Philadelphia Fire

by John Edgar Wideman

  I want to do something about the silence.

  A book, huh. A book people have to buy. You want Simmie’s story so you can sell it. You going to pay him if he talks to you?

  It’s not about money.

  Then why you doing it?

  The truth is, I’m not really sure.

  You mean you’ll do your thing and forget Simmie. Write your book and gone. Just like the social workers and those busybodies from the University. They been studying us for years. Reports on top of reports. A whole basement full of files in the building where I work. We’re famous.

  Why don’t you leave poor Simmie alone, mister? He’s suffered enough. And still suffering. Nightmares. Wetting the bed. Poor child’s trying to learn what it’s like to live with people ain’t King’s people.

  Will you help me find him?

  I don’t think so.

  Can we meet again at least? Talk some more?

  Saturday maybe. That will give me time to ask around. Not here. In Clark Park. I don’t like being in here with that machine sucking up all the air.

  I’ll meet you anywhere. Anytime. Tape or no tape.

  Saturday morning. Clark Park.

  What time, Saturday?

  Early.

  I’ll be there.

  I bet you will. Tell you a secret, though, my feelings won’t be hurt if you ain’t.

  Clark Park. Forty-third and Osage. Saturday early. I’ll be there.

  One more thing . . . is that damned machine still running?

  Yes . . . no.

  Click.

  If the city is a man, a giant sprawled for miles on his back, rough contours of his body smothering the rolling landscape, the rivers and woods, hills and valleys, bumps and gullies, crushing with his weight, his shadow, all the life beneath him, a derelict in a terminal stupor, too exhausted, too wasted to move, rotting in the sun, then Cudjoe is deep within the giant’s stomach, in a subway-surface car shuddering through stinking loops of gut, tunnels carved out of decaying flesh, a prisoner of rumbling innards that scream when trolleys pass over rails embedded in flesh. Cudjoe remembers a drawing of Gulliver strapped down in Lilliput just so. Ropes staked over his limbs like hundreds of tiny tents, pyramids pinning the giant to the earth. If the city is a man sprawled unconscious drunk in an alley, kids might find him, drench him with lighter fluid and drop a match on his chest. He’d flame up like a heap of all the unhappy monks in Asia. Puff the magic dragon. A little bald man topples over, spins as flames spiral up his saffron robe. In the streets of Hue and Saigon it had happened daily. You watched priests on TV burst into fireballs, roll as they combusted, a shadow flapping inside the flaming pyre. You thought of a bird in there trying to get out. You wondered if the bird was a part of the monk refusing to go along with the program. A protest within the monk’s protest. Hey. I don’t want nothing to do with this crazy shit. Wings get me out of here. Screeching and writhing as hot gets hotter, a scarecrow in the flame’s eye.

  Same filthy-windowed PTC trolley car carries you above and below ground, in and out of flesh, like a needle suturing a wound. You hear an echo of wind and sea, smell it. As you ride beneath city streets there are distant explosions, muffled artillery roar and crackle of automatic weapons, sounds of war you don’t notice in the daylight world above. Down here no doubt the invisible warfare is real. You are rattling closer to it. It sets the windows of the trolley vibrating. Around the next blind curve the firefight waits to engulf you.

  Above the beach at Torremolinos was another city of tunnels and burrows. Like a termite mound. Once, instead of following the shore path, he’d taken the vertical shortcut from beach to town. Haphazard steps hacked from rock, worn smooth by a million bare feet. You couldn’t see very far ahead or behind as you climbed up the cliff. Quickly the tourists baking like logs on the beach disappeared as you picked your way through a warren of dugout houses, the front stoops of some being the stations that formed a pathway from beach back up to hotels, shops and restaurants. Children sat at the mouths of caves and you planted your bare feet over, under and around their bare bodies, afraid of contamination, embarrassed by proximity, trespass. Bony gypsy children. Eyes dark as mirrors draped with black cloth. Eyes that should flash and play, be full of curiosity or mischief, but stare past you, through you. Riding these trains sunken in the earth, the sound of the sea waits in ambush. Near and far. Turn a corner and there sits one of these world hunger poster children silently begging to be something other than an image of disaster. Fingers of rib bone grasp the swollen belly like it’s a spoiled toy.

  He recalls the sound of waves lapping the pilings, breaking and shimmying slow motion against a golden slice of beach three hundred yards below the outcropping of stone where he had paused. He’s naked except for bikini briefs, a gaudy towel slung like a bandolier over his shoulder. He’s ashamed of his skin, its sleekness, its color, the push of his balls against the flimsy pouch of black nylon. No pockets to empty, no language to confess his shame. He couldn’t make things right for the hollow-eyed, big-bellied children even if he had a thousand pockets and dumped silver from every one and the coins sparked and scintillated like the flat sea when a breath of wind passes over it, sequins, a suit of lights rippling to the horizon. From where he’d stood on the steep cliffside, eyes stinging from shame at having everything and nothing to give, the sea reached him as whisper, the same insinuating murmur that can seep from under his bed at night in this city thousands of miles away, that can squeeze from behind a picture frame on a wall, that hums in this subway tunnel miles beneath the earth.

  He’ll tell Margaret Jones we’re all in this together. That he was lost but now he’s found.

  I could smell the smoke five thousand miles away. Hear kids screaming. We are all trapped in the terrible jaws of something shaking the life out of us. Is that what he’d tell her? Is that why he’s back? Runagate, runagate, fly away home / Your house’s on fire and your children’s burning.

  Should he admit to her he’d looked into the eyes of those gypsy children and shrugged, turned his hands inside out? The pale emptiness of his palms flashed like a minstrel’s white gloves, a silent-movie charade so he could pick his way in peace past stick legs and stick arms, the long feet that looked outsize because they sprouted first then nothing else grew. Big heads, big feet. Everything in between wasted away, siphoned into the brutal swell of their bellies. Skin the color of his, the color those tourists down on the beach dreamed of turning.

  The subway takes you under ground, under the sea. When the train slows down for a station you can see greenish mold, sponge-like algae, yellow and red speckling the dark stones. Sometimes you hear the rush of water behind you flooding the tunnel, chasing your lighted bubble, rushing closer and closer each time the train halts. Damp, slimy walls the evidence of other floods, other cleansings, guts of the giant flushed clear of debris. He groans, troubled in his sleep as his bowels contract and shudder from the sudden passage of icy water.

  When Cudjoe’s aboveground, heading toward Clark Park, the sidewalk’s unsteady under his feet. Should he be swimming or flying or crawling.

  He will explain to Margaret Jones that he must always write about many places at once. No choice. The splitting apart is inevitable. First step is always out of time, away from responsibility, toward the word or sound or image that is everywhere at once, that connects and destroys.

  Many places at once. Tramping along the sidewalk. In the air. Underground. Astride a spark coughed up by the fire. Waterborne. Climbing stone steps. To reach the woman in the turban, the boy, he must travel through those other places. Always moving. He must, at the risk of turning to stone, look back at his own lost children, their mother standing on a train platform, wreathed in steam, in smoke. An old-fashioned locomotive wheezes and lurches into motion. His wife waves a handkerchief wet with tears. One boy grasps the backs of her legs. The other sucks his thumb with a fold of her skirt that shows off her body’s sweet curves. His sons began in that smooth emptiness be
tween her legs. They hide and sniffle, clutch handfuls of her silky clothes. It hurts him to look, hurts him to look away. Antique station he’s only seen in movies. A new career for his wife and sons. Wherever they are, he keeps them coming back to star in this scene. Waving. Clinging. But it’s the wrong movie. He’s not the one leaving. All aboard, all aboard. Faces pressed to the cold glass. Caroline had never owned a silk handkerchief, let alone a long silky skirt.

  A trolley begins its ascent of Woodland Avenue, the steep curve along the cemetery where rails are bedded in cobblestones older than anything around them. A fence of black spears seven feet tall guards the neat, green city of the dead. When you choose to live in a city, you also are choosing a city to die in. A huge rat sidles over the cobbles, scoots across steel tracks, messenger from one domain to the other, the dead and living consorting in slouched rat belly.

  Teresa, the barmaid once upon a time in Torremolinos, would listen to anything you had to say, as long as you bought drinks while you said it. Beautiful and untouchable, she liked to shoot rats at night after work, in the wee hours neither light nor dark over on the wrong side of town, in garbage dumps, the pits dug for foundations of luxury hotels, aborted high rises never rising any higher than stacks of debris rimming the edges of black holes. She’d hide in the shadows and wait for them to slink into exposed areas. Furry, moonlit bodies, sitting up like squirrels, a hunk of something in their forepaws, gnawing, quivering, profiled just long enough for her to draw a bead between their beady eyes. She never missed.

  She was English. Or had lived in England long enough to acquire a British accent, a taste for reggae. Teresa never took Cudjoe seriously. He could amuse her, tease out her smile, but she never encouraged him to go further. She knew his habits— endless shots of Felipe II, determined assaults on each new batch of female tourists—and he knew she shot rats in the old quarter gypsies had inhabited before they were urban-removed.

  He’d daydream of leaving the bar with Teresa, her alabaster skin luminous in the fading moonlight. They were survivors. No one else in the streets, the only sound their footfalls over wooden sidewalks, then padding through dusty alleys as they entered the ghetto. He’d watch her do her Annie Oakley thing. Her unerring aim. Her face pinched into a mask of concentration as she sights down the barrel. When she tires of killing, when she leans her rifle against a broken wall and huddles in her own skinny, pale arms, he’ll create himself out of the shadows, wrap her in his warmth, the heat of his body he’s been hoarding while she shot. He loves this moment when she’s weak and exhausted, the pallor of her skin, the cold in her bones, the starry distance of all those nights at the bar when he made her smile but could trick nothing more from those sad eyes. Yes. Take her in the stillborn shell of a building that is also the grave of a gypsy hovel, abandoned when the urban gypsies fled to join their brethren in caves above the sea. Make love to her in the ruins that had never been a city, ruins that were once a wish for a city, a mile-high oasis of steel and glass and rich visitors. Surprise her and take her there, loving her to pieces while rats scuttle from the darkness to eat their dead.

  Yes. Clark Park. He knew the location of Clark Park. He’d nodded at Margaret Jones. Yes, I know Clark Park. He’d beaten up his body many a day on the basketball court there. Drank wine and smoked reefer with the hoop junkies many a night after playing himself into a stupor. Clear now what he’d been trying to do. Purge himself. Force the aching need for Caroline and his sons out of his body. Running till his body was gone, his mind whipped. Till he forgot his life was coming apart. Keep score of the game, let the rest go. The park a place to come early and stay late, punish the humpty-dumpty pieces of himself till they’d never want to be whole again.

  Clark Park where he’d see a face like Teresa’s. A woman sat in the grass, on a slope below the asphalt path circling the park, in a bright patch of early-morning sunshine. She was staring at the hollow’s floor, a field tamped hard and brown by countless ball games. This woman who could be Teresa, who would be Teresa until Cudjoe satisfied himself otherwise, rested her chin on her drawn-up knees. No kids playing in the hollow, no dog walkers strolling on the path, just the two of us, Cudjoe had thought as he stopped and ambled down the green slope, lower than she was, so he could check out her face. He’ll smile, one early bird greeting another. Pass on if she’s a stranger.

  Under her skimpy paisley dress, the woman was naked. She hugged her legs to her chest. Goose bumps prickled her bare loins. At the center of her a dark crease, a spray of curly hairs, soft pinch of buttocks. Cudjoe expected her to raise her chin off her knees, snap her legs straight, but she remained motionless, staring at the hollow. It could be Teresa’s face perched on the woman’s bare knees, a perfect match even though the body bearing it no way Teresa’s. But still it could be Teresa’s face. Right head, wrong body, like a sphinx. The eyes are dreamy, express a vulnerability Teresa never exposed. Teresa’s eyes were mirrors. You saw yourself, your unhappy secrets in them. Nothing in Teresa’s gaze suggested you could change her or change yourself. This woman, girl in Clark Park whose face was Teresa’s, whose body was compact, generously fleshed where Teresa was lithe and taut, this woman who let him see under her dress, had finally smiled down at him over her knees, a smile saying no more or less than this gift of sun feels good and I’m content to share it.

  Then she had leaned backward catching her weight on her arms, knees steepled, eyes closing as she tilted her forehead into the light filtering through the trees. Cudjoe’s throat had tightened; he was afraid to swallow, to move an inch. He stared at the dark hinge between her legs. Though she seemed unconcerned by his presence, she wasn’t ignoring him. She was stretching, yawning, welcoming, returning to him after centuries of sleep. She’d chosen her spot and he was part of it, so nothing was foreign, nothing could disturb this moment of communion when what she was was boundless, new, Eve to his Adam, Cudjoe had told himself, half-believing, as he peered into the crack between her legs, the delicate pinks, soft fleece. Born again.

  Her green-and-white minidress clearly an afterthought. Didn’t matter to her if it was off or on. She rolled slowly onto her side. From where Cudjoe stood the dress disappeared except for a green edging along the top of one bare flank. Neat roundness of her buttocks, graceful drape of thighs glowed in soft morning light. He couldn’t see a face now. Teresa disintegrates in the smoky shafts of sunlight painting the bank. Above him the remnant of a statue, a woman perfectly formed from marble.

  He’d been stuck. Like a fly in honey. He couldn’t look away. Couldn’t go on about his business. What was he looking for then, now as he remembers her, remembers her wisp of dress and the sun, his throat dry, loins filling up, growing so heavy he believed he was sinking into the ground, remembering how she was Teresa, then she wasn’t, then she was, and the loud clanking of trolleys up Woodland, down Baltimore, cables popping, laughing at himself, believing none of it was real? At some point she’d risen, awkward, stiff from sitting too long. A flash of red-dimpled white cheek before she smooths down the flowered hem of her dress. How long had he stood there like a dummy, gazing into the empty stripe of sunlight?

  On Mykonos scuffing his way through hot sand he’d seen naked bodies every size, shape and color stretched for acres between green sea and rocks spilled at the base of cliffs, bodies so casual, blasé, he ignored them, preferred them at night, clothed, in the restaurants and discos. Funny how quickly he’d gotten used to nakedness. Hair, skin, bones. What was different, what was the same about all the bodies. Blond, dark, lean, stubby, every nation represented, all shapes of male and female displayed in any angle he could imagine. What was he looking for in women’s bodies? Surely he’d have tripped over it trudging up and back those golden beaches on Mykonos. But no. The mystery persisted. His woman in the park. A daydream till she brushes bits of straw from the seat of her paisley dress. Runs away.

  Rules posted in the park, but the signs, blasted by spray paint, unreadable. No rules, no signs when he’d lived h
ere a decade ago. He’d remembered a green oasis. Forgotten those seasons, months when the park was the color of the neighborhood surrounding it. No color. Grays and browns of dead leaves. July now. Trees should be full, the grass green. He’d been hoping for green. Hoping the park sat green and waiting between Woodland and Baltimore avenues, that it had not been an invention, one more lie he’d told himself about this land to which he was returning.

  A statue of Charles Dickens. Only one in the world at last count. Little Nell at his knee stares imploringly up at the great man’s distant face. They are separated and locked together by her gaze. Both figures larger than life, greener than the brittle grass. Both blind. In a notebook somewhere Cudjoe had recorded the inscription carved into the pedestal. For his story about people who frequent the park. A black boy who climbs on Dickens’s knee and daydreams. A crazy red-haired guy muttering and singing nonsense songs to himself. A blind man who shoots baskets at night. A boy-girl vignette about a baby the girl’s carrying, how the couple strolls round and round the path, kids on a carousel, teaching themselves the news of another, unexpected life.

  Twenty blocks west the fire had burned. If the wind right, smoke would have drifted here, settled on leaves, grass, bushes. Things that eat leaves and buds must have tasted smoke. Dark clouds drifting this way carried the ashy taste of incinerated children’s flesh. Could you still smell it? Was the taste still part of what grew in the park? Would it ever go away?

  Cudjoe watches a runty little boy terrorize other children in a play area off to his right. The kid’s a devil. He screams and stomps his feet, laying claim to a domain invisible to the other kids till they encroach. Then he goes wild, patrolling his turf ferociously with shoves, screeches, the threat of his tiny fist wagged in somebody’s face. He’s everywhere at once, defending, shooing, hollering. Tough little bastard, Cudjoe thinks. All the other kids are buffaloed. Till one boy goes after the tyrant with a gun from outer space that squeals like a lost soul. The bully loses it. Screams and trucks away as fast as his stubby legs and miniature Adidas will carry him to a group of women sitting on a wall. Little guy’s so shook up, he crashes into the wrong lap, hiding his face till another woman, who must be his mother, snatches him up, fusses at him and plops him down beside her.