in sweat and thirsty. The Johnsons were “going at it” again. This time, it was definitely sex. Mrs. Johnson had a habit of screaming out, “You cocksucker!” when reaching orgasm; and her husband, spurred on by these declarations of love, would be driven into a frenzy. “You asshole!” the woman screamed next, above the frightful din of the shaking bed and their slapping flesh. Outside, a neighborhood stray, confused (or aroused) by their screams, began to howl. The call was taken up by all the dogs in the neighborhood—and dogs blocks away. In my bed, I hung on for dear life as the cruel rhythms of their lust seemed to be shaking the foundations of the world. I expected cracks to appear in the wall; I expected everything to come crashing down—especially after Mr. Johnson screamed his own string of expletives and cried out. However, there was soon silence and what passed for a peaceful calm.

  I went to get washed up. My aunt and her baby were sleeping in their room. My aunt was snoring in her usual way that always made me wonder if she was being strangled in her sleep. It used to terrify me, but in time, it merely became another signpost of my life—a reminder that I was still alive and that the people I had known yesterday were still there today, living their lives. Besides, of course by now my thoughts were only about Tisha and that magical room in the basement of the crack house. I had to see Madame Evangeline about the amulet, but first I had to see Tisha—to make sure that magical room still existed. I left the apartment before my aunt awoke. I practically ran to the crack house. In the basement, I was relieved to find that the room was still there. The dolls were still arrayed on the plush rug; the pink curtains still danced lightly on a gust of air beyond the shattered windows. However, as Tisha wasn’t there, the magic was gone. I waited around for a couple hours, by which time it was about 10 o’clock. Unfortunately, in my haste to verify the existence of that magical room, I had neglected to eat. Hunger pangs began to gnaw at me (if you’ll forgive the pun). That hunger, combined with the sleeplessness of the night before and my mounting bewilderment with life, left me in a dazed state. The heartbreak of the previous evening, when Tisha had seemed not to see me, returned to me then, and I became suddenly terrified that when she finally did return, I would still be invisible to her. I fled back home—where there was at least food to eat and where my loneliness would be straightforward and non-threatening.

  My aunt was again in the living room w
hen I got home. The baby was crying and my aunt sat holding it indifferently on her lap. I looked at them both anxiously. My aunt didn’t seem to notice me, so after a while, I went about my business. Rather, I went to eat something while my yearnings for the fantasy of Tisha built themselves into a kind of madness… I guess that, at this point, some of you are probably bogged down in the question of if my aunt was a good mother or not. As I write this I sense my own judgmental inclinations being triggered. It springs out of me like a reflex. I’ve found myself thinking that most human acts of evil are just an evolutionary reaction to stress—to terror and panic and disillusionment that have reached such a state of refinement that that terrified, panic-stricken, person seems outwardly calm. The frenzied violence which one saw on the streets was only a showy distraction. The worst violence always happens in private—within one’s soul. That’s where dreams die and the human desire to love and be loved festers in the face of disappointment and hopelessness. It is once this evil had entrenched itself that the showy violence of the streets has a fertile breeding ground, and people like my aunt (and those she loves and can’t love) became statistics. I’m not saying that my aunt was a “victim of circumstance” or anything so trite. I’m saying that she was a circumstantial human being, undone quite possibly by her inability to grasp the essential truths of her existence—or, as I’ve said before, the inability of her imagination to see past the horrors of her predicament.

  Anyway, after eating, I returned to the room that was mine by default and fell asleep. I dreamed the kind of formless, disturbing dreams that usually plague those incapable of finding rest during the waking hours. I awoke four or five hours later. I awoke abruptly, disturbed by some fleeting image from my dream. I shuddered and sat up in bed, looking around confusedly. The mid-afternoon sun was shining directly into the window and I squinted as I looked over at it. I needed to move, but I felt too tired. At the same time, while I needed to sleep, the residual images of the dream world—whatever they had been—terrified me to the point that I began to think of sleep as a horror to be avoided at all costs. I went to the bathroom again. My yearning for Tisha was still there. I remembered that I had to see Madame Evangeline again. I missed my mother. When she first went away to work, I would be overcome by the certainty that she had returned. That certainty used to always be there when I was about to open the door to come inside the apartment—or in those dreamy moments immediately following sleep, when all seemed possible. I would rush ahead, expecting her to be there, expecting to find her smiling and opening her arms to me, holding back tears as she told me how she had quit her job to be with me. I, in turn, would be rapt in the joy of angels, because her declarations would verify that nothing else mattered but the peace and love that existed in that moment.