Bed-Stuy Is Burning

by Brian Platzer

  Save Amelia. And save Simon. And save me. Get us three through this. And if you do, so shall I consecrate my son to you, Adonai. Please, Adonai. Don’t let our blood be spilled. Amen.

  The train was stopping and going, and then stopping again. He was still at least ten minutes from Utica, where he had no idea what to expect.

  Chapter 35

  Daniel was the man of the house until Aaron returned. Maybe even after Aaron returned? He loaded the cartridge into the shotgun. He asked if Antoinette knew how to use it. Antoinette told him she wouldn’t take a life. Daniel tried to call his brother, but cell signals seemed to be down for good and there was no landline. They turned on CNN and saw police in riot gear with what looked like full military equipment: tanks and camouflage and what appeared to be a missile launcher but was probably some kind of tear gas dispenser.

  These military units surrounded the Marcy Projects, which had turned into a war zone. Wolf Blitzer was interviewing Jay Z, who’d grown up there, and as Jay Z was talking, residents of the tower were holding up posters that showed Jay Z with his hand up as though in solidarity with the protesters. Jay Z cut the interview short. He’d been asking for a cease-fire.

  Tanks surrounded the Marcy Projects. One of its buildings was on fire.

  Wolf Blitzer said the Marcy Projects, “Consist of twenty-seven, six-story buildings on 28.49 acres and contain 1,705 apartments housing about 4,286 residents, many of whom appear to be barricaded in their units throwing projectiles and shooting at the police in riot gear below. Though the incidents started farther east, anger spread west, and these Marcy Projects seem to be the focus of the city’s attention. Over to . . .” a reporter interviewing a representative from the city government asking residents to think of the children.

  “Whatever your grievances, I’m sure they can be met. Please, please think of the children in these buildings. They will accidentally be put in harm’s way.”

  “Is that a threat?” Wolf Blitzer said. Somehow, Wolf Blitzer was able to jump in and ask the city representative questions, too.

  “What? God, no,” the woman said. “God no. What’s going on is awful. We have to stop the citizens of this great city—the greatest city—from harming one another. We have to contain the situation. We have to put out fires. We’ll work with them afterward, but police have to shoot back if they’re being shot at—for self-protection purposes—and there are innocents and children in these situations.”

  “Are you threatening them?” Wolf Blitzer said.

  “I’m not threatening anyone,” the city representative said. “I’m just a spokesman. What are we supposed to do?”

  Daniel said, “We have enough rations. We have two guns. And one of them is a CZ Over/Under twenty gauge. There are bars on the windows. We’re barricaded in here safely until the police come our way. Amelia’s on her way to take care of that girl.”

  “I don’t think so,” Antoinette said.

  Chapter 36

  Amelia stood in the stairway, halfway between the third floor—the bedroom floor—and the fourth floor, which housed the office and exercise room. The office was big and bright, with stained-glass windows and a large wooden desk, bookshelves, and a rug from her trip to Turkey with Kevin. The exercise room was smaller, on the other side of the office through a simple white door. It was a small white room, which they had once both used, but since the baby only Aaron did. Amelia guessed that the girl was sitting at the desk. Amelia guessed that after jumping up and down in despair and stupidity at running back into the house alone, the girl sat and cried in Amelia’s desk chair. Where Amelia had sat just a few hours before, when everything had been fine. When Amelia had been reading comments on her article about the neighborhood. An article that now, just a few hours after it went live, was either entirely useless or exactly the sort of thing that could get her on every cable news channel tomorrow. She could be an expert on Bed-Stuy. If anyone would allow a white person to represent the neighborhood. She’d have to be the third guest on a panel of three. She’d have to be the academic, or the gentrifier. She’d have to be the kindhearted white gentrifier who was trying to understand her angry black neighbors. She’d have to be yelled at by an angry young black man and she could choose whether to take it and apologize or explain that the angry young man wasn’t actually angry at her but at cultural trends. Or she could explain that as angry as the angry young man was, his father or grandfather would have had a right to be even angrier. She’d turn down those interview requests, she thought. No, she wouldn’t. She’d take advantage of the opportunity. She’d tell the world what a hero Jupiter had been.

  Halfway up the stairs, Amelia leaned in to listen. She couldn’t hear anything. Knowing she was about to see someone, she smelled her shirt. She’d mostly been able to wipe the vomit away. And it was only baby vomit, which wasn’t so bad. But still, she smelled of sweat and baby vomit. She looped her hair behind her ears with her left hand. She was shaking. She gripped the pistol with her right hand and the wooden banister with her left. The girl, from what Amelia thought she saw, was between fourteen and seventeen years old, between 80 and 120 pounds. Amelia gripped the gun in her right hand. She was a righty. She’d shot a rifle before. She and Kevin had in Germany. With his German friends from college. Or Cologne. That was his joke. No one knew if Kevin had met these guys in college or while taking a summer cooking course in Cologne. Not even Amelia.

  But she’d never shot a pistol before. Once, she’d held a pistol with the safety on and pointed it at Kevin’s chest as what had been maybe, possibly, not entirely, an empty threat, when she’d found out that he was maybe, possibly, sleeping with someone else. He’d denied it. She still wasn’t sure. Kevin never said. How could she be sure? She’d wanted it to be true. She still did. She wanted Kevin to be the one who had ruined her marriage. It meant this relationship—whatever it was—with Aaron had more hope. Would last. If Kevin had been the rotten one, then there was no reason to think she and Aaron wouldn’t last forever in spite of Aaron’s problems. And where had that gun come from? She’d gone from guilt for seeing Aaron regularly at Aaron’s tiny apartment to fury over Sandra from the restaurant whom Kevin might or might not have been sleeping with in the same way Amelia was actually sleeping with Aaron. She went from guilt to fury to stumbling onto a heavy black plastic case in the suitcase they never used under the bed but now Amelia was considering using if she was going to run off to Aaron’s house. She’d been considering telling Kevin about Aaron, she’d been preparing by looking for luggage, she’d checked the suitcase they never used under the bed, and found a heavy black case inside, opened it with his three-digit code for everything, and found a pistol. Then Aaron had come home all happy, too happy, from a dinner with Saaaaaandra. Not Aaron. Kevin. Kevin had come home from dinner with Saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaandra, the sommelier at the new place where Kevin was working in Greenpoint, and Amelia took the gun out, checked to make sure the safety was on, and Kevin jumped her, threw the gun on the ground, and they slept together. Liquor on his hot breath. His teeth against hers.

  It was the last time they’d had sex like that or sex at all. She went to Aaron’s place later that night, told him about the gun, not about the sex, asked to hear the story about the gambling, the money, but never found out why the gun was there or how long it had been in the suitcase or whether Kevin had slept with Sandra or if she—Amelia—was the one who’d wrecked their marriage. If she was the one who couldn’t stay married, if the broken marriage was her fault and not her fun-loving, gun-toting, Sandra-sexing husband’s. Was it legal? Registered? Was it to protect her? She never knew. It never came up in the divorce. Because Aaron never came up. Or Sandra the Sommelier. It was all amicable. They didn’t have any children or shared assets to fight over.

  Now she had this house. She had Simon. She had an entire life.

  Amelia was crying. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t go up there with a gun and threaten to shoot or actually shoot another woman or, God forbid, a girl.
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  She began the climb from the landing between the third and fourth floors. She was shaking so her vision was slightly blurry, and she held on to the gun to stabilize herself, but that was ineffective, so she held on to the railing. She heard a male voice, which filled her with joy until she realized it wasn’t Aaron’s.

  “Leave me alone,” Amelia said to Daniel. “I’m okay.”

  She didn’t want Daniel coming upstairs and shooting this girl. Not in her house. There had been enough violence already. She didn’t want Aaron to come home and find Jupiter’s body downstairs and the girl still upstairs. She didn’t want him to be in a position where he had to make another mistake and start life over again, again. She would handle it. She trusted herself more than she trusted him. She wanted to control this. She wanted to be in control of the violence if there had to be violence. This was where she was going to raise her son. She trusted her own instincts more than Daniel’s. She wasn’t sure if it was gender based, but she knew she was the right one to talk to this girl, and though she wanted more than anything else in the world for Aaron to be safe and home, she was still the one to talk to this girl. Daniel she had no patience for. He had shot a teenage boy, even if that boy had killed a man! It was impossible that she was having real thoughts about shooting and killing. It was impossible that she was holding a gun. Then she thought that her skepticism confirmed she was correct in sending Daniel away. He wouldn’t be skeptical. He would be aggressive. He would want to prove himself again and again and again. That was the difference between men and women. Men constantly needed to prove themselves. Needed to display themselves to the world, for an opportunity to bask in the world’s approval. Not her. She needed to know that what was done was done right. She wanted to look after her own. Herself. Her son. Her home. Her family. She was the right one to come upstairs and send this girl away. That was the most important thing. Simon was downstairs and in danger.

  But she heard a male voice again, and she wasn’t certain it was coming from downstairs, though it definitely wasn’t coming from upstairs. She sat to listen. As long as she was between her baby downstairs and the girl upstairs, she was protecting her baby. The gun was in her hand. She heard the voice of a father, so it had to be her father because it wasn’t Aaron’s voice. Her father was dead, though, his voice available only on a video recording—Amelia three or four years old on a powerboat, her father holding the camcorder asking Amelia if she liked the flags on the bridges they were passing—and this voice wasn’t his. This voice was allowing her to sit, though, and relax. It was comforting, and it was telling her the truth. She was at ease for the first time since Jupiter was shot. She wouldn’t have disagreed if someone had told her the voice was in her head. Of course it was in her head if it wasn’t coming from another person. Of course it wasn’t her father. Her father had been dead for thirty years almost. So it was God—if that was the word for consciousness. Or why not just God, actually?

  She wasn’t wearing a watch, and she didn’t look at her phone, because time wasn’t at issue. She felt weightless but immovable. She sat on the steps and listened as God or her subconscious told her, on those stairs, that the house she was sitting in was her house purchased with money that had been in her family for generations and that generations of her family would come to live there.

  God is here, and I didn’t know it, Amelia thought, and she was afraid, and she said out loud, “This is a house of God.”

  The stairs shined bright above her. The sun filtered through the skylight in thick kaleidoscopic beams, through clouds of dust that teased Amelia to reach out and unsettle them with her fingertips.

  “My child,” he said.

  “My child,” she said.

  She stood slowly and climbed to just outside the door to the office. The door was thick wood. Mahogany, she guessed. She didn’t know what kind of wood it was. She didn’t know anything.

  “Hello?” she said.

  No response.

  She knocked.

  Then louder, “Hello?” Amelia repeated.

  She listened for sobs.

  Nothing.

  Hello?

  She tried the door, which she was sure would be locked, but it wasn’t.

  Chapter 37

  Near Kingston Throop, crowds began to talk.

  “I knew it was coming. I had a friend who lives near there, who lives near that area of Ralph, and she’s always talking like people aren’t as nice to each other as they used to be.”

  “Uh-huh. First thing happens is white folks move in to the nice houses, then cops move in to protect the white folks, rents go up, way up, then things change, get worse for those people who been living in the neighborhood for—”

  “Well that’s why did you see those pictures online?”

  “I saw them.”

  “Fire from Marcy all the way across.”

  “Your family okay?”

  “That’s what I’m going to find out, maybe join in some of the—”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “But be careful.”

  “Stan’ll protect me, and I know who to stay away from, what corners to let alone.”

  “I wonder how long the subway’s gonna run, or if we’ll skip Utica at least.”

  “Well like I said, I’m getting off after Utica. I’ll get off at Ralph, walk toward north. Where you going?”

  “All the way to Broadway Junction.”

  “Okay, then, you be safe.”

  “Nice to meet you. Holler at Stan for me.”

  “You be safe.”

  “You, too.”

  Aaron wore his suit with the tie still knotted neat against his throat; he wasn’t crying anymore. “You hear that?” a black man in a suit asked him. He’d taken the seat of the white woman.

  “I live right in the middle of it with my wife and baby. They’re there. Right off the Utica stop. This train better let off there,” Aaron said.

  “Shit, man.” And then to the women who were talking: “You ladies hear that? This guy says he lives right in the middle of it and police won’t help his wife and baby, so you two watch what you’re saying.”

  “We’re sorry.”

  “Yeah, we’re sorry.”

  “What am I going to do?” Aaron said. “They’re looting. The neighborhood’s on fire according to the news.”

  “Be polite. Ask them nicely,” one of the ladies said.

  “Okay,” Aaron said, fortified. He believed in what the lady had said.

  But then a group of ten black teenagers got on the subway at Kingston Throop, clearly heading to the same place Aaron was. They were quiet, excited. They were jumping up and down a little bit. They were as eager as Aaron was to get to their stop. There were a dozen of them, not ten. They stood even though there were seats available. They were quiet even though they were sixteen or seventeen years old. It was difficult, riding this last stop knowing that he and these kids were going to the same place—maybe the same house. He couldn’t say anything to them. Nobody said anything more to Aaron. He focused on his house, each room, on what he could do when he got there.

  The kids were respectful but powerful as a group. One took out candy. He was wearing dark blue jeans and a polo shirt buttoned all the way up. Aaron thought about Arnold Schwarzenegger and laughed. The kid saw him laugh, and both Aaron and the kid looked down, then up, then at a family a few seats away from Aaron that had nothing to do with the riots.

  A grandmother, mother, and children, Aaron guessed. Hispanic. The children were both girls. Maybe six years old. Aaron had a good sense of ages from when he’d run the tots program at the synagogue. One girl looked normal. Like a regular little girl Aaron wouldn’t have noticed. She wore shorts, a T-shirt, and a pink hooded sweatshirt. Her hair was braided sloppily, and she drank a can of Sprite with a straw. She wore white sandals covered by pony stickers that were dirty from the street. But the other girl was horrible, and she was what Aaron thought the kid with the buttoned-up polo shirt was looking at.r />
  This girl was fat in way that made it seem she was proud to be fat. She was years before puberty, but she carried herself in a conceited, almost sexualized way. Aaron knew many people who would say she was asking to be slapped. She wore tight white pants and a shirt that said Shopping Is My Cardio, and she waved around a long, thin, multicolored woven lollipop that she’d suck on and wave closer and closer to her mother and grandmother’s faces until even for those passengers who were on their way to the riot it became difficult not to stare. This fat six-year-old sucked on the long, sticky lollipop, waved it so it stuck to the window of the subway car, wrenched it off the window where it had stuck, sucked on it some more, and swung it around closer and closer to her grandmother’s face as though she was daring her grandmother to tell her to stop. But her grandmother and mother ignored her, talking in Spanish about whatever they were talking about.

  When the lollipop grazed the grandmother’s nose, the black man on the train who’d been talking to Aaron straightened up. The two women who were talking about the riot gasped. The dozen black kids who’d been sharing the candy were transfixed by this point. Aaron was no longer angry with the girl. When he’d thought he was the only one who saw her behavior, it irritated him, but the more people who joined the audience, the less Aaron cared—the more he felt it wasn’t their concern. The more he wanted to get home.

  The fat girl licked the lollipop. Rolls of her stomach fell over her shorts. She put the lollipop down next to her, on the plastic subway seat. Her sister reached for it, and the fat girl slapped her sister’s hand. She pushed her sister, so some of the Sprite spilled. The fat girl grabbed the can of Sprite and threw the straw on the ground and drank the Sprite until it was finished. She handed it back to her sister upside down so some of the sticky last drops got all over the girl’s pink sweatshirt, at which point the fat girl lifted up her own T-shirt exposing her fat belly and rubbed her belly making the “mmm, that’s so delicious” motion. Her sister started to breathe quickly in a pre-crying hyperventilating way, and the mother was watching the whole thing, but she didn’t say anything. Neither did the grandmother. The fat girl picked up the lollipop off the subway seat, licked it, and smacked the grandmother in the face with it. The grandmother remained placid.