by Ibi Zoboi
I remember those words. His voice is clear in my head.
So when I am completely split in half, I wail. I scream. I yell out his name over and over and over again. Kasim. Kasim. Kasim.
I try to crawl toward the white sheet. Toward the body.
I’m on my hands and knees, and the cold ground beneath me is as still as death. It doesn’t rumble. It doesn’t crack. But I do.
Someone picks me up from off the ground and whispers, “Get out of here, Fabiola.” It’s the detective. I let myself go in her arms. But she is too weak to carry my load.
“You killed him?” I say with my tiny weak voice. “You shot him?”
“Not me, Fabiola. You have to get out of here. Get her out of here,” the detective says to Chantal.
My body still trembles. It’s as if my soul wants to let go of it, to climb into that space where Kasim is lingering. He wants me there with him, I’m sure.
Chantal’s hold is even weaker. She almost falls with me. I can’t walk on these broken legs. I can’t hold on to my soul with this broken body. Kasim.
Still, we make it back to the car. I fold myself into the backseat next to Pri.
“The police shot Kasim,” Chantal says, quiet, quiet.
When I hear those words, I become undone. So I cry and scream and hold my belly as if I am giving birth to all the misery and pain that has ever walked the earth.
Kasim is the earthquake and he has shattered my heart into a million little pieces.
THIRTY
WE ALL CRY. We are a chorus of silent tears, tiny whimpers, deep guttural wails, and sharp piercing shrieks.
The drive back home is slow, as if we are inching our way through muddy dirt roads. Chantal leans in close to the steering wheel, wiping away tears every few seconds. She has to see straight for us. She has to be strong for us.
I unravel. I am the loudest. I am the shrieking one. It all pours out of me like a billion knives. I can’t stop. I can’t think straight. I only dump sharp, slicing, painful wails out into the car. The windows are closed. None of it escapes into the cold, wild air.
“Shit! Shit, shit, shit, shit!” Pri says over and over again when we drive up to the house.
I quiet down to a whimper. Through the windshield, I spot Dray sitting on the steps to our house. I don’t react. I have no emotion left for him.
“How the fuck did he find out so quick?” Pri says through tears.
“I’ll go talk to him,” Donna says, sniffing back her tears.
“No,” Chantal says, calm. Too calm. “He’s not here to talk, Donna. Kasim must’ve had some of Dray’s other boys with him and they got away. Dray knows exactly what went down. We need a plan.”
“Why the fuck are you talking about a plan?” Pri shouts. “He sees the car. He’s staring right at us!”
“Call Ma, then,” Donna says.
“She hasn’t been picking up all night. I bet Q got something to do with that.”
“Q? What did he do to her?” These are the first words I speak since leaving Grosse Pointe. They almost choke me.
“He won’t hurt her, but he’ll keep her out of the way.”
“Turn back up Joy,” Pri says. “Let’s get the fuck outta here!”
“No,” I say, and open the door to the car.
“Fabiola!” Chantal calls out.
But I’m already in front of the house. The car doors slam behind me as my cousins join me. I step right in front of Dray with my fists clenched, my body aching, and my heart broken.
He’s not wearing his eye patch, and for the first time, I see that there’s a balled-up scar and a narrow sliver of white where an eye is supposed to be—as if someone had dug it out and left only a ghost of an eye.
I start to say something, but he cuts me off.
“’Cause of you, my cuzz is dead. How? Tell me something now! I wanna hear it from your mouth,” he hisses.
“Dray, baby . . . ,” Donna starts to say as she walks up next to me.
Dray puts his hand up to Donna’s face but keeps staring at me. “This has nothing to do with Donna. Nothing to do with Pri or Chant. This is between me and you. Talk. Now!”
“Dray, I . . . you . . .” The words are stuck in my throat.
“She ain’t got nothing to do with this!” Pri shouts. She pushes me out of the way and I bump into Chantal. “Whatever beef you got, you deal with us.”
“Go inside,” Chantal whispers to me, handing me her keys. “Go inside!”
“She ain’t going nowhere, son. Stay the fuck out here,” Dray says. He opens his coat, but I can’t see what he’s showing them from where I’m standing.
“Nah, bro. Deal with me, nigga! I’m right here. I’m right here!” Pri shouts in his face.
Chantal shoves me out of the way and I stumble toward the steps. My cousins have surrounded Dray and are yelling in his face, telling him to leave me alone and deal with them, all of them, instead. As I watch him from behind, he is calm like Baron Samedi.
Baron Samedi. Ezili. Ezili-Danto. Ogu. Les Marassa Jumeaux. Papa Legba.
These are my guides. I need them now. I have to call on them. If there ever was a time that I needed to pray, to pour libation, to ring the bell, to rattle the asson, to sing a song so all my ancestors and my lwas, so God can hear me, it is now!
I rush into the house, up the stairs, and into Chantal’s room. My hands are trembling. My whole body shakes. With only the streetlight from outside pouring through the window, I search for my lighter and tea candle. I’ve added more things to the altar over the past couple of months—candy for Ezili and the Marassa, a Scotch bonnet pepper for Ezili-Danto, a razor blade for Ogu, and since I haven’t been able to find cigars, a cigarette taken from Mantant Jo’s room for Papa Legba. These are all offerings to the spirits, and in return, they will help me.
But a loud banging makes me drop the asson. My heart jumps when I hear loud footsteps coming up the stairs.
Dray.
I don’t even have time to close the door and lock it before he bursts in and pulls me out of the room by my hair, then the hood of my coat, then my arms. I scream. I kick. I fight. I scream louder. My cousins have come up the stairs, too, and they’re pulling my body in the other direction. Crying. Screaming.
“Let her go! Please, let her go!”
“Fuck outta my way!” Dray shouts.
I cry and scream from the very bottom of everything that makes me alive. I pull from life itself and dig for the loudest, most painful cry in the whole world, because my body is being dragged down the stairs and the skin on my back burns from scraping against the carpet. I dig my fingernails into his hands and arms. I dig for flesh and bone and maybe, if there is one, for a soul. Then I grab the banister while my body is stretched out on the stairs. Chantal is above me, pulling my leg, trying to keep me upstairs. My head burns. He’s ripped out my hair, maybe. I don’t let go of the banister. But he pulls my fingers off, bends them back so that they almost break.
And still, I make that sound from the God place. I beg for my life because it must be Death that awaits me at the bottom of the steps, in the living room, in this house.
“Fabiola, Fabiola. Don’t fight, Fabiola. Don’t fight,” someone says through tears. Donna. Her voice is worn now, as if it’s been stretched too thin.
But there is nothing left to do but fight. I keep grabbing the banister and screaming. He pulls my fingers back, then he grabs both my arms. He wins. I am at the bottom of the stairs. Still, I fight. I kick. I scream.
There’s a hard blow that makes me numb. Darkness swallows my face, eats my thoughts. The pain pulses throughout my body and makes me weak, makes me surrender. I hear words and voices and cries as if they are far away, sealed tight in a jar.
“Get the fuck up!”
“She can’t. You kicked her!”
“Fab? Fab? Get up. Please get up.”
Another jolt of pain. In my face. It echoes in my head like church bells.
“Don’t fucking kic
k her in the face! You want her to talk? Don’t fucking kick her in the face!”
A sound—flesh against flesh. A scream.
“What the fuck, Dray! What the fuck! Pri, Pri! Get up.”
“Dray! Stop! Please! Stop!” It’s Donna’s voice, chopped into broken pieces.
“Shut the fuck up! Yo, wake her up. Wake her up or I swear to God I’m gonna light this whole house up!”
“Fabiola? Fabiola? You gotta talk. You gotta explain yourself. If you can hear me, try to get up.”
“Kasim,” I manage to say, because the taste of iron fills my mouth, the same mouth he’s kissed.
“Yeah, yeah, yeah! Yeah, bitch! Kasim. Say his name one more fucking time. Kasim.” Dray’s voice breaks.
It sounds like a giant wall has cracked, and soon it will come tumbling down.
With my head still like the bottom of a beaten conga drum, I stand up. I hold on to Chantal, and when I’m on my feet, my head spins. I spit my iron blood in his face. “Kasim,” I say again.
He doesn’t wipe it away. “Yeah, my fucking brother, son! That was fam, son! My brother. He was all I got. All I got!” His voice is shaking. Dray’s wall is cracking, splitting down the middle.
I can see him now. Close, so close. Something is in his hand, but I don’t dare turn my head to see because I might fall again. I can think of no other words besides his name. “Kasim” is the only breath I can breathe right now.
“You gonna fucking come in my car, and kiss me, talking about how you need money for your mother, bitch?” He paces around me.
Chantal pulls me close to her, but I free myself. I want to be like a tree, a concrete pole—unbreakable.
That thing in his hand is up by my face now.
A gun. That thing in his hand is a gun.
“Dray, baby. Baby, listen to me.” Donna with her broken voice.
“Shut up, Donna! Shut up. You had something to do with this, D? Huh, Donna? The way you left me hanging like that? You had something to do with this?”
“Dray. No, baby, no. I swear. Baby, I would never do that to you.”
Donna is a river. Her cries flow into every corner of the house. Chantal only breathes heavily, as if this space is slowly wrapping its hands around her neck. Pri is a ball of fire—still, steady, waiting. She stands close to me, ready to catch me if I fall.
“Huh? Answer me!” Dray yells, and his spittle reaches my face. “You want your ten percent now, Fabulous? Huh?”
My cousins plead. Their words are prayers to the walls, this house, this corner.
He presses the gun against my pounding head. The tears from my eyes are a waterfall. My bones are rattling, and maybe even the blood that flows from my heart is running toward safety, trying to get out. Get out. But I am as still as a pole.
“Dray. Not here, not now,” Chantal says. “We didn’t know. We didn’t know.”
“Yo, fuck you! Shut the fuck up! I’m talking to this bitch right here. Huh, snitch? You gonna fucking snitch? You don’t even know how this shit works out here in Detroit. You gonna talk to cops, bitch?”
I can feel his whole body shaking from how he holds the gun against my head. His wall is tumbling down.
I remember walls. I remember concrete. Whole cities can seek vengeance, too. And even the very earth we stand on can turn on us. I remember the rumbling sound of falling walls, of angry earth. And maybe the dead rose up out of the ground the day my country split in half, and the zombies, with their guardian, Baron Samedi, leading them, forced their way out of cemeteries in search of their murderers.
I will do the same. By the grace of my lwas, when his walls come tumbling down for good and he kills me tonight, I will do the same.
I am not afraid of dying. Death has always walked close—an earthquake, a hurricane, a disease, a thief and his knife. If Death owns half of my aunt, then I will sell my whole self to it.
My mother will know where to reach me.
So I say, “Do it, Dray. You want to kill me, do it!”
“Fabiola! No! No!”
My cousins try to pull me away, but I am steel, too.
I squeeze my eyes shut.
A click.
A bang.
A burn.
A dark.
A light.
THIRTY-ONE
WHEN THE BIG earthquake happened, I was in a courtyard—our house with its two floors was on one side, and another bigger house with its wide three floors was on the other side. I was putting clothes on the line after coming home from school. Manman had just taught me how to boil water in the big aluminum pot over hot coals to pour into a bucket of dirty clothes, then drop in a bar of indigo soap, and, once the water cooled off, crouch down around the bucket to scrub the clothes between my hands.
My hands were still too small to make the squishing wet sound my mother’s hands made when she washed clothes. Still, I was learning. And I was getting better.
I was humming a song. I don’t remember which one. My knees hurt from squatting so low. I stopped for a moment to stand up and wipe the sweat from my forehead with the back of my wet hand, and maybe, I thought, I was dizzy, because everything around me moved. And then there was a rolling sound. I swayed and dipped, and in an instant, the walls around me started coming down. The columns that held the second floor of our house split in half, and the roof surrendered. A long crack eased up on the side of the other house. And soon, the concrete, the stones, the marble tiles, the dancing rebar, all fell down around me.
And it rained dust and screams and prayers.
I was in the middle of it all, standing on my two skinny, ashy legs, with my wet hands. Alive. Unbroken, after all.
My eyes are still shut.
But I am still standing.
Slowly, I open my eyes.
I am not dead.
Dray is.
His body is slumped over the banister, and he slides off, slowly, slowly. Bright red oozes from a hole on the side of his face, near his broken eye.
And I am shaking. I am the earthquake. I can’t stop shaking.
My cousins are frozen in place, but their eyes look past me, behind me.
Slowly, I turn.
And there, in the open doorway, is my Papa Legba. Still with his black tuxedo—torn and old now—his cigar, and his cane. Or a gun. Or a cane. No, a gun. A cane.
I stare. I want to move closer. To touch him. To ask him questions. But I just stare.
And then he sings his song.
Crossroads, cross paths,
Double-cross and cross-examine,
Cross a bridge across my mind.
A cross to bear across the line,
And cross the street across town.
Cross out, cross off,
cross your t’s and cross your fingers,
then nail him to a cross as you cross
your heart and hope not to die.
As he sings this, the streetlight begins to shine through him as if he is made of nothing. Slowly, the top hat, the tuxedo, the cane, and the man begin to disappear right before our eyes. He becomes the smoke in his cigar—thick cloudy air blending with the light and cold air.
He’s gone again. And I force my aching body to run after him. I hold my head as it pounds and spins. I reach the corner of American and Joy. He’s not there. Nothing is here. I want to call out his name. I want to say thank you. But instead, “Kasim” eases out. I turn to the house to see Dray’s white car parked in front. I don’t want to go back into that house with its dead man and his gun and my blood that is not my blood and their madichon.
Chantal runs out to get me and pull me back into the house.
Then Pri comes to stand next to us, next to where Donna is lying over the dead body crying and crying.
And I think, I never got to do that with Kasim, just as Pri says, “We never got to do that with our father.”
We all stand there and inhale, exhale together. In one breath.
“Go upstairs. Get a sheet,” Chantal says.
I have to step over Donna to get upstairs.
DRAYTON’S STORY
Ain’t no way for you to know what it feels like to leave your body when you die. It’s not like in the movies, where you just float up into the air. Ain’t no floating, white clouds, bright lights, angels singing . . . none of that shit.
It hurts. A bullet to the head . . . it goes straight through and turns into some kind of blow horn for your memories. It wakes up shit you ain’t never thought you would remember. And you realize that this shit ain’t new—you’ve been dead before.
I remember running toward sky, some open space, some room to breathe. Freedom. And I wasn’t supposed to. So a bullet pulled me back to reality. At that point, death was more real than anything because I remember not owning my own body, my own breath, my own thoughts. In death, you own it. You take back your shit—your body, your thoughts, your past—and you own it.
Even when I’m born again in Detroit, and I’m supposed to be free like the fucking wind, there’s still some shit trying to own my life—money and the bullshit jobs my moms had to work, these shitty streets, and this whole fucked-up system. When you remember all the ways you been killed, and how that shit hurt your fucking soul, ain’t no way in hell you could shake that off. So I didn’t give a fuck about nothing. Niggas out here threatening to take my life, I just laugh and promise to come back when I’m gone. That’s why when Q put a gun in my little ten-year-old hands and told me to aim it at that guy with the Detroit Tigers cap, it wasn’t even a thing.
It’s war out here, son. If my pops and his pops before him been fighting all their lives to just fucking breathe, then what’s there for a little nigga to contemplate when somebody puts a gun in his hands?
But my aim was off. My little hands were cold, sitting in the passenger seat of that car. Q was right there next to me telling me to calm the fuck down and aim straight for the Detroit Tigers cap. He was teaching me more about these streets than my pops ever did. But it was all wrong from the start. He got into my head. It messed with my aim.
The blowback made me drop the gun and I missed the guy in the Detroit Tigers cap. It hit a guy named Haitian Phil in the back of his head.