Birds of Paradise

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  BRIAN LEAVES HIS HOUSE in a state of ignominy. There are things to be done, he tells himself. In the past, whenever he’s felt beset by nameless promptings and anxieties, he’s always been able to hide in his work. Work rescued him and Avis both when Felice left. They submitted to hard labor: there seemed a genuine sanity in it. He lets his fingers ripple along the edges of the steering wheel, noting a greenish-gray haze at the edge of the sky. Brian picks up the phone. When Javier answers, he says abruptly, “Talk to me, man—that Steele Building—I’ve been thinking about it.”

  “Brian?”

  Brian detects a flicker of sound in the background—a feminine voice? “Jesus, Jav, where are you? Are you alone or what?”

  “Dude, what’s your problem? You’re the one I’m worried about.”

  “Worried? Why? Just because I’m going to put my goddamn house and my life savings on the line?”

  “Listen, man, breathe—everything is fine—it’s perfect, right?” Now Javier’s voice is placating. “But I think maybe—look, we better slow things down. This isn’t the best time right now.”

  Brian stares at the street. It occurs to him that he is, perhaps, losing his grip. His voice is half strangled. “Is Parkhurst gonna know about the Steele Building?”

  “No, man, he doesn’t know nothing. He’s out of it. All he can think about right now is his Topaz deal.”

  For some reason, Javier’s words make him want to weep or punch the steering wheel. “The Topaz Building. That thing.”

  “Buddy, hey, we need to talk. Now isn’t the best time, though.”

  “You already said that. But the other day you said it was a beautiful life. So I’ve decided. I want to do it. I want in. Let’s make a billion.”

  “That’s good, Brian. That’s really good.” But there is something taut, almost compressed, in Javier’s voice. “Just, relax yourself, all right? Todo es fácil. I’ve gotta go now, okay? But hang on—we’ll talk very soon. For now, be easy. You do that for me, buddy? Just be easy.”

  HE TAKES BRICKELL, his usual route—joggers, bicyclists, green avenues, new cars, vertiginous high-rises on all sides. But it’s midafternoon now and the light is all wrong: he’s missing from his life and no one has noticed. When he approaches the turnoff to the Ekers Building, he drives smoothly past. Easy. He’ll show him easy. He feels buoyant: he lowers the window and lets the air flood in: it smells like salt. Almost immediately, he hits lights and downtown traffic and he rolls the window back up. He has to jog to the east to skirt a construction site, trucks piled with plaster and lumber rumbling past in clouds of white dust. The entire city seems to vibrate with the roar of the cranes, as if its very core is being disemboweled. Brian stares at light skittering through the planks fencing off a work site and thinks of his son again: The wealthy need homes, too, he argues silently. But then he is haunted by some sense of revulsion: a soul rot.

  Brian creeps through the city blocks then gets on to First. He rarely ventures this far north, past the Design District, its narrow wasteland of expensive furniture and home decor boutiques. But on First, the city reveals itself—a mess of check-cashing and pawnshops, Latin bakeries, and stunned, displaced tourists milling around. There are placards on a number of crumbling foundations, announcing, The Future Site of . . . Developed by . . . Everything is either falling apart or under construction. Even the people look different—darker skin tones, hair beaded, nails long and decorative, the cars dustier, rearview mirrors festooned with prayer beads, baby shoes, dice; there are dashboard saints and Virgins of Guadalupe, Cuban flags, flags of Colombia, Haiti, El Salvador, Lebanon. He makes a decision: he still doesn’t know exactly where the Steele Building is, but he does have the address for Parkhurst’s Blue Topaz. At the light on Northeast Fifty-fourth, he takes a left, following directions included in a folder from a commission hearing. It’s a grimy, working-class city street with hand-lettered signs for local businesses: Gonaïves Car Wash, Chez Italienne Fried Chicken, Bonjour Travel, the battered Église Haïtienne, every window covered with bars and scrolls of ironwork, metal dumpsters covered with the sort of graffiti that looks like vicious slashes, rows of rusted metal spear fencing, sailing plastic bags, and weed-riddled torn-up lots. At the corner, pulled up beside King Stable Bar-B-Q Lounge, its sign faded to near-invisibility, he makes a right, passing a mural of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bob Marley and above them in sky-blue paint, God Bless the United States of America.

  As he turns into the neighborhoods, he has a powerful sense of intruding: the blocks are tiny, without markers or sidewalks—the grass is thick with garbage—beer cans, used diapers. Children play in the street so twice he has to back out and go up a different block. He drives slowly, trying to see things yet not appear to be looking. A woman in a turban speaks to another woman in a tight caftan; a man climbs over a chain-link fence into a neighbor’s yard; groups of people talking, sipping drinks, sit under rickety constructions covered in plastic tarps and canvas. There are taped car windows and houses boarded up with planks of wood, overturned shopping carts, yards of bare dirt, a flock of chickens scrabbling in a plot. He rolls through block after block. No one appears to notice him even though his car is so big there are sections where it seems wider than the street. He can’t help thinking of how, when he bought this SUV—a white Mercedes-Benz G55—Stanley referred to it as his whitey-mobile. He’s about to flee the area when he spots a billboard in another rubble field between rows of small wooden houses: Future Home of Les Temps Perdu Condos Dev. by P.I.&B.

  Like everything else in the neighborhood, the sign looks provisional and decayed, as if it’s been battered by the elements for a long time. He pulls up to the site and lowers his window. Beneath the bright yellow lettering, he can make out the pentimento of another earlier sign: Future Site of À La Mode Hotel. A thin column of despair rises within his chest. The problem isn’t merely that the building will disrupt the neighborhood, he sees now. The problem is also that, in some sense, the neighborhood is undisruptible and unsavable. They bought the property from the Aguardiente Group, who apparently did little more than conjure up a name for their project. Brian frowns, running his fingers over the steering wheel. He’d heard rumors that the group itself had run into the usual tax and finance problems, dissolving after scarcely a handful of projects. It was easy to forget that so many of these groups were mere cabals, forming and disintegrating seemingly at whim.

  There’s no shoulder on the road and nowhere to park, so Brian drives the SUV directly into the lot, snapping twigs and crushing a swath of thorny green weeds. His company now owns the imaginary building in this field, and possession being nine-tenths of the law, he will inspect the empty space he’s traded his honor in for. He climbs out of the car and counts off a hundred or so paces, stopping just before the field dead-ends in a chain-link fence and the back of a row of shedlike houses made of plywood. It’s warm and the air swims a bit. On a kind of despairing impulse, he hikes up his chinos and squats in the weeds, then shifts to a cross-legged sit. The ground is sandy and covered in odd plants pushing straight up like fingers, and a bed of ground leaves, pods, shreds of plastic, cigar butts, and other unidentifiable, partially decomposed garbage. It’s not an uncomfortable place to sit. In fact, as he reclines on one hand, he becomes aware of a softness in the air, a familiar scent of lighter fluid and grilling meat. Across the lot, on the other side of the street, he notices an immense woman in a dress of some stretched, shiny fabric, sitting on the concrete step in front of her house, staring at him. Her eyes look like punched-out holes, her fat arms rest on her knees. He waves at her and she doesn’t quite wave back, but he detects an incline to her head. He thinks of his mother, her silent final months in bed, face shining with tears, watching her sons with a look of ancient disappointment.

  There is sweet music from an invisible source: swaying reggae chime. He begins to imagine that the place is not all that bad, that there is, in fact, a pleasant sort of ramshackle quality about the neighborhood that he actu
ally enjoys. He lets himself toy with an idea: if his investment in the Steele Building pays out, he will quit his job. They’ll give Stanley what he needs and most of the rest will go to charity. They could keep just enough to buy a little house right here (this condominium—he senses vividly—will never get built), become the kooky white couple—greeted at first with suspicion, until—with Avis’s baking—they manage to win the hearts of the neighbors . . . Or perhaps it’s not him and Avis? Now he sees himself standing on a glass balcony overlooking the ocean: a younger woman wafts out; she is draped in silk, her hair like gossamer . . .

  He is interrupted in these musings by a shout and looks up to see three lanky black men headed toward him from the opposite corner of the field. They wear tank tops and denim shorts halfway down their hips, revealing four or more inches of boxer shorts. All three of them are built like the figures on top of trophies, their arms sinewy with tight, round muscles, skin gleaming as if freshly oiled. “Yo, man!” the one in front calls. “What you doing out here? You lost or something. You gotta be lost.” He wears a pair of aviator-style sunglasses on his forehead. “Guy’s tripping,” another one, in a red T-shirt, solid black tattoos engraved into his bicep, says. “He look lost.”

  Brian blinks at them. He thinks he should be frightened, but it seems he can’t summon the energy for fear. How little it takes to make one’s life jump its tracks. The phrase put out to pasture floats through his mind and he laughs. “Some pasture, huh?”

  The men glance at each other. The man in red says, “Yo.”

  “How long you been sitting out there in the sun, man?” Sunglasses says. “Why don’t we get you in your nice big car now and get you on your way?”

  Brian points to the billboard. “You see that sign over there? That’s me.”

  Sunglasses and the man in red walk to the sign while a third one in an olive drab tank top and a shaved head stays behind, watching Brian with his hands on his hips.

  “That’s me,” Brian says again.

  “Yes, sir,” Shaved Head says gravely.

  The two men study the sign, frowning, and Brian wonders then if they can read and, if not, if he’s just insulted them. Sunglasses walks back with Red Shirt trailing by a few steps. “So you Pib?”

  “Pib? Ah—PI&B. Yes. I work for them. They bought this property and they’re planning to build here. Actually, probably they’re just going to pretend to build and then sell before anything goes up.”

  Sunglasses tilts his head back and crosses his arms high over his chest, tucking his hands under his armpits. He gives Brian a long, dissecting stare. “Sorry to say it, but you don’t really look like you work for nobody.”

  Rattled, Brian searches in his pockets, but he left his wallet in the garage with his new hammer and batteries. He extricates his cell phone and says, “Wait.” When Javier picks up on the first ring, he feels a cascade of relief. “Hey, Javy! Buddy! Listen, I need a favor. I’m up here at the Topaz site and I need you to confirm for some people that I work for PI&B.”

  Sunglasses rolls his eyes. “Man, what does that prove? Just proves you got some homeboy who’s crazy as you.”

  Javier, on the other end, says, “What? Who said that? Where are you?”

  “The site. For the Topaz condo. Little Haiti, remember? Unless you want to call it North Design District. North NoDo? You take North Miami Ave—”

  “What the fuck you there for? What are you doing? Vámos, get the fuck out of there, Brian. Don’t tell me anything now. Just get in your car and go.”

  Brian wants to laugh at the creaking panic in his friend’s voice, the way it intensifies his accent. “It’s fine. I’m talking to these guys here—”

  “What fucking guys? Do not talk to no guys.”

  “Too late.”

  “They right there? How many are there? Do they have guns?”

  Brian lapses into silence. He senses his lovely, iridescent state of fearlessness start to wisp away. “I don’t know,” he says quietly as he eyes the way Red Shirt swings his arms impatiently, opening and closing his hands. “Possible.”

  “Brian, what the fuck. How the fuck did you do this?”

  “I don’t—I didn’t—” His voice falters.

  “Listen.” Now Javier has dropped to a kind of broken rasp—the closest he can come to a whisper. “Do not move. Do not get into a car with them. Stay there. I’m coming. Right now. I’ll be there in five minutes.”

  “Yeah. Yes. Good,” he mumbles. He listens to the line disconnect and then listens to silence for a few seconds, wishing he could preserve the magical sense of safety he felt while he was talking to Javier. The young men shift and look around. Sunglasses says, “So what your boy say?”

  Without meeting his eyes, Brian slides the phone back into his pocket. “He says he’s coming here.”

  At this, Red Shirt throws up his hands. “Man, what’re we hanging around this fool for? Let’s leave him and go. I don’t got all day.”

  Brian notices a look exchanged among the men and it comes to him then that they might not be the danger at all. Perhaps it’s not necessarily a good idea for him to be sitting here alone in an open field. Danger—his sense of it—floats free of itself. Brian thinks of Parkhurst’s contempt for “fearfulness,” and what he calls its antidote—the “magnificence of ambition.”

  “Wait. Wait a sec.” Brian carefully rolls on to his knees, then, bracing with fingers on the ground, pushes to stand, one foot at a time. “I want to—can we just . . .” He needs to catch his breath. “You seem like—like really good people—like—” He’s shaken by some sort of emotion and has to let it subside: he doesn’t have himself fully in hand today. “You remind me of my son,” he says to the shaved-hair kid. “I mean, he wouldn’t like any of this—the development. I just need to tell you guys something. If this project does get under way? These people—PI&B, they’re going to try to destroy this place—everything you’ve built here. And you have to find a way—you have to really organize. The Little Haiti Action Corps—they didn’t even come to meetings. I can give you the names of some good legal people—they’ll do it pro bono.”

  Sunglasses holds the back of his hand to his forehead, shielding his eyes. “Whoa, man, wait a sec here. You’re talking about the people you supposedly work for—is that right?” he asks. Brian wonders why he doesn’t just lower the glasses to cover his eyes. And . . . why not a belt for those pants? Make life easier. Why not go to trade schools, learn some skills—like welding!—instead of wandering around like a pack of animals? That must not be the point, he thinks. So what is the point? He wishes desperately he could call Stanley right now, but fears these young men are out of patience—just when he could be on the verge of giving them some really useful advice.

  “You dissing these people—you ain’t even established you work for them yet.” Red Shirt draws a finger through the air, limning his words. He’s more compact and intense than the other two. “This muthafucka on crack,” he says.

  “You know what?” Shaved Head rests his hands on the striped fabric of his boxers. “These Pib boys? They come round here last month or two. These boys in suits offer my auntie money for that piece of junk she lives in—right over there, see? And then what, the other day, another dude come out, throw another pile of cash on top of that.”

  Brian notices again the flickering glance pass between the men: a kind of alert or caution. “What the hell, man?” Shaved Head cries: this is directed at Sunglasses, as if he’d said something. “It’s no secret.” His gaze swings to Brian. “They giving my auntie two hundred fifty thousand for her fallin’-down house. My auntie’s eighty-two year old—her house smell like a hundred cats died inside it.”

  “Word,” Red Shirt says.

  “They’re giving my mama and my granpapa the same,” Sunglasses says. “You can trash the white boys all you want. That’s some dollars. Shouldn’t be messing with it.”

  Brian shakes his head, slow, wild energy entering his body. It’s all around
him, turbidity in the air, a humid swelling, like the curling of water before it boils. “Okay, so—they’ve already been here? I know that sounds like a lot? But if your auntie wants to go buy another place—she’s gonna find out that—”

  “His aunt is eighty-two,” Red utters, his voice low and hot. “She ain’t gone be buying no new house.”

  “She gone live with her people near Charleston,” Shaved Head adds more casually. “My auntie is still cleaning houses for people, man. She gets six hundred dollars a month.”

  “My mama and granpapa and great-uncle, they live together and between them, they got nine hundred fifty dollars a month to live on. They pay taxes, too. You believe that?” Sunglasses says. “This money coming in mean some our old folks can finally relax.”

  Red Shirt spits into the field dust. “We’re getting money too. And I ain’t even gone discuss that with you. Yo, we don’t even know who you are really.”

  A SLEEK BLUE BULLET of a car rolls in, stops beside Brian’s SUV, and Javier springs out. Brian is touched to realize that Javier is afraid for him, that he did apparently manage to shrink the time-space continuum of downtown traffic and make it there in just over eight minutes. He jogs across the lot, taking in Brian, his dusty chinos, the three men, the scrubby, ruinous field. “Hola, boys. Greetings. What I miss? Bring me up to speed here.”

  Sunglasses snorts lightly, chin lifted. “This your homeboy, Habana?” he asks Javier. “’Cause he come up in here, get in that dirt you see right there, and start talking crazy shit about you people.”

  “Tell them,” Brian says, vaguely sensing they’re having parallel conversations. “They don’t believe me. Tell them I work for PI&B.”