The Fugitivities Read online

  The Fugitivities

  First published in 2021 by Melville House Publishing

  Copyright © Jesse McCarthy, 2021

  All rights reserved

  First Melville House Printing: June 2021

  Melville House Publishing

  46 John Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  Suite 2000

  16/18 Woodford Road

  London E7 0HA

  mhpbooks.com

  facebook.com/mhpbooks

  @melvillehouse

  ISBN 9781612198064

  Ebook ISBN 9781612198071

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021932777

  Book design by David Ter-Avanesyan/Ter33Design adapted for ebook

  A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  a_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Part Two

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Three

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Part Four

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  For my mother and fathers, and all the foremothers and forefathers who keep us in flight

  They said a whale swallowed Jonah

  Out in the deep blue sea

  Sometimes I get that ol’ funny feelin’

  That same old whale has swallowed me

  —J. B. LENOIR

  Le voyage est une suite de disparitions irréparables.

  —PAUL NIZAN

  PART ONE

  My best allegiances are to the dead.

  —GWENDOLYN BROOKS

  Your letter came today. I brought it with me to the Luxembourg Gardens and read it on the shaded path behind the tennis courts. Are things going very differently from the way you imagined? Or is it that your writing has changed since you moved? You sound more American now, I think. But there’s something else too, a sadness that you haven’t shared with me before. I’m glad that you found an apartment, and, if I read you right, a new friend. I liked the image of you and Isaac painting the walls, and of the group of black girls playing double Dutch on your street in the evening. I understand you’re worried that they might soon disappear, but could Brooklyn really change that suddenly? I would have written sooner if I didn’t keep falling behind at work. I get so distracted staring at the screen. Does it happen to you? I’ll be clicking and tapping along and the whole thing weirds into daydreaming. I think it’s the other half of my brain playing tricks on me—the part that wants to write songs. Sometimes I get into a panic, interrupt whatever I’m doing and throw down scads, a flurry of notes that I hope I might finish someday. Not even songs, just spots of emotion flaring up, like Sailor Moon in her ecstatic transformation. It’s funny how I used to fantasize about being swept up in that tornado of light. I wrote something the other day that made me think of you. It’s about the river by my grandfather’s house. The smell of its mossiness. The cold licking at my ankles. Those spirals of snail-colored water under the neat lines of the poplar trees along the départementale. It reminded me of those ripples of river grass in the Tarkovsky film that we talked about at the café around the corner from Le Champo. I miss those days when we were always together. I guess I should worry about you—or tell you that I do. You say that maybe you’re drinking too much, waking up suddenly in bars not knowing where you are and stumbling outside to hail one of those yellow taxis that have televisions in them now so that you don’t have to look out the window. That many times when you wish you would pass out, you don’t. I feel like I can see you slumped in a musty back seat, hear the droning rush, and feel your loneliness as the car takes you over one of the great bridges, and for a brief moment you feel everything drop away. Like the city all around you is a distant star. I know better than to tell you what you need to do. But don’t forget that you promised we’d keep writing, even in our delayed, interrupted way. Remember all the things you promised to tell me, and the stories we’ve only half told each other. I have my moments, comme tout le monde. I never told you about them, maybe because there would be too many other things to say. But I think that’s what these letters are for. To make up for lost time with an unavoidable slowness, like a station where we always know we’ll bump into each other. I wish I could tell you why I think of you when I think of my river. Or the smell of rain along the footpath behind our house. I would say it entirely in images like one of your favorite poets. But I can’t right now. I still have two open reports to file and my mother needs me to help her with the telephone company. They’re tearing up her street to install the fiber-optic. I’m going to Strasbourg tomorrow. I’ll be sure to write you again from there if I can. I’m bringing your letter with me and will read it again on the train. I want to travel with it a while, stretch these words across space and time, unfold, read, refold. I want to hold onto you, to this.

  —A

  1

  Perspiring, dizzy with heat and exhaustion, Jonah stopped at the corner of Underhill and St. Johns and plunked down the armchair he had trundled through the leafy streets of Park Slope, along the wide sunbaked extension of Flatbush Avenue, and, at Grand Army Plaza, around the imposing monument to the “Defenders of the Union,” where bronze charioteers looked out over the construction of a condominium tower. The rich folk in the Slope had a habit of throwing out nice furniture in the summer, and he was determined to furnish his new apartment. The haul had been pretty good so far—a “reclaimed-wood” bookcase, a banker’s desk lamp, a vaguely Oriental side table—with the only downside being that the crib now had the eclectic air of a showroom.

  He was about halfway down the block when he took note of the commotion surrounding a double-parked Grand Cherokee directly across from his building. The vehicle was loaded down with equipment for living: a cream leather sitting chair crammed in at an angle, trash bags full of clothes, a plastic crate stuffed with video-game accessories, assorted lotions and hair products. Foodstuffs, cooking appliances, a bottle of Crisco, remained stranded on the sidewalk awaiting transport. A man carrying a stereo unit emerged from the brownstone across the street and hollered. At the boom of his voice, a somber boy in a durag, one earbud pendant, looked up. At the man’s side stood a little girl with beaded braids, wearing a backpack; she saw Jonah and ducked behind her father’s knee. “You heard him, go help your father,” shouted a woman from the front passenger side, where she must have been trying to find more room. Her gaze passed over Jonah, assessing and dismissing in one sweep, before turning to the stoop as she called out the girl’s name in a high sweet voice.

  It took Jonah a moment to understand what he was seeing even though it was the simplest thing in the world. The exp
ression on the face of the man carrying the stereo was concentrated and severe. He arranged the equipment in the back seat, then turned to go back in for whatever remained. The boy still stood curbside, staring blankly at nothing in particular. They would have been neighbors, but as it stood, Jonah was only a straggling stranger who happened to be moving in while they were moving out. There was no trace of sadness in the boy’s face, no trace of fondness or regret for the street he was leaving, only an intimation that fairness was something he had never known and never would.

  The scene stuck in Jonah’s mind as he struggled with the chair up two flights of stairs to the apartment. Isaac was in the living room unpacking his records. Jonah shoved crumpled newspapers and packing materials out of the way and set the chair in the corner facing the window with the fire escape, then dropped his exhausted body into it. Focused completely on his own task, his roommate barely registered Jonah’s entrance. The brother had more records than a DJ. Isaac wasn’t actually that involved in the music scene; mostly he just listened to a small handful of albums on rotation. When they had first moved in, Jonah would find him there at all hours, sitting on the bare floor in the unfurnished room with his back up against the wall, one leg outstretched, locked in deep concentration, now and then murmuring a word or two, nodding his head in solemn agreement with the sound.

  “Folks next door are moving out,” Jonah said as he watched his friend digging through the crates, meticulously arranging his collection, unfazed by the room’s stifling heat. Everything had to be strictly alphabetical—his Main Source record, with its splash of atoms, he held aloft momentarily like a rare talisman, before sliding it in next to Madlib and Mahalia. That was Isaac, cool as a fan.

  “Oh yeah…it’s gonna flip.”

  “I feel like I should say or do something, you know…and then I’m standing there looking a fool with this vintage armchair in the middle of the street…like I’m a harbinger of doom or some shit.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know, man. It’s like the migration all in reverse. Same old story though, chief. Black folk moving out, white folk moving in…you know the deal. They stay on top like an apostrophe.”

  The conversation moved on to a recent television show, dropping the issue without acknowledging they were doing so, though both were eager to change the subject for reasons they didn’t yet feel they could share. There would, in any case, be no conclusions to that conversation, and the concrete reality they shared was the next day’s dawn commute to another training session in Canarsie.

  Jonah had met Isaac one month earlier at the orientation assembly for a teacher-training program at the Canarsie High School auditorium. They were around the same age and had followed the call to fill the ranks of the city’s teaching corps, decimated by decades of decay and demoralization that had driven the most qualified teachers out to better, wealthier, and whiter districts, where the parents were on the right side of the law.

  He found himself among a hundred or so would-be teachers crammed into the school’s gymnasium. There was no ventilation and like the rest of the educator corps, Jonah sweated into his interview attire as he tried to make sense out of the raucous commotion, the bleating cell phones, the shouted orders and pleas for attention. A team of young folk in matching polos circulated frenetically through the rows of folding seats thrusting documents into people’s hands. A beleaguered administrator shouted into a microphone until the hive cooled to a bearable hum. A series of officials took to the mic to enumerate rules and policies. They made frequent use of the words “rigorous” and “compliance.” The intimidating legalism culminated with a deadline to report to the Department of Education on Court Street for fingerprinting.

  Something about the way the brother seated next to him kept his quiet made Jonah think he must be there to teach math. After a quick glance and a hesitant pause, Jonah turned to him and they settled on an awkward dap. Jonah commented on the heat and the hectic crowd. If the teachers were this bad, Isaac said softly, he hoped the students would be saints.

  When the teacher orientation broke for lunch, they went out together in search of a bite. Jonah was thinking sandwiches, but Isaac seemed to ignore that proposition and they ended up gravitating to a Crown Fried Chicken. After waiting in line and getting their orange trays with menu items #1 and #2, they secured a table of their own with a view looking out onto a set of mid-rise housing projects arranged like Tetris blocks along a stretch of Ralph Avenue. Over wings, Isaac mentioned that he had split up with his girl and needed a place. Jonah was living in a hostel and needed a permanent roof over his head too. They agreed to join forces and they were already discussing neighborhoods and rent when they returned to the gymnasium to fill out more forms.

  The gears of metropolitan bureaucracy did their thing, and Isaac and Jonah were duly anointed with stamped (or photocopied) city certificates asserting their aptitude for pedagogical instruction in the public schools. A week later they were signing a lease. The rent was steep but between their two salaries they could afford a place within walking distance of Prospect Park. They would live together, but they would be working far apart; an obscure lottery system determined which schools they would actually serve in. When the numbers came up, Isaac was directed to a school in Brownsville—Never Ran, Never Will—and Jonah to a school in Red Hook, a neighborhood he associated mainly with On the Waterfront.

  It wasn’t until they were living together, going through some of the same experiences, that Jonah really got to know his new roommate. Isaac’s folks had fled the chaos and violence in Detroit for the suburbs of Richmond where he grew up a little more isolated but a whole lot safer. It was the trade-off people had to make—the lucky ones, those who already had something going, a minister in the family, a funeral-home director, a mother who had broken into one of the public school systems. They took advantage of the affirmative-action door jimmied open ever so briefly after the riots, raised Reading Rainbow kids, and never looked back. That was basically, Isaac told him, how he’d ended up everywhere, in that sweet spot where admissions officers were always hunting for precisely his demographic, the ones who had been afforded all the benefits of a better zip code, but who would also color in the brochure and the website appropriately.

  Jonah wondered, as he always did, how his own ambiguous but affluent upbringing would go over. A black dude from Paris? But his new friend was unimpressed, if interested. “That’s cool. A brotha from Paree. They got barbecue over there?” Isaac had a line for everything, but nonetheless this underwhelmed curiosity pretty much summed up the attitude he held generally. Isaac had been all over the US, on school trips, to visit friends and family. But he had never left the country. He wasn’t opposed to the idea; he simply never had the means, certainly not to go somewhere on his own. One time, his junior year of college, he had been on the verge of visiting a girlfriend in Jamaica, but they had broken up a few weeks before he was set to go. Now Jamaica was out of the question. Next chance he got, though, he was hoping to use his first paid vacation days as a teacher to go somewhere else in the Caribbean, maybe Trinidad or Barbados. “Frenchman, you gotta teach me to use them words the way you do,” Isaac would say, screwing up his face. “L’amour, les misérables, les incompétents. Love them French horns, too. I knew a football player in high school named Terrence who played the French horn. He wanted to go to Virginia State and play for the Trojans, but he got injured in a practice senior year. He ended up dropping out and going into the military. Haven’t heard nothing since.”

  In spite of the disparate slots and different ladder rungs Isaac and Jonah had alighted on, everything they learned about each other confirmed how significantly their trajectories converged once they graduated with their degrees. Jonah had attended an elite private college in New England, and Isaac a public university in North Carolina. Yet they both knew former classmates who had started more lucrative careers in consulting or banking or found prestigious internships with distinguished institut
ions and nonprofits, while they were both now engaged in something like charitable work, in “giving back,” as people said.

  On balmy evenings, they’d sit with beers in the front room and share stories about hallway incidents. When Jonah was buying, he walked over to Flatbush to purchase one of the new floral microbrews; when Isaac was buying, it was always Miller Time. It was a mellow ritual. They listened to Isaac’s favorite records, originally his mother’s. There had been some tension around his acquiring them. Isaac had started a small collection of his own during his senior year of high school. When he came home from college over spring break of his freshman year, he wouldn’t leave his room for days. He threatened not to go back and eventually showed his mother a note from the school therapist. They talked about it, and she made a deal with him. If he would go back to school and get his education, he could take some of her own records with him. It was, he said, just one of many ways in which she’d probably saved his life.

  The poor righteous teachers sat back in their bougie furniture and talked about “the situation” as they half listened to the plush tones of the Emotions or seventies-era Bobby Womack. There was always music in the air. On Sundays, Jonah awoke to the Clark Sisters ringing all down the hallway and into his room. The scratchy records somehow thickened things, popping softly in the air while they bantered until Isaac, without interrupting his train of thought, switched them out.

  “The situation” was everything and nothing in particular. Even though the friends almost never agreed on why, or what, it meant, or what was to be done about it, they agreed and mutually reinforced each other’s opinion that something had gone fundamentally wrong. It was in everything. Language and manners, gestures and traditions, entire understandings could be hollowed out overnight. Things had gotten weird, glitchy, like the looping video of the second plane. Twisted creeps were coming out of the woodwork all across America. Berserkers armed with gleaming shotguns and tubes of K-Y Jelly slaying Amish schoolgirls. “Active shooters,” in the new parlance, burning holes in the bodies of fellow college students cowering under their desks. Wars and shadow wars multiplying, mutating without a semblance of purpose. The inferno of Katrina. Corpses floating through the Ninth Ward. The Malebolge of the Superdome. The death of the oceans. Texaco dumping crude runoff in the rainforests of Ecuador. Jihadists slitting throats. Ice caps collapsing. Narco wastelands. The interfaces taking over. The death of the heart. Everywhere and in everyone, the situation was drawing out the worst; the sickos were gaining the upper hand.