by Danzy Senna
17
I GOT LOST ONCE, I was just a kid, maybe ten. Somehow, I got separated from my family. We were in Los Angeles for a weekend, visiting my parents’ friends—Mohammed, known as Mo, and his wife, Rebecca. Fellow professors. Fellow interracial marriage, an Arab and a Jew. And their three obnoxious kids.
We all went out to lunch in Santa Monica and then walked around afterward, looking in shops. It was hot—as hot as I’d ever felt. The street wobbled before us in the Southern California glare, and Mo’s linen shirt was sodden with sweat.
When and where and how I was separated from the group I do not know. In my memory I blame it on the Southern California sun, which I imagine bounced off every surface and blinded me. All I know for certain is that when I looked up to find them, they were all gone. My father, my mother, my brother—and the other family, too.
In those next three hours the streets became a maze of incomprehensible Spanish words, every mini-mall looking alike, and every sunburned face turned mocking and ghoulish, exploding with prosperity. The only other pedestrians were Mexican day workers from Tijuana who spoke no English, and a few drug-crazed white beach bums whom I knew better than to approach. Everybody else slid past in vehicles, a blur of humanity distanced by chrome and glass. I did not ask for help but instead—out of that bizarre pride that overcomes some of us when we are at our most desperate—made a show of pretending I was actually not lost at all. I was careful not to walk past the same café too many times, leaned against a random car in a parking lot as if I were waiting for my mother to come out with groceries any minute, wandered through shops pretending I was going to buy something, and sat on the lawn down near the water watching a juggler amuse a crowd of happy strangers. At one point I even pretended to talk on a pay phone simply to avoid one particularly concerned-looking woman with a baby who had seen me circling the parking lot and must have caught the panicked look on my face. I mouthed words and feigned a casual laugh at the dial tone on the other end.
I don’t know how long I wandered, but at some point I could wander no more. I sat down on a bus stop bench. It was getting late. The sky had turned a bleary commuter orange. The traffic was getting thicker. Cars moved slow as slugs onto the freeway, away from the sea. I curled over onto my knees and hid my face behind my hands and did not move from this position for a long time. Buses came and went from the stop and the air grew cool around me, and from behind my palms I sensed it was night.
And when I heard a man’s voice saying my name, I thought I was imagining things—but I moved my hands away. Sure enough, a police car sat idling at the curb in front of me.
I could see my parents in the backseat. And my brother’s dirty-blond Afro between them. They were all smiling. Even the policeman. Their white teeth shone in the darkness of the vehicle. I thought they were all laughing at me, amused by the sight of me, dirty and bereft at a bus station.
I did not move. I just sat there staring at them as if I were waiting not for them but for a bus back to Tijuana where my real family lived. I sat there staring until the policeman released the safety lock on the back door and my father was able to get out and pick me up in his arms.
That night Mo and Rebecca cooked a celebratory meal of falafel and baba ghanoush, and my brother and the other kids played a raucous game of Pictionary in the living room. I sat fidgeting by the window, staring out at the freeway in the distance. That stream of lights and the deserted city streets described the world for me now, and not here, this bright full space of laughter and friends.
This is the strange effect of getting lost. You become aware not so much of what is absent—all that is familiar and safe—but rather of what that familiarity has been keeping at bay: a world of strange shadows and cruel laughter, of odious companions just waiting for you to come out and play. And they know you will.
18
I SPENT ALL DAY hiding in my office, the door shut, editing my story. Rula liked the Ivers Greene article; he was, she said, a “real basket case,” but fascinating, and I’d done a graceful job of describing his work and influences. She only wished I’d included more about where he came from. It would run next week with my byline. And she had another story idea for me to work on. A New Age cult. She wanted me to research the organization and get back to her next week with what I thought was the best angle. She handed me a file of clippings, and I thanked her for the opportunity.
I slipped out of work early and wandered the city aimlessly for the next three hours, finding comfort in being no place at all. I walked through the Village trying on clothes, flipping through used records and books, none of which I bought. I sat in a café reading a magazine and sipping a latte. I was avoiding being locatable. I was interested in the faces of strangers.
It was dark when I got back to Brooklyn, some time past seven. I went to a small gourmet grocery store near the subway and bought fresh groceries: a chicken breast, rosemary, potatoes, butter, fixings for a salad. Then I went to the local video store and dawdled in the aisles before choosing an old Steve Martin comedy.
As I headed up the stairs, I flipped through Vera’s mail—bills, every single one. I was glad that they were addressed to somebody else. Their return addresses spoke of holes too deep to climb out of: Visa. Michael L. Cardullo, Attorney at Law. Department of Motor Vehicles. Internal Revenue Service. Direct Student Loans.
When I got to my landing I heard the phone ringing. I knew it wasn’t for me, but I still rushed to get it, dropping groceries and video and stumbling inside and down the hall to the bedroom.
“Hello?”
“Hello to you.”
She was chewing gum. Loud and hard. She was at a pay phone. There were street sounds behind her.
I scratched at my leg but couldn’t feel anything.
“Um, hi,” I said.
“Do you realize that the size of the average white man’s prick is forty percent smaller than the average black man’s?” She laughed, a long low chuckle like a ball bouncing down stairs. “Uh-oh. Did I shock you? I was reading this old book my uncle Herman gave me last year for Christmas. It’s about all the different races of the world.” She affected a slave drawl: “Da Chinee man and da Injun and da Nigra and da Cockasian. I’ll show it to you tomorrow at lunch. It’s a total fucking riot.”
My eyes darted around the dark bedroom.
“Hey, I’m cooking something,” I said. “Can we talk later?”
She gasped. “My God. Did you forget our plans? I was supposed to cook for you tonight! Oh well. Did you make enough for two, or should I bring my own fixings?”
“Actually, I have company.”
“What company? That jigaboo artist?”
“An old friend from school. Her name is—Lola.”
“Oh. Lola.” She said the name as if she too was acquainted with her. “Of course. Somebody your own age. Hip, happening Lola.” She sighed. “That must be nice. Better than hanging out with an old lady.” She let out a sort of strangled sound in her throat that was supposed to be a laugh but conveyed something more complicated.
“I think I smell the chicken burning. I gotta go.”
“I think I smell the chicken burning. I gotta go.”
I was silent.
“All right, all right, hon. I get the hint. Say hi to Lola, your lazy-assed friend who can’t take the chicken off the heat for you. Tell her she better be nice to you or I’ll beat her up.” Pause. “I’m kidding! And call me if you can’t sleep. ‘Kay, sweets?”
My voice was a small bewildered wisp. “Okay. Bye.”
As I hung up, I heard music turn on in the apartment next door. Al Greene. Crackling revolutions of soul. A man’s deep voice said something, and then a woman’s high laughter at the joke I hadn’t quite made out.
I WENT TO BED EARLY, on a grinding stomach. I’d lost my appetite when I pulled out the chicken and saw it sitting there, marinating in its own juices. I didn’t watch the movie either. Instead I turned off all the lights and got in bed, but I did not fall a
sleep. I twisted around in the sheets, trying to get comfortable on the lumpy bed that was not mine. Every sound in the building, on the street below, was fractious. Banging pipes. A dog barking. A television either next door or upstairs—the theme song to Diff’rent Strokes. An airplane passing overhead, that for a minute sounded like it was plummeting toward the earth.
I drifted off to sleep at three in the morning. The telephone woke me up, a shrill, angry sound like a drawer of silverware being overturned. I watched the white phone as I lay curled up tight and fetal. The answering machine picked up with a click, and the nasal, computerized man’s voice told the caller to leave a message. But whoever it was didn’t. He or she just sat on the other end, recording their own breathing, and I wondered if they, she, he, could hear me where I lay in the dark, barely breathing. Wondered if they would hear me if I were to speak aloud or cough. I didn’t take a chance. I stayed still and quiet and waited until the person hung up.
19
I DECIDED TO WAIT to call Ivers Greene until after the article came out. A nod toward journalistic objectivity. And so the weekend stretched before me—empty and endless. On Saturday morning, I headed to midtown and got to the New York Public Library just as the doors opened, and settled into a spot in the Rose Reading Room. I did research on the article Rula had assigned to me. I found the reporting a welcome distraction. I recalled, as I pored over the clipping file and scribbled notes into a pad, the reason I’d gone into reporting in the first place. I loved the sensation of disappearing—the delicious sense of my body fading into thin air and only my eyes remaining, two brown laser points observing somebody else’s story but never being a part of it.
The story Rula had assigned me was about a “wellness group” that had recently come under suspicion for practicing brainwashing tactics in their recruitment of members. The FBI was zeroing in on their leader, Tarik Raz—a slim, dark, mischievous man who reminded me a bit of a young Cat Stevens. Raz was a former medical student from Harvard who had turned into a guru. He had been fired midway through his residency at Mass General after he was caught doling out homeopathic remedies to his patients. He bought a mansion in Lemon Grove, a suburb of San Diego, and began his own clinic and mobilization center called the Institute for the Study of Wellness and Enlightenment, ISWE. It had since blossomed into a popular alternative-health center. The group’s activities were near impossible to track, due in part to the heavy security around the mansion, and in part to their method of “floating” activism. They moved around the country in a series of vans, like a rock band on permanent tour. But instead of concerts, ISWE held theatrical sit-ins outside of hospitals and government offices, and Raz gave inflammatory speeches indicting “the medical establishment.” According to the article, the FBI suspected that ISWE’s premises were cultlike, complete with nubile young female devotees, stray mixed-breed dogs, and love children roaming the premises. There were also rumors of an increased militancy among Raz’s supporters, of violence, sexual exploitation, and corruption in his ranks.
I spent the day reading up on Raz, taking notes in my spiral reporter’s notebook. He was, according to one article, the son of an Israeli soldier and a Palestinian cobbler. His parents had fled Israel with the young Tarik and raised him in the San Fernando Valley.
In one interview, Raz spoke about homeopathic medicine. He said you had to cure “like with like.” My mother believed this, too. As I was growing up, whenever I complained of feeling sick, she would put on her glasses, whip out a battered black book of remedies, and ask me elaborate questions about my symptoms. She would then bring me a brown glass bottle from her cupboard and feed me sugar pellets supposedly containing poison. Sepia. Nux vomica. Deadly nightshade. My mother swore it was these poisons, not the sugar, that would save me. You have to give the body small doses of the problem, she explained, to remind it what it’s fighting against, and to trigger it into action.
I never could tell if it was those remedies that worked, or if I just naturally got better. Later, in college, I made my mother miserable by going to the Student Health Center whenever I felt sick and taking antibiotics and cortisone and other evils.
You’ll feel better for a while, my mother warned, but you’ll see. It’s a temporary solution, and it will only make things worse.
She would approve of Tarik Raz. Maybe she already knew about him. I wouldn’t be surprised.
I took breaks every hour or so to rest my eyes and stare around at the array of New Yorkers around me. The balding Indian man poring over a physics book. A handsome, dark-haired couple pretending to work on their computers but really passing one another love notes. A buxom blonde in a tight blue dress highlighting a medical textbook, seemingly oblivious to the desiring eyes of the men around her. I found endless complexity in the faces of strangers, and peace in the hum of laptops, the indiscernible clicking of brains at work. I thought about Ivers Greene. I wondered what he would think about my article. I thought of his face and the way he’d said “You have hairy arms” to me in the café. I didn’t dwell on Greta or the disturbing timbre of our conversations the past few days. Something had shifted in the bathroom of the Ritz-Carlton—or perhaps before that, though I’d been unwilling to acknowledge the facts until now. In any case, I had decided to leave that chapter of my life behind, and the less mental space I gave her from now on the better.
Over the next few hours, I learned much about the rumors that swirled around the compound in Lemon Grove. The rebirthing sessions in the moonlight, complete with “placenta”—a concoction of whipped farm eggs rubbed all over the naked “newborn” recruit. The colon cleansings given in the basement every month by the resident nutritionist. The “tribal dinners” every Friday night when they feasted on tofu together in the dining hall and played seventies rock and did “wild dancing” until the wee hours.
When I got back to Brooklyn, my neighbor Flo was standing in the foyer watching the street from behind the glass door. She was the kind of woman who launched right into familiarities with absolute strangers—at bus stops, in store aisles.
“I’m waiting for my ride,” she said when she saw me. “Corky—late as usual. And you just know when she gets here she’s gonna be complaining about her hair. And how it’s my fault that it ain’t done right. You just wait and see.”
I shook my head and scoffed as if I knew what and who she was talking about.
She was dressed similarly to the last time I’d seen her, but this time she was holding a huge gift basket covered in plastic, filled with fruit and nuts and chocolates.
I opened Vera’s mailbox. Beside me, Flo shifted her feet and peered out at the night, sighing with impatience. “Motherfuckin’ Corky,” I heard her whisper to the glass.
I turned around and started to unlock the door leading into the building’s main corridor, but she called after me, “Hey, you black?”
I turned around. I was not sure I’d heard her right.
“Excuse me?”
“You black?” she repeated, chewing her gum and eyeing me up and down. “Corky and me made a bet. She thinks you’re a sister.”
“Well,” I said. “I am.”
“Hmmph,” she said. “You sure got a white way of showing it.”
“Yeah, um,” my words petered out. I’d heard this kind of dig many times before and it always stung me as if it were the first time.
“I’m just playin’,” she said, smiling now with her mouth. Her eyes remained dull and suspicious. “Want to come to a Kwanzaa party? I’m on the planning committee.”
She put the fruit basket down and reached in her bag and pulled out a lime-green flyer. “Here,” she said.
I thanked her and looked at the flyer as I went upstairs. A bespectacled old black man was holding a little braided black girl up in his arms, the two of them laughing. The party was next week at the Umoja Community Center on the corner of DeKalb and Washington. Refreshments would be served. I knew I would not go, but even still, it was nice to have an invitation somewh
ere over the holidays.
When I reached my landing, I heard the phone ringing inside. I didn’t rush to get it this time, allowing the machine to pick up as I took off my coat and put Vera’s letters in the giant Macy’s bag in the closet. But the person hung up as soon as the machine picked up and then called back all over again.
I went to the bedroom and stood at the door, one leg propped against the other in stork position, watching the phone, my arms hugged across my chest. The machine picked up again after the fourth ring, and this time her voice bellowed into the machine.
“Hello! Earth to Rocky. Pickuppickuppickup.” She emitted a long sigh. “What have you been up to all day? Where were you? It’s a Saturday, for God’s aching bones. What could you be doing up there? Papier-fucking-mâché? I’ve been calling and calling your ass.”
I crawled across the floor and sat at the far end of the bedroom, hugging my knees in the dark. As she rattled on, I noticed something odd. I could still hear sounds of a street behind her on the machine. Beeping cars and shouting and music playing. A Beastie Boys song. The repetition of the lines I did it like this, I did it like that, I did it with a whiffle ball bat! But there was an echo effect. It was the same exact sequence of noises I could hear coming from the street below.