The Fugitivities Read online

  He imagined the perspective of someone who had worked in these environs for a living, maybe as a customs inspector. The comedy of summing up exhausted voyages, transoceanic in scope and plagued with a litany of troubles, all taken in under a looking glass, done up in fine penmanship, arranged for the benefit of the custom’s house master, who requires neat columns on the page.

  One hundred and fifty years later, the commercial ocean recalibrated and danced about him. Somewhere above the sea-level streets, the diversity-trained, indefatigable, and ruthless agents of white-shoe firms huddled in their war rooms, ready to think outside the box, to dismantle and repackage the world at will. In the blink of an eye, a tinkering of margins could send spasms across the globe, tremors registered in cable-news crawl picked up and translated into sports analogies by the screaming bald guy on Mad Money, another indefatigable prognosticator in the wilderness of mirrors.

  Jonah passed the lines at the Dunkin’ Donuts where black workers wearing hairnets took orders, looking tired of building someone else’s civilization. He watched Bangladeshis manning their outposts in the early traffic, poking at hot dogs under their blue umbrellas. The storefronts were already open for business: gadget shops with their galaxy of cellular components; luggage vendors; and shoe stores with loafers 20 percent off. Above them, in a tinted haze, rows of high office windows transecting the sky in every direction conveyed a degree of the gray mystery of the general enterprise, as if the whole system generated a sweat, a mist burning off a dark river down which one had already been sold, without the friction of a public auction, and better yet with one’s tacit consent, the human cargo happily surrendered, as though the end of all historical troubles and aspirations, centuries of subsistence, of slavery, of colonialism, of empire, of industrial totalitarianism, had contracted to the dim radiance of this null surface.

  Jonah caught sight of Octavio ahead of him as he neared the water. He recognized the gait, the slim frame nimbly jaunting past some corporate art on the corner of Water Street, his presence made noirish by an orange-and-white Con Edison ventricle siphoning off steam that turned lavender, then green, in the traffic light. They went under FDR Drive and Jonah caught up just as they were turning on to the pier. Octavio swiveled and extended an arm in embrace without entirely arresting his motion, as though anticipating and absorbing the momentum of the encounter. They exchanged swift and somewhat severe greetings, before resuming the march down to the water. A foghorn sounded. At the far end of the dock, a water taxi was tying up. It was packed with business types all jockeying for positions at the exit. When the chain rope was pulled aside, they came pouring out in droves like extras from a Buster Keaton film. Octavio looked upon the scene with an enigmatic grin. When the commuters had disembarked, they made their leisurely way onboard.

  The sun was hoisting itself over the deck of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. They stood at the prow of the water taxi, the spray of the East River prickling Jonah’s shirt as his tie snaked in the snapping wind. The roar of the motor and the flapping gusts nearly covered their voices, so they ended up howling two feet away from each other, like floor traders caught in a five-hundred-point drop. Jonah had to concede the genius. He certainly wouldn’t do it on an everyday basis, but this was a hell of a way to commute to Red Hook for work. Octavio gazed south to the Verrazzano Bridge lying like an open parenthesis on its back.

  Octavio’s impassioned hollers overcame the diesel motoring.

  “We need to go south!”

  “What, you want to get off in Sheepshead Bay?”

  “No, I’m talking farther south, all the way south. Think big picture!”

  “What, Florida?”

  “No, man. I’m talking farther out. Past the Caribbean.”

  “You want to go to South America?”

  “To Rio.”

  “Rio. If you want sand and bikinis, why not Orchard Beach?”

  “Tss! No seas tan bruto…perdónalo dios, el caballero es flemático.”

  “You’re losing me. Why Rio?”

  “You remember my girl, Barthes?”

  “Barthes?”

  “Maggie Reynolds. Brunette, soccer team, she was the year above us. We both took lit theory our junior year. Every time she spoke, it was ‘Barthes this’ and ‘Barthes that.’ I used to tease her. The name stuck. Anyway, we had a thing, right, it was going pretty well too, but then we had to break it off when she decided to leave the city to work with favela children in Rio through one of those GlobalGiving NGO-type things. Anyway, the point is I have a plan. We go down there, we find her, we say what’s up, you know, and she gets us connected down there—she’ll have the whole place figured out, all we gotta do is take it all in. And she can put us up, I mean, she wouldn’t refuse me; we have history at this point, I’m talking romantic history!”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet,” Jonah scoffed. “You want to go all the way down to Brazil to rekindle a flame. That’s romantic, that’s cool, man…Maybe that’ll be impactful on your life, but why do you need to bring me along? I’m not trying to play third wheel. Are you suggesting we’re going to get work with Barthes’s NGO or something like that?”

  “Think bigger. We don’t go to Rio, we begin in Rio. We take on South America! Brazil! Argentina! Bolivia! Peru! The Andes! The Amazon! The Southern Cone! I’m saying, let’s get the hell out of here! It’s about having connections on the ground, man. Once we do, we make our own NGO. Needs Getting Obliged. Anyway, who needs a reason? This country is terminal—it doesn’t deserve saving. I wouldn’t wish a life in Castro country on anyone. But if you think Miami is a paradise you’re out of your mind! It’s a drugged-out swamp with a Gucci store. A resort-world run by reactionaries, real estate barrons, and cartel lawyers. The population is lunatic ex-Batistas and a mezclado of non-white refugees who basically do all the shit service jobs in the tourism hustle where the overlords launder their money. Come on, man, don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about—it’s the same everywhere. New York is a joke, a punchline in a tired Diceman routine. Have you listened to the way people talk? The writing is on the wall. We have to get out of here, see something else before it’s too late! How can these people live—how can anyone live when it’s like you can’t breathe half the time?”

  “But, so…what? You want me to just drop everything I’m doing and fly off with you,” said Jonah, watching the terminal pier come into view. “I think I know what you mean, but even if I agreed, I’m not sure running off somewhere else solves anything. Plus, I can’t just abandon my students.”

  The water taxi slowed, coming around the bend into the part of the waterway that fronted the ruins and relics of the Gowanus. There was a plan, much discussed at Jonah’s school, to have large tracts of it converted into a furniture superoutlet. Furniture for the massive influx of white graduates fleeing the suburbs their parents had fled to, not for the kids in the Red Hook Houses, who had never gone anywhere, who had survived, and who now sat in Jonah’s classroom daydreaming about driving a foreign supercar, or having enough money to buy a pair of limited-edition sneakers, or nodding off because of their meds or because they only ate one hot meal a day in the school cafeteria.

  “Who knows what is important? All my life, I feel like people have been telling me what is important,” Octavio was saying. “Everybody has a theory. God is important. Making money is important. Saving the environment. Ending racism. Changing health care. The church. It’s Marx, or the Media. But none of those things ever felt important to me. People just say they are. Barthes and all her friends and all of us—all of us. Come on, man, you know it’s all bullshit. Everyone wants what people have always wanted. They want to win. Why you think they sent us to that school? They only care that you’re successful. Famous and successful. To do that, you need to be someone other than yourself. So now you get good at simulating. You hide all your feelings and beliefs and desires, which you didn’t even know in the first place, a
nd soon you can’t tell the difference. But it’s easier to believe in the you that does well in interviews, the you as corporate candidate, a good team player who knows how to display leadership and integrate criticism and bring the right kind of energy to the project and smile like the diversity hire they all hoped that you would be. And you must be right about everything because all these people want to be your friends, and you deserve to make more money in one year than your parents made working hard in a decade. And that’s if it all works out, and odds are sooner or later it won’t. How can we be part of any of this shit, honestly? Look at you. I mean, you’re doing good. But tell me the truth. Dime la verdad. Do you want to be a teacher for the rest of your life?”

  Jonah looked out at the hazy undefined Brooklyn skyline, the endless tumble of warehouses and cranes that made up the Red Hook waterfront. The rest of life appeared sprawling and unknowable.

  “I don’t know. Probably not, I guess,” he said at last.

  “So what are you doing here? What is anyone doing? Work? Nobody believes in work anymore! It’s all a joke. A scam. You make a latte. You sign people up for forty bucks a month for free wireless and explain ‘features’ to them. You make a website that takes like two hours and charge for two hundred because these morons think making their Flash site is like building a cathedral. You look for things on search engines and add numbers to spreadsheets, then make new spreadsheets. You do all of this as part of an internship for which you are not paid, or only enough to pay for the commuting costs to get you back to your desk. Maybe you get the right kind of soy milk-substitute for the head of production and you feel gratified and tell yourself you’re getting ahead when they take a minute to gasp about the latest episode of America’s Next Top Model. No matter who you are or what you do or where you are, you spend the better part of your earthly hours staring at a computer screen and waiting to be free again. Period. Nobody works—they’re tethered, bothered, harassed by tasks, all kinds of mindless drudgery. But in truth, the only people who work are immigrants and men in construction. Everyone else is either a technocrat or serving the technocrats. Why play these corny games? I say out. Out! Let this place go to pieces. Life is too short. Ask anyone. If you had time and money, what would you do? Their answer: travel. Get away from it all. There’s nothing to figure out here. Nothing to solve. Get out! That’s all that matters.”

  Jonah got off at the pier. He had assumed Octavio would follow him, but when he turned around, he saw that his friend was still standing on the deck and sending him an indecipherable sign. The lanky figure cupped his hands to his mouth. “Think about it!” Octavio shouted something more after that, but whatever it was got swallowed by the chugging growl of the ferry as it reversed course across the greasy waters.

  Jonah turned into the pastoral calm of Red Hook’s cobblestone streets. Little clumps of greenery and dandelions sprouted in the curbside. He passed old cable drums and warehouses with marine outfittings, their bricks glowing warm and pinkish in the sun. The kneading sensation under his dress shoes kept him awkwardly amphibious, dipping in and out of his thoughts, pausing to bask momentarily whenever a salty summery gust came in off the wharf. Despite ambling, he arrived at the school early enough to find his classroom still empty. Through the windows he watched as morning light poured down over the harbor and the island city. Octavio was over there somewhere now, walking among the skyscrapers. It was, just then, the wrong feeling, and he was aware of this without being able to shake its significance in his heart. Manhattan had never looked so alarmingly beautiful.

  3

  Summer had arrived, bringing with it hydrant games, daylong cookouts, and heated brawls. The first Monday after school let out, Jonah spent the day wandering uptown. He walked through Central Harlem, heading west. He stopped to see the cathedral where James Baldwin’s funeral had taken place and then popped into a café across the avenue. He ordered coffee, secured a small table in the back, and ostentatiously pulled out his copy of Baraka’s The Dead Lecturer. He seemed to be the only person there without a laptop. But his mind wasn’t really in the poetry. It was on Octavio’s offer. His phone vibrated with a text: Isaac in “the city” (code for Manhattan), wondering what he was up to. Jonah texted back saying he should join him uptown.

  Whenever Isaac arrived somewhere, people took notice. The way the brother moved, like Morris Day, you knew what time it was. Entering the coffee shop, he gave the place a once-over, looking mildly irritated. A young couple stepped gingerly around him, offering an unnecessary apology. Only black men can unnerve a whole room so effortlessly, generating a sudden surface tension with only the faintest outward ripple. Jonah smiled. The waitress came by with fresh coffee, and Jonah launched right into it.

  “Listen, man, I’ve been thinking. Octavio wants to go down to Brazil, and he thinks I should come along.”

  “You buy your ticket?”

  “Not yet, I’m still trying to figure out what I can afford.”

  “Huh. Why?”

  “Because there’s nothing left! New York is dead, it’s moribund, practically a Connecticut suburb at this point. It’s getting to be like you can’t breathe. And it’s only going to get worse. The wars are never gonna end. The street shit is never gonna go away. And we’re still young but it won’t last forever, and I want to see more, you know, see the world before…before it’s too fucking late and the whole thing is underwater or whatever.”

  Isaac considered this without skepticism or keen interest.

  “Well, shit, man. You’re Mr. International over here. If the shit appeals to you, go for it.”

  “I don’t know, I mean it’s crazy on one level, but what if I regret not doing something that I’ll probably never be able to do again?”

  Isaac looked past Jonah. For a moment he was completely still, even statuesque. Then he sat back in his chair and let out a loud breath.

  “Listen, J., I think you alright, you have a good head on your shoulders—but you know Octavio is crazy, right? I mean, don’t get me wrong, he’s a great guy, but he’s got a…man, I don’t know…he’s got this restlessness…that you’d best be mindful of. I’d say he needs you to go with him just to keep him from doing some crazy shit that will get him killed down there.”

  “Yeah, I know…I know what you mean. But I can handle it.”

  “You can handle it.”

  “I can handle my own.”

  “I don’t doubt it—I’m just saying, with Octavio, it ain’t about to be just a walk in the park…and to be honest it sounds like he probably has his own reasons that got nothing to do with you. It’s like GZA says, ‘I gotcha back but you best to watch your front.’ That’s your problem right there. Don’t get me wrong, I like Octavio. But you know how he is. Trouble finds him. I’m talkin’ some outlandish diplomatic-incident type shit. Brazil? Nigga, you be lucky just to make it to the airport.”

  Octavio and Isaac had met a couple of times, usually at whatever bar Jonah had invited them both out to. In theory they should have vibed well, but more often than not Jonah found himself trying to mediate and preempt miscues between the three of them, the minefield of perceived slights or challenges that masculine conversation cannot seem to avoid. This often meant that even if he didn’t fully perceive himself to be doing so, he was taking sides. Music was especially unforgiving territory.

  As a New Yorker, Octavio felt a homegrown entitlement to hip-hop, a fierce pride that could abide no pretenders, and he brought up his favorites with a defensiveness that they didn’t need. Isaac respected, even appreciated, the depth of Octavio’s knowledge. But that was as far as he was willing to go. Because there wasn’t nothing in the world like being born to it. Cradled and raised in it. He never missed an occasion to remind them that the real home of the music would always be the South. They heard about it all the time because apparently Isaac had never loved and understood what made him Southern until he got to the city. As he saw it, Oc
tavio was like an ambassador of the city. Isaac had talked with Jonah separately about his problems with some of the black administrators at his school, the ones he sensed would have called him country if they could say it to his face. Who kept an attitude but played like it wasn’t nothing, like they could afford to deny what they were made of, like it wasn’t all those dusty front porches and tiny one-room churches across the South that their families had made their way through and left people behind in. Like the South wasn’t the lifeblood that made everything how it was in the first place. He was always complaining to Jonah about the way they talked, the way they leaned over you with their corporate-seminar lingo. Isaac said he hadn’t seen a square mile so ignorant, so dissonant and confused about how to live, as the core of the rotten apple between the bottom of Central Park and Canal Street. He wouldn’t dispute Octavio’s claims to NYC’s hip-hop bona fides. But as far as he was concerned, the South was never wrong when it came to the sound. New York didn’t know shit about drop-tops and candy paint. And there would come a day when the South finally had its say. When all that funk leaking out of Houston and Atlanta would bubble up like an unstoppable lava. Rising up out the Louisiana low-rises of Calliope and Magnolia. Pumping the full repertoire of low life into every nook and cranny of George Bush’s patriot-acting U.S.A. Flooding it with criminal hieroglyphics and underworld lore cooked up in dank bedrooms and basements. Exorbitant odes to pimpology served up on mellifluous flows. Mortuary tales of the long drug wars of the nineties rattling a trunk on the outskirts of Memphis where a box Caprice with a pint of Crown Royal in the dash creeps through the twilight bumping Tupac’s “Lord Knows.” That bass turned all the way up, soaked in so much pain it slows the heart.