What We All Long For

by Dionne Brand

  After she let the others in on her sorties to silent nighttime building sites and the railway tracks, she dragged them along with her. They all loved going to the railway tracks with a twelve-pack, some ganja, and a boombox.

  She was the most daring of the friends. By eighteen Tuyen had already moved out, living above the store on College Street. She considered herself an avant-garde artist, sometimes doing art installations at the small galleries along Queen Street West. With her bright face, her dark, always-inquisitive eyes, her arms elegant with silver bracelets, she became a ubiquitous figure throughout the alternative art scene, dressed dramatically in her self-designed clothing. She wore embroidered sleeveless vests to show off the muscles in her shoulders, well developed from building her elaborate installations, on which she honed her skills of carpentry, carving, and painting. Tuyen was androgynous, a beautiful, perfect mix of the feminine and the masculine, her face sleek and planed. In the winters she wore the great oilskin coat, which she had found rummaging at the Goodwill store.

  There were mice running across the ceiling of the apartments, day and night, but they didn’t mind, anything was better than home. The landlord, a Mrs. Chou, didn’t take care of the place, didn’t sweep the hallway, and didn’t paint. Anything that was broken Carla and Tuyen had to fix themselves, like the washers on every tap, the broken bathroom tiles, and the blown fuses. Mrs. Chou called the hovels she rented one-bedrooms, but they were little more than single rooms with a divider, the tiniest of galley kitchens, and a bathroom where you had to leave the door open to sit down on the toilet. Neither Carla nor Tuyen cared. Carla was only too elated when the apartment beside Tuyen became available. The first thing she bought was a stereo so that she could play the Fugees, Missy Elliot, and Lil’ Kim and dance. She slept on the bare floor for the first several months, the stereo booming her to sleep, the light brightly lit. Tuyen wondered how Carla could sleep in all that noise, in all that light.

  Tuyen’s and Carla’s apartments became places of refuge, not just for their immediate circle but for all the people they picked up along the way to their twenties. Like the Graffiti Boys across the alleyway, Tuyen’s friends from the gay ghetto, a few hip-hop poets, two girls who made jewellery and knit hats, and an assortment of twenty-somethings who did various things like music and waitering. The two rundown apartments were above a cheap clothing store. Mrs. Chou only made appearances to collect the rents and to say, “No parties,” and other than those predictable visits Carla and Tuyen had free reign of the place. When they did have parties, both apartments and the hallway were full of smoke and music, beer bottles, and loud talk above even louder music. A cloud of smoke hung at the ceiling and blew its way down the staircase. People didn’t go home for days on end until either Tuyen or Carla, mostly Carla, came off the friendly high of Ecstasy to find her face in the toilet or some asshole with his shoes on her bed and turned everybody out. Once, on magic mushrooms, Tuyen saw every detail in the wood on the staircase, she saw that beyond the wood there was a coal-orange glow, and the stairs felt hot and burning for a week after.

  Carla had bouts of cleanliness, which could only be called violent, during which she scrubbed and scrubbed her apartment and threw out perfectly good things like plates and knives. Tuyen had no such inclinations. Tuyen’s apartment doubled as an art gallery for her installations. Carla’s thrown-out objects would find themselves in an artistic creation of some kind.

  Tuyen’s own possessions, her clothes, her pots and dishes and such, were scattered in small piles around the growing lubaio in her apartment. These, her clothing, her dishes, spewed all over the floor, only hid smaller sharp-edged constructions of an earlier idea to build a hutoung in miniature, and an idea earlier still for mud terraces and a simultaneous one of ornamental wenshou—monsters and lions, horses and fish, phoenixes—all magical animals; some of which she gave to friends when their abundance threatened to clutter even her sense of space. These last she made of wood or soapstone or clay, and they were numerously scattered all around the room. Finally, and not unconnectedly, she had decided on the lubaio.

  Tuyen had secreted one more letter from her mother’s cache like a magical wenshou. She had memorized that one and replaced it—the only one in her father’s handwriting—addressed to the director of the Chi Ma Wan Camp shortly after the family arrived in Toronto.

  Dear Sir,

  We have lost our child as you know. We were six months in Chi Ma Wan Camp. I am inquiring as to if you have a record of him there. Did he arrive after we left? In case he reaches the camp, here is some money for his passage, and a small amount to get him sweet milk. Also this hat which belongs to his Bo, he will know it. Please take care of him until he can be with us.

  Respect to you, Vu Tuan

  She had no idea what she would do with these letters, but she sought them out in her mother’s room when she went on visits home and held them like ornate and curious figures of a time past.

  She had surreptitiously broken down the wall between her bedroom and the kitchen, making one large room for her installations. One thing with Mrs. Chou’s slum apartments—the ceilings were high. Tuyen’s dark room was a thick black velvet curtain. The dishes were in the bathtub as the countless paintbrushes were in the sink. Chinese architecture, she said, dating way back, did not use walls for support. Columns were used, she said. She avoided the visits of Mrs. Chou, installed new locks, and made Carla her lookout for Mrs. Chou’s possible raids. She had virtually destroyed the apartment. If she ever moved, she would have to do it late at night and very quickly and without a trace.

  Still exasperated and a little disturbed by her brother, Tuyen knocked on Carla’s door. Why, she wondered, did she find herself still waging that childish war with Binh?

  “Look what I have,” she said, when Carla opened.

  “Oh, sweet!” Carla said, reaching for the two plastic bags of food Tuyen offered.

  “Yeah? What do I get?”

  “Hugs,” Carla said, embracing her gratefully, “but really it’s your brother who should get them.”

  “Don’t even mention him. I’m so pissed with him.”

  “Why? I wish I had a brother like that.”

  “Oh, you do not know him. He is so manipulative …”

  “Well, I’ll exchange him for mine if you want.” Carla’s tone foreshadowed bad news.

  “Sorry, what now?”

  “Mimico again. Carjacking.”

  “Whoa! Christ!”

  “Freaking carjacking. How am I going to fix that one?”

  “Why do you have to fix it?”

  “Because he’s mine.”

  Tuyen had a peculiar feeling of self-betrayal. It was the word “mine.” Binh had more or less asked her the same thing—didn’t she want to know what had happened to their brother? Didn’t she want that anomalous void in her life—in their life—charged with some specific substance or body? Did she not feel that sense of casualty, if not fatality, wrapped around their childhood?

  Carla had moved to look out the window, and shaking off such thoughts, Tuyen walked across the room to her. She watched the thin muscle of Carla’s neck quiver like a tulip’s stem. She wanted to caress it, she wanted to put her lips on it. Then the mouth, turned down and sulking, she wanted to kiss it to the upturned suppleness she knew was there. Touching Carla’s shoulder gently, as if afraid of breaking it with her desire, she said, “It’ll be all right. Don’t worry.”

  THREE

  CARLA WOKE UP to the sound of the streetcar along College. The tiny apartment was hot already. She had slept late. She heard Tuyen still chipping away at her wooden lubaio next door, and she imagined Tuyen’s intense face, the woodchips in her hair, battling her demons, hammering them out on the wooden pole, amidst the ever-present coffee smell enveloping the room.

  Carla’s eyes took some time to clear before she could see the clock. Ten A.M. Late. Shit. The thought alarmed her for the briefest second. The rest of the room came into its bare view. She
heard the man downstairs rolling out the awning on the storefront. Her head felt woolly as if she’d been drinking—she remembered, yeah, but only one beer. Again the brief feeling of alarm. She was halfway off the futon, her head on the floor. This is how she woke up each morning, askew as if some great fight happened during her sleep. The awning downstairs squealed. The light from a clouded sun had already filled the apartment. She struggled to raise herself up, but a lassitude enveloped her. Not the lassitude of sleep but of consciousness. Slumping back onto the futon, she remembered yesterday.

  Yesterday she’d come home exhausted, dragging her bike up the filthy stairs. She was streaming with sweat. She had ridden so fast, and she’d ridden, out of her way, all over the city, burning off a white light on her body. First through the downscale suburb of Etobicoke, which looked like the badlands of some alienated city—the low seemingly unfinished buildings, the stretches of uncreative streets, the arid after-winter look of everything, the down-in-the-heel, stranded feel of the people.

  She was riding away from the Mimico Correctional Institute, where she’d gone to visit her brother, Jamal. Her visit with him had only heightened the mixture of anger and fright she’d felt over the last few weeks. She didn’t like this part of town, not only because of Jamal but because it seemed downtrodden somehow. A desolate outskirt—railway tracks, wedges of strip malls, and a prison kept like a secret. Gearing up on her bicycle she left the dreariness of it behind, heading downtown. When she made the intersection at Runnymede, the glow was still on her body, searing and damp. The afternoon light was sharp for spring. The sun coming west was dead angled at her head as she rode east, chipping between cars, crazily challenging red lights. The city was vivid. Each billboard screeching happiness and excitement. The cars, the crowds intense in the this-and-that of commerce, of buy this, get that, the minutiae of transient wants and needs. As fast as she was riding, she could still make out the particularity of each object or person she saw, so acute this searing light around her, tingling her skin. Could anyone see her? drenched in lightning?

  There had been numbing sluggishness to the prison behind her; a dangerousness, a dangerousness that was both routine and petrifying. That same sluggishness was in Jamal’s appearance at the visiting booth. It had been in the waiting room with the reception guard, who seemed chronically skeptical of all who entered; chronically hateful. Why Jamal put her through this, she didn’t know. Why, indeed, he put himself through it, let alone her.

  She hurtled through the upscale region of High Park, the old British-style houses. The people who must inhabit these with their neat little lives made her sicker to her stomach than usual because she’d just left her brother. The cute expensive stores, the carapace of wealth, seemed unaffected by her lit body. The handlebars of the bike were like her own bones, and like her bones she bent the brace toward the park itself. Perhaps there she might burn off the pace of her legs up the inclines and through the trees. But she was out of the park before she knew it. The trees held nothing. The manicured circle of flowers, the false oasis of the park, only made her sicker. Before long she was out on Bloor Street again, speeding east toward the centre of the city, flinging herself through the lights at Keele and bending southward to the lake; the bellowing horn and pneumatic brake of an eighteen-wheeler flinched her sinuous back, but she didn’t stop for the trucker yelling curses at her. She left the drama of the shocked driver and skewered traffic behind. If she could stop, she would have, but she was light and light moves.

  Her stomach always made a knot when Jamal was near. He was eighteen, for God’s sake. Why couldn’t he take care of himself yet? Why did he expect her to come to his rescue always? And why was there this uncontrollable urge in her, this frantic nervousness where he was concerned, as if she had to prevent him from falling, to look out for him as one would a baby with a baby’s recklessness?

  She was suddenly aware of music. It confused her until she remembered that she had clamped the small earplugs of her CD player in her ears and turned it on as soon as she’d left the building. Oku had lent her Dizzy Gillespie’s “Take It as It Comes.” The zephyrs of trumpets and saxophones streamed into her at Dundas Street. Out of the horns she sensed the lake and sped down to Roncesvalles. Ordinarily the bike would bump across the streetcar lines, but today she didn’t feel them, she was slipping through the city on light. She rode along the shore, feeling translucent. The sun was on the lake, turning its usual muddiness to a pearly blue stretching south and wide. Carla raised her back from its hunch, felt a small hopeful breeze.

  “How could you let other people handle you like that and run your life every minute of the day, Jamal?”

  They’d been sitting uncomfortably across from each other, a Plexiglas wall separating them.

  “Handle me? Nobody’s not handling me.” He had misunderstood her, thinking she’d meant sexually. “Ghost, them call me in here, you know, Carla! Ghost. You think me a batty man! Batty man in here ’fraid me, you know!”

  He pulled the neck of his grey issue aside, showing her a rough, ugly branded G on his breast under his left shoulder blade. Not a tattoo, but a brand rising in an unhealed keloid. It was a furious-looking red, parts of it still oozing. She suppressed a gasp. His face formed the mask of the brother she did not know. The brother trying to be someone she could not recognize. She didn’t know why he insisted on speaking in this accent. Something he’d picked up with his friends on the street. He did it to assume badness. She was angry whenever he used it on her, as if she didn’t know him, as if she had not practically grown him.

  “You don’t get it, you don’t get it at all, do you? What’s the point?”

  “Cho to blow!” he said, trying to impress the fellow prisoner in the booth beside him. “Me nah ’fraid nutten, Carla!”

  All their conversations in the last few years were conversations of deliberate misunderstanding, it seemed. She couldn’t speak to him clearly or reach him in any way, and he seemed to misunderstand her on purpose.

  “Do you realize where you are again? And I can’t get you out this time. Carjacking, Jamal! What’s going to happen now? You tell me.” She knew she was pronouncing every word, denying his newfound accent. She wanted to bring him back from the dreamworld he seemed to be in. “They won’t let me bail you. And he’s not answering his phone. So now what?”

  “Him pussy! Me ask he for anything?”

  “He” was how they both referred to their father outside of his presence, ever since they were small. “She” for Nadine, though Nadine had in effect been Jamal’s mother. Carla referred to her as “she,” and Jamal, as he grew older, reluctantly went along with it.

  “Well, who else can I ask? It’s me that’s doing the asking. That’s the position you leave me in. Who else, huh?”

  He’d maintained his sullenness and so she’d said goodbye, promising to leave him some money at the desk outside. She couldn’t wait to get to her bicycle and ride away from him. She’d left him standing there, his mouth in a babyish pout as usual. As she rode, she pictured him still standing there, waiting for her to turn around and come back, and all she could do was run, and all she could find was this well of heat and cold depth.

  The muscles of highway and streets met down at the lake. All along the underpasses graffiti marred the concrete girders. She recognized the tags. The kids who lived across the alleyway from her apartment were graffiti artists. Kumaran’s grinning pig, Abel’s “narc” initial, then Keeran’s desert and Jericho’s lightning bolt. She felt slightly comforted, though she had asked them often enough to paint something else if they were going to paint the whole city over. Something more. They had practically filled all the walls of the city with these four signs, and she would have liked them to paint a flowering jungle or a seaside, the places where her mother, Angie, had always dreamed of going but never went. But she loved the city. She loved riding through the neck of it, the triangulating girders now possessed by the graffiti crew. She loved the feeling of weight and balance
it gave her.

  Jamal didn’t see the city as she did. His life was in his skin, in his mouth, in his eyes, in the closest physical encounters. He operated only on his senses as far as Carla was concerned. But she saw the city as a set of obstacles to be crossed and circled, avoided and let pass. He saw it as something to get tangled in. Why couldn’t he see just one step ahead of himself, she wondered, one want ahead of itself, as she crisscrossed and floated under the highway bypasses. Everything was immediate for Jamal, everything in the moment. Well, he had to learn, just like she had. Against the flow of the rush-hour traffic making its way to the expressway taking cars out of the city, she pedalled at a demonic pace. Shit, shit, shit, shit. She had to stop thinking, just pedal, just go, go, go.

  Her legs were leaden when she’d finally dragged the bicycle up the stairs. Her thighs were boulders. It was as if because she’d stopped she’d become leaden, as if the sluggish prison embraced her again. If she’d continued, she was sure she would fly. But her own weight and the thought of her brother at Mimico Correctional crushed her again. She’d showered in cold water until her fingers were numb, then wrapped herself in a rough towel. Dripping and in between burning and freezing, she’d written something in her head. She thought she’d written it on paper, then searched for it wildly and didn’t find it. Her hands were useless, numb and shrivelled from the prolonged shower. She’d tried putting on a shirt but couldn’t find the neck. She’d sat naked by the window, freezing and thawing.