His stomach tightened around the grinding thought that he had not shown up to meet Brenda at the Autism Center but had gone to work instead. He planned to join her in the lightest sense but did not want to face the fact that he didn’t have the fortitude, the will, to see about a boy he couldn’t save, to behold another piece of his family that could not be salvaged. He was not up to sitting silently in the office next to Brenda while the doctor talked about eccentricities and treatments, with his voice lodged in his throat, with his thoughts caught in the loop of time.
At the last meeting he attended, there were the mysteries of the locust drawings and the strange building sketches, the structure that he knew (deep inside when he saw it) was a prison. But could it really have been Black Plains? Why would the boy draw such a thing? How could Sephiri know of a prison he had never seen? He himself had not wanted to think about its familiarity when he saw the sketch, so much like the photographs he saw of Black Plains—what that might mean. And beneath this denial was the thought that something else he was ill equipped to handle lay waiting. He did not want to feel again that there was nothing he could do, as he felt those days in Uncle Randy’s basement. He couldn’t look upon the blankness of Sephiri’s face, so much like the blank innocence of his little brother when they were boys, when their childhood was still intact.
Manden felt numb, frozen in the ruins of a situation he was powerless against. And this gnawing awareness only deepened the disgrace pitted in his stomach when he thought of how he was now sitting in the booth instead of at the center. “If you can make it,” Brenda said when she called to tell him that there were new concerns about Sephiri. The “observational study” had not gone well, as she feared. Sephiri wasn’t able to adjust to the new room prepared for him. The tantrum he had worried even Dr. Watson, since, this time, her boy raged and grieved at new extreme heights, dry-heaving and banging his fists on the floor and on the glass walls until he passed out.
And now there was the sudden onset of excessive sleeping, which seemed to be induced by something, even though there were no known changes in his medications or diet. She wanted no part of any further study, Brenda said. She didn’t care whether the drawings could mean that a savant ability had emerged, that Sephiri had somehow seen what was impossible to see. She didn’t want to explore how he might respond to the special room they set up for him anymore. “This is my baby, and I don’t want reaching Sephiri to mean that he’ll suffer,” she said. The speech pathologists were puzzled and had no answers. Brenda felt it no longer mattered. When Sephiri fainted from the shock of being moved to the new room—from whatever outrage had fueled his tantrum—it frightened her more than she expected. It made her fear that she had lost her boy forever. Now Sephiri’s autism seemed to have been transformed into something else. “If you can make it,” Brenda said again at the end, a soliloquy of desperation. She hung up in the pause before he had the chance to respond.
Manden fumbled with the notes and papers spread out on the booth counter. His hands needed something to do, something to make neat and orderly when his thoughts were in the jumbled chaos that seized him at that moment. A headline on the cover of the Washington Post caught his eye: “Police apprehend suspect accused of murder.” Such captions reminded him of his brother, for he saw his face in every mug shot, heard his voice in every film clip. Manden had wanted the man responsible for their father’s murder dead, too, although he hadn’t been able to admit it until he heard that Horus was arrested. His little brother, the one he had never been able to protect. He should have tried harder to look out for him. He supposed that this was what brotherhood was all about.
And how was it that he could feel only shame in the fact that it was Horus who took action, who sought to avenge their father’s murder and his memory, and he had not? Manden, the eldest son of the father, the next in line, and the one with “the empire in his heart,” words that held like an iron bit in his mouth. He was not the prince of righteousness that Jack Thompson intended him to be. But what had been his inheritance, his dominion? At ten years old, he became the man of a house that no longer existed. And he had been paralyzed since the moment he heard the gunshots, for the sound had taken his will, and he had been unable to retrieve it. What was left was a half-finished jigsaw puzzle, with huge parts of the picture missing. Was it the shame of his inaction or the shame of his brother’s action that took a bit of his ability to live with himself, year after year? He didn’t know what could be done about that. And never knowing what to do about it had driven him to silence.
Manden reached to massage his aching back as he slouched in the booth chair. His radio was blaring, the dispatcher barking out the usual. His mind was heavy with tedium, and the hours stretched out before him like a bleak tunnel. The radio spit static as he half-listened to the dispatcher’s voice dribble out in a long, garbled drone. “Jumper reported on track one . . . Red Line . . . fatality . . . crew dispatched at seven thirty-eight A.M. . . . shut down track and reroute until eleven fourteen A.M. . . . Code Purple, guys . . .”
“Damn,” said Manden. He wasn’t in the mood for carnage. Rage, maybe, but not death. Code Purple meant it wasn’t a simple housekeeping job. The motherfucker hadn’t hit the tracks in such a way that limbs could be recovered with ease after meeting steel: torso with head still attached off to the left, right foot fifteen yards down, forearm in groove between tracks. Code Purple meant squashed concord grapes. Blood and guts destined to add aggravation and delay to an already tiresome day.
Manden signed heavily, turning to a blond woman who was banging impatiently on the glass of his booth.
“I need to know if this is the line I ride to get to the Chevy Chase Pavilion!” the woman said. Shopping bags stuffed with tissue paper dangled from her pink forearms as she struggled with her coffee and cell phone.
Over the years, Manden had become a skilled lip-reader, and he understood what the woman said even through the thick glass. He looked at her blankly, thinking of the delays and what was probably headed his way from the shift supervisor.
The woman banged again. “Excuse me . . . man, is this the train to get to the Pavilion?” the woman repeated. Her face turned strawberry red as she glared through the glass at Manden.
He had become part of the scenery for tourists (whom Manden loathed with every cell in his body), and “man” was something they called him as they would call other objects they happened upon during their odyssey: “Look, Dan, there’s a bench we can sit on while we wait for the tour bus.” “Here is a parking space, and we won’t even have to walk very far to the Lincoln Memorial.” “That man will know if this is the train for the Pavilion.”
It was not so much that Manden hated the job for which he was being paid. But when he did have to deal with people, it was the job’s necessity that he not be human, not be a person, that he was viewed as (and required to be a part of) the scenery, that bothered him. He was asked by one of the passengers, for instance, to carry a bag and became a Pullman porter resurrected. A woman argued with him about the directions he gave her to the Watergate—how could someone like him know the quickest route to a place like that? “You speak very good English,” a man once told him.
But on some occasions, like when there was a terrorist alert or a suspicious package was found on one of the platforms, Manden was transformed from “man” to “sir.” The steely and unforgiving eyes of women became soft rivers, pleading and submissive. The rough, curse-ridden voices of men became low and edgy tremors. Manden had seen the phenomenon before and had learned that when people feel threatened, they huddle around the fire of imagined security. And just as quickly, when safety and normalcy seem restored, they throw caution onto the ground as a child would throw a pacifier. Fear was a delicious thing to Washingtonians, and they were electrified by something during citywide alerts and evacuations, chatting excitedly as they emerged from the subway tunnels, a grim delight in being a part of something horrible and media-worthy burning in their bellies.
And so the glass information booth, from which Manden administered small doses of power, was a fortress, bulletproof and impervious to injury and insult. And it was only when he was outside of the booth, like on the other days of the week, when he was on another post or special detail, that he was vulnerable. But he reminded himself that today he was working in his very own Bastille, and that the phlegm from small minds, insolent brats, and undeserving bastards would not hit him in the face but would instead splat squarely on the thick exterior glass walls of his booth and slowly roll down to never having been said or heard.
Manden looked at the woman with furrowed brows standing outside of the booth and zeroed in on the coffee she was holding. “You can’t bring food or drinks into the nation’s subway system, ma’am,” he said.
The ground shook with an oncoming train, and the woman looked worriedly at the platform. “Did you hear me? I just need to know if this is the train or not!” she shouted.
Manden leaned casually into the small brown speaker and pressed the intercom. “Ma’am, you may not board the train with food or beverages. You’ll have to dispose of that drink first.”
Rowdy middle-school students rushed past the woman, jostling her and the shopping bags. In her efforts to avoid dropping her accoutrements, Manden thought she looked like one of those Chinese acrobats, contorting her limbs with nimble magnificence. Ball balanced on a finger. Candle balanced on a foot. Plate balanced on a head . . .
The dispatch radio snarled between loud jags of static, “Status Code Purple . . . jumper could not be identified . . . transit police . . . delays expected to extend . . .”
Outraged, the woman went to a nearby trash can, threw away her coffee, and stormed back to the booth. “Look, sir. I’m late meeting up with my group. Does this go to the Chevy Chase Pavilion or not? This is the information booth, isn’t it?” Her eyes were moist with indignation.
Manden hit a button that opened a metal bar next to his booth, allowing her to pass. “Yes, this is the right train,” he said in perfect monotone through the intercom. He watched the lady run to the platform in her high heels to catch the train, which had just arrived, missing it by seconds as the doors swished shut.
He had taken part in this sort of banal sport over the years to distract himself from the deepening chasms of his own psyche, from the apertures that were forming. Like the women with whom he’d broken things off when they got too close. Like the way the days months years ran together, indistinguishable by the markers that ruled the lives of others: holidays, anniversaries, graduations, birthdays. On his brother’s birthday, Manden let the sun rise and fall and the moon rise and fall without acknowledging it. But he did not want to think of that now, because he would then have to think about Brenda and Sephiri, a tangle of confounding feelings that he could not unravel.
And so the petty, lowly exchanges with subway passengers were imperative interludes that suspended certain uncomfortable sensations and allowed him to escape (temporarily) the realization that even though it was Horus rotting in a cell, he and his brother were slowly vanishing together nonetheless. “I could quit this job,” he would say to himself, but he would then have to face the fact that without his life in the tunnels, he did not know what his life would be.
The radio chattered on. “Cleanup crews will be reporting to section . . .” Manden reached across the booth counter to turn down the volume and caught a glimpse of his reflection in the polished glass. The procession of wasted years written on his face looked back at him. He looked away as he had a thousand times before, since in the tunnels beneath the city, there were other things to see.
Sometimes he would arrive at the subway entrance and stand at the top of the escalator, watching the steel steps march down to their destinies. Other times, when he worked the hours on toward midnight, he would come out of the booth, step to the edge where the yellow line was painted, and look into the still tunnels. He would lean over and peer into the cave and let the abyss wash over him, let the cold concrete and steel seep through him. There was a darkness so alive it was as if it wanted to open its mouth and speak but dare not. In the silence, the black shifted on its own. Shadows hung in the air, waiting for something to happen. What was it that gave him the feeling that something was approaching besides the trains?
Manden looked at the time on the cracked analog clock sitting amid the counter clutter. The meeting at the Autism Center was long over. Had there been a new treatment prescribed? He wondered if the observational study (which he was straining not to call an experiment that he had sanctioned with his silence) did more harm than good. Manden remembered the bag of marbles he gave Sephiri and wondered if they were already lost out in the street and long fallen into a drain or given away to some other child who might have taken a direct interest in them. Or were they in Sephiri’s room somewhere, in the windowsill, like where he and Horus used to keep them?
It was a funny thing that the memory of marbles should plague him now. Such small pieces of glass filled with ribbons of color. But they held a world in them, and they were all he and Horus wanted to play with, all they talked about, when together they burned through the New York summer days of 1966. He remembered those precious times when it was just the three of them (he, Horus, and their father) outside of their apartment building. He and Horus shot marbles on the sidewalk, with Papa watching over them from the stoop, smiling and smoking a cigarette. Jack Thompson would point to the chalk line they drew in the middle of the game circle and say, “Make that line, boys! Whatever you do, make the scratch.” July 21, 1966, started like every other day when school was out and childhood was in full swing, packed with daring and games, adventure and enterprise . . .
“Come on, Horus, shoot your Alley. We ain’t got all day.”
“I’ma do it when I’m ready, Manny.”
“Told ya this one ain’t easy, with your big head and don’t know what you doin’. Should have used the shooter. You know we playin’ for keepsies.”
“Well, I’m almost eight years old, Manny, and I ain’t losin’ my mean, green Alley to no shooter.”
“Well, you still seven years old right now, while you runnin’ your mouth. It’s 1966, and we ain’t got all day.”
Horus stared down at the brilliant green cat’s eye marble nested in the hole made by his thumb and index fingers. His eyes looked as if they were piercing the round glass, and in the glare, he couldn’t hear the sirens wailing somewhere in the neighboring streets or old ladies calling for their cats. He couldn’t hear the doo-wop playing in the parked cars, the soft rap of young men laying it on thick to giggling girls. Horus couldn’t hear the metal wheels of little girls roller-skating down the sidewalk. There had only been the marbles in his hand, the line, and the target . . .
Manden had seen that kind of concentration on Papa’s face, too, when he was preparing for a meeting, one of his speeches, or an article he wanted released in the black newspapers. Manden would watch him go through his ritual of preparation (steps he thought as a child were the steps all men took in being men every morning). First, there was the quiet breakfast he shared with his wife at the table. Maria always fed her children first and waited to have breakfast with her husband. Then Jack Thompson did a silent shave in the mirror. With each stroke, there was always a contemplative pause, as if he was working something out in his mind and the movement of the straight razor helped to straighten out the thought. Then the methodical selection of shirt, tie, pants, and jacket, whether or not a vest should be included. Finally, the collection of books, notes, and papers neatly arranged on the dresser by his wife. Each page was taken in hand, absorbed, and returned to the pile. “Manden,” Jack Thompson would call out after all of that, “bring me my cane.”
As the eldest son, it was Manden’s job to bring his father’s dark wood cane, which he did not seem to need for walking but carried with him always when he was about, a third leg that supported his pride in himself, in the community he dreamed would one day exist. And every ti
me Manden brought the cane, his father would quote from a book of African proverbs. Rain does not fall on one roof alone. One falsehood spoils a thousand truths. The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people. Then, offering a nod and a smile, Jack Thompson would depart . . .
Manden looked through the subway booth at a group of young boys roughhousing near the escalator. The boys, five or six teenagers in all, grew louder and formed a circle on the platform. The teenagers clapped and nodded to a sound it seemed that only they could hear. One boy, wearing a baseball cap turned to the back of his head and combat boots, entered the center of the circle and started dancing, contorting his body and popping his head and arms like a robot. He spun around, gyrating, his long, slender build moving like a rubber band. Passengers walked by quickly, holding bags closer, shifting direction to take the stairs. They paused in disgust or avoided eye contact altogether. The boys were oblivious to the crowd and the hostility, engrossed in the rapture of their world. A heavyset boy with a deep, booming voice began to rap:
Lil’ man in the game to play
Ain’t even got another day
In a fucked-up world
With a fucked-up hand
But he gonna play it quick
Cuz nobody gives a damn
Yeah he gonna play it quick
For he lose the chance to can
Time of the Locust Page 19