Juliette opens the door but doesn’t greet me. She just turns and leads me to her room, where Matt is lying curled up in a ball on top of the covers and facing the window. He’s still got on the Morts pour Rien T—everything he was wearing the last time I saw him. Even his shoes.
I sit on the bed, down by his feet. “You okay?”
Such a stupid question, the answer obvious.
Juliette leans against the doorjamb, a cigarette in her hand that she ain’t even smoking.
“Is it Sidi?” I ask Matt. “Did you hear something from Aïda?”
He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t even move.
“Juliette,” I say, as gently as I can, “do you mind?”
She backs out and closes the door.
“You got to let it go, Matt.”
He just lies there in them sooty clothes, with finger streaks of blood I didn’t notice the other day on the thighs of his jeans, across his chest, the nubs of his nails all scabbed over.
“Wasn’t nothing you could do,” I say, “about Moose and them.”
He rolls onto his back, looks me in the eye.
“You don’t know what I did,” he says.
“What did you do, aside from survive when it wasn’t sure any of us would?”
“I did more than that.”
I see his face is streaked where he has been crying.
“You acted,” I say. “You organized a march, and you got folks out into the streets. You helped Jorge when it looked like he was about to get stomped. You been looking after Aïda.”
He turns toward the window.
“You don’t ask to be leader,” I say. “Something happens, and you act. It’s just who you are.”
I slap his shoe.
“Let’s go,” I tell him. “Get up.”
» » » »
I stay out in the front room while Matt showers. Juliette sits in the window, dragging on cigarette after cigarette, her eyes dark, looking out over the rooftops. I figure him and me can walk a bit, over by Les Halles where he likes. He takes a long time, but I don’t press him. The other day was rough. Rougher for him than for me, it seems.
Sitting in the storefront mosque all that time before Matt showed up and we found each other, I ended up thinking on things, just like Matt has been. On Moose and Mobylette, on Sidi. On Monsieur Oussekine collapsing, and Madame Oussekine’s wail. What might I have done different so it hadn’t all come to this? Or just what might I have done, period? Because it sure can feel like you did nothing when something like this happens.
But sometimes maybe we’re all just flies on the ass of an elephant. The interior minister keeps saying that Moose and Mobylette and Sidi were juvenile delinquents and that we had been vandalizing the construction lot, so the police had to intervene. But folks in Villeneuve see straight through the bunk. The interior minister isn’t just calling us vandals and thieves, Moose and Mobylette and Sidi and all of us that were with them that night. He’s laying that charge on every kid from the projects. And kids keep taking to the streets, and what can you do about any of that?
Back home, after the chaplain and the casualty-notification officer showed up at our door and I decided to keep on playing anyway, I thought that was doing something. For my teammates, for my team. But I figured out quicker than quick that Pops wasn’t any less dead for me doing it. Seeing Ahman and Jamaal and Juan watching me, seeing all my boys looking to me for…something—well, I just locked up. Now here I am, sitting in this apartment in Paris, my friends dead all the same, not for something I did or something I didn’t do, but still, that’s all I know to feel.
Responsible.
But that’s not it, is it? Matt talks about how his pops always tells his teams about accountability. Maybe that’s what we are, Matt and me: not responsible for what happened to Moose and Mobylette and Sidi, but accountable to them. Just like I’m accountable to my pops, to his memory.
Juliette, framed by the window, a cigarette in her lips, is staring at me. “You’re going back up there,” she says. “Aren’t you?”