by Junot Díaz
Her eagerness to please teased me with the prospect that perhaps no rules need inhibit my pleasure. I assumed all doors open if a generous enough tip was added to the fee already collected by a fortyish woman on a sofa at the massage parlor’s entrance on rue Duranton. In my mind, only unresolved issue the exact amount of pourboire. I didn’t wish to spoil our encounter with market-stall haggling, so like any good translator I settled for approximate equivalences, and we performed a short, silent charade of nods, looks, winks, hands, blinks, fingers to express sums and simulate acts, both of us smiling as we worked.
I trusted our bargain had reduced her rules to only one rule I needed to respect: pay and you can play. Her bright, black eyes seemed to agree. Resistance, they said, just part of the game, Monsieur. Just be patient, s’il vous plaît. Play along. I may pretend to plead—no no no no—when your fingers touch my underwear, but please persist, test me.
Easy as pie for a while. Underwear slid down her hips to reveal an edge of dark pubic crest. Then not so easy after she flops down on the floor next to the mat, curls up knees to chest, and emits a small, stifled cry. Then it’s inch by inch until underwear finally dangled from one bobbing ankle, snapped off finally and tossed aside. A minute more and not a bit of shyness.
Wish I could say I knew better. Knew when to stop, whether I paid or not for the privilege of going further. Wish I believed now that we were on the same page then. But no. Like most of us, I behaved inexcusably. Believed what I wanted to believe. Copped what I could because I could. No thought of limits, boundaries. Hers or mine. No fear of AIDS back then. Undeterred by the threat of hordes of Chinese soldiers blowing bugles, firing burp guns as they descend across the Yalu River to attack stunned U.S. troops, allies of the South in a civil war, Americans who had advanced a bridge too far north and found themselves stranded, trapped, mauled, shivering, bleeding, dying in snowdrifts beside the frozen Chosin Reservoir.
No regrets, no remorse until years later, back home again, and one afternoon Sonny Rollins practicing changes on the Williamsburg Bridge halts me dead in my tracks. Big colors, radiant bucketfuls splash my face. I spin, swim in colors. Enraptured. Abducted by angels who lift me by my droopy wings up, up, and away. Then they let go and I fall, plunge deeper and deeper into swirling darkness.
Am I remembering it right, getting the story, the timing right, the times, the fifties, sixties, everything runs together, happens at once, explodes, scatters. I will have to check my journals. Google. Too young for Korea, too old for Iraq, student deferments during Vietnam. Emmett Till’s exact age in 1955, not old enough to enlist or be on my own in New York City, slogging daily like it’s a job back and forth across the Williamsburg Bridge those years of Sonny’s first sabbatical. When I hurried back to rue Duranton next morning to apologize or leave a larger tip, it was raining. No Ana works here, I believe the half-asleep women on the sofa said.
I wish these dumb undershorts had pockets. Many deep, oversize pockets like camouflage pants young people wear. I could have loaded them with stones.
Before I go, let me confide my final regret: I’m sorry I’ll miss my agent’s birthday party. To be more exact, it’s my agent’s house in Montauk I regret missing. Love my agent’s house. Hundreds of rooms, marvelous ocean views, miles and miles of wooded grounds. One edge of the property borders a freshwater pond where wild animals come to drink, including timid, quivering deer. Stayed once for a week alone, way back when before my agent had kids. Quick love affair with Montauk, a couple of whose inhabitants had sighted the Amistad with its cargo of starving, thirsty slaves in transit between two of Spain’s New World colonies, slaves who had revolted and killed most of the ship’s crew, the Amistad stranded off Montauk Point with a few surviving sailors at the helm, alive only because they promised to steer the ship to Africa, though the terrified Spaniards doing their best to keep the Amistad as far away from the dark continent as Christopher Columbus had strayed from the East Indies when he landed by mistake on a Caribbean island.
I know more than enough, more than I want to know, about the Amistad revolt. Admire Melville’s remake of the incident in Benito Cereno but not tempted to write about it myself. One major disincentive the irony of African captives who after years of tribulations and trials in New England courts were granted freedom, repatriated to Africa, and became slave merchants. Princely, eloquent Cinqué, mastermind of the shipboard rebellion, one of the bad guys. Cinque, nom de guerre of Patty Hearst’s kidnapper. Not a pretty ending to the Amistad story. Is that why I avoided writing it? Is the Williamsburg Bridge a pretty ending? Yes or no, it’s another story I won’t write.
Under other circumstances, revisiting my agent’s fabulous house, the ocean, memories of an idyll in Montauk might be worth renting a car, inching along in bumper-to-bumper weekend traffic through the gilded Hamptons. My agent’s birthday after all. More friend than agent for years now. We came up in the publishing industry together. Rich white kid, poor black kid, a contrasting pair of foundlings, misfits, mavericks, babies together at the beginning of careers. Muy simpático. Nearly the same age, fans of Joyce, Beckett, Dostoevsky, Hart Crane. (If this was a time and place for footnotes, I’d quote Crane’s most celebrated poem, “The Bridge”—“A bedlamite speeds to thy parapets / Tilting there momentarily”—and add the fact that Crane disappeared after he said, “Goodbye—goodbye—goodbye, everybody,” and jumped off a boat into the Gulf of Mexico.) We also shared a fondness for Stoli martinis in which three olives replaced dry vermouth, and both of us loved silly binges of over-the-top self-importance, daydreaming, pretending to be high rollers, blowing money neither had earned on meals in fancy restaurants, until I began to suspect the agency’s charge card either bottomless or fictitious, maybe both. Muy simpático even after his star had steadily risen, highest roller among his peers, while my star dimmed precipitously, surviving on welfare, barely aglow. How long since my agent has sold a major piece of my writing, how long since I’ve submitted a major new piece to sell? In spite of all of the above, still buddies. Regret missing his party, Montauk, the house. House partly mine, after all. My labor responsible for earning a minuscule percentage of the down payment, n’est-ce pas? For nine months of the year no one inhabits the Montauk mansion. In France vacant dwellings are white space poor people occupy and claim, my mother had once informed me. Won’t my agent’s family be surprised next June to find my ghost curled up in his portion of the castle.
Last time in Montauk was when? Harder and harder to match memories with dates. One event or incident seems to follow another, but often I misremember, dates out of sync. Sonny Rollins’s sax squats on the Williamsburg Bridge, changes the sky’s color, claims ownership of a bright day. Was I in fact walking the bridge those years Sonny Rollins woodshedding up there? I’ll have to check my journals. But the oldest journals temporarily unavailable, part of the sample loaned to my agent to shop around.
I’m sure I can find a university happy to pay to archive your papers, he said.
Being archived a kind of morbid thought, but go right ahead, my friend. Fuckers don’t want to pay for my writing while I’m alive, maybe if I’m dead they’ll pay.
Stoppit. Nobody’s asking you to jump off a bridge. Nothing morbid about selling your papers. Same principle involved as selling backlist.
So do it, okay. Still sounds like desperation to me, like a last resort.
Just the opposite. I tempt publishers with posterity, remind them the best writing, best music, never ages. Don’t think in terms of buying, I lecture the pricks. Think investment. Your great-great-grandkids will dine sumptuously off the profits.
Truth is, I’ve got nothing to sell except white space. You know what I mean: white space. Where print lives. What eats print. White space. That Pakistani guy who wrote the bestseller about black holes. Prize client of yours, isn’t he? Don’t try and tell me you or all the people buying the book understand black holes. Black holes. White space. White holes. Black space. What’s the difference?
The Amistad packed with corpses and ghosts drifts offshore behind me. Ahoy, I holler and wave at two figures way up the beach. No clue where we’ve landed. I’m thinking water, food, rescue, maybe we won’t starve or die of thirst after all. The thought dizzying like too much drink too fast after debilitating days of drought. Water, death roil around in the same empty pit inside me. The two faraway figures scarecrows silhouetted against a gray horizon. They must be on the crest of a rise and I’m in a black hole staring up. Like me they’ve halted. I’m not breathing, no water sloshing inside me, no waves slap my bare ankles, roar of ocean subsided to a dull flat silence, my companions not fussing, not clambering out of the flimsy rowboat behind me. Everybody, everything in the universe frozen. Some fragile yet deep abiding protocol, ironclad rules obscure and compelling, oblige me to wait, not to speak or breathe until those alien others whose land this must be wave or run away or beckon, draw swords, fire muskets.
The pair of men steps in our direction, then more steps across the whitish gray. They are in booths making calls, counting, calculating with each approaching step, each wobble, what it might be worth, how much bounty in shiny pieces of silver and gold they could collect in exchange for bodies, a rowboat, a sailing ship that spilled us hostage on this shore.
My friends, calls out the taller one in a frock coat, gold watch on a chain, his first words same words Horatio Seymour, governor of New York, addressed in 1863 to a mob of hungover, mostly Irish immigrants, their hands still red from three or four days of wasting colored children, women, and men in draft riots.
I’m going to go now. What took you so long? I bet you’re thinking, or maybe you wonder why, why this moment—and since you’ve stuck with me this long, I owe you more—so I’ll end with what I said to my false-hearted lover in one of our last civil conversations when she asked, What’s your worst nightmare? Never seeing you again. Come on. Seriously. Seeing you again. Stop playing and be serious. Okay. Serious. Very super-serious. My worst nightmare is being cured. Cured of what? What I am. Of myself. Cured of yourself? Right. Cured of who I am. Cured of what doesn’t fit, of what’s inappropriate and maybe dangerous inside me. You know. Cured like people they put away—far away behind bars, stone walls, people they put in chains, beat, shock with electric prods, drugs, exile to desert-island camps in Madagascar or camps in snowiest Siberia or shoot, starve, hang, gas, burn, or stuff with everything everybody believes desirable and then display them in store windows, billboard ads, on TV, in movies, like perfectly stuffed lifelike animated cartoon animals.
Lying naked in bed next to naked her I said my worst nightmare not the terrible cures or fear I fit in society’s category of people needing cures. Worst nightmare not damage I might perpetrate on others or myself. Worst nightmare, my love, the thought I might live a moment too long. Wake up one morning cured and not know I’m cured.
P.S. The other day, believe it or not, I saw a woman scaling the bridge’s outermost restraining screen. Good taste or not I ran toward her shouting my intention to write a story about a person jumping off the Williamsburg Bridge, imploring her as I got closer for a quote. “Fuck off, buddy,” she said over her naked shoulder. Then she said: “Splash.”
Contributors’ Notes
CHIMAMANDA NGOZI ADICHIE is the author of a story collection and the novels Purple Hibiscus, Half of a Yellow Sun, and Americanah. She divides her time between Nigeria and the United States.
• This story was inspired by a friend who once told me that he had lied about a househelp when he was a child, the househelp was fired, and he—my friend—has carried the regret with him for years.
I am drawn as a reader to stories of childhood told in an adult voice, stories full of the melancholy beauty of retrospect. I am interested in the regrets we carry from our childhoods, in the idea of “what if” and “if only.”
I think of Okenwa’s attraction to Raphael as a certain kind of first love, a childhood first love, that early confusing emotional pull, that thing filled with an exquisite uncertainty because it does not know itself and cannot even name itself.
MOHAMMED NASEEHU ALI is from Ghana. He is the author of The Prophet of Zongo Street, a collection of stories. Ali’s fiction and essays have appeared in the New York Times, The New Yorker, Mississippi Review, Bomb, Gathering of the Tribes, Essence, Open City, and other publications. He is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Ali lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches undergraduate fiction at NYU’s creative writing program.
• In 1993, the West African nation of Ghana witnessed a dramatic change. After ruling the country with an iron fist for twelve years, the socialist-leaning, anti-West friend of Muammar Gaddafi and Fidel Castro—the military dictator Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings—discarded his signature military garb, donned civilian clothing, and was sworn in as the democratically elected president of Ghana’s Fourth Republic. Today, twenty-three years later, Ghana is heralded as the most stable and strongest democracy in sub-Saharan Africa. But before this glorious story, and even before the coup d’état that brought J. J. Rawlings to power in 1981, there was the coup of June 4, 1979, the putsch that introduced the then twenty-nine-year-old airman to the Ghanaian political scene. Though the regime—called the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council—lasted only three months, the violence it unleashed on Ghanaians was unprecedented, and the carnage would forever scar the hearts and minds of the citizens who lived at the time. During those three oppressive months Ghanaians witnessed the rounding up and killing (by firing squad) of every single living former head of state and their top commanders. The regime’s War on Corruption, which turned out to be a war against anyone who was rich, directed its guns and venom at business people and traders. The atrocities visited upon the Ghanaian public were horrendous and too numerous to mention here, but they included the public humiliation of wealthy business people “suspected” of hoarding, smuggling, or profiteering; the public stripping and flogging of market women who had sold provisions above the “controlled price”; the bombing of houses in which “contraband” goods were found, even if the goods didn’t belong to the homeowner; the assault, jailing, and even killing of any individual who dared voice dissent, no matter how slight. Businessmen and businesswomen were beaten to a pulp and paraded through city streets; many died while in custody, and those who managed to escape lost all their property to the state.
I was a young boy when this carnage took place, and even though I didn’t suffer any direct physical harm or any palpable emotional or psychological distress, the events of the summer of 1979 remain the most impactful of my life. The fear and the confusion of the adults in my life, and their helplessness in the face of such brutality, are what I try to capture in “Ravalushan.”
TAHMIMA ANAM is a writer and anthropologist. In 2013, she was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. She is a contributing opinion writer for the international New York Times and a judge for the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. Born in Dhaka, Bangladesh, she was educated at Mount Holyoke College and Harvard University and now lives in Hackney, East London, and Tamworth, New Hampshire.
• On April 24, 2013, an eight-story commercial building called Rana Plaza collapsed in a northern suburb of Dhaka, Bangladesh. When the rescue operations were called off, the death toll was confirmed at 1,130, making it the deadliest accidental structural failure in modern history. The garment-factory workers who died in Rana Plaza had been evacuated from the building the day before, but were ordered back on-site on the morning of the collapse. “Garments” was born out of that terrible tragedy, but when I went to write the story, it becam
e centered on female friendship among three factory workers and their attempt to find security, love, and humor amid the brutal realities of their lives.
ANDREA BARRETT is the author of six novels and three collections of stories: Ship Fever, which received the National Book Award; Servants of the Map, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize; and Archangel, a finalist for the Story Prize. She lives in western Massachusetts and teaches at Williams College.
• When I was in college, I spent a few weeks at the marine biological laboratory at the Isles of Shoals. The island and its creatures enchanted me, although I knew nothing, then, about the history of the area. Twenty years later, still largely ignorant, I set a story called “The Littoral Zone” there.
Many more years passed before I became aware of Celia Thaxter, her gardening books, and her family’s connection to the islands. Writing a story called “The Island,” in which I invented the character of Henrietta Atkins, a young student at the 1873 session of a summer school for the study of natural history, I began to think more about the late-nineteenth-century passion for marine biology. Its more demure fringes—collecting and preserving seaweeds, studying tidal pools, drawing and examining invertebrates—were, like certain kinds of botany, relatively welcoming to women then, and I began to wonder if Henrietta and her friend Daphne might explore those fringes later in their lives.