What We All Long For

by Dionne Brand

  There were two photographs of Quy. One as a tiny baby on his back, surprised by the flash of the camera. Then another, the one that her mother sent around the world in her quest to find him. A small, intelligent-looking boy, curious. Cam had made many copies, which she sent out with her letters. When Tuyen was little, these photographs littered the house. Their subject was the source of strange outbursts and crying. Over the years the photograph was less and less in evidence until it had virtually disappeared. It was not on the mantel of the house in Richmond Hill. It lay in the recesses of her mother’s room now with the baby picture. Well beyond the time that he could possibly still look like the curious little boy in the photograph, Cam had sent it along with her letters nevertheless. Tuyen hadn’t seen the picture in years.

  Tuyen was sitting in the dark; she still hadn’t turned on any light. Only the glow of the one good burner of the stove could be seen. The pot of potatoes was crackling as if the water had all evaporated. A faint tinge of burning starch could be discerned. Tuyen ran to the stove, rescuing the potatoes from parching. The handle of the pot was hot, and she let out a sound of pain but didn’t let go until she’d put the pot in the sink. She scraped the potatoes out, putting them into a bowl, poured salt and butter over them, and mashed them by the light of the refrigerator. She closed the fridge and walked to the lubaio, and leaning against it she slowly ate the potatoes. Then she turned the lights on and went to the darkroom.

  Tuyen slid the negative into the enlarger, suddenly in a hurry to see what she had captured with her camera—what secret of her brother’s. Perhaps she was too suspicious; perhaps she had simply seen her brother in his life, and this was the texture of a moment that she had apprehended and shot. She worked quickly, eyeballing the paper, figuring out the range of light, then deftly, one after the other, she printed the photographs in sixteen-by-twenty. When she was done, it was way past three in the morning. She wished she had had that smoke from Oku and Carla. They were across the hall, playing music. She could hear them giggling now and then. She hoped Oku wasn’t trying to move in on Carla, given that his hopes for Jackie were fading. A momentary panic struck her, then her vanity kicked in. No—Oku did not stand a chance, she thought. He could not begin to unravel those microwaves of kinetic energy that were Carla’s.

  She strung a line across from the lubaio to the window and pinned the pictures to it. It had been dawning on her ever since she had taken the first shot, the one with Binh’s face and the stranger’s back, and now it was apparent.

  “Shit, shit,” she heard herself say, looking at the pictures in sequence. The figure raising its hand, then turning, something like anger on Binh’s face, then a smile. She was convinced she saw a rough wiriness there in the body. Then the face, innocent, as a ghost’s. But unmistakably the face of an intelligent-looking boy. The face her mother, Cam, had coveted and sent all over Southeast Asia and Europe. Quy. Why did that face resemble this one? And why did Binh and the man appear to be in a quarrel? She felt disoriented, drawn to the babyness of the face against the body springy as violence. All the structures and translations of her childhood swept her, all the uncomfortable moments of explaining her parents to the world; all the insomnia endured, the regret her parents had translated into efficiency, all dwelled in the face of the man so much like the boy. Quy.

  EIGHTEEN

  “LOOK, ORNETTE PLAYS all this dissonance, right, and he plays it so long you’re out of breath and you think that you can’t stand it any longer and then … listen now, listen now, right …”

  Ornette Coleman was playing “The Jungle Is a Skyscraper” on the CD player. Oku’s face was glowing. “Then when you can’t take it any more, right, when you have had so much confusion, but it’s not confusion at all, you see … but anyway, then he gives you the melody, see, and guess what, guess what? Then in the middle of the melody, which you wanted, right, you find yourself longing for the dissonance.”

  “Yeah.” Tuyen was in the hallway looking in. Carla was looking out the window. Oku was always talking. That’s why Tuyen liked him. He could fill any space with talk. Sometimes she barely listened to the details. She loved his voice and his continuous enthusiasm. Even now he was dancing about the room, talking wildly about Ornette Coleman.

  “Check it out!”—as Coleman’s horn chattered desperately—“Hear that thick mass of horns? They do this harmolodic modulation, different instruments playing in different keys but in another communion, right, and all that rushing energy, dozens of themes just rushing together. See, everything makes sense when you listen to this, right?”

  “Yeah, that’s cool. Every horn is alone, but they’re together, crashing,” Tuyen said moving into the room. She and Oku were both on the same thought.

  Carla hadn’t turned from the window. Down on the sidewalk the man who sold lottery tickets was passing by. Oku turned up the music; it seemed to move the glass window pane in front of Carla. He grabbed Carla and began dancing her around the room against her will. Finally she started to laugh and dance around the room with him.

  Oku had slept over. Where? Tuyen wondered, her misgivings surfacing again about Oku and Carla. “You two must be still high from last night.” She thought of running to her place across the hall to get her camera but didn’t.

  Oku scatted along with the music. They danced and danced, then they whirled around Tuyen, swinging her back and forth, whirling her around the small room. Ornette Coleman punched notes from his horn like a fighter, jabbing and uppercutting; Charlie Hayden thrummed and pulled on the base; the drummer went mad; and it was as if the musicians were there in the room with them. From across the alley, Kumaran put his head out his window and shouted, “Hey, what’s that?” “Ornette Coleman!” Oku shouted back. Even when the music went into its short melody, their bodies stayed in confusion, waiting for Ornette to take them back. Carla lost herself in the dance, she wanted to be lost, her scythe-like body leaned on Oku’s, it hung on Tuyen’s like a leaf on a stem. Tuyen’s misgivings vanished again. No way they had slept together. She began laughing hysterically. It was a hysteria that was infectious. They fell on the floor when the music stopped.

  “See what I’m saying?” Oku laughed.

  Tuyen wanted the music to last longer. She tried to untangle herself from the two to go play it again, but she felt comfortable with Carla lying on her shoulder. She didn’t want to move.

  “My father would never understand that,” Tuyen said. “Order and practicality is all he sees. It’s like anything that’s complicated they see as waste.”

  “Not mine. Mine would see it, right, but he’d ignore it. He’d say, ‘Boy, that can’t feed you.’ And he’s the one who turned me on to Ornette Coleman.”

  They waited for Carla to say something. She sensed their waiting. This time she would say something, but she stayed quiet until it seemed that they had accepted, acknowledged, her accustomed silence. She was fighting herself, fighting her whisper. “There was never any sound in my house. There was never any music after my mother.” She’d heard, of course, the coarse songs of terror each time she remembered the day her mother died.

  Oku felt like telling her about hymns, how wonderful they could be, but she had offered a lot again in that whispery speech and he didn’t want to spoil it.

  “Let’s eat,” he said. “I feel like I haven’t eaten in a month.”

  “Well, don’t look at me, bro. There isn’t a thing at my place. I almost burnt the last of my potatoes last night.” Tuyen rolled over.

  “We could smell it. How could you burn potatoes? That’s like burning water. Who would think you grew up in a restaurant?”

  “Anyways …”

  “You know what? I gotta go see my father.” They fell silent. “The thing is,” Carla picked up, “while I’m listening to the music, I can hear it. It’s like a puzzle. It makes us seem understandable. Like why Jamal is in jail and everything.”

  “Whaddya mean?”

  “I mean, why he would be in jail, you know,
like why not? What made me think that he wouldn’t be … that he could be free or something … but what makes him not scared of that?”

  “Babylon, star. You can’t let them frighten you.” Oku was scared of jail himself, of course. All the time. For no immediate reason. He felt the hair at the back of his neck rising at the mention of the word.

  “I wonder if he’ll let me do a body cast of him when he comes out? For my installation? I think the body must record something. An imprint …”

  “You’re a freak, Tuyen. Shit, you’re a freak.”

  “Carla doesn’t like my installations. She feels her way up the stairs with her eyes closed.”

  Carla didn’t think that Tuyen had seen her, closing her eyes on her way up the stairs. But it would be like Tuyen to be watching. She kept still. The truth was that Tuyen’s photographs stirred some response in her that she wasn’t quite sure of. Just disturbing, that’s all. And how Tuyen could keep taking pictures that time while Oku was being roughed up or some horrible thing happened, she couldn’t understand. But Oku didn’t seem to mind. He’d never said anything about it. He acted as if he was a movie star, acting a part for Tuyen’s pictures.

  “Gotta go.” Carla jumping up from the floor.

  “Whoa, listen, can I stay here for a few days?” Oku asked.

  “Are you hiding out from somebody?” Tuyen probed.

  “Hey, lend me some money, Carla, and how about it, a few days?” He didn’t answer directly.

  “I notice you’re not asking me.”

  “Tuyen, where can anybody stay in your place?”

  Oku was really hiding out from Kwesi. He was used to hiding out at Carla’s when his father was on the warpath. He would spend days there, then finally go home because his mother wanted him to come home to help shoulder his father’s boorishness. This time it was Kwesi he was avoiding. He knew that Kwesi would be looking to tell him that he had punked out. Fine, he would cope with that later. God, he thought to himself, he was tired of people wanting things from him. He was tired of hiding out against it all.

  “Cool, cool,” Carla said, throwing him twenty dollars, “but don’t make a mess, eh, please, please.” She and Tuyen had to take their chances when he got too creative.

  “I know you people don’t eat unless I’m here, you know! You two are just lazy, man. Look at this,” he said, holding up a loaf of stale bread from Carla’s kitchen. “How old is that?”

  “Tuyen will help.” Carla laughed.

  “Hell, no, I won’t. I have work to do.”

  Carla took the wheels of her bicycle down from the wall. “Figure it out.” She hooked them onto the frame in the hallway, gathered her knapsack, and clanked down the stairs. “Later, people.”

  Upstairs Oku looked out the window to watch her go before asking Tuyen.

  “Why you figure she doesn’t like your pictures?”

  “Issues, man, issues. I don’t think it’s personal. I don’t take it personal or anything.”

  “Yeah, but why do you think?”

  “I don’t know.” Tuyen didn’t want to venture. She didn’t talk about her own things, and she didn’t want this intimacy with Oku.

  “Secret, eh?” He wanted to know what Tuyen knew, but he didn’t want to appear overly curious. He looked at her over his slightly raised arm, but she was noncommittal. “Come go to Kensington with me then.” When she hesitated, not wanting to keep on with the same conversation, he gave her a look of truce and became his joking self again. “Hey, you wanna eat? I can’t carry all the bags, can I?”

  “Not to mention you don’t want to meet Jackie and Reiner.”

  It almost slipped out of him, but he kept his silence. He didn’t want to tell Tuyen about making love to Jackie. He wanted to hold all they’d done in the time it happened. The minute he said anything about it, he knew it would disappear. So he allowed himself a joking boast.

  “Girl, I’ve got that under control. I’m scoping it out. Don’t you worry. When I come on that it will be like a motherfucker.” Even this felt ugly to him, like an intrusion or a betrayal, so he said no more.

  “All right, big Daddy Mac. Hang on a sec, wait here, I’ll get my stuff.”

  “Sure, sure, I’m right behind you.”

  “No, no, wait, I’ll …”

  “Whoa! What the fuck is that?”

  Tuyen’s door had been closed, and as she opened it, Oku had a glimpse of a line of photographs of the same face strung across the room.

  “Don’t look! It’s not ready yet.” Tuyen’s voice was slightly panicked. “Hang on, I’ll get my bag, okay?” She closed the door behind her. After a few moments of rummaging around inside, she came out again.

  “Hey, no sweat,” Oku said. “I know the creative thing, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Tuyen offered, and nothing else.

  As they opened the door to the alley, they saw Kumaran waiting for them.

  “Hey, man, lend me that music you were playing. What was it again?”

  “Ornette Coleman, ‘The Jungle Is a Skyscraper,’ man.”

  “Fantastic. Sweet.”

  “Give it to you when I get back. I want it back though, okay?”

  “No doubt, man, but come on, man, just get it for me, huh?”

  “Okay. All right.” Oku ran up the stairs and was back in the alley in a minute.

  “Don’t forget, man, I need it back, like today.”

  “Yeah, thanks.” Kumaran’s happiness followed them down the alley.

  The streetcar was squealing by. The profiles of its passengers struck Tuyen as another idea for her installation. Then she remembered the face in her studio and quickly shoved those thoughts aside.

  NINETEEN

  JAMAL WAS ON THE PHONE. He’d been languishing now for two months at Mimico. There were cracks in his voice where his bravado was leaking out. Carla had gone to his hearing in the courthouse on Jarvis Street. He sat with an uninterested slouch in the Plexiglas prisoner’s box. The hearing was routine—a postponement until his lawyer could appear, then another postponement until the police discovery. The Crown imposed bail conditions Carla couldn’t possibly meet on her own.

  “When you coming to see me?” he said over the phone.

  “I can come on Saturday. I got to pull some long shifts.”

  “Oh …”

  “What’s up, Jamal? You okay?”

  “Nothin.’ Nothin,’ same old, same old.” He giggled a bit.

  “Did Nadine come to see you yet?” She had expected Nadine to pick up a bit of the slack.

  “Yeah, she came, but she didn’t have no ID so they didn’t let her in.”

  “Oh, shame.”

  “It’s nothing. She left me some money. Didn’t want to see her anyway.”

  “Oh, don’t say that …” Carla stopped herself. She was not going to fall into that trap with Jamal any more. “You holding it together, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah. Look, Carla, ah, anyway, you know, you could get me out?”

  “Jamal, I don’t have the money, you know that, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah …”

  “This time it’s big. They want big money and …”

  “Okay, okay, no biggy, eh? Just come and see me, okay?” He sounded plaintive. Carla felt an opening in her chest.

  “You know I will. You know I will. No doubt. Right?”

  “Okay. See ya.” He hung up, trying to sound light.

  Carla had been trying to come up with the stomach to go talk to her father. Nadine had been unable to get him to bail Jamal out of Mimico—there was clearly no respect left there, no leverage. Apart from that, the month had passed with a kind of calm. Ironically, she didn’t have to worry about Jamal. When he was out on the street, she lived with constant anxiety about the next phone call, the next trouble. Now she at least knew where he was.

  But on the phone he had sounded jittery and lonely. He had taken himself so far away from her, she could not even be sure of her readings of him. Was it nostalgia on h
er part to read his call as loneliness? Was it rather she who was lonely? Her affection for him had never kept him safe or close. She knew that she loved him with a possessive passion, but she had never felt that love returned. He had always felt himself disconnected. She sensed this. As a child he seldom listened to what he was told. He barrelled ahead despite warnings, through the living room, breaking Nadine’s miniatures; down tobogganing hills, breaking his leg; against traffic, causing horns to honk. He never took advice, he never ever seemed to be in the same conversations as you. His eyes always flitted to something ahead and beyond you. His body had a wiry alertness, his face a vulnerable tenderness that could be seen now only sometimes below the blank pose he had gradually assumed over the years. Carla imagined this face now, the tender one, leaning into the public phone at the jail, hiding itself from the other inmates and guards.

  She had resolved to go see her father and tell him to bail Jamal out. Make him bail out Jamal. Now that resolve was strengthened by what she sensed in Jamal. And in herself. Perhaps he was in danger. More danger anyway, a different kind of danger, because danger was what Jamal was in at birth and what he had always gravitated toward. But she felt a different danger in his life now, the danger of his losing, yes, her.