by Junot Díaz
Shared cell-phone blues once with a girlfriend I had high hopes for once who told me about a lover once, her Michelangelo, gorgeous, she said, a rod on him hard as God’s wrath, is how she put it, a pimp who couldn’t understand why she got so upset when he conducted business by cell phone while lying naked next to naked her, a goddamn parade of women coming and going in my bedroom and Michelangelo chattering away as if I don’t exist, him without a clue he was driving me crazy jealous, she said, her with no clue how crazy jealous it was driving me—the lethal combination of my unhealthy curiosity and her innocent willingness to regale me with details of her former intimacies, her chattering away on her end and me listening on mine connected and unconnected.
Not expecting a call up here. If I could explain white space, perhaps I could convince everyone down there to take a turn up here. Not that it’s comfortable here, no reasonable person would wish to be in my shoes, I’m not even wearing shoes, tossed overboard with socks, sweatshirt, jeans, jacket, beret, stripped down to skivvies, and intermittent sunshine the forecast promised not doing the trick. Each time a cloud slides between me and the sun, wind chills my bare skin, my bones shiver. On the other hand, the very last thing any human being should desire is comfort. World’s too dangerous. Comfort never signifies less peril, less deceit, it only means your guard’s down, your vigilance faltering.
On the bridge one day dark, thick clouds rolling in fast, sky almost black at two in the afternoon, I caught a glimpse of a man reflected in a silvery band of light that popped up solid as a mirror for an instant parallel to the walkway’s fence, a momentary but crystal-clear image of a beat-up, hunched-over colored guy in a beret, baggy gray sweats, big ugly sneakers scurrying across the Williamsburg Bridge, an old gray person beside me nobody loves and he loves nobody, might as well be dead, who would know or care if he was dead or wasn’t, and this man scurrying stupid as an ant in a box, back and forth, back and forth between walls it can’t scale is me, a lonely, aging person trapped in a gray city, a vicious country, scurrying back and forth as if scurrying might change his fate, and I think, What a pitiful creature, what a miserable existence, it doesn’t get any worse than this shit, and then it does get worse, icy pellets of rain start pelting me, but between stinging drops a bright idea—universe bigger than NYC, bigger than America, get out of here, get away, take a trip, visit Paris again, and even before the part about where the fuck’s the money coming from, I’m remembering I detest tourism, tourists worse than thieves in my opinion, evil and dangerous because tourists steal entire lands and cultures, strip them little by little, stick in their pockets everything they can cart back home and exchange for other commodities until other lands and cultures emptied and vanished, tourists like false-hearted lovers worse than thieves in the old song, you know how it goes, a thief will just rob you and take what you have, but a false-hearted lover will lead you to the grave.
Once upon a long time ago I had hopes love might help. Shared rapture once with a false-hearted lover. I’ll start with your toes, she whispered, start with your cute crooked toes, she says, your funny crooked toes with undersides same color as mine, skin on top a darker color than mine, and when I’m finished with your toes, she promises, my false-hearted lover promises, I’ll do the rest. Hours and hours later she’s still doing toes, she’s in no hurry and neither am I. Enraptured. Toes tingle, aglow. How many toes do I own? However many, I wished for more and one toe also more than enough, toe she’s working on makes me forget its ancestors, siblings, posterity, forget everything. Bliss will never end. I read War and Peace, Dhalgren, Don Quixote, and think I’ll start Proust next after I finish Cane or has it been Sonny Rollins’s mellow sax, not written words, accompanying work she’s busy doing down there. Whole body into it, every tentacle, orifice, treacly inner wetness, hers, mine. Time seemed to stop, as during a yawn, blink, death, rapture, as in those apparently permanent silences between two consecutive musical notes Sonny Rollins or Thelonious Monk blew, or between heartbeats, hers, mine, ours. A hiccuping pause, hitch, an extenuating circumstance.
It’s afterward and also seamlessly before she starts on my toes and she’s still in no hurry. No hurry in her voice the day that very same false-hearted lover tells me she’s falling . . . slipped out of love.
Shame on me but I couldn’t help myself, shouted her words back in her face. Who wouldn’t need to scream, to grab her, shake her, search for a reflection in the abyss of her eyes, in the dark mirror of white space. I plunged, kicked, flailed, swallowed water, wind, freezing rain.
Sad but true, some people born unlucky in love, and if you’re jinxed that way it seems never to get any better. No greeting this morning from my neighbor ghost, not even a goodbye wave. Can’t say what difference it might have made if she had appeared, I simply register my regret and state the fact she was a no-show again this morning in the naked space above her window’s bottom ledge.
We speak politely in the elevator, nod or smile or wave on streets surrounding the vast apartment complex or when we cross paths in the drab lobby of section C of the building we share. Not very long after I moved into my fifteenth-floor one-bedroom, kitchenette and bath, the twin towers still lurked at the island’s tip, biggest bullies on the block after blocks of skyscrapers, high-rises, the spectacle still novel to my eyes, so much city out the window, its size and sprawl and chaos would snag my gaze, stop me in my tracks, especially the endless sea of glittering lights at night, and for the millisecond or so it took to disentangle a stare, my body would expand, fly apart, each particle seeking out its twin among infinite particles of city, and during one such pause, from the corner of one eye as I returned to the building, the room, I glimpsed what might have been the blur of a white nightgown or blur of a pale, naked torso fill the entire bright window just beyond my kitchenette window, a woman’s shape I was sure, so large, vital, near, my neighbor must have been pressing her skin against the cool glass, a phantom disappearing faster than I could focus, then gone when a venetian blind’s abrupt descent cut off my view, all but a thirty-inch-wide band of emptiness in my neighbor’s window, increasingly familiar and intimate as the years passed.
What if she had known that today her last chance. A showing as in Pentecost. No different this morning, though it’s my last. Her final chance too. Sad she didn’t know. Too bad I won’t be around tomorrow to tell her so we can be unhappy about it together, laugh about it together. Her name, if I knew it, on the note I won’t write and leave behind for posterity.
Posterity. Pentecost. With a phone I could review both etymologies. Considered bringing a phone. Not really. Phone would tempt me to linger, call someone. One last call. To whom? No phone. Nowhere to put it if I had one. Maybe tucked in the waistband of my shorts. Little tuck of belly already stretching the elastic. Vanity versus necessity. So what if I bulge. But how to manage a call if I had a phone and someone to call. Freeing my hands would mean letting go of the thick railing, an unadvisable maneuver. Accidental fall funny. Not my intent. Would spoil my show. A flawless Pentecost this morning, please.
“Posterity,” “Pentecost”: old-fashioned words hoisting themselves up on crutches, rattling, sighing their way through alleys and corridors of steel girders’ struts, trusses, concrete piers. Noisy chaos of words graffitied on the pedestrian walkway: DHEADT REFUSE, EAT ME, JEW YORK, POOP DICK DAT BITCH, HONDURAS. Ominous silence of highway free of traffic as it never is except rarely after hours, and even during the deepest predawn quiet a lone car will blast across or weave drunkenly from lane to lane as if wincing from blows of wind howling, sweeping over the Williamsburg Bridge.
“Why” the most outmoded, most vexing word. Staggering across the Williamsburg Bridge one morning, buffeted by winds from every direction, headwind stiff enough to support my weight, leaning into it at a forty-five-degree angle, blinded by the tempest, flailing, fearing the undertow, the comic-strip head-over-heels liftoff, and I asked myself, Why the fuck are you up here, jackass, walking the bridge in this god-forsake
n weather, and that question—why—drumming in my eardrums, the only evidence of my sanity I was able to produce.
Why not let go. Fly away from this place where I teeter and totter, shiver, hold on to a cold iron rail, thighs pressed together, fingers numb from gripping, toes frozen stiff, no air in my lungs.
Always someone’s turn at the edge. Are you grateful it’s me not you today? Perhaps I’m your proxy. During the Civil War a man drafted into the Union Army could pay another man to enlist in his place. This quite legal practice of hiring a proxy to avoid a dangerous obligation of citizenship enraged those who could not afford the luxury, and to protest draft laws that in effect exempted the rich while the poor were compelled to serve as cannon fodder in Mr. Lincoln’s bloody unpopular war, mobs rioted in several northern cities, most famously here in New York, where murderous violence lasted several days, ending only after federal troops were dispatched to halt the killing, beating, looting, burning.
Poor people of color by far the majority of the so-called draft riot’s victims. A not unnatural consequence given the fact mobs could not get their hands on wealthy men who had hired proxies and stayed behind the locked doors of their substantial estates in substantial neighborhoods protected by armed guards during the civil unrest. Colored people on the other hand easy targets. Most resided in hovels alongside hovels of poor whites, thus readily accessible, more or less simple to identify, and none of them possessed rights a white man was required by law or custom to respect. Toll of colored lives heavy. I googled it.
So much killing, dying, and after all, a proxy’s death can’t save a person’s life. Wall Street brokers who purchased exemption from death in the killing fields of Virginia didn’t buy immortality. Whether Christ died for our sins or not, each of us obligated to die. On the other hand, the moment you learn your proxy killed in action at Gettysburg, wouldn’t it feel a little like stealing a taste of immortality? Illicit rapture. If suicide a crime, shouldn’t martyrdom be illegal too? Felony or misdemeanor? How many years for attempted martyrdom?
When you reach the edge you must decide to go further or not, to be free or not. If you hesitate you get stuck like the unnamed fair-skinned young colored man in Reisner’s photos. Better to let go quickly and maybe you will rise higher and higher because that’s what happens sometimes when you let go—rapture. Why do fathers build wings if they don’t want sons to fly; why do mothers bear sons if they don’t want sons to die.
When I let go and topple backward, will I cause a splash, leave a mark? After the hole closes, how will the cops locate me? I regret not having answers. The plunge backward off my perch perhaps the last indispensable piece of research. As Zora Neale Hurston said, You got to go there to know there.
But no. Not yet. I’m in no hurry this morning. Not afraid either. I may be clutching white-knuckled onto the very edge of a very high bridge, but I don’t fear death, don’t feel close to death. I felt more fear of death, much closer to death, on numerous occasions. Closest one summer evening under streetlights in the park in the ghetto where I used to hoop. Raggedy outdoor court, a run available every evening except on summer weekends when the high-fliers owned it. A daily pickup game for older gypsies like me wandering in from various sections of the city, for youngblood wannabes from the neighborhood, local has-beens and never-wases, a run perfect for my mediocre, diminishing skills, high-octane fantasies, and aging body that enjoyed pretending to be in superb condition, at least for the first five or six humps up and down the cyclone-fenced court, getting off with the other players as if it’s the NBA Finals. Ferocious play war, harmless fun unless you get too enthusiastic, one too many flashbacks to glory days that never existed, and put a move on somebody that puts you out of action a couple weeks, couple months, for good if you aren’t careful. Anyway, one evening a hopped-up gangster and his crew cruise up to the court in a black, glistening Lincoln SUV. Bogart winners and our five well on the way to delivering the righteous ass-kicking the chumps deserved for stealing a game from decent folks waiting in line for a turn. Mr. Bigtime, big mouth, big butt, dribbles the ball off his foot, out of bounds, and calls a foul. Boots the pill to the fence. Waddling after it, he catches up and plants a foot atop it. Tired of this punk-ass, jive-ass run, he announces. Motherfucker over, motherfuckers. Then he unzips the kangaroo pouch of his blimpy sweat top he probably never sheds no matter how hot on the court because it hides a tub of jelly-belly beneath it, and from the satiny pullover extracts a very large pistol, steps back, nudges the ball forward with his toe, and—Pow—kills the poor thing as it tries to roll away. Pow—Pow—Pow—starts to shooting up the court. Everybody running, ducking to get out of the way. G’wan home, niggers. Ain’t no more gotdamn game today. Pow. King of the court, ruler of the hood. Busy as he is during his rampage, brother finds time to wave his rod in my direction. What you looking at, you yellow-ass albino motherfucker. Gun steady an instant, pointed directly between my eyes long enough I’m certain he’s going to blow me away and I just about wet myself. Truth be told, with that cannon in my mug maybe I did leak a little. In the poor light of the playground who could tell. Who cares, is what I was thinking if I was thinking anything at that moment besides dead. Who knows. Who cares. Certainly not me, not posterity, not the worker ants wearing rubber aprons and rubber gloves who’ll dump my body on a slab at the morgue, drag off my sneakers, snip off my hoop shorts and undershorts with huge shears before they hose me down. Sweat or piss or shit or blood in my drawers. Who knows. Who cares.
A near-death experience I survived to write a story about, a story my mother reads and writes a note about on one of the pamphlets she saved in neat stacks on top of and under the night table beside her bed, each one containing Bible verses and commentary to put her to sleep.
I saw the note only after Mom died. A message evidently intended for my benefit, but she never got around to showing it to me. She had underlined words from Habakkuk, the pamphlet deemed appropriate for the first Sunday after Pentecost—“Destruction and violence are before me; strife and contention arise—law becomes slack and justice never prevails . . . their own might is their God”—and in the pamphlet’s margin she had printed a response to my story never shared with me.
Of course I had proudly presented a copy of the anthology containing my story to my mother, one of two complimentary copies, by the way all I ever received from the publisher as payment. Mom thanked me profusely, close to tears, I believe I recall, the day I placed the book in her hands, but afterward she never once mentioned my story. I found her note by chance years later when I was sorting through boxes full of her stuff, most of it long overdue to be tossed. Pamphlet in my hand and suddenly Mom appears. Immediately after reading her note, I rushed off to read all of Habakkuk in the beat-up, rubber band–bound Bible she had passed on to me, the Bible once belonging to my father’s family, only thing of his she kept when he walked out of our lives, she said, and said he probably forgot it, left it behind in his rush to leave. I searched old journals of mine for entries recorded around the date of the pamphlet, date of my story’s publication. After this flurry of activity, I just about wept. My mother a busy scribbler herself, I had discovered, but a no-show as far as ever talking about her writing or mine. Then a message after she’s gone, ghost-message Mom doesn’t show me till she’s a ghost too: This reminds me of your story about playing ball.
Why hadn’t she spoken to me? Did she understand, after all, my great fear and loneliness? How close I’ve always felt to death? Death up in my face on the playground in the park. Probably as near to death that moment as any living person gets. Closest I’ve ever felt to dying, that’s for damn sure. So absolutely close and not even close at all, it turns out, ’cause here I sit.
Yo. You all down below. Don’t waste your breath feeling sorry for me. Your behinds may hit the water before mine.
At the last minute, for comfort’s sake, for the poetry of departing this world as naked as I arrived, maybe I will remove these boxers. Why worry about othe
r people’s reactions. Trying to please other people a waste of time at my age. I understand good and well my only captive audience is me. Any person paying too much attention to an incidental detail like shorts is dealing with her or his own problems, aren’t they, and their problems by definition not mine. I have no words to soothe their pain.
Can’t seem to get underwear off my brain this morning. Not mine, we’re finished with mine, I hope, though a woman’s underwear that day in Paris, my undershorts today on the Williamsburg Bridge surprisingly similar, made of the same no-frills white cotton as little girls’ drawers used to be. I’m seeing a lady’s underwear and recalling another unlucky-in-love story. Last one I’ll tell, I promise. A civil war precipitated by underwear. Not a murderous war like ours between the states. A small, bittersweet conflict. Tug-of-war when I pull down a lady’s underwear and she resists.
I was young, testing unclear rules. I wished/wish to think of myself as a decent person, an equal partner, not a tyrant or exploiter in my exchanges with others, especially women. Which means that whatever transpired in Paris between a lady and me should have been her show, governed by her rules, but I was renting her time, thus proxy owner of her saffron skin, slim hips, breasts deep for a young woman. Why not play. Wrap a long, black, lustrous braid around my fist, pull her head gently back on her shoulders until her neck arches gracefully and she moans or whimpers deep in her throat.
I asked her name and when she didn’t respond immediately, I repeated my French phrase—Comment t’appelles-tu—more attention to pronunciation since she was obviously of Asian descent, a recent immigrant or illegal, maybe, and perhaps French not her native language. Ana, I thought she replied, after I asked a second, slower time. Then I shared my name, and said I’m American, a black American—noir, I said, in case my pale color confused her. I asked her country of origin—De quel pays? Another slight hesitation on her side before she said Chine—or she could have said Ana again or the first Ana could have been China, I realized later. Her name a country. Country’s name spoken in English, then French, an answer to both my inquiries.