a while. It’s like the way you fold a piece of paper in half, trace your thumbnail down the crease until it’s sharp enough that the missing half of the page fills the room and there’s nothing else to breathe. They say a person experiences a rush of pure elation at the exact moment of drowning. At twilight, in the summer, the day drowned in the dark. Pieces of elation came alive, parcels of fugitive heat. Invisible streams of it moved around, lolled about in the streets, paused without pausing on stoops.
So for a few minutes at dusk the city opened. It was as if all the promises of invisibility existed without the terrors. The terrors came later, of course, enough to break a bent beam of light. But for a half hour or so around sunset after a hot day, it was pure drowning.
Ndiya Grayson would get off the bus to go see Shame Luther at twilight. She stepped into this place he’d found to live where elation hung out longer than it did elsewhere. Where life was wound into what happened on the missing half of the page. It’s why she arrived by descending degrees, presence terraced. It’s why she was already gone by the time she found she couldn’t leave. Had never left. Long gone and never left; she held, as it were, the American ticket.
To tell it means to unfold the untold. The sky glowed overhead, the orange clouds of a night in late summer, Chicago. The hiss as the bus knelt down. It dipped its bumper into the huge puddle left over from the afternoon’s gushing fire hydrants on three of the four corners at the intersection. It’s just a few world-changing blocks east from the corner of Sixty-Third and King Drive, a few minutes’ walk. As she’d learn later, a few minutes’ walk into a past she’d never had, her past. There was no place in the city like it and no place in the city was close. No police of place, fences buried underground. She noticed it right off. She remembered it with the feeling that it was remembering her.
She’d ask Shame about it when she and Mrs. Clara’s Melvin finally got inside his door. He’d take Melvin’s goggles and her thigh-length linen coat and try not to notice, just yet, her soaked high-heels and dripping skirt. He’d say, “Yeah, this is where all the city’s twilight comes to stay the night. And, do you know, there are places that have none at all? We get theirs too. Isn’t that right, Melvin?” Melvin was oblivious in his red swim trunks with blue sailboats. He rocked back and forth on the outside edge of his sandals and held one yellow rain boot by its pull-on loop in each hand. Shame: “A little payback.” And she: “Payback? For what?” And Shame, smiling at the hallway outside the open door behind her: “Come on in.”
All of that was still a bus stop and a three-block walk away. It’d seem to her that it took half her life to walk those three blocks. In a way, she was right about that. But for now she was still on the eastbound 29 bus. She was still dry, hadn’t felt the fitted glove of air. So she hadn’t asked herself anything yet. Yet. The word seemed laced into all her time with Shame. Call it “time.” Hers with him seemed to be built of delay. Every moment shackled to its mirror in a kind of tug-of-war between this and that, here and there. Things took forever to happen. They happened when they happened and never felt late. Then the bizarre part, they happened again and again—and so really happened—later in her mind. Ndiya’s memories of time with Shame stood out like colorized scenes in a black-and-white film. No. They were like parts of a movie that she’d encountered first as music and so could never really take the movie version seriously. It’d be weeks before she asked herself much at all about Shame Luther. But when she did she’d find music where she thought there was vision, touch where she thought there should be music. And whenever there was supposed to be touch she found a part of her life that had nothing to do with him at all.
She hadn’t thought it through, refused to in fact. So she knows all of this in a way she can’t tell herself about. Known without the telling to self. Words evaporated into what lay behind them before her brain caught the voice. Absorbed, maybe. But—then what? As she moved up the aisle to the back door of the bus, she felt like she was already in the street. The crushing heat of the afternoon was gone. She loved the summer heat at night, the way the whole city stretched out in strings of light, turned its back and breathed long and quiet.
■
Breath in slow motion. Easy as this here. The mute pressure of heat lightning. The way a city slipped its pulse into you. This was a South Side summer night and the difference, that is, the memory, struck her immediately when she’d come back at the beginning of the summer.
Ndiya had sworn she wouldn’t come back to Chicago, not until they tore The Grave down. Somewhere in herself she believed they never would. From all what they’d stole into her as a child, she’d assumed they never could come down. From all what they’d torn—in her mind, something in how she’d been sent away had made the buildings indestructible. Now they had come down. It was national, international news when they’d decided to tear down the projects where she’d grown up. It was journalism; she had her doubts. But here she was. True to her word.
True to the word. “Here” she was, back in this city that she’d forced to forget her name. So she thought. Immediately upon her arrival, she’d found that “here” was a verb. She felt “hered.” The first thing she noticed about this verb was that it hurt. And the hurt twisted into colors, a kind of bouquet in her arms and legs. The bouquets changed her pulse, sharpened her vision until the colors in the world began to switch places: blue bars from the city flag on a police car swooped up into the sky; red from the stripe on a passing bus caught and wrapped around parked cars; silver green from trees in the park blown into the air made the wind momentarily visible. Here was musical. When the colors “hered” their way around playing musical chairs, she noticed, they didn’t hurt anymore. Here bristled and sparkled. But it wasn’t pain. She learned that all kind of things, voices in daily, anonymous speech more than anything else, had the power to here her. All summer voices in crowds of people jousted about until she lost track of which voice came from which face. “Where is this here?” she repeated to herself as she checked to see if the strange lightning in her arms and legs was visible to people around her. Didn’t seem to be.
More than twenty years she’d lived in other places. She found that “there” was a verb too. She’d felt all kinds of “theres” and “thereings,” the ways people could unknowingly there her. All kinds of ways. At every new job, people asking her the question and—without noticing Ndiya’s face—answering, “Chicago? Great place. Oh, I love Chicago, the Art Institute, and we have friends in”—fill in the name of whatever suburb. Or it was, “My daughter lives near Wrigley Field.” Ndiya wondered how everyone’s fucking daughter could live near Wrigley Field. At first, she’d attempted to halt these “thereings” by stating merely and matter-of-factly that she’d never been to the Art Institute nor had she ever seen Wrigley Field. But after a few rounds of those “thereings,” she found herself frightened by the accumulating urge to smash the visibly confused face staring back at her over a cubicle wall or via a favorable angle in an anonymously glossy, marble-veined women’s room wall or mirror. For years, in self-defense, she called it pleasure, the way those there-smiles she wore felt hammered on her face with hot nails. This was the period of her life she called Ndiya-Walking-Away. It didn’t last. And, reluctantly, she’d conceded that she’d gotten nowhere walking away which, in a way, felt to her like a virtue.
■
Looking out the windows of the bus as it inched through traffic east on Sixty-Third Street, Ndiya could smell it. “Here.” Chicago laid out on its back, its chest rising and falling as if lying next to a midnight blue lover. The lake. She thinks of the lake as Chicago’s unmapped East side. “Forget State Street,” she thought, “the dividing line between east and west is Lake Shore Drive.” As a child, she studied “Chicago” in the encyclopedia. In third grade she found a map of the city in the World Book’s volume H under “Hydrogen Bomb.” She traced it carefully into her notebook. There was a map of the city with a hydrogen bomb blast marked by a black dot in the middle. Concentric circles of destruction radiated outward. She asked her teacher where exactly on the map they lived and Mrs. Cross had swiftly taken the book away from her. It didn’t matter, she had it in her notebook. Years before she’d ever really connected it to the actual lake, she found a fold-out National Geographic map