that he thought I should know.
Ten minutes tops, I was on my way. They were holding you at University Hospital pending court hearing. Don Walsh came in not long after. Didn't say much. Just shook hands, a little sadly I thought (I didn't learn about Danny till later), and introduced his friend from the DA's office, woman named Arlene. Arlene's wearing jeans and a pink dress shirt with a man's tie at half-mast and a leather fanny pack. Steps through, around and past legal formalities like she's off somewhere else reading a book or having a good meal this is so simple, and before any of us know it we're out the other side. Standing on the sidewalk with this miserable six-in-the-morning rain slopping down us and into clogged gutters. Whole city starting to smell like wet sheep.
You and Deborah been together long?
Just wondered. She was there too by then. Asked if it were possible the two of you might be alone awhile. She had her car, she'd bring you round to the Center.
Three weeks, or just over. You came in on a Sunday. It's Monday now. Late afternoon.
Funny. I never imagined I might be sending out smoke signals, to Richard Garces or anyone else. Makes meremember what you wrote: 'Signals we're set here to read.'
I did keep track of your books. Every new one that came out I'd read it, thinking: Okay, he's managed to pull it off one more time. I'd try to figure out the people I knew, which of your apartments you were describing, the bars and restaurants and women you wrote about. The Old Man's still my favorite.
You all right? Need to rest? That's some strong stuff you're behind right now. Know how it is.
Maybe later we'll have the chance, be able, to talk about all that.
Remember how when I was a kid you used to recite the prologue to Tlw Canterbury Tales to me in Middle English, tell me about Rimbaud? Je est un autre. You must become a seer. Ilfaut que vous changer votre vie.
Okay, changiez. Present subjunctive. Whatever. Hey: I was close.
I used to think a lot about that story you were always telling. How back home your father took you to breakfast one morning at Nick's, on the levee by theriver, and how once you'd ordered and got your plates through a side window into the kitchen and were sitting there on the steps of the old railway station, watching all the white folks so warm at the tables inside and balancing greasy paper plates on knees shaky with cold he told you that no matter what you did-raise his children for him, fight his wars for him, keep his economy afloat-to the white man you'd always be invisible.
Mirrors weren't made for the likes of us, you said.
But of course I knew there was no way I was going to be kept away from those mirrors. Mirrors, hell. I'd be on the covers of their goddamned magazines.
We're kids, stuff like that goes through us like water. What's my old man know? Or your old man? Any old man. Things are different now. World's different. I'm different. Sure.
So I go on readingmy books and then one day, it seems all at once now when I look back on it, how the hell did this ever happen, there I am, in Europe, halfway to being an old man myself.
Biggest damn mirrors you ever saw. Here's everything I've been taught is most important, everything I've made so much a part of my own life, of what I am. Eiux›pean ait, European history, European literature, eveiything that defines the cultiue I live in. Put out a hand and you touch it Knock over some monument of imaging intellect if you're not careful.
Then one day I realize I can't see myself in those mirrors anymore. I'm simply not there. Not there at all, however hard I stare.
Because my skin is black? Because I'm not European? You tell me. I haven'tfigured it out. But everything I'd based my life on was suddenly gone.
I came back to the States only to findthat this had all become every bit as alien to me now as Paris, Berlin or London, Brittany with its cattle, Kent with its sheep.
The whole country was forts now. Fort Lakeside, Fort Prytania, the Walled City of Metairie. Malls and parking lots and fast-food chains. Everybody zipping past at forty, fifty miles an hour like trapped flies banging against windows. Everybody shut away in his own little world.
And the more you're alone, the more natural seems the importance, the supremacy, of self. Other lives become little more than contrails dissolving on the sky.
Somehow, I knew, I had to break out of that tyranny. Get the windows open, learn to move slowly again, break the mirrors, embrace others' lives.
I called you twice, but couldn't figure out what to say. I waited till the machine cut off, then hung up myself. But you know that, of course. You wrote about it.
I've been here at the Center almost the whole time. Here and other places like it. Found out pretty quickly that the pain I carried around with me, thought I couldn't bear-compared with others', that pain was nothing.
These faces, they're the mirrors I can see myself in.
Every one of them.
36
'Yours more than most, though,' my son had said there in the He'p-Se'f Center out in Gentilly, on Elysian Fields, New Orleans' own Champs-Elysees, for which (like so many other things in the city) there had been all manner of grandiose plans, none of them ever within sniffing distance of fruition, the street, built at great expense, all its life little more than an interminable bus stop lined with rathole cafes and cut-rate stores, step-up cottages with cheap cement steps and gaps between thin shingles of siding hurriedly hammered on, nothing at all by way of internal walls.
Within the week I was transferred to a halfway house in midtown, a once-grand home now given to dangerously sagging porches and balconies with railingslike decayed teeth, across the street from a service station recently converted to a falafel house, sheets of plywood still stacked along the side. Holding on for dear life, and for lack of any other entertainment, inmates sat out on the balconies to watch citizens come and go.
A couple of weeks later I was home, where this time Zeke, in turn, met me at the door.
'This is my son, Brother David,' I said, and everyone laughed: Richard Garces, Don, Deborah, Norm and Ray 'RM' Marcus from up the street. All of them had come to see me home. And they'd all brought food.
For the next hour or two we worked our way through, around and over pots of red beans and rice with grilled sausage, steaming gumbo from which protruded various claws and halves of bivalve shells, tasso on a bed of mixed greens, boiled crawfish. We'd covered the kitchen table with newspapers. Garces and Norm Marcus were in competition to see who could collect the biggest heap of crawfish bodies.
I'd taken one look at my own pile of bodies, all the mail that accumulated while I was away (life goes on), and dumped it in one of the boxes people had brought food in. Over the next few weeks that box would move otherwise untouched from kitchen floor to pantry to a closet shelf to the trash can I set out curbside each Tuesday and Friday.
Zeke made untold pots of coffee and, for Deborah, cup after cup of tea, which he delivered to her on a small tray complete with cream pitcher, lemon slices, vat of sugar and a demitasse spoon he'd found somewhere. Hard to tell whether she or he got the bigger kick out of it.
Music was catch as catch can. Whoever firstnoticed the last record, tape or CD was done went over and put on whatever he or she wanted to. Irememberhearing Fats Waller, Mozart's horn and clarinet quintets, Arrested Development, Frank Sinatra punching out lounge-lizard standards (no idea how that ever got in there: not mine), Blind Willie McTell and wife, the Charlie Christian Minton sessions, Irish music recorded live at Matt Malloy's, Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad. At one point someone even pulled out Buster Robinson's old BlueStrain record and put that on.
Hours later Don and I found ourselves sitting on the bench under the tree in the backyard, by the slave quarters. People still moved around inside the house, in the light. Dark out here. Moonlight pushing through clouds, through humidity that shelled the moon in nacreous layei's, made it a pearl. A few more neighbors had shown up, a teacher or two, Sally Mara with her latest young man, the two of them all in black. Keith LeRoy wearing perfect English.
'I hope you know how happy I am for you, Lew,' Walsh said. 'I mean that.'
