3. The White Uniform (2021)
Shrimp tried to focus on the music—music was the major source of meaning in her life—but she could only think of January. January’s face and her thick hands, the pink palms roughened with calluses. January’s neck, the tense muscles slowly melting beneath the pressure of Shrimp’s fingers. Or, in the opposite direction: January’s heavy thighs pressing against the tank of a bike, bare black flesh, bare black metal, its dizzying sound as it idled, waiting for the light, and then before it had gone quite to green its roar as it went tearing down the freeway on the way to … What would be a suitable destination? Alabama? Spokane? South St. Paul?
Or this: January in a nurse’s uniform—brisk, crinkly, blinding white. Shrimp would be inside the ambulance. The little white cap rubbing against the low ceiling. She would offer her the soft flesh of her inner arm. The dark fingers searching for a vein. A little daub of alcohol, a moment’s chill, the hypodermic, and January smiling—“I know this hurts.” Shrimp wanted to swoon at that point. Swoon.
She took out the plugs and let the music wind on, unheard, inside the little plastic case, for a car had left the street and pulled up to the little red charger. January lumbered out from the station, took the man’s card, and stuck it in the credit slot, which replied “Ding.” She worked like a model in a shop window, never pausing, never lifting her eyes, off in her own universe, through Shrimp knew that she knew that she was here, on this bench, looking at her, longing for her, swooning.
Look at me! she thought at January fiercely. Make me exist!
But the steady flow of cars and trucks and buses and bikes between them dispersed the thought-message as though it were smoke. Perhaps some driver a dozen yards past the station would glance up with momentary panic, or a woman riding the 17 bus home from work would wonder what had reminded her of some boy she had thought she had loved twenty years before.
Three days.
And each day returning from this vigil. Shrimp would pass in front of a drab shop with a painted sign, Myers Uniforms & Badges. In the window a dusty moustached policeman from another town (the sprinkles on his jacket were wrong for New York) brandished, in a diffident way, a wooden billy club. Handcuffs and canisters dangled from his black gunbelt. Touching the policeman, yet seeming not to notice, a fireman decked out in bright yellow rubber striped with black (another out-of-towner) smiled through the streaked glass at, in the opposite window, a tall black girl in a nurse’s white uniform. Shrimp would walk past slowly and on as far as the traffic light then, like a boat when its engine conks out and it can no longer fight against the current, she would drift back to the window, the white uniform.
The third day she went inside. A bell clanked. The sales-clerk asked could he help her.
“I’d like—” she cleared her throat “—a uniform. For a nurse.”
He lifted a slim yellow tape measure off a stack of visored caps. “You’d be… a twelve?”
“It’s not—Actually, it isn’t for me. For a friend. I said that since I’d be passing by here … ”
“What hospital would she be with? Each hospital has its own little requirements, you know.”
Shrimp looked up in his young-old face. A white shirt, the collar too tight. A black tie with a small, crisp knot. He seemed, in the same indefinite way as the mannikins in the windows, to be in uniform.
“Not a hospital. A clinic. A private clinic. She can wear … whatever she likes.”
“Good, good. And what size is she, your friend?”
“A large size. Eighteen? And tall.”
“Well, let me show you what we have.” And he led Shrimp, enraptured, into the farther twilight of the shop.
4. January (2021)
She’d met Shrimp at one of the open sessions of The Asylum, where having come to recruit she’d found herself, in the most shameful way, recruited—to the point of tears and, beyond tears, of confessions. All of which January reported faithfully at the next meeting of the cell. There were four cell members besides herself, all in their twenties, all very serious, though none were intellectuals or even college dropouts: Jerry and Lee Lighthall, Ada Miller, and Graham X. Graham was the link upward to the organization but not otherwise “leader” since one thing they were against was pyramidal structures.
Lee, who was fat and black and liked to talk, said what they were all thinking, that having emotions and showing them was a completely healthy direction. “Unless you said something about us?”
“No. It was more just sexual things. Or personal.”
“Then I don’t see why you brought it up here.”
“Maybe if you told us something more about it, Jan,” Graham suggested, in Graham’s gentle way. “Well, what they do at The Asylum—”
“We’ve all been to The Asylum, honey.”
“Stop being a fucking bully, Lee,” his wife said.
“Lee’s right, though—I’m taking up all our time. Anyhow I was there early, sort of sizing them up as they came in, and I could tell the minute this one arrived—her name is Shrimp Hanson—that she wasn’t one of the regulars. I think she noticed me right away too. Anyhow we started off in the same group, breathing and holding hands and all that.” Ordinarily January would have firmed up a narrative of this length with some obscenities, but any resemblance to bluster now would only have made her feel sillier than she did. “Then she started massaging my neck, I don’t know, in a particular way. And I started crying. For no reason at all I started crying.”
“Were you up on anything?” Ada asked.
January, who was stricter than any of them on that score (she didn’t even drink Koffee), could legitimately bridle. “Yeah, on your vibrator!”
“Now, Jan,” said Graham.
“But she was up,” she went on, “very much up. Meanwhile the regulars were swarming around us like a pack of vampires. That’s what most of them come there for, the sludge and the blood. So we went off into one of the booths. I thought we’d screw and that would be that, but instead we started talking. That is, I did—she listened.” She could remember the knot of shame, like the pain of a too sudden swallow of water, as the words came out. “I talked about my parents, about sex, about being lonely. That kind of thing.”
“That kind of thing,” Lee echoed, supportively.
January braced herself and took a deep breath. “About my parents. I explained about their being Republicans, which is all right of course, but I said that I could never relate sexual feelings with love because of their both being men. It doesn’t sound like much now. And about being lonely I said—” she shrugged, but also she closed her eyes “—that I was lonely. That everyone was lonely. Then I started crying again.”
“You covered a lot of ground.”
She opened her eyes. No one seemed to be angry with her, though they might have taken the last thing she’d said as an accusation. “We were at it most of the fucking night.”
“You still haven’t told us anything about her,” Ada observed.
“Her name is Shrimp Hanson. She said she’s thirty, but I’d say thirty-four, or older even. Lives somewhere on East 11th, I’ve got it written down, with a mother and I can’t remember how many more. A family.” This was, at root, exactly what the organization was most against. Authoritarian political structures only exist because people are conditioned by authoritarian family structures. “And no job, just her allowance.”
“White?” Jerry asked. Being the only nonblack in the group, it was diplomatic for her to be the one to ask.