Bed-Stuy Is Burning

by Brian Platzer

  “Sit down,” Antoinette said. “And put the gun down.”

  “I’m sorry,” Daniel said.

  “You’re getting excited again,” Antoinette said.

  “I’m sorry,” Daniel said.

  “Just have a seat for one minute and try to stay sat.”

  Brooklyn—Bed-Stuy especially—was horrible. Bed-Stuy was the worst. Daniel didn’t mean for black people. Bed-Stuy was fine for black people. Bed-Stuy was the worst for white people. Bed-Stuy was for white people who wanted to live in Brooklyn but didn’t want to own up to the fact that they wanted to live in Brooklyn. Of course Daniel wasn’t thinking about the poor black people who lived there because they couldn’t afford to live anywhere else. He wasn’t thinking about the middle-class black people who grew up there or had maybe rented there and then had made some money and then bought in Bed-Stuy because it was the neighborhood they knew, and their friends were there, or their family, too, and in the late eighties and nineties they could buy a house for cheap and look after their people. He wasn’t even talking about the gentrifying blacks, the first round of gentrifiers who wanted to buy up the nice brownstones on the blocks where other black people lived because they wanted to make a good investment and live in up-and-coming black neighborhoods and be the kings and queens. Daniel had to hand it to these investment bankers and lawyers and hedge-funders who went to Ivy League schools or historically black colleges and then wanted to come back and rule their little worlds. That made sense. They were the conquering heroes back from making it good in white America, so of course they wanted to find a black enclave to retreat to and settle their families down where they didn’t always need to look over their shoulders and wonder if they could let their proverbial (and sometimes literal) hair down.

  But why? Why? What, what, what was wrong with people like Aaron and Amelia? People who made real money and could live anywhere but instead wanted to push their way into other people’s communities that were just on the cusp of being pleasant? It was offensive for a million reasons. For one, it wasn’t even nice yet! Celestino, the one decent restaurant, had just closed! Cobble Hill was actually nice! If Daniel and Thela could have afforded to rent in Cobble Hill, they never in a million years would have lived in Bed-Stuy where black kids got conspicuously harassed by cops every morning in the subway station and there was no Duane Reade within a million blocks. Fort Greene was actually nice! Park Slope was actually nice! Williamsburg and Greenpoint were expensive shitholes, but Clinton Hill, if you were looking to spend a few bucks less than Fort Greene—that was much nicer than around here! But this? The garbage didn’t get picked up, and there might be a fucking race riot any fucking day.

  Also, who the fuck did these white Wall Street assholes think they were, buying up one of the nicer homes in a community that had been all black and suffering and oppressed for seventy-five years? It just seemed so douchey. White people kept the neighborhood poor and crappy for three quarters of a century, and then as soon as black people worked to make it a more pleasant place to live, this white couple came in and bought the nice house? Granted, it wasn’t like Aaron and Amelia were the individuals who’d been oppressing the people in this neighborhood, and granted, the people they’d bought the place from made out well, and the house itself was beautiful, and Aaron and Amelia had the money and therefore shouldn’t be forbidden from living in any house they wanted in any neighborhood in any city, but come on! They had to walk into the definitive historical district in the blackest neighborhood in the country and buy the house on the block? And then not even rent to black people? Fuck them! It just seemed like such a piece-of-shit move.

  Antoinette sang to Simon:

  There’s a brown girl in the ring

  Tra la la la la

  There’s a brown girl in the ring

  Tra la la la la la

  Brown girl in the ring

  Tra la la la la

  She looks like a sugar in a plum

  Plum plum

  Daniel liked what people called “hipster” Brooklyn when he could afford it. Hipster, he thought, was a word like “hick” that was derogatory. People tended not to realize that no one would ever apply it to oneself. But still, Daniel liked cured meats and local chocolates. He liked soft shirts and IPAs and long-form journalism and quirky artistic girls like his wife. Or, he once had liked these things. Now, he mostly slept and drank coffee and listened to podcasts. Which was hipsterish, too, in its way. The problem with Brooklyn was it turned people into either money-spending, restaurant-dwelling hipsters or alcoholics or shut-ins. Of those three, of course he chose shut-in. Who wouldn’t? There were no normal people in Brooklyn. Either people did drugs all the time, or they were terrible artists. Or everything about them was hideously precious. The only normal people were the impoverished majority and the ultrarich one percenters, because the former didn’t mind eating off-brand Doritos and fried takeout for dinner, and the latter didn’t mind spending thirty-eight dollars an entrée. So of course the former was storming the homes of the latter. And of course Daniel had stopped leaving his apartment. And of course Thela was cheating on him with another man or Mother Nature or jazz music, or whatever it was she’d been doing.

  Antoinette sang:

  Show me your motion

  Tra la la la la

  Come on show me your motion

  Tra la la la la la

  Show me your motion

  Tra la la la la

  She looks like a sugar in a plum

  Plum plum

  However this ended, Daniel would apologize to Thela and tell her he wanted it to be not like it was once but like other people lived. In other, more normal places. Where people could live without being so extreme. He would be someone she might look forward to spending time with again. He’d try to relax. Get rid of the guns. Cut back on caffeine. They might have a son. Make love again, at least. He might make money. He had skills. He could run an office—a dental office in New Jersey. Or they could start a tutoring and music-lessons company together in California. Or he could become a paralegal in Colorado. They might have a life together. A real life. He was ready to be a real, regular, responsible man.

  Antoinette was slowing down and whispering now:

  Skip across the ocean

  Tra la la la la

  Skip across the ocean

  Tra la la la la la

  Skip across the ocean

  Tra la la la la

  You look like a sugar in a plum

  Plum plum

  Simon was fast asleep on Antoinette’s chest, and Daniel was standing, holding a shotgun, when he heard a pistol fire upstairs.

  Chapter 42

  Minutes before, Amelia had stepped into what had been her office. She held the pistol with her left hand and undid the safety with the middle and index fingers of her right. The gun felt heavy, as though in psychological proportion with her ability to shoot it. Like the gun was heavy, but its physical weight would be nothing compared to the weight of pulling its trigger. There were two bookshelves in the office still up on the opposite wall from the doorway, and some books remained on them, but most were scattered all over the floor. Amelia pressed slightly against the trigger and it felt unmovable, but then she thought maybe a touch more pressure might make the thing go off. The rug was twisted up on itself and covered in books, and one bookshelf was overturned and splintered: the bookshelf that Amelia had shipped east from her grandmother’s storage unit after her death.

  There was no sign of the girl, but Amelia wasn’t surprised. When she’d found the door unlocked, Amelia sensed the girl would be in the exercise room. So Amelia took her time. The glider rocking chair was in three pieces next to the smashed stained-glass windows, windows that had lasted the previous 120 years. The glider had been used to pitch over the bookshelf and break the stained glass. The glass was wrenched out toward the garden below. The panes were shattered, and those not shattered were cantilevered open, so wind whipped into the room. One-hundred-twenty-year-o
ld shattered stained glass was beautiful. It was sharp and reflecting the sun. The computer’s screen was cracked, too. The desk was undamaged as far as she could tell, but all the photos that had been on the wall were cracked, the bookshelves were destroyed, the computer screen was cracked, the stained glass was destroyed, the—Amelia laughed! Her laughter erupted from below her stomach and burst out her throat. She stopped herself because the girl could hear her—Amelia could always hear Aaron grunt when she was writing and he was working out—but what did she care if the girl could hear her? She had a gun, and this was her home, and the girl was closed in a room with no windows and only one door, and Amelia was willing to shoot her.

  But that’s not why Amelia was laughing. She wasn’t laughing at the destruction. She was laughing at its lack of significance. Books were on the floor. A binding or two had ripped. But she hadn’t looked at any of those books for years, except the couple she’d just read and most likely wouldn’t ever read again. Aaron’s money could buy a new bookshelf. Aaron had more than she did. She had fifty-seven thousand dollars in her bank account, and she guessed Aaron had three times that. She wasn’t rich, but she had more money than most people did. Even without Aaron and without landing some big nonfiction book, she had enough to replace a few pieces of furniture and to maintain her independence for a couple of years. And generations of her family would come to live in this house.

  A new bookshelf wouldn’t be her grandmother’s bookshelf, but Amelia had loved her grandmother, not her grandmother’s furniture. Stained-glass windows could be fixed, or replaced with new windows, stained glass or better insulated. Aaron was about to give fifty thousand dollars away to charity. A replacement for the gambling. As long as Aaron couldn’t be trusted with his money, she couldn’t marry him. Gambling, risk, whatever he wanted to call it. As long as he kept threatening to give money away. Now he could use that money he was going to give away to provide work for American glass artisans. Amelia laughed loudly and gripped her gun. Pointed it toward the white door that led into the exercise room.

  “I’ve got a gun, and you’re trespassing and dangerous,” Amelia said. “With stand-your-ground-laws and that you were with those kids who just shot my neighbor and now what you’ve done to my office, I could shoot you right now. Do you hear me? I could shoot you right now, and I don’t give a shit. No one would think twice. I’ve got my baby downstairs. Come on out, and I’ll let you out of my house alive. We’ll walk downstairs and you can leave. But get the fuck out of my house.”

  Amelia had begun by yelling and then she was talking in a brusque way, but now she was laughing again. She was proud of herself. She knew her rights. She was doing the right thing, taking care of her family. She was taking care of her family and herself. Nothing substantial had been lost. Yet. She had Simon still, and Aaron, and that was what mattered. Her stained glass didn’t matter. Her grandmother had died years ago. Aaron and Simon were the only things that mattered, and neither of them were lost.

  There was mumbling from the exercise room.

  Amelia moved closer.

  “Speak up,” Amelia said. She had to get very close to the white door to hear the girl, and something about pressing her face against the crack near the door handle made all the adrenaline that had invigorated her threats run out of her. She heard her own breath. She sat on the floor and looked at the mess and remembered that Aaron was probably on his way home. Probably in a taxi or the subway, if the subways were running.

  “I can’t,” the girl said. “I can’t go outside.”

  “Sure you can,” Amelia said, her resolve melting along with the girl’s voice. The girl’s voice was meek and trying hard to be steady. It was exactly what Amelia feared her own voice sounded like.

  “Like you said, I was with those kids who killed Mr. Jupiter,” the girl said.

  And then they both waited for the other one to talk.

  The white door, painted just the year before, was already dirty and cracking. The girl said, “I knew Derek from the block. I can’t go home because of the police. And if Derek finds out what happened, he’ll fucking kill me, so right now this room with you is the safest place I’ve got.”

  “What’s your name?” Amelia said. “I’m Amelia.”

  “Sara.”

  “Your real name,” Amelia said.

  “My name is Sara.”

  “How old are you?” Amelia said.

  “Eighteen.”

  That was older than Amelia had expected. Amelia had expected the girl to say fifteen, or sixteen, maybe. But eighteen was different. This was an adult that Amelia was holding hostage, which was preferable, she reasoned.

  “Why did you come here?” Amelia said, feeling the wind whip into the open room. “At first, I mean.”

  “Because Derek Jupiter said to. He said to come here. He said that nice people used to live here and you drove them out. He said that it was time to take the neighborhood back. Shit, I don’t know. What are you going to do to me?”

  “Do to you? What am I going to do to you? What was your idea coming here? To do what?” Amelia said. “Why did you come here? What does that mean, take back the neighborhood?” Amelia was losing track of exactly what she was saying, but she could feel herself falling into a normal pattern. It was the pattern she used as an interviewer. All of a sudden, through the white door, she was conducting an interview. She wanted to know more about Sara. Mr. Jupiter’s son had told her to come here? That made the story tragic. So did the girl’s eyes, from what she remembered. She was smart. Circle back to “you drove them out,” Amelia reminded herself.

  “I don’t know,” Sara said.

  “I’ve got a gun,” Amelia said, to shake herself out of the rhythm. But part of her wanted to retract that last statement. She could interview Sara. But she would have to interview Sara at gunpoint. Sara was an individual who embodied the repercussions of gentrification. She could write it as a first-person account of a woman whose friend was just killed by Sara’s friend. No one else had a story like this one.

  “I know that,” Sara said. “You keep on saying you’ve got a fucking gun. I know you have a fucking gun. Fuck! Is Damien dead?”

  “I’m saying do you want to come out? Even though I’ve got a gun and will have to point it at you? You don’t have to leave. Yet. We can sit in the same room.”

  “Not yet,” Sara said. “Is Damien dead? You say you have to point a gun at me. You just killed my fucking friend! You’re a total psycho.”

  “I don’t know. Your friend? The one who killed Mr. Jupiter? Is that Damien?” Amelia said, confused. “I have a child.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t know?” Sara said. “He’s dead or not. Everyone has a child. You think I care about your child?”

  Sara started jumping up and down. The room was white inside. Where Sara was. Sara looked around for nonwhite parts. And black parts, like the machines and weights, didn’t count. There was a brown towel on the barbell rack. White walls. White floor matting. These people were crazy rich. Like that Shabba Ranks video. Like every hip-hop video. The workout machines were black. A weight machine, weight bench, a stairs machine, and a treadmill. She was sitting on the weight bench now, with her head in her hands. The door didn’t lock, but Sara was confident that Amelia wouldn’t open the door. Something about how Amelia kept asking her if she wanted to come out. That made it seem she wouldn’t come in. But Sara wasn’t sure, so now she held a bench-pressing bar with no weights on it. The bar was metal, but a different metal from the handcuff metal that was still on her wrists. Her wrists were sore from that metal. The weight-lifting metal was shinier. She held it down at one end like a baseball bat. Now Sara was jumping up and down holding the heavy metal bar.

  “What are you doing in there?” Amelia said. “Are you all right?”

  “Is Damien dead?” Sara said through the door.

  “Mr. Jupiter is,” Amelia said, “but I don’t know anything about Damien except, if he was the guy who shot Mr. Jupiter, that
he’s a murderer who deserves it. Why did you come here? You’re friends with Jupiter’s son? What were you hoping to accomplish?”

  “Accomplish?” Sara said. “Fuck you. I don’t owe you an explanation. What were you hoping to accomplish moving to a neighborhood where everyone hates you?”

  “I’ve got the gun and you’re in my house and you killed my neighbor,” Amelia said.

  “Your neighbor? Fuck you,” Sara said. “That’s Derek’s dad.”

  “And there’s no lock on that door,” Amelia said. “You killed him. You killed his dad.”

  “Then come at me,” Sara said. “You want at me, come at me.”

  “Sorry,” Amelia said. “Calm down. I’m sorry. I have a child. Let’s both calm down.”

  Amelia heard what she thought was jumping up and down from inside the exercise room. She heard metal scrape metal. A roar in the street downstairs made Amelia want to go to Simon, but also she was happy not to be with Simon. She would be told if something happened to Simon. Simon was safe with Antoinette. Every minute she wasn’t told about Simon was another minute Simon was safe. She didn’t want to think about Simon in danger. She wanted to do her job.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Amelia said.

  “What?” Sara said.

  “Let’s tell each other about ourselves. My name is Amelia. My boyfriend’s name is Aaron. Our son is Simon.”