flourish on the planet of America, some black people had opted for the epic tragedy, grand and bitter, of terraforming; others, like Gwen’s parents and their parents and grandparents before them, had engaged in a long and selective program of pantropy. Black pantropy had produced, in Gwen and her brothers, a clutch of viable and effortless success-breathers, able to soar and bank on thermals of opportunity and defy the killing gravity of the colony world.
It had turned out that Gwen was unprepared for life on the surface of the planet Brokeland. Over the past week, at last, she had begun to succumb to the weird air and crushing gravity of it all. Little by little she had surrendered every gift and hard-won attribute of dignity and ambition until, finally, following the incident at Queen of Sheba and the bloody mess of Baby Frankenthaler’s birth, she had lost the one remaining advantage she possessed, the most precious, the hardest-won: her cool. As Julie Jaffe would no doubt put it:
Now there was the board that had been called into session for this afternoon, empowered, duty-bound to drag Gwen through the whole botched delivery all over again. She couldn’t face that, and she couldn’t face Aviva. She no longer wanted to be a midwife, any more than she wanted to be married to Archy or stepmother to his child. She loathed kung fu, herself, and Oakland. She had never liked the Bay Area, with its irresolute and timid weather, the tendency of its skies in any season to bleed gray, the way it had arranged its hills and vistas like a diva setting up chairs around her to ensure the admiration of visitors. The people around here were fetishists and cultists, prone to schism and mania, liable to invest all their hope of heaven in the taste of an egg laid in the backyard by a heritage-breed chicken. She had to get her shit out of the little upstairs room before Irene Jew got back from the qi fixer, pile it into the back of the car, and light out for someplace. Some town without fixations, one that had sent its vinyl records to the dump and would eat any kind of an egg you set before it. She had hoisted every sail to catch the rising wind of her panic; there was no telling what bleak tropic she might yet strike.
As she crossed the floor to the poster of Lee rampant, another door swung open, nearly smacking Gwen in the face. It was the door behind which lay a half bath with a PVC stall shower, one that boomed like a drum whenever Gwen rotated herself inside it.
“Oh, I’m—Oh,
It was Valletta Moore. Though she was ravaged by time, smoke, and a ponderous hand with the makeup brush, there was no mistaking her. A pinup photo of the woman in her heyday, clipped from an old
Even without the stiletto heels that, in the picture on her father’s wall, had launched Valletta like Saturn V rockets into the stratosphere of her Afro, the woman was tall, a couple of inches under six feet. Had to be at least fifty but showing, with the help of a skirt that seemed to have been made by taking a few passes with a black ACE bandage around her hips and upper thighs, enough leg to string with telephone wire, carry startling messages to the world. Hair pulled back tight and glossy against her head, lips shining with purple paint. Her madly green eyes, in the instant before they vanished behind a pair of big Dolce & Gabbanas, betrayed an unmistakable half- canine look of guilty surprise. Caught, Gwen thought, in the act.
Valletta Moore put her head down, shouldered a large red plastic handbag, and with a cool nod, slid past Gwen. In a blasphemous pair of heeled pumps, she went clicking across the sacrosanct floor of the dojo. The officious swagger in her gait might have been some flavor of self-possession or the cool skedaddle of a shoplifter making for the door. In either case, the streamer of toilet paper that trailed from the waistband of her tiny skirt like the banner of an advertising airplane pretty much spoiled the effect.
“Oh! Um. Miss—Ms. Moore.”
The woman stopped, and in the instant of her hesitation, the clatter of her exit echoed in the empty studio. She started to turn back to Gwen, then reconsidered. She shouldered the bag again, walked away with no reply.
“Go on, then, Valletta. Fly that flag,” Gwen said. “Always good to have some extra toilet paper on you. You never know.”
A taut-fleshed, claw-fingered, but elegant hand emerged from Valletta’s front of haughtiness like a stagehand sent backstage to retrieve a leading lady’s tumbled wig. The hand felt around behind with a frantic helplessness that touched Gwen enough to impel her forward to help. Valletta whipped around and jumped back when she saw what Gwen was up to.
“Hi,” Gwen said, dangling the strip of toilet paper between three fingers from about the height of her right shoulder, as if she expected a yo-yo to materialize on the other end of it.
“Look at that,” said Valletta Moore with a hint of accusation and reproach.
Like boxers or circling cocks, they appraised each other. Their respective cryonic targeting arrays were brought online and deployed. Where their gazes met, great snowbanks heaved up between them. The air chimed with the crack of ice.
“Any other way I can help you?” Gwen said. “Does Mrs. Jew know you’re here?”
Valletta Moore took in the spectacle of Gwen’s belly, squinting one eye as though staring along the edge of a plank to gauge its trueness. “Who you supposed to be?”
“Who’m I
Gwen caught a whiff of the other woman’s perfume, something dense and somehow reminiscent of the smell of Froot Loops, maybe Poison. She recalled having detected a whiff of it, like the pressure of an incipient migraine behind the eyeballs, her first night in the secret room. If Valletta Moore was not herself a former pupil of Mrs. Jew, then Gwen reasoned that maybe Archy’s father had returned to the Bruce Lee Institute, seeking refuge and shelter in the hands of his old teacher, departing just before Gwen showed up.
Great. It had been shameful enough fleeing to the dingy spider hole, behind the hidden door, when she could at least imagine herself to be following, as Master Jew had given her to understand, in the footsteps of fugitive lamas and persecuted practitioners of Falun Gong. But maybe all this time she had been filing herself alongside a squirrelly old no-account basehead and his washed-up ex-ex-girlfriend in a drawer marked, everlastingly,
“How’d you get in here?” Gwen said.
“I have a key.”
“I heard there was only one extra key.”
When Valletta snapped open her handbag to fish out and brandish her own key to the door of the institute, Gwen glimpsed against the red satin lining a hole in the universe that was exactly the shape of a large handgun, just sitting there absorbing all light on the visible spectrum.
“How’d you get a key?” Gwen said steadily, though her heart swam in her chest, kicking like the boy who inhabited her. “You take lessons here?”
She glanced across the studio to the glass cabinet where Mrs. Jew had amassed a gold-brass conurbation of trophies ranked in dusty skylines. Generations of insect citizens had abandoned their husks and limbs in its necropolitan streets. Propped along the back of the topmost shelf, a half-dozen framed black-and-white photographs depicted Mrs. Jew with some of her most successful colleagues and students, among them the future Kato, looking grave as a mycologist in a white gi, and a handsome brother in a tall natural, bent down to get his smiling face alongside that of his tiny
“You used to be a student here, too?”
The “too” hung there, unglossed, a pin to hold the map threads strung by Gwen as she worked her way from the woman standing in front of her; to the photograph of Luther Stallings in the trophy case; to his estranged son, a memory of him crying in the bathroom at their wedding, relieved and crushed because his daddy, conforming perfectly to Archy’s expectations but not, alas, to his hopes, had failed to show; to stories she had heard from Archy about crack houses and court appearances and, long ago, a naked woman shaving her legs in the bathroom of a Danish modern bachelor pad in El Cerrito.
