Half-Resurrection Blues_ A Bone Street Rumba Novel - Daniel Jose Older Page 0,40
took the initiative, talking about the park and how different it was at various hours of the day. I was quiet at first, but she ignored it like a pro. We stick to larger universal topics—the smell of coffee, waking-up routines, and soon it feels natural, like what normal people do. Our eyes say plenty more, but soon even all that gets lost in the winding conversation. And then I find I’m fading; the night with all its longness and terriblosity, has caught up to me. I’d’ve been perfectly happy sliding into unconsciousness on this comfortable-ass easy chair, but instead Sasha lays me down on the couch—me mumbling total nonsense like an old man and her cooing and shushing me, covering me with blankets till everything becomes dim, and then there’s nothing at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It’s snowing when I wake up. I have no idea what time it is, a few hours from dawn maybe. The heater’s clanging incessantly like some angry troll got trapped in there on the way to his cave. Sasha is apparently quite the movie buff; stacks and stacks of videotapes and DVDs crowd around her television like a fragile entourage. Besides that, you’ve got your standard van Gogh coffee shop painting, a portrait of Frederick Douglass looking surly, a few dangly plants and some framed photos that might very well be the same sample ones they use in picture frames all over the place. It’s a nice spot, altogether, and seems to be keeping my demons at bay.
Something moves in the corner of my eye. She’s standing in the doorway to her bedroom, watching me. I have no idea how long she’s been there, but what’s important is she’s still wearing those flowy pants that look like they could be gone with very little effort, and her nipples are still insinuating themselves through that tank top. That’s what’s important to me anyway. Her mouth is frowning, but somehow I can tell she’s smiling in some deeper place. Her eyes meet mine and she nods her head. It’s the smallest of gestures: Point Zero. I send up a brief silent prayer of thanks to whatever omniscient force has guided my life to this point and a quick silent shout-out to Riley for a speedy recovery, my dear brother, and then I stand, let the sleep slide off me as I rise out of the covers, and follow her into the room.
* * *
When I was lying completely still in that room in Mama Esther’s house, life tiptoeing back into my body, I heard the flutterings of a coupling. Through all that back talk and smack talk, all the tiny and gigantic legends that unraveled, there was one that you could pick out above the rest. A singular, crisp ray of emotion: unmistakable. It was a simple thing—two teenagers. A young dark-skinned girl with big eyes and a Dominican kid, all shiny curls on his head and baggy pants. The other kids’d be rollicking through the motions and these two would join the fun, but there was something else going on. I don’t think it was just me who could sense it; the other young’uns picked up on all that electricity too, with that unerring adolescent radar they have.
He lived in Bushwick, a few neighborhoods over, but they went to the same school and he started showing up on the block and fell in well with the other kids. You could tell he wanted her by his quietness and his stupid boy teasing. In my room, I imagined her shy smile as she punched his arm for saying something stupid and him contorting with joy at the attention. I couldn’t tell you what separated it from any of the other flirtations that played out up and down the block that summer. It was just something you could taste in the air whenever they got within a block of each other. It was easy: a force greater than either of them wanted that union to happen, and the world sent that great magician of the inevitable, gravity, to make it so. Once gravity enters the picture, all bets are off. Those kids were hurtling toward each other like two asteroids that traveled bajillions of light-years just to cross paths at that one fatal instant. Who knows what endless cause and effects spiral out of those gravity-inflicted collisions? There’s something different about them though. They burn harder, and the fallout can shake the whole city on its foundation.