Saint X (ARC)

by Alexis Schaitkin

  How did I pick Saint X? Easy. I knew not a soul there and not a soul knew me. I had two suitcases and Sara. She was four months old, a scrawny babe with a head of dewy curls and an aroma like boiling milk turning to caramel. I wore the prettiest thing I owned, my floral dress and ivory pumps. The pumps had cut up my feet before Saint Kitts was even out of view, but so what? They would heal somewhere else, and that was all that mattered. I was seventeen.

  When we debarked at Bendy Harbour, a gentleman in a linen suit offered to help me with my luggage. When he asked my name, I told him I was Agatha Lycott, which wasn’t true. All my life I had been Agatha Hodge, but over my dead body would I be her here, too. Lycott was the surname of a girl in the form above me at school. I always thought it elegant, the sort of name that, of course, belongs to somebody else. From that day forward it was mine and, above all, Sara’s. To anyone who asked, I told the story I had dreamed up awake and alone and growing bigger in the dark in my father’s house, about how my husband, a government minister, had died in a tragic automobile accident just weeks before our daughter’s birth. To make the story more convincing I told everyone I was twenty-four, though I was such a small thing I could more easily have passed for twelve.

  But this one’s cousin on Saint Kitts knew that one’s friend on Saint X, and so on. I had been on the island less than a month the first time I told my story and was met with suspicion rather than compassion. The rumors trailed me even here, to this sand-and-rock speck where they make their curry with vulgar quantities of allspice and where not even the teachers speak properly.

  You can never start over. They will not permit it, neither the ones who shun you nor the ones who are kind to you so they may lord their kindness over you. In the end they are all after the same thing, all so very curious to know the truth about the origins of the daughter of that skinny little Kittitian sket. I will not give them the satisfaction, though the truth would make them beg for my forgiveness. I will carry the secret of Sara’s paternity to my grave.

  Before Sara was born, I imagined that my love for my child would be a sweet blooming inside of me. I was desperate to have someone to love this way, desperate for love to swoop in and soften my sharp edges. But there are other kinds of love. What I got instead was a love that filled and terrified me, a love I knew as intimately as my own body; it was my mother’s love for me, a thing I never, ever wanted.

  When Sara told me she was pregnant, I knew I had been naïve to think a new name would be enough to put an end to the passing down of this broken mother’s love. I never should have let her leave the house so angry that day, the day she brought Clive Richardson home. “Wait! Don’t go! Sara, I love you. Sara, forgive me. Sara, my child.”

  At night, I plead into the darkness, hoping with the force of my love to undo the past so she may begin again.

  But answer me this: If I’m such a sket, then why have I been lonely every day of my life?

  SNOW

  AFTER THEY FOUND THE GIRL, Clive became untouchable. When he was released from prison he tried to return to his life, but Don and Des closed ranks. Even Arthur wouldn’t touch him. He couldn’t find work, not cutting grass, not even scrubbing toilets at Papa Mango’s. He and Edwin kept their distance from one another. As far as he knew, Edwin had also been shut out of polite society, but it was different for him. He hadn’t been to prison, for one thing. He didn’t have a family to support, for another.

  For weeks after his release, Clive went to Sara’s house and begged to see his son. But Agatha wouldn’t let him past the front door. Finally, one day, he waited down the road until he saw Agatha go out. Then he went up the front walkway. “Please, Sara! Let me talk to you!” he shouted as he pounded on the door. He didn’t care who saw.

  The door swung open. “Hush,” Sara scolded. “You’ll wake him.”

  He told her everything he had planned during his time in Her Majesty’s Prison. He was sorry. He would do whatever it took to make it up to her. He would quit drinking and smoking. He had messed up and he knew it, but he would fix it.

  “And what kind of mum would I be if I let you into my boy’s life after this mess?”

  “But I’m innocent! I swear it! Don’t you believe me, Sara?”

  “It doesn’t matter what you are,” she snapped. “Innocent, guilty, can’t you see? It’s all spoiled.”

  “I know it must seem that way right now. But with time, maybe—”

  She shook her head. She had her hand on the door, ready to close it.

  “Please,” he begged.

  She paused. She smiled a small, sad smile. “You know, I think you’re the only person who was ever really sweet to me,” she said. Then she closed the door.

  GROWING UP, Clive had known more than a few people who had returned to the island from abroad, and it was from them, long before he ever thought their stories would be relevant to his own life, that he learned what it meant to leave home. Almost all of these people had gone either to New York or London, though he knew a few who’d gone elsewhere—to Glasgow, Birmingham, Toronto, Miami. A few years before he left, a boy who’d been three forms above him at Everett Lyle Secondary flew off to Houston, but last Clive heard he, too, had washed up in New York.

  For most of his childhood, New York and London were roughly interchangeable to Clive, big, gleaming cities, more Dominicans and Haitians in New York, more Jamaicans in London. But when Keithley returned from London with his wife and the baby boy who was destined to die on the soccer pitch behind Horatio Byrd, he began to understand that the people who returned from New York and those who returned from London had changed in distinct ways. Though Keithley had left home determined never to return, he appeared relieved to be back, and this seemed the case for many people returned from London. It was true they had failed to do what they had set out to do, to build a big life away. But in London it had become plain that this plan was naïve and misguided. The city had taught them that the big life was nothing but the delusion of a person from nowhere who didn’t know any better. They rarely spoke of their time away.

  The New Yorkers, too, appeared relieved to be home. New York, like London, had been drab and crowded and unforgiving, and the winters were colder and the summers hotter and more humid than in London. But their relief was thin, a skin covering the flesh of longing. They spoke of New York constantly, as one turns over a riddle one has not managed to solve. They seemed convinced they had missed the big life by inches. It had been there, set plainly before them, but some narrowness of vision had prevented them from grasping it. Now New York was over. They had not grasped it and they could not figure out why.

  Clive knew he was not like these men. He did not want to leave home. New York had been Edwin’s dream, never his. He arrived with no grand plans, no conviction that in New York the world would finally recognize his special deservingness. He hoped only that his time away might make it possible, someday, to go home and reclaim the only life he’d ever wanted, a quiet existence with Sara and his son. Mates and a drink after work. Picnics and cricket in the sand at Little Beach on the weekends. Perhaps another child eventually, a daughter, chubby like him. People did not forget, but they might decide, eventually, that they no longer cared.

  Most of the people he knew who had gone to New York had settled in the Bronx, but he did not want to run into people from home. He chose Flatbush because it was the largest Caribbean neighborhood in the city; a place, he hoped, he could get lost in. He found a room in an apartment on Farragut Road, in a building whose dim hallways smelled of mice. The apartment had four small bedrooms, each shared by two men, and a common space with a kitchenette against one wall. When he moved in, a bunch of rotting bananas atop the fridge cast off a sickly-sweet smell. In the bathroom, toothbrushes balanced precariously on the rim of the sink, which was lacquered with a pale blue chalk of hardened toothpaste; the floor around the toilet was littered with cardboard tubes. He could hardly believe this filthy apartment was New York, and he was thankful that it was he, not Ed
win, who was here to see it.

  The unwritten rule of the apartment was that the men pretended not to see one another. In such close quarters, it was the only way to keep the peace. They took wordless turns in the bathroom, slept and woke and pretended not to overhear one another’s phone calls home.

  Only two of them disrupted this dreary concord. The first was Ousseini, Ouss for short, the youngest among them at twenty-two and the only one not from the Caribbean. He was short and sprightly, with the simultaneously curious and sleepy countenance of a child. On Clive’s first night in the apartment, as he unpacked his suitcase in his bedroom, Ouss stood in the doorway in his mesh shorts and undershirt, elbow against the doorjamb, and confessed he’d been socially and sexually deprived ever since he arrived in Brooklyn from Burkina Faso three years before.

  “I desire a wife with such ardor I can think of nothing else.”

  Clive was hot and tired and wanted only to lie down on his thin mattress and sleep. On the opposite side of the room his roommate Charles was flipping through a sports magazine, diligently ignoring Ouss and eyeing Clive every so often with a glint of warning.

  “You’re young,” Clive said succinctly.

  Ouss shook his head sadly. “This is what I thought, but it was an error. I have five brothers in Ouaga, and all have children. When they were marrying I thought they were foolish to start families. I thought I was so smart to remain free to pursue my dreams. Now I fear I am too late. I want a woman who will be my partner. I want to start a business. But what woman in New York will love me? We need women. All of us here. You, too, Charles!” Charles kept his eyes on his magazine. “You see! You see! We are becoming dysfunctional. To live in this world of solitary men is not natural.”

  Ouss talked on and on and Clive, not wanting to be rude, nodded politely and offered small words of comfort. Later, he understood that this had been his critical mistake. The other men ignored Ouss absolutely. This was how Clive became the recipient of Ouss’s laments, a position he found somewhat irritating, though ultimately not as disagreeable as he supposed he should, because, as Ouss had said, theirs was a solitary existence, and it was nice to have company.

  Then there was Sachin, as surly as Ouss was talkative and romantic. Sachin left his briefs on the bathroom floor, his old food in the fridge, was often drunk and prone to picking arguments. (Those were his bananas rotting atop the fridge when Clive moved in.) He took an immediate dislike to Clive, who found himself on the receiving end of much of the man’s vitriol. “It’s not personal,” Ouss assured him. “He possesses a lot of anger. He had a wife and daughter back in Trinidad who died in an accident after he left. I think he should go home and begin again, but he’s afraid. Jean-François says he speaks to them in his sleep.”

  In New York, with these men, he became Clive again, as he hadn’t been since Edwin christened him in the schoolyard at Horatio Byrd Primary. Gogo. That name, that world, that life. At times it seemed to him like one of the stories his mother used to tell him, vivid and vaporous as a dream.

  NEW YORK surprised him. He expected a rough, gritty place, and while this vision was not exactly inaccurate, there were things it failed to capture. The pleasure of a nine P.M. sunset in June. In spring, in the parks, the quiet grace of what seemed like all the people in the world spread across the lawns. He had expected a place where there were a million things to see, but also where what you saw was what you got. Instead, New York seemed to tremble with the unseen. Subway tunnels whooshed people through the earth, the warm steam rising from street grates the only sign of this subterranean world. He had heard that the layers of the city went down ten meters, that below the city of today were buried houses, streets, and cemeteries, and he could sense this past beneath his feet. Walking at night, he sometimes feared someone would grab his elbow, and he would whip around to find himself staring into the eyes of his dead father.

  IT TOOK him three months to get his hack license. He submitted the dozens of pages of paperwork for the application. He got a medical exam from a Dr. Khutsishvili in Midwood. He took defensive driving at Safe Taxi Academy and sat for the six-hour exam: What landmark is located at the intersection of 33rd Street and 5th Avenue? Which of the following streets runs parallel to Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard? How many roads cross Central Park, and where are the transverses located? When he found out he had passed, the first thing he did was call Sara.

  “I’ll be making decent money,” he told her happily. “I’ll be wiring some home to you and my gran as soon as I can.”

  “My mum needs new tires for her car,” she said bluntly.

  “Your mum?”

  “Yes, she needs new tires for the car I use to take your son to the doctor and to do the shopping. Although you cannot see us, Clive, we are living every day down here, and every day has its expenses.”

  He took a deep breath in. “Can I speak to him?”

  She sighed. “It would only confuse him.”

  For a moment neither of them spoke.

  “Clive?”

  “Yes?”

  “Be careful on those roads.”

  HE LEASED a night shift because he heard it was more profitable.

  “Last chance to change your mind,” said the manager at the fleet garage, a middle-aged man named Larry in an old, beat-up Mets cap calcified by sweat and grime, before he took the money for Clive’s first night’s lease.

  “You’ll never see him without that filthy thing,” the driver behind Clive in line said, gesturing at the hat.

  “Don’t even take it off to screw my wife,” Larry said proudly.

  Clive handed him the money.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Larry said with a smile. “I’ve got hacks getting mugged on the regular. Half these guys have diabetes, and you can say sayonara to your kidneys unless you want to piss in a bottle all night.”

  In the months that followed, Clive found that the things Larry said were true. It was the most punishing work he’d ever done. Customers ran off without paying. He was regularly accused of taking a slow route on purpose. (How was it that these people, these New Yorkers, didn’t know he made less, not more, the longer each fare took?) Some nights, his first fare found him stuck in gridlock on the FDR bound for JFK, where he waited another hour in the holding area for his next fare, and when this happened he knew the best he would be able to do on his shift was to break even, and he would spend the next ten hours laboring simply not to lose money, after which, bone-tired on the bus home, he might see a white woman seated next to him clutch her handbag and smile kindly at him; at first he was perplexed by this sequence of behaviors, but he came to understand that these women did not trust him, but they also did not want to appear distrustful.

  In spite of all this, the work also had its pleasures. The drivers inhabited a secret shared world. He liked to linger after his shift in the garage, where men played checkers and polished off takeaway containers of curry and jollof rice in the break room, retreated into the prayer room with its three threadbare rugs, groused about the new weekly lease rates in Punjabi and Urdu and Haitian Creole. He found comfort in the ritual details of the garage—its smell of motor oil, the rainbow slicks on the concrete floor, the clouds of yellow dust cast off as the mechanics touched up paint. He learned a hidden archipelago within the archipelago of New York: the Pakistani curry-and-chai cafeterias on Lexington, the Haitian spots in Harlem, the dwindling gas stations, the bodegas that carried meter paper. He learned to feed himself in New York from the examples of his fellow drivers. Deals: two plain slices and a can of soda; egg roll and sesame chicken combo. Egg and cheese on a roll from a bodega, scarfed down on the sidewalk, gone before he tasted it. Foods from home, too, peas and rice and pumpkin soup and fish stew with dumplings, though none of it satisfied him; the scent of island food carried on cold air delivered a sense not of nostalgia, but of error. So much of New York was like that, not-quite-memories and almost-evocations that slapped him with his distance from home … the sonorous
coos of the turtledoves of his youth emanating from the filthy iridescent throats of pigeons in the streets.

  There was something about the night shift. He discovered that his favorite New York was the one you could only know at four A.M.: The darkness, which was never true black but a trembling blue, as if the city exhaled the residual light of day all night long, and against which the vivid green of traffic lights on the avenues—block after block of them to the edge of sight—was that rarest thing, beauty as pedestrian as it was exquisite. New York was the city that never sleeps, but it did, and as he drove its empty, witching-hour streets and sailed across its starry bridges, he sometimes felt that the city had been abandoned to him, that every other living soul had vanished into the air.

  He left the garage around six in the morning. On his walk to the bus he watched the sun come up behind the buildings. The oystershell light of dawn. How it tugged at him, reminding him of his old bike ride to work at Indigo Bay. Even this daily sadness he did not mind, exactly. The ache of it was its own pleasure.

  Be careful on those roads. He heard Sara’s voice all the time. Be careful, when a car cut him off on the BQE at sixty miles an hour. Be careful, in the pouring rain and when his eyes yearned for sleep. Her words were the most meager of gifts, a small seed of hope that he had not been completely forsaken, and he held fast to them.

  ON A night in December of his first year in New York, he picked up a man in a suit outside of an office building in midtown. Once the man had hefted his briefcase onto the seat beside him and closed the taxi door, he declared, “We’re going to Westchester.” The man told Clive the name of a town at the northernmost edge of where he was required to take passengers, and proceeded to spend the ride alternately reading documents and directing Clive. Up the Henry Hudson, the river a black abyss, the cliffs of Jersey twinkling across the water. Onto the winding ribbon of the Saw Mill. After nearly an hour, the man directed him off the highway. A few minutes later, Clive found himself on a narrow road driving through what could only be described as the country. It was his first time this far out of the city. He drove up steep hills from the crests of which the villages below glittered like something from an old movie. In a moment of wonder and terror, a silvery deer leapt out from the woods into the road; Clive slammed on the brakes and narrowly missed hitting it. “Jesus,” the man in the backseat muttered without lifting his head from his papers.