“My father had been an orphan, brought up in the hard homes of relatives who didn’t want him there. Perhaps that was why he so readily believed my mother, a waitress at the roadside diner where he ate his breakfast, when she told him her folks were dead. Kinlessness seemed to him a natural condition, and a terrible one. Perhaps that was what gave him the courage to propose to this startling young woman with hair like wild horses and a look in her eyes like wild horses also. And after a while of being married to him, she began to believe it too.
“But maybe she’d believed it even before. Maybe when she’d left them, run away, not even a note, Don’t look for me, when she’d cut and styled her hair, when she’d changed the shape of her eyebrows with tweezers and painted on a new mouth, when she’d given herself a name pretty and proper like she’d always wanted to have, it had been the same as dying.”
The store is dark now. A total dark. It is the night of no-moon, and someone has shattered the streetlamp outside, so no dusty lines of light seep through the closed slats. I listen to my American’s words and think how darkness changes the timbre of voices, deepens them, cuts them from the body’s confines to float free.
American, into what design shall I weave your floating words, with what color of spice shall I dye them.
“One day when I was about ten, maybe younger,” he says, “a man came to our house. It was a weekday, Dad was at work. The man wore an old coat torn under one arm and jeans that smelled of animals. His hair, straight and black, fell to his shoulder, and looked vaguely familiar.
“When Mother opened the door and saw him her face turned gray like old rubber. Then a look came over it, hard as the concrete step on which he stood in boots crusted with mud and manure. She started to close the door but he said, Evvie, Evvie, and when I saw her eyes I realized he was calling her by her real name.”
The American’s voice takes on the high, wondering tones of someone dreaming again an old childhood dream.
“She sent me in the other room but I could hear her voice, like fork prongs scraping a tin plate: Why you come here to ruin my life? My mother who always spoke perfect grammar, who washed out my mouth with soap if I ever said ain’t. His voice rumbling louder and louder. You ought a be shamed, Evvie, turning your back on your own people. Look at you, imitating whitefolks, thinking yourself so fine and grand, and your little boy that don’t even know who he is. She hissing furious at him to keep it down, you no-good bastard.
“After that I heard snatches only. He’s dying. So what he’s dying, I don’t owe him nothing. Words in a language I didn’t understand. And finally, Shit Evvie, I promised him I’d find you and tell you. I done my bit. Now you do what you want. The front door slammed and everything went quiet. A long time later I heard her moving slow and shaky, fixing dinner, stumbling like an old woman in her high shoes. I went in the kitchen and she let me peel potatoes. From time to time I shot her a covert glance, trying to read her expression, wishing she would say something about the man who’d come to our door. But she didn’t. And before Dad came home she went and washed her face and put on lipstick and a fresh smile.
“That was the first time I realized that there was a place inside of my mother that she kept away from everyone, even me, whom she loved more than anyone.
“Early next morning after Dad left she went into the bedroom, and when she came out I saw she was wearing her best dress, navy blue with a matching jacket and little pearl buttons all the way down the front, and her pearl necklace, which she kept in a little velvet case and didn’t like me to touch. Come on, she said, we’re going somewhere. What about school, I asked, and my mother, who had never let me skip classes before, said, It’s okay, let’s go. All the way in the car she was silent, not scolding me for fiddling with the radio or having the music on too loud. Once or twice I started to ask her where we were going, but she had on a small, absorbed frown, like she was listening to something inside her head, so I didn’t. We drove for a couple of hours this way. And when we turned onto a narrow street with paint-peeled houses and junk cars in the yards and clumps of dandelion grass and garbage spilled from Dumpsters, she made a small sound like something was stuck in her chest, maybe the hook that had pulled her back all the way to that place.
“She jerked the car to a stop and got out very straight and tall, holding my hand so tight it would hurt for days. She walked into a small clapboard house that smelled musty, like wet clothes left too long in a washer, all the way through to the kitchen, like she knew where to go. The kitchen was full of men and women, some of them drinking out of brown bottles, and when I saw their heavy, flat faces, the hair that hung limp and black over their foreheads, it was like looking into a warped mirror. My mother moved past them as though they weren’t there. The click of her heels on the scarred linoleum was a precise, confident sound. But her fingers were damp with sweat as they gripped mine, and I knew she felt the eyes on the gleaming pearl buttons of her dress, heard the whisper that went around the room like the frost-wind that kills early fruit.”
The American stops as though he’s come up against a wall and doesn’t know which way to turn.
I look at him newly, hair and skin color and shape of bone, trying to see in him the people he is describing. But he is still my American, himself only, not like anyone else.
“At last we were in a narrow room with too many people in it and not enough light. On the bed in the corner was a thin stick-shape covered with a blanket. When my eyes got used to the dimness I saw it was a man. In my eyes he seemed enormously, completely old. Someone was shaking a rattle and singing. I didn’t understand the words, but I could feel them weaving thin and snakelike around us, binding us all together.
“When they saw my mother everything stopped. The silence was like a sudden fist slammed against your ear. They propped the old man up in bed, held him so he wouldn’t slump over.
“The old man raised his head with such effort that I could feel the slow muscles of his neck creak and pull. He opened his eyes, and in that dark room they glinted like flecks of mica in a cave wall. Evvie, he said. The word came out sharp and clear, like an arrow, not the way I expected an old man to sound. Then he said, Evvie’s son. The calling in his voice was like arms around me. Right away I wanted to go to him, though I had always been bashful with strangers. But my mother’s hands were on my shoulders, her fingers tight and helpless as the grip of a small, scared bird.”
The American takes a deep, shuddering breath as though he’s pushed his way up out of a long, airless tunnel. Then he shakes his head. “I can’t believe I told you all this crap,” he says, shielding himself in the way of men behind that small hard word. “Whew. This pepper stuff is pretty potent.”
My American, say what you will. It is not the spice only but also you wanting me to hear. This is my belief and my hope.
Aloud I say, “It isn’t—what is that word—crap. You know that.”
But I see I will have to wait a long while, perhaps forever, to hear what happened in that dying room.
I am only half sorry that he has stopped. His words have filled the store already, wild water burst from its boundary. It pushes at me with all its opaque weight. It will take me time to swim through, to find out what edges this flooding has erased between us.
Meanwhile I want to tell him, I will carry this moment from your life like a spark in my heart. But I am suddenly shy, I Tilo, once so brash and bold. How the Old One would have laughed at it.
All I can say is “Anytime you want to talk, my door is open for you.”
He laughs his old laugh, easy again and mocking. His arm sweeps the shelves. “All this and free counseling too. What a deal.” But his eyes are holding mine and a deep light in them saying I’m glad.
One day you will have to tell me what you see when you look at this shape wrapped in its folds of oldwoman skin. Is it some truth about me that I myself do not know, or merely your own fantasy.
At the door he says, “You still want to know my name?”
I am almost laughing at his question. Lonely American, can’t you hear my heart singing its red rhythm of yesyesyes.
But I make myself say what the Old One told me when I left the island, in warning.
“Only if you wish it. Because a true-name has power, and when you tell it you give that power into your listener’s hands.”
Why am I telling you this when you will not understand.
“My true-name, that’s what you want? Well. Maybe I can figure out which one it is.”
“How,” I ask. And inside me: Surely he will not know.
“All the others were given to me, but this one I chose.”
American, once again you have amazed me. I who thought that you, being of the West and used always to choosing your own way, would take such a choice for granted.
He hesitates, then says, “My name is Raven.” And traces a pattern on the floor with his toe. He will not look at me. In tender amusement I see that my American is embarrassed, a little, by his unAmerican name.
“But it is beautiful,” I say, tasting the long wingbeat sound of it in my mouth, smell of hot sky rising and falling, dark wood in evening, bright eye, tailfeather formed of charcoal and smoke. “And right for you.”
“You think so?” Quick flash of pleasure, as quickly hidden, in his eye, Raven who feels he has made himself vulnerable enough for one day.
“How I got to it,” he says. “Ah. Another day I’ll tell you that story. Maybe.”
I nod assent, I Tilo this once not impatient for knowing. I trust them, the untold stories that stretch between us like filaments of beaten gold. His stories and mine. That will not be lost even if not spoken.
“Raven, now I must tell you my name. Will you believe if I say you are the only man in America, in the entire world, to know it?”
Somewhere ground bucks underfoot, shudders apart. Somewhere a volcano startles awake and coughs fire. Wind turns to ash.
Yes say his eyes, my American letting fall the cloak of his loneliness. He holds out his gleaming goldbrown hand (somewhere a woman is weeping) and into it I place my name.
Raven has left, and the store feels too large. Its silence makes a distant ringing in my ears. Like old fluorescent tubes, I think, and am surprised by the thought. For some time now I have been seeing this, my mind invoking impressions of which I have no experience. Are they left behind by those who pass through this space? Are they his memories becoming mine?
I wander the aisles, cleaning up though all is tidy already, giving my hands something to do. What I really want is to touch all he has touched. I am hungry for what little I can get. The faint soap-smell of his skin. The last lingering heat from his fingertips.
And thus I come to the newspaper which he left smoothed out on the counter. I lay my hands on it and close my eyes, wait for an image to tell me where he is now, driving down the freeway night perhaps with the windows open, drums on the radio and the sharp clean scent of an unseen ocean, the spices in his hair. What he is thinking. But nothing comes. So after a while what else is there to do but open my eyes and gather up the sheet to store carefully at the bottom of the bin where I keep old papers.
That’s when I see the headline. DOTBUSTERS GO FREE. And under it the picture of the two white teenagers, teeth bared in triumphant smiles. Even the blurred photo cannot hide the cocky tilt of their heads.
For a moment I am pulled by an urgent need, an instinct heavy in the pit of myself where the fears lie. Tilo find out what has pleased them so. Tilo you must. Instead I fold up the paper with fingers that tremble a little.
I have never read a newspaper, not even the Indian ones that are delivered to the store each week.
Don’t you want to, you ask.
Of course I do. I Tilo whose curiosity has pulled me so often past the limits set by wisdom. Sometimes I put my face to the newsprint. A smell like burning metal rises from the tiny black letters.
Then I move back. Haven’t I broken enough rules already.
This is what the Old One told us: “Events in the outer world are nothing to Mistresses. When you fill your head with inessentials, the true knowledge is lost, like grains of gold in sand. Set your mind only on what is brought to you, search only its remedy.”
“But First Mother, will it not help if I know what is happening elsewhere, to see how this one life given to my care fits the tapestry?”
Her sigh, impatient but not unkind. “Child, the tapestry is far larger than your seeing, or mine. Turn inward for what you need to know. Listen for the right spice to say its name.”
“Yes, Mother.”
But today I want to ask, Did you First Mother ever feel your thoughts awash around you like the wave-salt ocean, and one voice, his, calling like a gull so that all else grows dim and distant, like submarine sounds.
Mother what shall I do. All the certainties of my life are crumbling like cliffs in a sea gale, gritty dust stinging the eye.
My head so heavy I must rest it on the counter where the paper still—
The vision lashes at me, a whip against my eyelids. A young man in a bed with tubes trailing from his nose, from the insides of his elbows. The white of his bandages blend with the white of the hospital pillow. Only his skin stands out in patches, brown like mine. Like mine, Indian skin. Radium blips jerk across a screen. In all the room there is no other movement.
Except inside his head.
Tilo what—
Then I am sucked in. As I go under in a thunderclap of pain I know I am at the start of the story whose end I read in the headlines.
Inside his head evening is falling, the pale sun swallowed up by trees, the downtown park darkened, almost deserted, only a few last office workers clustered tight around the bus stop thinking home and dinner. He takes down the red awning, the bright yellow letters that say MOHAN INDIAN FOODS crumpling in on themselves. He’s a little late but it’s been a good day, almost everything Veena cooked got sold, and so many people telling him “Tastes good,” bringing back friends. Maybe it’s time to hire a helper, put another cart on the other side of town, near the new office complexes. He’s sure Veena could find a friend to help her with the cooking….
Then he hears the steps, fall leaves breaking under boots, a sound like crushed glass. Why does it seem so loud.
When he turns the two young men are very close. He can smell their unbathed odor like stale garlic. He thinks how Americans always smell different from Indians, even the office babus under their cologne and deodorant. And then he realizes it is his own sweat, his sudden prickly fear he is smelling.
The young men’s hair is cut severely short. Their bristled scalps gleam white as bone, white as the glitter in their eyes. He guesses them to be in their late teens, not much more than boys. Their tight-fitting camouflage jackets make him uncomfortable.
“Sorry, closed already,” he says, wiping the top of the cart emphatically with a paper towel, kicking out the stones he’d wedged under the wheels. Would it be rude to start walking while they are still standing there? He gives the cart a tentative push.
The young men move deftly, block his way.
“What makes you think we want any of this shitty stuff,” one says. The other leans forward. Casually, elegantly even, he tips over a neat stack of paper plates. The Indian reaches automatically to grab them, and thinks two thoughts at once.
How flat their eyes are, like mud puddles. And I should have started running already.
The blunt boot tip catches him in the armpit under his outstretched arm, a hot jolt of pain spurts down his side like molten iron, and through it he hears one of them spit, “Sonofa-bitch Indian, shoulda stayed in your own goddamn country.” But the pain’s not as bad as he feared, not so bad that he can’t pick up the stone and pitch it at the young man who’s kicking at the cart until it comes crashing down and the kababs and samosas that Veena so carefully rolled and stuffed scatter everywhere in the dirt. He hears the satisfying thwack of contact, sees the young man knocked backward wit
h the force of it, his face almost comical in its surprise. The Indian feels good even though it hurts to breathe and a small jagged thought—ribs?—spins up for a moment into the lighted part of his mind. (He doesn’t know that later a lawyer will show the young man’s stone-bruise to the judge and say the Indian had started it all, his clients were only protecting themselves.) He believes for a moment that he can get away, can maybe run to the bus stop, the small safe halo of the streetlight, the handful of commuters (can’t they see what’s going on can’t they hear?) waiting. And then the second young man is on him.
Even now that the Indian cannot remember much else (head yanked up, knuckles cased in metal smashing down), the memory of pain is clear. Pain like a constant throughout whatever happened next. (Kick to the groin, face dragged through gravel.) So many kinds of pain—like fire, like stinging needles, like hammers breaking. But not really. Pain, which is ultimately only like itself. (“Fucking turd, bastard, piece of shit, this’ll teach you.”) He thinks he shouted for help, only it came out in the old language, bachao, bachao. He thinks he saw a red tattoo on a forearm, the same swastic sign that they used to paint on the walls of village homes for good luck. But surely it couldn’t be (a blow to the head so hard that his thoughts splinter into yellow stars), surely it was only the blood in his eyes, the torn nerves playing tricks on him.
In the hospital room it is so peaceful, the pain comes and goes orderly as waves. By now he is almost used to it. Only wish Veena could be here, it would be nice to have someone’s hand to hold on to when outside the sky turns inky purple like that night, but they took her home to get some rest. “Don’t worry,” they told me. “Worry will keep you from getting better. We’ll take care of things. Try to rest.” But what am I to do with the questions rattling in my skull-box, will I walk again, how to make a living now, the right eye, is it totally gone, Veena so young and pretty left with a crippled scarred husband. And over and over, Those two haramis, did the police get them, may they rot in jail.