Just to see her.
Sixty seconds, never longer, often shorter, just to peer in from the sidewalk, just to glimpse her whizzing past, dyed-bronze dreadlocks in their upsweep bobbing, bobbing, past the window, just to know that she is near him. Peering in then going home. Miraculous that nobody has noticed nor harassed him, a black man at the window, with dreadlocks, no coat, although it’s always been his magic trick to be there without being there, to muddy his form, not to need to be known. This is what he lives from. The art of not being there. With Sangna, who remains there, sending payments to Yale and attending openings and refusing interviews and generally sitting at the control board of the mother ship in Shoreditch (her loft apartment, formerly his), selling paintings for gazillions on the spreading speculation that he bled to death in bathwater, art world it-boy’s tragic end, a kind of darkly comic comment on the nature of this art world, wherein nothing is so thrilling as an artist’s dying young.
But how can he tell her — now standing before him, the blur at the window resolved into flesh, when she means: have you been here, this close, without calling, this whole time, here in Brooklyn, just over a bridge? — that he doesn’t, doesn’t “live” here, or lives without “living,” by which he means hurting and causing to hurt; that it is all he has wanted and all he was seeking in etching thin T’s into both of his wrists: a way out of the hurting, for her, who is life-full, who lives and has always lived fully on earth, in the world, in and of it, not grounded nor grounding but ground, in her person, the canvas itself?
“Is this where you live?” she says, peering behind him, then at him.
He shakes his head. “…,” then, “come in.”
• • •
Later, indoors, another congress of three blowing, all, on the tea he’d been brewing from leaves (and on other things, hot things, to cool down the anguish, as one soothes a baby, shhhhh) — Sadie explains. “I wanted to call you,” she says to him, sheepish, “but I didn’t have a number. I only had this.” She holds up the card that he made for her birthday, on the one side a drawing in simple pastels, brown and violet and orange, her face vaguely, close up, the other his writing, happy birthday, baby s, which he’d sent to her wrapped in glycine via FedEx, having scribbled on the label the required return address. “So I made up that story about the paper, I mean, kind of, we did have to write one instead of an exam, and the professor said if we needed extra time after Friday, we could leave it with the doorman at her building in New York, but I mean, clearly, I lied,” with a quick glance at Taiwo, “because I didn’t think you’d come if I told you the truth,” with a quick glance at Kehinde, “and you’re, like, in hiding and no one can call you…” and more in this vein, not a word of which Kehinde can hear for the silence his mind sometimes lays on his tongue and his ears. Like a mother, protective, covering the ears of her infant as something too loud makes a sound in its space, or its eyes in the sunlight. Two soft hands of silence that rest on his mouth and his ears. “… Are you mad?” Sadie is frowning, at him, then at Taiwo. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Nothing,” says Taiwo, sipping tea.
“I’m not mad at you,” he says in his head.
“Why aren’t you talking?”
“I don’t know why,” he says in his head.
“He doesn’t know.” Taiwo nods to Sadie and gestures. “Keep going.”
“We haven’t even gotten to the bad part.” Sadie sighs. She looks at him pityingly. She looks like their father. The tilting-up eyes set in valleys of bone. He has always rather envied her this, and his brother, that they bear such a resemblance to the people they come from, Olu a darker-skinned Fola, classically Yoruba, Sadie a lighter-skinned Kweku, classically Ga. “Aboriginal intransigent” he calls this kind of feature set, the marker of a people with a sticky set of genes or else the product of a process of refinement and reinforcement over century upon century of mass reproduction. Ethiopian eyes, Native American cheekbones, the black hair/blue eyes of the Welsh, Nordic skin: it’s a record of something, he thinks, a visual record of the history of a People, capital P, in the world. That he can find, and finds familiar, the same squarish lip shape, the high-riding brow bone and regal hooked nose on his mother and brother as carved out of ivory by sixteenth century artisans on ritual masks, that the face keeps repeating, the one face, over and over, across ages and oceans and lovers and wars, like a printmaker’s matrix, a good one, worth reusing — is wondrous to Kehinde. He envies them this. His siblings and their parents belong to a People, bear the stamp of belonging.
He and Taiwo do not. Their features are a record, yes, but not of a People, the art history of Peoplehood, constant and strong, but the shorter, very messy, lesser history of people, small p, two at least, who one day happened to make love. As children they’d decided they were aliens, or adopted, notwithstanding the funny photo of their mother in the hall (Fola massively pregnant with a smiling Mr. Chalé and the pink twinned tomato she’d grown in his yard). It wasn’t until later, at thirteen, in Lagos, just arrived at Uncle Femi’s, ushered into the lounge, that they’d see, from the threshold, standing frozen with wonder, the face that theirs came from, there, white, on the wall.
• • •
The woman behind them, Auntie Niké, pushed them forward, her ruby red talons digging into their skin. “What is it?” she asked — rather, spat: hostile t sounds, a thick Lagosian accent, matching accent-piece scowl. She’d been pushing and pulling since they got to the airport, both stunned into silence she assumed to be awe, pulling their suitcases, “This way, darrings,” pushing them into the Mercedes, “don’t touch the leather with your fingers, ehn, they’re oily,” as they drove.
Lagos, through the window, was not as he’d pictured, not luscious, the tropics, bright yellow and green. It was gray, urban-gray, the sky smoggy and muted and clogged with tall buildings, a dirty Hong Kong. The highway from the airport was packed with huge lorries and rusting okadas and shiny Mercedes, all honking, one long steady whine of annoyance, the whole city singing the same nasal dirge. The palm trees looked weary. The harbor was gray, the same shade as the sky, full of barges and yachts. As they’d crossed the bridge, leaving the island of Ikeja for the mainland, Lagos Island, he glimpsed a large sign: THIS IS LAGOS. Not Welcome to Lagos, Lagos Welcomes You, but simply THIS IS LAGOS.
“This is Lagos,” Niké spat.
He found her grotesque, this never-heard-of Auntie Niké with her skin chemically bleached to a wan grayish-beige and a tawny-brown wig falling slick to her shoulders, red lipstick and blush bloodying cheekbones and lips. But the black eyes betrayed her — exposing some sorrow, collected and stagnant, rank puddles of grief — when she touched his cheek, pulling, “A pretty boy, ar’t you?” and he wasn’t afraid of her, not then, not yet.
They’d pulled into the gates of their uncle’s apartment, which from the outside didn’t look like much, four or five floors. It was not until they entered the foyer, then the elevator, that they understood the scale of things. The building was his. The whole building, four stories, belonged to the uncle who was waiting in the penthouse, they were told, going up. She pushed them off the elevator, “Leave your luggage for the houseboy,” with the uncontainable joy of a child on Christmas morning, “To the left, ehn, he’s waiting,” down the double-width hallway to doors standing open to opera, full blast.