of the invisible water.
Not the waves on the lake—her map showed the shape of all that space under what you saw on the surface. All that cold, dark water plunging down and away from anything anyone could ever know. While she stared at the map, she traveled as if she was underwater where sound comes at you from all directions at once. Suspended in this unknowable sound, her own index finger with the mocha moon-sliver at the top of the nail traced the darkening shades of blue on the map. The shades told its depth. Once, in second grade, she filled a five-gallon pail for their box-garden project and found she couldn’t move it at all. Her teacher, Ms. Willis, had to pour half away so she could carry it. “So, it’s heavy too,” she thought, narrowing her eyes. She checked both corners of her vision as if she’d just discerned a crucial secret. For weeks after that, she went to bed and lay there sleepless imagining how the lead-heavy depth of the whole lake would feel if it was her blanket and how nobody—not her mother, not Principal James, not the mayor—would be able to move it.
Nothing in Chicago ever made sense to her without the lake. Strictly speaking, nothing much made sense with it either. But with the lake floating out there, in her mind, it didn’t matter as much. She remembered the Fourth of July when she was little. They’d go to the lake. It seemed that the whole South Side lined up along the shore. She always wondered if they (“We?” she thought now) thought the lake would open up and everyone just walk away. When memories like this came to her, it felt like she could blink with her arms and legs. It was as if her whole body closed quickly then reopened. To herself she called these memories body blinks. No music in Chicago makes sense if you can’t feel the Moses effect in the song: the pulse-way people arrive but never get there, depart but never leave a city. No sense, not sense to feel, that is, if you can’t hear that. You have to follow a song out over the lake at night till the sound of all the spilled light of the city disappears into the waves. If you’ve done that you know that the light is the gloss of all the never-lostness and not-foundity, the used-to-be-somehow and the not-quite-ever-again-ness of the people, of even one gone-person. When you do that you, that used-to-be or could-have-been but now-never-again version of you blows off with it.
For Ndiya, no matter the pronouns and prepositions, every song was really sung to that unknown, invisible weight. And she had the chart on her map. She listened to her clock radio at night, volume down so low she used it as a pillow to hear the songs played by her favorite DJ, Misty after Midnight. She’d listen with her eyes closed and then open them up and place each song on her map of the emptied-out lakes according to something she thought of as the depth of the sound. The depth of the sound was the weight of a song. Sound never lost, songs without a trace.
As she rode the 29 bus, Ndiya heard Deniece Williams’s “Free.” In her memory she saw her ten-year-old finger catch the red glow from the digits in the clock face. Her finger pointed at the blue-black center of the lake’s terraced shape. She still thought of “Free” as Chicago’s heaviest song, an impression she couldn’t shake or believe, find or lose, until she heard the song again and it was as plain as never is always plain. The way Niecy’s voice stood alone among the instruments. The way she floated and dived. The way the song was, on one level, so simple. The way she sang the filigreed frailty of what she knew and her point-blank refusal to take any refuge in it. Blue silk stitched around an ice cube. So clear the cold it held felt like a mouthful of high-altitude sky, almost empty. The song was a dare: “Go ahead, melt. Give up your shape against the smooth blue skin of it all.” Ndiya held that song in her mind like a low moon rising up. Kept it in her mouth like a cherry gumdrop full of venom. Walking down the aisle of the bus, she tried and failed to remember ever hearing the song played in any other city. She knew she had, of course. Still, she wondered if it was possible to hear this song outside of Chicago. What could it possibly sound like with no poisonous moon low over the lake’s impossible weight? She figured it must be possible. For someone maybe, but not for her.
At night, in the summer, she thought, the city got its breath from the cold bottom of the lake. It heated the air in its lungs, took what it needed, and breathed the rest out invisible. She imagined body heat blowing out the open window of a car speeding down South Shore Drive. She imagined the weight of the whole lake balanced on the head of a pin. She’d never actually been on the lake in a boat, but thought it must actually move like her uncle Lucky’s big old burgundy sedan. “My ninety-eight,” she remembered him saying. She didn’t know what that phrase had to do with a car. She decided, vaguely, it must mean something chrome and cursive.
It didn’t matter. She remembered Lucky’s cut-eyed smile, the way he wore his hat pushed back on his wide forehead so it made him look like he’d always just been surprised and was always, anyway, ready for more. Rusty-haired and freckled. That phrase, “ninety-eight,” floats on loose struts. “Hair on fire,” he’d say. In his voice, it sounded like “hay-own-fie.” Uncle Lucky drove with his right arm laid across the top of the passenger’s seat so he could wave at people without looking at them. His left wrist draped on the wheel to coax and nudge the loping chassis through the curves. She used to think he steered that car the way you do a friend with your shoulder and an elbow in the ribs when you pass a secret joke between the two of you. She felt both her arms blink at the term “ninety-eight.”
Ndiya looked at her face in the bus window, “The two of you.” Then she thought, “The both of you.” She recognized her reflection in the smudged glass, the girl under the lake disappeared under that suspended blanket of sound. The word “disappeared” echoed into static and traveled down her arms and legs. To keep her balance in the aisle, she thought of Lucky and his falsetto “ninety-eight.” She thumbed a bassline on her thigh and heard it in her chest, boom-bomp, “Riding High.” Faze-O: Lucky’s theme music. Ndiya blinked her whole body closed, hard, and opened back to the present. Her voice evenly split between plea and command: “All you colors back in your places.”
To focus, she reminded herself that this bus took her to her third date with Shame. That name? Just then she heard three sirens, all of them in the distance. “These aren’t dates!” she scolded herself as the siren of a distant fire truck caught her ear. The clear sound of its bell bounced off the bus driver’s rearview mirror and came straight down the aisle. The distant clarity of an emergency cued a thought that she didn’t know this man all that well. Didn’t know his neighborhood at all. She thought, “Shame? Is he serious?” She’d heard more bizarre names, but this one seemed to sit on its owner a bit too much like the crushed rake of a loud velvet hat. Yvette-at-work’s warning about musicians had gone all “red zone” when Ndiya showed her Shame’s address: “This Negro lives where? And you don’t ee-ven know his name?”
She had been “here” before. Now she wonders if she means “there”? That was date number two. This thought broke a rule. She’d vowed not to admit to herself that date number two had happened: “Mind off number two, nothing happened, never happened.” But even if it hadn’t happened, she had ridden over there with him on his cycle—“Ah, ah! Mind off that, never happened.” In any case, this was her first time coming to see him, here, by herself. She allowed herself to think about that because if she really thought about the last time, she wouldn’t ee-ven have agreed to come back. She liked to think in that voice even though she knew better. She felt the epic adrenaline in that voice. She felt the power of that idiom and the betrayal of her disappearance into static as a child. She shook it off and thought safely about language.
Moving up the aisle, she held the thought under her tongue in her mind; she could taste the difference. “Here” and its grace-note silent t. The way the word “even” arched its eyebrows and appeared in her face. “Chicago,” she thinks. Even the way you say “ee-ven.” She felt the meaning push up from beneath while the sound of the word held both ends down. Ever since she’d been back, her arms and legs blinked on their own. Tones in simple words pulled them apart from the inside. Words, or whatever they were, played through her body like a flashlight waving around underwater. Chicago. A place where you could taste words. Ndiya stared at her reflection in the window. She turned away, eyebrows up, body closed. Then she whispered to herself, “Call it even.”
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