It was Guinea.
Even with the additional incentive of Bintou, who, if she wasn’t actually the second wife of his brother-in-law could probably be made while the baby was down for a nap, Albie could not sit in that apartment for the entire day. For one thing it was tropically hot. The radiator hissed and clanked like someone was beating it to death with a lead pipe down in the basement. Neither Bintou nor Dayo even flinched at the noise but it made Albie want to take off his skin. Small wonder Jeanette and Fodé left for work so early. A humidifier blew a steady mist through the tiny room, very possibly an attempt to re-create a sub-Saharan climate in this Brooklyn terrarium. “Good for the lungs,” Bintou said, smiling when Albie got up to see if it could be turned off. The window that led to the fire escape was jammed and so he went down the four flights of stairs to smoke. The third time he went to smoke he carried his bike with him and rode away into the softly felted snow. By one o’clock he had a job as a bike messenger.
It was the work he found in every city, the only employment he felt that life had prepared him for. He couldn’t even call himself an arsonist since he was now twenty-six and hadn’t so much as set a fire in a fireplace since he was fourteen. When asked when he could start work he said now, and then went on to spend the day figuring out Manhattan. It wasn’t a complicated place.
“I am so proud of you! And this means you will stay. Visitors don’t get jobs on their first day in town. Houseguests don’t get jobs. You are a resident now. One day here and you own the city.”
Jeanette smiled at her brother, a small Jeanette smile, rolling her eyes slightly. Africans, she seemed to be saying. What can you do? She was still dressed in her own work clothes, a skirt and sweater. She had been in her second year of graduate school for biomedical engineering when she got pregnant. Jeanette, it turned out, was the smart one. She had explained to Albie the night before that instead of following her original plan to have an abortion, she and Fodé had decided to conduct a radical social experiment they called Having The Baby, and because of the outcome of that experiment, she had dropped out of school and now worked as a field service engineer for Philips. She did set-up, instruction, and service for MRI machines in hospitals stretching from Queens to the Bronx.
“I plug them in,” she said flatly. “I show people the manual.” She would have to continue to do so, she explained to Albie last night while making up his bed, despite the mindless, soul-crushing nature of the work, at least until Fodé had finished his doctorate in public health at NYU and Dayo was of an age that it seemed bearable to send him to day care. Dayo care, they called it. “If I don’t go back to school,” she whispered while she tucked a sheet over the sofa cushions, “the radical social experiment will have failed because I’ll have to kill myself.”
Albie held the baby while Jeanette heated up the dinner Bintou had left for them. Fodé set the table and opened a bottle of wine, telling them the story of his day. “Americans love the idea of vaccinating Africans. What could be nicer than a photograph of dusty little Nigerian children lined up for inoculation on the front page of the New York Times? But for their own children the mothers of New York City find vaccinations passé. They say the vaccination is not sufficiently natural, that it could possibly cause something worse than it could prevent. I have spent the day trying to convince women with college educations to vaccinate their children and they argued with me. I must go to medical school. No one will listen to me if I am not a medical doctor.”
“I’ll listen to you,” Jeanette said. “Don’t go to medical school.”
“One woman told me she did not believe in epidemiology.” He covered his face with his hands. “It is appalling.”
“Measles are no longer applicable in New York.” Jeanette patted his shoulder. “We’ve transcended measles.”
Jeanette washed the salad greens. Fodé wrapped the sliced bread in tinfoil and put it in the oven. They worked around one another in the tiny space, each one stepping out of the other’s way.
“Tell me about your day instead,” he said to her. “Let’s think of something better.”
“You want to think about MRI demonstrations in hospital basements?”
Fodé stopped for a moment, then smiled and shook his head. “No, no.” He turned then to his brother-in-law, so pleased to have another opportunity. “What I meant to say is — Albie, please, tell us about your day.”
Albie shifted the weight of his nephew in his arms. He spoke to the baby. “I was stopped by security guards in four buildings today. I showed my ID, was told I could go up, and then I was stopped by a second guard at the elevator who told me I couldn’t go up.”
Fodé nodded with appreciation. “This is most impressive for a white man.”
“And I was almost hit by the M16 bus.”
“Stop it,” Jeanette said, putting a bowl of salad in the middle of the table. “No more about your day either.”
“That leaves us with Dayo,” Albie said.
Fodé took the baby from his arms. “Dayo. There is no one I would rather hear from. My son, tell us, was it a beautiful day to be alive?”
“Uncle,” Dayo said, and held out his arms to go back.
Albie, who had lived close to the edge for so long, and at times had strayed past the edge, looked out the window to see the lights shining down from all those countless Brooklyn apartments. He wondered if this was what people were doing — were they making dinners with their family, holding babies, recounting days? Was this what life was like for them?
Albie’s bicycle was an amalgamation of so many different replacement parts it could no longer rightfully be called a Schwinn. It was his job to deliver small packages and notarized insurance forms and promising manuscripts. Sometimes it was a contract and he was to wait for a signature before riding it back to where it had come from. Sometimes he was asked to sign as a witness. New York was the land of limitless deliveries. There was always someone who had something that needed to be someplace else, and so the day went on until he stopped it. He cut in front of buses and between taxis, startled drivers from Connecticut like the Goddamn Boy on a Bike he had once been. The tourists saw him bearing down on them and hung to the curb. When he arrived at his destination, he lifted his bike onto his shoulder like it was his younger brother and carried it with him into the elevator. While Albie was three inches taller than his father, he was only very tall and not extraordinarily tall. He was, however, extraordinarily thin, and the thinness gave him the illusion of additional height. Often the receptionists would blanch ever so slightly to see Albie approaching their desk with a manila envelope in his hand, the bicycle wearing a dent into his acromion. He was a living skeleton with his black tattoos and his thick black braid, like Death himself had come for them, ready to ride them out on his handlebars.
“You should consider upping your caloric intake,” Jeanette said when he came limping back into the apartment in the evenings.
“Occupational hazard,” he said. True and not true — he’d seen some fat messengers in his day.
Albie made money, and after a couple of months of thinking he would leave tomorrow or the next day, he started giving half of it to Jeanette for rent and coffee and wine and Dayo’s education or her education. The other half he changed into hundreds and folded into the zipper compartment of his duffel. He had tried to give the money to Fodé first but Fodé wouldn’t even look at it. The next day he waited for his sister at the subway station and gave it to her instead. Jeanette nodded and pushed the bills into her pocket.