Her flight, however, was not about distance but the pure expenditure of energy. She needed to burn everything off. She needed to make tracks. She needed to assert her existence through movement and separate herself from all that was static and unchangeable and inevitable around her. It didn’t matter what might be accomplished. All that mattered was her commitment to the effort.
Marcus was uncertain whether to follow her or not.
He stood there wanting to yell. It would have been inane. What could he have yelled? “Stop”? “Hold on”?
He acted on impulse. He followed her without intent or a plan. He simply felt that their connection couldn’t be allowed to be broken. Not this way. She was walking in the direction laughably called the Financial District. All that was there now, other than the carcass of buildings, was a taxi stand where foreign drivers stared into their smartphones listening to TV shows in their native languages through tiny speakers that made the voices they missed only seem that much farther away.
She trudged down Fourth Avenue like someone fighting against a river, and Marcus pursued. Pale, torn, shredded, and fixated, he walked fast enough to overtake her but he did not run; running seemed wrong, running would have turned him into a pursuer—it was too literal and direct and aggressive. He needed to catch up to her and change her mind about everything, using words he didn’t have and hoped would magically appear, the way they did not with his mother.
He caught up to her outside an unfinished building at 86 Brookmeyer Road.
“Don’t leave like this,” he’d said.
“Leave me alone, Marcus.” Her voice was low. There was nothing conflicted in her tone.
Traffic was light. The glass tower rose and merged with the steel sky above them.
“I’m afraid that if you leave now you’ll never come back.”
“That’s right.”
“It’s because of the verdict. I know, I understand that. But we can’t destroy everything—”
“Everything?” she asked, dropping her bag from her shoulder and waving her hand between them. “You mean us? That’s the ‘everything’ to you?”
“I’m afraid to talk to you. I’m afraid of your anger. It’s bigger than us, and it comes from a place outside of us, and I can’t find a place to talk to you here on the inside.”
“I don’t care,” she said. “I don’t owe you that. You don’t get a ‘safe space.’ You have a country of your own, Marcus. Go home. Go to where you belong. Consider yourself lucky that you have someplace else to call home that isn’t here.”
That is when he threw down the gauntlet and decided that—instead of him leaving Lydia to try to come to terms with the seismic implications of the grand jury decision—they should hold hands and, to save their relationship, declare war on injustice.
“We can fight this!” he’d yelled to her.
He actually said that: We can fight this.
What he thought he meant, at the time, was that they could choose to be together, independent of the injustices of the wider world. They would not be the first couple since Romeo and Juliet to try it, and there was a very good chance they’d wind up better off than those two did. An interracial couple in 2008 was a less impossible scenario than the pursuit of romantic love in 1597.
But Lydia wasn’t trying to save them; she was trying to save some part of herself.
By the time Marcus recounted all this to Sigrid and Irv from his rock on Lake Flower, he had come to understand that his declaration to “fight” sounded different to her than how he’d intended it. She heard it with different ears. To her, his proclamation had been a declaration of war against time and history and gravity.
We can fight the winds and the seas, he might have said instead. We can fight against the spread of the continents and the pull of the moon. Let’s fight against the elements, one by one, until we have dominion over them all, and let us establish a kingdom of righteousness and liberty and tolerance and human kindness and give it a name unspoiled by other names. We will speak of our victory in a new language unshaped by power, and sing to each other in poetry untainted by robbery or theft of one culture by another. We’ll do that together, he might as well have said. Just you and me. And we will wash away the old world in a great flood and renew it. Adam and Eve, naked on the Ark. A stateroom for two—the only animals here on a mission from God.
“I want to show you something,” she said in reply to his own emancipation proclamation.
If she’d walked away, if she’d shaken her head in dismay as she should have, if she hadn’t looked at him as someone who needed to be enlightened—if she had simply told him to fuck off and leave her alone—she’d still be alive.
But she didn’t do any of that.
She dropped her duffle bag to the ground and walked directly into 86 Brookmeyer Road and started climbing the stairs, two at a time, like a high school athlete scaling the bleachers.
Marcus considered collecting the duffle, but she had already vanished into the building and there was no way he’d catch up to her if he were carrying it. Something else, something important, was happening.
Why was she going in there? It had never even felt like a place before—only something irrelevant and characterless in his geography that he passed by on his way to someplace else.
Marcus was bigger and taller and stronger than Lydia, and he had a broad chest. He weighed about 190 pounds and stood over six feet tall. He was not athletic, per se, but he lived a clean
