'Me being big as I am, and a retro-nigger, I have to love what I'm seeing. Because this is something I could never dream of doing in my thinnest day on earth.'
Yes, they spun on their heads, bodies upright and legs spread slightly, and one of the breakers had his hands cuffed behind his back. Eric thought there was something mystical about this, well beyond the scan of human encompassment, the half-crazed passion of a desert saint. How lost to the world he must be, here in the grease and tar of Ninth Avenue.
Family and friends came next, in thirty-six white stretch limousines, three abreast, with the mayor and police commissioner in sober profile, and a dozen members of Congress, and the mothers of unarmed blacks shot by police, and fellow rappers in the middle phalanx, and there were media executives, foreign dignitaries, faces from film and TV, and mingled throughout were figures of world religion in their robes, cowls, kimonos, sandals and soutanes.
Four news choppers passed overhead.
'He liked having his clergy nearby,' Kozmo said. 'He showed up in my office once with an imam and two white boys from Utah in suits. He was always excusing himself so he could pray'
'He lived in a minaret for a while, in Los Angeles.'
'I heard that.'
'I went to visit once. He built it next to his house and then moved out of the house and into the minaret.'
The dead man's voice was louder now as the sound truck approached. His best songs were sensational and even the ones that were not good were good.
Behind his voice the handclapping of the chorus became intense, driving Fez into improvised rhythms that sounded reckless and unsustainable. There were great howls of devotion, whoops and street shouts. The clapping spread from the recorded track to the people in the limos and the crowd on the sidewalks and it brought a clear emotion to the night, a joy of intoxicating wholeness, he and they, the dead and provisionally living.
A line of elderly Catholic nuns in full habit recited the rosary, teachers from the grade school he'd attended.
His voice was going ever faster, in Urdu, then slurry English, and it was pierced by the shrill cries of a female member of the chorus. There was rapture in this, fierce elation, and something else that was inexpressible, dropping off the edge, all meaning exhausted until nothing was left but charismatic speech, words sprawling over themselves, without drums or handclaps or the woman's pitched cries.
The voice fell into silence finally. People thought the event was over now. They were shaking and drained. Eric's delight in going broke seemed blessed and authenticated here. He'd been emptied of everything but a sense of surpassing stillness, a fatedness that felt disinterested and free.
Then he thought about his own funeral. He felt unworthy and pathetic. Never mind the bodyguards, four versus three. What set of elements might be configured that could possibly match what was happening here? Who would come to see him laid out? (An embalmed term in search of a matching cadaver.) Men he'd crushed, to nourish their rancor. Those he'd presumed to be wallpaper, to stand over him and gloat. He would be the powdered body in the mummy case, the one they'd all lived long enough to mock.
It was dispiriting, then, to think about this collection of mourners. Here was a spectacle he could clearly not command. And the funeral wasn't over yet.
Because here came the dervishes, turning to the faint call of a single flute. They were lean men in tunics and long flared skirts, with topaz caps, brimless, cylindrical, tall. They spun, they turned slowly with arms wide and heads titled slightly.
Now the voice of Brutha Fez, hoarse and unaccompanied, moving slowly through a plainsong rap Eric hadn't heard before.
Kid used to think he was wise to the system Prince of the street always do things his way But he had a case of conventional wisdom Never say nothing the others don't say
The young breakdancer who invites the peril of the street, his arrests and beatings, the panhandling dances on subway platforms, his shame in verse after verse, women shiny in tights, unaffordable, and then the moment of disclosure.
Thread of dawn that wakes the East To the cry of souls unfolding
His embrace of Sufi tradition, the struggle to become another kind of panhandler, a beggar for rhymes, singing his anti-matter rap (as he called it) and learning languages and customs that seemed natural to him, not sealed in mystery and foreignness, a blessing embedded in the skin.
O God O Man living high at last Sucking the titmilk of prayer and fast
Wealth, honor in a hundred countries, armored cars and bodyguards, shiny women, yes, again, everywhere now, another blessing of the flesh, women veiled and bluejeaned, clutching the bedposts, painted women and plain, and he sang a little sorrowfully of this and of the voice in a visionary dream that spoke to him of a failing heart.
Man gave me the news in a slanted room And it felt like a sliver of icy truth
Felt my sad-ass soul flying out of my mouth My gold tooth splitting down to the root
There were twenty dervishes in the street and they were the archetype, perhaps, the early and sacred model, maybe, of the posse of breakdancers, only rightside-up. And Fez 's final words could find no beauty in dying young.
Let me be who I was Unrhymed fool That's lost but living
Now music filled the night, ouds, flutes, cymbals and drums, and the dancers whirled, counterclockwise, faster with every turn. They were spinning out of their bodies, he thought, toward the end of all possessions.
The chorus chanting vigorously now Because whirl is all. Whirl is the drama of shedding everything. Because they are spinning into communal grace, he thought. And because someone is dead tonight and only whirl can appease their grief.
He believed these things. He tried to imagine a kind of fleshlessness. He thought of the whirlers deliquescing, resolving into fluid states, into spinning liquid, rings of water and fog that eventually disappear in air.
He began to weep as the follow-up security detail went past, a police van and several unmarked cars. He wept violently. He pummeled himself, crossing his arms and beating his fists on his chest. The press buses came next, three of them, and unofficial mourners on foot, many resembling pilgrims, all races and styles of belief and manner of dress, and he rocked and wept as mourners in cars went by, an improvised continuum, eighty, ninety cars in slack ranks.
He wept for Fez and everyone here and for himself of course, yielding completely to enormous body sobs. Others were weeping nearby. There was a wave of breastbeating and flailing. Then Kozmo wrapped an arm around him and drew him in. It did not seem strange that this was happening. When people die, you weep. The greater the figure, the more widespread the lamentation. People pulled their hair, wailing the dead man's name. Eric slowly grew still. In the leather and flesh of Kozmo's enveloping bulk, he felt the beginnings of thoughtful acceptance.
There was one thing more he wanted from this funeral. He wanted to see the hearse pass by again, the body tilted for viewing, a digital corpse, a loop, a replication. It did not seem right that the hearse had come and gone. He wanted it to reappear at intervals, proud body open to the night, to replenish the sorrow and wonder of the crowd.
He was tired of looking at screens. Plasma screens were not flat enough. They used to seem flat, now they did not. He watched the president of the World Bank address a chamber of tense economists. He thought the image could be crisper. Then the president of the United States spoke from his limo in English and Finnish. He knew a little Finnish. Eric hated him for that. He knew they would figure it out eventually, how he'd made it happen, one man, bereaved and tired now. He coded the screens into their hatches and cabinets, restoring the interior of the car to its
