The History of Soul 2065

by Barbara Krasnoff

  “Don’t stop,” said Carlos. “Be mad. Be really mad.”

  “But what should I do?” Ben asked tearfully. “She’s making all that smoke, and she’s going to hurt my mama and papa. And everybody else! What should I do?”

  “What do you do when you get really, really mad?” Carlos asked him. “What did you do when Eliot pushed you off the swing and made you skin your knee? You told me all about it. Did you just stand there and cry?”

  “I yelled,” Ben said.

  “You yelled really, really loud.”

  Ben took a deep breath. “Stop!” he shrieked. “You stop! You’re mean and I hate you, and they hate you, and we all hate you!”

  Azazel stopped looking amused. Small flames licked her skin while the darkness seethed and rolled around her. “Idiots!” she cried out. “You who are dead and who shall soon be dead, do you think to challenge us and win?”

  Ben stared at the huge, dark, awful thing that threatened his parents and his world.

  “It is up to you, child,” said his Grandmama. “We’re all here. We’re your family. We won’t leave you. Ever.”

  Carlos leaned over, and lightly kissed Ben’s forehead. “I love you,” he said. “Whatever happens, I always will. Now go ahead—yell the house down.” He smiled.

  Ben smiled back at Carlos, and at his Grandmama. He squeezed his eyes shut, clenched his hands into fists, took a deep breath, lifted his head and screamed.

  It was the high, piercing wail of a furious young child—a child who had never before experienced true injustice. His shrill cry filled the room and was amplified by the voices of the past and future souls who surrounded him, those who had and would witness the hate that would be used against them and others. His voice and theirs joined into creating a tapestry of sound that flowed over and into the dark reality that Azazel had been building—and suddenly there was a tiny crack, a thin spill of sunlight within the roiling gloom.

  Azazel growled and extended her arms further. She opened her mouth and began to howl, a frightening sound like a cage full of angry dogs. For a moment, Ben hesitated. The crack began to close.

  “Louder!” Grandmama Sophia urged. “Hurry, child!”

  Ben squeezed his eyes tightly shut, turned his face up to the ceiling and to the sky above that, and screamed, louder and higher, until his body burned and he was aware of nothing but his own voice, filling his room and his universe.

  Somewhere in his head, Ben watched as the crack widened, pushing a steadily brighter stream of light through Azazel’s carefully built reality. There was a shattering crash and the darkness split apart with an intense, blinding flash.

  And then, just as suddenly, everything was quiet. Ben breathed deeply, tears streaming down his face. He gulped.

  “Shh, kindele,” said Grandmama Sophia quietly. “Be still. All is well.”

  “Hush, querido,” Carlos whispered, stroking his hair gently. “You did it. I knew you could. Everything will be fine now.”

  Ben, shaken and still a little tearful, took a slow, careful breath. “My head hurts,” he complained.

  The boy opened his eyes and looked around. His room was there again, the way it always was, the walls all back in place. The streetlights shone through the window. His nightlight glowed in its place next to the door.

  But his Grandmama, Carlos, all the people had who been there, were gone.

  “Where did you go?” Ben said, looking around.

  “I’m right here.”

  Azazel still stood in the center of his room. She had regained her long hair, tuxedo and red shoes, and was looking at herself critically in a small mirror, arranging her hair and pouting her lips.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “This look is a little old-fashioned, after all. Perhaps next time, Marilyn Monroe with a touch of Tony Curtis thrown in?”

  She threw the mirror away and stared coldly at Ben.

  “You realize,” she said, “that this doesn’t change things. Not really. Humanity will continue to kill its own kind continually, stupidly and unnecessarily—just not as quickly. And as far as you’re concerned, remember, there will be a price to pay. There always is.”

  Ben looked back at her, unafraid. “Go away,” he said. “This is my room.”

  Azazel grinned. “No hard feelings. See you later, alligator,” she said. And then, she was gone as well.

  The boy sat on his bed and pulled his stuffed panda to him. He was sorry that his Grandmama Sophia and his friend Carlos had to go away. He wondered who the little girl was who had spoken up and if they could have played together if she stayed. And he felt tired and a little strange, as though he were a glass of water that somebody had drank all up.

  “Benjamin Solomon, what are you doing awake at this time of night?” It was his mama’s voice, the tone she used when she suspected he was thinking of doing something she didn’t approve of. She had opened the door; the light from the hallway outside spilled into his room.

  “Get back into bed, young man,” she said sternly. Ben climbed back under his covers while she walked over, tucked him in and then sat next to him on the bed. She reached out and stroked his head.

  “Are you still frightened?” his mama asked gently.

  “No,” he said. “You know what, mama?”

  “What, mein Kind?”

  Ben smiled. “The numbers really are magic.”

  For a moment, her hand on his head was still. Then she pulled him to her and rocked him gently, back and forth. “For you, yes, they are magic,” she whispered. “Just for you, my baby.”

  Ben closed his eyes and let her carry him to dreams of an enchanted future.

  Rosemary, That’s For Remembrance

  A story of Lydia Jacobson, Isabeau’s housemate

  1981

  I remember.

  When I was a girl, I loved going to the beauty shop. It had light blue walls, I think, and a radio. I sat under the dryer wearing a pink smock, reading the latest issue of Vogue, and listening to…what was her name?…to one of my friends talking about her latest boyfriend. It was nice.

  Kay’s is nice, too. The woman in charge comes to greet us; she has bright yellow hair and thick glasses and she says hello to me, not just to the woman who brought me (should I know her?) the way a lot of people do. And she wears a nametag on her pink smock so that I always know her name; it says “KAY” with tiny purple flowers entwined around it.

  Even though I’ve only lived in this neighborhood for…well, for a few years (I remember that I grew up in Williamsburg and brought up my children in Canarsie; I remember those years very well), Kay’s looks like all the beauty shops I ever knew. Once, I remember, I went to a new one, and it had deafening music and strange machines and tall boys talking loud and winking at the others when they thought I didn’t see. (I know I’m old. I can’t help it. They’ll be old one day too, and why don’t they understand that?)

  Kay smiles at me, takes my coat and my pocketbook, and helps me sit down in one of the chairs while the woman who brought me goes and sits in front of the salon and starts reading a magazine.

  “And how are you today?” Kay says while she puts a towel around my neck and then covers me with a flowery cape to protect my clothes. I’m fine, I say, although we both know I’m not fine at all. I’m disappearing. Bit by bit.

  I don’t know why and neither do they. The doctors, I mean. Tests are inconclusive. (You see? I can understand these things; I’ve got a Masters in History, after all.) They say it past me, to the woman who lives with me, who says she’s my friend Isabeau. (I remember an Isabeau, but she’s young and slim and has two lovely children, not elderly and sad like this woman.) But I listen. And sometimes I remember.

  Kay chats to me while she dampens my hair and takes out her scissors. I had beautiful hair (I have photos), thick and brown. Jack used to run his hands through it and beg me not to cut it, although long hair wasn’t the fashion and I really looked better with short. Now, I look in the mirror and it’s all dull gray and I c
an see parts of my scalp showing through; it makes me want to cry, more than the wrinkles and the pieces of my life that have disappeared.

  I start to get up, to get away from the mirror, but the moment I start to move Kay swings the chair around so I’m looking instead at the TV set that’s been set up high on the back wall. “There,” she says. “You don’t mind facing the wall, do you? It’s so much easier for me.” She chatters on, about her friend’s daughter who is pregnant and miserable; about how the weather has been unseasonably icy and why do they call it global warming when things are getting colder?

  Beneath the TV set, a young Asian girl with a sour expression works on the nails of an old woman with bright orange hair (am I that old? Surely I’m not that old) and nods, and says we’ve ruined the world and that one day we’ll wake up and all the oxygen will have disappeared from the earth. She says it with satisfaction.

  On the TV, a man walks around the streets of a foreign country (because nobody else is speaking English), and stops in a marketplace and talks to a man who is frying foods in a little booth, and tries some of the foods, although it looks extremely unappetizing. (Let Julie eat what she wants, I told Jack when he tried to make our daughter eat her vegetables, and what does she look like again?)

  “There you are!” says Pat (no, not Pat, that was the woman who cut my hair when I was a girl, this is Kay, it says so on her name tag). “Ready for the dryer?”

  Kay puts a pillow on the chair so I can sit comfortably and settles me in. She puts a magazine on my lap and brings over a small can of ginger ale, placing it on a table next to the chair. “There,” she says. “We like to make our ladies comfortable. Ready?”

  I nod, and look up at her. She takes her glasses off and smiles, and wait, something is wrong—her eyes are striped, completely striped through the pupils and the iris and whites, all green and silver. I want to call out, to warn somebody, but I don’t know who here will help me and then she pulls the dryer over my head down like a giant upside-down cup and turns it on.

  Something hums and grabs my head and my brain and where am

  I smell morning and hear eggs frying and there is sunlight coming through the gauze kitchen curtains Julie! it’s a school day young lady do you know what time time time is on our side and her eyes are getting cold it’s cold outside please stop blowing bubbles in your milk round like a hairdryer yes honey your tie is on the hanger does he still love love me do don’t tease the bye baby bunting have a good day at the office, dear, and don’t forget and there he goes and she goes and they go and it’s quiet and oh the baby’s crying but what is that sound and where did everyone go and what was I going it’s all going it’s all

  “There now,” a voice says. “That didn’t hurt a bit, did it?”

  There’s a woman standing over me wearing a smock with flowers and a tag. I suppose it’s a name tag, but I can’t read it, it’s just squiggles. I’m in a…a…someplace with a lot of women and it looks nice, but something is missing.

  The woman smiles at me and bends down. “It’s all right,” she whispers, and her eyes are pretty stripes and somewhere under her voice is something, a hissing or a crackle. I can’t tell what it is or what she is. “I can’t,” I tell her. If I could only. But. “I just can’t. They’re missing.”

  “Don’t worry,” she says. “We’ve got them. We’ve collected them from you and many like you, and we’ll keep them safe long after you and yours are gone.” She puts on a pair of glasses and raises her voice. “Now, let’s go back to the chair and I’ll comb you out.”

  She helps me up and takes me to a chair. I sit, and look at the old woman in the mirror, and wonder who she is.

  Stoop Ladies

  A story of Julie Jacobson, Lydia’s daughter

  1983

  This is the way the world ends, Julie reads. Not with a bang but a whimper. She lifts her eyes from T.S. Eliot’s poem to a puffed-up pigeon grooming itself on the windowsill. “That’s me,” she tells the pigeon. “They fired me, and all I could do was whimper.” A typical Brooklyn bird, it doesn’t seem particularly interested.

  A high cackle bounces into the room from across the street. The pigeon flaps anxiously away while Julie peers outside.

  The ladies have gathered.

  Every summer evening, after the dishes are done and their men placed safely in front of the television set, they sit in the small yard next to the stoop: some on folding chairs and others on the concrete steps. The youngest in her 50s, the oldest past 80, they watch the passersby and talk of schools and children, of changes in the neighborhood, of the new theater on the corner and the cops who ticket double-parked cars.

  On her walk home from the subway every evening, Julie usually nods at the ladies as she goes home to chicken-and-rice or a pizza from the restaurant on the corner. Although they nod back, and even wave their hands in invitation, she typically just waves back as she climbs the steps to her front door. Only once or twice has she felt comfortable joining the crowd of elderly, gossiping women. It’s bad enough, she tells herself, that she has to work so hard to be accepted by the beautiful, thin executives at her office, or the well-dressed middle-aged men at the bars (who look past her without even focusing). She’s not going to associate herself with a group of obvious losers, blue-haired women past their prime. That would be admitting defeat. Admitting that her life is over, after never having happened.

  Although, Julie sometimes concedes to herself, the few times she let the voices draw her from her solitude, the ladies made her welcome. And it was pleasant, standing around with people who talked to her as if she was important, and asked for her sympathy and advice on stolen cars, misbehaving computers, children going astray….

  Her beeper buzzes at her; she pulls it quickly from her belt and checks the message. No luck so far, it reads. Will try to talk to Sam. Stay cool. Ginnie.

  She reaches for the phone and dials Isabeau, whom her mom had always called “my extra-special friend,” and who always lent a sympathetic ear when Julie had a problem. When Julie’s father left, Isabeau persuaded her mom, who had no idea how to do things like hire a mechanic or write a check (never mind handle a divorce), to leave the large, lonely house and move in with her and her two kids. And when Julie’s mom was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, it was Isabeau who helped make those last couple of years as easy as possible.

  Isabeau’s phone rings several times, and then the answering machine clicks on. The hell with it. Julie hangs up, turns on the TV, and flips through the channels for a few moments, settling for a sitcom in which a man tries to avoid an oversexed, overweight, badly dressed secretary. But the chatter from outside pushes past the canned laughter and demands her attention.

  Julie sighs, leaves the bedroom and goes into her tiny kitchen. I’ll make myself a snack, she tells herself, but halfway through a lettuce and tomato sandwich she changes her mind, pulls the half-full garbage bag out of its plastic can, ties the ends, and takes it out her front door and down the steps.

  On the bottom landing she passes Mrs. Golini’s door. Living one on top of the other, both she and her landlady have maintained a respectful distance. They smile hello and exchange holiday gifts at Christmas and ignore each other’s existence the rest of the year.

  Outside, a slight breeze eases the summer humidity. Julie drops her garbage in one of the cans at the side of the stairs and glances surreptitiously across the street. Six of the ladies are out tonight. Julie glances up at her windows, where the blue light of the television reflects off her shades. The loneliness of the evening is nearly overwhelming. Slowly, almost without thinking, Julie turns her back on her building and crosses the street. “Hi,” she says tentatively.

  The women smile at her. “We were wondering when you’d come over again,” says Mrs. O’Neill, sitting back in her wheelchair. The wheelchair is more for convenience than necessity; after breaking her hip two years ago, she decided that it was more comfortable than her folding chair and told the hospital authorities it had be
en stolen. As usual, she wears an old, threadbare pink sweater over a long, flowered housedress; her chubby bare feet are pushed into a worn pair of slippers.

  “We even took penny bets on it,” grins Jackie, a part-time beautician who works in the hair salon around the corner. She rests one hip against the railing, a cigarette dangling loosely from her wide, sardonic mouth. “I won.”

  Julie smiles back. The night is pleasant and cool; a few cicadas vibrate in a neighboring tree.

  “Come sit,” says one of the women, a thin, dry lady named Norma, patting the step beside her.

  Julie shakes her head. “That’s okay,” she says. “I prefer to stand.”

  Mary—a pleasant bleached blonde who can sometimes be heard yelling down the block for her teenaged son—nods at her. She is, as usual, sitting next to Mrs. O’Neill on a small cloth director’s chair. “How are you, Julie?” she asks in a voice tinged with the Irish accents of her childhood.

  Julie shrugs. “Fine,” she says. In her loose green tee shirt, sweat pants, and old sneakers, she feels a little underdressed next to Mary’s careful polyester fashion.

  “I was sorry to hear about your mother,” said Mary. “We said hi a few times when she was visiting. She was a nice lady.”

  “Thanks,” Julie says, a bit tersely. She still hasn’t figured out how she feels about her mother’s death—sad because her mom is gone, or relieved because the woman who finally died was, in the end, no longer her mother.

  “I understand you’re looking for a new job. Have you found one yet?” asks Mrs. O’Neill, shooting a quick look at Mary. Surprised, Julie starts to ask how she knows, but doesn’t get the chance.

  “Why is she looking for a job?” demands another woman whom Julie doesn’t know, a withered form in a bright pink jogging suit who sits comfortably crocheting in an old blue folding chair.