by Tim Curran
She regarded his hand as if amused by his gesture, but finally took it and said, “My name’s Reyna.”
“Nice to meet you, Reyna.” He let go of her small warm hand reluctantly. “You new here?”
“We’ve been here a couple weeks now.”
“You live alone?”
“I live with my family.” He noticed then how she stood blocking the door, which stood half closed behind her. “I have a big family.”
“Yeah, you got one of the three bedroom deals, huh?”
“Yes.”
“Reyna?” a woman’s voice said behind her. “Quién es ese?”
Reyna glanced over her shoulder. “Sólo un hombre que se pierde.” She looked back at Franklin and giggled again, then slipped backwards through the door and closed it. He heard it lock, as the old woman’s had done.
Franklin shook his head. “She crazy, too,” he said to himself.
A loud, drawn-out creak behind him caused him to look in that direction. He thought it was the old woman opening her door again, maybe to belatedly thank him, and leaned toward the corner for a peek. He saw that her door was still shut, as was the exit to the rear stairwell, but an undulating and amorphous smear of purple light hung in the air in the dark of the corner.
His headache stabbed him anew. God, he needed to get himself to his own place downstairs, take a few ibuprofen and kick back to watch a movie. He knew his eyes were only superimposing that restless purple light against the shadows, and yet it looked more like it was lurking back there amid the shadows, half submerged. Or rather, half emerged.
A dull heavy boom awakened Franklin, its echoes dispersing along his nerve endings. He sat up on his sofa wild-eyed, while the TV still blathered nonchalantly.
His body told him it had experienced a shudder or vibration, perhaps of a mild earth tremor, but there was no lingering evidence to support this. Aside from the TV, his darkened apartment lay still around him. Late afternoon had stealthily progressed into deep night while he slept.
He pressed the heel of one hand into the center of his forehead and croaked, “Jesus.” The pain hadn’t abated; was if anything more profound. Maybe he needed some food in his belly, and to hydrate.
That boom. He suspected now he had been dreaming. His dreams, he was certain, often tried to send him coded messages. These distorted dispatches from his subconscious were all he had in place of critical memories.
Yes … he must have been dreaming of the bomb. A bomb of water-gel explosive that had been dropped from a helicopter onto the roof of the house where his parents and other families—both black and white—had lived together, as the culmination of a long standoff and shootout with the police.
Not that he remembered any of the details himself, despite having been in that house at the time, but he had read of the incident years later online.
In the shootout and resultant fire, numerous people living in the bombed house had been killed, Franklin’s father among them. His mother had survived uninjured to be committed to a psychiatric hospital, but had later committed suicide by self-immolation, as if desiring to die in the manner of her husband.
And he, only five-years-old when the police raid occurred, had been given by his grandparents to a deprogrammer, in whose home he had apparently stayed for several months.
He had no memory at all of the deprogrammer, and his grandparents had never explained why a five-year-old, whom one would assume to be very malleable and resilient, would require such radical brainwashing. His grandparents, both dead now, had angrily refused to discuss any of it when he was growing up, except for an occasional frustrated exclamation. Once his grandmother had referred to the deprogrammer as an “exorcist.” Another time his grandfather, his father’s own father, had shouted, “It’s good the police killed them, before those evil fools called up the devils they worshipped!”
As a teenager, less afraid of his grandparents and less willing to let the matter go, he had persisted, “You’d think the cops wouldn’t drop a bomb like that, after that thing with MOVE in Philly only five years before. Knowing what happened that time.”
“You fool,” his grandfather had replied. “Where do you think the police got the idea? They wanted that to happen again!”
He swung his legs off the couch but sat there in the fluttering blue TV light for a few minutes longer, giving his heart a chance to slip back into its regular rhythm. It was then that he realized he was hearing another sound that he had thought was part of the TV program that had been running obliviously while he slept. He reached for the remote, muted his television, and listened.
It was coming from the floor above, muffled through the ceiling: a number of voices speaking—or was it singing? —in unison. The words sounded to be in another language, though he couldn’t say if it was Spanish. Well, of course it had to be Spanish, right? That was what Reyna had spoken in earlier today with that other woman behind the door.
Sounded like quite the Saturday night party up there. Maybe tequila and weed were the guests of honor. Despite his headache, he kind of wished pretty little Reyna had invited him to join them.
Each of the three units at Trinity Village had a laundry room in the basement, and Franklin liked doing his wash late on weeknights when there was less competition for machines. He really only ever used the elevator at the front of the building on laundry night, but he found it was still out of order, so he had to carry his overflowing basket down all those flights of steps.
When he scuffed in his flip-flops into the long basement room with its low ceiling, smelling of the underground, he discovered only one other person in there: a neighbor from the second floor named Vondra. Vondra snorted when she saw him come in, folding the last of her clothes atop a table. “Well, look at this sad lonely man. Are you still moping for that big white girl of yours, Franklin?”
He said, “Nice to see you, too, Vondra.” He started loading one of the machines.
“Honest to God, I think men like you would rather date the fattest white girl in the world than the sexiest black celebrity. You see, the racists make you ashamed of your own kind so much you can’t bear to be with a black woman. You got to try to show them you’re just as good. Meanwhile, fine-ass black women like me are raising our kids alone. I think you must hate yourself for who you are, Franklin.”
“I don’t hate myself, Vondra,” he said mildly as he poured detergent into the slide-out drawer. “Hell, I don’t even hate you.”
“Huh.” She patted down the neat stacks of clothes in her basket, hoisted it up and started past him for the doorway and the steps to the ground floor. “Shit, I thought your big ole Jess came back here to see you a couple nights ago when I felt the building shaking.” She laughed at her own joke.
Franklin looked up. “Hey, wait up. You mean you felt that, too? That … boom or whatever? I thought I just dreamed it.”
Vondra paused in the threshold. “Yeah, the building was shaking, just for a second or two.”
“Earthquake maybe, huh?” he said.
“Guess so. Night, Franklin. Hey … maybe you should come down and have a drink with me sometime when the kids are asleep.”
“I would if you weren’t so mean, Vondra.”
“You mean you would if I was more fat.” She cackled all the way up the stairs.
He sighed and wagged his head as he started feeding quarters into the machine. As it started up, he slid more quarters into the second of the two machines he’d loaded. The vibration of the two washers quivered up through the soles of his flip-flops and seemed to spread up his ankles, his calves, like a swarm of centipedes inside him racing for the ladder of his spine … racing for his brain, so that they might start chewing into it and get another headache going.
For some reason, the vibrations made him glance around at the basement room uneasily. There was a padlocked door, probably with supplies or maybe water pipes or circuit boxes behind it, and one window at the far end past all the washers and dryers. To the right of the win
dow, the wall took a turn into a tight little corner. He knew what was there, though he couldn’t see it from this angle: a fire exit. It was locked from the outside but sometimes tenants propped it open, no matter how much the landlord threatened with flyers posted on the corkboard over the folding tables, so that they might let in cool air or stand outside and smoke while they waited for their clothes to wash or dry.
Franklin stared toward that dark corner. He knew there was only an exit back there. Not a low, weirdly-angled ceiling. Not a pulsing blob of purplish-blackish light … or anti-light.
“Hello, Franklin.”
He whirled around, startled. For a microsecond he had thought the voice had emanated from within the corner.
It was Reyna, carrying a plastic basket of clothes. She set it down atop the washer nearest to the door she had just passed through. It being a sweltering summer night, the laundry room itself like a sauna, she wore cutoff denim shorts and a tank top. With her hair in a ponytail her neck was bared. Oh, all that coffee-with-cream-and-sugar skin. Vondra had him wrong. It was all good.
The timing seemed fortuitous, just the two of them alone down here late at night; he thought they’d have a chance now to become better acquainted. But no sooner had Reyna set down her basket than a tall, slim man in his early twenties, with short red hair and a sprinkling of freckles, appeared in the doorway behind her also carrying a basket. At first Franklin took him to be another of the tenants on his own, but Reyna faced him and said, “Just put that down right here, hon.”
The young man said, “Right, sure, just put it down.” He placed the basket atop the machine next to Reyna’s, then stood towering over her awkwardly as if awaiting another command.
Reyna smiled at Franklin and said as if in explanation, “James is autistic.”
“Oh … yeah? Are you his, uh, caregiver?”
“No, he’s just my buddy. Right, James?”
“Right, I’m your buddy,” James echoed.
Franklin was surprised. He’d assumed all the people, however many “all” constituted, living with Reyna in her apartment were of the same nationality. Apparently that wasn’t the case.
“And he has superpowers, too,” Reyna boasted. “Don’t you, hon?”
“Right, I’m like a superhero.” James flexed the muscles of his slender arms, smiling, but without making eye contact with either of them.
Reyna explained to Franklin, “When he first came to us with his mom when he was small, James could recite every word and imitate every sound effect in a Disney movie. But we figured he could do even better than that, so we worked with him, and now James can memorize every word in a book. Not just one book, either, but a bunch of books. Our family moves around a lot, because we do our work in all different cities, in all different states. So it isn’t easy to bring a lot of books around with you. With James, we don’t have to worry about that. He can recite anything we need for our work.” She turned toward the tall young man, who had begun weaving from foot to foot, flapping his hands, smiling toward the ceiling and chuckling deeply to himself as if amused at some secret thought. “James, recite for me from page 984. You know the book I mean.”
James started speaking in another tongue, while still weaving side-to-side and flapping his hands, though a bit more quickly than before, and still gazing at a point beyond the ceiling.
“What language is that?” Franklin asked Reyna. It sure wasn’t Spanish.
“That’s the language of the Naacal people,” she replied.
“Huh.” He didn’t want to admit he’d never heard of them. But it did sound like James was speaking in an actual tongue, as opposed to just speaking in tongues.
“That’s enough, hon,” Reyna told him, holding up a hand to cut him off. “Good job. He’s such a sweetheart. Family is everything, Franklin. Like they say, it’s greater than the sum of its parts. Our individual lives are small and meaningless, but united we can have more of an impact on the world and bring about something greater than ourselves … something that lasts where we don’t. Haven’t you ever wanted to be part of something bigger, Franklin?” Before he could answer—and he did open his mouth but paused for wont of words—she went on, “I get the feeling that you once did belong to something bigger, but you’ve forgotten about it. Once you were innocent, more open and in tune with the universe, like James is. But you lost that. I understand … it happens to most adults. But there are ways to get back to that clearer vision, that bigger picture. You have to open your mind. That’s what our family does … we’re all about opening doors. And for you, I think that remembering would be the first step to that.” She smiled over at James. “You’re great at remembering, aren’t you, James?”
He chuckled, weaving.
“Well, I think maybe I’m not ready to be part of a family yet,” Franklin said uncomfortably. “I kind of like being on my own right now.” He didn’t admit to missing having a woman live with him. That he missed Jess.
“You should still come upstairs and visit my family sometime. I’d be happy to introduce you.” She started pulling handfuls of clothing out of her basket and shoving them into the front of her washer. “I think you’d like them. I’m sure you’d fit right in.”
“Yeah, maybe sometime,” Franklin said, but he found himself becoming less interested in Reyna by the moment, regardless of her motherly gentleness toward the autistic man. He watched her feed more clothes into her machine. So far everything she had put in was black. In fact, it looked like most of the items in her basket were the same type of long black garment. He gestured toward the next batch she pulled out into her arms. “What are those—robes?”
Reyna paused to look down at the black bundle she held against her chest and giggled, as she had giggled that other day in her doorway. “Yeah. We use them for parties.”
“Halloween parties?”
“Something like that.”
“Okay.” Halloween was several more months away. Franklin remembered the sounds he had heard Saturday night, that he had taken for a party. Now he wasn’t so sure. Those voices he had heard speaking or singing in unison … had that been in the “language of the Naacal people,” too?
“Wonderful things are going to happen very soon, Franklin,” Reyna told him. “You really should be a part of it, directly. Alone we’re just like ants, but together we can make a difference that will change things forever. We’re all going to die someday anyway, so why not do something of gran importancia that’ll have an effect on everything—something that we could never accomplish by ourselves? Because by ourselves we’re nothing. Right, James?”
“Right, we’re nothing.” He clapped his hands rapidly, then went back to flapping them.
Franklin started edging toward the doorway. “I hear ya—it’s good to have something to believe in. Well, got some things to take care of while my clothes wash, Reyna. Nice to meet you, James.”
“Don’t be a stranger, Franklin,” Reyna said, cocking her head seductively. “Please come and see me sometime, will you?”
“Sure, I’d like that. See ya around.” He escaped into the little hallway that took him to the stairs up to the ground floor. To himself he muttered, “Crazy damn born-agains.”
Sometimes he found copies of The Watchtower left on the laundry room’s folding tables or pinned to the cork bulletin board, but he figured Reyna and her family were into something different from that. Whatever it was, he didn’t want to know. Despite his efforts as a younger man to learn what it was his own parents had been involved in, lately the more gauzy scraps he thought he remembered of his boyhood the less he wanted to remember.
He wondered how Reyna had sniffed those traces in him. Was she sensitive to some nervous vibration he didn’t even realize he generated?
He sat in his apartment channel-surfing and almost dozing off. When a half hour had elapsed he went back downstairs to switch his clothing to the dryers for an hour. He dreaded finding Reyna and James still there, but they weren’t. Their own machines were st
ill running. He hoped to get his business done and dash out of there again before they returned. However easy on the eyes Reyna was, he had had enough of her talk of family and changing the world.
As he pulled his damp load out of the second machine he had filled, he found an item among his clothing that he had not put in there himself. Slick, black, and heavy as the flayed skin of some sea creature, he recognized it as one of the hooded black robes that he had watched Reyna load into her own machine. He knew its presence was no accident. He understood she had sneaked it into his machine as a playful gesture of invitation.
“Fuck that,” Franklin said, and he tossed the robe into one of her two empty, waiting baskets before he left the basement.
A loud scraping sound caused Franklin to jolt up straight on the sofa, to the realization he had fallen asleep waiting for his clothes to finish in the dryers three floors below him. The TV, his only constant companion, was playing a nature program. A chambered nautilus, spiraled like a symbol for infinity, hovered above the carcass of a lobster, upon which it was feeding. The TV’s soft murmur explained that a nautilus could have up to ninety tentacles.
Maybe the narration had gotten into and influenced his sleeping mind, because he had been dreaming that his mother was showing him pictures in a great old book spread open in her lap. Though her face and hands were crisped charcoal black, and only smoldering wisps of hair remained on her peeling head, her eyes were undamaged and shone at him both dark and bright at once. She smiled with motherly gentleness at the five-year-old Franklin and pointed to an illustration of a seated creature or entity with a bulbous head bearing three eyes on either side, and many long tentacles where a nose and mouth would be in a human. His mother had been saying to him, “The more voices that sing together, the wider the doors will open. You have to learn to sing with us, baby. Soon you’ll be singing, too.”