Eager to roll, Nerese took Freddy Martinez’s mug shot and wedged it under the base of Ruby’s Weeping Monk on the corner of Ray’s night table.
Then, wheeling for the exit, she nearly collided with a slender young black man who had materialized at the foot of the bed. The kid’s instinctual reaction to her was to immediately backstep the hell out.
“Yo, sorry . . .” He made it to the nurses’ station.
“Whoa! Whoa!” Nerese automatically reverted to cop tone, pointing a finger at him—Do not move—the kid, apparently with equal experience and instinct, showing his hands but otherwise doing as he was told. “In here,” beckoning him back to the bedside.
“How you doin’ today.” He smiled easily although he continued to play statue from the waist up.
“‘What’s Mine Is Mine,’” she said without thinking.
“What?” The kid blinked, then: “Yeah,” his smile broadening. “How’d you know that. Did Ray show you my stuff?”
He tentatively eased out of the freeze, face still unclouded. “I’m Salim.” Offering his hand, fine-boned, like the wing of a bird. “How you doin’,” he repeated, that smile of his staying put.
“Had days better,” she said cautiously, still sizing him up.
He was tall but rail-thin, the suggestion of physical frailness underscored by high cheekbones, pronounced orbital sockets and a carefully groomed pencil-line mustache.
And he was natty, too: spotless Mets jersey, baggy jeans and near-mint powder-blue Timberland boots.
“Can I see Ray?”
“He’s out,” she said, blocking his access to the bedside.
“Out. Out where?”
“Unconscious,” Nerese looking straight into his face. “They had to drill a burr-hole in his skull to drain the excess blood that was pushing in on his brain,” watching the eyes.
“Oh, shit.” Salim reared back, wincing in honest disgust.
“How do you know him again?”
“He’s my teacher,” he said, this grown man stating it in the present tense, then finished with her, slipping around to the head of the bed. Nerese flared at the dismissal.
“Oh shit,” he hissed, hovering over Ray’s gauze-wrapped dome. “You can see right in there.”
“Come away now,” Nerese commanded, thinking, Finished with me?
Chapter 15
Salim—January 18
“I wasn’t even doing nothing, just hanging with my boys when the shots went off.
“Somebody said ‘you bleedin’, I didn’t even feel it and now I’m down here, don’t have no one to talk to, no TV, no phone, no Z100, and this is like forever . . . I didn’t deserve this.”
“Good.” Ray nodded at Jamaal. “Any comments?”
The challenge had been to create voices for the Dempsy River Anthology—the dead of the city looking back from the solitude of the grave on lives spent/misspent.
The idea had come from Myra’s having mentioned that she was reading Spoon River Anthology a few classes back, although he was very careful not to point that out when he announced the assignment—not that she wouldn’t know where he was coming from with this.
“Comments?”
“Z100?” Rashaad reared back. “That’s white-boy music.”
As one, the class turned to check out Ray’s reaction. Bondo was out sick.
“I do believe my daughter listens to Hot 97, blazin’ hip-hop and R’n’B,” he said, the kids grinning with surprise that he even knew of that station’s existence.
“Yeah,” Rashaad said. “See, that’s what I’d listen to down there.”
Altagracia started waving as if she were trying to flag down a lifeguard.
“Go,” Ray said.
“Yeah, OK.” Clearing her throat. “And nobody say nothing till I’m finished.”
“Just go.”
“OK.” Then,
“Man, I knew I shouldn’t have gone in on that business. The thing looked shaky from the door but the money was large.
“My mother always tried to set me straight but I never listened to nobody, not even her, and so now I’m down here with nothing to do for forever except think about how stupid I was.
“And that’s it,” she said looking up.
All four of the stories read so far, if stories were what you could call these bite-sized epitaphs, had equated being dead with being bored—being buried with being sent to your room with the added hitch of an eternal power outage, no TV, phones, boom box, just you and the four walls until the cows came home.
“Comments?”
“And not stupid ones,” Altagracia said.
He had pretty much given up on the idea of the class getting any kind of real criticism; it was enough that they were writing.
“No comments?”
“I liked it,” Felicia said, the girl as usual trying to turtle down below her starched collar.
“OK,” he began, then faltered as the door to the teacher’s lounge opened and a young black man of indeterminate age quietly slipped into the room. Gliding along one of the walls, he sat himself down behind the big scuffed desk that stood catercorner beneath the windows.
Ray didn’t know who he was, a student most likely, but maybe a little older. He decided to let him be.
“Efram.”
“Yeah, OK.” The chubby Latin kid did an Art Carney, extending his arms, twirling his wrists, official class wisenheimer; the other kids already half-grinning, bracing for his latest stylings.
“Even as a corpse I look good. Just a little hole where the bullet went in.
“There’s a real cute girl in Row 6, Plot 9.”
And the howling began. Efram looking up. “Man, how come nobody ever lets me finish?” pleased with himself.
“All right, all right, calm down.”
“Yeah, please.” Efram shot his cuffs. “Control yourselves.”
The newcomer took out a small notebook and started sketching, his eyes flicking rhythmically between his handiwork and the seminar table.
“OK.” Efram cleared his throat. “As I was saying,
“There’s a real cute girl in Row 6, Plot 9. She’s already sent me like a dozen dead-o-grams, but I’m still considering my options because I heard there’s an even cuter girl gonna be buried tomorrow in Row 8, Plot 4, and since two-timing my women is how I got laid out down here to begin with, I better stick to one corpse at a time.
“The—the—that’s all, folks!”
Ray let the kids cut loose. After only three classes, he had already worked out a natural batting order; the four other kids first, then Efram for comic relief and then, for the grand finale, Myra.
The class was working in ways that had nothing to do with school as school—it was more like a goodwill free-for-all, the readings themselves like short toasts at the end of a banquet.
“OK. OK,” Ray said, intending to gesture for Myra to bring out the big guns, but instead found himself turning in his chair to check out the visitor again; the kid still quietly sketching.
He met Ray’s eye with an amused, oddly intimate smirk.
“Myra?” Ray called out distractedly, still turned to the kid; something . . . “Myra, go ahead . . .”
“Uh-oh, here we go,” Rashaad clowned, getting shooshed by everyone.
Modest in her power, Myra kept her eyes downcast, fussing with her notebook, then for the third week in a row began to read in a near inaudible murmur.
“Start again,” Ray said gently.
“This is called ‘Dead Man Talking,’” Myra said, then coughed into the side of her fist.
“As a famous actor I created desire and excitement everywhere I went. However, no one knew how miserable and alone I really was. Everybody around me wanted something but had little or nothing to offer in return.
“Then one day I was walking in the neighborhood of my youth, and I was reminded of how happy I used to be living here before I became a celebrity.
“I decided right then and there to escape my p
resent life for a little while, go up to my old apartment where my mother still lived and move back in until I felt better. My mother was overjoyed, and I returned to my old bedroom.
“There was only one problem. When I looked out the window I saw not the world of today but of twenty years ago. All my childhood friends were downstairs again, hanging out on our old bench, even though I knew in reality that most of them had gone on to die of drugs or gang-related violence. They were looking up at me smilingly and silently waving for me to come down and join them just like when we were all kids.
“The next thing I knew, I was on the floor of my bedroom, unconscious.
“My mother called a doctor who said I had a bad heart.
“For seven days I lived in my old bedroom hiding from the cold uncaring world, and each day I looked out the window and saw only my childhood friends on the bench, beckoning for me to join them. And each time I woke up on the floor of my bedroom unconscious.
“On the eighth day, when I looked out the window to see their beckoning waves I decided enough was enough and I called out that I’d be right down.
“They said I died of a heart attack that day and buried me with much fanfare. But it’s only my shell that you will find here six feet under. For the rest of me, look out that window and if you’re lucky, me and the boys will gladly ask you to join us on the old bench of our carefree youth. The end.”
Myra closed her book and coughed into her fist again.
“That’s a for-real story,” Efram said soberly.
“How do you come up with that.” Altagracia winced.
Myra shrugged, fought down a smile, spoke in her tiny voice. “It’s just in my mind.”
“The mind of Minolta,” Rashaad announced.
Ray sat there moved by the sentiment and impressed with the kid’s ability to bring the story to completion the way she did, but except for a terse “Very good,” as if he were commenting on a single-malt Scotch, he held himself in check.
The class-ending boop came over the PA, everyone rising except for Ray, intent on not gassing up Myra’s head anymore—not even a low-five at the door.
Instead, he turned to watch the quiet visitor uncurl himself from behind the big desk, the sketch that he had been working on now tucked between elbow and ribs. Even from across the room Ray could see it was something extraordinary; something deeply detailed, and despite the use of a ballpoint pen, subtly shaded.
As the visitor made his way around the desk and over to the long seminar table, Ray quickly got to his feet to maintain a sense of psychic balance.
The kid was tall but bird-boned, the delicacy of his frame underscored by a carefully tended razor-thin mustache.
Face-to-face now, he fixed Ray with that same teasing gleam and waited.
“Can I help you?” Ray said awkwardly. “Are you in, you’re not in the class, are you?”
“Not really,” he drawled, shiny-eyed, holding something back; something delicious.
Ray got a closer look at the artwork—a drawing of a stubby, guttering candle, a moth with a minute human face hovering precariously close to the flame.
Something about it spoke to Ray of jail, and off-balance, the words were out of his mouth before he could check himself. “Were you in the joint or something?”
“The ‘joint’?” the kid said with gentle mockery, ducking his head to make better eye contact.
“No offense. I just meant . . .”
“Mr. Mitchell, you don’t remember me?”
Ray looked at him for the first time, really looked. “Coley?”
“There you go,” his eyes dancing.
“Jesus, Coley . . .” He couldn’t remember the kid’s last name, Coley a member of that notorious English class of his that had ducked out on Shakespeare in the Park nearly a decade ago.
“Except now it’s Salim.”
“Salim.”
The kid had to be close to thirty years old.
“And yeah, I was incarcerated,” he said soberly. “This is my hundredth day back out.”
“OK.” Ray nodded, not knowing what to say. “So how’s it going?”
“You know, I’m trying to maintain. Get out from under all the negativity, you know? So how you doing, Mr. Mitchell?”
The question, sweetly put, nonetheless made Ray uncomfortable. He always preferred to be the asker.
“I have a daughter,” he answered reflexively, Ruby his ace in the hole these days.
“Oh yeah?” Salim/Coley said, reaching for his wallet and pulling out a photo of a toddler, ash-gray eyes and niblet teeth. “That’s my son. That’s Omar. He’s two and a half now.”
Ray felt himself go puttylike with goodwill.
“I don’t have any pictures of my daughter.”
“That’s OK.” Salim beamed. “I see her in your eyes.”
“Really.” Ray winced, then noticed that the kid had a paperback in his hand, something entitled Where Is God, When . . .; and automatically began compiling a reading list for him. “So you just came by?”
“Yeah—well, no. Felicia Stevenson, in your class? She’s my stepfather’s niece and she was talking you up in the house last night, you know, how you were all positive with her writing and that made me remember how you . . . You know, you remember the day you took me to that art school over in New York?”
“School of Visual Arts. Sure,” Ray said carefully.
“Yeah. You had hope in me back then, and that was important so I just, you know, I just wanted to come by and say hello.”
In his last year of teaching, when Coley was technically still on the books but pretty much a full-blown dropout, showing up in class once a week if that, Ray had taken it upon himself to reach out to a college friend of his who was an art director at Young & Rubicam to arrange for the kid to get a tour of the agency, see artists getting paid.
This friend of Ray’s took one look at Coley’s untutored portfolio, gave him a long speech about how talent without training gets you nowhere, dropped a few hundred dollars’ worth of pens and markers and manuals in a shopping bag for him, scribbled out a letter of introduction to one of the deans at the School of Visual Arts twenty blocks south and set up an admissions interview on the phone before Coley and Ray had even hit the elevator banks.
Out on the street they had parted ways, Ray heading uptown, Coley, his letter and his goodie bag allegedly heading downtown to a new life. But he never quite got there; he claimed later that night on the phone that the shopping bag was too heavy, so he hopped a subway at Grand Central and went back home to the Bronx.
Ray had been furious with him for the rest of the term; in fact, it wasn’t until years later, when he was coked up driving a cab and had occasion one day to drop off a few SVA students in front of the school, that he realized with belated clarity that the problem wasn’t Coley being an ungrateful shortsighted jerk that day—it was just that it had all been too much for him; too much, too soon, and the kid, most likely unbeknownst to himself, had simply freaked.
“You still live in the Bronx?”
“Nah. Not for a while. Like, right after I had gotten finished with high school? My mother married this guy from around here, so we moved.”
“You still drawing?” Ray nodded to the candle and the moth.
“Yeah. Like this, though.” Salim shrugged.
“You working?”
“Yeah, well no, not like an employee per se. However, I’m working on something. I got this idea for a nonprofit organization to help inmates return to so-called society? I call it LIFE—Living in Fear of Extinction. I want to set up a whole reentry program, you know, literacy, computer literacy, how to fill out résumés, how to communicate, how to be prompt, how to be inspirational, how to make eye contact. See right now, I’m at the research stage, I need to learn how to file an application for tax-exempt status, how to find sponsors, how to—”
“Anything else?” Ray unable to hear this shit.
“Other? Well, yeah, I had this T-shirt thin
g goin’ on, you know, bought shirts in bulk, designed my own logo, hooked up with this printer did the silk-screening on a delayed payment schedule but that’s all on financial hold for the time being, and I was also working on a comic book I wanted to publish, called Dawgs of War, about the future, when America wages war on the Republic of Nubia and it was gonna focus on one platoon of guys from the hood, how they get educated over there, you know, come to understand that they’re fighting . . . you know, that they’re on the wrong side, you know what I’m—”
“Do you want to grab something to eat?” Ray cut him off again, offering the meal half out of curiosity, and half just to shut him up.
The school was surrounded by fast-food outlets, diners and burger taverns but Ray drove Salim over to Jersey City, to a small café reclaimed from the shell of an old Chinese laundry on a regentrified street of brownstones.
“Yeah, this is nice,” Salim said, his gaze slick with pleasure.
The room was small and dark with a pressed-tin ceiling painted chocolate brown, a framed movie poster for Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête on one wall, and Ingrid Bergman’s Joan of Arc on another. A refrigerated display case featured three small cakes and an array of petite tarts. They were the only customers.
When the sole waitress came to the table, Salim threw her a terrific smile. “How you doing?” he said. “You having a good day?”
“So far.”
“Yeah? Me too,” Salim said. “I’ll have the, what’s . . . Is there any meat in the Asian salad?”
“Chicken.”
“Yeah, no, I don’t eat meat. Can I have it without the chicken?”
“How about I just bring you a garden salad.”
“OK. Yeah. And is there any caffeine in the raspberry tea?”
“Nope.”
“Yeah, OK, good. I’ll have that too.”
Ray studied Salim. He looked thin but healthy, almost untouched by the years.
“I’ll have the same,” Ray said, too keyed on the kid to put any thought into food.
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