When Mark saw me, he said, “Look!”
James, Matthew, and Luke turned, already drunk, repeating, “The prodigal son has returned,” in different, whining pitches. We laughed together. One of the bottles was almost finished, the other was half finished, and only the four of them were in the house. I sat down, and we all began repeating, “Pass the whiskey, pass the whiskey.” Matt got up to vomit in the bathroom. The game was to not let the whiskey touch the table. “Pass the whiskey, pass the whiskey.” Luke created an early 2000s hip-hop playlist, and the living room was filled with the voices of black men, again. For twenty minutes (the second bottle was finished) we all rapped the words—them omitting nigger because I was there. But every nigger they omitted built the tension in the living room (the first bottle was finished), until I heard Matt screaming, “Nigger! Nigger!” in the kitchen.
I rounded the corner as Mark said, “What are you doing?”
Matt turned to me and said, “I’m not calling him a nigger. I’m not even using the word nigger.”
“So what are you doing?” I asked.
“I am saying niggar with an a. You know. Like something that is worthless.” But Matt had not inflected the e any differently than the a. He smiled at me and put his head through the Sheetrock next to their bathroom. His nose was cut and bleeding. Mark was speechless. I realized that what Matt had meant to say was niggardly, though the word meant cheap, not worthless.
“Where are you going, bro?”
If I could have laughed along with them—felt detached enough from the historical concept of a nigger, or the disgust I felt when it came from a white man’s mouth—I would have. We had been approaching this crossroads since we engaged in a friendship, and the end was not as hurtful as it was embarrassing. I had not seen it coming. I relegated us to minor actors in a greater tribal play, and continued along, crossing Pearl Street to University Place, where the cold began to creep beneath my jacket. I crossed the campus green until the road reached a fork. There was a statue of our school’s founder, Ira Allen, at the crossroads. It was not the first memorial to stand on that patch of the green. Before Allen, there had been the Marquis de Lafayette, whose name is used on many streets in the United States of America, notably in lower Manhattan. I had traversed it last December. The statue was erected in 1883 alongside renovations to the Old Mill (High Victorian Gothic) that remade the face of the old Old Mill (Federal). Four years after the school erected the statue that still stood at this crossroads, McKim, Meade & White had finished constructing the Ira Allen Chapel (Colonial Revival), the building I had been called to in November. As I stared up, the figure reminded me of Teddy Roosevelt’s monument outside the Museum of Natural History, though the two men were memorialized in different positions, at different years of age. The statue was erected in 1925, during Prohibition, and in February of that year, it was defaced.
It was as if a mist covered the present. All that came before informs us, and is then obscured by us. I stepped off the base of the statue and walked backward. Above Allen’s head, I could see the frames of all the buildings on campus: Federal, Greek Revival, Italianate Revival, High Victorian, Richardsonian Romanesque, Queen Anne Revival, Victorian Eclectic, Neoclassical Revival, Colonial Revival, Art Deco, International, Brutalist, Postmodern. They appeared as one building in my mind, and as I was drawn back to the figure of Ira Allen, a mist was coming from his chest. A man pushed out of his sternum and walked toward the Living and Learning Complex, which linked Central to the athletic campus. I followed, turning right with him, past the murals in remembrance of the U.S. military’s presence in El Salvador, September 11, and Earth Day. He walked south, crossing the amphitheater, then the outdoor basketball courts, to the gym, where lights were still on though it was the dead of night. I continued to follow as he broke into a sprint. I was running, too. Our footsteps echoed against the buildings. The clack of his dress shoes seemed to repeat the thud of my sneakers. He stopped behind a blue Chevrolet Impala, pulled something out of his pocket, and went around the other side of the car. I could see letters appearing on the windshield but could not make out the words. When I shuffled around the automobile, the man in the gray suit was no longer there. I bent down and read his handwriting—“We wear the mask that ——— and lies.” The red words and dash were suspended in the dark. I remembered the verse from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” (1896). Dunbar’s name was used to replace the “M” school in Washington, D.C., in 1916. It was where, seven years prior, Jean Toomer had become conscious of his blackness. I began to recite the poem.
“We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes, —
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile . . .”
I thought: “To grin is a red herring that distracts you from a lie. To lie is a red herring that distracts you from the truth.” Before I could dissect the meaning of the omission of “grins,” I had stopped moving again. There was no unified thing he was showing me, no reason I should be obsessing over his actions, so I looked around the parking lot, dark and empty, then continued behind Patrick Gymnasium and Gutterson Arena, toward my dorm room. I opened 321, and papers wrapped around my ankles. I laid my head to rest, waking to the toothbrush on my desk, which I’d used twenty times all semester. I decided to clean my teeth.
There was a copy of the school’s newspaper on the bathroom sink. The new provost had denied the student body the right to see course evaluations. I remembered the very first issue of this volume, number 127, where the president of the student government sat smiling, defying the institution’s right to hide reviews of teachers, then the third issue, where the congress slandered his name for this executive action. On page 6 there was an article about the Royall Tyler Theatre hosting Harry Potter, the play. The three witches of Macbeth appeared in my head. They were singing around a cauldron with black-faced dancers, peering into their future and our past. My mental associations no longer weighed me down, so I continued reading without stopping to feel. The pills were beginning to suppress the guilt I needed to interpret my emotions. On page 8 there was a piece about an amusing end-of-semester ritual that students had invented in the ’90s, next to a small opinion piece entitled “Call a Plumber, My Wiki Is Leaking.” The two articles were separated by one black line. I read both stories, without regard for their boundaries.
“Whether you bike, run, | The oil leak in the Gulf | long board, rollerblade, skip, dance or | Coast of the United States may | hop, the Naked Bike Ride allows you | not in fact be the largest and | to express yourself in one of the most | most destructive leak that we | liberating ways possible. | have seen this year.” The point was not to try to perceive reality as it was presented, but all at once, without the burden of history. I went back to the dorm room and found a box of garbage bags on my former roommate’s desk. I put the last three pills in one of them, before adding the phone that Rick had given me. I saw the wastebasket in the corner and pulled my notebook from it. The pieces of my novel were too short and too disconnected to be considered chapters. Some of the sentences were crossed out and written over. The six entries and the Prologue were all right, but the work needed something else, a narrator outside of me, maybe, a theme to fill out the sketches. I picked up the blue pen on my desk, then put both pen and notebook in the garbage bag, before leaving all of the trash beside the welcome mat. At the base of the stairway, I saw groups of students huddled around tables in the atrium. Some of them were studying. I walked in their direction, headed toward the entrance.
The sunlight shone from outside, so I closed my eyes and imagined Melody there. She was waiting now. A distance separated us, though we were not far apart. I tried to hold on to the image but the vision was passing. I raised my eyelids.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank my parents, Wynton, Candace, and Greg. I would like to thank my sib
lings, Wynton, Jasper, Sydney, Cameron, and Oni. I would like to thank all the Tatums, Stanleys, Marsalises, and Ferdinands, wherever you are. Without you this work would not have been possible. I would like to thank my closest friends, and, Shhh . . .
I would also like to acknowledge everyone at Catapult for making this book a tangible object and supporting it. A special thanks to Zachary Lazar, who helped turn my early effort into a contiguous novel. Finally, I would like to thank my editor, Pat Strachan, for turning that contiguous novel into As Lie Is to Grin.
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