France, 1969
72. MANSOUR AND BONNIE cash the Brazilian check and take the train back to Goutte d’Or in guarded silence, like hand-to-mouth Parisians might detect their money and pounce if they so much as breathe. Home, they spread the francs on the bed and marvel at the dirty paper like it’s a child just born. The first thing they’ve accomplished together.
The news spreads fast. Neither of them know who is telling people, but that night, there begins a stream of quiet knocks by a neighbor, then two, then three, offering congratulations, and before long their apartment is combustible with dancing and glee, and the Goutte d’Or nightclub is briefly reincarnated in Mansour and Bonnie’s living room until the light of the morning finally convinces the crowd that it’s time to go home.
With all the jubilation, the anticipation, the sudden wealth and resulting anxiety, it should have come as no surprise to Mansour that he seizes. Something fast and noisy and nauseating, mostly in his sleep. In between fits, he looks to his side, thankful she’s not there. And maybe because of Bonnie’s absence (she is still smiling in her sleep, curled up in a ball in the living room where she passed out on the floor), he lets the thing ride him, hoping it will take its course and soon be gone. When he feels well enough, when he feels that he can breathe and the worst of it has passed, it is because he’s in a familiar dream.
A startling cold rises from his heels and moves up to his head. When the cold reaches his mouth, it starts to taste like water, salty. He sputters as his sight returns. He is underwater, in the ocean. A hand pulls him farther in. As the tide withdraws, lowering the water to his waist, it reveals Kiné, her braids flattened to her face by the water. She blocks the sun, but all the light in the world spills in from either side of her. She looks at him with a troubled gaze and then he is suddenly small and she puts him on her hip, gazing out into the horizon. He touches her face. Her skin is slick. Her heartbeat pulses against him like an amplifier, the warmth of her breath on his face.
“Mama!” she calls over her shoulder. “Do you have Mansour’s medicine?”
Mama calls back, “Let me go look for it.”
They are now on sand, and Kiné places Mansour on the ground. He whines and reaches for her leg, but she turns around and walks back toward the water.
He sees a wave coming. He freezes.
Kiné leaps inside.
The very edge of the wave absorbs him and he floats for a while beneath the surface of the water. He sees his mother drifting before the force of the water slams him into a rock and he tastes the blood gushing from his broken nose. A hard pull yanks him from the water. It’s Mama, guiding him out.
He coughs as she screams for his mother, a scream that stretches from the shore to the horizon.
On the day of their flight to Rio (the only way to Bahia) for the World Music Festival, the band meets for lunch in Paris. A little bit drunk, Mansour tells a rambling story about Liam’s only prospective adoptee as a child.
“Is that supposed to be funny?” the drummer, Davis, asks in a Brooklyn accent that makes Bonnie smile to herself. It’s been too long. He’s flown in for the festival, one of two old band members to reunite with them. The trumpeter, after much back-and-forth, is planning to meet them in Brazil. The significance of the gig has brought Liam and Mansour back together.
“It wasn’t funny then,” Liam says.
“Come on, man,” Mansour retorts, speaking now to the group. “Listen, he was born into the system—he’d been in the system for fifteen years! And who adopts him?” Mansour’s eyes glaze over with laughing tears, and he grips the Irishman’s shoulder as he laughs. “A pedophile! He waits his whole life for parents, and he gets a pedophile.”
The Irishman is looking down at his toast. He starts to smirk, and then the rest of the table feels permission to break.
“I said: ‘My man, you have the worst luck. You have African luck, brother.’” They’re all laughing now, and the Irishman shakes his head with closed eyes and a smile.
Mansour continues, “So I say: ‘What do you want me to do?’ We had a little gig somewhere that night—where were we, man?”
“It was in Copenhagen,” Liam chimes in drily, repeating the obvious, a thing he’s already said.
“Copenhagen! Yes. I said: ‘What do you want to do?’ And he says to me: ‘Nothing. I just want to run away.’” Mansour shakes his head. “Man, some kids shouldn’t come into this world. They just got the worst luck.”
Bonnie’s glare startles him when he meets it across the table. She is seeing through his laughter. Seeing him down to the bones. Looking at him with her head titled and her heart open, like he’s wounded. That way she had of prying too far into him. A thing he often felt but couldn’t ever quite put into words. Sometimes she does it with language, but mostly with her eyes and her touch.