Raul had art last period on Fridays, a peaceful moment at the end of his week in which he was free to draw meticulous dragons breathing fire into trees. Just before he left the classroom, in the second after the bell rang and everyone began to shove their notebooks frantically into their backpacks, he leaned over and flipped the catch on the window sideways, to the unlocked position. The art room was in the basement of the school and the windows were big and at ground level. No one was looking in his direction and so no one saw him do it. He did it only because he could. MissDel Torre the art teacher would turn it back before she went home, or if she didn’t think to do it, and MissDel Torre was an idiot so who knew, the janitor would do it when he mopped up after school.
“I want to go see something,” Raul said to the other boys on Saturday morning. Nothing else was going on and so they didn’t even bother to ask him what it was he wanted to see, they just got on their bikes and followed him over to school. He led them behind a low hedge that blocked the window’s view to the street and, looking into the art room, Raul pushed on the glass, barely tapped on it, and the window swung open. Albie, elated by the possibility of an interesting Saturday, dragged the four bikes behind the hedge, while Lenny, who was smallest, squeezed through first. Once he was inside and straightened up he smiled at them through the glass, and waved. He found another window at the other end of the room that opened wider, a portal to another world, and one by one the Goddamn Boys on Bikes slipped inside.
There was no explanation for how the school, which was the major source of misery in their lives, could have been transformed into the most compelling place on earth simply by virtue of its being Saturday.What a difference a day makes, Albie’s mother used to sing back when she still did things like that.Twenty-four little hours. The halls were silent and wide without the hordes of furious children and bitter, defeated adults. Without the buzzing overhead lights the sunlight fell down the walls and across the linoleum tiles, collecting in watery pools around their feet. Edison wondered what it would be like to be old, as old as his father, and come back here then. He figured it would be like this, the building entirely his, because he didn’t take into account that other children might be coming in the future. Raul stopped and looked at the winners of the art contest lined up on a cork board. Only two of the pictures were any good: a charcoal drawing of a girl in a sundress, and a small painting of two pears in a bowl. Both had only been awarded honorable mentions while a ridiculous collage of a skyscraper made out of tiny magazine pictures of skyscrapers had won. He wondered if MissDel Torre, who, it couldn’t be said too often, was an idiot, hadn’t been able to see which of the students had actual talent because there were always too many people around.
They had lost Lenny at some point. None of them had noticed he was gone and then he came back again, walking towards them down the hall. “Guys,” he said, waving his arm as if they might miss him. “Come here. You’ve got to see this.”
The squeak of their tennis shoes echoed in the halls and the sound made Albie laugh, and then they all laughed as they passed the endless row of lockers, all of them closed, all of them exactly the same. “Look at this,” Lenny said, and he turned into the boys’ bathroom.
For a freshman in public high school in Torrance, and especially for Lenny, who was not as tall as the other boys and skinnier despite his efforts, no place was more terrifying than the bathroom. He used every means he could think of to stay out of there, though sometimes he suspected it was thinking about it so much that made him need to go. But this room, which as recently as yesterday had been as foul and dangerous as a junkie’s den, a haze of boy sweat and shit and piss, the acrid stink of boy fear, this room was now perfectly clean. It smelled vaguely, even pleasantly, of Clorox, like a public swimming pool. In fact, the way it was all arranged—the mirrors and sinks on one side, the line of toilet stalls with their green metal doors on the other—had a sort of peaceful symmetry. There was a huge amount of space between the toilets and the sinks so that you wouldn’t have to bump up against any other kid unless that kid was very specifically trying to bump you. For the first time the boys noticed three bands of tiles that went around the entire room, three bands of blue that served no purpose whatsoever except to be decorative. Raul went to a urinal and, tilting back his head with the flow, noticed sunlight. “When did they put windows in here?”
Because no one was around to stop them, they went in the girls’ bathroom as well and found it to be exactly the same, except that the three stripes of tile that ringed the walls were in shades of pink, and instead of urinals there was a Tampax dispenser bolted by the sinks on which someone had scratched the wordsEAT MEinto the white enamel. Someone else had tried, unsuccessfully, to sand it out. The room was disappointing somehow. Even Albie and Raul, who both had sisters, thought there would be more to it than that.
All the supply closets in the school were locked, as was the principal’s office, which was too bad because they would have liked to rifle through the desk drawers. They talked about taking everything out of one classroom and switching it with another, or maybe just moving a few things around to make people wonder if they were losing their minds, but in the end they decided not to touch anything. It felt too good to be in school on Saturday, and if they wanted to come again they were better off leaving everything the way it was.
So it was senseless that Albie dropped his matches in the art room trash can just when they were getting ready to leave. He kept books of matches in his pocket all the time now, to practice opening them up and striking a match with one hand. Then he would give the matchbook a hard shake and put the fire out. Except this time when he lit the match he dropped the whole book in the trash can in the far corner of the room near the window where they had come in, much the same way Raul had flipped the lock open on the window. There wasn’t any reason, no reason for lighting the match or dropping it. It wasn’t to impress the other boys, who were themselves always dropping lit matches everywhere these days. There was no reason that it was in the art room, except that the art room was the room where they happened to be, and really no reason they were in the school on a Saturday in the first place. It was a big metal trash can that took the match, waist high, ten times the size of anything they had in the regular classrooms where all a kid would throw away was a pop quiz he got a lousy grade on. The trash can in the art room should have been empty, everything in the school was empty and clean, but down in the bottom of the green plastic trash liner there were still some crumpled-up pieces of newsprint and a couple of oily rags that had been used to wipe down the paintbrushes after they had soaked in the turpentine, and so the trash can lit up like the very mouth of hell, shooting a flame that made Albie jump back as if on springs and made the other boys turn. The flame caught the nubby green polyester draperies that were double-lined to make the room dark for that point in the semester when MissDel Torre made a slide-show presentation on the highlights of art history. The draperies were the age of their parents and burned faster than the dry grass in the field, the flames tearing straight up to the acoustical tiles in the ceiling and spreading over the boys’ heads to the other side of the room where the paints and brushes and pastels and papers and jars of solvents waited like Molotov cocktails to explode. The smoke was nothing like the smoke they loved outside. This smoke was somewhere between ink and tar, oily and viscous and black. It came for them, sucking up the air while the clear orange flame sucked up the drapes. The whole room was coming for them now with the fire in every corner. They had entered the room through the window but when they checked the window they found it was no longer an available exit.
They had never set a fire inside before, had never seen one, and so they wrongly used the skills they had developed by setting fires outside: they stood perfectly still and watched, the theory being that they had made the fire and so the fire was bound to respect them. Then the school’s fire alarm went off. They knew that bell, so loud it seemed to be going off inside their brains. They loved fire drills, everything dropped, the girls always so upset because they weren’t allowed to take their purses with them, everyone lined up and rushed outside in an orderly manner. The bell brought them back to their senses. The bell saved them. They had practiced and practiced so that in this moment the boys did what they had been drilled to do: duck low, stay together, run for the door. A flame reached out and caught hold of Albie’s Red Baron T-shirt, burning his back. In the hallway Edison pulled it off him and burned his hand. As they ran for the door, the sprinklers they had never noticed doused the long, empty hallway, dissolving the entries for the art contest. They pushed out the side door, ran into the sunlight, and fell on the grass by the parking lot, gasping and coughing, panting and singed, the smell of smoke ground into their skin. Albie thought for an instant of his brother. He wondered if dying had been anything like this for Cal. The four boys lay there in the grass, tears streaming over their blackened cheeks, so exhilarated by the force of their own lives they were unable to move. That was where they were when, a scant minute later, the firemen found them.
It had been a nearly impossible decision for Teresa to send Albie to Virginia to live with Beverly and Bert. Clearly he needed a father, but some other father, any other father, would have been preferable. Beverly and Bert had not killed Cal. Teresa knew this very quietly inside herself. They had been negligent in the details of supervision but as Albie’s most recent catastrophe confirmed, so had she. Still, it felt better to blame them. It felt almost good, although good probably wasn’t the word. She could call Bert up on the phone and ask him, “Does it feel good to blame me for Albie? Is ‘good’ the word?”
What Teresa knew for certain was that she couldn’t keep her second son, and since there was no one else volunteering to take him, she didn’t see what else she could do. In the end, Albie went to Arlington, and when he failed in the private school there he was sent to a boarding school in North Carolina, and then military school in Delaware. He was eighteen the summer he came back to Torrance, a junior in high school given the fact that the boarding school had held him back. Holly and Jeanette were both home from college and tried to take him to the beach, to parties with their friends he might remember, but Albie was lodged like an anvil on the couch, watching game shows and eating bowls of cornflakes covered over with a thick sludge of sugar. He kept his collective communication to twenty words a day. He counted them. He worked his way through the liquor cabinet from left to right, though the cabinet itself had no organizing principle. He never started in on any bottle until he’d finished the one preceding it.
Then one day he claimed to have gotten a call from Edison. His old friend had a job setting up bands in a club in San Francisco, and he said that all Albie had to do was carry the amplifiers off the buses and plug them in. Edison had an apartment with some other guys and Albie could throw a mattress on the floor. Albie seemed to be almost excited about this, as excited as Jeanette and Holly and their mother could remember him being about anything. Lifting things, plugging things in, sounded like a job he was qualified to do, so Teresa bought him a bus ticket to San Francisco and made him a stack of peanut butter sandwiches. Holly and Jeanette each gave him a hundred dollars out of their savings. He loaded his bike underneath the bus with his duffel bag, and Jeanette and her sister and their mother waited until he took his seat by the window so that he could see them wave goodbye. He was going away again. He would be someone else’s impossible problem to solve. They were each privately giddy in their relief.
Fodé came into the bathroom that night while Albie was brushing his teeth, one tap and he let himself in, shutting the door behind him. The bathroom was a good place to talk, even if there really wasn’t the space for two adult men to stand comfortably together. Albie was pressed up against the sink, and Fodé, wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt, moved around the stacked plastic milk crates full of folded towels and bath toys and Pampers. “My brother,” he said, “listen to me, I want to tell you, you will stay here with us. A week, a year, the rest of your life, as long as you need to be here, we welcome you.”
Albie had the toothbrush in his mouth, minty foam trailing from his lower lip, when his sister’s husband put a hand around the back of his neck and touched their foreheads together. A tribal custom? A sign of earnestness? A pass? All he knew about his sister was what he dimly remembered from when they were teenagers, and about her crazy African husband he knew nothing at all. Forehead to forehead, Albie nodded. He still needed a place to sleep tonight.
Fodé smiled. “Good, good, good. Your sister needs her family. Calvin needs his uncle. And I could use a brother. I am very far away from home.”
“Sure,” Albie said.
“You can talk to me. That’s what we do. You look around this house, your house, and you think things are busy.” He shook his head. “I am very good at stopping. You say, ‘Brother, stop, come and sit with me,’ and here I am. You tell me what you need.” Then Fodé stopped and looked at him again, his face so close it was difficult to focus. “Albie, what do you need?”
Albie thought about this. He leaned forward to spit his toothpaste into the sink. His head was about to split open. “Tylenol?”
At this small request Fodé beamed, his teeth, his glasses, his broad forehead, so many reflective surfaces for light. He reached across Albie and opened the medicine chest, pointing to the second shelf. “Tylenol,” he said proudly. “Are you unwell?”
“Headache.” His eyes did a quick inventory of what was available, which was pretty much the Tylenol and the pediatric Tylenol, eardrops, eyedrops, nosedrops.
Fodé filled the small yellow cup on the sink and handed it to him, the communal cup. “Soon you will sleep. That’s what will help. You’ve had a long trip home.”
Albie swallowed four pills and nodded, a nod which was also meant to cover thank you and goodnight. Fodé nodded solemnly in return and backed out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. Jeanette had told him where this friendliest of creatures had come from but damned if he could remember, Namibia, Nigeria, Ghana? Then it came to him.
It was Guinea.
Even with the additional incentive of Bintou, who, if she wasn’t actually the second wife of his brother-in-law could probably be made while the baby was down for a nap, Albie could not sit in that apartment for the entire day. For one thing it was tropically hot. The radiator hissed and clanked like someone was beating it to death with a lead pipe down in the basement. Neither Bintou nor Dayo even flinched at the noise but it made Albie want to take off his skin. Small wonder Jeanette and Fodé left for work so early. A humidifier blew a steady mist through the tiny room, very possibly an attempt to re-create a sub-Saharan climate in this Brooklyn terrarium. “Good for the lungs,” Bintou said, smiling when Albie got up to see if it could be turned off. The window that led to the fire escape was jammed and so he went down the four flights of stairs to smoke. The third time he went to smoke he carried his bike with him and rode away into the softly felted snow. By one o’clock he had a job as a bike messenger.
It was the work he found in every city, the only employment he felt that life had prepared him for. He couldn’t even call himself an arsonist since he was now twenty-six and hadn’t so much as set a fire in a fireplace since he was fourteen. When asked when he could start work he said now, and then went on to spend the day figuring out Manhattan. It wasn’t a complicated place.
“I am so proud of you! And this means you will stay. Visitors don’t get jobs on their first day in town. Houseguests don’t get jobs. You are a resident now. One day here and you own the city.”
Jeanette smiled at her brother, a small Jeanette smile, rolling her eyes slightly.Africans, she seemed to be saying.What can you do?She was still dressed in her own work clothes, a skirt and sweater. She had been in her second year of graduate school for biomedical engineering when she got pregnant. Jeanette, it turned out, was the smart one. She had explained to Albie the night before that instead of following her original plan to have an abortion, she and Fodé had decided to conduct a radical social experiment they called Having The Baby, and because of the outcome of that experiment, she had dropped out of school and now worked as a field service engineer for Philips. She did set-up, instruction, and service for MRI machines in hospitals stretching from Queens to the Bronx.
“I plug them in,” she said flatly. “I show people the manual.” She would have to continue to do so, she explained to Albie last night while making up his bed, despite the mindless, soul-crushing nature of the work, at least until Fodé had finished his doctorate in public health at NYU and Dayo was of an age that it seemed bearable to send him to day care.Dayo care, they called it. “If I don’t go back to school,” she whispered while she tucked a sheet over the sofa cushions, “the radical social experiment will have failed because I’ll have to kill myself.”
Albie held the baby while Jeanette heated up the dinner Bintou had left for them. Fodé set the table and opened a bottle of wine, telling them the story of his day. “Americans love the idea of vaccinating Africans. What could be nicer than a photograph of dusty little Nigerian children lined up for inoculation on the front page of theNew York Times? But for their own children the mothers of New York City find vaccinations passé. They say the vaccination is not sufficiently natural, that it could possibly cause something worse than it could prevent. I have spent the day trying to convince women with college educations to vaccinate their children and they argued with me. I must go to medical school. No one will listen to me if I am not a medical doctor.”
