“Well, who else can I ask? It’s me that’s doing the asking. That’s the position you leave me in. Who else, huh?”
He’d maintained his sullenness and so she’d said goodbye, promising to leave him some money at the desk outside. She couldn’t wait to get to her bicycle and ride away from him. She’d left him standing there, his mouth in a babyish pout as usual. As she rode, she pictured him still standing there, waiting for her to turn around and come back, and all she could do was run, and all she could find was this well of heat and cold depth.
The muscles of highway and streets met down at the lake. All along the underpasses graffiti marred the concrete girders. She recognized the tags. The kids who lived across the alleyway from her apartment were graffiti artists. Kumaran’s grinning pig, Abel’s “narc” initial, then Keeran’s desert and Jericho’s lightning bolt. She felt slightly comforted, though she had asked them often enough to paint something else if they were going to paint the whole city over. Something more. They had practically filled all the walls of the city with these four signs, and she would have liked them to paint a flowering jungle or a seaside, the places where her mother, Angie, had always dreamed of going but never went. But she loved the city. She loved riding through the neck of it, the triangulating girders now possessed by the graffiti crew. She loved the feeling of weight and balance it gave her.
Jamal didn’t see the city as she did. His life was in his skin, in his mouth, in his eyes, in the closest physical encounters. He operated only on his senses as far as Carla was concerned. But she saw the city as a set of obstacles to be crossed and circled, avoided and let pass. He saw it as something to get tangled in. Why couldn’t he see just one step ahead of himself, she wondered, one want ahead of itself, as she crisscrossed and floated under the highway bypasses. Everything was immediate for Jamal, everything in the moment. Well, he had to learn, just like she had. Against the flow of the rush-hour traffic making its way to the expressway taking cars out of the city, she pedalled at a demonic pace. Shit, shit, shit, shit. She had to stop thinking, just pedal, just go, go, go.
Her legs were leaden when she’d finally dragged the bicycle up the stairs. Her thighs were boulders. It was as if because she’d stopped she’d become leaden, as if the sluggish prison embraced her again. If she’d continued, she was sure she would fly. But her own weight and the thought of her brother at Mimico Correctional crushed her again. She’d showered in cold water until her fingers were numb, then wrapped herself in a rough towel. Dripping and in between burning and freezing, she’d written something in her head. She thought she’d written it on paper, then searched for it wildly and didn’t find it. Her hands were useless, numb and shrivelled from the prolonged shower. She’d tried putting on a shirt but couldn’t find the neck. She’d sat naked by the window, freezing and thawing.
For six months she hadn’t seen Jamal. She’d convinced herself that if she didn’t see him, if she didn’t hear from him, if he didn’t call her, then things were fine. He was doing well wherever he was. She dreaded his phone calls, especially the phone calls late at night—why he always seemed to be in trouble late at night was beyond her. So six months had passed and she hadn’t spoken to him directly. She had heard from him. He’d left two messages on her machine, one sounding sweet: “Carla, just want you to know, see, that I really love you and I appreciate everything you did. I’m fine. Calling because you know how, eh, you say I always call with trouble?” He giggled. “I wanted to tell you that I’m fine and, you know, just checkin’ you …” The next time he sounded elated: “C, man, I’m really getting it together. Everything is cool, great.” She was beginning to get comfortable but should’ve known, whenever he sounded elated some shit was going to happen.
The next time she heard, it was a legal-aid lawyer who called, asking her whether she could bail him. Then a sheepish collect call from him: “Ah, C, man, ah is like, ah, well, I think I’m in trouble, you know.” She was silent, she refused to help him say what he wanted and she refused to play into it with him. Somehow, when he got himself in trouble, she always felt as if she was to blame. She would ask him some incredulous question like, “What the hell were you thinking, Jamal?” And he would take offence as if he had a right and as if she were asking something unreasonable and as if she should know that it was not his fault, any of it. It just happened to him, he’d say, or it was really the guys he was hanging with. He was a fantasist. She didn’t doubt that it really happened to him—he was, unlike her, open to things happening to him.
He told her convoluted stories about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, like, he and his friends were just hanging out in the park, chilling, smoking a joint, and some other guys from Flemingdon came along and for no reason started a fight about some girl and he didn’t really want to get involved so he stood to the side and somehow the police got there and somehow they picked on him and his friends while the other guys ran off. Another story was that some guy owed him some money and he went to pick it up and just then the guy’s girlfriend had called the police on him and they came and started
