Bed-Stuy Is Burning

by Brian Platzer

  “You did good,” she said.

  Clouds covered the sun and everything was dark.

  “I just sat there,” he said. He didn’t want to be patronized or humored by this shiny white girl with an overbite.

  “It’s not easy,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said. Maybe she wasn’t humoring him. Maybe she was just being nice.

  “Some people squirm around or sweat or need to stand up and leave. You did good,” she said.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  Like five hundred pigeons flew overhead and everyone ducked.

  “Did they really say,” she said, “they’d arrest you if you didn’t come with them? After the week you’ve been through?”

  The crowd was starting to thin out, and Derek didn’t know if there was something on the clipboard that meant she was supposed to be talking to him, or if she wanted to be talking to him. Either way, he didn’t know what to do exactly, when the conversation ended. He knew what he wanted to do, what he told himself he needed to do, what he’d been on his way to do when the cops had picked him up—but not what he was actually capable of doing. And it seemed like he was free to do it now. The feeling of this conversation was that he wasn’t being kept there by force.

  “I was at the park where the whole thing started,” he said, prolonging their conversation purposely. “I ran after I was arrested. The cops must have known that when they brought me here.”

  “But your dad died,” she said.

  Derek looked at her. On second glance, her suit fit like shit. Her job was to wear a fucking suit, and it was shiny and it fit like shit. And the overbite was strange. He wouldn’t even fuck her if he could.

  “Sorry,” she said.

  “It’s okay.”

  “Want cab fare to get home?”

  “Naw,” he said with a strange accent.

  “Why not?” she said. “It’s my job to give you cab fare.” The breeze blew strong.

  “Okay. Eighty bucks?”

  “Okay.”

  “Really?” he said.

  “I don’t care,” she said. “I just have to write it on this list.”

  “That’s tight.”

  “Who are you going home to?” she said.

  “Why do you give a shit?”

  “Sorry,” she said. “You remind me of my son.”

  Now the sun was bright again.

  “Home,” he said. “To my father’s home.”

  Hot dog carts were everywhere.

  It was strange how all of a sudden Derek noticed the carts.

  “Did my dad say anything?” he’d asked Sara.

  “Say anything?” Sara had said.

  “Did he say anything about me?” he’d said.

  She’d sat on her bed looking down. Finally:

  “Yeah, he did say something,” Sara had said.

  “What?” he’d said. “Did he say how I was a fuckup or anything like that? Tell me the truth.”

  “He said how you loved to eat his cooking,” Sara had said.

  “Don’t fuck with me,” he’d said.

  “How would I be fucking with you?” Sara had said. She’d looked so small. Like a kid.

  “What’d he say?” he’d said. “Exactly.”

  “He said that you’d come home at night and eat whatever was in the fridge,” Sara had said. “That he’d leave extra food there because he knew you’d eat it. So he’d leave it there for you.”

  Derek had screamed at Sara’s feet like he was dying.

  Chapter 56

  Amelia saw Sara’s apartment. It was a small but nice home inside clean-enough Bed-Stuy housing projects. Smelled of mint. An artificial mint cleaner that Sara must have used before Amelia arrived. Amelia took notes on the broken kitchen table. On the soda bottles and chicken wings in the fridge. She took notes when Sara spoke to her mother on the phone. She took notes on bail, and how it was a system whereby poor people had to spend months in jail. It was a modern-day debtor’s prison.

  Amelia brought Sara to a garage, where a mechanic took bolt cutters and removed the cuffs without asking any questions. Probably, Amelia thought, because Amelia was white and paying cash.

  Amelia was learning, and Sara was earning. That’s what Amelia said. Sara just glared. She ate her meatball Parm at the sandwich place. Over lunch, Sara texted on her new phone. They never spoke, except when Amelia addressed her directly or when Sara got frustrated.

  “I don’t have time for this shit,” Sara said, counting her two hundred dollars at the end of a four-hour day. “My mother’s never going to make bail like this. My brother’s going to need physical therapy money. Two hundred dollars ain’t shit.”

  Three days later: “What are you writing down?” Sara asked Amelia as they entered Interfaith Hospital.

  It was the day Amelia told Sara she wouldn’t get paid if Amelia couldn’t meet her brother. Sara had visibly needed to contain herself from screaming or getting violent. A shot cop had been rushed to Interfaith, so there were television crews and people yelling at each other and homeless people in the waiting room refusing to take their medicine so they were chained to hospital beds, and Sara didn’t recognize anyone to ask what room Andy had been moved to.

  “Just about what it all looks like. How everyone gets treated. No one gets treated like this in Manhattan hospitals.”

  “You mean white-people Manhattan hospitals.”

  “I don’t know. I guess,” Amelia said.

  “Don’t write stuff down in the hospital room,” Sara said.

  “Okay,” Amelia said.

  But they didn’t end up getting in. There’d been a chemical spill on Andy’s floor, so visitors weren’t allowed.

  Sara lost her mind, seemed to blame Amelia.

  “This isn’t my fault,” Amelia said, breathing heavily like her body was trying to make her cry. She wasn’t sad, but the place was. Amelia was feeling as though it might be her fault. Every day, it took courage to meet Sara and face her scorn.

  “This never happened when you weren’t here,” Sara said.

  “You’re being silly,” Amelia said.

  “You’re the one paying five times minimum wage for me to show you that my life is like shit,” Sara says. “I’m not the one who—you know what? Fuck this.”

  Sara walked off with her back straight. She wore her uniform of black sneakers, black pants, the Nets cap pulled low. Amelia hadn’t focused on it the last few days, but from behind, in the hospital waiting room, Sara was scary again.

  Amelia stayed at the hospital, asked the facilities manager how often spills like this occurred, and was told there’d been no spill. They were just washing the floor. Disinfecting it.

  “Chemical spill? What would that even mean? This is a hospital. We are in New York City. Goddamn,” the facilities manager said.

  Chapter 57

  Daniel had worked it all out. He was out on bail, and from what his lawyer had said, he would be okay. He’d been 100 percent honest about everything with Thela and his lawyer and brother. His brother told him that he’d done right. That he—Daniel’s brother—would have used the pistol and not the shotgun, but Daniel had probably wanted to be safe. His brother had even come over to visit for the first time. Thela had seduced Daniel for the first time in as long as he’d allowed himself to remember.

  All those jobs that he’d been thinking about doing but wasn’t qualified for—they hadn’t made any sense. A dental office in Philadelphia? Daniel liked New York. He liked Brooklyn. Thela needed to stay because of her career, which, now that they were talking again, seemed to have some momentum behind it. Daniel was going to teach. High school history if he had his way. He had already filled out the paperwork to be a New York City teaching fellow. He had the advanced degrees. All he needed was certification, and he wanted to teach in a Bed-Stuy school. That made more sense. He had killed someone. He wasn’t as cavalier about taking a life as his brother was. He knew that some part of him was going to have to live the rest o
f his life attempting to make up for what he’d done. Give back for what he’d taken.

  Daniel was going to travel with Thela to her gigs when he could. Over the weekends for now, and all summer once he became a teacher. He was going to reconnect with her and with the friends who would still give him the time of day. Start as a teacher and maybe become a principal one day. Make a difference in twenty lives, then maybe a division of kids’ lives, then a school, a district? That was the problem with these kids, was his guess. No one to really care about them. A bunch of nice people collecting paychecks. But no sustained interaction with sensible white people who would dedicate years to them. He was willing. They were living in a world divided into us and them. Into poor and rich. Black and white. And he was just one overeducated fuckup, but why not? And if he had the confidence to shoot one of them, he should be able to teach them with confidence—confidence that he was sure their other white teachers lacked. That was another problem he was sure existed. The teachers must fear their students. What kind of starting point was that?

  Thela wouldn’t want him thinking about why Amelia was out of the house all the time now, and it was none of his business anyway, and things seemed calm.

  Thela was working with Daniel about overthinking things less. Ruminating she called it. He had to stop always ruminating. Going into vicious cycles. Entropic cycles. Anyway, he had handed in both his guns to the cops as part of his bail agreement, so it wasn’t as though if things got violent he could help. Thela didn’t even allow steak knives in the house anymore. Like he was a danger to himself or to her. She said until the trial or until they decided there’d be no trial, which was what his lawyer thought more likely. Daniel’s brother thought Thela was going to leave Daniel—that once the knives were locked up, trust didn’t enter back into a marriage, but what did he know? Daniel’s brother’s wife was blond and worked at Deutsche Bank.

  Daniel was cooking now, going back and forth from the window to the stovetop, because he couldn’t let more than ten minutes pass without looking outside. He didn’t like to let five minutes pass without looking outside, and he set his alarm to wake him on the hour every hour at night, so at night he could look out his window to make sure things were calm, but during the day, he liked to look out the window every five minutes if he wasn’t doing any activities, and, at the very longest stretch, every ten minutes, if he was doing activities, such as now, when he was cooking. The only exception was during the commutes between six and eight in the morning and around seven in the evening, when, no matter what, he had to be at his window nonstop and everything else took second priority. One of his worries was whether the exterior cameras would be up by the time he took his first trip with Thela to see her perform, or if, God forbid, Aaron didn’t let him mount the cameras or if cameras would be a Landmarks Violation of the Historic District, but then he would just dip into their savings to get the really small spy cameras, and he could check what was transpiring on the block on his phone.

  So every seven or eight minutes while he was letting his sauce reduce, he went to the window to look both ways and up and down the block and snap a few pictures with his phone and upload those pictures to the cloud for permanent safekeeping. Then he went back to cooking dinner.

  He was on one of his breaks when he saw Derek Jupiter Jr., marching up the street to the house two doors down. Jupiter’s house. He’d been worried about Derek so was relieved when he saw him, and then surprised when ninety seconds later he came out again and passed Aaron’s stairs to bang on Daniel’s own door.

  “One minute, Derek! Come in, come in,” Daniel said.

  “How do you know my name?” Derek said, reaching into the back of his pants.

  “I’ve spent hours talking with your father,” Daniel said.

  “You had no fucking right to shoot Damien,” Derek said.

  Derek was unhinged. He wasn’t at all like his father was, but he was like his father described him as being. Jupiter had been worried his son was becoming violent.

  “Come in,” Daniel said. “I’ll have dinner ready soon. I’m so glad you came.”

  Derek pulled a gun from behind his back. Pointed it at Daniel.

  “What are you doing?” Daniel said. “Put that thing away. After what went on last week? Are you crazy? That’s the last thing you should be carrying around. After what happened to your father? I’m going to become a schoolteacher.”

  “You had no right,” Derek said.

  “Your father and I—we were friends,” Daniel said.

  “Fuck!” Derek yelled. “Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”

  “Derek,” Daniel said.

  “That was my job,” Derek said. “You took away my responsibility.”

  “I was scared he was going to hurt the baby,” Daniel said. “That boy. That kid who hurt your dad. I was scared of him. He pointed his gun at me. I did what anyone would have done.”

  “Fuck!” Derek yelled. “What the fuck am I supposed to do now?”

  Chapter 58

  The doorbell rang at 8 a.m., three hours before Amelia was supposed to meet Sara at her mother’s apartment. Amelia had been in the kitchen pouring coffee and now greeted Sara by the front door.

  “This isn’t working,” Sara said, once inside. “Pay me my full amount. The amount you promised. You swore. I still have the check. You promised me that money.”

  “My baby’s upstairs,” Amelia said. “Let’s not talk here.”

  After the scene at the hospital, Amelia had been expecting something like this. But she wouldn’t know how to explain it to Aaron. Why she was spending time with Sara; why she was paying her. Aaron had taken a few vacation days and had been looking after Simon while Amelia was “out reporting.” He’d told Amelia he’d been adoring the days, even though Simon had continued with his silence. He’d told Amelia he’d loved being with the other parents, talking to them about the riots. But that mostly he’d loved being with Simon. Aaron was upstairs with Simon now, plying him into his clothes.

  “Your baby? What’s he got to do with it?” Sara looked up and around Amelia into the house.

  Amelia reached to her pocket to call the police. Sara was jumping up and down as she’d been that first day with Damien and Mike.

  Now Sara hugged herself with her thin, bony arms and started to shake. It was strange for her to wear short sleeves. The cuffs had been gone almost a week.

  Amelia hesitated.

  The stairs creaked, Simon yelped, Aaron brought him down.

  Sara stood taller. Amelia scuttled between Sara and her family. “We have a visitor,” Amelia said.

  “I see that,” Aaron said. “Whom do I have the pleasure?”

  Aaron wore gym shorts and a T-shirt, the baby against his chest. “Who is this?” Aaron asked Amelia, again, about Sara in front of Sara.

  “I’m Sara,” Sara said.

  Simon looked at Sara and started screaming, making noise as he hadn’t done for two weeks. Except for at the synagogue, he’d been nearly silent since the day.

  Now Simon exploded. It was a high-pitch hyperventilating shriek, and Amelia couldn’t stand it. This was the first real sign of life in her son in a week, and it was antilife. Simon went glassy-eyed. It was the look a serial killer has as a baby, blank and in pain. He only stopped screaming to gather breath and scream more.

  Simon’s face was bright red and his hands were white. His turtle pajamas were rumpled and stretched. Amelia feared he was going to burst a blood vessel or worse.

  “Baby,” Aaron said. “Baby, baby,” but it wasn’t going to end, and they both knew it, and it was exactly at the frequency meant to break a parent’s sanity, so when Sara said, “What’s wrong with your kid?” Amelia said, “Get out of my house,” as though she meant it—as though she’d never meant anything as much as she meant that, but the baby was still screaming, and this was clearly the chaos that Sara was looking for or felt comfortable in because Sara took this moment to make a stand and said, “Not until I get my money. This d
eal of yours was fucked from the beginning. And you know it. It’s too slow. And I’m no kind of assistant. As soon as I get my cash, I’ll leave,” and though Aaron was stroking his screaming baby’s face, and Simon’s tears were pouring from his eyes and into his tiny mouth so now he was choking as well as screaming and gasping for air, Aaron said, “Is this the same girl from . . . What money?” and Amelia said, “Nothing, no money, she was just leaving,” but Sara repeated, “As soon as I get my money,” and Aaron said, “Get her away from Simon, and Simon will stop crying. Here,” handing Simon to Amelia and shooing them both upstairs, and he was right.

  Amelia took Simon up to her bedroom and sat with him on her bed.

  “Who-oo’s my ba-by,” Amelia sang. “You’re my ba-by—you’re my baby, baby. You’re my ba-by—you’re my baby, baby. You’re my ba-by—you’re my baby, baby. You’re my ba-by—you’re my baby, baby. Who’s my baby? You’re my baby—You are.”

  Amelia removed Simon’s pajamas so Simon was just wearing his diaper and then she crossed her room into his and removed his diaper and tossed it into the diaper bin so he was naked.

  She removed her own shirt and bra, and Simon was shivering but not from cold she didn’t think but the postcrying shiver of trying to regulate his system and catch his breath. His little fingers were in little fists and his tiny ears were his father’s. He was yawning now, relaxing from the physical trauma of howling and choking, and his eyes were waking up.

  Chapter 59

  Three hours later, Aaron opened the bedroom door to see Amelia asleep with her arms around their son. She was delicate and strong. Aaron slipped under the covers behind her. Simon was naked and seemed to have peed a little bit, or maybe it was sweat. Amelia was wearing just her underwear bottoms, so Aaron took off his shirt and pants, and the three of them were in bed together safe.

  • • •

  When Amelia woke up, she diapered Simon and brought him back into bed. It was around eight o’clock at night and she was hungry. But Simon yawned and Aaron was still in bed, so she joined them.