How Long 'Til Black Future Month?

by N. K. Jemisin

  She happens to glance down. A four-leaf clover is growing there, at her fingertips.

  Eventually she resumes the journey home. At the corner of her block, she sees a black cat lying atop a garbage can. Its head has been crushed, and someone has attempted to burn it. She hopes it was dead first, and hurries on.

  Adele has a garden on the fire escape. In one pot, eggplant and herbs; she has planted the clover in this. In another pot are peppers and flowers. In the big one, tomatoes and a scraggly collard that she’s going to kill if she keeps harvesting leaves so quickly. (But she likes greens.) It’s luck—good luck—that she’d chosen to grow a garden this year, because since things changed, it’s been harder for wholesalers to bring food into the city, and prices have shot up. The farmers’ market that she attends on Saturdays has become a barterers’ market, too, so she plucks a couple of slim, deep purple eggplants and a handful of angry little peppers. She wants fresh fruit. Berries, maybe.

  On her way out, she knocks on the neighbor’s door. He looks surprised as he opens it, but pleased to see her. It occurs to her that maybe he’s been hoping for a little luck of his own. She gives it a think-over, and hands him an eggplant. He looks at it in consternation. (He’s not the kind of guy to eat eggplant.)

  “I’ll come by later and show you how to cook it,” she says. He grins.

  At the farmers’ market she trades the angry little peppers for sassy little raspberries, and the eggplant for two stalks of late rhubarb. She also wants information, so she hangs out awhile gossipping with whoever sits nearby. Everyone talks more than they used to. It’s nice.

  And everyone, everyone she speaks to, is planning to attend the prayer.

  “I’m on dialysis,” says an old lady who sits under a flowering tree. “Every time they hook me up to that thing, I’m scared. Dialysis can kill you, you know.”

  It always could, Adele doesn’t say.

  “I work on Wall Street,” says another woman, who speaks briskly and clutches a bag of fresh fish as if it’s gold. Might as well be; fish is expensive now. A tiny Egyptian scarab pendant dangles from a necklace the woman wears. “Quantitative analysis. All the models are fucked now. We were the only ones they didn’t fire when the housing market went south, and now this.” So she’s going to pray, too. “Even though I’m kind of an atheist. Whatever, if it works, right?”

  Adele finds others, all tired of performing their own daily rituals, all worried about their likelihood of being outliered to death.

  She goes back to her apartment building, picks some sweet basil, and takes it and the eggplant next door. Her neighbor seems a little nervous. His apartment is cleaner than she’s ever seen it, with the scent of Pine-Sol still strong in the bathroom. She tries not to laugh, and demonstrates how to peel and slice eggplant, salt it to draw out the toxins (“it’s related to nightshade, you know”), and sauté it with basil in olive oil. He tries to look impressed, but she can tell he’s not the kind of guy to enjoy eating his vegetables.

  Afterward they sit, and she tells him about the prayer thing. He shrugs. “Are you going?” she presses.

  “Nope.”

  “Why not? It could fix things.”

  “Maybe. Maybe I like the way things are now.”

  This stuns her. “Man, the train fell off its track last week.” Twenty people dead. She has woken up in a cold sweat on the nights since, screams ringing in her ears.

  “Could’ve happened anytime,” he says, and she blinks in surprise because it’s true. The official investigation says someone—track worker, maybe—left a wrench sitting on the track near a power coupling. The chance that the wrench would hit the coupling, causing a short and explosion, was one in a million. But never zero.

  “But … but …” She wants to point out the other horrible things that have occurred. Gas leaks. Floods. A building fell down in Harlem. A fatal duck attack. Several of the apartments in their building are empty because a lot of people can’t cope. Her neighbor—the other one, with the broken arm—is moving out at the end of the month. Seattle. Better bike paths.

  “Shit happens,” he says. “It happened then, it happens now. A little more shit, a little less shit …” He shrugs. “Still shit, right?”

  She considers this. She considers it for a long time.

  They play cards, and have a little wine, and Adele teases him about the overdone chicken. She likes that he’s trying so hard. She likes even more that she’s not thinking about how lonely she’s been.

  So they retire to his bedroom and there’s awkwardness and she’s shy because it’s been a while and you do lose some skills without practice, and he’s clumsy because he’s probably been developing bad habits from porn, but eventually they manage. They use a condom. She crosses her fingers while he puts it on. There’s a rabbit’s foot keychain attached to the bed railing, which he strokes before returning his attention to her. He swears he’s clean, and she’s on the pill, but … well. Shit happens.

  She closes her eyes and lets herself forget for a while.

  The prayer thing is all over the news. The following week is the runup. Talking heads on the morning shows speculate that it should have some effect, if enough people go and exert “positive energy.” They are careful not to use the language of any particular faith; this is still New York. Alternative events are being planned all over the city for those who don’t want to come under the evangelical tent. The sukkah mobiles are rolling, though it’s the wrong time of year, just getting the word out about something happening at one of the synagogues. In Flatbush, Adele can’t walk a block without being hit up by Jehovah’s Witnesses. There’s a “constructive visualization” somewhere for the ethical humanists. Not everybody believes God, or gods, will save them. It’s just that this is the way the world works now, and everybody gets that. If crossed fingers can temporarily alter a dice throw, then why not something bigger? There’s nothing inherently special about crossed fingers. It’s only a “lucky” gesture because people believe in it. Get them to believe in something else, and that should work, too.

  Except …

  Adele walks past the Botanical Gardens, where preparations are under way for a big Shinto ritual. She stops to watch workers putting up a graceful red gate.

  She’s still afraid of the subway. She knows better than to get her hopes up about her neighbor, but still … he’s kind of nice. She still plans her mornings around her ritual ablutions, and her walks to work around danger spots—but how is that different, really, from what she did before? Back then it was makeup and hair, and fear of muggers. Now she walks more than she used to; she’s lost ten pounds. Now she knows her neighbors’ names.

  Looking around, she notices other people standing nearby, also watching the gate go up. They glance at her, some nodding, some smiling, some ignoring her and looking away. She doesn’t have to ask if they will be attending one of the services; she can see that they won’t be. Some people react to fear by seeking security, change, control. The rest accept the change and just go on about their lives.

  “Miss?” She glances back, startled, to find a young man there, holding forth a familiar flyer. He’s not as pushy as the guy downtown; once she takes it, he moves on. The PRAYER FOR THE SOUL OF THE CITY is tomorrow. Shuttle busses (“Specially blessed!”) will be picking up people at sites throughout the city.

  WE NEED YOU TO BELIEVE, reads the bottom of the flyer.

  Adele smiles. She folds the flyer carefully, her fingers remembering the skills of childhood, and presently it is perfect. They’ve printed the flyer on good, heavy paper.

  She takes out her Saint Christopher, kisses it, and tucks it into the rear folds to weight the thing properly.

  Then she launches the paper airplane, and it flies and flies and flies, dwindling as it travels an impossible distance, until it finally disappears into the bright blue sky.

  Sinners, Saints, Dragons, and Haints, in the City Beneath the Still Waters

  The days which bracketed hurricanes were p
ainful in their clarity. Sharp-edged clouds, blue sky hard as a cop’s eyes, air so clear that every sound ground at the ear. If a person held still enough, he would feel the slow, unreal descent as all the air for miles around scrape-slip-slid downhill into the whirlpool maw of the approaching storm. If the streets were silent enough, he would hear his own heartbeat, and the crunch of rocks beneath his feet, and the utter stillness of the earth as it held its breath for the dunking to come.

  Tookie listened for a while longer, then hefted the plastic bag a little higher on his shoulder and resumed walking home. A ways behind him, a hulking shadow stayed put.

  Tookie sat on the porch of his shotgun house, watching the rain fall sideways. A lizard strolled by on the worn dirt strip that passed for a sidewalk, easy as you please, as if there wasn’t an inch of water already collected around its paws. It noticed him and stopped.

  “Hey,” it said, inclining its head to him in a neighborly fashion.

  “’Sup,” Tookie replied, jerking his chin up in return.

  “You gon’ stay put?” it asked. “Storm comin’.”

  “Yeah,” said Tookie. “I got food from the grocery.”

  “Ain’ gon’ need no food if you drown, man.”

  Tookie shrugged.

  The lizard sat down on the sidewalk, oblivious to the driving wind, and joined Tookie in watching the rain fall. Tookie idly reflected that the lizard might be an alligator, in which case he should maybe go get his gun. He decided against it, though, because the creature had wide batlike wings and he was fairly certain gators didn’t have those. These wings were the color of rusty, jaundiced clouds, like those he’d seen approaching from the southeast just before the rain began.

  “Levee gon’ break,” said the lizard after a while. “You shoulda got out, man.”

  “No car, man.” It occurred to Tookie only after this that “man” was inappropriate.

  The lizard snorted. “Big strong buck like you oughtta get off your ass, buy a hooptie.”

  “The fuck I need a car for? The bus and streetcar go everywhere I want to go.”

  “Except out of the city, with a hurricane on your ass.”

  Tookie shrugged again. “My mama had a car. She and my sister and her kids was all that could fit.” He had sent them along with the last of his cash, though he had not told them this. “We called the rental folks, too, but they was out of cars. They want a credit card anyway. Don’t nobody give you a card without a job, unless you a college student, and I ain’ even got a GED.”

  “Why not?” asked the lizard. “You don’ look stupid.”

  “Teachers thought I did.” Stupid and good for nothing, waste of time to educate, waste of space on this earth. Maybe, Tookie thought, the hurricane would take care of that. “I got tired of hearin’ that shit after a while.”

  The lizard considered this. Then it came over to the steps of Tookie’s house and climbed up on the first step, its tail—as long as its body—dangling into the water.

  “How you get a house, then, with no job?”

  Tookie couldn’t help smiling. “You the nosiest damn lizard I ever saw.”

  The creature grinned at him, flashing tiny needlelike teeth. “Ain’ I? They don’ let me out much.”

  “So I see.” Perhaps Tookie was feeling lonely; he decided to answer. “I sell a little weed,” he said. “Get some Adam from over the bridge, sell it to the white kids over by Tulane. Don’t take much to make the rent.”

  “Adam?”

  “Ex. MDMA. Little pills, make you happy.”

  “Oh.” The lizard settled itself more comfortably on the doorstep, then abruptly raised itself again. “Hey, you ain’t got no pit bulls, do you? I been smellin’ somethin’ big and mean now and again. I hate dogs.”

  Tookie chuckled. “Nah. I’m just a foot soldier, man.”

  The lizard relaxed. “Me, too.”

  “You ain’t a foot soldier, you a fuckin’ lizard.”

  “Shut the fuck up, man.” The lizard followed this amused statement with a yawn. “Mind if I crash here for a minute? I’m tired as hell.”

  “Come up on the porch,” Tookie said. The polite thing would’ve been to invite the creature inside, but he’d never been one for letting animals in the house. “I got some Vienna sausages.”

  “I ain’ hungry, and the step is fine, thank you.” The lizard rolled onto its side like a cat sunning itself, except it wasn’t a cat and the pelting rain wasn’t sun.

  “Suit yourself.” Tookie got to his feet, mopping warm rain from his own face; the porch overhang wasn’t stopping it at all now. The wind had gotten bad enough that the stop sign on the corner was bent at a sharp angle, its four letters so blurred with driving water that they seemed ready to wash off. Across the street, three shingles blew off Miss Mary’s roof in rapid succession, the sound of destruction muted by the rising freight train wind.

  The lizard turned to follow Tookie’s gaze. “She shoulda got out, too.”

  “Yeah,” Tookie said. He sighed. “She should’ve.”

  He went inside, and the lizard went to sleep on his porch steps.

  The next day, watching through the attic door as his secondhand furniture floated, Tookie wondered about the lizard. His food bags were secure between two half-rotted wooden slats—his gun was in one of them—and the water didn’t look too bad, so carefully he lowered himself through the attic door into the drink.

  On the porch, he paused for a moment to marvel at the sight of Dourgenois Street transformed into a river. Driven by the still-powerful wind, the water was up to his waist; down on the street it would probably be chest-deep. Only the topmost edge of the bent-over stop sign was visible. All the houses had been strangely truncated, like mushrooms only half-emerged from rippling gray soil.

  “Hey,” said a voice, and Tookie looked up to see the lizard clinging to his porch ceiling, upside down. It yawned, blinking sleepily. “I tol’ you the levee’d go.”

  “I guess you did,” Tookie said, a note of grudging wonder entering his voice. Most of the other denizens of his street had gone to the convention center if they couldn’t get out of town. There was only him and Miss Mary—

  And Miss Mary’s door was stove in, a little rapids frothing on her porch as water flowed in.

  “Damn shame,” said the lizard.

  Tookie stepped off the porch. For an instant his feet floated, and a fleeting panic set in. The voice of a long-dead uncle barked in his head: Niggas don’t float, fool, sank like stones inna water, waste of money teachin’ you how to swim. But then his feet touched solid ground and he found that when he stood, the current wasn’t as swift or strong as it appeared. Simple enough to walk perpendicular to it. So he did, navigating around a neighbor’s derelict car (now submerged) and pausing as a shapeless spiderwebbed lump (basketball net?) floated past.

  The top of Miss Mary’s hollow door had broken in, but the bottom was still in place and locked. Tookie pulled himself over it and looked around the old lady’s living room. “Miss Mary?” he called. “It’s Tookie from ’cross the street. Where you at?”

  “In here ’bout to drown, goddamn, what you think?” returned the old woman’s voice, and he followed it into her kitchen, where she sat on a chair that was probably resting atop her dining table. He couldn’t tell for sure because the table was under water. He pushed his way through floating jars of spices and wooden spoons.

  “Come on here, Miss Mary,” he said. “Ain’ no point in you stayin’.”

  “It’s my house,” she said. “It’s all I got.” She had said the same thing a few days before when he’d invited her to pass the storm with him, in his house, which was higher off the ground and newer, or at least not as old.

  “I ain’ gon’ let you stay up in here.” In a flash of inspiration, he added, “Lord don’t mean for nobody to just sit and wait to die.”

  Miss Mary, eighty-four years old and about as many pounds, threw him a glare from her waterlogged throne. “Lord don’t like bu
llshit neither.”

  He grinned. “No, I guess He don’t. So come on, then, ’fore I drown in your kitchen and stank up the place.”

  So she gingerly eased herself off the chair and Tookie helped her into the water. He had her wrap her skinny arms around his neck. Then with her on his back, he waded out of her house and back across the street to his own personal bayou. There, with much huffing and cursing, he managed to hoist her up into the attic without breaking any of her old bones.

  Once that was done, he headed out onto the porch again to see to the lizard. But it was gone.

  After a sigh, Tookie went back inside and climbed to the attic himself.

  Outside, unseen, something large and dark moved under the water. It did not surface—though for an instant it came near to doing so, and the water rose in a swell half-obscured by surging wavelets from the broken levee two blocks away. But then it moved away from Tookie’s steps, and the water flowed free again.

  The water kept rising even after the wind fell, all through the skin-stingingly beautiful day that arrived in the storm’s wake. Helicopters began thwapping past, lots of them, but none of them ever slowed over or landed in the Ninth Ward, so Tookie paid them no attention. He made sure Miss Mary ate some Vienna sausages and drank half a Sunny Delight, then he went out again in search of something that would float.

  A few feet beyond his door he encountered a family of nutrias, the giant-rat denizens of the city’s boggiest places. The first three nutrias, two dog-sized adults and a smaller one, dogpaddled past with a quick by-your-leave glance in Tookie’s direction. The fourth came along some ways later, swimming slowly, its eyes dull, mouth open and panting. As its right foreleg came near the surface, Tookie saw that it had a bad break, white bone flashing under the brown water. Flies already crawled around its sleek wet back.

  Tookie reached out and caught the creature, lifting it and giving its neck a quick wring. It went limp in his hands without a squeak. As Tookie tossed the small body up onto a nearby rooftop—the water was already foul, but he couldn’t abide adding to the mess—he noticed that the two adult nutrias had stopped. They did not look angry, though they watched him for a long moment. Then they resumed their trek, and Tookie did, too.