CARLA WOKE UP to the sound of the streetcar along College. The tiny apartment was hot already. She had slept late. She heard Tuyen still chipping away at her wooden lubaio next door, and she imagined Tuyen’s intense face, the woodchips in her hair, battling her demons, hammering them out on the wooden pole, amidst the ever-present coffee smell enveloping the room.
Carla’s eyes took some time to clear before she could see the clock. Ten A.M. Late. Shit. The thought alarmed her for the briefest second. The rest of the room came into its bare view. She heard the man downstairs rolling out the awning on the storefront. Her head felt woolly as if she’d been drinking—she remembered, yeah, but only one beer. Again the brief feeling of alarm. She was halfway off the futon, her head on the floor. This is how she woke up each morning, askew as if some great fight happened during her sleep. The awning downstairs squealed. The light from a clouded sun had already filled the apartment. She struggled to raise herself up, but a lassitude enveloped her. Not the lassitude of sleep but of consciousness. Slumping back onto the futon, she remembered yesterday.
Yesterday she’d come home exhausted, dragging her bike up the filthy stairs. She was streaming with sweat. She had ridden so fast, and she’d ridden, out of her way, all over the city, burning off a white light on her body. First through the downscale suburb of Etobicoke, which looked like the badlands of some alienated city—the low seemingly unfinished buildings, the stretches of uncreative streets, the arid after-winter look of everything, the down-in-the-heel, stranded feel of the people.
She was riding away from the Mimico Correctional Institute, where she’d gone to visit her brother, Jamal. Her visit with him had only heightened the mixture of anger and fright she’d felt over the last few weeks. She didn’t like this part of town, not only because of Jamal but because it seemed downtrodden somehow. A desolate outskirt—railway tracks, wedges of strip malls, and a prison kept like a secret. Gearing up on her bicycle she left the dreariness of it behind, heading downtown. When she made the intersection at Runnymede, the glow was still on her body, searing and damp. The afternoon light was sharp for spring. The sun coming west was dead angled at her head as she rode east, chipping between cars, crazily challenging red lights. The city was vivid. Each billboard screeching happiness and excitement. The cars, the crowds intense in the this-and-that of commerce, of buy this, get that, the minutiae of transient wants and needs. As fast as she was riding, she could still make out the particularity of each object or person she saw, so acute this searing light around her, tingling her skin. Could anyone see her? drenched in lightning?
There had been numbing sluggishness to the prison behind her; a dangerousness, a dangerousness that was both routine and petrifying. That same sluggishness was in Jamal’s appearance at the visiting booth. It had been in the waiting room with the reception guard, who seemed chronically skeptical of all who entered; chronically hateful. Why Jamal put her through this, she didn’t know. Why, indeed, he put himself through it, let alone her.
She hurtled through the upscale region of High Park, the old British-style houses. The people who must inhabit these with their neat little lives made her sicker to her stomach than usual because she’d just left her brother. The cute expensive stores, the carapace of wealth, seemed unaffected by her lit body. The handlebars of the bike were like her own bones, and like her bones she bent the brace toward the park itself. Perhaps there she might burn off the pace of her legs up the inclines and through the trees. But she was out of the park before she knew it. The trees held nothing. The manicured circle of flowers, the false oasis of the park, only made her sicker. Before long she was out on Bloor Street again, speeding east toward the centre of the city, flinging herself through the lights at Keele and bending southward to the lake; the bellowing horn and pneumatic brake of an eighteen-wheeler flinched her sinuous back, but she didn’t stop for the trucker yelling curses at her. She left the drama of the shocked driver and skewered traffic behind. If she could stop, she would have, but she was light and light moves.
Her stomach always made a knot when Jamal was near. He was eighteen, for God’s sake. Why couldn’t he take care of himself yet? Why did he expect her to come to his rescue always? And why was there this uncontrollable urge in her, this frantic nervousness where he was concerned, as if she had to prevent him from falling, to look out for him as one would a baby with a baby’s recklessness?
She was suddenly aware of music. It confused her until she remembered that she had clamped the small earplugs of her CD player in her ears and turned it on as soon as she’d left the building. Oku had lent her Dizzy Gillespie’s “Take It as It Comes.” The zephyrs of trumpets and saxophones streamed into her at Dundas Street. Out of the horns she sensed the lake and sped down to Roncesvalles. Ordinarily the bike would bump across the streetcar lines, but today she didn’t feel them, she was slipping through the city on light. She rode along the shore, feeling translucent. The sun was on the lake, turning its usual muddiness to a pearly blue stretching south and wide. Carla raised her back from its hunch, felt a small hopeful breeze.
“How could you let other people handle you like that and run your life every minute of the day, Jamal?”
They’d been sitting uncomfortably across from each other, a Plexiglas wall separating them.
“Handle me? Nobody’s not handling me.” He had misunderstood her, thinking she’d meant sexually. “Ghost, them call me in here, you know, Carla! Ghost. You think me a batty man! Batty man in here ’fraid me, you know!”
He pulled the neck of his grey issue aside, showing her a rough, ugly branded G on his breast under his left shoulder blade. Not a tattoo, but a brand rising in an unhealed keloid. It was a furious-looking red, parts of it still oozing. She suppressed a gasp. His face formed the mask of the brother she did not know. The brother trying to be someone she could not recognize. She didn’t know why he insisted on speaking in this accent. Something he’d picked up with his friends on the street. He did it to assume badness. She was angry whenever he used it on her, as if she didn’t know him, as if she had not practically grown him.
“You don’t get it, you don’t get it at all, do you? What’s the point?”
“Cho to blow!” he said, trying to impress the fellow prisoner in the booth beside him. “Me nah ’fraid nutten, Carla!”
All their conversations in the last few years were conversations of deliberate misunderstanding, it seemed. She couldn’t speak to him clearly or reach him in any way, and he seemed to misunderstand her on purpose.
“Do you realize where you are again? And I can’t get you out this time. Carjacking, Jamal! What’s going to happen now? You tell me.” She knew she was pronouncing every word, denying his newfound accent. She wanted to bring him back from the dreamworld he seemed to be in. “They won’t let me bail you. And he’s not answering his phone. So now what?”
“Him pussy! Me ask he for anything?”
“He” was how they both referred to their father outside of his presence, ever since they were small. “She” for Nadine, though Nadine had in effect been Jamal’s mother. Carla referred to her as “she,” and Jamal, as he grew older, reluctantly went along with it.
“Well, who else can I ask? It’s me that’s doing the asking. That’s the position you leave me in. Who else, huh?”
He’d maintained his sullenness and so she’d said goodbye, promising to leave him some money at the desk outside. She couldn’t wait to get to her bicycle and ride away from him. She’d left him standing there, his mouth in a babyish pout as usual. As she rode, she pictured him still standing there, waiting for her to turn around and come back, and all she could do was run, and all she could find was this well of heat and cold depth.
The muscles of highway and streets met down at the lake. All along the underpasses graffiti marred the concrete girders. She recognized the tags. The kids who lived across the alleyway from her apartment were graffiti artists. Kumaran’s grinning pig, Abel’s “narc” initial, then Keeran’s desert and Jericho’s lightning bolt. She felt slightly comforted, though she had asked them often enough to paint something else if they were going to paint the whole city over. Something more. They had practically filled all the walls of the city with these four signs, and she would have liked them to paint a flowering jungle or a seaside, the places where her mother, Angie, had always dreamed of going but never went. But she loved the city. She loved riding through the neck of it, the triangulating girders now possessed by the graffiti crew. She loved the feeling of weight and balance it gave her.
Jamal didn’t see the city as she did. His life was in his skin, in his mouth, in his eyes, in the closest physical encounters. He operated only on his senses as far as Carla was concerned. But she saw the city as a set of obstacles to be crossed and circled, avoided and let pass. He saw it as something to get tangled in. Why couldn’t he see just one step ahead of himself, she wondered, one want ahead of itself, as she crisscrossed and floated under the highway bypasses. Everything was immediate for Jamal, everything in the moment. Well, he had to learn, just like she had. Against the flow of the rush-hour traffic making its way to the expressway taking cars out of the city, she pedalled at a demonic pace. Shit, shit, shit, shit. She had to stop thinking, just pedal, just go, go, go.
Her legs were leaden when she’d finally dragged the bicycle up the stairs. Her thighs were boulders. It was as if because she’d stopped she’d become leaden, as if the sluggish prison embraced her again. If she’d continued, she was sure she would fly. But her own weight and the thought of her brother at Mimico Correctional crushed her again. She’d showered in cold water until her fingers were numb, then wrapped herself in a rough towel. Dripping and in between burning and freezing, she’d written something in her head. She thought she’d written it on paper, then searched for it wildly and didn’t find it. Her hands were useless, numb and shrivelled from the prolonged shower. She’d tried putting on a shirt but couldn’t find the neck. She’d sat naked by the window, freezing and thawing.
For six months she hadn’t seen Jamal. She’d convinced herself that if she didn’t see him, if she didn’t hear from him, if he didn’t call her, then things were fine. He was doing well wherever he was. She dreaded his phone calls, especially the phone calls late at night—why he always seemed to be in trouble late at night was beyond her. So six months had passed and she hadn’t spoken to him directly. She had heard from him. He’d left two messages on her machine, one sounding sweet: “Carla, just want you to know, see, that I really love you and I appreciate everything you did. I’m fine. Calling because you know how, eh, you say I always call with trouble?” He giggled. “I wanted to tell you that I’m fine and, you know, just checkin’ you …” The next time he sounded elated: “C, man, I’m really getting it together. Everything is cool, great.” She was beginning to get comfortable but should’ve known, whenever he sounded elated some shit was going to happen.
The next time she heard, it was a legal-aid lawyer who called, asking her whether she could bail him. Then a sheepish collect call from him: “Ah, C, man, ah is like, ah, well, I think I’m in trouble, you know.” She was silent, she refused to help him say what he wanted and she refused to play into it with him. Somehow, when he got himself in trouble, she always felt as if she was to blame. She would ask him some incredulous question like, “What the hell were you thinking, Jamal?” And he would take offence as if he had a right and as if she were asking something unreasonable and as if she should know that it was not his fault, any of it. It just happened to him, he’d say, or it was really the guys he was hanging with. He was a fantasist. She didn’t doubt that it really happened to him—he was, unlike her, open to things happening to him.
He told her convoluted stories about being in the wrong place at the wrong time, like, he and his friends were just hanging out in the park, chilling, smoking a joint, and some other guys from Flemingdon came along and for no reason started a fight about some girl and he didn’t really want to get involved so he stood to the side and somehow the police got there and somehow they picked on him and his friends while the other guys ran off. Another story was that some guy owed him some money and he went to pick it up and just then the guy’s girlfriend had called the police on him and they came and started questioning him, not the guy, and said there was a bench warrant out for him because he didn’t show up to see his probation officer, “but that was bullshit, Carla,” and on top of that the cops charged him with resisting, which everybody could tell was a false charge. “Carla,” he’d say, “you know resisting is a false charge, anybody can tell you when you see a black person charged with resisting, it’s the motherfucking cops who started it, right, right, Carla?”
It was hopeless trying to sift through to the real story with Jamal. Lurking in everything he said was a glimmer of it, but Carla knew that she never got the whole truth. For one thing, he was never to blame. So while it was true that the police were motherfuckers, Jamal was also troubled and she knew this, he was her brother. He was troubled and black and so the last two facts would outweigh the first when push came to shove. She tried to make him understand this, but he just wouldn’t listen. She didn’t want him to end up dead or in prison for life, but God, he was wearing her out. How many times had she said to him, “Jamal you realize that you’re black, right? You know what that means? You can’t be in the wrong place at the wrong time.” And he would answer, “C, you think I’m stupid or something? I wasn’t doing nothing, C. For real.”
This time she had waited for the saga. She had kept quiet on the other end of the phone, and when he’d heard her silence he’d said, “Ah, C, Carla, I was, um, implicated in a crime.” He probably thought this sounded official and formal, and he probably thought it said that he was really not involved and that he knew the “runnings,” as he called them, he knew the system and the lingo, and he wasn’t asking for help just because he was her brother but because he had been falsely accused. Implicated! She’d wanted to scream at him. She’d wanted to tear him to pieces, to say to him, You little punk, you idiot. You couldn’t stay in school long enough to pass grade twelve, but you can say you were “implicated” in a crime. But before she screamed at him all the rage that the word “implicated” made her feel, she’d put the phone down quietly.
The lawyer had called, asking her about bail and saying it was best if Jamal pled guilty because then he would probably get a judge who would only give him a light sentence or maybe probation, even though that was unlikely since he was on probation when he was implicated in the crime—that’s where Jamal must have picked up “implicated.” Would she at any rate visit her brother and convince him to plead, since if he asked for a jury trial and pleaded innocent and wasted the court’s time, then the judge would definitely be annoyed and give him a longer sentence.
She hated talking to these patronizing lawyers. Their tone suggesting they knew something way beyond what she or Jamal knew, something generic, something unavoidable. So she found herself saying to him archly, “What if he isn’t guilty? Should he just plead being black?” There was silence on the other end, to which she said, “I’ll get back to you.”
Her brother was a piece of work for sure, but she would defend him against that kind of presumption any day. Her father would have to bail him out this time. She didn’t have a penny or a pot to piss in. The last time, at least, she had been able to say he could live at her place, but that had brought her only grief—unbearably what she liked about him as a child she couldn’t take now. There was never a way to make a bargain with him—you do this and I’ll do that. When he was younger she had seen it as cute—breaking stupid convention, being honest—but now she saw it as an inability to show loyalty or to see himself as connected to people. To her, really. She had loved him most, and she thought that he would see that and love her back—enough to … to what? Behave? Live quietly? What? She herself had no idea … to be safe, at least. But a carjacking, Christ! To get involved in a carjacking, what the hell would be his story this time? She could tell it herself—C, I didn’t even know it wasn’t the guy’s car, he pulled up and said let’s go for a ride. That would be the story. He was an innocent again, pulled unwittingly into a plot.
When she’d first got news of his charge, she’d called her father and got Nadine. “Oh my God. He’s not here, but I’ll tell him. Tell me where Jamal is, Carla, so I can go see him. My God.”
“Mimico,” Carla answered. “There are certain times you can go.” She didn’t want to prolong the conversation with Nadine. “You should call them.”
She wanted to get off the phone quickly. She couldn’t take Nadine’s hysterics, nor did she want any assumption of friendship with her. There had always been awkwardness between them, even in her childhood, and Carla preferred that it should stay that way. Loyalty to her dead mother, Angie, dictated that. She never knew what to say to Nadine so she said “goodbye” and “see you” and dropped the phone before Nadine could say more.
Three hours later her father hadn’t called back and she’d left another message, this time on the answering machine. When he still didn’t answer that, she was so furious her head blazed into an ache. Who the fuck did he think he was? Did she ever call him for anything? Did she ever need him for anything? That was when her body had begun to feel this incandescence. Her face glowed at her in store windows for the next two days, and a nervous kinetic energy kept her awake. Finally she had decided to go and see Jamal and tell him that there was no bail. No bail out of anything any more.
Sitting at the window after the shower last evening, she’d had a smoke to warm her, lighting the cigarette as if all her fingers were thumbs. Ghost, my ass, she’d thought. His ghostliness didn’t stop the police from finding him. That’s what she had wanted to tell him yesterday. You’re such a fucking ghost, every time you do some shit they find you. Or, Ghost, why don’t you just disappear from my life. Not that, not that, she felt rotten when she thought that. The smoke hadn’t calmed her. Smoking was an affectation she had started early, in high school, in the café across from Harbord Collegiate, in the park on Grace Street, where she and her friends would sit on the embankment, puffing and joking.
When the telephone rang, she hadn’t answered. Her father? Not likely. Tuyen from next door or Oku, Jackie? Or was it Jamal calling again, collect? Whoever it was—she hadn’t answered all evening. And it couldn’t have been Jamal, she’d soon realized, if it was all night. He’d given that privilege up to the suits and the uniforms. Listening calmed her in an icy way. The more the phone had rung, the more distant she became. She looked out the window, blowing smoke into the air.
Tuyen had rapped on her door. Carla had heard her voice calling through the seam, asking her, “How was it, Carla? How is he? Come on, come talk to me.” Tuyen’s voice soft, then gruff, then giving up. Then she’d heard her go back to chipping away at the wooden lubaio. She didn’t want to tell Tuyen about it right then. Tuyen was her best friend. They shared everything, but it was long understood that some things, for both of them, were unknowable, unshareable. It was usually Tuyen who pushed and pulled at the borders of these things. Tuyen’s artist’s curiosity getting the better of their restraint. Carla had ignored her, trying to warm her icy body with her cigarette.
Carla’s place was sparse and grew even more sparse after every visit to Tuyen’s. She had a futon and three cushions on the floor, a tiny fridge and stove that came with the rent, her stereo and a small television on a few red-and-blue milk crates, and her bicycle hung on the wall. Her clothes, which she kept to a minimum, were neatly, ascetically, hung in two closets. Her shoes she left in a military row outside her door. She didn’t want to tread dirt into her rooms, and since she and Tuyen were the only tenants on the second floor, her shoes were safe. She was frightened by clutter.
The street below the window seemed distant, blurred, soft-lit last evening. She’d watched the street people haggling, the store owner trying to move them along, the man who went to the Mars ten times a day for ice cream, the lottery ticket man, the café sitters, the trail of plastic-bag-laden people coming from the market. She watched and watched until the light went and the street lights came on and the crowd changed, with the exception of the regular homeless—the man who always told her, “Have a nice day, have a very nice day”; the chain-smoking woman who, on bad days, declaimed herself ugly to anyone within a few feet; the other woman who waited in the alley each day to tell the unsuspecting passerby that her dog had died; and the short, swollen, barefoot man with black hair. Then she watched the sun set—not the actual setting but the way anyone in a city sees the sun set, taking it for granted that the pinkish orange hues enveloping the buildings reflect the sun’s going light. So she had watched from her window, the undivided phalanx of buildings eat away the sun.
Much later, eaten away herself into the gaze of the ebbing street and the perennial clicking of the streetcars, she had fallen asleep below the window. When she woke at the still-open window, the air had gone a little cold, and the jaundiced light of the street lamp had hit her in the face, “blessed” her face, as her mother used to say. “When I blessed my eyes on you.” Why had she remembered that? Blessed, blessé. When my eyes wounded you, when the sight of you wounded me, which one did it mean? She felt the stroke of light, which is why she must have awakened. The street was now a damp quiet. It must have been three or so, perhaps four, in the morning, the time of the morning when streets seem to be their own selves, reflective, breathing some other breath, going some other way without the complications of people.
She had awakened then with a clarity and thought, If you expect that I could help you. She reached for her notebook and wrote it down. She had been dreaming it, over and over again, this line of words said to someone in her dream. “If you expect …” echoing under the rest of the line, “that I could know you, that I could see the thing riding you, if you expect that I should … if you expect to see God in me …” Well, it was a little dramatic but not hard to figure out who her dream was talking to, she thought, throwing the notebook aside. She wished her dreams were more complicated. She always wrote them down thinking they might be, then read them in the mornings knowing they were not parables but just extensions of her day life. She wished they were more cunning, hiding some secret that she might discover there.
One of the arms of Tuyen’s lubaio was closest to the wall against which Carla’s bed lay on the floor. Carla had grown accustomed to Tuyen chiselling all through her sleep. Last night she had dreamed Tuyen asking, “What about that wall?” Meaning the one near Carla’s head. Meaning could she take it down too, could she extend her sculpture through to Carla’s place? Could she store the railway ties in Carla’s apartment? Carla always dreams this when she is nervous.
Last night she’d wanted to lift her head and pound on the wall for Tuyen to stop chiselling. But she only turned, putting her foot to the wall, and dreamed, If you expect that I should ease some ache in you … She wrote it down in her sleep, as a bit of paper from Tuyen’s wrecked room floated toward her. She grabbed at it and, in grabbing, woke up, got up, the feel of paper on her fingertips. She felt thirsty, went to the refrigerator, found a beer, and went back to her bed, closing the window and reaching for her notebook.
The chiselling stopped momentarily. Tuyen was listening to her move around the room now. Carla eased her body down quietly onto the bed—Tuyen had heard her, she was sure, and might come over, and she didn’t want that. She sat quietly, her quiet and Tuyen’s attention holding up the wall between them. She didn’t want to talk. She waited stealthily until she was sure that Tuyen understood. She didn’t want to tell her about sitting with Jamal in the Mimico prison. Her brother had sent her speeding through the city with the random logic of an element, and she felt she was unravelling. She wanted that heat in her brain to subside. She heard Tuyen chiselling again, and she put the beer to her lips, drinking it all at once like water, slaking the thirst that light gives you.
Waking up and finding herself halfway on the futon and halfway on the floor, and knowing she was late for work, Carla decided not to go. That decision made her spring to her feet, take a shower, and get dressed. She would call the Asshole—that’s what she called him, the dispatcher at Allied Swift Packages. What would be the use of going to work anyway? It was Monday, and sometimes she liked to take Monday off just to go in the opposite direction of the world hustling past her with its Monday morning anxieties. No one wanted to be where they were, which made them all rude and unhappy. Monday was the day of mistakes, which is also why she was glad to be off the road, her bicycle weaving in and out of traffic, trying to negotiate opening car doors and being squeezed at right turns. Mondays, she preferred to walk. By Tuesday the city had calmed down in acceptance of the fact that it had to work, that it had no choice.
Today she herself would have been careless.
“I can’t come to work today,” she said, surprised at the strength of her voice.
“Why?”
“I just can’t,” not finding a plausible reason she could give him other than she was late and still so fresh from a dream that it was too disturbing to deal with the real world. He was at the beginning of a new sentence—“Look, Carla, it’s Monday, we need”—when she cut him off—“I’ll see you if I see you”—and hung up. She didn’t care if he didn’t give her good calls, she didn’t care if tomorrow when she got in he made her wait longer than anyone else or gave her short runs. It was Monday, and she wanted to walk against the current of the city.
She washed her face compulsively again before leaving, trying to remove the phantom blessing of the lamppost from her forehead. She rubbed her face with the towel, still feeling the stroke of light on her, and left the apartment quickly, trying to ignore Tuyen’s open door. Lately she’d found Tuyen’s attentions too attuned to her, too burning, too difficult. Something was changing ever so slightly between them and she felt uncomfortable, uncertain about what it was.
Waving Tuyen away, she got a coffee at the Mars deli and drifted along College Street in the direction of Yonge.