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And after how many speeches to herself about what not to do? Things not to do such as, first and foremost, meet anyone, much less someone, at a basement party? After all of that, Ndiya Grayson met Shame Luther at a basement party. It was the Fourth of July, a Sunday. Well, by the time they met it was early Monday morning. Over the next month she'd seen him twice. This night would be the third time. Ndiya promised herself to review the two previous occasions so she could make the third time turn out different. What does that mean, "turn out"? "At least give it a chance to happen," she'd thought to herself. As for Shame, OK, she thought, "It's some-kind-of-his-name." That's what it said on the flyer Yvette-at-work brought to show her on Tuesday, after Ndiya's email about having met him at the party: NIGHT VISIONS: CATCH SHAME LUTHER: WEDNESDAY NIGHTS @ THE CAT EYE. The glossy card featured a yellow cat eye superimposed over a piano. She slid it across Ndiya's desk without a pause in her step, "This your basement boy, girl? Watch yourself with musicians." And no she didn't just keep walking.
Musicians? Shame hadn't mentioned the music part when they met. He said he was a laborer. He recited it as if standing at attention: "International Laborers' Union, Local 269." She had no idea what that meant. As they shook hands on the porch, she'd managed, "Yeah? Where's that?" She noticed the callused skin of his palm and the thick, smooth feel of his fingers. His hand felt like it wore a glove of itself. "Well, the local's in Chicago Heights. But for a few more weeks," he said, "that, the work, is a wire mill out west up on Thirty-Eighth Street." "Up on Thirty-Eighth?" she thought. He said the name, "Joycelan Steel." She remembered the name because she didn't know what a wire mill was and because the name, Joycelan Steel, sounded like a person she'd want to meet. Names: Shame Luther and Joycelan Steel. The union, the local, the work? None of it sounded real. On her guard that first night, she didn't ask him anything more about what or where or why he did whatever he did. She didn't ask. She was trying to keep it simple. She failed.
*
And at night, the city arched its back. Its eyes faded to slits, front limbs stretched out. The claws became invisible, likewise the scars. The heat eased as the day gave up. Motion ensued where everything except scars rests. Scars took over and attempted to redeem the day. A telephone pole begged the cleat back its divots. Things no river could forgive vanished. They didn't disappear. Just slipped up inside of wherever they were for a while. It's like the way you fold a piece of paper in half, trace your thumbnail down the crease until it's sharp enough that the missing half of the page fills the room and there's nothing else to breathe. They say a person experiences a rush of pure elation at the exact moment of drowning. At twilight, in the summer, the day drowned in the dark. Pieces of elation came alive, parcels of fugitive heat. Invisible streams of it moved around, lolled about in the streets, paused without pausing on stoops.
So for a few minutes at dusk the city opened. It was as if all the promises of invisibility existed without the terrors. The terrors came later, of course; enough to break a bent beam of light. But for a half hour or so around sunset after a hot day, it was pure drowning.
Ndiya Grayson got off the bus to go see Shame Luther at twilight. She stepped into this place he'd found to live where elation hung out longer than it did elsewhere. Where life was wound into what happened on the missing half of the page. It's why she arrived by descending degrees, presence terraced. It's why she was already gone by the time she found she couldn't leave. Had never left. Long gone and never left; she held, as it were, the American ticket.
To tell it means to unfold the untold. The sky glowed overhead, the orange clouds of a night in late summer, Chicago. The hiss as the bus knelt down. It dipped its bumper into the huge puddle left over from the afternoon's gushing fire hydrants on three of the four corners at the intersection. It's just a few world-changing blocks east from the corner of Sixty-Third and King Drive, a few minutes' walk. As she'd learn later, a few minutes walk into a past she'd never had, her past. There was no place in the city like it and no place in the city was close. No police of place, fences buried underground. She noticed it right off. She remembered it with the feeling that it was remembering her.
She'd ask Shame about it when she and Mrs. Clara's Melvin finally got inside his door. He'd take Melvin's goggles and her thigh-length linen coat and try not to notice, just yet, her soaked high-heels and dripping skirt. He'd say, "Yeah, this is where all the city's twilight comes to stay the night. And, do you know, there are places that have none at all? We get theirs too. Isn't that right, Melvin?" Melvin was oblivious in his red swim trunks with blue sailboats. He rocked back and forth on the outside edge of his sandals and held one yellow rain boot by its pull-on loop in each hand. Shame: "A little payback." And she: "Payback? For what?" And Shame, smiling at the hallway outside the open door behind her: "Come on in."
All of that was still a bus stop and a three-block walk away. It'd seem to her that it took half her life to walk those three blocks. In a way, she was right about that. But for now she was still on the eastbound 29 bus. She was still dry, hadn't felt the fitted glove of air. So she hadn't asked herself anything yet. Yet. The word seemed laced into all her time with Shame. Call it "time." Hers with him seemed to be built of delay. Every moment shackled to its mirror in a kind of tug of war between this and that, here and there. Things took forever to happen. They happened when they happened and never felt late. Then the bizarre part, they happened again and again—and so really happened—later in her brain. Ndiya's memories of time with Shame stood out like colorized scenes in a black-and-white film. No. They were like parts of a movie that she'd encountered first as music and so could never really take the movie version seriously. It'd be weeks before she asked herself much at all about Shame Luther. But when she did she'd find music where she thought there was vision, touch where she thought there should be music. And whenever there was supposed to be touch she found a part of her life that had nothing to do with him at all.
She hadn't thought it through, refused to in fact. So she knows all of this in a way she can't tell herself about. Known without the telling to self. Words evaporated into what lay behind them before her brain caught the voice. Absorbed, maybe. But then what? As she moved up the aisle to the back door of the bus, she felt like she was already in the street. The crushing heat of the afternoon was gone. She loved the summer heat at night, the way the whole city stretched out in strings of light, turned its back and breathed long and quiet.
*
Breath in slow motion. Easy as this here. The mute pressure of heat lightning. The way a city slipped its pulse into you. This was a South Side summer night and the difference, that is, the memory, struck her immediately when she'd come back at the beginning of the summer.
Ndiya had sworn she wouldn't come back to Chicago, not until they tore The Grave down. Somewhere in herself she believed they never would. From all what they'd stole into her as a child, she'd assumed they never could come down. From all what they'd torn—in her mind, something in how she'd been sent away had made the buildings indestructible. Now they had come down. It was national, international news when they'd decided to tear down the projects where she'd grown up. It was journalism; she had her doubts. But here she was. True to her word.
True to the word. "Here" she was, back in this city that she'd forced to forget her name. So she thought. Immediately upon her arrival, she'd found that "here" was a verb. She felt "hered." The first thing she noticed about this verb was that it hurt. And the hurt twisted into colors, a kind of bouquet in her arms and legs. The bouquets changed her pulse, sharpened her vision until the colors in the world began to switch places: blue bars from the city flag on a police car swooped up into the sky; red from the stripe on a passing bus caught and wrapped around parked cars; silver green from trees in the park blown into the air making the wind momentarily visible. Here was musical. When the colors "hered" their way around playing musical chairs, she noticed, they didn't hurt anymore. Here bristled and sparkled. But it wasn't pain. She learned that all kind of things, voices in daily, anonymous speech more than anything else, had the power to here her. All summer voices in crowds of people jousted about until she lost track of which voice came from which face. "Where is this here?" she repeated to herself as she checked to see if the strange lightning in her arms and legs was visible to people around her. Didn't seem to be.
More than twenty years she'd lived in other places. She found that "there" was a verb too. She'd felt all kinds of "theres" and "thereings," the ways people could unknowingly there her. All kinds of ways. At every new job, people asking her the question and—without noticing Ndiya's face—answering, "Chicago? Great place. Oh, I love Chicago, the Art Institute and we have friends in [fill in the name of whatever suburb]." Or it was, "My daughter lives near Wrigley Field." Ndiya wondered how everyone's fucking daughter could live near Wrigley Field? At first, she'd attempted to halt these "thereings" by stating merely and matter-of-factly that she'd never been to the Art Institute nor had she ever seen Wrigley Field. But after a few rounds of those "thereings," she found herself frightened by the accumulating urge to smash the visibly confused face staring back at her over a cubicle wall or via a favorable angle in an anonymously glossy, marble-veined women's room wall or mirror. For years, in self-defense, she called it pleasure, the way those there-smiles she wore felt hammered on her face with hot nails. This was the period of her life she called Ndiya-Walking-Away. It didn't last. And, reluctantly, she'd conceded that she'd gotten nowhere walking away which, in a way, felt to her like a virtue.
*
Looking out the windows of the bus as it inched through traffic east on Sixty-Third Street, Ndiya could smell it. "Here." Chicago laid out on its back, its chest rising and falling as if lying next to a midnight blue lover. The lake. She thinks of the lake as Chicago's unmapped East side. "Forget State Street," she thought. "The dividing line between east and west is Lake Shore Drive." As a child, she studied "Chicago" in the encyclopedia. In third grade she found a map of the city in the H World Book under "Hydrogen Bomb." She traced it carefully into her notebook. There was a map of the city with a hydrogen bomb blast marked by a black dot in the middle. Concentric circles of destruction radiated outward. She asked her teacher where exactly on the map they lived and Mrs. Cross had swiftly taken the book away from her. It didn't matter, she had it in her notebook. Years before she'd ever really connected it to the actual lake, she found a fold-out National Geographic map that showed the contours of the bottoms of all the Great Lakes. She'd mark her way east off the edge of the city and imagine herself a mile out, floating eight hundred feet above the earth on the sound of the invisible water.
Not the waves on the lake, her map showed the shape of all that space under what you saw on the surface. All that cold, dark water plunging down and away from anything anyone could ever know. While she stared at the map, she traveled as if she was underwater where sound comes at you from all directions at once. Suspended in this unknowable sound, her own index finger with the mocha moon-sliver at the top of the nail traced the darkening shades of blue on the map. The shades told its depth. Once, in second grade, she filled a five-gallon pail for their box-garden project and found she couldn't move it at all. Her teacher, Ms. Willis, had to pour half away so she could carry it. "So, it's heavy too," she thought, narrowing her eyes. She checked both corners of her vision as if she'd just discerned a crucial secret. For weeks after that, she went to bed and lay there sleepless imagining how the lead-heavy depth of the whole lake would feel if it was her blanket and how nobody—not her mother, not Principal James, not the mayor—would be able to move it.
Nothing in Chicago ever made sense to her without the lake. Strictly speaking, nothing much made sense with it either. But with the lake floating out there, in her mind, it didn't matter as much. She remembers the Fourth of July when she was little. They'd go to the lake. It seemed that the whole South Side lined up along the shore. She always wondered if they ("We?" she thinks now) thought the lake would open up and everyone just walk away. When memories like this came to her, it felt like she could blink with her arms and legs. It was as if her whole body closed quickly then reopened. To herself she called these memories body blinks. No music in Chicago makes sense if you can't feel the Moses affect in the song: the pulse-way people arrive but never get there, depart but never leave a city. No sense, not sense to feel, that is, if you can't hear that. You have to follow a song out over the lake at night till the sound of all the spilled light of the city disappears into the waves. If you've done that you know that the light is the gloss of all the never-lostness and not-foundity, the used-to-be-somehow and the not-quite-ever-again-ness of the people, of even one gone-person. When you do that you, that used-to-be or could-have-been but now-never-again version of you blows off with it.
For Ndiya, no matter the pronouns and prepositions, every song was really sung to that unknown, invisible weight. And she had the chart on her map. She listened to her clock radio at night, volume down so low she used it as a pillow to hear the songs played by her favorite DJ, Misty after Midnight. She'd listen with her eyes close and then open them up and place each song on her map of the emptied-out lakes according to something she thought of as the depth of the sound. The depth of the sound was the weight of a song. Sound never lost, songs without a trace.
As she rode the 29 bus, Ndiya heard Deniece Williams's "Free." In her memory she saw her ten-year-old finger catch the red glow from the digits in the clock face. Her finger pointed at the blue-black center of the lake's terraced shape. She still thought of "Free" as Chicago's heaviest song, an impression she couldn't shake or believe, find or lose, until she heard the song again and it was as plain as never is always plain. The way Niecy's voice stood alone among the instruments. The way she floated and dived. The way the song was, on one level, so simple. The way she sang the filigreed frailty of what she knew and her point-blank refusal to take any refuge in it. Blue silk stitched around an ice cube. So clear the cold it held felt like a mouthful of high-altitude sky, almost empty. The song was a dare: "Go ahead, melt. Give up your shape against the smooth blue skin of it all." Ndiya held that song in her mind like a low moon rising up. Kept it in her mouth like a cherry gumdrop full of venom. Walking down the aisle of the bus, she tried and failed to remember ever hearing the song played in any other city. She knew she had, of course. Still, she wondered if it was possible to hear this song outside of Chicago. What could it possibly sound like with no poisonous moon low over the lake's impossible weight? She figured it must be possible. For someone maybe, but not for her.
At night, in the summer, she thought, the city got its breath from the cold bottom of the lake. It heated the air in its lungs, took what it needed, and breathed the rest out invisible. She imagined body heat blowing out the open window of a car speeding down South Shore Drive. She imagined the weight of the whole lake balanced on the head of a pin. She'd never actually been on the lake in a boat, but thought it must actually move like her uncle Lucky's big old burgundy sedan. "My ninety-eight," she remembered him saying. She didn't know what that phrase had to do with a car. She decided, vaguely, it must mean something chrome and cursive.
It didn't matter. She remembered Lucky's cut-eyed smile, the way he wore his hat pushed back on his wide forehead so it made him look like he'd always just been surprised and was always, anyway, ready for more. Rusty-haired and freckled. That phrase, "ninety-eight," floats on loose struts. "Hair on fire," he'd call it. In his voice, it sounded like "hay-own-fie." Uncle Lucky drove with his right arm laid across the top of the passenger's seat so he could wave at people without looking at them. His left wrist draped on the wheel to coax and nudge the loping chassy through the curves. She used to think he steered that car the way you do a friend with your shoulder and an elbow in the ribs when you pass a secret joke between the two of you. She felt both her arms blink at the phrase "ninety-eight."
Ndiya looked at her face in the bus window, "The two of you." Then she thinks, "The both of you." She recognized her reflection in the smudged glass, the girl under the lake disappeared under that suspended blanket of sound. The word "disappeared" echoed into static and traveled down her arms and legs. To keep her balance in the aisle, she thought of Lucky and his falsetto "ninety-eight." She thumbed a bassline on her thigh and heard it in her chest, boom-bomp, "Riding High." Faze-O: Lucky's theme music. Ndiya blinked her whole body closed, hard, and opened back to the present. Her voice evenly split between plea and command: "All you colors back in your places."
To focus, she reminded herself that this bus took her to her third date with Shame. That name!? Just then she heard three sirens, all of them in the distance. "These aren't dates!" she scolded herself as the siren of a distant fire truck caught her ear. The clear sound of its bell bounced off the bus driver's rearview mirror and came straight down the aisle. The distant clarity of an emergency cued a thought that she didn't know this man all that well. Didn't know his neighborhood at all. She thought, "Shame? Is he serious?" She'd heard more bizarre names, but this one seemed to sit on its owner a bit too much like the crushed rake of a loud velvet hat. Yvette-at-work's warning about musicians had gone all "red zone" when Ndiya showed her Shame's address: "This Negro lives where? And you don't ee-ven know his name?"
She had been "here" before. Now she wonders if she means "there"? That was date number two. This thought broke a rule. She'd vowed not to admit to herself that date number two had happened: "Mind off number two, nothing happened, never happened." But even if it hadn't happened, she had ridden over there with him on his cycle—"A, ah! Mind off that, never happened." In any case, this was her first time coming to see him, here, by herself. She allowed herself to think about that because if she really thought about the last time, she wouldn't ee-ven have agreed to come back. She liked to think in that voice even though she knew better. She felt the epic adrenaline in that voice. She felt its power of that idiom and the betrayal of her disappearance into static as a child. She shook it off and thought safely about language.
Moving up the aisle, she held the thought under her tongue in her mind; she could taste the difference. "Here" and its grace note silent t. The way the word "even" arched its eyebrows and appeared in her face. "Chicago," she thinks. Even the way you say "ee-ven." She felt the meaning push up from beneath while the sound of the word held both ends down. Ever since she'd been back, her arms and legs blinked on their own. Tones in simple words pulled them apart from the inside. Words, or whatever they were, like this played through her body like a flashlight waving around underwater. Chicago. A place where you could taste words. Ndiya stared at her reflection in the window. She turned away, eyebrows up, body closed. Then she whispered to herself, "Call it even."
