Ecstatic

by Victor La Valle

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Praise

  1 THE WHALE,

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  2 MISS INNOCENCE,

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  3 HOUNDS.

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Acknowledgments

  The title: an explanation

  About the Author

  Books by Victor LaValle

  Copyright Page

  TO VIRGINIA SMITH,

  a great writer, editor, and human being.

  Who knew anyone could be all three?

  Underneath it all I hear pan pipes tooting and a cloven hoof beating time.

  — JOHN FAHEY

  Acclaim for Victor LaValle’s THE ECSTATIC

  “[The] characters are as beautifully rendered as they are bizarrely believable.... LaValle ... writes prose that hums in your ear and appeals to your intellect.” —The Washington Post Book World

  “One of the funniest, darkest novels of the year. . . . A gracefully funny, character-driven, black comedy of manners.” —New York Post

  “In the majestic tradition of William Faulkner, Victor LaValle has created, with love apparent, a singular cast of crazies, con men, and beauty queens out for their piece of the pie. This quest is a rollicking laugh-out-loud wild ride, but be warned: It is punctuated with stunning grief and mournful beauty. The Ecstatic is a jubilant American novel.” —Binnie Kirshenbaum, author of Hester Among the Ruins

  “A domestic drama . . . that might have been conceived by Ice Cube and Fellini.” —Time Out New York

  “The characters are messy and complicated.... LaValle renders them raw and real, but with sustained doses of humor to take the edge off.” —The Washington Post

  “Possessed by Kafka, Carver, and the Notorious B.I.G., this is a tale of the new millennium American experience, grotesquely captured in a prose so crisp that it cuts to the core before you can blink. LaValle exposes our absurdity—clinical and otherwise—with all its hilarity, eroticism, violence, and horrific beauty.” —Willie Perdomo, author of Where a Nickel Costs a Dime

  “An auspicious first novel that ranges with obsessive-compulsive precision over the same pulpy patch of black-geek meta-culture that Colson Whitehead . . . attacked with The Intuitionist. . . . A daring performance.” — Black Issues Book Review

  1 THE WHALE,

  1

  They drove a green rented car into central New York State to find me living wild in my apartment. Wearing shattered glasses and my hair a giant cauliflower-shaped afro on my head. I was three hundred and fifteen pounds. I was a mess, but the house was clean. They knocked and when I opened the front door there were three archangels on my stoop. My sister rubbed my ear when I cried. She whispered, – Why don’t you go put on clothes?

  My family took me home to Queens and kept me in the basement. When I tried to go outside alone, they discouraged it. My sister led me by the hand when walking to the supermarket. Mom cut my meat at the dinner table. They treated me like what some still refer to as a Mongoloid. A few days of this is tenderness, but two weeks seems more like punishment. The spirit of blame stooped in a corner.

  Their concern was wonderful, but the condescension was deadly. And surprising. Before opening the front door to them I really thought my life was full of pepper.

  Three weeks after coming back to Rosedale I cooked a big, red breakfast for my family just to prove that I could. Not only to them, but to myself. It was September 25th, 1995. I remember certain dates to organize and understand my disaster. Without them my mind is a mass grave.

  It was a red breakfast because I added ketchup to the eggs when scrambling them. And to the bacon as it curled in the pan. Call me tasteless, but ketchup is the only seasoning I need.

  I was so nervous that I even dressed up that morning. This bright purple suit that was loose on me and hid my tits. Made me look like a two-hundred-fifty-pound man.

  Our oven was so hot I had to watch I didn’t sweat into the food. Wiped my forehead with my tie. I pulled butter from the fridge to set next to a plate of toast and if this didn’t make them happy then I was out of ideas.

  But they didn’t appear. I waited a long time.

  Even though I heard their beds creak then footsteps on the floor, they never came around the corner. It was like they turned to dust. I prodded the bacon, but without enthusiasm. There was no sizzle yet. With my left hand in my pants pocket I hoped to look cool. I counted numbers to keep from fidgeting.

  I turned the gas flames lower. I washed dishes left in the sink overnight and put them in high cabinets. Sunlight addressed the windows.

  Worst of all fears is abandonment. Eventually I had to know where they’d gone. The white linoleum tiles ticked against the undersides of my dress shoes.

  I was silent in the hallway. There weren’t any windows here so the place was dark and the ceiling seemed far. My hands tapping the walls was the echo inside a hollow bomb.

  They’d hid in the bathroom. Mom leaned against the sink while Grandma rested on the toilet and my sister, Nabisase, sat on the rim of the tub. Three versions of the same woman— past, present and future— huddled in one room. With the door partway shut I was unseen and apart from them.

  Mom whispered, – We should go to him.

  – Yes. Grandma agreed, but they stayed there.

  My family was afraid of me.

  I expected more sympathy, actually, because I sure wasn’t the first one in my bloodline to go zipper-lidded. You should’ve seen when my mother tobogganed naked through Flushing Meadow Park in 1983. Four police carried her to the hospital wrapped in their jackets. Parents on the hill thought Mom was a hump-starved fiend out to abduct their children. Her illness often made her frenzied sexually. Whenever she relapsed the woman was an open womb, but Haldol had stabilized Mom’s mind for years.

  There was my Uncle Isaac, too, who walked from New York to the Canadian border in 1986, and emptied out his brain pan with a rifle. So when they discovered me in that Ithaca apartment Mom and Grandma recognized the situation. Their boy had become a narwhal.

  I pushed in the bathroom door to surprise them, but instead of shuddering they only sighed.

  – Good morning, Grandma murmured.

  – I made eggs.

  Nabisase smiled. –That’s very good of you!

  She was confused and angry. She was thirteen and thus only partially human when it came to compassion. Call me her older brother, by ten years, but Nabisase practically had to tie me down to cut my hair that first week back. I kept saying that I looked fine. No kid is going to enjoy that. Sarcasm was her mild revenge.

  Mom and Grandma were earnestly complimentary; anything I did earned praise. If I’d taken an especially heavy boweling they would have bought me a squeeze toy.


  Nabisase asked, – Is the fire oven still on?

  – Fire oven?

  –The place where you cook, Nabisase explained slowly.

  – It might be, I admitted.

  They ran past me. Forget that. Right over me. Even Grandma, a ninety-three year old, vaulted my doughy shoulders and sped into the kitchen. Where Mom was turning the burners’ dials straight off, to six o’clock.

  – I wouldn’t have started a fire, I told them.

  – How do you know? Nabisase asked.

  Neville Chamberlain believed Hitler would be satisfied to taste only a jigger of Czechoslovakia. My family knew I wasn’t retarded, but the idea of one more paranoid schizophrenic in our fold fucked with their common sense so much that they never mentioned medication, hospitalization, examination. For what? They wished that I was fragile instead of berserk, so that’s what I became. They handled me with cushy mitts.

  Grandma’s English was slightly twisted. She was from East Africa. Uganda, specifically. My mother had also been born there, but Nabisase and I were from Queens. Grandma said, – Well we should have nice dresses then.

  – For breakfast?

  Grandma said, – You are wearing a suit. We should put on long pants.

  While they changed I finished with the food. I got the frying pans going again; the smell of pig meat warmed my heart. The eggs were solid; not dry, just firm. So much grease on the skillet that they floated pretty as kids in a wading pool. I wasn’t fat because of any thyroid condition.

  We lived in Rosedale, at the southeastern end of Queens. A suburb of New York complete with the growls of cars leaving driveways. The sound of engines was pleasant to me.

  Grandma came back first wearing a yellow housedress and black flat shoes. She walked down the hallway, into the living room, then sat on the sectional couch waiting to be served. Across the street a husband backed his RV into the yard of a home he shared with his wife. My family was middle class and I liked that.

  Then, loud as the Devil in his best pink shoes, my sister attacked my mother. A blitzkrieg; bomb blasts and shouting. Lightning behind Mom’s bedroom door.

  My mother came down the hallway chased by her daughter, who was swinging a hair dryer and yelling Mom’s name. Nabisase hammer-slammed Mom across the back of the skull and the dryer’s nozzle shattered into plastic chips around the room. Nabisase took two handfuls of Mom’s hair and used them as handles for pulling our mother, face first, to the ground.

  Grandma tried to stand, but the couch was shaking too much because Mom had pushed Nabisase backward across it. My mother might even have strangled Nabisase if my sister weren’t scratching the skin from Mom’s hands.

  Nabisase pulled the television from our gray entertainment unit. It would have made a louder crash but my mother’s foot stopped the fall. Maybe a toe was broken. I bet my sister wished that was true.

  My mother had dabbled with art— dress making and sculpture to name two. The only proof of this was a horrendous statuette on top of our entertainment unit. A tiny bust meant to resemble Sidney Poitier except that both ears were on the same side of the poor man’s head. With the television crashing the small bust wobbled about to fall so my mother set it safely on the floor.

  Then there was a broom against the wall, so Mom took it and gave Nabisase two baton shots in the ribs. This put my sister on the floor.

  And I was the one with a problem?

  Grandma yelled, – Anthony! Come. Anthony! Please.

  When I stood between my sister and mother they went around me. My sister threw couch cushions over my head hoping they’d hit Mom. Not to hurt, but to annoy, which was a fine alternative.

  Mom whipped a small picture frame under one of my outstretched arms and it plunked against a wall, chipping the paint. –I’m getting a lock for my bedroom, Mom promised. I’m getting it today.

  At which point Grandma raised her voice. The old lady climbed on the couch. – You crazy three bitches! she yelled. You stake my heart!

  She fell backward, but caught herself. The yellow housedress hung down between her thighs. With her spindly old arms and legs visible she became a giant wiry spider. Gnashing and screaming and the yellow fabric gathered below her like a dangling silk line. Loom of the dead. She scared us away.

  There really were worse situations than mine. Mothers and daughters are war.

  Not to seem monomaniacal, but there was still the matter of nine eggs, eight slices of toast, six pats of butter, four glasses of orange juice, two cups of tea, six sausage links and thirteen strips of bacon awaiting an eating. How could they forget that?

  My mother and Nabisase went to dress; passed the kitchen like there was no food inside. This is something I couldn’t do. I didn’t understand how my mother could. She used to be weak like me, but now I was the only one who felt the pantry calling. There are people who love to eat and those who don’t. My mother might have changed, but I was still a man who found any complication less daunting after a full plate.

  I took our largest salad bowl from one of the cupboards above the kitchen sink and threw in those nine eggs. I added another half-cup of ketchup and a teaspoon of salt.

  I mixed the ketchup, eggs, sausages, salt and some syrup with a wooden spoon. Until there was a red-and-yellow soup four inches deep and thicker than sap. The idea was to sour mash this concoction then sink into the basement where I could eat it at leisure on my bed. When anyone decides to tell me I have a problem with food I gesture to the long line of helpful advisors forming a kissing line to the right of my ass.

  And I would have made it down if I hadn’t gone back for the bacon.

  Right at the top of the basement steps I realized the thirteen strips were in a bowl next to the pepper shaker. If I didn’t get them now Mom would toss them to thwart her own gluttonous tendencies. I darted into the kitchen, grabbed the bacon, dropped it into my big bowl and was set to sashay merrily away, but before I turned around Mom and my sister were at my sides.

  – Oh that’s too much food for one, my mother said.

  My sister put her arm on my shoulder. – You should put that in the garbage place.

  – Garbage place?

  Mom didn’t dignify Nabisase’s goading, but her own tone wasn’t much better. The difference was that my mother didn’t even know how to spell patronizing, so forget realizing that she was doing it.

  She asked, – You don’t want to get a stomachache, do you?

  I said, – Do you people realize I was the first one in this family to even get to college?

  – We’ve all gone to university, Mom said. Myself, your Uncle. Even Grandma. And we got our degrees.

  – But that was in Uganda. I was in the Ivy League for two years.

  My sister touched my arm. –The only place you’ll graduate from now is McDonald’s University.

  Mom said, – I’ll throw it out for you.

  I looked at the brew mournfully. I could have fought with my mother, but why? I unloaded the slop into our garbage bin. This made my mom glad.

  She was fifty-three years old with gray stubble on her chin. It was while I was away at college that Mom became beautiful by losing ninety pounds. She was sane and slim now. When I’d been walking around downtown Ithaca with cookie crumbs in my hair, Mom was jogging across Brookville Park. Seeing her again had been the hardest. Before I went to Cornell we were misfits, a pair. We’d finish an entire Louisiana Crunch Cake in twenty minutes; hiding from Nabisase and Grandma in the bathroom.

  But do you believe our world is an alchemical comedy? Because I do.

  Inside the house I was a twenty-three-year-old college dropout, a girthy goon suffering bouts of dementia, but when I opened the front door I was That Right Young Man Living In An Otherwise Hysterical Home.

  New York City Police had been called to our address four different times in the month before I returned. Sister against Mother. Mother against Sister. Once Grandma called cops on both. No one was ever arrested, but there was a quartet of pink police
reports on the fridge under a magnet shaped like bananas.

  Outside, the ladies were crazy and I was brand new.

  I walked down the front steps and pulled our green garbage bin from one side of the house onto the sidewalk. I auditioned for the role of conscientious new director. After putting out the trash I coiled the lawn hose by the driveway.

  The man across the street, with the RV, said, –Taking care of a house is never done, is it?

  His wife was next to him; we spoke from their yard to mine. – But we’re glad to see someone’s over there doing it, she said.

  Meanwhile Nabisase and my mother were inside yelling again.

  My sister left through the kitchen’s black security gate. When she went out she slammed that metal door and a gong sound woke Rosedale’s sleeping dogs. It was just seven in the morning and now they barked like it was noon.

  When other neighbors peeked they saw me throwing away supermarket circulars as Mom opened the same kitchen door, slammed it even louder, then made the Oldsmobile Firenza’s engine bleat by twisting the ignition key too hard.

  – You keep it up, both husband and wife told me.

  Rosedale really was a lovely place. Trees grew beside great lampposts. The sycamores caught starlings on their bare branches. This neighborhood was for teachers and tax preparers. One supermarket manager. A family who owned their own meat store; the specialty was goat.

  Two branch supervisors for Bell Atlantic phones.

  Two bus drivers.

  Nurses.

  I spent the next hour in the front yard holding a trowel while theatrically grunting through light field work. I did that because neighborhoods expect cooperation from every family. I know it’s dumb to care about other people’s opinions, but I wanted everyone to think highly of me.

  At the top of the front steps I checked for mail, but it was too early. My sister had cut my hair to the raw scalp. The cold wind hurt, but I didn’t put on a hat.

  Even after I opened the front door my left and right foot refused to enter. Who would give up manhood, honestly? With so many benefits. The world defers to me.

  – Pull the door closed! Grandma yelled from the couch. She watched the television news and read a copy of The Globe, too.