by Tope Folarin
He closes his eyes and imagines himself as the agitated singer who’s wailing in his ears. Suddenly he has long hair, piercings everywhere, his white skin merely a canvas for the whims of the various tattoo artists he visits every so often. He wonders if there are any black people who sing rock music. Besides Prince, that is. And Lenny Kravitz. He, himself, sings, but he’s fond of hip-hop and R&B though he’s only listened to such music for a few years. Now he remembers doing the same thing—listening to as much rap as he could; memorizing lyrics; imagining himself as the artist who paces the stage and defiantly shouts lyrics at hungry crowds—when he moved to Dallas only a few years before. And here he is, on the move again. He wonders, not for the first time, if he’s somehow become addicted to the peripatetic lifestyle he experienced as a child. The abrupt moves from one town in Utah to another, then the scramble south to Texas, then the trying on and casting off of various towns until he left home for college. He wonders if he’s addicted to the moving or to the studying, or perhaps, even, to the opportunity that distance presents to everyone, a chance to trade in the miles traveled for a new persona, a disguise that becomes who you are the moment you enter a place that has never seen you before.
He blinks—the sun is peering over the horizon. The maintenance men have disappeared into the netherworld from which they emerged. The airport is regaining consciousness. It’s a big brain that launches only a single thought into the air again and again, a vision of planes filled with dozens of restless passengers, some of them anxious, others excited at the prospect of flight, separation from earth. He stands, stretches, and walks over to the large windows to watch the airport think. Then he returns to his chair, pulls on his backpack, and walks away from the terminal, dragging his rolling suitcase behind him. He stops at a newspaper kiosk and purchases a package of mints and a couple magazines for the trip to Maine. Then he strolls to the designated pickup area, a rental car stand just outside the large double doors.
He pops a mint and stands bobbing to his music as the air slowly warms. He frequently consults his watch (just a blinking digital face, the plastic straps fell off years ago), pulling it out of his pocket to glance at the numbers before stuffing it back and pulling it out a few moments later. He does this many times before he realizes that someone observing him from afar might find his actions suspicious, or at least a bit strange. He stuffs his strapless watch into his pocket for good and counts the seconds in his head instead.
Five minutes later a young woman approaches from his right. She smiles and squints at the sign above them, then places her suitcase on the ground. She extends her hand.
“My name’s Melissa,” she says, and they shake on it. She’s dressed plainly—she’s wearing a brown T-shirt, tight jeans, and flip-flops. Her brown hair is pulled back into a neat ponytail that seems to wiggle as she smiles, even though she isn’t moving her head. Her face is clear, pale and fresh. They stare at each other for a few moments, and then he asks her if she’s traveling to the same school in Maine. She nods and tells him that she’s transferring from the University of Vermont. He tells her that he’s an exchange student, and she interrupts him and tries to guess where he’s from. Senegal? No, he says. OK, how about Cameroon? He shakes his head and just as he’s about tell her that he’s from the States, like her, she raises her hand as if they’re in class and waves it for a moment. He’s confused, but he calls on her all the same. She says “Jamaica” so loud that a few people in the taxi line glance over at them, and when he shakes his head once more she seems disappointed. She asks, finally, where then? He allows a moment for dramatic pause, then he says “Morehouse” with a wide smile on his face. The name hangs in the air between them, then Melissa shakes her head as if she’s trying to clear it of something, she says where?
They step away from each other and gaze ahead at the long line of cars entering and leaving the airport. They glance at every vehicle as if it might be the one that is supposed to ferry them away. Despite the awkwardness of their first conversation he is eager to pass a test that has yet to be administered, so he slides his earphones over his ears and turns up the volume on his music until he’s sure that Melissa can hear it beside him. He does this even though the music is now so loud that it seems as though a band composed solely of energetic cymbal players has taken up residence in his head. Melissa doesn’t look in his direction, so he inches closer to her, and when she notices him she smiles and says something but her words are destroyed by the cymbals. He lowers the volume until the lead singer is yelling in a whisper. It is an interesting effect.
“What did you say?”
“I said what are you listening to?”
“Oh nothing, just a little Creed.”
“Creed?” She says it just like this.
“Yeah, Creed.” He cannot tell if her shock is a sign of amazement or disgust.
“Oh.” She looks surprised, looks around. Now he is nervous. Isn’t Creed a popular band? They have one of the top songs on the charts at the moment, a number he has actually grown to like after much effort on his part.
“Something wrong with Creed?”
“Oh nothing. Well . . . it’s nothing. I just met you, y’know?”
“No, it’s all good. Just tell me. You don’t like them?”
At this Melissa looks around again and leans toward him. She is so close that he can smell her. She smells of soap and evergreens.
“I don’t know if Creed is really popular where you’re from, but, honestly, they suck.”
He nods, but to no one in particular.
“Really? Well I kinda like ’em.”
“Really?” says Melissa. She smiles again. Her face was made for smiles. “OK, how about this; I’ll give you something to listen to, and you pass me that Creed CD and I’ll give them another chance?”
He is pleased by the reasonableness of her statement. He opens his CD player and hands the CD over to her, and she pulls a disc from her bag and hands it to him. On the CD the words No Doubt are printed on masking tape in lazy black handwriting. He places the CD in his player and presses play.
The van finally arrives a few minutes later, and they climb in. The driver stops to pick up a couple other students who are bound for the same school, and then the van glides onto the highway, and Logan International Airport recedes behind them. He’s trying to enjoy Melissa’s CD, but he finds the music quite moody, and he would prefer something a bit more fast-paced. He turns around to see if Melissa has changed her mind about Creed, but she’s already fallen asleep. Her mouth is slightly open, her face at peace. He removes Melissa’s CD from his player and inserts another CD from his bag, The Score by the Fugees. They rap and sing as the van hurtles forward.
* * *
He waves at Melissa and the others in the van after the driver drops him off in front of his dorm, Rand Hall. He looks around. Bates College is washed in light. This is the first place he has been where reality actually supersedes expectation, where the static fantasies evoked by color photographs pale in comparison to humming, buzzing, shining life. He doesn’t know how to take it all in, so he stands there and allows his senses to collect what they can, but he knows that the information he’s receiving from his eyes and nose and ears is a poor facsimile of the life unfolding before him.
Someone taps his shoulder and he whirls around, still dazed, and sees a tall, kind-looking black man standing there.
“Welcome. We’ve been waiting for you,” the man says. “My name is Dr. Bennett and I’m a dean here. I’ll be showing you around. But first let me take you up to your room so you can drop your stuff off.”
Dr. Bennett picks up one of his bags and they head inside. They walk up four flights of stairs and all the way to the end of the hallway. Dr. Bennett knocks on the last door on the left. He reaches into his pocket and flips rapidly through a bunch of keys until he finds the right one. The room is quite large—two beds, two desks, and two large windows that look out over campus, on all the sun-drenched happenings below. He dum
ps his stuff on the bed on the right-hand side of the room and stands there for a moment. Then he turns and they leave.
Together they walk around the campus, and he’s delighted to see all those dorms and buildings up close. With each step he feels happier, more assured of his place in the world.
Dr. Bennett accompanies him back to his dorm. There are many people gathered on the lawn on the side of the dorm now, and large metal buckets everywhere, filled with lobsters. He sees people expertly deconstructing the lobsters, the many fingers working quickly over the red shells and pulling soft, yellow-tinted white meat from within. He looks at Dr. Bennett and Dr. Bennett smiles and points ahead to an empty spot on the grass. They sit, and a short woman with steel-gray hair shuffles by and hands a lobster to Dr. Bennett and another one to him. She drops a few napkins on his lap and shuffles away. Without prompting, Dr. Bennett shows him how to break the lobster apart. It’s a messy process, and even Dr. Bennett has bits of lobster dripping down his fingers and the sides of his mouth. The effort is worth it, though. The lobster is good. He accepts another lobster from the old woman and tries again, occasionally glancing at Dr. Bennett as he inexpertly cracks it open until he develops a style and rhythm all his own. As they eat, the ancient sun lowers itself, ever so carefully, into a pool of pink light.
* * *
He is sitting in someone’s room with about ten other students, all of them black. It’s close to 9 PM. He wonders why the room is dark, and why—since he arrived at this school four days ago—he’s only been around people of color. At first he was fine with this because he felt so comfortable among them. He felt they might teach him things he has always wanted to know. Even now when he glances at them he sees, for only a glimmer of a moment, a view of what he could be. They seem so proud, so confident, but also profoundly unhappy—with their circumstances, themselves, with their school—and he intuitively understands that mutual unhappiness, if it’s channeled and dammed, can be used to power the turbine of identity. For even if, in the beginning, one acquires identity by negation—we are what they are not—at least it’s a start, much better than what he is managing on his own.
And yet. Three days ago he discovered that much of his schedule for the following week had already been planned. Since then he’s attended various black solidarity meetings, and black parties, and black book discussions, and now he is tired of it all.
He is also keen to learn about the secret ways of successful white people, and he knows he can achieve this only by infiltrating their social circles, by drinking beers with them, by dating them. And yet here he is, staring at the same black faces, only now something is telling him that he may have misjudged the lot of them.
Here, among these black folk, he detects a kind of determined provincialism. It seems the only thing they wish to discuss is home—the food they ate, the clothes they wore, the music they listened to, the stories they created and traded among themselves. The main currency in these conversations—the only currency, perhaps—is nostalgia. He now senses why it might be so difficult for these people to fit in. It seems they are all more interested in lugging their pasts around with them than stepping into the future. He is uncomfortable. He wonders when he will get another chance to chill with Melissa—he hasn’t seen her since he arrived, and he’s developed something of a crush on her since.
Now they are talking about music. He has a good idea where this will go—he has grown familiar with the unvarying shapes of their stories. Someone will mention a song that everyone in the room is familiar with, and then that someone will claim to have heard the song long before anyone else. This person will then go on to claim to have been present at the club where the song was first broadcast in public; she might even claim that a relative contributed in some way to the production or promotion of the song. Soon enough, his theory is confirmed: now someone is claiming to have been in the room when an especially popular tune—a song that everyone in the room, even him, high on his high horse, loves—was being composed. They are all listening as if an ancient creation tale is being told. He rolls his eyes.
After a few minutes someone suggests they play a game of secrets. The premise is simple: everyone in the room is to tell a secret they’ve never uttered out loud before. The person with the most salacious secret wins. He does not see the point of this game. He has no desire to divulge any secret in such company—after all, he doesn’t know a single person here! How is he expected, then, to give these people access to some dark, closed-off part of himself? In his mind he begins to spin a lie full of abuse, theft, and intrigue, just to see how far he can take it, how long his audience will follow him, when someone across the room begins to speak.
She is confident and carefree, divulging a secret that is so striking and lascivious it must be true. She laughs at various points in her tale and gesticulates in a grand manner, as if addressing an audience of hundreds. He is intrigued. He doesn’t know how to feel about her willingness to tell these people such a strange, obscene story. He doesn’t know what to think of her—her boldness, the fact that she seemingly doesn’t care what others in the room might think of her when she’s done. She yells and she whispers, she points to various places in the room. She finishes with a vocal flourish, ending her tale on a high note, and everyone laughs and claps afterward. “Don’t know how I’m going to top that one,” someone says. “Me neither,” replies someone else.
He decides to tell a secret of his own—about the time he stole a candy bar from a convenience store. After he’s done he hears someone clearing her throat, and then another secret, and then another. Over the course of an hour he hears dozens of secrets—secrets that are actually tales about the kind of people they once were, and how different they are from each other, and how alike. Secrets about who they are now, and who they might become. And what secrets! What stories! So many dark, wonderful, twisted hymns.
At the end they vote, and they decide that the first woman’s secret was best. Everyone congratulates her, and he looks over in her direction to nod and maybe smile, but it’s too dark. He cannot make out her face. The party breaks up then; it’s past midnight and they all have early classes. Someone flips on a light switch and suddenly everything is bright yellow, then individual shapes begin to carve themselves out of light. He looks again to the far side of the room to get a look at her but her back is turned and she’s walking out the door.
He is struck by the oddest sensation. He wants to follow her. He looks at the door again and she’s already gone. He doesn’t even know how she looks, only that she’s wearing a purple sweater. He stands and stares ahead until someone taps his shoulder. “Are you all right?” He nods, gathers his things, walks out.
Outside he sees her back. She’s walking at a regular pace, and he still feels a desire to track her down. Just then he does something he rarely does. He acts impulsively. He jogs up the path and slows down when he draws close to her. He smiles.
“Quite a story you told in there,” he says, summoning all the suave he can.
“You think?” she says, playfully. He can make out her profile now. She seems attractive but he needs to get a better look at her. Maybe he can walk her home. . . .
“Where do you live? I don’t mind walking you home. No reason for you to be out here by yourself.”
Her laughter is like ice cubes filling up a glass.
“I doubt anything’s going to happen to me out here, but I have a better idea. You hungry?”
He’s not really hungry.
“Yeah, you?”
“Yeah. There’s this burger place just down the street. You wanna go?”
“Sure.”
She turns suddenly to the left and soon they are walking over the quad, and then they are off campus, venturing into the dark. He’s nervous and somehow she senses his discomfort. “Nothing to worry about,” she says, laughing. “If anybody comes for you I’ll beat them up.”
He has to laugh. She’s quick. Then she bumps his thigh with her thigh, and now he’
s wondering what’s happening. She smirks and they continue walking.
After a few minutes they tuck into a small, dingy shop at the edge of town. There are only a couple people inside, one behind the counter and another at a table only a few feet from the door. The man behind the counter greets her warmly by name. She responds in kind, and orders for both of them. He is slightly put off by this, but she laughs. “Trust me, you’ll love it,” she says. With that she walks toward a table in the back, and they sit. I look at her for the first time. She has long dreadlocks, a warm smile, and high cheekbones. He can’t help but smile at her. They talk about college, high school, elementary school, and then the waiter brings their food, large cheeseburgers with fries, and when he bites into his burger he is surprised by how flavorful it is. He looks up to see the woman smiling at him. “See?” she says. He nods and continues to chew.
They remain mostly silent while they’re eating, but they look at each other between bites. When they’re done they sit for a moment more, and then the owner of the shop wanders by to tell them he’s closing up soon. They thank him for the food and take their leave.
He offers to walk her home and she accepts. On the way they walk close to each other even though it isn’t cold outside. He walks her all the way to her door. She turns and they face each other. He doesn’t know what to do. She hugs him. He smiles awkwardly and walks away before he can ruin the moment.
When he gets to his room he sees that his roommate, who arrived yesterday, is already asleep. He undresses as quickly and quietly as he can, and just as he is climbing into his bed the phone begins to ring. He jumps and rushes to the phone before it rings a third time.
“Hello?”
“Hello,” he whispers.