What do you do when someone quotes you back to yourself, practically speaking, more or less, without knowing it? A little knot has lodged itself in my esophagus, enough to breathe, but not to speak, not for a minute.
And what about you? I manage to ask, finally.
What about me? He could go on talking like this for hours, I’m thinking, extemporizing this way. He’s leaning into it. I couldn’t leave, he says. Even when I had the chance. Drawn back like a homing pigeon. From wherever I happened to land. Even Bangkok. And I love Bangkok. But wherever else I was, I just felt eventually like the earth was going to swallow me up and bring me back here. I just had to go deeper and deeper into Baltimore. Bind myself to Baltimore. Hopeless and fucked-up as it was. But then I realized something, and it’s business school 101. One man’s vacant lot is another’s man’s gold mine. Absence and anonymity: that’s the twenty-first-century recipe for success. I was going to be a black man one way or another, but I wasn’t going to just up and disappear because my city’s off the map. Because, truthfully, the world is going to come to Baltimore one day. The world is Baltimore.
Hold on. I scrabble in my bag for my notebook. Let me write this one down, okay? I’ll have to use that line in the book.
He loosens his collar and glances at me sideways, as if we’ve become sparring partners and he’s waiting for an unexpected move.
I didn’t make that up, he says slowly. Alan did.
When was that? I never heard him say that.
Later. After you left. When Cheryl used to bug him about applying to college. He would say, I don’t need to go anywhere. The world is Baltimore.
I stare at him, my mind buzzing with the white noise of the traffic below, for a moment not quite digesting the words.
What, you mean, after he was back from rehab? When I was away at Amherst?
You thought we never saw each other, Kelly?
He never mentioned anything about it.
Maybe he was afraid to freak you out. He knew I was changing, that’s for sure. Changing into what, of course, is a different story. But he knew something was happening.
My chest has become a giant ticking clock, a wound spring releasing itself in tiny increments.
Where was this? At his house?
I don’t remember. Who cares? I saw him there; he came downtown; we had lunch together; we hung out in Fell’s Point a couple of times at night. He needed help. I tried to help. I took him to a methadone clinic. Hell, I took him to get an AIDS test. This really bothers you that much?
It’s just all news to me. He never told me that he’d seen you. Aren’t I allowed to be hurt by that? It’s a betrayal. What else could it be? I wanted to know what happened to you. I was curious. I didn’t abandon you; you abandoned me.
Isn’t that a little strong, Kelly? Abandoned? I don’t recall you wanting to hang out so much senior year. After the band broke up. I don’t recall you leaving me a lot of messages. Did you ever ask him about me, directly? Did you ever mention me in his presence?
How was I supposed to know he had seen you? Anyway, it wasn’t the first thing on my mind. He was dying.
He wasn’t dying. He died.
However you want to put it.
No, he says. It’s different. His death was a discreet event. Not natural. Suicide is never natural.
Didn’t he ever say, you should call Kelly? Didn’t he want to know why you’d disappeared like that?
Haven’t you been listening? He detaches himself from the railing, finally, and begins walking back to Pierson Street, his street, pumping his legs, hardly looking back to see if I’m following. He knew there was something going on with me, he says. He kept talking about my journey. To tell the truth, it bugged me. All this New Age stuff he picked up from NA. The hero leaving home. The three obstacles. Growth. God, he went on and on about growth. Of course he was right. I was able to see that, later. After I stopped being angry. I realized he never really wanted me to be like him.
It took me a long time to see that.
He gives me a look, over his shoulder: you, too? And then, with recognition, or pretending recognition, he nods.
I mean, he says, in a sense you could say it was Alan that gave me permission. He opened that door. He said, there’s more than one way to live. He was into radical solutions, after all. No halfway measures.
No, that’s true. No halfway measures.
—
Rolling toward us on Howard Street, slowly, deliberately, is a Baltimore Police squad car, with two shadowy figures underneath the mirroring glare of the windshield. The driver’s-side window rolled down, a beefy, red-haired forearm adjusting the mirror. And without touching his body, without looking over at him, I feel a change in the envelope of energy around Martin, a crackle of static electricity: and I draw up my breath, stiffen my spine, and open my hands, keeping them in plain sight, keeping my gaze straight ahead, an unworried, unselfconscious man, as I imagine a black man would always have to be, though I’ve never imagined it before in quite this way. It occurs to me that in a way, on this street, in this odd place where pedestrians rarely stray, I am his alibi. There is a percentage by which a white man and a black man walking together by Tilson Falls Park are less likely to be stopped than a black man walking alone. You could do a study. You could measure it. This is the calculus that a black man lives with every day. This is a theory I’ve always understood but never experienced, not once. And, too, it occurs to me, as it should have, long ago, that there’s a reason Martin puts on a suit and a silk tie every day when he leaves the house, whereas I, in my current state, have worn the same hooded sweatshirt, the same jeans, the same black Converse, for three days running. Were I a black man, it occurs to me, working or not, in this city, I would have a dry-cleaning bill. And I want to turn to him, though I won’t, and say, I understand the part about hypotheticals.
I realized something recently, I tell him, instead. Two times nineteen is thirty-eight. We’ve outlived Alan by exactly one lifetime.
Didn’t he always say that he could die at sixteen? Martin says. Having lived a long and happy life? That was his downfall, that Ian Curtis crap. Self-pity. Self-aggrandizing pity. It made him vulnerable. He didn’t value life enough. He just gave it away.
Deep in my chest cavity, in some unmapped region, some imaginary town down a side road from the pancreas to the bile duct, a church bell is tolling, a deep, sonorous vibration, traveling across a lake, up forested hillsides. Something is waking up. A disturbance, an alarm. He knows something. What does he know?
What’s your point?
He stares at me and begins walking even faster, almost at a jog. We’re going somewhere with this story, I can’t help thinking, and he doesn’t want to get there, either. But there’s no other way.
I don’t have a point, he says. Just a good memory.
22
Recording #4 (1:04:34)
Source:
(1) TDK Chrome cassette tape, 90 minutes, condition —
(2) Sony cassette tape, 60 minutes, condition ++
Labeled both tapes side one “Tape 4 PRIVATE DO NOT DESTROY” “Tape 5 PRIVATE DO NOT DESTROY”