PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2019

by Carmen Maria Machado

  PEOPLE WERE STILL allowed to accompany passengers past customs and straight to the boarding airplane. (Sounds impossible now, right?) Anyway, that night Uzumma cried herself to a vomit. I couldn’t make sense of it: Why did she have to make Mommy run around, looking for a sink to rinse her mouth and wash her face, napkins to dry her up? Uzumma cried about how she was going to miss him, how the house would be boring without JV. I watched her in mild irritation. Did Mommy really deserve the stares the airport workers gave for bringing what looked like a sick child to the airport? I tried to distance myself, as though I weren’t part of their party. I inherited from my father this tendency, as I did his brown eyes. It’s the same disinterest I feel toward the evening news these days; I never watch it, because it starves me of knowledge.

  As we exchanged hugs, JV promised to always remember us and said that we shouldn’t forget him. I was the only one he gave a kiss on the forehead, and then he whispered into my ears.

  “If you wait for me, I will come for you. Just be a good boy. JV will come back for you.”

  I looked him full in the face; he tried to conceal his expression, which showed the uncertainty his life was to take. Truth be told, he looked like a cornered house rat. Yes, a frightened rat, as he boarded that airplane headed for New York. From there he would find his way to Jackson and finally to Oxford, Mississippi.

  2.

  JV did keep in touch in those early years while he studied for an MBA. He wrote letters and sent postcards. In the beginning, he complained about Mississippi. His professors didn’t want him there, a letter I found in my mother’s drawer revealed, although his claim was one he couldn’t back up.

  “Can you believe that where I live,” he wrote in another letter, “they don’t sell ordinary alcohol on Sunday?” He wanted to leave and continue school in Washington, D.C., but it wasn’t because of the alcohol thing, he insisted. My father would have none of his tales. “He chose to go there and started there; he must finish there.”

  He must have settled into that kind of living, because those complaints ceased. On one of the two family vacations when we visited New York, my mother tried to contact him, but he never responded. It was during these visits that it started to dawn on me that most of the black people I saw in America were nothing like the Jeffersons or the Huxtables, who were from a new sitcom that year.

  When my father was conferred the Okaa Omee 1 of Emekuku and my mother the Ugo Nwa Chinamere, I expected JV to surprise me by coming. I can’t explain why I hoped so much. I was an acne-faced teenager by then, and there was a girl I was infatuated with at school, but what I still remember are the shirtless drummers, their bodies glistening with sweat. I watched closely as the masquerades danced at the ceremony; one was about the height of JV. I watched the way its ankle swerved with rhythm, the twist and turns of its arms, as though I expected some act of trickery that would make the occupant take off the costume and reveal JV. Of course, that never happened; JV did not attend my parents’ chieftaincy celebration.

  He used to call us when we had a land phone. My mother was the one who took it upon herself to ask him to visit home. Then his calls ceased, and he never answered ours. He must have graduated, because I remember seeing a picture of him in his graduation robe. There was the story my mother told her friend, that he had taken up teaching at a community college, but maybe she was lying. During his span of being incommunicado, we were handed down tales about him. A community college professor in Tennessee, a contract worker for the South Carolina state government, a door-to-door insurance salesman in Atlanta, Georgia, then a job working with a lawn-mowing company in Houston, Texas; he was a supervisor at Walmart in Baltimore, Maryland; he drove trucks for a furniture company in Washington, D.C. With these stories, our hearts broke many times over—except, of course, my father’s.

  “They say he was seen sweat-soaked at the Million Man March in Washington, D.C.,” my mother said, almost in tears one evening as we watched the news. JV turned fifty in Washington, D.C., doing whatever odd job it was he was doing in that populated American city. He was married, we heard. No, he wasn’t; he just had a domestic partner—whatever that meant. Then he was divorced, then remarried, then divorced again. We set out to forget him. It was easy. We never mentioned his name and tried hard never to mention America, though the latter was impossible, seeing how America put itself in every television screen.

  3.

  I didn’t see JV until I began living in Houston, Texas, as a thirty-year-old. I had two master’s degrees from England and had worked for a few years at British Petroleum in London before I was transferred. From Texas, I found my way to D.C.

  In D.C. it wasn’t long before I looked JV up. My curiosity was kite-high. I heard from a family friend that he lived in the northeastern part of the city. But when I reached out to my few Nigerian connections, they mostly shook their heads, as though that explained his lot. No one really knew where he was.

  “It was around the time taxi drivers were being killed all around D.C. that I stopped seeing JV ride his taxi,” a woman, also from Emekuku like me, informed me. She thought she meant well. Before then, I never knew that JV drove taxis for a living.

  I hired a private investigator, and it didn’t take long before he found out the specifics of JV’s existence.

  “Anacostia kwa?” a man I called Uncle Aloysius out of civility enunciated over the phone when I informed him of the findings. “Do you really want to go there? The only good thing there is the name of a neighborhood. Good Hope Road is what they call it.”

  For days afterward, I thought about all the warnings I heard, from just about everyone I spoke to, about going to Southeast, as I stared at JV’s address on my phone.

  I GOT ON the Metro, plowed through morning commuters: stiff-looking men in solid-color suits and their briefcases. Women in business-style high heels, with bold-colored lipsticks and impatience in every stride. I stopped at the train station nearest to his house and got into a taxi. We drove past dozens of houses, some three-storied, others one, most two-storied, all painted in gloomy colors. Grayish reddish brown or glazed clay. Variety was limited. The pedestrians moved with an apprehension; they seemed burdened by the knowledge of what they had become. I thought about my childhood in Aladinma. When we returned from our holidays in New York, some of the children from another neighborhood would beg Uzumma and me to tell them about America. They wanted us never to exhaust our American stories, to pinch at our mountain of stories. How much they, even as children, idealized America. If only they knew then what they know now. Most of them, like me, have left home. Some to live in countries whose names they had never heard previously, countries so cold their ears numb in the winter. In places that promise yet fail them in many things many times over, they continue to stay. We like and comment on each other’s pictures on Facebook. When we Skype each other, we talk about small things: how the government back home has failed, how home is only good for retirement. Never do we talk about our lives. Never do we look each other long enough in the eyes; perhaps the mirrors there will only show us ourselves, the selves that we left at home. As the saying goes: to travel is to see.

  PEOPLE WALKED PAST as though they had all the time in the world, yet in their feet was the calculating agility of a cat. The private investigator said that on the building where JV lived, the words LOVE YOUR BLACK NATION were written in orange graffiti.

  The old three-story brownstone on Third Street in Southeast D.C. was nondescript, like a park bench: unworthy of a second glance. The only things that attracted a glance from me were the fluttering pigeons that homed in the dark spaces under the eaves of the brownstone next to his. A man the complexion of ginger-clove stood by the steps of the brownstone blowing cigarette smoke upward, his tattooed neck bared for me to see. He noticed me approaching, studied me swiftly, as if to see what trouble I would be, calculated that in my button-down long-sleeve shirt and blue jeans I was no threat, then hitched up his droopy jeans and grabbed his crotch. I swept past
the porch and into the hallway. It smelled of wet dog and fried onions and soap. A teenage girl with flowing multicolor hair, wearing black harem trousers and a yellow top that bared her midriff, raced up the stairs behind me and stopped to flash me a letter. Before I could look at it, she screamed, “I got accepted,” and continued past me, tears slick on her brown face.

  THAT MORNING I’D had no mental picture of what JV would look like, but the girl’s vanilla scent took me back to the tint of vanilla in JV’s shaving powder.

  I recalled JV in the backyard of our Aladinma house—back when houses in Aladinma still had just flower hedges and wire fences demarcating them—sitting on a fold-up chair and humming Jim Reeves’s “A Railroad Bum.” His lips curled as he sang.

  I never seemed to have a dime, but I had myself a ball

  Singing hi le hi lo, he li le li lo

  I used to be a railroad bum but I’m not anymore

  Thinking about that song still gives me the shivers these days. Maybe it’s the lyrics about a once-upon-a-time drifter, or the vision the song conceives, not of Jim Reeves but of JV, in shorts and shirtless, soft-tapping his feet in glee, his beard fully covered in vanilla-scented shaving paste as my mother hands him his weekly allowance. That vision of him still visits me. Sometimes it’s as clear as water; other times the water is rippled, and his image fragmented.

  AFTER MULTIPLE KNOCKS, I sensed a presence on the other side of the door; someone was watching me from the peephole. I heard the click and jangle of locks. The person that opened the door of the apartment was far from my wildest imaginings of what JV would look like.

  In the crack that the door chain allowed, his eyes narrowed in on me. “Kemoye?” he said, as if making sure I hadn’t appeared there by some trick.

  I stood dumbfounded.

  He called my name again. “Kemoye.” I could see the film of tears in his eyes.

  I have had quite a few disappointments in my life. My friends have betrayed me; my secrets have been revealed; people have made promises they couldn’t keep; I have had unfaithful girlfriends and disappointing jobs. None could compare to seeing JV.

  They say that black doesn’t crack, but if you have seen poverty, then you need a different saying.

  When I greeted him, a disbelieving light appeared in his eyes.

  “Your cheeks are an evidence of good living,” his Aladinma friends used to say. If only they could see how hollow and shrunken those cheeks were now. The edges of his eyes and mouth crinkled, and his tired skin bore evidence to years of hard living. Those lips had been battered by smoking, and his hair had faded to the color of cigarette ash. But I couldn’t tell what brand of cigarettes this brown bag of a man smoked; he smelled of lavender soap.

  The room he led me to was cramped and small. Jimi Hendrix’s poster was big on the wall, the bed was high and fluffy, and beside it sat a worn caramel velvet loveseat facing a striped armchair and a coffee table with Edward P. Jones’s All Aunt Hagar’s Children opened facedown.

  How was I to begin a conversation with someone I hadn’t seen in over twenty years? Our conversation treaded within the space of civility. I asked questions and tried to fill the awkward pauses with casual phrases and gestures that masked my disappointment. But in between I was focusing on his facial expressions. I watched him with a child’s wonder, checking for signs of the JV I knew; his periodic humming, his sweet-talking and larger-than-life attitude.

  “It’s a tight country,” he said, his voice naked as if from a not-distant memory.

  He removed the cluster of clothes from the backrest of his armchair to make space so he could lean back. I called the cabdriver and asked him to be back in thirty minutes.

  I knew what he wanted to say before he spoke. “Let the cab go. We will find our way. This place isn’t as bad as some people make it seem. We virtually live behind the president.”

  I called the cabdriver back before I thought about what I was doing. I looked around the room: the ashtray with cigarette stubs by the window, the clothes tossed around, the harsh scent of tobacco and air freshener that hung in the air.

  He started, “It’s a country of ambitions, but it’s hard.” He grunted, spat into a paper towel, folded it, and continued. “Don’t get me wrong, there are opportunities; I have seen plenty. Yet no matter how promising they are, once I try, they start to fizzle out. It’s almost like trying to grip air. It amounts to nothing.” He finished with his shoulders slouched, head bowed as he poured himself and me a glass of cheap liquor.

  I wanted to counter him, to tell him that it was never too late.

  He must have seen the rebellion in my eyes, because he silenced me with questions. “Do you know how many times I have tried? You think it’s me? Then ask my roommate.” There was no joy in his voice.

  It was one of those slow-motion moments of life, where anything could happen. Love could triumph, or hate solidify. I watched JV cry. I was quiet because I saw what he thought of himself: a failure twice over.

  “You were raised preppy, nothing wrong with that, but here we are like dry bones in the valley. In time you will realize this.”

  Never had I felt so slapped in my life. I wanted to tell him that I too had come upon that realization; that once, during a Christmas party at work, my boss, already tipsy, had nudged me and said, “Kemoye, you mean to tell me that you cannot dance? Dude, even the president can do the dougie.” Beneath the nervous smile, I saw the flick of disappointment in my boss’s eyes. Beyond awkward side-to-side movement, I couldn’t dance as was expected of a black person. I wanted to tell him of an acquaintance who watched me rub my itchy nose and asked whether my drugs had finished. But I knew that those moments were small compared to what JV was living. I wanted to comfort him, to give something impossible to give his sixtyish self. I wanted to give him certainty as one would a child.

  He went on about his chain of failed marriages, a son in military training—the only redemption that could keep him off the streets. There was a daughter on a scholarship at Juilliard, and another daughter, a teenager living with her own mother. He hadn’t remarried and for years now had treated women with varying degrees of disinterest.

  “I have long stopped suffering my heart. Bu . . . but . . .” JV continued, searching the ceiling for words. “Anyway, my life hasn’t been a complete hell. I have been lucky enough to be black on a Saturday night.” His words sank into me. Lucky to be black on a Saturday night. I must have read that somewhere.

  “How about moving back to Nigeria? You can always start a business or teach at the university.”

  He looked at me as though I were a stranger.

  “This is my country now; I’m my own progenitor. I’m here now.” His voice seemed to come out of nowhere. “But if you hope to go back, start planning your exit now. Or else this place will sink its teeth into you, and then going back home will be impossible. Then you will realize that the place you left as home is no more, and instead all that is left is that which is inside you. Within you, you carry your own home.”

  WE TALKED AND talked that whole day. I didn’t even realize when we both finished the bottle of liquor. I wondered what he did for a living. Did he still drive a taxi?

  By early evening we had nothing left to ask each other. I thought I had scanned through all his photo albums, but my eyes caught something under his coffee table, in between thick books. It was an album I hadn’t gone through. I flipped through it. The first photo was of me in a blue denim pinafore and green shirt holding a small plastic green samurai sword. My teeth flashed in a smile at the camera. Tucked between the photo and its transparent protective cover were these words: Favorite nephew in the world. He wrote in cursive. Looks just like me, could have as well been my son.

  I continued flipping through. All the photos were of me. Some were of us and some even pictures of me as an adult, which he must have found on the internet. Something felt crushed inside me. I knew he was fond of me as a boy, and I always thought it was because everyone said I looke
d like him. The same clear umber complexion. How was I to know that he saw me as his son? I wondered why he never wrote to me all these years, why he had never tried to keep a relationship going with me.

  I remembered what he said to me at the airport when he kissed me on the forehead—that he would come back for me. But JV had missed my childhood; I had grown up while waiting for him to fulfill his promise.

  “I wrote personal letters to you,” he said, “but you never wrote back. Maybe your mother never wanted you to see them.”

  I said nothing. It’s an eerie realization, that two quiet people like us were better off quiet alone, not asking questions, pretending as if all those absent years never happened.

  “You still like peppery chicken, right?” His voice boomed from the kitchenette.

  “Sure.”

  I heard the clanks of knives and spoons. There was the harsh aroma of onions being sliced, and my eyes started to water. The aroma of sliced onions would be the perfect excuse if JV had seen my tears.

  “Out of peppers. I better go buy some,” he said. My eyes must have shown my protest, because he added, “You know you will spend the night with me, mister.”

  I nodded a yes; there I sat, a child to him again.

  “Will you move with me to Texas?” I asked. It felt like the right thing to ask. To show love to this man who saw himself in me.

  A quiet reserve fell over him; his movements stopped, and his eyes were still and unblinking. A half-peeled ginger in his hands dropped into the sink, and his lips cracked open but didn’t form words, even though I was sure he’d heard the question.

  I waited for him to stumble out a yes, but I know now that change will never come. I didn’t ask again.

  OUTSIDE, IN THE graying evening, as we walked to the bodega by the street corner, a boy who looked no older than twelve walked up to us. It was really JV he walked up to.