Ecstatic

by Victor La Valle

  I couldn’t just stand up. I didn’t want to be noticed, remembered, described to the police.

  To Maximilian’s surprise the lights went out, but not the power. His microphone still worked. In the suddenly dark auditorium, he yelped, – Spit!

  Once there, I pressed the long metal bars on the double doors and heard the lock give.

  A raiding party was outside, expecting me.

  A road flare should be used outdoors.

  This seems like practical instruction, like who needs it said, but common sense escapes some folks.

  Auditorium illumination had sworn down to nothing, even Maximilian had dimmed. He needed someone else’s cue. – Hello? he asked into the microphone. What part is this?

  The audience was largely oblivious. This didn’t take a very long time. One minute of darkness.

  Then the road flares.

  They have to be snapped before they start burning so first there were half a dozen cracking sounds.

  I saw the protestors go in carrying the flares. The hallway, where they’d been waiting, was as dark as the auditorium.

  The sallow woman came in first; she still looked nineteen, but she was thirty-nine. I recognized her even with boots on. Wearing a black leotard and a black thermal underwear top, but nothing to cover her face. Did she expect to be seen? Want it? I wondered where the film crew was positioned.

  She dashed her flare down the aisles. So did the six that followed her.

  They ran past me. I pulled the doors closed. I was still inside. We were in a room, but it felt big as the world.

  After flares the protestors pulled can-horns from their coats and pumped them. The honks helped to orient people: Yes, you should be scared.

  Some women in the audience screamed and others ducked their heads. The men did just about the same. Less yelling, more tucking.

  The middle-aged woman, their leader in here, yelled, – No more beauty, just more art!

  They’d been in a group, but then the demonstrators ran the aisles chaotically. Playing their can-horns whenever it seemed the audience might get their bearings enough to get up and slap these kids down.

  Every two minutes. Horn! Horn!

  This was supposed to have been fun. Except for the flares there was no light and I’d let seven imps in the room.

  One problem was getting my eyes to focus.

  As if the bleating cans wasn’t enough, there were audience members screaming. Then the rusty ring of auditorium seats flipping up as people stood and slamming down as they sat again.

  – Less beauty, more art!

  The protestors were yelling, lecturing us, but who was listening? I heard the words, but didn’t understand. It was loud enough in here that even Grandma covered her ears. When I scooted back to her, she’d pulled her cloche down over her eyes.

  The rear curtains on stage pulled back, but the band was gone. There was a drum kit, but no one playing it.

  With the backstage area exposed there was some light other than the hot-pink road flares. The lamps back there must have been on another circuit. They didn’t do much more than illuminate the contestants, all of them on the stage now. A crowd of forty-two crying girls.

  They were confused. So were we. Forty-two of them. I tried to pick my sister out so I could go up there and get her, but I didn’t see Nabisase. A few of the girls climbed off the stage and tried to find their families. Many of them screamed, – Mommy! Mommy!

  It sounded like they’d all lost one.

  Maximilian started making noise. I wouldn’t even have noticed his voice among so many others, but he was holding that working microphone. He muttered, – I’ll be so glad when I get home.

  Somebody should have turned the speakers off but in the commotion they’d spun the dial up to one hundred and thirty.

  – I’ll be so glad when I get home.

  My eyes remained half in focus, half in the basement.

  I saw many more of the Miss Innocence girls climb offstage. A few jumped. You might have thought they were on fire. We were beneath them, but they joined us. A magnanimous act.

  Once the stage cleared the thirty-nine-year-old guerrilla hurled balloons up there. She was right at the front, but no one bothered her. Afraid to tackle the saboteur.

  Her friends joined. Four throwing balloons and three facing the audience, waving their can-horns threateningly. They didn’t have to. Everyone was scared of them. Even me.

  The balloons wobbled heavily. When they hit they splattered greenish grease across the stage. Five balloons. Then fifteen. Great globs of oil stained the boards.

  I tried to comfort Grandma, but she didn’t want it. I wondered if she’d seen me open the double doors. It was her hearing, not her sight, that sucked. I touched her shoulder and she pushed my hand away. Head forward, screaming, – Nabisase! into her lap.

  Around us whole families stood to run and sat again. They didn’t know what to do.

  I wished I had Uncle Arms in my hands so I could squeeze his lying neck. This was monstrous. I regretted helping.

  When I went to the door a second time it was because I knew that I heard knocking.

  It wasn’t forceful and I thought of Uncle Arms’s rapping from the other side.

  My lightest touch made the doors move. I said, – Uncle Arms, I want to talk to you.

  But he wouldn’t have heard me over the echoing chorus in the room. I was surprised the can-horns weren’t hoarse by now. If anyone but Maximilian was speaking I couldn’t hear it. All other voices became traffic in the auditorium. A long vowel sound; a cloud of despair; or one ecstatic outburst from the mouths of God.

  One door slipped back three inches. A light was on in that service hallway now. 10,000 watts. It was a clear, vivid, luminous, incandescent, flaring flaming fucking corridor now. I covered my eyes. Twenty-five more anarchists ran past me, into the auditorium.

  We should have stayed in Rosedale. I could have cheated fate. It was November 12th. I remember.

  Nabisase found Grandma.

  I heard my sister calling a name, but hardly recognized it as my own.

  Grandma and Nabisase were to my left, twenty feet. I held the door open with my hand; I was framed by the hallway light. Easy to see me. And to see them. Grandma in her seat. Nabisase kneeling in the aisle. Both of them looking at me. Misunderstanding.

  My eyes began to flutter as I let go of the door. It shut. My family was in the auditorium, but I was stuck outside. Not alone. There was one last figure here, wide as an oven and twice as tall. It wouldn’t let me in its cabin, but had come to take me now. It touched both sides of my face with its very small hands. The taste of salt water was on my tongue from crying. I opened my mouth, tried to talk, but there was a lion’s egg in my throat. Two of us, in the service hall, became entangled.

  3 HOUNDS.

  21

  Ledric Mayo could go ahead and die because I wasn’t going to help him. I was saying that to myself the whole seven-hour drive from Lumpkin, Virginia. If Nabisase and Grandma had been speaking to me I’d have told them that very same thing.

  It’s what I told myself as I called in sick at Sparkle on Monday morning.

  Then again at noon when I went outside to do yard work because I just couldn’t sleep. To illustrate the mood of my family: I hid the kitchen knives and that’s no joke.

  – Aye nigga.

  – Get that nigga!

  – Get that nigga to stop cutting them bushes!

  Three times Pinch yelled at me and three times I ignored him. He was with a few other guys in the yard next to mine, on the front steps of Candan’s house.

  Pinch stood up when I didn’t heed his command to stop chopping at my hedge and he walked out then around into my driveway. Now I couldn’t ignore him because his beefy hand was on my shoulder. I let go of the trigger of the hedge clipper and the high –chip– –chip– noise faded away.

  –Those bushes never did anything to you.

  He and I surveyed the hedge, which ran the le
ngth of my driveway. Twenty-five feet before it reached the backyard, where we had a less formal row of shrubs.

  I was proud of myself because I’d really gone hell with the cutting. It wasn’t fair that in the summer this bramble was going to bloom into one impossible green afro which would have to be trimmed every two weeks and yet it wasn’t even really our property. The damn thing was growing from Candan’s side. The President was the one who’d planted it, so why did I have to tend one half of its features.

  –That’s called being neighbors, said Pinch.

  There were plenty of other reasons to be agitated, but the one that irked me most was Mr. Ledric Mayo. I really didn’t see how I could go administer to an idiot who’d poisoned his own stupid self.

  The two other guys, Candan one of them, stood in Candan’s yard but came closer to disapprove of me from fewer feet away. Through the tindersticks of this bare winter hedge I watched them shake their heads.

  Candan said, – Now that’s too much, Anthony. Next time you don’t have to cut a lot.

  Who knows. Maybe the guy spoke to me that way because he truly meant to be kind, but it was the tone one takes with a guy who separates clear and colored glass for a living.

  – You took the top two feet off that thing, Pinch said. The President’s not going to be to happy about it.

  – He’s no one’s boss, Candan said quickly.

  Even I was surprised to hear him sound so ferocious.

  Then the President came round the corner in his Lincoln Town Car.

  His Town Car was a big mess; not even old; a ’94 model, but damn that front end was battered. The headlights were held by gray duct tape. One of the rear-door windows was veiny from having half-shattered.

  Pinch smiled. – Candan, you tell the President what you just told us.

  The guy next to Candan was as fat as me. Out in Queens this wasn’t as rare as the Surgeon General would wish. It was like, say, semi-rural Pennsylvania. I am the unattractive America.

  The President didn’t make it easy on his car, weaving like he did. He bumped against curbs a couple of times.

  Going twenty-five miles an hour and without once tapping a brake the President spun that black car to the right just as he reached home. As the car entered the driveway it bumped one of the poles of their fence, making it shake rattlesnake-loud.

  The President was not a drunk. It wasn’t alcohol making him weave. – Youngbloods! The President yelled happily. He rolled down the electric passenger-side window, but still sat in the Town Car. Candan and the fat guy were on one side of the hedge, Pinch with me on the other.

  Candan spat.

  The car was turned off.

  Out stepped the President in a turquoise track suit.

  It was his eyes that were wrecked. I had never seen them this close before. They went in two directions and neither was straight ahead. His driver’s license had gone out of style three years ago, but try telling him to renew it. Men never believe their powers will fail.

  – Youngbloods, he said again.

  Pinch smiled first. – How you, Mr. Jerome?

  He shrugged. The President was that kind of man who meant to be weary, no matter. If he was in bed he’d say his back hurt from being prone then when on his feet he’d swear the most he wanted was to spread out on a board to sleep. The President said, –They got me on the run, Chester. They got me out of breath.

  Candan walked toward the car without greeting his father.

  – I got the damn car keys! C.D. Come back over here. Where you been hiding? the President asked me.

  –Took my family away for the weekend.

  – How far? he asked.

  – Viriginia. Seven hours’ drive. We got back at four this morning.

  – Are you all here? Candan asked.

  – Where else would we be?

  – Four of you came in this morning? Candan asked. One, two, three, four?

  – Damn Candan, the President said. I think the man can still count!

  I looked at his son, at Candan, wondering how people had spoken about me in the weeks since I’d returned.

  The President joked around instead of letting his son press. He pointed at me and the other Jell-O-fellow beside Candan. – You two look like the bookends at a cookie factory.

  Guys giggled, even the other big boy, but the joke didn’t make sense to me.

  – Why would a cookie factory have bookends? I asked.

  But too late for that because the President noticed my work. He walked the length of the hedge while still in his yard then scratched his gray mustache. He wore a black leather baseball cap with an adjustable strap on the back. – You sure made a mess of this, he said.

  I wondered why he had to accuse me, but remembered the big orange clipper in my hand.

  The others waited for angrier words, but the nice thing about the President was that he was never going to get his gun from in the house. Most he’d do is crack an egg on your forehead.

  – If I ever need a haircut I won’t call you, the President said.

  Before there could be any more jokes Candan’s red dog came from their backyard and crouched at the President’s feet. A lithe Doberman, missing one of its ears. I thought it was playing with the older man, but it snarled at the President until Candan walked over, slapped its side and yelled, – Shut up!

  – Get back! Candan yelled.

  The President bowed his head, but I didn’t know if the gesture was in deference to his son or his son’s emissary, the Doberman.

  After Candan commanded it the mutt popped up, trotted off, thin body bouncing so high above the ground it seemed about to float off like some long, useless balloon. It barked a few times, which caused a few other nearby dogs to rev up so then there were pockets of howling in the neighborhood for close to thirty minutes.

  One day; so far; no mother; not bad.

  When the President went inside their house Candan paced casually to the Lincoln then removed keys the President had forgotten in the driver’s side door. He shook them in front of us like Candan needed people to see that he was right to assume his father doddered, but we looked away, ashamed for him to show it.

  22

  When I walked back inside with bits of hedge drit still on my hair Grandma was in the living room with Nabisase. The younger was talking while combing the old woman’s hair into braids, but they stopped when I came in.

  Fatigue twists the tongue until it turns blue. – I think you’re overreacting, I told them. Mom’s the one who cut out on you, not me.

  For the first time in years I felt like a child. A horrible time compared with adulthood.

  – Did you hear what I said?

  Nabisase and Grandma continued to play Easter Island; in the living room I stood three feet from a civilization unwilling to answer me.

  Stupidly, I went and tried Mom’s door. It was locked when we left so why would it be any different now. I got down on my knees and pressed my nose to the space at the bottom. Then my ear. I was waiting for a sign that she was back in there.

  She wasn’t.

  I went to get the mail and that’s when I realized I never sent Ahmed Abdel his note. It was in my jacket pocket, forgotten when I chased my sister and grandmother to Uncle Arms’s charade.

  As I got the letter, walked to the door, my sister finally said something.

  – Are you going to see about Ledric?

  – How’d you know about that?

  – I played the answering machine.

  – I was only going to mail a letter.

  Grandma didn’t look at me, but she said. – He sounds terrible and sick.

  – You two have Ledric Mayo on the brain.

  I tapped the letter to Ahmed Abdel against the door. They waited.

  – I don’t have the energy, I complained. This is the only thing you all can talk to me about?

  Nabisase stood up. – I called him already and got the address. I said we were going over.

  – Why’d you do that
?

  – Because we’re going to.

  I didn’t want to bring Nabisase with me to Jamaica and luckily it was four o’clock so my sister’s church was having its second Monday prayer meeting. She was willing to miss school, but not devotions. Christ had really impressed my sister with his Bible that you’ve heard so much about. The first morning back from Lumpkin she read Scripture while eating cereal.

  But you know, I’m not even going to say Christ when I refer to Nabisase’s faith because I still didn’t believe she meant it. I’ll say Selwyn because Nabisase wouldn’t know the difference.

  Nabisase walked with me, though not for the comraderie. I was on the sidewalk and she stayed at the lip of the street. She thought I’d betrayed her. On the drive up from Lumpkin I filled the car with gas and didn’t make one stop; she and Grandma didn’t speak.

  Except when we were finally home and I got out, ran around to Nabisase’s side.

  Then my sister said, – Don’t you hold any more doors open in front of me.

  It’s harder to stay close when someone watches you betray them. She thought she understood me perfectly and I just couldn’t explain.

  I smiled as we reached the corner of 229th Street and 147th Avenue. Nabisase went to hear sermons at the Apostolic Temple of Selwyn. A Church with Old Time Powers.

  Watching her, I wondered how, exactly, a person finds religion.

  After ten minutes a brown van stopped about a half-block past me. I waited for it to come back but the driver wouldn’t rewind so I had to walk over.

  There are two kinds of vans used for this small-business public transportation. The difference is in the size of the passenger door. One has a great big hatch while the other’s got a portal the size of an airplane window. I will let you guess which this van had; it shouldn’t take long to figure. When I opened the tiny entrance the crowd inside muttered. I distinctly heard one man whisper, – Oh god damn, at the sight of me.

  Ten passengers watched me struggle in. The inside of the cabin smelled like sweaty feet and cocoa butter. Each row of seats fit three people, but those were to capacity so I had to get past them, to the last back ass end where there was the longer seat that fits four.