Time of the Locust (20 page)

Manden looked at the time on the cracked analog clock sitting amid the counter clutter. The meeting at the Autism Center was long over. Had there been a new treatment prescribed? He wondered if the observational study (which he was straining not to call an experiment that he had sanctioned with his silence) did more harm than good. Manden remembered the bag of marbles he gave Sephiri and wondered if they were already lost out in the street and long fallen into a drain or given away to some other child who might have taken a direct interest in them. Or were they in Sephiri's room somewhere, in the windowsill, like where he and Horus used to keep them?

It was a funny thing that the memory of marbles should plague him now. Such small pieces of glass filled with ribbons of color. But they held a world in them, and they were all he and Horus wanted to play with, all they talked about, when together they burned through the New York summer days of 1966. He remembered those precious times when it was just the three of them (he, Horus, and their father) outside of their apartment building. He and Horus shot marbles on the sidewalk, with Papa watching over them from the stoop, smiling and smoking a cigarette. Jack Thompson would point to the chalk line they drew in the middle of the game circle and say, “Make that line, boys! Whatever you do, make the scratch.” July 21, 1966, started like every other day when school was out and childhood was in full swing, packed with daring and games, adventure and enterprise . . .

“Come on, Horus, shoot your Alley. We ain't got all day.”

“I'ma do it when I'm ready, Manny.”

“Told ya this one ain't easy, with your big head and don't know what you doin'. Should have used the shooter. You know we playin' for keepsies.”

“Well, I'm almost eight years old, Manny, and I ain't losin' my mean, green Alley to no shooter.”

“Well, you still seven years old right now, while you runnin' your mouth. It's 1966, and we ain't got all day.”

Horus stared down at the brilliant green cat's eye marble nested in the hole made by his thumb and index fingers. His eyes looked as if they were piercing the round glass, and in the glare, he couldn't hear the sirens wailing somewhere in the neighboring streets or old ladies calling for their cats. He couldn't hear the doo-wop playing in the parked cars, the soft rap of young men laying it on thick to giggling girls. Horus couldn't hear the metal wheels of little girls roller-skating down the sidewalk. There had only been the marbles in his hand, the line, and the target . . .

Manden had seen that kind of concentration on Papa's face, too, when he was preparing for a meeting, one of his speeches, or an article he wanted released in the black newspapers. Manden would watch him go through his ritual of preparation (steps he thought as a child were the steps all men took in being men every morning). First, there was the quiet breakfast he shared with his wife at the table. Maria always fed her children first and waited to have breakfast with her husband. Then Jack Thompson did a silent shave in the mirror. With each stroke, there was always a contemplative pause, as if he was working something out in his mind and the movement of the straight razor helped to straighten out the thought. Then the methodical selection of shirt, tie, pants, and jacket, whether or not a vest should be included. Finally, the collection of books, notes, and papers neatly arranged on the dresser by his wife. Each page was taken in hand, absorbed, and returned to the pile. “Manden,” Jack Thompson would call out after all of that, “bring me my cane.”

As the eldest son, it was Manden's job to bring his father's dark wood cane, which he did not seem to need for walking but carried with him always when he was about, a third leg that supported his pride in himself, in the community he dreamed would one day exist. And every time Manden brought the cane, his father would quote from a book of African proverbs. Rain does not fall on one roof alone. One falsehood spoils a thousand truths. The ruin of a nation begins in the homes of its people. Then, offering a nod and a smile, Jack Thompson would depart . . .

Manden looked through the subway booth at a group of young boys roughhousing near the escalator. The boys, five or six teenagers in all, grew louder and formed a circle on the platform. The teenagers clapped and nodded to a sound it seemed that only they could hear. One boy, wearing a baseball cap turned to the back of his head and combat boots, entered the center of the circle and started dancing, contorting his body and popping his head and arms like a robot. He spun around, gyrating, his long, slender build moving like a rubber band. Passengers walked by quickly, holding bags closer, shifting direction to take the stairs. They paused in disgust or avoided eye contact altogether. The boys were oblivious to the crowd and the hostility, engrossed in the rapture of their world. A heavyset boy with a deep, booming voice began to rap:

Lil' man in the game to play

Ain't even got another day

In a fucked-up world

With a fucked-up hand

But he gonna play it quick

Cuz nobody gives a damn

Yeah he gonna play it quick

For he lose the chance to can

All them suckers in his way

Fuckers hatin' on his life

Tryin' to sink his battleship

Tryin' load him down with trife . . .

The boys grew louder and louder, laughing and stomping their booted feet on the ground. A short boy with a scarf around his head took a joint out of his pocket and lit it. Older women looked on and shook their heads. Businessmen and students with backpacks skirted the circle. Small children pointed. But nobody said anything to them.

Manden watched the boys play at shooting each other and sighed. He sighed because he would not have said anything, either. Even with the roughhousing, the dancing, and the loud profanity, he would not have said a word. But part of his job responsibility was to ensure that there was no smoking anywhere in the subway, let alone an illicit substance. He would have to approach them. He would have to attempt to put the fear in them that a grown man could put into a boy, and he knew that he did not have such power and they had never known such fear. He was not their father, they would remind him. And they would burn into him with the white heat of young, hateful eyes. And they would hate him for appearing as if he was trying to be their father, of reminding them of the fact that their fathers were not there. Or that men around them did not really want them in their lives. Like Uncle Randy. Manden knew this feeling. He grew up with it himself and carried it with him like a diamond that each day became harder and sharper. He knew that when he approached the boys with authority, they would not respect him any more than the other men who looked like him, those who glared at boys like them with hatred and disgust.

Manden left the booth and walked slowly toward the boys, his back throbbing. Some of the teenagers saw him coming, and their faces became masks of stone.

“There's no smoking here,” said Manden. “And you all need to quiet down and move on.”

The short boy with the joint took a long toke, pinched it out with his fingers, and stuck it behind his ear. “We ain't got to do a damned thing, Mr. Officer. How you know we ain't got somewhere important to be, toy cop?”

The other boys were electrified by this opening exchange, and Manden could feel their excitement, their heat. Their eyes all said: “I dare you.”

Manden said, “You all have to go.”

The tall rubber-band boy said, “You ain't none of my mama. Daddy, neither, wherever the fuck that niggah is. We ain't going nowhere.”

Manden put his hands in his pockets and looked at the boy. Although he wanted to smack him across the face, he understood the boy's anger and disrespect. He understood the triggers and knew the boiling points as well as any alchemist, although his own fury had long ago been snuffed and cooled and hardened.

Passengers rushed by, eager to get to their next subway destinations. Manden looked at the teenagers, and they glared back at him through the brimstone of defiance and rage and helplessness. One of the teenagers said again, “Man, we ain't going nowhere.” The others cackled and nodded in agreement.

Manden looked through them, into their frightened hearts and out to the dark and empty tunnel behind them. “Well, that's one thing you boys are right about,” he said. “You ain't going nowhere.”

He left them there and returned to the glass booth. Their laughter and jeers followed him in the stagnant trail of air, until he closed the door behind him and they hit against the glass. He let other thoughts empty from his mind. Because it was easier, Manden reasoned, looking away from the boys, much easier to watch the other creatures of the herd that passed hurriedly through the subterranean chambers of the D.C. Metro system. Peacocks flashed their wares, chirping loudly in the hopes that the world would see and hear all of the reasons they were special and valued. Silver-backed gorillas, angry and bitter from years of anger and bitterness, pounded their chests as they walked, daring any challengers. Packs of hyenas scavenged for easy prey, stiff competition for the snakes waiting in the shadows. But sometimes there was a lone elephant that had long ago lost touch with its own kind, watching the jungle of creatures disapprovingly, despairing in the disappointing truth that its own reality differed not from the others. Manden watched the passengers go by. Had he become a lone elephant too?

On the radio, the dispatcher began again, and since Manden heard his name this time, he could no longer ignore it with the ease with which he had done most of the morning. “Dispatch to Thompson. Come in . . . Thompson, what's your twenty?”

Manden snatched the radio, cursing under his breath. “This is Thompson. I'm stationed at the information booth at the west entrance today. Come back.” Manden waited for a response, grinding his teeth. Nothing.

So except for the Code Purple, the day was ordinary. Still, a man had ended his life earlier that morning. He had his reasons, thought Manden, whatever they were. The man “jumped the fence,” as Manden and other guys working the subway sometimes joked about during break times when there were other such incidents. But after the chuckling died down, a coughing affliction always seemed to take hold of them all, and death hung heavy in the air like a smog that choked them the rest of the day. This no one ever discussed.

Manden again caught a glimpse of his own watery figure mirrored in the booth glass. He leaned against the counter, his back aching. There was still that thing growing near his spine. He called it a thing, since the chiropractors and radiologists had found nothing there, nothing wrong with him. On damp days and in moments of uncertainty, he could feel the thing's presence more than ever. It had started growing when he was sitting next to his mother all those long hours in the pew at his father's funeral. She was holding his hand tightly, until the numbness in his fingers traveled up his arm. He felt the beginnings of the thing growing then, a hard kernel that formed and pressed into the high-backed wood as his mother swooned and the deacons shouted, a lodged pit that his spine had since curved around. He could feel it always.

The sound of keys jingling the booth door interrupted ­Manden's thoughts. His coworker, Piper, a red-headed man in his twenties, let himself inside. His face held a pale green pallor. He nodded at Manden. “Going home, Thompson. They got somebody to relieve me, thank God. Sick to my stomach. I guess it was too much excitement for me today,” he said.

“What?” asked Manden.

Piper covered his mouth with his hand, shaking his head. “I saw him.”

“The jumper?”

Piper nodded. “Some of him, anyway. Coroner had pieces of him on a black plastic sheet on the platform.” He covered his mouth again, as if staving off an urge to retch. “Did you know that it takes eighteen football fields for a train to come to full halt when it's traveling at top speed? I've seen a lot of things. You probably seen it all, but Lord Jesus.”

Manden felt nothing. “Bad, huh?”

“You should have seen his hand, Thompson,” said Piper. “I swear, I'll see it in my dreams tonight. Usually, they leave notes tucked in their pockets, you know? Or they spray-paint something. ‘Fuck You.' ‘I hate life.' ‘Love Always.' You know, something. But this jumper had written one word on his damned palm. I had my flashlight, and I was scanning near the police line, and I saw it. On his palm, he wrote the word ‘WHY,' with three question marks.” Piper rubbed his stomach. “That's it. Just ‘WHY.' It gave me the creeps. You know what I mean? For him to end his life and leave a one-word epilogue like that. To take himself out and leave only a question. I lost my breakfast right then. Spilled my guts, but I couldn't help it.” Piper shook his head. “See you tomorrow,” he said, and exited the booth.

Manden watched Piper walk away, thinking of the jumper. People ended their lives for a lot of reasons. Some of them didn't seem serious enough to commit suicide over. Others might have been understandable. Like losing your mind bit by bit. Like a slow death in a cell. He wondered if Horus had ever thought about ending his life. Manden looked into the darkness of the tunnels. It was between train arrival and departure, and there was no air blowing about.

And in spite of being inside the Bastille he had fashioned for himself, Manden could not keep the rushing thoughts from breaking through the walls of his mind. Was he any better than the jumper? He woke up every day and asked himself why he was here. He could think only of what he hadn't been able to save. But there was Brenda and Sephiri, both of whom he had let down today. Wasn't there still something worth trying for with them? Surely his brother's family was worth salvaging, but he didn't know if that was possible, and he didn't know how to find out. In those small, quiet moments, when Manden watched Sephiri staring or spinning or flailing, he wondered what he was waiting for. Maybe in his heart, he was waiting for some moment when the boy would somehow be different, when things were not what they were. So much of his life was still in conflict, still left blank. But he could not haunt the underbelly of the city forever, could he? He would have to face what he pretended did not exist at some point, for nothing was going away.