He’s got a friend, though.
A friend’s not a job. Job’s not your mom taking her babies out of Baltimore.
A fire engine races by on 29th Street, barking and screeching, sending a flock of tiny birds up into the air, where they form a cloud, a disk, and then drop all at once back onto the grass. Davis discreetly flicks through the messages on his phone.
Where else’d you go to college? he asks me.
Oh — Amherst. You know where that is? In Massachusetts?
Where Emily Dickinson’s from, he says, expressionless. We just did a unit on her. That’s a real place? I mean, it’s still there?
Yeah. Actually, it hasn’t changed that much. The buildings, I mean. It’s still a quiet little town. Great school, though. Really small classes. Why, I’m thinking, can’t I squeeze out a sentence longer than three words? Nobody falls through the cracks there, I say. You can’t be anonymous. You get all the attention you could ever want. On the flip side, you’re stuck with the same four hundred people for four years.
He gives me a look halfway between astonishment and disgust.
Four hundred people in the whole school?
Davis, you have got to understand, Martin says. The really good places are small for a reason. Lots of advantages to that. Plus, it’s a tiny school sitting on a mountain of money. Get into Amherst and they’ll give you a full ride. Books, travel, everything. It’s the all-star league of the mind. Here, show Kelly that video you made.
I deleted it.
BS, man. It’s on YouTube.
My data plan’s off.
Okay. Fine. Martin takes out his phone, taps the screen, and hands it to me. I bookmarked it, he says. It’s Davis in front of a wavering camera, in an alley, or an abandoned lot, with two girls flanking him in matching black hoodies and pink wide-frame glasses. The audio isn’t tracked with the video, and I can hardly hear the beat through the phone’s tinny speakers, but I can hear Davis’s piping, slightly flat falsetto: I willed my keepsakes signed away — what portion of me I could make — assignable and then there interposed a fly — with blue uncertain stumbling — buzz between the light and me—
That was his class project, Martin says. For the Dickinson unit.
He’s gay, I’m thinking. For what good reason? Because he sings too high? Because he’s secretive and drawn into himself, because of the way he folds his legs, the delicacy of his fingers tapping the table like a keyboard? He’s gay, and Martin doesn’t know. Is it true? Would it matter, even if it was? All Martin’s trying to do is get him through twelfth grade. And give him the chance to unmake himself.
By the time he’s in college — say, three years from now — Martin will no longer be just Martin. The truth will be out. And another avenue of unmaking will be open.
I look at Martin’s face, and at Davis’s.
The truth is, I’m thinking, it could be almost anyone. There’s a fly beating against the glass of this thought. If the hole is deep enough. If the wanting is bad enough. Did I think we were special? Was Martin special?
Mom’s asking when I’ll be back, Davis announces, chin buried in his chest.
Okay, Martin says. Got to clean all this up first. Want some crabs? There’s extra.
Mom does that, he says. Cleans them and all. Makes crab cakes.
Stay just as you are, I want to tell him. Don’t go anywhere. Don’t go.
20
The second night of the L.A. riots, April 30, 1992, was also the night of L’Arc-en-Ciel’s biggest show, at the Spring Fling at Johns Hopkins. We were supposed to show up for sound check two hours early, but by four-thirty we were stalled in Alan’s living room with the TV on; our amps and cases stacked in the hall, my station wagon unloaded. Reginald Denny’s beating — the white man yanked from his cement truck, kicked, struck with a brick, left lying with his long blond hair splayed in blood on the asphalt, all filmed in the shaky lens of a helicopter camera — played in an endless loop on all four stations.
Alan sprawled across the couch, guitar in his lap, fingering chords silently and staring at the set list he’d written inside the back cover of Heidegger: Basic Writings. Martin had gone to the bathroom and never returned. I sat curled up in an easy chair, smoking one of Ayala’s Camel Lights from a pack she’d left on the mantelpiece. I hadn’t smoked since one obligatory trial cigarette in sixth grade; in fact I hated smoking, was opposed to it, considered it a form of mass corporate poisoning, an addiction factory, but I needed something to ease my ratcheting heart, and we didn’t have any weed in the house, and drinking was out. It was bad luck to drink before shows. And in any case my personal feelings about smoking, as about anything else, had never seemed more irrelevant, more like piss in the ocean.
I had been sitting, immobilized, for the better part of an hour, watching plumes of black smoke rising from South Central, lines of policemen with shields and shotguns, spidery looters carrying stereos and sacks of diapers through shattered windows. I had a splitting headache. I wanted to break my sticks, take a kitchen knife and slash my drum heads, or pour gasoline over the whole kit and set it alight, if that wasn’t such a cliché. Instead, I concentrated on each inhalation, trying to measure out a lungful of smoke, swallowing the dry cough and the urge to spit.
We can’t just play a fucking show, I said to Alan. Right? I mean, what do they want us to say? Happy fucking spring?
He got up and turned off the TV.
What the hell are you doing?
Enough, he said. Enough is enough. Just sit tight for a second.
I stood up to stretch my legs, and saw a flicker of movement in the window: Martin was standing on the front lawn. He’d taken his shirt off and hung it around his shoulders, and he stood, hands on hips, staring up at the mulberry tree that hung over the side of the house, now just beginning to bloom.
When Alan returned he held out a record for my inspection: Fugazi’s Repeater, lyric sheet turned up. “Styrofoam,” he said.
There are no more races to be run
There are no numbers left to be won
We are all bigots so filled with hatred
We release our poisons like Styrofoam
This is what we’re going to do, he said. To start with. Hold still. He popped the cap off the Sharpie and wrote something in block letters on my forehead. Now you do me, he said. Martin! Come here!
• • •
Bigot, Alan’s forehead said.
Mine said Racist.
Martin’s: Burn This.
The songs we played, without more than a fifteen-second pause in between, were our angriest, loudest, most dissonant. That was alclass="underline" three songs, and then two tall guys rushed the stage; one threw Alan off, into the crowd, and the other leaped over the guitar amp and then tripped on the drum riser and knocked three teeth out on the edge of the bass drum.
It happened, as they say, in slow motion, in a kind of sludgy, badly colored filmstrip: Alan balling up around his guitar in midair; Terc kicking a third guy off the stage as he tried to climb up; a complete stranger running right at me, for me, fists outstretched, and falling, and rolling across the stage with his hands wrapped around his face, blood running through his fingers. My crash cymbal was in my lap, the snare under my feet; a guitar cord whipped through the air; Martin’s bass cabinet groaned as someone knocked it over. Sirens; squawking megaphones; I pushed the hardware away and scooted off the stage to the left, thinking I would circle around and find Alan out front, and promptly, as I reached the stairs, tripped myself, and planted my elbow in a row of stage lights. I still have that scar.