This Side of Brightness

  “Treefrog screw you.”

  “That ain’t even funny,” she says.

  “It weren’t meant to be funny. Come on. I’ll show you.”

  He passes the cigarette, and she drags hard even though the filter is burning. “Maps?” she says.

  “I keep maps. Sometimes I make maps.”

  “What the hell you make maps for? It’s not as if you’re going anywheres.”

  * * *

  In the darkness, beneath his nest—she will not climb—he closes his eyes and touches the side of her face. She shivers for a moment, but he lets his fingers rest until her body stops quaking and she relaxes and says, “This is stupid.”

  The movement of his fingers is slow and precise. He will trace a line across from ear to nose, a perfectly straight line; otherwise the translation will be inaccurate. He begins at the outer edge of her ear—he has removed his gloves for exactness, spat on his fingers to clean off the tunnel dust, dried them on his overcoat. He moves from the top of her ear to the under-hang of flesh, and he gauges the tiny distance along the top of his forefinger. The distance decided, Treefrog opens his eyes and reaches into his overcoat pocket for a piece of graph paper and a pencil. On the graph paper he draws two lines, one vertical, one horizontal, meeting at an axis, fixed and finite in the center of the paper. Elevation on the vertical, distance on the horizontal. He flicks the lighter with one hand, then the other, and marks the elevation of her ear, the tip and the underhang: two small dots of pencil on the graph paper.

  He must be careful; the eraser is down to a stub, and he doesn’t want to make a mistake. Closing his eyes once more, he feels his way along her ear—it is full of rumples and ridges—and she says, “Ohhhh.”

  The tunnel is achingly quiet, only the zip of cars above, a sound so constant that it is swallowed. He remains with his fingers tentative at the center of her ear, near the well of her eardrum, and he can feel the nervousness tremble through her.

  “I don’t like you touching me there,” Angela says, but he tells her that it will look like a miniature lake. Some other time, he thinks, he will begin from a different point, maybe at the lobe where the missing earring will make a sinkhole of sorts. Angela shifts and lights another cigarette. He doesn’t want to feel her face while she smokes; he says it will give a false reading, the suck-in of cheeks when she draws on the filter. She smokes it down to the quick and then Treefrog crushes it underfoot.

  He snaps his eyes shut and moves across the ear until his finger touches the side of her face at the soft point just at the top of her jawbone.

  “You sure your fingers is clean?” she asks.

  “Yeah,” he whispers.

  There is a tiny ridge at the bone and he marks it on his graph. Angela is quiet now, and she too closes her eyes. Treefrog pecks at the air with his head and he is sure that he can smell the lovely mustiness of her, but then she winces when he touches the bruise on the middle of her cheek—the topography of violence—and he tries to skim the very edge of her skin where it must be colored blue.

  “That hurts.”

  “Sorry.”

  If she cries, he wonders, will he be able to stop the water with his fingers so that the tense molecules might be arrested for a single second, become forever a part of her face? But she doesn’t cry, and his fingers move a little more quickly now, away from the bruise. Her skin makes a little bump toward the side of her nose where it flares out.

  “You got a nice nose,” he says to her, as his fingers begin the rise to a bone that feels as if it has been broken many times. He touches her nostril and comes to the very center of her face, smooths his fingers along her cheek.

  “You done yet, asshole?”

  “I have to do the other side.”

  “Why?”

  “’Cause you can’t have half a face.”

  “What if Elijah sees us?”

  “I’ll make a map of his fist. It’ll look like a ridge with a big knob on the end.”

  She chuckles.

  “Stand still, goddammit.”

  Treefrog reaches up with the left hand and strokes her right ear, remembering the exact movements of his fingers on the opposite side of her face. It is vital that each hand do an equal amount of touching. His fingers move across her cheekbone—no bruises on this side—and with infinite tenderness he maps the geography of Angela. When he is done, he climbs up to his nest, brings down four blankets, and they sit in the tunnel by the Melting Clock mural. A train whizzes past not ten feet away. He joins the dots together on the graph paper, licking the lead end of the pencil so that the joining line is dark and prominent.

  He works with great care, making sure that the lines are consistent, uniform, unwavering, that a gentle curve appears between dots, that the graph doesn’t become jittery or messy. He never once uses the eraser. The lighter and the pencil are switched from hand to hand, his fingers shaking in the cold. Angela looks over his shoulder, her chin on his overcoat, saying, “This is about the stupidest thing I ever seen.”

  When Treefrog is finished, he holds the paper up and shows Angela the rise and curl of her face—the canyons and ridges and riverbeds and hanging valleys that she has become.

  “Heyyo,” he says to the paper.

  “That’s me?”

  “There’s your ears, that’s your nose, that’s your cheek.”

  “Looks bumpy.”

  “I can change the scale,” says Treefrog.

  “Do me a favor, Treefy?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Get rid of the bruise there,” she says.

  He looks at her and smiles.

  Scraping his fingernails along the top of the eraser to make sure it doesn’t leave black smudges on the graph paper, he scrubs out the hillock where the bruise was. She kisses him on the cheek and softly says, “Doctor Treefrog.”

  “If I take readings of everywhere I could make a map of the rest of your face. I’d have all these contours and your face’d look like this.” He draws a series of distorted circles. “Your nose’d be like this. And your ear’d be like this. And your lips, they’d be weird. Like this.”

  “Where d’ya learn to do this?”

  “I taught myself. I been making maps for a long time.”

  “You ever do it for anyone else?”

  “I did it for Dancesca.”

  “Who’s she?”

  “I told you about her. And Lenora too. My little girl.”

  “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Nobody knows where I is either,” says Angela.

  * * *

  Walker sits by the window. The apartment has been remodeled to twice its former size, the landlord stung for housing violations. The view from the window has changed in recent years—the sunlight is blocked out by large housing projects that step their way across the city. Giant gray and brown buildings, they frown against the skyline. Washing flutters out from balconies. Boys chat through adjacent windows, using tin cans and string. Suicides are heard for the length of their screams.

  Only Louisa and the boy remain in the apartment with him. Both Walker’s daughters have left to get married, Deirdre to a steamfitter in the Texas oilfields, Maxine to a welder from Philadelphia. Slowly the girls have faded from his life. Photographs of their children sometimes arrive late, as if they’ve suddenly been born at the age of one or two. Walker often thinks of making a trip to see them, but it never happens; his bank account will not allow it.

  Most of his time is spent sitting by the window, watching his ten-year-old grandson, Clarence Nathan, playing alone in an empty lot across the street.

  Sometimes, in the apartment, Louisa dances. Walker turns the couch to face the center of the room, tightens a blanket over his legs, balances a teacup on the arm of the couch. Clarence Nathan also watches—his mother’s arms stretched out to an unvoiced song and her feet going back and forth delicately as Walker’s big guffaws mix in with the city’s sirens. She tucks her head to her chest, as if i
nto a wingpit. Lifts it up again. Arms moving up against a heavy air, she seems ready for the sky, a chimera of movement and geometry. But Walker has noticed changes in the rhythms in recent years. From his position on the soft cushions, he has seen Louisa’s movements clang toward a certain jerkiness, a loss of control. Tall and long-legged, she has developed the look of something wounded. Her arms don’t quite stretch out as they used to. Her feet are not as lyrical. Her breathing is jerky. The primitive rawness is less than it once was, and she has lost something in the way she spins; there is often a temporary stumble on the lip of the carpet, as if her fluidity has siphoned itself down into the tequila, where Louisa searches for it. A bottle and a half a day. In the morning she stumbles out of bed and goes straight to the cupboard, doesn’t even wince at the first sip. She loves to peel the labels halfway off, scraping them with her fingernails. Sometimes she hides in the bathroom for hours, comes out with the bottle empty.

  Louisa wears a row of seashells at her neck, strung together on a piece of white twine. The shells jangle when she moves. She always says she feels a little dizzy, that a doctor has given her pills to help cure the problem. She swallows the pills in handfuls and they keep her awake for long stretches. She goes to late-night clubs, arrives home frenzied, her hair unthreading as she tosses in the single bed beside her son. In the afternoons, she wakes only to give a cursory kiss to the boy, then falls back silent on the bed.

  A litany of men calls at the door and Walker has noticed—with a thickening sense of shame—the rise of her skirts high on her thighs.

  Things have begun to go missing from the apartment: a vase, a soupspoon, a picture frame but not the picture.

  “Y’all seen Clarence’s frame?” Walker asks her. “He looks mighty naked without it.”

  “Haven’t seen it anywhere,” she says.

  “Wouldn’t happen to be in the pawnshop?”

  “’Course not. What you think I am, a thief?”

  “Take it easy, girl. Y’all know I don’t think that.”

  “You saying I soaked his frame?”

  “’Course not,” says Walker. “I’m sorry. Just shooting my mouth off. Don’t mind me.”

  “After all I do around here? Cook and clean. Keep you near your grandson. You know, I could live anywhere I want. And you tell me I’m a thief?”

  “I was just wondering about the frame.”

  “Well, don’t wonder.”

  “Hey,” says Walker after a moment, “d’y’all ever think about what might be growing in the place of Clarence’s eyeball?”

  “What?”

  “His eyeball. I mean, what sort of plant? In Korea. I mean, that’s what he said long ago, wasn’t it? That something might grow there in that place.”

  “You got a fever or something, Nathan? I’ve no idea what you’re talking about. All I hear from you these days is things that don’t make any goddamn sense.”

  “Don’t cuss in front of the boy.”

  “I’ll curse if I want.”

  “Sometimes I think it may be a big American oak.”

  “No such thing as an American oak,” she says.

  “Or a chestnut tree or something.”

  “No chestnuts in Korea.”

  “Maybe a maple.”

  She turns away. “I’m going out for a while.”

  “Where you going to now?”

  “Just out.”

  “Watch that skirt don’t disappear altogether. You’ll be whistling down the street. They’ll hear you coming around the corner.”

  “Funny funny.” And then she sighs. “Will you look after Claren?”

  “Holy Name,” says Walker.

  “Well?”

  “Y’all know I always look after the boy.”

  “Thanks,” she says, landing a brusque kiss on Clarence Nathan’s forehead.

  “Lord,” Walker says, as she leaves.

  One evening Louisa comes home and wakes Walker, and—with her pupils swimming up near her eyelids—she insists on dancing while the boy is asleep. She puts a finger to her mouth for silence and stands in the center of the room. The seashell necklace lies white against her brown skin. She has wrapped a thin blue scarf around her head. Four other scarves hang from it, down to the small of her back, rippling in with her hair, which is filthy. She spins and whirls and throws out her arms and Walker is temporarily enraptured until—suddenly—she loses control, falls, and, as if in slow motion, one foot goes high in the air, her arms make half windmills, her elbow grazes the floor, and she collapses against the cupboard. Her head slices against a metal handle.

  Walker, in his pajamas, struggles up and lifts her from the ground. He leans close and notices a trace of vomit on her breath. He is thankful to see there is no blood, just a scrape on her forehead.

  He opens the buttons on the sleeve of her blouse to check her pulse and sees the bracelet of tiny track marks on the inside of her wrist.

  “Go back to bed,” he tells his grandson, who is awake and standing beside him.

  “What’s wrong, Mister Walker?”

  “Go on now. Your momma’s just taken a little turn.”

  Walker is glad to find the faintest of pulses—like the distant memory of a canoe turning a corner—and he lifts Louisa to a sitting position, gently slapping her face to waken her.

  * * *

  “The thing about a crane, son, is that when it swallows a fish it takes it down headfirst. Any sort of fish y’all want. The tail never goes down the throat first. If it did, the scales would rip her throat. So she eats it headfirst, and it goes down all nice and smooth. That’s a known fact. They just do it by nature. They’re no fools. They just do things the way God supposed them to do. I seen that happen.”

  * * *

  Balance is the boy’s inheritance. While his mother is strung out on a tide of chemicals and his grandfather is strapped to the couch with pain, he likes to go up to the rooftop and look out beyond the architecture of Harlem—past the projects and the red-brick churches and the funeral homes and the intricate plasterwork and the empty lots and the parks—to the skyscrapers leaping across Manhattan.

  Heroin deals take place on the rooftop, wads of money changing fists, but the junkies leave Clarence Nathan alone. When they get high they like to watch him walk the edge of the wall, acrobatically, above a seventy-foot drop to the street below. They urge him to go faster, to run along the thin ledge.

  The boy moves like a morphine vision, full of potential. His feet never go astray and he can even do a handstand, a slight quiver to his arms as he looks upside down at the sky.

  He never thinks of the danger. His heart is steady anywhere. The blood flows equally to each part of his body.

  Once he went to his school gymnasium, climbed the rope from floor to ceiling, and hung upside down—a teacher saw him, dangling in the air with the rope wrapped around his foot, knotted at the ankle. He remained still; his body didn’t even sway. The teacher recognized him from other incidents—he’d been cornered at school many times, beaten up by other boys. For a moment he thought Clarence Nathan had strung himself up, but the boy let out a yelp, curled his body, unknotted his foot, slipped down the rope, and dropped to the ground.

  Some afternoons his grandfather struggles up the staircase to watch the boy’s antics. Walker uses a cane, guiding himself past the reams of graffiti on the walls. His seventy-second year has given him more pain than ever before. A thin gray beard has appeared on his cheeks, his fingers no longer nimble enough to handle a razor. A tobacco pouch is slung around his neck for easy access, tied with a length of cord. It bobs above the silver cross. He labors to open the door at the top of the stairs, eventually just shoves it with his knee, and winces with discomfort.

  On the rooftop Walker finds some sunlight and turns his face toward it, sees Clarence Nathan standing on the ledge.

  “Mister Walker!” shouts the boy.

  Walker glares at the junkies who are slumbering on the other side of the roof, melting cubes in
a bucket for shooting ice water into their veins.

  He sits on a shabby blue lawn chair covered with the soot of the city. He reaches up to his brow and rubs his temple cool and then nods to the boy. “Go ahead, son.”

  “Which one’ll I do?”

  “Any one y’all want.”

  “Okay!”

  “Just be careful.”

  Walker settles back in the seat. He has seen it often enough that he has learned not to be afraid. The boy waves, rushes to the edge of the roof, and leaps to a nearby rooftop. In the air there is a fusion of ecstasy and danger: one leg straightened way out in front of the other, the rush of wind around him. He lands perfectly, three feet beyond the lip of the next building, looks around, and grins. He leaps back again, sticking to a curious rule he’s made for himself, landing on the alternate foot each time. He likes it this way. If he makes a mistake he goes back and forth, back and forth, to ensure balance. The soles of his sneakers are almost worn out. He tells himself that one day he will try it barefoot. Pride thumps in him as Walker gives a slow round of applause, a bit of tobacco spit escaping the old man’s mouth and dropping on his shirt. Walker rubs at it, ashamed.

  “Good job, son.”

  “Will I do it again?”

  “Sure. Nothing too fancy though, that’s all. Go on now.”

  Walker sits all afternoon, moving the lawn chair according to the swing of the sun, watching the acrobatics.

  Even when the boy listens to his grandfather’s stories he perches on the ledge, putting his arms around his knees, rocking back and forth above the street.

  When the sun goes down, Clarence Nathan hops from the wall and cleans the soot off the back of his grandfather’s pants. The soot billows out from the old man’s ass, and they laugh as it makes clouds in the air.

  The stories continue as they make their way over patches of sticky tar and broken glass and then negotiate the staircase down. There are new faces graffitied on the stairwell wall, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale wearing dashikis, their faces set between two large panthers drawn like petroglyphs. Beside that: PIGS AREN’T KOSHER. Beside that: EAT YOUR DRAFT CARD. Further down, a poster with the face of the late Martin Luther King.

  There are two new locks on the apartment door. Inside, dishes are piled high in the sink. The fridge is open, nothing inside. A half-made wicker chair stands upside down, abandoned. Photos are yellowing on the walls. All the frames have gone missing.