your fortunes say?” I asked.
“This one says…” she squinted, “You were never closer to reconstructing the world than you are now.”
“It does not say that!” I howled.
“You’re right,” she said, “but I do.”
Tamara ate the rest of her cookies without looking at a single fortune.
Daylight crossed the couch. Tamara and Mirror were both asleep when I left and stepped outside, still drunk. I unbraided my hair. Brown and crimped, it fell around me. I shook my head. A car started. I turned. Steam rose from the windshield as it warmed. It was Sunday. The street with its shuttered bistros and gated shops was half in shadow and where light struck the road, gray vapor shimmered. I walked out and set my feet upon the centerline and headed home.
I saw a group of pregnant women by the yoga studio. They rubbed their goldfish-bowl and snow-globe bellies. I could have gone around them but I walked until I was deep in the abyss of that winter aquarium. Annette and Jimmy. The Black Ocean and the baby rats. Credence, Grace and Miro. Everything, all of it, was on fire. The only thing to do was pass through cleanly. Everything would still burn. My cheeks would still blister and my hands blacken. The only thing that made any sense was the bomb threat because that’s where instinct met action, clarity.
I turned onto our street and leaves blew across my path and skittered sideways like crabs, rattling up the sidewalk and settling on the grass. They were all over our porch. I put some in my pocket walking up the steps.
Annette was hanging a black lace shawl over a mirror in the entryway. The rayon fringe angled down leaving a corner of the glass, splattered with yellow paint, exposed. She hung then re-hung the shawl but there was always one part of the mirror uncovered.
“It’s a Jewish thing anyway,” she said and let the shawl drape like a sash across the frame.
She sat down in a chair by the door. In her hand was a cordless phone. I stayed back because I smelled like vodka and didn’t want her to think I was out partying while she and everyone else she knew were getting ready for the funeral and police riots that were certain to follow. I tried to tack the shawl up again and finally got it to stay. Annette watched me the whole time but I wasn’t on her mind. I was just another thing in the distance. She wandered into the kitchen.
On my way up the stairs I thought about something Tamara said. She said the black community is our Lord Brahma and that every time we try to escape their gaze another head grows and looks down at what we’ve done. Then the conversation had descended into debates about exoticizing minorities and ended up somewhere on the banks with the rest of the mud bricks of the pyramid. I went to sleep and dreamt of tidal waves. When I woke, the world was washed clean and the streets empty of water. But then I realized it wasn’t over. It was only the drag of a great wave calling all of itself to itself, gathering. I looked at the dry road and knew that I was between moments.
19 Two Rivers
Annette left a black dress that belonged to her grandmother draped over my computer chair and I put it on. The funeral for the boys would start at the church around 3 PM and be followed by a procession to the cemetery. After the eulogy some community leaders were going to speak. Then everyone was supposed to march to the Roseway Bridge and throw flowers in the river near where they found the boys. There had been chaos earlier in the morning when the city revoked the permit to march. They said it was because of all the bombings and the threats still hanging and that it was a matter of public safety. My plan was to go but leave early. I didn’t know how much I could take, all that sorrow just spinning out into nowhere.
On my way out the door Jimmy called to say that the staff meeting at Rise Up Singing was still on as scheduled. Apparently, Coworker Franklin had meditated on the idea of cancelling (due to the massive funeral) but his inner coin flip had come up Capitalism and he wanted to re-open as soon as possible.
“As a victim myself…”
—Coworker Franklin tries to equivocate the looting of Rise