Disclaimers: See Chapter 1. Any other comments can be sent to me at bironel@gmail.com
Please note : This is an Optional Chapter! This is an excerpt of the character Nailah's Novel. You could skip it and not be lost in the story. This was just an attempt to see a story from Nailah's POV and it was fun!
Synopsis: A novella about the an insanely wealthy white woman's search for her soul mate and the debt ridden black woman writer, with a vivid imagination, who tries to keep out of her way.
Nailah's Untitled Novella
Chapter 1: The Hawthorne Effect
If I became a monster today, and decided to kill them, one by one, they would become aware only after most of the flock had been slaughtered, thought the boy. They trust me, and they've forgotten how to rely on their own instincts, because I lead them to nourishment. - The Alchemist , Paulo Coelho
Two years ago my dearest and closest friend died. Two years is not long enough for grief and guilt to ease. There is a lump in my throat, which though uncomfortable, holds the bile from my gut at bay and retards the flood of tears from filling my lungs. Guilt born of unspoken sentiments and impotent gestures console me. I sit at my desk, in the face of the mundane everyday things I do to get from the state of semi-consciousness to total oblivion. My head starts throbbing mercilessly behind my eyes.
I gulp down my coffee, my life's blood, while taking Memerex (25 mg for my headache. It has one of those elements from that curious table I had to learn in high school), Laucux (60 mg of some designer steroid for my eyes; they cause the headaches) Panterol (only 8 mg or my co-workers would have to talk me out from under my desk) and Nexus ADL (15 mg to counteract the side effects of the other pills).
My dearest friend used to say my headaches weren't cause by my eyes but severe sleep deprivation. I came into this existence with a strange affliction concerning my sleep cycle. I'd sleep for long periods. As a child, I'd lay nearly comatose in my bed for 14 hours straight before waking to run about on the supercharged batteries stored in my limbs.
When I attended elementary school, I'd arrive home after school at 3:30 p.m., finish my homework by 4:30 p.m. and then be knocked out until I woke up at 7:00 a.m. to get to school.
The strange thing was that I recall being a rambunctious child. It was my duty to leave no tree unclimbed, no firecracker unlit, no electronic device in a state of low entropy - for my curiosity was as voracious as my need to run. And run I did. While other children zoomed along on an assortment of bikes, skates, skateboards and scooters, I relied on my thin limbs to sprint me to all my destinations.
That activity proved to be my saving grace, when bullies, both male and female unsuccessfully tried to assert their dominance over me. To my delight, no one was ever able to catch me.
Having been raised by my Grandmother, alone, she constantly complained that I was too much of a handful for her to manage. At the time I thought, to myself, that perhaps she needed bigger hands. She often believed that I'd sleep my life away. She tried numerous homespun remedies to curb my sleeping. She tried to schedule my sleeping until later, yet my internal clock ran at it's own will.
Her motherly frame was brushed with the scent of desperation as some of her "solutions" could been seen as child abuse. She used to make me sit in the kitchen, fully clothed, next to the sink with a bowl secured to my lap by the flesh of my thighs. She would pour hot water into the bowl. If I fell asleep, and I often did, the hot water would spill onto my lap knocking me briefly out of my drowsy state. The pain was instantly unbearable then quickly dissipated.
If I did not scream out in pain when the “bow broke”, I could gently fall asleep in that hard wooden chair until my cold, damp jeans competed with my numb butt for my attention.
I had quickly adapted and was able to fall deeply asleep in minutes after a brief “hot bath” completely ignoring the long hours of cold, damp, numbness. Even being hit repeatedly upon my head was not enough stimuli to wake me up. She did not give up but my internal clock was as stubborn as she was.
Because of my Grandmother, I can sleep standing up until I fall either on my face or back on my ass. The first time I had to stand in the kitchen until my designated sleep time, I cracked a rib and my front tooth after falling forward into the kitchen sink. It seemed my body could dish out more effective punishments than she could in their battle over my consciousness.
In desperation, she commanded that I sit still or move as little as possible to conserve my energy. She concluded that my frenzied running about was draining my energy. This was by far the worst punishment she could have come up with. I began to hate sleep all together but my resourceful mind won this battle to: I slept all the time. Which resulted in missing quite a bit of school during my fourth term.
The harshness of her “solutions” subsided gradually over time. Since it was impossible to wake me before my mind deeded it the appropriate time, my dinner beverage always consisted of some caffeinated concoction. [I blame my current addiction to coffee on my Grandmother.] When her stratagems didn't work, she sort out the assistance of western medical science.
After a battery of examination, evaluations and tests nothing was found organically wrong with me. I was referred to a child psychologist. That was the proverbial “broken back camel” as far as my Grandmother was concerned. She refused to stigmatize me with the label of "damaged goods" - partly because she felt the blame would be hers alone.
So I never went.
I was sad when my weekly visits to the doctors came to such an abrupt end. I missed how special I felt being at the center of their collective attentions.
I felt the privilege of being some secret project that only highly skilled people could unravel, decipher. I was a puzzle, a curiosity. Special.
Then I became a teenager and the spectrum of my sleep diet changed, forever. My need for sleep decreased in length to it's present state: I sleep for no more than three hours within a twenty four hour cycle. I would worry late at night that I'd never be able to sleep as I did as a child. I looked forward to the drowsy feeling, when my eyelids were too heavy to keep open, and when my body became so relaxed it melted into my bed.
I tried sleeping pills, which initially worked, but the prolonged use introduced the headaches, which plague me now. After six months they no longer worked at all. I might have well been eating M&M candies for all the good they did. Then I began to experiment with other remedies. The most successful was the use of antihistamines, the allergy medication. They still work to some extent but with prolong use I can throw my sleep cycle so far out of whack that I don't sleep at all for two days straight. That happened a few times.
My mind retaliated by introducing its dance of seizures, into the un-pressed fabric of my life. My present state of being. This was understandably problematic. It severely limited my social life but it gave me the bizarre return of a hyper-relaxed state when the seizure was over, which was an aid to falling asleep for two to three hours.
My dear friend, my only friend, was sympathetic to both my seizures and sleeplessness. It was she who discovered the gift of the antihistamines. She firmly believed that all my problems would be a distant memory if I could regulate my sleep cycle on an eight-hour track. Perhaps my dear friend was right. The world lost a true gem. And I am the world.
I do not want to eulogize her passing or allow myself to be haunted by her ghost. Although it's more than I deserve considering the part I played in her death. Sadly if I had it to do over again, I know I wouldn't change one way I acted and reacted.
My eye jumps. Usually that happens to signal a severe headache is coming. Those headaches are more like mental storms thundering throughout my head.
Every sensation: sound, light, touch burns me within and without. An hour later, I'm so numb from the pain it isn't a concern that I've sweated out gallons of water through every pore.
Once I weighed myself after such an episode and discovered I had lost three pounds within three hours! A pound per hour! All water weight, of course, but it was significant.
My dear friend once joked that, if I could work around the pain and writhing on the floor, gagging on my own tongue, it would be the next great discovery in weight management. Migraines coupled with epilepsy are a dynamo fat burning combination? Who knew?
My eye jumps again yet I know a headache isn't about to attack me because I am well medicated. It jumped because the phone is ringing. It really shouldn't startle me. But I dread picking up the receiver. I look around me. The office where I work, are a series of low-wall cubicles in a row. I just got a dirty glance from a coworker, Rufus Polson. I suppose my phone is disturbing him. I don't care. I don't want to answer it.
On my desk, a computer with an open empty electronic virtual document page waiting for me to type, anything; my reference books; stacks of manuscripts; an open dictionary; my orderly manila folders in an accordion case; my three inches thick binders with D-rings an assortment of red pencils, a half of a cup of cold black coffee and black markers.
My phone keeps ringing. For some reason the voice mail hasn't picked up. I would rather delete yet another voice message than have to force myself to listen to that voice. The voice from the grave I dug with my hands. The voice that feeds my guilt fattening meals while my waste line gets leaner and meaner.
What's up with the voice mail?
Rufus gives me another "knowing" little stare.
I move a stack of papers, which have been sitting in front of me for the past seven hours, including lunch, to the opposite side of my desk. The only work I've done all day. I glance at the computer clock at the lower right hand corner of the CRT screen. The time reads: 4:44 p.m. Not quitting time yet. I need to spread the work out more evenly throughout the day.
Now I'll have to sit here with nothing to do for the next sixteen minutes... or perhaps talk on the phone.
Still ringing.
I can survive sixteen minutes. Nothing can harm me in sixteen minutes. I can be strong in sixteen minutes. The phone rings again and as I pick it up I glance at the computer clock. It's only 4:46 p.m. Fourteen minutes is even better.
I answer: Hmmm, Hello?
The Voice: -it doesn't take a genius to figure it out. I assumed he was taking about me. You know how easily concepts come to me. So it wasn't a giant leap to think I was the subject of the conversation....
I gather my thoughts...
I ask: Who?
The Voice: I don't like being teased. You know this. So it isn't my fault. I refuse to take the blame. It isn't my fault, is it?
I respond: I guess.
The Voice: It's part of my uniqueness. Do you know anyone else who despises being teased as much as me?
I respond: Lots of people.
Here I go through a litany of names, which isn't necessary to relate at this time.
The Voice: Well I just finished watching Fight Club.
I respond: A most excellent flick.
The Voice: It was good.
She mumbles something under her breath.
The Voice: A hardy laugh would go here nicely.
I respond: I am laughing.
Insert fake laugh.
The Voice: Did you hear what I said?
I respond: That's why I'm laughing. Actually, you said something before that but I didn't hear it.
The Voice: Why are you laughing if you didn't hear me?
I (exasperated): You said, "A hardy laugh would go here nicely."
The Voice: That's not what I said that was funny. I said something else.
I respond: What?
The Voice: I said: In Tyler we Trust.
I laugh.
The Voice: Now that's the genuine laughter I was seeking.
I stop laughing. Suddenly I feel like one of those dolls with the head ripped off or the arms misaligned in their socket due to rough play, curiosity or both.
The Voice (laughing): Well I've seen just about every DVD he has here. Now I'll look at my baby's porn movies.
Here I sit on the phone at work, not working, listening to a porn movie over a phone. I need a raise. I need to rise up. I want raisins. The chocolate covered ones.
Cheesy, porn movie music, from the video, travels over our connection. She shares too much. Last week when we spoke, she took me into the bathroom with her via the miracles of cordless phone technology. I could hear the echoes of her fecal matter dropping into the bowl of water upon which she squatted or demurely sat while chatting at me. I would like to think even when voiding one's colon, classy people maintain a sense of class. She could be classy when she wanted to.
I respond: I'll let you go and watch your movie.
The Voice: Why? Oh. I don't need to hear the sound. I'll listen to your conversation.
This ought to be interesting.
I respond: What do you want for your birthday?
The Voice: You know ______ asked me the same question! I'm confident you both know exactly what to get me.
I respond: I could get you a toy for your play scenes.
The Voice: Those toys are very expensive. I wouldn't expect you to get me that. I considered asking for a $500 gift certificate from the Titty Tickler. But that would be a more appropriate gift from ______ .
I respond: So that puts me back at square one. Isn't there anything else you want?
The Voice: You know it's been ten minutes. Ten minutes and not a stitch of clothing have been removed. No oral sex. No contact. What kinda movie is this?
I respond: I still don't know what to get you.
The Voice: Just get the real me what I want.
I respond: How would I know that?
The Voice: You know me better than anyone.
Now this was not exactly true even if she technically is my best friend. Yes I know, I said my best friend died two years ago. And that is true but what is also true is I'm talking to her right now or she's talking at me. She didn't resurrect like Jesus or anything like that. This Voice is her and it isn't. It is her Husk.
My best friend loved the theater, music, writing and books. This Voice, this Husk, gravitates to the darkest impulses within. Where her originator created, she destroys. And so I must constantly play the diplomat with her because she could destroy me. She has the power to do so. I laid the weapons of my destruction at her feet.
It's not like she wouldn't be justified given what I had done to her. So fueled, my healthy sense of self-preservation, I worry over such trifling things. Gifts to appease, to placate, and to navigate her capricious whims.
She believes I know her. I knew her, but I am ignorant of deepest desires of this dark aberration. I don't think the Husk would be satisfied with a gift for the original and not for itself. I would have given my dearest friend a book, a CD of classical music, or a couple of tickets to a Broadway play. My best friend would have been happy with a custom handcrafted pen. The Husk may use it to gouge out my eyes and have me videotape her while she did it, or have me do it to myself.
Last year I presented a gift, to her delight and my despair, which consisted of a child's frustrating disappointment and subsequent descent into depression.
At her request, I videotaped a child, I was instructed to isolate and collect at a shopping center. I spirited him away from his caretakers and locked him in a small windowless room where food and drink was kept just beyond his reach. After two weeks of this torment, I, in my misery, let him go, dirty, unkempt and unharmed... physically. I have stopped having daymares about that one, no two months ago.
After I presented her with that damned video, she toyed with my pain like a dentists' drill destroys a diseased nerve for a root canal. With no anesthesia.
I have to remember to make an appointment for just that on Friday.
For many months she randomly played that gift over and over to torment me, until, thank goodness, she became too bored to delight in my discomfort. Engrossed in her early morning viewing, she remained silent on the other end of the phone. I could hear the faint tidal rhythm of her breath. Many thoughts darted around my mind. I broke a slight sweat trying to catch the most appropriate thing to say to her.
I respond: It's the thought that counts so...
The Voice: Naw. I want a gift that rocks! I'll call you later and tell you what I'd like.
My head begins to hurt again. I have a growing sense of dread. Why did I bring it up? I'm like a battered woman who provokes her batterer to unleash the terror after a numbingly quiet spell.
I respond: I'll talk with you later.
The Voice: This conversation is not finished.
I respond: Aren't you about to hang up?
The Voice: Why do you think that?
I respond: You just said I'd call you later. That phrase usually precedes ending the conversation.
The Voice: I just meant I'd call you later with the info. I'll call you after seven.
I respond: I'll be home late tonight.
The Voice: I'll leave the info on your answering machine.
It dawns on me how a seemingly bad idea can mushroom into something worse. She proposes to ask me to create for her some depravity distorted into a gift: recording my complicity on my message tape? If the shit flies it's definitely going to hit me in the face. I've never developed a taste for shit sandwiches.
I respond: I'll get you what I originally planned last year.
The Voice: Then what's all this talk about not knowing what to get me?
A flash of remembered inspiration.
The Voice: What time are we meeting on Thursday? I thought I'd hang out with ______ during the day then you during the evening but since he probably won't be back until Thursday evening, I could hang out with you during the day. Why don't you take the day off?
I respond: I could do that.
Insert my fake coughing sounds.
I jokingly ask: Where'd that cough come from?
The Voice (barked): Don't do that!
Apparently my attempt at subtle humor, i.e. coughing into the phone, annoyed her. I don't remember her hearing being so sensitive before. Perhaps a weakness to be exploited. I must not let her know I've discovered it.
I respond: It was a joke.
The Voice: It wasn't funny. What joke?
I respond: Never mind it isn't worth explaining.
The Voice: I wanna know what joke?
I respond: Just let it go.
The Voice: Tell me!
I respond: It was a punch line.
The Voice: What was a punch line? "It was a joke?"
I respond: No. "Where'd that cough come from?"
The Voice: See how you can't just tell the punch line? How you have to give the entire story? The skill in telling jokes involves a whole delivery process, which seems oblivious to you...
As her voice droned on and on with examples of good versus bad joke delivery, I wonder why I had not thought of something clever to shut her up. I despise being so diplomatic even if I have to lobby for the sanity of myself. The Husk knows where all the bodies have been buried. And...
I've gotten ahead of myself.
She ended her lecture with a brief discussion to which I was again invited to reply, about when and where we would meet on Thursday. I had decided to go to work after all and meet her during my lunch break. We said our good byes and I listened to the dial tone for about five minutes after she hung up. Just to assure myself she was no longer on the other end.
When quitting time came, I gathered my belongings and headed to the bathroom. Once behind the closed door of the bathroom stall, I could finally regain a sense of privacy and solitude, which eluded me all day sitting in my communal cubicle.
My cubicle, open to everyone in the office, is beside the community of fax, printers and Xerox machines. A strategic location where all my co-workers wait patiently in queues discussing distracting diatribes of false niceties about clothing, new hair styles or parroting criticisms from uninformed newspaper hacks about the latest book, movie, CD, i.e. pick-your-drug/distraction/entertainment.
– – –
Ah! Instant relaxation as the mass quantities of coffee I filtered throughout the day made the final journey to the bowels of the sewers below my feet. For the first time since I put my shoes on this morning I noticed the detail of them and how they flattered my feet. I have good taste in leather, I conclude, without obsessing too much into my foot apparel.
I closed my eyes and detected the scent of April fresh Lysol. The aroma sparked a memory: These shoes, on my feet, were the very ones I wore when I first met my dear friend. This scent was very familiar also. I recalled a bathroom of a job I managed two years ago, another place, another time:
– – –
I had given an auspicious presentation to a stirring committee to revamp and expand the outsourcing freelance pool, which I managed. My co-workers, supervisors and subordinates unanimously were pleased with all my recommendations.
After much hand shaking and back slapping, quite literally, my hands were very sweaty and filthy and I felt hot so I slipped out the conference room and into the bathroom to wash my hands and calm my anxiety with a cool, moist towel strategically placed upon my neck, just under my collar. The scent of Lysol pierced my nostrils. I walked towards the sinks and pulled down a couple of sheets of paper towels. The two dry sheets hung, lightly floating in the air, waiting, just for me.
I heard the faint sound of someone clearing his or her throat. I looked up into the mirror first, at my reflection, then at the rest of the bathroom behind me. I saw no one but knew I was not alone.
At the sink I turned on the water, lathered up, massaging my hands and dispatching germs with complete abandon. Then I rinsed them off in the warm water. I heard someone giggle softly then someone whisper: Be quiet.
I hung my hands down to allow the water to drip into the sink as I closed the faucet with my elbows. As I watched the water racing around the sink the urge overcame me and I had to relieve myself.
Strange cooing sounds mixed with the flush of the toilet echoing off the tile walls.
I was back again at the sinks re-washing my hands. This single act of washing sparked the urge. I felt as though I were the servant to my bladder and was slightly apprehensive that I could be lost within the circular ritual of hand washing and bladder voiding for an eternity.
All of a sudden, Raghavendra Bhat, Raggie for short, the head of IT services, violently rushes out from a stall and dashes out of the bathroom, without washing his hands, I immediately noted. All I could think of, as I watched his back disappear behind the slowly closing bathroom door, was all the machines he'd probably contaminate with his germs. The fax, the Xerox, etc.
As the steam rose from the sink, condensation sprayed the mirror in front of me. A slender figure emerged slowly from out of the same stall Raggie previously occupied. I must have walked in on some inter-office tryst.
I concluded it was none of my business so I actively avoided making any eye contact with the other person in the bathroom. Who, for some reason, seemed to be standing directly behind me!
It unnerved me a bit because there were three perfectly empty sinks beside me, which could have been used. A slender arm with a delicate hand reached around my right side and the naked hand wiped the moisture off the mirror in front of me. Annoyed I looked up into the mirror. A young woman was standing behind me. She was smiling at me. I did not return the sentiment. That smile annoyed me. I was minding my own business so why couldn't she? I didn't want to be drawn into whatever she was weaving. But she possessed a charm, which disarmed me: an annoying smile. It sickened me at the time to reveal that my frown gradually became a smile. My annoyance turned inwards, I returned my attention to the important ritual at hand. Pun intended.
The Woman: Are you really this compulsive or are you just nosy?
I responded: What?
The Woman (repeats): Are you really this compulsive or are you just nosy? You've washed your hands twice since you've been in here.
I corrected: I washed my hands once, then used the facilities and then, I washed them again. I possess a level of hygiene Mr. Bhat apparently lacks.
I was growing increasingly annoyed with this young woman. How dare she call out my -isms when I have carefully concealed them under the cloak of numbing conformity!
The Woman: Don't take that the wrong way. I'm wired to pick up personalities with unique complexities. It's like my radar picks them out. I don't specifically look out for them they just gravitate to me. It's like I can see them through the veil of complexity I weave for myself. You know what I mean? Compulsives, obsessives, neurotics, you name the -ives, they surround me. Shoot I'm the poster child of compulsivity.
The phrasing, the choice of words was excellent. Reflected in front of me was a person who didn't use empty euphemisms to cover the tracks of a lazy mind. I turned to face her. She was still smiling at me. I genuinely smiled back.
The Woman: You aren't shocked or surprised?
I responded: Should I be?
The Woman: You asking me for permission? There I go again taking all the air outta the room. My mama used to say I suffer from diarrhea of the mouth.
I never laughed so hard in my life. I laughed so hard I nearly choked. She was still smiling but was very surprised at my response. My stomach began to hurt but a good hurt.
The Woman: What's so funny?
I responded between laughing coughs: Diarrhea of the mouth? Considering where we are and what you were doing...
The Woman: I guess it is funny when you look at it that way.
I responded: There is some benefit to being...complex.
The Woman: Ah! You've just washed your hands and you getting ready to do it again!
I smiled. She looked down at my feet.
The Woman: Nice shoes.
We simultaneously laughed after a momentary pause. I felt like a kid again. After my fifth and final washing and her aborted attempt to give head to the head of the IT department, she and I became fast friends.
– – –
An unknown coworker enters the bathroom. To the dismay of my second cranial nerve, my anonymous office mate begins to evacuate his bowels. My silent reverie, my communion with my fashion sense, my appreciation of my liquid filtering capacity and my fond memories of my best friend, were all disturbed beyond resolution.
I hurried out of the stall to the sinks, washed my hands (only twice) and left before the noxious fumes could assault me further.
Thus ends day 257 on job number 63.
– – –
Commuting home, standing on the underground platform of the subway station, the heat is oppressive.
The conductor mumbles over outdated PA systems: Something about the train doors, as straphangers push, squeeze and force their way onto fully packed subway cars.
I let three trains go by before embarking on one to begin my journey home. My purpose was to get a car as close to empty as possible. Then I could possibly get the Holy Grail of commuting: a seat.
One curious train rolls into the station. Alternating cars are fully packed while others are almost empty. Once the doors of an empty car opened, I immediately realize why it was empty as a blast of hot, moist air licks my face.
I enter the car, take out a Lysol antiseptic towelette from my jacket pocket and wipe down my selected seat, allowing a few seconds for it to dry before sitting.
A diminutive Hispanic man observes my ritual.
Hispanic man: That works?
I respond: It comforts me to think so.
I smile. My face hurts a little.
The small Hispanic man disappears into darkness between the haze of my eyelashes. Eyes closed, leaning back against the hot metal wall.
I recall that above my head an advertisement model compels me to avoid all the pretense and drink only real vodka. For a second, outside my norm, I desired that drink.
I've succumbed to the perversion of the status quo mind: allowing media noise to create mediocrity within me.
The grinding versus screeching action of the train wheels racing along the metal track propels us all through the harden arteries beneath the city.
Sparks illuminate the primitive ego scrawlings on the filth incrusted walls speeding past the window, within the frame of the metal wall, above my resting head. The din of chatter and paper rustling are the white noise waves I float above and sink below.
The pretense of sleeping.
The train pulls into a station. Once the doors open, the humidity inside the car is sucked out along the platform. Straphangers' curse aloud and scramble to the open doors of the other tightly crowded air-conditioned cars before they close.
The train doors can't seem to decide whether to stay open or to close. My eyes open in the midst of this mechanical indecision.
Light brown eyes look directly into mine. The Hispanic man must have been looking in my direction the entire time.
I lazily look at the indecisive doors. It had been playing the game of chicken with a long black arm and a rather large black hiking boot. It's owner must wear a size 22, shoe. Remarkably the limbs are beating technology in the struggle as more body parts emerged through the crack between the two doors.
A teenaged Black couple enters the car I share with the small Hispanic man, an Asian woman and a sleeping homeless person too wrapped up in a hibernating cocoon to tell the sex or the race of the slumbering mass.
From the corner of my eye, I noted one of the teenagers was very tall and thin; the other was short and fat. I focused my gaze back at the Hispanic man. Uncharacteristically flirtatious, I smile at him again. He rises from his seat and moves towards me. I take out another Lysol? towelette and wipe the seat next to me. He sits beside me.
Hispanic man: I don't fear germs.
I respond: It wasn't an antiseptic gesture.
I look at this man's face it is handsome in gruesome sort of way. I scan his body. He possesses the necessary physical hardness my eyes tend to appreciate. There was no ambiguity about his maleness. I even detect a faint whiff of his natural musky body odor; mixed with whatever deodorant he used earlier in the day. I look at his hands. He is a laborer of some sort, perhaps a construction worker.
Someone shouts: Get the fuck outta here!
In a strange kind of synchronicity, we look up and over at the young black couple.
Tall Black Male (aka The Boy) repeats: Get the fuck outta here! Your lying ass didn't see that shit!
The Boy is hanging from the metal pole above the row of seats by one long, black arm. Swinging to the rhythm of our racing train. Half of his hair is arranged in neat rows of thin braids. The other half of his hair is an unkempt bush out of which a hair-pick grows: a hard black fist, thrust upwards to the train car roof.
Tall as he is, his clothes hangs on his body like he raided the closet of an even taller giant. His crisp white T-shirt ends just above his knees. His black jeans would have flowed off his legs like streams of black fabric if it were not for the oversized black hiking boots, which stops them in a pool of black collecting at his ankles.
The Girl was a shade lighter than the boy, short and fat. Very fat. Her ample breasts rests on the rolls of her belly, which in turn rests in the flesh of her thighs. Her hair is arranged on her head like a shiny plastic cap made of thin black threads. It seems as if she used the entire contents of an industrial strength gel to hold her "do" in the style she chose. She sported a tight neon green, sleeveless T-shirt, gray pedal pushers and gray sneakers with matching neon green piping along the sides. Finishing the ensemble off with matching neon green laces, Her long nails are surprisingly neon green too. The mind reels pondering how she got it all to coordinate so perfectly and why'd she bother. She must be no older than 14 years, which explains quite a lot.
Girl: Who the fuck you cursing at?
The Boy slaps the Girl across her head. The Girl kicks at the Boy, misses his groin when he jumps back. She jumps to her feet and punches him hard in the arm twice. Her fat hides her underlying powerful brawn.
Boy: What the fuck is wrong with you? You want me to slap your ass again?
Girl: Whinny ass!
Boy (feints slapping her): Say what?
The Girl kicks again and this time connects with his groin. As the Boy falls back against the empty row of seats in front of them an old Asian woman quickly moves her bags to another seat away from the dueling duo. The Girl steadies him against the seat with her one knee pressed against his thighs and punches him twice in the chest. She backs off slowly ready to pounce again should he challenge her.
The Asian woman stares at them. As though her gaze will control their actions. She didn't realize that sort of old school discipline no longer works in this new world order.
Boy (groans): You play too much.
Girl: Stop moaning bitch!
Having gotten the attention she wanted, the fat black girl looks around the car. Her eyes rest on us.
Girl: What the fuck you looking at?
No one responded.
Girl: There's nothing but bitches on this train.
I looked again at my temporary companions' hands as he turned his body to fully address her.
Hispanic man: You addressing a man now. Not a boy! (addresses the boy): Your first mistake was to slap her only once.
Girl: You need to mind your fucking business!
My eyes darted between an angry female teenage face contorted to reflect the experience, which it lacked, and his hands, which did. Thick and large, there were calluses everywhere. I wondered how his hands would have felt on my skin, under my skin.
– – –
That curiosity plagued me as I mounted the steps leading up and out of the subway station, after the train reached my stop.
Behind me the transit police was sorting out the aftermath of the altercation with a non-responsive homeless person, the dazed Asian woman sitting on the floor of the train in the midst of her overturned packages, a dead teenaged boy, a bleeding teenage girl and an unconscious small Hispanic man with bloodied fists.
– – –
I thought about the small Hispanic man's hands all long my walk from the train station to my house. It was a shame those strong hands were marred with all that blood. I shuddered a bit, not fond of seeing blood. It's color and consistency always made me a little queasy.
I found myself looking at the hands of the various people I'd pass along my walk home. Some of the most macho men in my neighborhood had the most effeminate looking hands. The observation depressed me, a little.
– – –
I could see my house two blocks away on the corner. My house, grew larger the closer I came to it. It is a brick, two-story walk-up that my Grandmother acquired through her exploits as a bag lady.
I am startled by the loud clang of something banging against metal. A new millennium bag woman. I look across the street and witnessed a black homeless woman with black plastic bags hanging from both her wrists, banging on the street light pole with a thick wooden stick. It looks like a one used to play stick ball. About the width and length of a broomstick handle.
My Grandmother, a different kind of bag lady, used to pick up and carry the receipts of illegal numbers from the runners to the banker. She was wise enough to invest her earnings in this house. My father had only one child. So I inherited this house after his death, which incidentally was not exactly what he wanted but these things happen.
– – –
My neighbor Mr. Baptiste is looking out of his window, of the brownstone adjacent to mine. I wave to him. He darts back behind his curtains. I wave to him because he is nosy and I want him to know that I know he is nosy. Mr. Baptiste is an obese Haitian man with one leg because his diabetes was untreated for so many years that one of his legs had to be amputated, when I was eight years old.
I recall enjoying stories about pirates when I was eight. I thought Mr. Baptiste was an old Haitian Pirate. He used to have small parakeets in a cage in the window he now likes to peep out.
With his funny speech, the peg leg and the parakeets only an autistic child would miss the whole pirate vibe he was throwing out there.
He is constantly in that window the same time everyday when I come home from work. Yet he pretends that it is a coincidence that he is looking out the window as I walk up the street. I used to ignore him so that he wouldn't see how it bothered me to be under his surveillance.
I used to become enraged behind my locked front door, every day after returning home from work. There was a hole in the wall I kicked in over a period of three years.
Just behind that front door, I'd often fall to the rage of pain attacking my head just behind my eyes, after playing kickboxing with the wall. I'd collapse to the parquet floor beneath me and shake off excess weight: My perverse exercise regime.
I recently re-plastered and painted it. If you look closely at the wall you can just detect a slight indentation where the hole used to be. I initially thought the job I was working, at the time, was taking it's toll on my sanity and I was venting my frustration out on the hallway wall. So I quit. But after quitting a series of over twenty different jobs per year over a two-year period, I began to realize that it wasn't the work, which was driving me mad.
It was this constant surveillance Mr. Baptiste placed me under. He even began sitting there watching when I came home late. It didn't matter what hour, he was there peeking out between the blinds, watching.
I had decided I'd either have to do something about his behavior or something about my response to it. If I regulated him, it would have been messy beyond repair, so I regulated myself. I fixed my wall and wave at him every time I see him. My waving unnerves him. I detect fear in his face every time he darts behind his curtain. We're even... for now, annoying fat pirate.
[End of Chapter One of Nailah's Novel]