I saw the coffin get buried in a cemetery, and I’m almost positive that he was still inside. And so if he ever came back to life, how could he get out from underneath the ground?
I’ve also seen a lot of bugs die, like ants and beetles and things.
Did any of them ever come back to life?
Maybe.
One time I put a housefly in a jar, then put the jar in the freezer for an hour. When I took the jar out, the fly was dead—at least it seemed dead, so I think it really was—but within a few seconds it started moving its tiny hair-like legs, and after a few more seconds it was rubbing its wings together, and after about ten more seconds it was buzzing freely around the room again.
• • •
I hear the fitting room door slowly creak open.
I sit up on the bench to see who it is.
It’s Mr. Emmanuel.
The last person on Earth I want to see right now.
“Ey, pikin,” Mr. Emmanuel says quietly. “Aw yu du, girly-girl?”
I lie back down and cross my arms over my chest.
I hate Mr. Emmanuel right now.
If I could, I would make him be dead, and my momma be alive again.
“You hurt my arm,” I say, staring up at the ceiling. “And you lied.”
Mr. Emmanuel doesn’t respond.
He probably can’t talk because he’s too busy thinking of another lie to tell.
“Me no lie to you, Jasmine,” he says quietly. “Come now. Look at me, girl. Don’t be like that.”
I don’t move. I close my eyes so Mr. Emmanuel knows I’m not looking at him, not even a little bit.
“Pikin. Come now. What lies do I tell?” he asks. “Has Chrissie been filling your ears with poison about old Emmanuel?”
I open my eyes. “Who’s Chrissie?” I ask.
“My sister, Christiana,” Mr. Emmanuel answers. “She’s always riding a brother’s back about something or another—don’t listen to a thing she tell about me. Look. Earlier, I tell you the truth about me mum. Once I get out of here, I’m about to pawn some of these things you get for me, and then—blau—I send some cash home to help me mum out. Okay? I was honest-to-goodness about it.”
I sit up on the bench so I can see him. He looks the same as before—same slouchy posture, same short beard, same green bandanna, same ropy black hair.
“I don’t care about that,” I say. “You told me you were a doctor. You said you’d help my mom.”
Mr. Emmanuel shakes his head. “A doctor? Naw, girl. I never call myself no doctor,” he says. “Medical training. That’s what I got back home. At university and on the war grounds. That’s what I tell you before, and that’s no lie.”
“Why are you talking like that?” I ask.
Mr. Emmanuel stares.
“Like what?” he asks.
“Like—I don’t know—different than you were before. Like you’re being tough all the sudden.”
Mr. Emmanuel shrugs. “I talk the way I talk,” he answers. “Look. I only come in here to give ohsh-ya for the loss of your mum. Proper like. I’m not trying to stand here listening to your mouth complaining about everything.”
“But you lied about helping her.”
“I didn’t lie about nothing, girl. It was just too late,” Mr. Emmanuel says. “You told me the people from outside were on the way up the stairs soon, and we had to be ready for that—ready for anything they bring. Your mum just ran out of clock is all.”
“You could’ve helped her instead of getting ready,” I say. “And why did you need to get ready anyway? Those people were coming up here to help us.”
Mr. Emmanuel snorts.
“Help? Get the fuck out of here, white girl. You don’t know what you talking about.” He waves his hands at me like I’m a fly that’s getting too close to his food.
“I’m not white,” I say, crossing my arms again. “I’m just light-skinned.”
Mr. Emmanuel shakes his head. He’s smiling at me, but it’s the mean kind of smile, not the nice kind.
“Whatever you are. You’re ignorant to the world working,” he says. “Let me ask you something, light-skin. Did you know those outsiders—your rescuers—they never show up here? The ones you told me were on their way? They never come. You know that?”
What?
I can’t believe what I’m hearing.
The rescuers never came up to the second floor?
“Are you sure?” I ask.
Mr. Emmanuel laughs a little bit, but it’s the same as his smile—mean, not nice.
“Look around you,” he answers, turning his head one way, then the other, making his dreadlocks swing. “You see your people riding in here, wearing their rubber suits, ready to carry you out of the mall on top of their shoulders? Naw, girl. Your rescuers never show here. So if you want to get mad at somebody and call somebody liar, get mad at them. Call them liar. They the ones that cause all this, and they the ones that cause all that.”
He points toward my momma’s body.
I don’t want to look at Momma—it’s too hard for me—but I can’t help it.
For a while, she looked like she could just be asleep, but she doesn’t look asleep anymore. I’ve seen my momma asleep a million times, and she never looked like this before. No. Now, the body lying next to me looks like the shell that my momma used to live in, but left behind.
I don’t know what to say right now.
Why didn’t the rescuers come up to the second floor to check on us?
If they had come, maybe they could’ve helped Momma before she died.
“Look here,” Mr. Emmanuel says. “I understand feeling anger over losing your mum, especially so sudden. And as young as you are, right? My own pops passed on when I was around your age—what you be, like, seven or eight or something?”
I smile.
I can’t help it.
I like that Mr. Emmanuel thinks I’m older than I actually am.
“Yeah,” I answer.
“All right, then. I lost Pops at around that exact same time in my life. You understand?”
“Yeah,” I answer. “I guess so.”
“And do you know what I learned when Pops moved to the next life like he did?”
“No. What,” I ask.
“The anger you feel, it needs someplace to go besides stay in the gut, you know? You can’t let it cook like a stew down there. You got to put it to good use. Use your anger as an engine, like a boiler.”
Anger as an engine?
A boiler? I don’t even know what that is.
“Huh?”
“Anger be the best engine, girl,” Mr. Emmanuel says, nodding. “Let it be the thing that moves you most. The prime mover. Vroom vroom. You know?”
“Um. Okay,” I answer.
“Damn right, okay,” he says. “Now let’s try it out—rev your engine a little bit, I mean.”
“Okay.”
“I need your help with something. All right?”
Oh no.
Mr. Emmanuel wants my help with something else.
I don’t like the sound of that at all.
“Help with what?” I ask.
“Easy thing I need. Izi, izi, izi, pikin,” Mr. Emmanuel answers. “You already done this thing once before. I just need you to repeat it for me.”
• • •
Mr. Emmanuel makes me leave my momma behind in the fitting room—he tells me that I have to get out of the room and stretch my legs—and as we walk up and down the aisles of Macy’s together he explains what he wants me to do. Actually, he tells me what he needs me to do.
Basically, Mr. Emmanuel needs me to get my picture taken by the news reporters outside, the same way I did for Mr. Jim downstairs.
Mr. Emmanuel tells me that the picture-taking worked really well for the first floor, so he thinks it could work for the second floor too.
“Just do the same thing you did before,” he says. “Big smile. Dancing and holding your sign high in the air. Same exact thing.”
&nb
sp; Same exact thing I did before?
Hold on a minute.
“Wait. You saw me do that?” I ask.
“Of course I saw you do it. Everybody watch what you done,” he answers. “White children all up in a line, smiling and cheering—of course, I see it. You played on nearly every news channel and website over the world, even on Awareness Times back home.”
“But how did you see it?” I ask. “I mean, in here?”
Mr. Emmanuel stares at me like he doesn’t understand the question.
“In where?” he asks.
“In the mall.”
Mr. Emmanuel shrugs. “I watch it the same way everybody watch everything—on a tiny fucking screen in your hand. What does it matter?”
“I thought you said your phone doesn’t work here,” I say. “So how did you see the news if your phone doesn’t work?”
Mr. Emmanuel doesn’t answer me.
He suddenly stops walking. I stop too.
I can tell that he’s staring at me.
I don’t stare back—his eyes are too scary right now—but I know that he’s staring because I can feel it.
“You trying to call me a liar again?” Mr. Emmanuel asks quietly. “Is that what you’re doing?”
I shake my head really fast. “No. I’m not.”
That’s actually not true.
I really do think Mr. Emmanuel is lying about his phone not working. But I’m too scared to tell him the truth about what I think.
“I use Sistah’s phone for the news,” Mr. Emmanuel says. “She let me borrow it for a while. Okay?”
“Okay,” I say, nodding.
“All right, then.”
Mr. Emmanuel puts on a smile. It looks fake to me, like the smile I make when I take a school picture.
Without another word, we start walking together through Macy’s again.
As we move up and down the aisles, saying nothing to each other, I look around at the people of the second-floor village. The people I live with now. My people—that’s what Momma would want me to call them.
I have no idea what time it is—it feels like the middle of the day—but almost everybody is resting like they just ate a big meal. Men are lying directly on the floor. Ladies are sitting with their backs resting against display cases. When I walk through the Bed and Bath section, I see whole families—men, ladies, and kids—piled on top of every single bed Macy’s has for sale.
Eventually, Mr. Emmanuel and I stop next to a closed door near the bathrooms. The gold-colored sign on the door says Manager in black lettering.
Mr. Emmanuel leans up against the door and crosses his long, thin arms. “So will you help us with the picture or won’t you?” he asks.
I want to answer yes.
I want to answer yes because I know that’s what Mr. Emmanuel wants from me.
But I can’t. Not yet.
I can’t, because I still have more questions. And when I don’t let the questions out of my body, I can feel them squirming around inside of me, trying to find an escape hatch.
“I just have some questions,” I say.
Mr. Emmanuel smiles his school-picture smile at me.
“Of course, pikin. Anything. Ask away.”
“So why do you want me to do the pictures?” I ask. “I know you said why already. But can you please say why again?”
Mr. Emmanuel makes a big sigh.
He scratches his beard—I notice that his fingernails are really, really long. And pretty dirty.
“All right,” he says. “It’s easy for you to understand. Before the pictures were taken of you, nobody comes to help. But after you make the pictures, the rescue team comes running in like that.” He snaps his fingers. “Do you understand?”
That part makes sense. I understand that the pictures made the people outside want to help us faster.
“Okay,” I say. “But I thought you didn’t want the rescuers to come.”
Mr. Emmanuel’s nose crinkles like he just smelled something spoiled. “What you mean, girl?”
“I mean, the last time the rescuers tried to come, you had to get ready for it. I saw people hiding, and some other people had knives and guns in their hands.”
Mr. Emmanuel suddenly smiles again—but this time, the smile seems real, like the smile he had on his face when he talked about soft pretzels at the mall.
“You’re a real smart girl, ain’t you,” he says, nodding. Right now, he looks a lot like Daddy looks when he’s proud of me for something.
I nod. “Yep.”
“Good girl. Good, smart girl. Me? I’m also smart, pikin,” Mr. Emmanuel says. “You think I don’t want rescue? Of course, I want rescue.” He points toward a family lying on a mattress across the aisle from us. “You think they don’t want rescue? Of course, they want it. But this is complicated, pikin. Right now, the news stories are talking about the second floor like it’s populated by wild animals, like we part of the jungle up here. Disease, dirty, rotten. Bad. You know?”
I do.
I think I understand what Mr. Emmanuel means.
I haven’t seen any of the news stories. But I do know that Mr. Jim doesn’t like the second floor people at all, so I can imagine somebody else might not like the second floor either.
“So right now,” Mr. Emmanuel continues, “in the world outside, they don’t care too much about the people on the second level, you know? Because we’re not even people to them, at least not all the way people. And let’s be real. To most regular folks, it don’t matter too much what happens to a few wild animals out in the jungle, does it? I mean, who really cries when the rat dies, right?”
I shrug. “No one, I guess.”
“Exactly. And that’s a big, big problem for us right now, pikin,” Mr. Emmanuel says. “We need to change the way they see. Because when the rescuers come for us, we need them to be coming with the right thought process. Coming to help. Not to pile on with more hurt. Do you understand?”
I do.
I think I know what Mr. Emmanuel means.
He wants the rescuers to want to rescue us.
“But why me?” I ask.
His nose crinkles again. “What you mean?”
I point toward a group of kids sitting quietly in a circle on the tile nearby. They’re playing a game that involves flicking shiny marbles toward each other.
“I mean, there’s like a million kids here,” I say. “Why do you need me for the pictures?”
“Honest?”
“Yeah. Honest.”
“Because you white,” Mr. Emmanuel says.
“I told you—”
“It don’t make no difference what you think,” he says, cutting me off. “White, light-skin, high-yellow, whatever word you use. Call yourself how you want in your mind. But when the world see you on the news screen, they see you white. And that’s what we need them to see on the second level right now. White.”
“But why?”
Mr. Emmanuel shrugs. “Because then they understand that humans are involved.”
• • •
Eventually, I decide to do what Mr. Emmanuel wants.
Not because I changed my mind about him.
I still think he’s a total jerk.
An opportunist, I mean.
And I still hate him for lying to me and for hurting my arm.
But I decide to let the reporters take my picture anyway. It’s what Momma would want me to do, I’m pretty sure.
Once I’ve made my decision, Mr. Emmanuel opens the door with the Manager sign on it, and I’m almost blinded by a bright light streaming in through a huge window on the far wall.
Squinting and holding a hand in front of my eyes, I walk into a medium-sized room that immediately reminds me of Momma’s office back at home: there’s a desk with a computer, a printer, a filing cabinet, a trash can, and a great big mess of paperwork all over every surface.
Mr. Emmanuel enters the room and, without hesitation, starts picking up objects—a stapler, a keyboard, a ta
pe dispenser, stacks of paper—and moving them around as though he’s searching for something.
I stand in the doorway and watch. “What are you doing?” I ask.
Mr. Emmanuel opens a desk drawer and fishes around inside. “I’m looking for something to make your sign with,” he answers. “Big paper, cardboard. Magic marker. Chalk piece. Something.”
I watch as he opens another desk drawer, searches inside for a few seconds, and closes it.
“What about that?” I ask, pointing to a blue pen on the desktop.
Mr. Emmanuel pauses in the middle of opening another drawer. “What about what,” he asks.
“That. The pen.”
“Naw, girl. It draws too thin a line,” he says. “The message needs to be visible from way, way down. We’re on the second level, remember? Everyone who sees the message will be down on the first.”
Oh yeah.
What Mr. Emmanuel said is true. Everyone who sees my sign will be on the ground, looking up.
I try to imagine myself as a news reporter, wearing a blue suit with a white button-down shirt underneath, standing on the sidewalk outside with a microphone in my hand and staring upward at the mall building. It would be pretty hard to see something in a window from that far down.
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