Another Kind of Madness. Ed Pavlic
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guarded against threats. Bring it on. If she could do anything, Ndiya Grayson could do that. In two weeks, she could mouth the words before the lawyers got their sentences out. In three, a few junior associates recognized that she wrote in their world-obliterating tribal language better than they did. Most quickly began to simply list the basic facts of the case and let her do the rest. They’d make a special effort in five-syllable words to say—strictly on procedural grounds, you understand—that they’d need to proof the briefs before they were submitted, but she knew it was all show. They probably didn’t even read them until they were on their way to court, if they ever got that far.
She felt a flash of panic when she saw how plainly some people read things about her that she hadn’t consciously disclosed. She asked Yvette-at-work about her future as a legal ghostwriter. She was told not to sweat it. “If they know you’re smart you’ll either get promoted in a little while or fired right away—how long has it been?” She’d started as a temp and, when the temporarily absent person stayed gone, she’d signed a one-year contract for more money than she’d ever thought she’d make. In truth, she thought to herself, it wasn’t so much a job as an excuse to get out of bed, shop on Oak Street, and live in a part of the city that meant absolutely nothing to her. “What do you expect,” she’d laughed to herself, “going to work in a building that looks like a fifty-story pair of sunglasses?” She imagined that the buppified stretch of townhouses on the near South Side where she sublet her place couldn’t mean anything to anyone. She figured that was the whole point. She was wrong, of course, but that didn’t matter yet. And if you allowed for travel well beyond the speed of light, and back in time, the neighborhood was just a few blocks east from where she’d grown up.
The message about Maurice’s party was the first post she’d received after having been added to the SnapB/l/acklist. This was the secret listserv that trafficked news between the young, gifted, and professional black employees of Gibson, Taylor & Gregory, the corporate law firm where she worked. Somewhere, of course, she knew better than to click to join and RSVP to the list to say nothing of actually showing up to That Maurice’s birthday party. And worse, Yvette-at-work had written back to the list to acknowledge that Ms. Ndiya Grayson, new colleague and the newest member of the list, would be there and everyone should make it a point to introduce themselves.
Nevertheless. “No, forget the n,” she thought. “Make it ‘evertheless.’” At six thirty on that Friday evening, she found herself in front of a mirror, humming along to the sublet TV’s “Soul Salon” and lost in time blending shades of MAC on her eyelids. She checked the rhythm-method calendar of her hair: “It’s Friday, second day out of the braids and on its way back for the weekend. Sunday evening, back to braids.” She made sure the seam in her stockings was straight up the back of her calf. The door of the building said, “Don’t!” when it slammed behind her but she shook it off and went down the steps to take the bus uptown to the Violet Hour. Everyone was meeting there for dinner before they headed off to whatever other closet of uptown nowhere the rest of That Maurice’s party was to take place in.
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Leaving big-eyed Melvin and his grandmother or whoever she was behind, Ndiya continued walking as the business strip gave way to residential buildings rimmed with lawn and living room furniture and old people to nod and smile at as she passed. In her mind, she continued on with her self-promised reckoning with date number two. The incident. She remembered riding the bus up South Michigan Avenue, awestruck by the unfamiliarity of the city and bothered by a strange feeling that she knew all of the black people she saw personally. Coming back to Chicago felt like returning to a family of two million people who lived in, or near, a city that’d embarked on an aggressive campaign of cosmetic surgery. “Way too aggressive,” she thought, as she wondered if what happened to Michael Jackson’s face could happen to a city. She knew it could. She’d been to Phoenix, an experience—or, more accurately, the utter lack of—which changed USA in her mind to ABP: “Anywhere But Phoenix.”
Still, this was Chicago. She thought, “It is still Chicago, right?” The miles of empty lots, abandoned blocks, and defunct train tracks that she’d known south of Grant Park were one place of massive change. And she knew that what she’d known was itself—for someone else—a bit of blur that wasn’t designed to last either. “Chalk it all up to America’s War on Time,” she thought.
Thoughts like these made Ndiya half regret her youthful, vengeful lack of patience and half wish she could feel it again full force. Then she remembered Art. After college they’d moved back to New York City where he’d grown up. She saw herself smile and wince and shake her head in the window as post-op Chicago wheeled past like it was on a gurney outside the bus. She remembered, though, how her youthful fire had delivered her to dangerous dead ends. “Look at me,” she’d told Art. “I can go anywhere in the world and never be mistaken for anything but exactly what I am, NAF, Negro American Female. All I have to do is open my mouth and say a word or two. A person, a language with origins nowhere, no history. Certainly nowhere and no history the world will admit to.”
She had looked in Arturo’s eyes as they opened up and fell through the back of his head like someone had kicked through the scrub and knocked the lids off of two long-abandoned wells in a ghost town. This had begun to seem like a weekly ritual. Aggravation building, she had thought, “He better not cry because I’m not sure if I’ll cover his wide, ever-earnest face with kisses or bust him in his no-irony-having mouth.” His tone as cold and clear—and, Ndiya thought, poisonous—as the abandoned water in his welled up eyes, Art had said simply, “You’re lucky.” And with her response, what had already become a kind of code-phrase for her life knowing Art began to feel like some kind of secret name or destiny; “Maybe I am.”
■
As she traveled toward date number two on the bus up Michigan Avenue, still trying to admit to herself that she’d decided to go to That Maurice’s birthday party at all, she looked down to her left and into the sun. Where once lay strewn and tangled abandoned railroad tracks, she saw new, sapling-studded rows of townhouses and signs: 2 Bdrms of Brilliant Light Starting from the Low-400s. She thought to herself, “Botox and a nose job, and what the fuck does low-400s mean?” In the end, she couldn’t file the altered landscape under anything resembling “change” in her thoughts. She knew ripples would pour out of the money changing between the same hands and shift the gravity of things. Maybe that is change?
Everyone else would be forced to react. At the same time, she wasn’t inspired by the, in her ears, delusional howling about gentrification either. “Who the hell got to keep their neighborhoods?” she thought, with a force that made her look around to see if she’d actually said it out loud. If she had said it out loud, no one on the bus cared. She hadn’t invested in either position. She’d opted out or tried to. So she figured her thoughts didn’t really count and that’s exactly the way she’d wanted it. For a minute, she even thought about giving brothers like Maurice Thomas a break. Maybe she would. She thought, “Who knows, maybe this party would be OK.”
Maybe it was all the maybes. She thought of Arturo again. She’d gone home with him and she’d seen the gentrification wars up close and impersonal in New York City in the summer of 1991. Art had told her about growing up in Alphabet City and it had sounded like Mister Rogers. Of course, it wasn’t that way at all but you couldn’t tell him that. She remembered the banners and fliers from that summer: Save Tompkins Square Park. The first time she saw one of the placards, she’d asked Arturo, “Where is Tompkins Square Park?” He pointed across Avenue A into a tangle of weeds and bent iron fencing behind which she’d seen all manner of makeshift dwellings and the rhythms of the homeless men and the thin-boned, addicted white girls who, from what she could tell, lived in there. “Save that? Too late, baby,” she’d said. Art shook his head: “They just want to clean up the place, Ndiya, are you mad at that?” And she: “Yeah, and clean you right up and out of here along with it.” But she didn’t mean what he thought she meant. As always with Art, she meant, “Maybe I am.” She’d walked through the park with him several times already. She’d certainly never had the impression that it was a place to be saved.
She’d