The new friends were tourists, come to gawk. It was careless, she knows, but oh so horribly easy to let things slip. Sometimes all it took was not returning a phone call. With the more persistent ones, she had to stand them up, repeatedly. They would be baffled, angry, hurt. Some left shouty messages, or worse, sad ones, on her answering machine. Eventually she just unplugged it and threw it away. She suspects it was a relief for them in the end. Being her friend was like going to a tropical island for a little fun in the sun, only to be kidnapped by terrorists. Which was something real she saw a news piece about. She reads a lot about trauma. Survivor’s stories.
Kirby was doing her friends a favor. Sometimes she wishes she had the same options on an exit plan. But she’s stuck in here, a hostage in her head. Can you give yourself Stockholm Syndrome?
‘So how about it, Mom?’ The ice on the lake shifts and cracks musically like windchimes made of broken glass.
‘Oh, honey.’
‘I can pay you back in ten months, max. I figured out a schedule.’
She reaches into her backpack for the folder. She worked up the spreadsheet at a copy shop, in color and with a fancy font that looks like script. Her mother is a designer, after all. Rachel gives it due diligence, reading carefully down the rows as if she’s examining an art portfolio instead of a budget proposal.
‘I’ve paid off most of my credit card from travelling. I’m down to a hundred and fifty a month plus one thousand dollars on my student loan, so it’s totally do-able.’ Her school did not give her a sympathetic leave of absence on her debt. She’s babbling, but she can’t stand the tension. ‘And it’s not that much, really, for a private investigator.’ Normally $75 an hour, but he said he would do it for $300, a day, $1,200 a week. Four grand for the month. She’s budgeted for three months, although the PI says he’ll be able to tell her whether it’s worth pursuing after one. A small price to pay for knowing. For finding the fucker. Especially now that the cops have stopped talking to her. Because apparently it’s not healthy or helpful to take too much interest in your own case.
‘It’s very interesting,’ Rachel says politely as she closes it up and tries to hand it back. But Kirby won’t take it. Her hands are too busy, breaking up sticks. Snap. Her mother sets the folder down on the wall between them. The snow immediately starts soaking into the cardboard.
‘The damp in the house is getting worse,’ Rachel says, closing the subject.
‘That’s your landlord’s problem, Mom.’
‘You know what Buchanan is like,’ she laughs, wryly. ‘He wouldn’t come out if the house was falling down.’
‘Maybe you should try knocking out some walls and see.’ Kirby can’t keep the bitterness out of her voice. It’s an internal barometer of putting up with her mother’s crap.
‘And I’m moving my studio space to the kitchen. There’s more light there. I find I need more light these days. Do you think I have Robles’ disease?’
‘I told you to get rid of that medical book. You can’t self-diagnose, Mom.’
‘It seems unlikely. It’s not like I’ve come in to contact with river parasites. It could be Fuchs’ dystrophy, I suppose.’
‘Or you’re just getting older and you need to deal with it,’ Kirby snaps. But her mother looks so sad and lost that she relents. ‘I could come and help you move it. We could go through the basement, find things to sell. I bet some of that stuff is worth a fortune. That old printmaking kit must be worth two thousand dollars on its own. You’d probably make a heap of cash.
‘You could take a couple of months off. Finally finish Dead Duck.’ Her mom’s work-in-progress is, morbidly, a story of an adventurous duckling who travels the world asking dead things how they came to be dead. Actual sample:
— And how did you die, Mr Coyote?
— Well, I was hit by a truck, Duck.
I didn’t look when I crossed over the street
Now I’m a snack for scavenging crows to eat.
It’s too bad. I’m so sad.
But I’m glad for what I had.
It always ends the same way. Every animal dies in a different gruesome way but has the same answer, until Duck himself dies and reflects that he too is sad, but glad for what he had. It’s the kind of dark pseudo-philosophical whimsy that would probably do very well in children’s publishing. Like that bullshit book about the tree that self-sacrifices and self-sacrifices until it’s so much graffiti-ed rotting wood on a park bench. Kirby always hated that story.
This has nothing to do with what happened to her, according to Rachel. It’s about America and how everyone thinks that death is something you have to fight, which is weird for a Christian country that believes in an afterlife.
She’s just trying to show that it’s a normal process. No matter how you go, the end result is always the same.
That’s what she says. But she started it when Kirby was still in ICU. And then ripped it all up, pages and pages of adorably grisly illustrations, and started again. Over and over with these stories of the cute dead animals, but never finishing it. It’s not like a kid’s picture book even needs to be very long.
‘I take it that’s a no, then?’
‘I just don’t think it’s the best use of your time, honey,’ Rachel pats her hand. ‘Life is for living. Do something useful. Go back to college.’
‘Sure. That’s useful.’
‘Besides,’ Rachel says, her gaze dreamy, looking over the lake. ‘I don’t have the money.’
It’s impossible to push her mother away, Kirby thinks, letting the crumble of sticks fall from her numbed fingers onto the snow. Her default state of being is absent.
Mal
29 APRIL 1988
Malcolm spots the white boy straight away. Not that a lack of melanin is wholly unusual round these parts. Usually they driving, the car barely pausing long enough to make their score. But you get your walk-ups too, from the far-gone fiends with their yellow eyes and chicken skin and hands shaking like old folk through to miss lady lawyer in her expensive suit, coming up from downtown to wait patient with the rest of them every Tuesday and, lately, Saturdays too. The street’s egalitarian that way. But they don’t tend to hang around after.
This man just standing there, right on the steps of them abandoned tenements, looking about like he owns the joint. Maybe he does. Rumors going round that they aiming to gentrify Cabrini, but you’d have to be one crazy motherfucker to try that shit out in Englewood with these rundown shitholes.
Mal doesn’t know why they even bother boarding them up no more. They all been long stripped of any pipe or brass handles or other Victorian whatnot. Broken windows, rotten floors, and whole generations of rat families living on top of each other; granny and gramps and mammy and pappy and baby-boo rat. So only the really hard-up tweakers would try their luck using ’em as a shooting gallery. Those places a wreck. And in this neighborhood, that’s saying something.
Not a realtor, he figures, watching as the man steps down onto the cracked concrete, his shoes scuffing the faded hopscotch grid. Mal has already had his hit, the dope sitting in his guts, slowly turning them to cement. It takes the teeth off his day, so he’s got all the time in the whole world to watch some white man acting weird.
The cracker crosses the lot, skirting the wreck of an old couch, walking under the rusting pole that used to have a basket ball hoop attached ’til kids yanked it down. Self-sabotage, that’s what that is. Fucking your own shit up.
Not police neither, way he’s dressed. Which is badly, in floppy darkbrown pants and an old-fashioned sports coat. That crutch under his arm speaks to a sure sign of someone who has gone spiked up in the wrong place and done themselves some damage. Must have traded his hospital cane to the pawn shops already to have ended up with that clunky old thing. Or maybe he didn’t go to hospital at all ’cos he got something to hide. There’s something whack about him.
He’s interesting. A prospect, even. Could be the guy’s hiding out. Ex-mob. Hell, ex-wife
! Good place for it. Could be he’s got some cash stashed in one of those old rat nests. Mal peers at the row houses, speculating. He could sniff around while the white boy’s out about his business. Alleviate him of any valuables that might be troubling him. No one the wiser. Probably doing him a favor.
But looking at the houses, trying to figure which one he mighta stepped out of, makes Mal feel strange. Could be the heat rising off the asphalt giving everything the shimmers. Not quite the shakes, but close. He should have known better than to buy product off Toneel Roberts. That boy been dipping, for sure, which means he been cutting too. Mal’s stomach cramps like someone’s got their hand right up in there. A little reminder that he hasn’t eaten in fourteen hours and an indication, oh yes, that the dope’s been cut. Meantime, Mr Prospect is heading down the street, smiling and waving away the corner kids shouting out to him. He gives it up for a bad idea. Least for the time being. Better to wait ’til the white boy comes back and he can check it out properly. Right now, nature calling.
He catches up with him a couple of blocks down. Luck plain and simple. Although it helps that the guy is staring at the TV in the window of the drug store, so hypnotized that Mal is worried he’s had a seizure or something. Not even aware he’s obstructing people’s way. Maybe it’s some big news. World war fucking three broke out. He sidles up to see, innocent as you please.
But Mr Prospect is watching commercials. One after the other. Creamette’s pasta sauce. Oil of Olay. Michael Jordan eating Wheaties. Like he’s never seen someone eating Wheaties before.
‘You okay, man?’ he says, not willing to lose sight of him again, but not quite steeled up enough to tap him on the shoulder. The guy turns with such a ferocious smile that Mal almost loses his nerve.
‘This is amazing,’ the guy says.
‘Shit, man, you should try Cheerios. But you blocking traffic. Make some room for the people, you know?’ He gently guides him out of the way of a kid on rollerblades barreling down on them. His man stares after him.
‘Dreads on a white boy,’ he agrees, or he thinks he does. ‘Just can’t do it. How’s about that one?’ He pretends to nudge him with his elbow, not making actual contact, to indicate the girl with tits that God himself must have sent down from on high, barging up against each other under her tank top. But the guy barely looks at her.
Mal senses he’s losing him. ‘Not your type, huh? That’s all right, man.’ And then, because the jonesing is already beginning to gnaw at him: ‘Say, you got a dollar to spare?’
The guy seems to see him for the first time. Not like the normal white-man-glance-you-over neither. Like he gets him right to his core. ‘Sure,’ he says and reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket to pull out a bundle of banknotes held together with a rubber band. He peels one off and hands it over, watching him with the intensity of some rookie trying to pass off baking soda as the real thing, putting Mal on his guard even before he looks at the note.
‘You fuckin’ kidding me?’ he scowls at the $5,000 bill. ‘What am I supposed to do with this?’ He has his doubts now about this whole damn enterprise. Cracker is crazy.
‘Is this better?’ he says, and flicks through the bills to hand him a C-note, looking for his reaction. Mal is tempted not to give him the satisfaction, but hell, who to say he won’t give him another if he gets what he’s looking for. Whatever that is.
‘Oh yeah, this’ll do fine.’
‘Is the Hooverville still down by Grant Park?’
‘I don’t even know what you talking about, man. But give me another one of those and I’ll walk you up and down the whole park ’til we find it.’
‘Just tell me how to get there.’
‘Hop on the green line. Take you all the way downtown,’ he says, pointing to the El tracks visible between the buildings.
‘You’ve been a great help,’ the man says. To Mal’s dismay, he tucks the bundle back into his jacket and starts limping away.
‘Hey now, wait up.’ He breaks into a little jog to catch up with him. ‘You from out of town, right? I can be your tour guide. Show you the sights. Get you some pussy. Whatever flavor you like, man. Look out for you, know what I’m saying?’
The guy turns to him, all friendly, like he’s giving him the weather report. ‘Leave off, friend, or I’ll gut you here in the street.’
Not ghetto bluster. Matter of fact. Like tying your shoelaces. Mal stops dead and lets him go. Doesn’t fucking care no more. Crazy cracker. Better off not getting involved.
He watches Mr Prospect limping down the street and shakes his head at the ridiculous fake bill. He’ll keep it as a memento. And maybe he’ll go back to those broke-down houses to have a poke around, while the guy’s gone. His stomach clenches at the thought. Or maybe not. Not while he’s still flush. He’ll treat himself. Blue caps. No more of Toneel’s inferior shit. He might even buy for his boy, Raddison, if he sees him. Why not? He’s feeling generous. He’ll make it last.
Harper
29 APRIL 1988
It is the noise that bothers Harper the most – worse than being huddled in the sucking black mud of the trenches, dreading the high whine that precipitated the next round of artillery fire, the dull thud of distant bombs, tanks grating and rumbling. The future is not as loud as war, but it is relentless with a terrible fury all its own.
The sheer density is unexpected. Houses and buildings and people all crammed on top of each other. And cars. The city has been reshaped around them. There are entire buildings built to park them in, rising layer on layer. They rush past, too fast and too loud. The railroad tracks that brought the whole world to Chicago are quiet, subdued by the roar of the expressway (a word he will only learn later). The churning river of vehicles just keeps coming, from where he can’t imagine.
As he walks, he catches glimpses of the shadow of the old city underneath. Painted signs that have faded. An abandoned house that has turned into an apartment block, also boarded up. An overgrown lot where a warehouse stood. Decay, but also renewal. A cluster of storefronts sprung up where an empty lot used to be.
The shop windows are baffling. The prices are absurd. He wanders into a convenience store and retreats again, disturbed by the white aisles and fluorescent lights and the glut of food in cans and boxes with color photographs that scream the contents. It makes him feel nauseous.
It’s all strange, but not unimaginable. Everything extrapolates. If you can catch a concert hall in a gramophone, you can contain a bioscope in a screen playing in a store window, something so ordinary it doesn’t even attract an audience.
But some things are wholly unexpected. He stands entranced by the whirling and flaying brush strips of a car wash.
The people remain the same. Hustlers and shit-heels, like the homeless boy with the bulging eyes who mistook him for an easy mark. He saw him off, but not before he was able to confirm some of Harper’s suppositions about the dates on money or where he is. Or when. He fingers the key in his pocket. His way back. If he wants to go.
He takes the boy’s advice and gets on the Ravenswood El, which is practically the same as in 1931, only faster and more reckless.
The train skelters through the corners so that Harper clings to the pole, even sitting down. Mostly, the other passengers avert their eyes. Sometimes they move away from him. Two girls dressed like whores giggle and point.
It’s his clothes, he realizes. The others are wearing brighter colors and fabrics that are somehow shinier and tackier, like their lace-up shoes. But when he starts moving across the carriage towards them, their smiles wither and they get off at the next stop, muttering to each other. He has no interest in them, anyway.
He ascends the stairs onto the street, his crutch clanging against the metal, drawing a pitying look from a uniformed colored woman who nevertheless does not offer him assistance.
Standing under the metal pylons of the railroad, he sees that the neon of the Loop has intensified ten-fold. Look here, no, here, those flashing lights say. Distrac
tion is the order and the way.
It takes only a minute to figure out how the lights work at the crosswalk. The green man and the red. Signals designed for children. And aren’t all these people exactly that with their toys and noise and haste?
He sees that the city has changed its color, from dirty whites and creams to a hundred shades of brown. Like rust. Like shit. He walks down to the park to see for himself that the Hooverville has indeed gone, leaving no trace.
The view of the city from here is unnerving. The profile of the buildings against the sky is wrong, shining towers so high the clouds swallow them up. Like a vista of hell.
The cars and the crush of people makes him think of woodborer beetles eating their way through a tree. Trees riddled with those wormy scars die. As this whole pestilential place will, collapsing in on itself as the rot sets in. Perhaps he’ll see it fall. Wouldn’t that be something?
But now he has a purpose. The object burns in his head. He knows where to go, as if he has been this way before.
He gets on another train, descending into the bowels of the city. The clattering of the tracks is louder in the tunnels. Artificial lights slice past the windows, shearing people’s faces into fragmented moments.
It leads him, ultimately, to Hyde Park, where the university has created a pocket of pink-faced wealth among the working-class rubes, who are overwhelmingly black. He feels edgy with anticipation.
He gets a coffee from the Greek diner on the corner, black, three sugars. Then he walks up past the residences until he finds a bench to sit on. She’s here, somewhere. As it is meant to be.
He slits his eyes and tilts his face as if he is enjoying the sunshine, so that it doesn’t seem that he is examining the faces of all the girls who pass him. Glossy hair and bright eyes under heavy make-up and fluffy hairstyles. They wear their privilege like it’s something they pull on with their socks in the morning. It blunts them, Harper thinks.
And then he sees her, getting out of a boxy white car with a dent in the door, which has pulled up at the entrance to a residence barely ten feet from his bench. The shock of recognition goes all the way through to his bones. Like love at first sight.