by Chris Abani
“Don’t you see what’s going on?”
“The shooting? Shouldn’t we call the police?”
“What do they care if dogs are shot?”
For a moment, Ray-Ray was confused. He thought Black was making a racial reference, but something in the way he said it made Ray-Ray realize that he was really talking about dogs.
“People come here to throw away dogs they don’t want or can’t afford to feed. They just drive up and throw their dogs off. The poor creatures die slowly, blood and brains splattered everywhere.”
“Shit,” Ray-Ray said.
“Damn right. Then the gangs come along and use the dog corpses for target practice.”
By now they were on the bridge and heading toward the group.
“Fact that they haven’t shot at us means they only have the one gun,” Black said. The shooting had stopped and Black guessed the girls had run out of ammunition. As he watched them leave in a squeal of tires, he knew he was right. Black parked on the bridge. Before he got out, he reached into the glove compartment and took out a clump of sage, which he shoved into his back pocket. Then he made his way down to the concrete bed of the River, followed with great difficulty by Ray-Ray. There were about ten dogs lying around. Dead or dying. Many of them had their legs and mouths taped, perhaps to ensure a heavy landing, or perhaps to keep their whines from haunting their killers. Black stood in the middle of the circle and began to cry. Then, raising his arms to the moon that was low and full in the sky, he wailed, like a dog. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the sage. Struggling against the wind, he lit it and walking amongst the dead animals, he smudged them in the smoke. Ray-Ray stood outside the rough circle, watching. He needed a hit of something. Shit. He shivered.
Black stopped beside an animal. Bones stuck out of its fur and its legs still jerked. Black whispered into its ear and it looked at him as if it understood, as though it was forgiving him. Then with a quick twist, he dispatched it. He turned to Ray-Ray.
“Hey, ’mano, can you get me my hat and some blankets from the bus? I think I’m going to be here for a while and I don’t want to catch a cold.”
Nodding, Ray-Ray did as he was asked. With his short legs, it took longer than it should have, and when he came back he saw that Black had moved the dead animals into a tight circle and that he had placed the smudge stick on the riverbed in the middle. Wrapping the blankets Ray-Ray gave him around himself, he set his hat on his head, and sank to the floor.
Ray-Ray stood there, unsure what to do.
“Hey, Ray-Ray,” Black said, voice soft.
“Yeah?”
“There’s a joint in the glove compartment of the van. Good shit. Why don’t you have a hit, güey. This will take a while.”
Relieved, Ray-Ray returned to the van. He lit up, sat back and blew smoke out the window at Black, who was sitting among the dead and dying dogs, hands stroking their blood-soaked fur.
Black sang to them, the rhythm carrying their spirits across the other mythical River. The joint was working and Ray-Ray felt himself slipping away. He took one last look at the scene. It was an eerie sight.
Black, a dark huddled mass in shapeless old blankets, an eagle feather rising out of the top of his battered black felt hat, a mound of sage burning beside him, the dogs lying still, silent, like corpses, at least one with its big head in his lap, and in the background, the gentle throb of the city, and Black’s voice rising like something old and long forgotten, breaking through the resistance of night in a formless sound that was all sand.
The chant as familiar as skin.
twenty-four
noctilucent.
That was the word that came to Black as he looked at the still-burning streetlights wearing halos in the early mist. All of the dogs had passed over, and he had done right by each one. Ray-Ray left at some point during the night, but Black hadn’t noticed. He was tired, though, tired of everything, of this weight that was pressing down on him and yet remained invisible, like a succubus. He knew he was a little crazy, even he couldn’t pretend that away anymore, not even to himself. But what afflicted him or why remained a mystery.
He needed to paint. He needed Fatima. That mystery was the only thing that could save him now. That mystery was his only hope. The way her body, a woman’s body, fell into light. The way desire wasn’t about the vagina, but about the lips. About disappearing into the warm, moistness of another.
He stopped on the bridge and looked at the figure rising up the wall in the early light like a vision of a goddess. How to get to her? The base of the wall was in the back of Bomboy’s warehouse and the only way to it was through the warehouse, or from the River. I could always climb down the side of the bridge, Black thought, and make my way along the culvert lip. It would be hard work with paint, but he could do it. Going back to his van, he took a length of rope, wound it across his body in a cross. Then he tied several paint cans to each end. He tied another length of rope around the cross, firmly strapping the paint cans to his body. Selecting the same length of orange rope he had been using to rappel up and down the wall, he climbed over the side of the bridge. As he hovered there, the artist in him marveled at the intricate and ornate ways the concrete had been worked. Worked for love, for art, in pride, and almost nobody saw this anymore, nobody that mattered anyway, and yet even for being invisible, this particular beauty was part of what lit this city. Every silent moment was part of the big noise.
Finally he was down and making his way along the lip of the culvert, watching the ripple and flow of the water. He was careful not to fall in as the recent rains had raised the water level several feet and he knew the currents under its dark surface could reach forty to fifty miles an hour. Making it to the back of Bomboy’s warehouse, he unloaded himself and went to smoke by the River. Legs dangling over the edge, he was halfway through his fifth to last Marlboro, night getting lighter, when he noticed that in the drainpipe opposite, a young man’s head and arms were caught in the locked grill, the rest of his body disappearing into the pipe. He looked like he was half swallowed by a snake. He was clearly dead. A lizard person, Black thought. Stupid teenagers who raced each other supine on skateboards through subterranean flood drains and sewers that were linked to the River. He threw his cigarette away and returned to Fatima.
He began to paint.
Sunflowers.
So many it seemed Fatima would disappear in the forest of green stalks and large yellow faces. Each petal turned up to catch the most sun, each petal like a pane opening onto a brilliant light. The flowers crowded around the figure of the woman. She was still pink and red gristle and in some places, black bone, like the cadavers Bomboy loved. Split open like the heart of a pomegranate.
Then the blackbirds.
Thirteen, to be precise, filled the field of yellow flowers, black dots in the brilliance, auguring. And still Black painted. The only details on the birds were their eyes, which were alive, like coals in a fire smoldering in the back of a cave.
Then.
With broad sweeps of his brush—in this case, a household mop—he covered the brightness with whitewash. Covered it up until there was nothing but Fatima in a sea of white. Still: the flowers shone through. Still: the blackbirds sang. Still.
When he was done, he hung from the ropes, swinging like an effigy of a lynching while he smoked a cigarette and looked out onto the river. This River held the truth, he thought. What it was, though, he would only know when he reached it. And he would.
Yes.
This River was distant, yet never far.
Morning.
As the first clutch of cars began to gather in a jam on the bridge, Black finished the painting. He lowered himself and stepped back, lighting his last Marlboro, thinking, none of it belongs to us, none of it is ours until we finish.
After.
All of it.
After the sun has lit the way.
After the night has passed into a dream.
After our fear is no longer
the thing.
Rising fifty feet, on the side of the abattoir wall, in a head to toe yashmak, was the figure of a Muslim woman. Only her eyes and hands were visible. In one she was strangling a dove. The other was wrapped around something that, though still largely unformed, was meant to be an AK-47. The image was stunning and more than a little disturbing. The sheer scale of it would terrify onlookers, in the way Black knew they imagined an angel must tower over everything. But he wasn’t swayed by that, couldn’t be, for to live there, in the viewer’s fear, was to be like a blind man staring at a sunset, able to see only what was already inside of him. But for him, the true terror was her eyes. Black. Unrelenting.
Behind him, Black heard the whistle of a train, like some omen. He turned to it. There was only the train.
And the riddle of tracks.
twenty-five
Straight.
The line dropping from the sky was the side of a high-rise. It fell, not slowly like a leaf on a lazy wind, but directly, like a determined note of music. It fell straight down until it hit the arc of the overturned bowl of an umbrella, hesitated for the briefest moment, then rolled like the deep belly laugh of a bass down to hover at the tip of one spoke. Trembling there for a while, it made the leap of faith to the street where it was lost in the cracked lines of sidewalk, spreading out into the day like sound pushed around a drum’s skin by a pair of brushes. Iggy turned and walked away, the fleshy jiggle of her ass slowly beginning the downward spiral of her day.
Siren.
Hardly the sweet song of Greek mythology, she thought, ducking behind the near life-size piñata of George Bush leaning against the entrance to the store on Olympic. There was the sound of approaching emergency vehicles and Iggy ducked into the shop. From the safety of George’s wide back, she watched the bedlam pass: two police cars cockroaching through the underbelly of the city.
Black’s derision at their haste came back to her. “Oh, they gotta get to the doughnut shop before it closes,” he would say, and laugh. At her, perhaps, she thought. Black’s derision always seemed able to take on multiple targets.
Emerging from the store, Iggy hesitated for only a minute before buying the George Bush piñata. Once she paid for it, she wasn’t sure why she had bought it. Did it remind her of an oversized doll, a fetish of some sort, an oracular object like the effigy of Kings which the Roma destroyed in ritual to remind themselves to be humble? As she looked down at the piñata in her hands she realized she needed to see Black. Or perhaps it was Fatima she really wanted to see. None of his earlier figurative work had particularly moved her, or intrigued her as much as this idea of Fatima. She wasn’t sure why, but felt like it was tied into her discoveries in the spaceship. At the very least she and Black could have a great time beating George senseless, she thought. Just like politics, she thought, hefting the big paper doll over her shoulder and making her way up Central to Fourth Street and the bridge under which Black, like a self-respecting troll, was sitting, cooking up the magic of his murals and threatening the people passing above with his art. Just like love.
Nobody paid any attention to Iggy as she walked up the street, except a homeless man on the corner of Fifth and Central. The man asked for some money for food, and when Iggy shrugged him off, the man reached for the paper doll. He punched a hole neatly through George’s leg, hoping to pull out a handful of cheap sweets, but came up with air. Iggy cursed under her breath and kept walking.
She paused by the picture window of a mannequin store. Several male figures stood backing the street, hands crossed over naked buttocks. In the corner a female mannequin faced out, wearing leather bondage clothes and holding a leather cat-o’-nine. Next to it was a small shop selling Christian literature and a cart selling mouthwatering hot dogs and burritos. Her face looked back at her from the window. She smiled but her eyes remained dark. Turning away from the window and her eyes, she bought two burritos and continued up the street.
Making a left on Fourth, Iggy headed east. In no time she was by the bridge near Bomboy’s abattoir. She crossed it to the opposite side because she wanted to get a clear view of Black’s mural. Turning around halfway across, she stopped short. Fatima filled the sky. Iggy suppressed a shudder and a sob at the same time. God, she’s beautiful, and how I hate that fucker, she thought at the same time. Why couldn’t she fill someone’s sky this way? For the first time in a very long time she felt alone.
Sighing, Iggy headed back the way she had come, for the abattoir and Black. In a few minutes, having come in the main gate and walking past the warehouse, she could see him sitting on the culvert lip, smoking.
“Hey, Black,” Iggy said, approaching Black and then sitting beside him.
“Hey, Iggy,” Black said. He was surprised. She never came to his work sites. He wondered what was up. “Check out the wall,” he added.
“I saw,” Iggy said.
“I told you. This one is different.”
“Yes, you did,” Iggy said quietly.
“Hey, guys,” Bomboy called.
Black turned. Iggy cursed under her breath.
Bomboy ambled over with a lopsided smile on his face. Iggy couldn’t tell if it was relief at being able to take a break from work or whether he was just high from the blunt he was smoking.
“Not working this morning? And who’s your new friend?” Black asked Iggy, indicating the piñata.
Before she could reply, Bomboy was there.
“Can somebody get a hello?” Bomboy asked, amiably, offering the blunt to Black.
“Hello, somebody,” Iggy said, with a forced smile.
Bomboy sat down next to Iggy and Black. He reached into his pocket and produced an assortment of accoutrement: paper, weed, resin, tobacco and matches. He began to roll a joint expertly with one hand, while the other shielded the wind.
“What’s up?” he asked.
Iggy shrugged. Black silently puffed on the blunt he was given. Bomboy finished packing the paper, rolled it over with one hand, while the other quickly packed his paraphernalia and stash away. He licked the joint once, sealed it, passed it to Iggy and struck a match. The sulfurous flare bit into Iggy as she took a deep drag on the joint and passed it back to Bomboy, who offered it to Black. He shook his head and Bomboy smiled and took a deep drag, letting out the smoke in stages.
They sat in silence for a while as the smoke fogged around them. Iggy didn’t smoke much, but Bomboy and Black were passing the joint back and forth and eventually they both began to giggle. Drug heads, Iggy thought, looking away at the River. She reached into her bag and passed Black one of the burritos she bought from the roach coach on the corner, nearly knocking George over with the vehemence of the move. She hated that phrase, roach coach, but she used it. Black accepted the burrito, tore it in two and passed one half to Bomboy. They ate silently for a while.
“Why a Muslim woman?” Iggy asked. “Is this some clichéd statement about 9/11?”
“You know I don’t do that shit.”
“Then why?”
Black shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Personally,” Bomboy began, interrupting. “Personally, I don’t like that she is a Muslim.”
“Why?” Iggy asked. “Weren’t you going to sell alarm clocks with the call to prayer in Rwanda?”
“You are just obstinate and obfuscating. Don’t you know that was strictly business?”
“So why don’t you like Muslims?” Iggy pressed.
“I don’t think you want to open that door,” Black cautioned.
“No, she asked. Let me answer,” Bomboy said.
“No, Bomboy. I’ve heard enough about Rwanda and your bullshit,” Black insisted. Iggy knew Black thought he was being gallant and protecting her from whatever gory details Bomboy was going to share with her, but she knew it had little to do with her really and everything to do with his ego. In the end, with men, it was always about them.
“I appreciate you trying to spare me, Black, but I think I can handle it.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I had this client, obviously I cannot tell you her name, a middle school teacher in Wisconsin. It was around the time when the worst atrocities were happening in Rwanda and she’d just been fired for her unorthodox approach to teaching current affairs.”
“Unorthodox? Wisconsin?” Black interrupted.
“Why don’t you just listen? Anyway, she told her students about the war and about the killings and got no reaction. Next day she brought in an assortment of dolls and knives for each student.”
“Is this something from Oprah?” Bomboy asked.
“Picking up a doll,” Iggy continued as if he hadn’t spoken, “she hacked its arms off, explaining matter-of-factly that this was happening right now in Rwanda to children like them. The class flinched and some of them looked like they were about to cry. ‘Do it,’ she told them, ‘hack the dolls to pieces.’ ”
“That’s just creepy,” Black said.
Iggy nodded. “I guess. But she was confident that she could tap into their latent goodness and that they would realize the gravitas of the situation.”
“And?” Bomboy asked, leaning forward.
When Iggy spoke again, it was eerie. Something changed in her voice, her tone and her eyes. It was almost as if she was channeling her former client, as though the woman was actually there, speaking through Iggy.
“They paused, knives poised high,” Iggy said. “Then they hacked at various parts of the dolls, timid at first, giggling nervously. Then they grew bolder, hacking and laughing until in a frenzy they butchered all the dolls like mad elves in a deranged Santa’s workshop. The teacher said she was frozen, appalled. She was broken, and if they hadn’t fired her, she would have left anyway.”
Both Bomboy and Black were staring at Iggy openmouthed.
“Did it really happen?” Black asked.
“Yes.”
“What does she do now? This client?”
“She’s a cop,” Iggy said, then laughed at the look of horror on Black’s face.