of the men were vets and other fugitives cured when Reagan cut the funding and “liberated” them from the VA or whatever other kind of care they’d been getting. The girls and their paramours were all, she suspected, from Milwaukee and they couldn’t seem to tell if they were being saved by dope or punished by life in New York. “Saved or punished,” she thought, “it beat Milwaukee.” By Milwaukee, Ndiya didn’t mean the town itself. She’d never been there, after all. She thought of it, instead, as the paradigm town of Happy Days white amnesia and numbness that silently, somehow, seemed to work like quarantine for the however many hundred thousand black people who lived there. That could be any number of American cities. In Milwaukee, as in Chicago, as elsewhere, it all happened under the banner of the stolen American Indian name and that clinched the cynical deal and made most of what she saw burn down her arms from her young and half–numb struck flamethrower of a brain.
Riding the bus to Maurice’s party, she could see that she and Art both had had it all wrong back then. The placards and petitions and protests weren’t meant to save or clean up the park. They were meant to prevent the police from occupying it in order to clean it up. The white girls she saw who’d left Milwaukee to grow mats on their heads and convince themselves that “life” meant forgetting to change your T-shirt, they didn’t want the park cleaned up. They wanted it preserved so that the twisted thicket could remain just like it was. All this was far beyond Ndiya at the time. In retrospect, she was happy to have misjudged it like she did. In a way, by then, her own private pain and the numbness she guarded it with had made her conservative. If it hadn’t, she might have really hurt somebody. Likely, she’d have hurt Art, even worse than she did. Art who ordered and gathered his own thoughts by disagreeing—albeit always in the most agreeable terms—with whatever Ndiya said. Art said he wanted a “good life for himself.” Somehow this meant he’d convert all memory and things he saw in the present into models of such a good life to be replicated.
Outside Tompkins Square Park and down the block were huge, would-be empty lots full of fragments from broken bricks and pieces of broken window frames. Arturo explained that the buildings had been abandoned and then demolished and the bricks had been mined for use in suburban housefronts all over the country. Not always in that order, either. Often bricks were mined while the buildings stood. He said white men used to come to the neighborhood and offer a dollar for every hundred bricks the kids could load on their pickup trucks and flatbeds. A penny a brick. Arturo and his friends had worked many summer nights until dawn loading down those trucks with bootlegged bricks. The buildings leaned, floors bowed, the walls in the hallways curved. Slats under the busted plaster protruded like ribs of an animal left for vultures on some Sunday afternoon wildlife show. In the basements, the whole structures of shifting, diminishing weight made low moans and sharp coughs. Art said he knew two boys and their sister who were killed when a floor and ceiling collapsed after too many bricks were mined from weight-bearing walls in the basement. At dawn, after those nights, their hands were hot and raw, forearms scraped from carrying bricks stacked in each arm. When the light came up, the trucks drove away up First Avenue loaded down so that the front wheels looked like they barely met the pavement.
Ndiya was always amazed that Art could relate stories such as these and retain a sense of optimistic detachment, as if the moral of all of these stories was that everything happened for the best. At school she’d admired this in him, and she had thought it was a radical kind of focus; at home it seemed much more like a determined blindness.
In these lots cleared by Arturo and them, Ndiya saw where hundreds of people had built shelters. Families lived there. She could see the World Trade Center in the background, and in the foreground lived a shantytown. There was another down the block and there was another around the corner from there. She identified with these people somehow. She’d prayed for the buildings she grew up in to be vacated and destroyed. On a bad day she just prayed for them to be destroyed. She felt something familiar in the dissembled misery she witnessed in these lots. She saw kids playing much like she’d played, getting pain and fun and joy and bitterness and togetherness and betrayal all tangled up with each other in their bodies until, she thought, no one could get them untangled. Anyone who suggested that they could be untangled was an enemy. They’d grow up like she had, until she hadn’t. They’d be afraid of all the people they loved until they didn’t know if they were in love with fear or afraid of love itself.
Remembering all of this on the bus to Maurice’s party made her feel it all again. Most powerful of all those feelings was the truly strange rain of realization that happened when she began to learn that this inseparable tangle wasn’t true for everyone. Or that’s what they said.
Some people she saw on her walks through Art’s neighborhood were addicted already. She recognized them because they were the only ones who walked like they knew where they were going in the morning. Others soon would be. One or two of those kids in the shanties would move though it all just like she had and come out without any visible scars. They’d bear their experience, mostly a series of things that should have but didn’t happen to them, like an unintelligible alphabet written in kerosene on their skin. Their lives would swerve between lighted matches that would touch off sketches of flame on their skin and furnaces would roar in chests, fire in their veins. Then, if they were lucky, they’d scramble around lighted matches and call it life. All her life, Ndiya had found she could recognize these people no matter where she saw them. She’d never been able to make up her mind what, in fact, distinguished them from the crowd. She could feel these people recognize her as well. Their eyes would catch and fall open. There’d be a quick nod and then they’d turn and be off.
That’s what she had thought in her twenties. None of it was true. And most of her sudden flashes of anger were really about the numb wall she’d put between herself and her actual past. In a way that was even less memorable to her than it was visible to other people, she wasn’t one of the spared, to whom things hadn’t happened that the odds said should have happened. In fact, as if in a twisted symmetry, things that should never have happened to anyone had happened to her. In just that way, by changes almost as simple as grammar in a sentence, she’d invented a story to stand beside her. This twin person could negate what had happened to her in that abandoned elevator when she was twelve.
All of this, guarded by a sentry, sat behind a wall no one, certainly not Arturo Almeida, was going to get behind. In a way that was standing right next to her before she’d seen it approach, and in a way her sentry was incapable of dealing with at all, Shame’s reactions to things had awoken something, put something in motion. From the start, part of knowing Shame took place behind this wall in her life story, took place in a part of her life that wasn’t in the story. She could feel he was trouble. Nonetheless, she went along with the string of accidental inevitables that happened after they’d met. She didn’t know why. With Shame, in exactly that unforeseen way she’d armed herself against, she felt alive close up; trouble, for once, felt like distant thunder.
In New York that summer with Art, some of the adults she saw headed and raised families in these thrown-together shanties often comprised of materials stolen from construction sites, two-by-fours and sheets of blue plastic, with portions of abandoned cars and delivery vans. She couldn’t tell how many families lived in a sky-blue US Air Force school bus that had been turned on its side in one of the lots. She’d pass by in the morning as the addicts stalked their singular purposes and the employed adults in the shanties tried to wipe wrinkles from their loose pants and tight jackets. Some stood in line to brush their teeth at the steady trickle from a long-spent fire hydrant near the corner. She appreciated their struggle for dignity, and their misery echoed the wordless and violent melody of her worldview in a way that made her sweat feel like it ran down someone else’s skin.
She remembered the protests and the way the NYPD surrounded the park. She remembered no one seemed to care about the families in the shanties all around or the other families, like Arturo’s, who lived in the projects that loomed over Alphabet City from Avenue D. It was all about that disaster of a park. She didn’t ever see any of the people from the projects or the shanties—too busy dodging matches—at the protests about the park. The protesters were the only ones she didn’t recognize. But, she thought, she knew them all. For all she knew, every one of them had individually passed her in the crowded but utterly empty hallways and pathways