Philadelphia Noir

“Marrying you was the only way to get close enough to find the truth,” she said coldly. “We had to know if you were part of a larger cell or if you acted of your own volition. The fact is, I did it for the same reason you helped bin Laden escape in Tora Bora. I love my people, and I wasn’t about to watch you or anyone else hurt them.”

Richard leaped forward and grabbed Miller’s weapon from his hands, but before he could fire, Corrine pulled a gun from the small of her back and pumped three rounds into his chest.

The gun slipped from his fingers as blood bubbled up in his mouth. He looked at Corrine for the last time before closing his eyes and leaning back against the wall.

At that moment, everything went quiet and Richard was afraid. But it wasn’t the numbness in his body or the sensation of blood spilling down his chest that frightened him. It was the silence.

As Richard fought through the depths of unconsciousness to reach back toward life, it was the silence that enveloped him like a shroud, pulling him down into the tomb his life had become.

He was tempted to surrender-to lay his head upon the breast of silence and allow it to rock him to sleep, the way his mother had rocked him as a child. What, after all, did he have to live for? Who would shed tears if death folded him in its arms and held him there forever?

Richard was a scarred man in more ways than one. He wasn’t connected to a home, or to a family, or to a wife. Not anymore. He’d been severed from them all, like the silence was severing him from life. Even now he felt it, sliding up through his ears and into the recesses of his mind. He felt it pouring over his body, slow and thick and sweet, like syrup. It was silence, and as his eyes closed for the last time, Richard reached toward it with his very soul, hoping at last for peace.

SECRET POOL BY ASALI SOLOMON

West Philadelphia

I learned about the University City Swim Club around the same time things started disappearing from my room. First I noticed that I was missing some jewelry, and then the old plaid Swatch I’d been saving for a future Antiques Road-show. I didn’t say anything to my mother, because they say it’s dangerous to wake a sleepwalker. But then I felt like we were all sleepwalkers when Aja told me about the pool, hiding in plain sight right up on 47th Street in what looked like an alley between Spruce and Pine.

“You don’t know about the University City Swim Club?” she said, pretending shock. It was deep August and I sat on the steps of my mother’s house. Aja was frankly easier to take during the more temperate months, but since my summer job had ended and there were two and a half more weeks before eleventh grade, I often found myself in her company.

Aja Bell and I had been friends of a sort since first grade, when we’d been the only two black girls in the Mentally Gifted program, though there couldn’t have been more than thirty white kids in the whole school. Aja loved MG because there was a group of girls in her regular class who tortured her. Then in sixth grade, I got a scholarship to the Barrett School for Girls and Aja stayed where she was. Now she went to Central High, where she was always chasing these white city kids. It killed her that I went to school in the suburbs with real rich white people, while her French teacher at Central High was a black man from Georgia. Despite the fact that I had no true friends at my school and hated most things about my life, she was in a one-sided social competition with me. As a result, I was subjected to Aja’s peacocking around about things like how her friend Jess, who lived in a massive house down on Cedar Avenue, had invited her to go swimming with her family.

“Come off it, Aja. I just said I didn’t know about it.”

“I just think if you live right here… maybe your mom knows about it?”

“Look, is there a story here?”

“Well, it’s crazy. There’s this wooden gate with a towing sign on it like it’s just a parking lot, but behind it is this massive pool and these brand-new lockers and everything. And it was so crowded!”

“Any black people there?”

“Zingha, why you have to make everything about black and white?”

“Maybe because people are starting all-white pools in my neighborhood.”

She sighed. “There was a black guy there.”

“Janitor?”

“I think he was the security guard.”

I snorted.

We watched a black Range Rover crawl down the block. The windows were tinted, and LL Cool J’s “The Boomin’ System” erupted from the speakers.

“Wow,” I said, in mock awe. “That’s boomin’ from his boomin’ system.”

“So ghetto,” said Aja.

“Um, because this is the ghetto,” I said, though my mother forbade me to use the word.

“He spoke to me,” Aja said suddenly. “The pool security guard. He wasn’t that much older than us.”

“Was he cute?” I asked without much interest.

“Tell you the truth, he’s a little creepy. Like maybe he was on that line between crazy and, um, retarded.”

I laughed and then she did too.

“So you been hanging out with Jess a lot this summer?” Jess, a gangly brunette with an upturned nose, was Aja’s entry into the clique to which she aspired. But Jess sometimes ignored Aja for weeks at a time, and had repeatedly tried to date guys who Aja liked.

“Well, not a lot. She was at tennis camp earlier,” Aja said, glancing away from my face. She could never fully commit to a lie. I imagined my older brother Dahani a couple of nights ago, spinning a casual yarn for my mom about how he’d been at the library after his shift at the video store. He said he was researching colleges that would accept his transfer credits. Dahani had been home for a year, following a spectacular freshman-year flameout at Oberlin. That memory led me to a memory from seventh grade when Dahani said he’d teach me how to lie to my mother so I could go to some unsupervised sleepover back when I cared about those things. I practiced saying, “There will be parental supervision,” over and over. Dahani laughed because I bit the inside of my cheek when I said my line.

“You mean the pool at the Y?” my mom asked me later that night. We had just finished eating the spaghetti with sausage that she had cooked especially for my brother. She had cracked open her nightly can of Miller Lite.

“Not that sewer,” I said.

“Poor Zingha, you hate your fancy school and you hate your community too. Hard being you, isn’t it?”

“Sorry,” I muttered, rather than hearing again about how I used to be a sweet girl who loved to hug people and cried along with TV characters.

Dahani, who used to have a volatile relationship with our mother, was now silent more often than not. But he said, “I know what you’re talking about, Zingha. Up on 47th Street.” Then he immediately looked like he wanted to take it back.

“You been there?” I asked.

“Just heard about it,” my brother said, tapping out a complicated rhythm on the kitchen table. When he was younger it meant he was about to go to his room. Now it meant he was trying to get out of the house. I wasn’t even sure why he insisted on coming home for dinner most nights. Though of course free hot food was probably a factor.

“So what are you up to tonight?” my mother asked him brightly.

“I was gonna catch the new Spike Lee with Jason,” he said.

My mother’s face dimmed. She always hoped that he’d say, Staying right here. But she rallied. “You liked that one, didn’t you, Zingha?”

I looked at Dahani. “Sure, watch Wesley Snipes do it with a white woman and stick me with the dishes.”