Eye of the Cricket (19 page)

I nodded.

"I remember I was pushing my boat up the Nile. All these little sucking kisses on my skin where leeches were attaching themselves.
I was living off some hard, bitter-tasting fruit off trees on the bank and the raw flesh offish with teeth like razors that
I snared in nets improvised from old shirts. Had these big grins on them."

"All these people were after me. They wouldn't give up. Never even knew who they were. See them, feel them, back there behind
me. Someone pulled a tube out of my throat."

"You were on a ventilator for a while. A breathing machine. I was there when they took you off."

"All at once I had to breathe again. Had to go on. Before, it had been so easy."

"Always that choice."

"We spoke, didn't we? Something about a missing son, old man looking for him. Everfind him?"

I shook my head. "No."

Night had not so much fallen about us as it had toppled there, collapsed, capsized. Lights lashed up from boats on the river,
others stabbed at the darkness from cars racing past on Leake Avenue behind us.

"Someone else brought news—or no news. They drank together."

"Right. The detective and the old man, the father who'd hired him. In a bar on Decatur. Detective's come to tell him his son
is dead."

I shook my head again.

"Someone else, then. I was terrible sick, some kind of flu, burning up one minute, freezing the next. Let go in the bed a
couple of times I know of at least, too weak to crawl out. Guess he probably cleaned that up too, in between reading this
book to me, spooning soup down me. Had to be a week at least, I was like that. He must of read that book to me cover to cover
half a dozen times."

"Don't suppose you remember what he looked like."

"Not paying much attention at the time. Not quite there, right?

Couldn't get outside myself. Young man's what I see now I look back on it."

"Black or white?"

"Black. Like you. Mostly his eyes I remember."

"His eyes."

"Brown. With green floating around somewhere in there, never could say just how or where. Like yours."

"Ever hear his name?"

He thought it over. "Sorry. Can't recall his ever using one. Not much use for names, situations like that."

"He never introduced himself? Hi, I'm Carl, I'll be your waiter for today?"

"He could have. Like I say, I was pretty far gone."

"Never heard another staff member speak to him, maybe call him by name?"

He shook his head. "I think I'dremember. Whole thing's etched in my mind. Like a dream, doesn't make much sense, but you can't
shake it off, can't get shed of it. I thought I was dying. Held on pretty hard to whatever I could grab on to. Strange times."

Dark now was absolute.

"One more beer, you want it," I said.

"You don't?"

"Got your name on it."

"Why not, then."

First he rolled it along his forehead, then popped it open and drank.

"One thing," he said.

"Yes?"

"Never thought of this before."

I waited.

"When I first started coming out of it. Most of it's kind of a blur, you understand, what happened when, the order of things.
All jumbled up together. But now I think about it, there was this one time I came half awake—-early morning, late evening,
no way to tell—and someone's standing there over me saying, You're going to be okay, you hear me, you're going to be okay,
it's just a matter of time now.

"I remember reaching up, things still not too clear. Didn't know him. Could be one of those who'd been chasing after me. My
hand's huge up there, blots out the whole sky. I try to ask him. He takes my hand and bends close over me.

Now his face fills the sky. Can't make out what I'm saying.

" 'David?' he says, 'You're asking after David? He's gone on. Sicker ones than you here now, mate. But not to worry: we'll
take good care of you.'"

Abyssinia, right. Turns out it looks just like Metairie, except with camels. We drag our worlds along with us and we can't
let them go, can't get rid of the damned things. Trapped animals have better sense. They'll gnaw a leg off and crawl away.
We just tell ourselves that once we get the furniture inside our heads rearrangedit's going to be a new room, a new world.
Sure it is.

But you're going to be okay, Lewis. We both are.

You've been here just over three weeks. Don't suppose you remember much of it. Police picked you upfinally. You'd been sitting
on curbs outside Cooter Brown's and a string of bars up on Oak berating custom-el's as they came out, demanding what you kept
calling donations, going in these places and, before they heaved you back out, grabbing half-finished beers and drinks off
the tables.

Sound familiar?

You still feel like you're underwater looking out, what you told me a few days ago, it's because the doctors have you on some
pretty heavy sedation. You've been off IVs a couple of days now. You were so dehydrated when you got here you could barely
pull your tongue away from the roof of your mouth. Another day or two now, you might even be able to keep food down again.
Be a while before you're up for boudin or grillades, I'm afraid.

Much of those last weeks come back to you?

Well, maybe some of it will, in time. You never know. What does it matter? You're here, you survived. That's the important
thing.

You sure you want to hear this again now? I've already told you twice.

Three, four in the morning, I had a phone call. Dan the Man two flights clown, I hear him stomping up stairs like he's driving
railroad spikes with his feet, eveiyone in the house awake for sure and lying there listening to this, no way anyone's gonna
sleep through it. Then there's this polite knock at the door: You got a call Brother.

Brother's what most people call me here. Started out like so many things do as a joke, someone going Hey, bro, because I was
black, someone else picking it up, calling me Brother Theresa.

I'd never had a call before.

Guy on the other end tells me his name is Richard Garces.

No, I didn't know him, only met him last week. But he told me how over the years he'd built up this loose network of people
like himself, social workers, mental-health nurses and techs, people he'd talk to over the net on a regular basis, and how
some years back he'd started hearing things he got curious about. So he pushed a little, asked a few strategic questions and
kept his ears open, started putting it together.

Hairiest thing he ever did, he said, not telling you. But he had to figure it was my own life—that I had my reasons which
Reason could not know, and so on.

Ten minutes tops, I was on my way. They were holding you at University Hospital pending court hearing. Don Walsh came in not
long after. Didn't say much. Just shook hands, a little sadly I thought (I didn't learn about Danny till later), and introduced
his friend from the DA's office, woman named Arlene. Arlene's wearing jeans and a pink dress shirt with a man's tie at half-mast
and a leather fanny pack. Steps through, around and past legal formalities like she's off somewhere else reading a book or
having a good meal this is so simple, and before any of us know it we're out the other side. Standing on the sidewalk with
this miserable six-in-the-morning rain slopping down us and into clogged gutters. Whole city starting to smell like wet sheep.

You and Deborah been together long?

Just wondered. She was there too by then. Asked if it were possible the two of you might be alone awhile. She had her car,
she'd bring you round to the Center.

Three weeks, or just over. You came in on a Sunday. It's Monday now. Late afternoon.

Funny. I never imagined I might be sending out smoke signals, to Richard Garces or anyone else. Makes meremember what you
wrote: "Signals we're set here to read."

You all right? Need to rest? That's some strong stuff you're behind right now. Know how it is.

Maybe later we'll have the chance, be able, to talk about all that.

I used to think a lot about that story you were always telling. How back home your father took you to breakfast one morning
at Nick's, on the levee by theriver, and how once you'd ordered and got your plates through a side window into the kitchen
and were sitting there on the steps of the old railway station, watching all the white folks so warm at the tables inside
and balancing greasy paper plates on knees shaky with cold he told you that no matter what you did—raise his children for
him, fight his wars for him, keep his economy afloat—to the white man you'd always be invisible.

Mirrors weren't made for the likes of us, you said.

So I go on readingmy books and then one day, it seems all at once now when I look back on it, how the hell did this ever happen,
there I am, in Europe, halfway to being an old man myself.

Biggest damn mirrors you ever saw. Here's everything I've been taught is most important, everything I've made so much a part
of my own life, of what I am. Eiux>pean ait, European history, European literature, eveiything that defines the cultiue I
live in. Put out a hand and you touch it Knock over some monument of imaging intellect if you're not careful.

Then one day I realize I can't see myself in those mirrors anymore. I'm simply not there. Not there at all, however hard I
stare.

I came back to the States only to findthat this had all become every bit as alien to me now as Paris, Berlin or London, Brittany
with its cattle, Kent with its sheep.

The whole country was forts now. Fort Lakeside, Fort Prytania, the Walled City of Metairie. Malls and parking lots and fast-food
chains. Everybody zipping past at forty, fifty miles an hour like trapped flies banging against windows. Everybody shut away
in his own little world.

And the more you're alone, the more natural seems the importance, the supremacy, of self. Other lives become little more than
contrails dissolving on the sky.

Somehow, I knew, I had to break out of that tyranny. Get the windows open, learn to move slowly again, break the mirrors,
embrace others' lives.

I called you twice, but couldn't figure out what to say. I waited till the machine cut off, then hung up myself. But you know
that, of course. You wrote about it.

I've been here at the Center almost the whole time. Here and other places like it. Found out pretty quickly that the pain
I carried around with me, thought I couldn't bear—compared with others', that pain was nothing.

These faces, they're the mirrors I can see myself in.

Every one of them.

Within the week I was transferred to a halfway house in midtown, a once-grand home now given to dangerously sagging porches
and balconies with railingslike decayed teeth, across the street from a service station recently converted to a falafel house,
sheets of plywood still stacked along the side. Holding on for dear life, and for lack of any other entertainment, inmates
sat out on the balconies to watch citizens come and go.

"This is my son, Brother David," I said, and everyone laughed: Richard Garces, Don, Deborah, Norm and Ray "RM" Marcus from
up the street. All of them had come to see me home. And they'd all brought food.

For the next hour or two we worked our way through, around and over pots of red beans and rice with grilled sausage, steaming
gumbo from which protruded various claws and halves of bivalve shells, tasso on a bed of mixed greens, boiled crawfish. We'd
covered the kitchen table with newspapers. Garces and Norm Marcus were in competition to see who could collect the biggest
heap of crawfish bodies.

I'd taken one look at my own pile of bodies, all the mail that accumulated while I was away (life goes on), and dumped it
in one of the boxes people had brought food in. Over the next few weeks that box would move otherwise untouched from kitchen
floor to pantry to a closet shelf to the trash can I set out curbside each Tuesday and Friday.

Zeke made untold pots of coffee and, for Deborah, cup after cup of tea, which he delivered to her on a small tray complete
with cream pitcher, lemon slices, vat of sugar and a demitasse spoon he'd found somewhere. Hard to tell whether she or he
got the bigger kick out of it.

Hours later Don and I found ourselves sitting on the bench under the tree in the backyard, by the slave quarters. People still
moved around inside the house, in the light. Dark out here. Moonlight pushing through clouds, through humidity that shelled
the moon in nacreous layei's, made it a pearl. A few more neighbors had shown up, a teacher or two, Sally Mara with her latest
young man, the two of them all in black. Keith LeRoy wearing perfect English.

"I hope you know how happy I am for you, Lew," Walsh said. "I mean that."

"I know you do."

"So what's up? David planning to stay here awhile?"

"I hope so. I've asked him."

"Good. That's good."

Inside, Garces, Norm and RM were trading dance moves. They were about equally bad, and loving it. Heads thrown back. Laughing.

"And Deborah? How do things stand there?"

I shrugged. "We'll see. Give time time, as the twelve-steppers say."

"Yeah. Has to be tough for her, all this coming down on her at once."

"Yeah."

"No question how much she cares, you know. All she can do just to take her eyes off you in there."

Zeke pressed his face against the glass and peered out at us. Don and I waved.

"Do me a favor, don't fuck this one up, Lew."

"I'll try."

"Sure. Sine you will." After a moment he added, "I'm pulling for you."

"You always have."

"Just don't expect as much out of her, out of the rest of us, as you do from yourself."

"You're saying this to a man who three weeks ago was drinking dregs out of beer bottles, cigarette butts and all."

We sat together awhile without saying more. Faintly I could hear people's laughter from a neighboring yard. Some guest I didn't
know stepped just outside the kitchen door to smoke, nodding politely towards Don and me. A squinel leapt from roofs edge
to banana plant, came within half an inch of not making it.

"He was a fuckup, Lew. Always had been. Lazy as overcooked spaghetti. Weak. No skills, social or otherwise. Never gave me
reason to think he'd ever be anything else."

Minutes went by.

"I loved him, Lew. No one else can understand that the way you do.

I miss him. Always will."

I slid my arm up over my friend's shoulder there in the close New Orleans night, in that struggle of moonlight.