It was a roaring, late spring day in the City. Bright but unseasonably cool. A sparkling patch of green, green grass. A blue jay mobbing a hawk. The happy sound of nearby hammers bringing something into being. Pung. Kapung. Pung. Pung. Kapung. Me and my boy. I left work early to grab Nigel per a plan I couldn’t quite recall. Nigel and I walked across the grass of the Great Lawn at the School Without Walls. He wore a brown scarf and, for a change, a baseball cap, the neon-green one, without my prompting. His curly brownish hair poked out from the edges. He was due for a haircut, although I liked the way his hair partially obscured the mark. I removed his backpack and hefted it onto my shoulder. Oof. When did knowledge become so heavy?
“Thanks,” he said with his fingers. His class was learning American Sign Language so that students who heard the magic of words would be able to communicate with those who heard the magic of silence. This meant I was learning ASL, too. The boy hadn’t even peeped that morning when I kissed him on the forehead.
Suddenly Nigel hurried in front of me. He held out his hands, so I would stop. I stopped. Seeing my inability to comprehend his signs, he tried charades. We were master charadists, the pair of us.
A girl cut across the lawn. It was that dark-as-dung brat who’d ratted me out to Penny about the skin-toning cream, that time Nigel trapped himself in the closet. Like a gnat, she often buzzed around when I came to pick Nigel up.
There was no uniform requirement at the School Without Walls—they were against such orthodoxies. But just like the other times I’d seen her, the girl wore a traditional school uniform with a twist: a plaid skirt, a white top, and a purple faux-fur jacket. I took this as a sign that she was a program student, one of the kids the City gave handouts of tuition, lunch, and uniforms. I didn’t like that she sometimes visited Nigel at the house. She was flippant and crude. And the dozens of twisted kinks and ribbons on her head made her look like something that belonged on the cover of a nineteenth-century minstrel ad. But Penny didn’t mind her, so the girl—she had a name: Araminta Ahosi—sometimes visited Nigel at the house, where they played handheld video games or hide-and-seek, which apparently she was skilled at. At least she had some veneer of decorum. She always called me mister.
“Hey, mister,” she said. “Hey, Nige.” What was this “Nige” business anyway? My son didn’t like people freestyling his name. Whenever I called him Nigerious or by his verbalized initials, he pursed his lips.
“You’re interrupting a very important discussion,” I said to the pest.
“Oh. You must have forgot about— Mmph!” Nigel clamped a hand over her mouth.
He held up two fingers. Two words. He circled his thumb and forefinger around the opposite ring finger.
“Ring,” I said. He gave me a weak thumbs-up. Right track. Wrong word. “Wedding.” He kept pointing up. “Wife? Penny?” Nigel hopped and did a little leprechaun dance.
“Dweeb,” Araminta said.
Nigel poked out his tongue. Second word. He motioned like his stomach was covered by a balloon.
“Whale.” Araminta threw her arms wide.
Nigel held a finger over his own mouth.
“Fine, boo.” She put a hand on her narrow hip. “I ain’t got to say nothing. I can just stand here and be quiet.” She switched hips. “See? Won’t say a word. I’m shutting my trap. Right now. Just like that. Zippit.” She imaginatively zipped her lips shut and flung the key over the iron fence.
Nigel forced down a laugh, but my guts betrayed me, and I guffawed despite myself.
I straightened my face but chuckled again.
“Fat?” I said. “Pregnant?”
Nigel wagged his finger. He pulled his shirt collar over his head so that he was hidden like a frightened turtle. The crown of his skull emerged from the neck hole. He mock-screamed as he emerged. I was second-guessing our decision to teach that kid about the facts of life before he was big enough to hold a sippy cup.
“Mom’s birthday!” I clapped my hands. How could I have forgotten? Nigel’s eyes brightened, and he offered a fist bump. I shook my head. He knew better. We shook hands.
“Can I ride with y’all?” Araminta asked me.
“I don’t think that would be a good idea,” I said. “Tonight is a very special—”
“My dad has to work late,” she said, “and I don’t want to be there alone. The people upstairs make weird noises every Thursday at nine-seventeen P.M.”
I sighed. Nigel had told me that her father presently held a number of menial part-time jobs, including a horrible gig for the City Department of Sanitation, removing dead rodents from drainpipes or something similarly repulsive. Her mother had tapped out of life at some earlier point.
“Fine,” I signed.
Nigel signed that we had to hurry. He was right. We had much to do and precious little time. We had a cake to buy, and Penny would be home soon. Araminta took off toward the Bug. Nigel sprinted to catch up. His hat fell in his wake. I recovered it. Cake time.
Thank the fates for my considerate son, who prompted me with reminders of Penny’s birthday. Or as Nigel and I rebranded it some time ago: One Cent Day. Once we cleared the whirlpool of car-bound parents and children that were in the area around the school, crosstown traffic was quite tolerable. We were skimming along like a hippo on an ice floe.
I checked the rearview mirror. They were having a conversation in sign. Nigel wasn’t the type of kid to have a ton of friends. He once had a few who were especially close, but most of those he left behind at his prior schools.
Nigel and Araminta laughed audibly, breaking the fiction of deafness. What was so funny? Araminta flipped the device around. An animated ape getting blown up by an exploding cigar. Silly major-key music playing in support. They watched the sequence again and guffawed, one of them stomping the wheel well in delight.
Was there anything better than watching my shy, taciturn, neurotic boy laugh uncontrollably? My misadventures, in the final analysis, were all about pulling Nigel into a land where such giggles and happy grimaces were frequent.
The Mall of the Seven Myrtles parking lot was crowded as usual. But this didn’t bother me. I didn’t advertise the fact, but I was a lover of the Myrtles. It was riverfront property on the former footprint of a church and earlier tourist area that had fallen in a storm.
I got warm fuzzies each time I crossed the reclaimed cobblestone pavilion, which presently faced the water, and passed the historical statuary—our state’s first governor, Jean-Jacques LePieu, clad in a fetching tricorne hat. His knee was raised high like that pirate in those cheeky rum ads. I couldn’t help checking that both of his arms had hands. Some squirrel in my subconscious had been trying for decades to convince me that he had a hook. But no. One mitt held a stalk of maize, and the other a newborn babe. He had graciously just accepted both from kneeling, naked Native Americans.
The steamboat calliope tooted “I Wish I Was in Dixie,” as if we weren’t already.
The Myrtles combined my love of several fields of inquiry—architecture, people watching, snazzy duds—into a ginormous mise-en-scène I could stroll through without pissing off the director or the audience. The design team that built the Sky Tower also constructed the mall, so that the structures were as alike as they were different. They were a pair of elegant sisters, one tall and thin, the other wide-hipped and round-bosomed. The seemingly countless levels of undulating terraces that formed the atrium of the Sky Tower were limited to merely three floors in the Myrtles. But those gorgeous, gold-trimmed, curvilinear decks stretched onward to the edge of sight. Video panels displayed happenings in other sections of the mall such as the food court or the terrarium. A jumbo panel above showed a children’s kazoo band performing at the main entrance fountain. A crew of actors in superhero costumes worked the food court.
The mall’s long ceiling was a pearlescent canopy that changed colors depending on the viewer’s perspective. “How does the ceiling change like that?” Araminta asked.
“It doesn’t change,” I said. “Your eyes are crooked.”
She smacked her lips.
Nigel and Araminta played with the electronic mall directory. I didn’t think I’d ever seen anyone as black as her. Did she lose herself in the dark? When she reentered the lighted world, did she have to make sure that she didn’t leave any of herself behind in the shadows? A spinning compass faded away. A map dotted by hundreds of icons, each for a different business, materialized.
The mall was shaped like a stylized, seven-branched tree. The trunk sprouted from the river, and our cakery was perched near the tip of one of the upper branches. We stepped onto a conveyor belt. We passed the food court. The ersatz comic book heroes must have been prerecorded because I didn’t see them. However, we passed a duo in cowboy hats playing banjos—the Myrtles hired performers to roam around and entertain in much the same way Disneyland did.
We passed stores Nigel and I had experienced before with Penny, Mama, Nigel’s other friends, or any combination thereof. Here was the handmade toy emporium where a red, yellow, and blue biplane on a tether ceaselessly circled the checkout counter. We’d bought Nigel’s first wagon in that place. There was the sundry shop that used to give away free photo negatives. We did that as a family when Nigel was about four. I never liked the picture. It was tucked into a closet at home.
A red-faced girl in a pinafore yelled that she didn’t want to. Her mother, a woman in her twenties who seemed prematurely aged, yanked the girl by the wrist. The girl yelped. I wanted to reach out and say something. But even though I had stopped walking, I ludicrously continued to float away thanks to the conveyor belt. The mother looked right at me, as if to say, What do you think you’re looking at?
We got off the belt at a four-way intersection. I smelled sugar, butter. Hope transmitted on an air current. Cakery Royale was close.
Just as we arrived, someone called my name. A woman with light brown skin and sleepy eyes. Zora Suhla Smits. I’d only seen her a couple of times since the first meeting I crashed at the Musée. She wore a skirt suit. I introduced her to Nigel and Araminta. “Nice to meet you,” she said. Nigel said that the pleasure was all his without moving his lips. I explained the sign thing to Zora. She signed something back.
“You have lovely children,” she said out loud.
“This one isn’t mine,” I said. “She’s on loan from the pound.”
Araminta growled.
“Lovely.” Zora grimaced. “Can we talk for a few moments?”
“Sure,” I said.
Nigel signed that they were going to the arcade in the third branch. I was about to tell him we didn’t have time, but Araminta poked out her tongue. Then she grabbed the back of her own collar and led herself away. Nigel grabbed his collar and did the same.
Zora lobbed small talk at me. “Aren’t we having fine weather?”
“More or less,” I bunted. I was still trying to decide where Zora fit on the leadership scale. Was she an indomitable firebrand like her grandmother or the kind of malleable black figurehead that history preferred? She was tallish but young and somewhat ill at ease, as if she’d only just grown into her shell. I realized then that she was probably only in her early thirties, but an old soul. Yet I knew enough about history to recognize that the descendants of great people are rarely great themselves. Despite having some of the visual and verbal tics of their forebears, many people in Zora’s position simply swam in their ancestors’ wake, often for profit or D-list notoriety.
We walked into the bakery. A lanky man in a baker’s coat offered free samples of bread pudding in disposable cups. I wished Penny were with me. She loved free nosh in disposable cups. The sweet shop had made my and Penny’s wedding cake. We’d been hooked ever since.
“Riley tells me you’re soaking up the philosophy well.” I had been working out of the satellite office several evenings a week, after my firm hours, distributing pamphlets or writing drafts of manifestos for Jan, Marie, and Riley to pick apart. My job was simple: Draft position papers that argued for a nation without divisions. Instead of “out of many, one,” BEG thought of America as a big bowl of milk into which tiny drops of chocolate, caramel, dulce de leche, coconut, or tamarind could be diluted out of existence. “Out of many, only one.” Try as I might, I wasn’t good at adhering to their fiction as I would have liked. I kept inadvertently mentioning multiculturalism, diversity, facts, history, reality. Once I mistakenly inserted the phrase “white supremacy” into a pamphlet. I thought Riley would rap me on the knuckles with a ruler.
“Funny,” I said. “I thought Riley might tell you to lock me out.”
She forced a smile. “Do you know how movements change the world? Through coalitions and a belief that we can make progress, if we use all the tools at our disposal. My grandmother was an agent of change through her persistence and eloquence. When she spoke, everyone heard her. She made a difference through sheer force of will.”
“Those were different times,” I said. “Seems like you’re doing well under the circumstances.”
“That’s kind of you,” she said, “but not true. I’ve run BEG for years, and I have to admit we’re in park. Maybe it’s because I was educated up north. Or maybe it’s because I’m too light-skinned.” She seemed to be staring at my cheek when she said this. “The point is I don’t care about your personal motivations. We need you.”
“Me?” I asked.
“You’re a talented speaker, and people in the right places are aware of you, comfortable with you. We haven’t had an official spokesman in years. However, I would understand if you can’t do it, with all your obligations. You have a job, and this is only a volunteer position. Plus, the glare of the spotlight can be taxing. I’m sure also you’d have to clear channels with your—”
“I’ll do it.” I hadn’t imagined that my plan would work so well. But here I was. My path to winning over Eckstein was opening before me.
“Really?” Zora asked.
“I’m happy to help.”
“What a pleasure to hear. Show up for this on Thursday morning.” She handed me a glossy push card. For all of BEG’s shortcomings, they could print the piss out of propaganda. The card featured the organization’s pastel color scheme as well as their emblem, a stylized, palm-up hand. Ribbon cutting at the Trueblood School. Eleven-thirty A.M. Truce Garden dedication. What on earth was a Truce Garden?
A tremendous thud rocked the building, and I grabbed a post for balance. Several of the megavideo panels flashed pure white light, which died down after a moment. The people on the panels—the people by the main entrance—seemed to be attacking each other.
No. They were running for their lives.
Far down the hall, shoppers stormed through the entrance doors. They ran toward me. I began to turn tail, but—Nigel and Araminta. Where had they gone?
Someone shouted my name. “Sir, your cake.” The tall baker held a black cake box by its pink ribbons. I grabbed it and ran.
I didn’t use the conveyor. I probably passed Zora along the way. But I didn’t notice her. I didn’t notice much of anything other than intermittent groups of shoppers pointing up at the video panels along the way and, occasionally, at me. I was a good runner. I could jog a couple miles on a cool day without killing myself. But I didn’t normally create the spectacle that I did now: a black man, balancing an oversize cake box on one hand, running against the tide. I was really asking for it. Security would be on me any moment.
I cleared a stand of kiosks and paused at the glass exit doors, which were veined with cracks and hard to see through. Wedging my foot into the gap, fingers reached in. Together, with the unseen people on the other side of the door, I opened it. A mass of smoke and desperate shoppers pushed in on me. A baby wailed. I was trapped, suspended in a crush of bodies. It was bad outside.
Smoke. Dust. Sirens in the distance. A thud nearby. A pile of something on fire—the LePieu statue, rendered to slag. I felt the heat of it even fifty yards away. Shopping bags and purses everywhere. A plastic Crooked Crown tiara broken in half. A dark pool of liquid. I stumbled away from the scrum and into the clear.
Children scampered like in a panicky game of hide-and-seek. A boy held his arm at a strange angle. That kazoo band! A man lay on the ground, clutching his side. Strangest of all, scraps, like plus-size confetti, green, red, and black, were everywhere.
“Go inside!” a woman in a gray one-piece, mall security, said from just beyond the molten statue. “Terror!”
A thin figure in a hard, brown mask, like something from an African arts and crafts show, shoved the guard to the ground. The figure pointed a revolver at the guard. A black van screeched, hopped the curb, and stopped. The side door slid open. A brown hand beckoned from the van’s interior. The figure leaped inside. The van pulled away.
A news helicopter hovered somewhere overhead. I suddenly became aware of high-pitched voices behind me.
“Dad!” Nigel and Araminta were standing inside the mall doors. I hustled over and drew them into my arms. They both seemed rattled but otherwise okay.
“Are you crazy?” Araminta said. “Why’d you go out there?”
I gathered the children in my arms and squeezed them. “Thank god you’re safe,” I said.
Nigel patted my arm and pointed at misshapen letters that were spray-painted on the wall. A massive graffiti tag: ADZE.