The Fugitivities Page 2
On paydays, Jonah and Isaac walked to a new soul food joint on Franklin Avenue, run by a West Indian woman who had anticipated the changes coming to the presently less gentrified parts of Crown Heights. Isaac was offended by the lack of white bread stuck to the bottom of his wings, but the sauce wasn’t bad, and over drinks they talked politics and traded gossip, arguing fiercely about the importance of various music critics they had, in reality, only just discovered.
In the dark on the walk back, they’d swagger, partly on account of the rum and sugar, but also because they felt the eyes of the battered neighborhood watching, and even though not a finger or even a holler was ever raised in their direction (although occasionally it seemed it might happen, and plenty of adventurous white kids, especially white girls, had gotten robbed in the area since their arrival), they knew with unspoken certainty that they were alien to these corners and that no amount of Garveyite pleading would ensure their safe passage should things take a different turn.
Early in the mornings, hungover or not, they left the apartment together, walking in hurried silence down to the subway station at Grand Army Plaza, where they split with a nod and took trains in opposite directions. The subway platform was quiet at those hours, and it wasn’t uncommon to have to wait fifteen or twenty minutes before an arrival. The inbound trains coming from East New York and Flatbush on Jonah’s side were always packed with black and brown faces. White folks started boarding in numbers just one stop farther in the Slope. The cars were so packed by then that they were often left stranded at the edge, with their wet hair slicked, earbuds in, staring icily at the compressed accordion of bodies. But before the crunch, in that precious time before the thundering clatter rolling up out of the tunnel announced itself, Jonah would head to the abandoned stretches of the platform where he could sit on the last bench (unless a homeless man was slumped there) and feverishly compile notes about the previous day in a teacher’s journal that the school administration had recommended he start keeping.
In his first weeks as a new teacher, the thing that struck Jonah most about the students were the tattoos. They all had them. Gangs, he’d figured at first, or the usual rituals of adolescence. Boyfriend-girlfriend, signs and blessings for courage, fearlessness, spirituality. There were plenty of those. But they were not the most common ones. Those were the markings of death. Names and nicknames of friends, schoolmates, brothers, sisters, cousins. One of them Jonah recognized from screen-printed T-shirts he had seen students wearing in the hall. The face, name, and lifespan of a kid who must have been sitting in a classroom with whoever had filled Jonah’s role the year before. This grim reaping, everyone agreed, was nonetheless a measure of progress. Things were far better than ten years earlier, in the terrible early nineties, when the death count had been much higher and even the school’s principal of twenty-six years, Mr. Daly, was shot and killed in a burst of crossfire while out looking for a student who had been bullied. R. J. 1982–2000. Wade Never Forget 1980–1997. Antoine 1984–2004. Krystal R.I.P. in Heaven 1985–2001. Jermaine Noah Howard 1980–2002. The most beautiful, and the saddest, inked along a forearm in tightly bound cursive simply read, “Peace To All My Brothers Who Passed Away.”
Teaching was, among other things, a high-wire act. Jonah learned to walk the wire, often by falling painfully from it. The hours of instruction sometimes felt like battle. Something about the collective charge of restless minds made endings, no matter how calculated, feel sudden and abrupt. The students rushed back out in a vortex, a few strays always lingering, sometimes out of curiosity, or kindness, oftentimes for protection. There was no silence like that of the classroom when one stood at the desk alone, wiping down the blackboard, gathering one’s papers in a quiet shuffle.
The long commute home from Red Hook required a transfer from a bus, since the trains didn’t run there. When Jonah got home, he often found Isaac as drained as himself. They’d barely be able to speak to each other, unless to relate what often sounded like war stories. Jonah hadn’t necessarily expected his job to be what it was, but now he was knee-deep. Almost without realizing it, he spoke more to himself than to anyone else, and he did so in the pages of his journal. The weeks passed, and as he grew more practiced in the form, more accustomed to the rhythms of his own mind, the number of pages scrawled in haste every morning on the subway platform multiplied. So much so, that, more than once, he looked up in a jolt of panic to see the doors jamming shut in his face.
Lesson planning helped, but it could not save them. That was the conclusion that kept resurfacing in his notes as the days began to resemble each other more than they differed. He held a pivotal but tenuous role in the lives of the kids who came to him from the housing projects that sat between the long-defunct waterfront and the elevated tracks over the Gowanus canal. A stabbing incident involving a transfer student less than a month after his arrival concentrated these thoughts into an indissoluble fear. He felt it leeching his courage every morning as he approached the high walls and metal cladding of the school’s fortresslike frontage. Once he got past the metal detectors and up the grand staircase, his classroom was at the end of the hall, a corner room on the fourth floor, which meant it got light and even a glimpse of the harbor where, though you couldn’t see it, Lady Liberty watched over the endless rounds of the Staten Island Ferry.
He wasn’t afraid for himself. What he feared was becoming attached to a student who might lose their life, or spend years in prison, or who might never leave these same blocks that formed everything they knew, and that they might not want to. The fear was that he would fail to reach them, founder in showing them how to remain on the narrowest of rising roads, the slim chance that maybe, if they went against everything, the most powerful forces in society and the most intoxicating impulses of puberty, if they persevered with unwavering tenacity and a near-military discipline, there was a chance they might slip through the bonds. This fear could be crippling.
The infernal contradictions between his hopeful expectations and the downward spirals of aimless and angry students deepened. He was locked in a struggle, but against whom? It felt like it was against them, the students who went off like bottle rockets without warning, were fine one minute, spazzing out of control the next. But it wasn’t them, and he knew it. He told himself it was their parents. Or it was the administration; the school principal with her perpetually gleeful greetings and frizzy hair who had clearly decided she would rather be liked than respected. But that wasn’t the truth. Nor was it the brand-new Barnes & Noble Classics he had purchased that sat untouched on the “reading shelf” he had set up along the back wall. It was none of those things, and yet in a way it was all of them. Everyone knew the rot had reached the core. Knowing didn’t make a difference to what could be done. The acronyms, the tests, the teaching staff themselves; everything changed except for the thing they were all supposed to be achieving. The unspoken game was how to get credit for sweeping dirt under a rug. But then why should he have expected anything else?
From his pedagogical instruction, Jonah knew that he was never supposed to have a favorite. He knew it was unethical to think in those terms. But he did have a favorite. B., who usually came in with a hoodie, kept to herself, and pretended to be asleep at her desk. It had taken Jonah months to understand that she was too smart for the class. He hadn’t connected the dots until she turned in a free-writing assignment not long after the Christmas break. It was an essay about discovering her aunt’s fatal overdose. She wrote it in longhand with a glossy purple pen. Her prose was elegant and fluid. When Jonah handed her the paper and she saw the letter grade, she lit up. He told her it was exceptional, that she was talented, and he asked her if she had thought about going to go to college. She said she wanted to study fashion. He gave her a copy of If Beale Street Could Talk, and in the following weeks she would show up early to class every day and read alone at her desk, still wearing her puffer coat and cradling the book defensively like a treasure.
The possibility of her failing had never entered Jonah’s mind. So, when B. stopped coming to class around Easter, he was genuinely shocked. Was there something more he should have done? Had he done all that he could have? If he were doing a better job with his classroom management would she still be there? He tried to hold the students in his mind in a loosely individuated whole, a kind of buzzing abstraction. But when bad things happened to them—and they did with alarming frequency—their fragile lives suddenly became very real and singular, unbearably so.
As the weeks passed, the possibility of her recovering or making up assignments and getting a passing grade faded and then finally evaporated entirely. Jonah thought he might not see her again at all, and he was told by other teachers that this was something that sometimes happened, and that one simply had to accept it. But at the very end of the year, on a bright summery day with light streaming in through the corner windows, B. appeared in the doorway after class and asked to speak with him. She apologized for her absence and told him the outlines of what he understood was an account of sexual assault. It might have been exceptionally allowable to give her a hug, but he did not think he could, so he told her gravely and emphatically how sorry he was and asked her if there was anything he could do to help. She told him not to worry about her. That she was more confident in her future than ever before. She said she had suffered more than anyone would ever be able to make her suffer again. She said she was sorry to have failed his class. He told her she hadn’t failed. That so many people, and he first among them, had failed her. She told him not to blame himself. She wasn’t angry anymore, she said. She said nothing could hurt her now. “Don’t worry about me—Imma do for myself,” she said. He told her it was a brave thing to say, that he was proud of her resolve. She said she was going to make her own way in the world, like she always knew she would have to. She thanked him for the novel, and said that Tish was her, that she had never connected with someone in a book like that before. He was going to say how pleased he was that she enjoyed the reading, but her friends were calling to her from the hall. She dabbed her eye, smiled, picked up her schoolbag, and hurried on her way.
2
Teaching had not allowed for much in the way of frivolities but going out to film houses to lose himself in the dark was a vice Jonah couldn’t shake. As long as he stayed in Brooklyn the unfavorable equation of public transport and distance usually led him to adopt the path of least resistance: ordering takeout and watching something random online. But in Manhattan, he gravitated toward indie screen institutions like Cinema Reggio down on Twelfth Street, with the old-fashioned marquee that reminded him of the rue Christine. One evening that spring, he ducked into the Reggio, mostly to get out of a sudden downpour. They were screening a restored print of Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep—according to some critics, read the lobby notice, it was the greatest black film ever made but virtually unknown outside the indie film world, having disappeared from most screens for decades. He went to purchase a ticket.
Unmistakable. The lanky boyish shag of hair, the reedy voice, the thin delicate hands extended in Italianate gestures. The vendor working the booth was his former college classmate, the wild Cubano from B Dorm. Octavio Cienfuegos. In this serendipitous instance, Octavio was occupied with finessing the elderly couple in line ahead of him; the old man, visibly overwhelmed, was writing down his email address for the Reggio newsletter. Unbeatable discounts, exclusive VIP screenings, not to mention the privilege of supporting the seventh art—Octavio dispensed his assurances with charming conviction and more than a little free association. Once the couple had given up their email and fled in polite haste, Octavio seemed to just as swiftly become a statue again, an inscrutable Pierrot, his gaze fixated on a point somewhere in the middle distance, so that when Jonah got up to the counter and knocked on the glass, he nearly jumped.
“Oh shit! Oh, shit! Jonah? Qué bolá, asere?”
Octavio was visibly high.
“Nothing much, man, just come to see a movie. How the hell you been?”
“You see I’m working, right! Listen, Jonah, normally man, for you, you know I would hook you up, but I haven’t been on the job so long, you know how it is, give me a few weeks, I’m gonna have my way around here, I’m seeing things already, man, I’m telling you, the way they run this rig, it’s por la izquierda, you wouldn’t believe it. Next time you come…”
“No worries, man,” Jonah said. “I wasn’t looking for the angle. I make decent money now, anyway. I’m teaching.”
“Okay, Teach—get those tax dollars, but don’t be a stranger, come see me after the film. Seriously. I’ll be off by then. I want to talk to you. Some strategies I’ve been working on. Knight moves. Avanzadas. I’ll explain. You gotta catch the flick, pero socio, find me later, okay? If you don’t see me, just chill, don’t ask around. Sometimes I duck out, you know, but I won’t be far.”
This conspiratorial tone and its implied precautions proved entirely unnecessary. After the film, Jonah found Octavio waiting for him outside in front of the theater. He was standing unperturbed under the marquee. The rain still coming down hard and blowing in sideways had left him soaked on one side, as if he had been standing there for a long time. Octavio handed him one of the cinema’s upcoming events calendars to use as an impromptu umbrella. Jonah accepted it with thanks, and they ran, splashing, over to Heathers, a nearby bar, where Octavio was well known, and, as he put it, had “standing.” Under Prince-purple fluorescent lighting, they reacquainted themselves with college anecdotes and a debate over whether Killer of Sheep was truly the greatest black film ever made. Without hesitation, Octavio said it was commendable but in no way superior to the best of Micheaux. Jonah hastily agreed, vaguely recognizing the name, though he had never actually seen a film by that director. Octavio had always already seen everything—working the Reggio “internship,” which meant little pay and a lot of free films, certainly helped. Not that he needed rent money. He was living with his parents in the city to save money while he applied to art schools.
The job itself was a soft take. Do whatever management said needed to get done, be a jack-of-all-trades. He would fix the marquee, sell popcorn and tickets, and assist Benny, a Mexican dude from Aguascalientes, who cleaned all the surfaces and the bathrooms, and mopped the lobby. The Reggio management was Sal, a cigar-smoking Bensonhurst man built like a bouncer and notorious for his gator-skin loafers and low boiling point. Octavio put his Cuban heritage to good use when they hosted the Latino Film Festival, doing Q&As and the like. As long as Jonah kept a low profile, Octavio volunteered to sneak him into the festival when it came around.
Jonah found himself drawn to the air of intelligent mischief that he recalled admiring from a distance in college. Octavio was the kind of guy who cut it close and knew, maybe a little too well, that he was attractive, and that the relation between those things allowed for certain kinds of movement in the world, slippages and maneuvers available only to some. This meant that when he had an idea, he acted on it immediately, seemingly intuitively, although because the hidden ratio of calculation and impulse remained masked it was impossible to tell whether plans or impulses led the way, only that the end result was that he enjoyed a remarkable knack for merging with whatever currents were around.
So, when Octavio texted Jonah one evening in May to say that he had an idea that would change their lives, Jonah agreed to meet him the very next morning without giving himself cause to question the possible reasons or portents. The school year was in its last few weeks, and because Jonah still needed to make his way to Red Hook and Octavio was in Manhattan, it was suggested that they meet at the crack of dawn in the Financial District, where they could catch a ferry taxi over to the Brooklyn waterfront. The trip over, Octavio said, would give him all the time he needed to explain himself, and Jonah would get to class on time.
That morning, Jonah got up in the blue darkness and left the apartment while Isaac was showeri
ng and took the train to downtown Manhattan. The Fulton Street station hadn’t reopened yet, so he got out one stop higher, grabbed coffee at the first Starbucks he saw, and headed down on foot. A good third of the district was still being excavated and repurposed. Construction workers cried out to one another over the chorus of chattering rock drills. Thunderous loads of concrete barreled into the tumbril of Mack trucks to be carted away. American flags were draped on machine pieces, decals adorning the countless work helmets of men whose booming Jersey voices seemed to hang and ring out longer in the dusty air. Forty stories above him floated the largest flag he’d ever seen, billowing out behind a crane operator, the long boom turning like a clock hand, sweeping across the brightening sky and over the massive hollow below.
Jonah crossed below City Hall in the shadow of the Woolworth Building, mostly east and south again, into the blue veins of New Amsterdam. He toyed with visions of the same streets in the first century of their existence, festooned at their ends with sail and riggings. The disembarked European tribes staking out street corners, scrabbling like dogs trained for the fight. The clank of continental commerce and the groan and shudder of titanic construction. Black dock workers signaling with their eyes and a nod of the head to the runaways not yet secure on the landing. Looking for agents on the path to the North. Those others had walked here, those persons whose cherished names and things had gone misremembered, unrecorded, or just overlooked, trapped in fine layers of archeological sediment, entire cities of the dead murmuring under the blab of the pave, like the African burial ground he had read about, discovered underneath a parking lot.