Dev’s fingers brushed the back of my hand and closed on empty air as I propelled myself from the barstool.
He called after me, and I ignored him. Tamara, watching this, pulled away from her new man and angled herself so I couldn’t pass her.
“Did something happen?”
“Oh, everything’s swell, Tamara. But I’d leave me alone right about now.”
She flinched, but rubbed my shoulder. “You know, Pea, there was a broad over by the door just now, giving you the oddest stare.”
“I’ve got to—really?”
Tamara glanced at Clyde. He nodded at me. “White lady. Older. Busted up, like her old man’s got a nasty temper.”
This night was trying to unravel every awful feeling I’d ever had coiled inside me. Maryann West was here. And if Dev was telling the truth—
I had to find her and talk to her, before Victor noticed. The crowd had grown thick while Dev quietly skewered me from behind the bar. I wiggled my way through it, looking everywhere for Maryann and not finding her. I angled for the door, and might have made it if not for the hand that fell on my shoulder.
“Looking good, dollface,” a familiar voice said. “What’s your rush?” Russian Vic had the voice of a newscaster, nasal vowels pressed into service of staccato sentence fragments. He dangled subjects like fishhooks, and baited them with implied interrogatives.
I pivoted on the ball of one foot and engaged a smile. “Fresh air,” I said. “I hate smoking in this press.”
“Red Man said you never gave him an answer. So you’re gonna…”
“I’m going outside,” I said, firmly. “And I just found out about this job today. Our deal from the start was that I get a choice, Vic. Remember that.”
Victor looked back at Walter, sprawled across a chair and surrounded by a two-foot radius of free space. “They may call you my angel,” he said, conversational, “but you remember this: you’re my knife. A knife’s edge gets dull, well, you have to…”
I stepped backward. “Go outside, Victor. You have to go outside. We’ll talk about this later.”
Victor had a shock of silver-gray hair and more than a dozen silver teeth to match. He’d had all his own teeth when I met him, but it seemed the dentist gave him a new one each year. He grinned, and all that silver flashed. “Sure we will.” His soldiers were all convinced he had saint’s hands for detecting disloyalty, but I—like my dentist—figured he was lying. I’d never known a white man with saint’s hands.
If I could have sprinted through that crowd, I would have. No one scared me quite like Victor. Not because he was ruthless—if anything Red Man was better known for his artistry with violence—but because I had been trading on his power for years too long.
I reached the door without any sign of Maryann West. Out on the sidewalk I could breathe again. I pulled out a cigarette with jittery relief. I flicked Dev’s lighter on and off, on and off, struggling to regain enough control to go back inside.
Victor might kill me.
Seven months didn’t matter to Dev at all.
Someone’s heels clicked on the sidewalk. I turned to see Maryann West walking straight toward me. She’d cleaned up since this morning, but it still hurt to look at her. She squinted and stopped five feet away.
“I need to ask you something,” I said.
“Fuck you,” she said.
As she reached into her pocket someone else sprinted up behind me, someone who was screaming my name in a voice completely different from the one that had said I just couldn’t stay.
Dev pushed me. I thought that was why I had fallen until I smelled blood, which was familiar, and felt it on my hands, which was also. I tried to grip my knife, and then tried again, even though by now the pain had started and I knew the blood for my own.
“Phyllis,” Dev said, like he had back then, a note low and joyous that gave meaning to the silence around it. He stilled my hands and pressed his jacket to my chest.
There was something in his face I needed to understand. Not the horror or grief, which anyone might feel while holding the dying woman they once loved, but something beyond it, or before it.
“Why?” I asked, and shook.
“Shh,” he said, “Pea, stay still—”
“Why work for Victor? Why stay?” I trusted him to understand the rest. Why stay in my world after I’d rejected his? Why watch me and let me watch him for a decade while we slept with other people?
He cursed and looked up and said something that might have been a prayer. I blinked, which seemed to take a very long time.
“I’ll tell you later,” he said.
“Tell me now.”
“You’re not going to die!”
“Why stay, Dev?”
I focused on the whites of his eyes, very bright and wide as the sky.
He whispered, “I’m an informant,” and so it wasn’t the bullet that killed me, after all.
Two.
After I died, I saw a light, blue and barrel-vaulted, with a tunnel at the end of it.
A little less than common. Three plus eight is eleven: a one and a one. Add that up and you have two.
That dark artery demanded attention, smug with its complication and its vice, but I turned to lines that pointed to a cloudless sky, and I waited.
The tunnel told me that we don’t have beds, try Harlem Hospital, and what the hell are you insinuating, the poor woman’s as white as you are—but the tunnel should have known I didn’t care, that this train don’t see no white or black, no, this train. And yet the light, all uniformity and grace, seemed content to watch instead of offering its embrace. There were people in it, old men and women, speaking in tongues that had crossed an ocean and died on foreign soil. They wore no chains; in this place they raised their hands.
At my back, the tunnel’s pulse grew stronger, so that I felt its broken
