I.
More a game than a question, he thinks. Then thinks maybe not much difference between games and questions. He decides to call it a thought experiment when he tries it out on a friend. If he can find a friend willing to play. Friend he wants to play with. He’s old. Few friends left. A stranger might do. Start the experiment by asking: If you were one of those in charge of running the world and you learned in secret from unimpeachable sources that life on earth is going to terminate abruptly, very soon, within weeks, months, six months at most, if such incontrovertible information existed and you had the power to reveal it or keep it hidden, would you inform the public.
Thought experiment goes on from there as one question leads to another. If, for instance, politicians in power were now certain that the deadly plague we are experiencing these days means that all life will soon, very soon cease, no exceptions, no reprieves, no second acts, no escape, would they announce or withhold the news. Why. Who would benefit or suffer. Would those leaders you imagine, or would you, yourself, be governed by a moral, ethical imperative that outweighs all other considerations: to tell the truth. Do you trust anyone in authority. How would people react if such awful news were made public. Would chaos erupt. Total anarchy, panic. A violent, uncontrollable, global orgy of immediate self-gratification. Everybody determined to snatch whatever they can before it’s too late. Constrained only by the fear of other people’s strength and violence. Law of the jungle prevailing—eat or be eaten. Or would some of us stay on the job, attempt to maintain a semblance, at least, of order.
He would argue that everybody, whether conscious of it or not, engages in a version of the thought experiment daily. Because, of course, deep down, we all are aware life is temporary, and that anybody is liable to die the next instant. Which means each morning as we awaken and open our eyes and begin sleepwalking into our usual routines, we choose either to confront or to suppress the dirty secret of mortality. For obvious reasons, most of us choose not to start the day by reminding ourselves of our utter vulnerability.
But issues raised by his thought experiment—death, time, truth, responsibility—impossible to ignore or resolve, he’s sure. Sure that his responses to those issues are unsatisfactory and incriminating. And just as sure that his evil habit of taking advantage of others won’t be cured by nattering away in so-called thought experiments. As the ultimate authority in the only world he can even pretend to run, he must admit, he reminds himself, that he exploits rather than shares his knowledge of the end. In this fragile place with everybody passing through faster than the speed of light, with the end never more than a heartbeat (or lack of one) away, what rules apply. None. Isn’t that what he has convinced himself of. No rule except pleasing himself. His actions speaking louder than any thought experiment’s words. Acting as if the certainty of everybody’s imminent disappearance exempts him from responsibility.
Time. Less of it the older he gets. Very little, next to nothing left now, so why does he worry so much more now about time. Why does time frighten him. More time or less time equally unsettling. Though it feels as if it unfolds endlessly, time always relative, unquantifiable. Always limited. Not guaranteed no matter how precisely people attempt to measure, ignore, worship, save, anticipate, or prolong it. Time not something he can count or count on. Time mysterious and brief as any next instant that he imagines will follow the briefly present instant already lost. He doesn’t possess time. Time possesses him. Locks him up like his brother serving a life sentence in prison.
Ahh . . . all these deaths. Ahhhhh . . . all these deadly days. He can’t help it. What’s inside him sneaks out loud as a pitiful groan. Are these dire days (didn’t his mother warn him they were near at hand) the Biblical Last Days. He’s positive lately, his feeling sharp and unambiguous as a nail through the bottom of a bare foot, that the Last Days have been entered upon, but, to spite the vanity of the virulent, all-conquering virus ravaging the city, he keeps his feeling secret.
Careful, Uncle. Careful you don’t get hit by a car, walking around up there in the big city having one those deep conversations like you do with your own self, she hollers at him. His smart pretty niece, a gift by way of a smart pretty niece, her mother. He missed them. Mother and daughter. Missed all his people. Only phone calls. Couple a month or so. His people far away. Too many gone for good now. Dead and gone. Seldom sees the ones left. Too bad. He likes his pretty niece. She likes him back, no doubt. She’d be a perfect partner for the thought experiment. Next time he sees her he’ll try to get her attention. She’s the sort of person who might understand what enormous power anybody holds in their hands when they consider seriously the issues his thought experiment examines.
But an irony lurks within the thought experiment, always threatening to emerge and spoil the fun. With the end just around the corner, why bother to share thoughts with anyone. Why pretend anybody’s responses are worth discussing. Or mean much. Or matter at all. Knowing the end on its way, and not knowing how to change it, what’s the point of making up more stories, writing them or reading them.
He instructs himself to ignore the irony and try to draw out his favorite niece anyway. Woo her to talk about what she might do if she knew the world about to end. Should he remind her of Rwanda. Warn her about the terrible old man. Colored man he followed home and watched undress.
Why Rwanda. Because the horrors, sweet girl, unleashed in Rwanda, expose the stakes, the power and chaos, that the thought experiment confronts. Rwanda a country whose authorities announced the end of the world coming immediately. In days or weeks at most, life on earth would be finished unless certain Rwandans, designated by Rwandan officials as the cause, as agents responsible for the dreadful obliteration of all existence, are removed immediately. Hurry, hurry, the government said. Not a moment to spare.
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An old, colored American man was summoned by Rwandan officials to do work in Rwanda, he would tell her. A man who is our ancient enemy but poses as a friend. For centuries, that man has been convinced of colored people’s worthlessness. It shames him and he is ashamed of us. A traitor. Fattens himself consuming the flesh of others. He can never be trusted. His treachery unforgivable.
When the man returned home from his mission in Rwanda, I crouched one night outside his window. Watched the old fucker undress. Dim light. No naked glare of a single, lynched bulb like burns in the cell of my brother, your uncle. Near darkness O.K. with me. Kept me invisible to him, and I sure did’t want to see too much of a deteriorating old man. His movements encumbered by age. Yet he also resembled an obedient child as he went about his business as kids do, attentively, earnestly, endeavoring to imitate their elders. To earn their praise, obtain their permission, the bounties they grant. Doomed forever to spy on others, spy on himself. To report progress or lack thereof to his superiors in their language he’d been taught to mimic.
In Rwanda, the old man had been first passenger off the plane. Got weeks of work in before the other commissioners disembarked and passed streamlined through customs. He was expected. No. He had been on the ground waiting. Been there before. Always. Never departed. His presence necessary. To authorize, facilitate slaughter. Argue justness. Righteousness. God’s will. Proclaim the urgent necessity to eliminate fellow-citizens. Not a visitor. Home. Home boy. Home again. Honorary Interahamwe. Impuzamugambi. Machete ready in hand. Government-sponsored radio voices in the run-up to the executions had borrowed his gravity. His long-dead, once youthful spirit pranced onstage at rallies. Cheerleading killings. His expensive shoes splashed through blood, splintered bones.
Weary and decrepit, back home long enough to forget he had ever left, the man hangs up a grayish suit, embalmed stiff by dry-cleaning fluids. Submits each gesture for scrutiny, approval. Brown man, colored like him. Sufferer. Suffered. He listens to him breathe, to sounds of him farting. Spares himself the smell. A coon-aged coon honored by being appointed to a delegation invited to investigate, twenty-five years after the fact, Rwanda’s genocide. Crimes of, by, for its people. Rewarded for his decades of labor in America’s gulags—hard work, impeccably high standards, a guard many years, then assistant warden, a warden twice, chair of board of pardons and parole, expert witness, judge, jury, executioner—you name it—old man had been there, done that. Loyal. Steady. Unflinching. Why wouldn’t Rwandans be happy to host him, toast him, solicit his advice and benefit from his lifetime of service, experience, knowledge, etc. . . . of incarceration, the incarcerated . . . etc. Him singled out, rewarded for achievement, for persevering in his chosen trade just as your uncle has been rewarded in the writing trade he practices, even granted permission to publish an occasional book. Lucky and colored . . . etc. Despite or because of color . . . etc. What’s the difference.
Should he tell his niece how sorely he was tempted to throttle the man that afternoon when he conjured up just the two of them alone in the men’s room of a Rwandan courthouse. Disappointed himself, when he didn’t finish him off then and there. When the hateful old man’s time up, wouldn’t his moans for morphine or death be music to my ears, he thinks. Mehr Licht the last words attributed to a dying Goethe. German words, niece, meaning “more light,” and still sounding a bit like Mehr Licht when translated into English. More dark, that old darkie will gasp. Darkness to hide him, to cover up his fears, his rage, his betrayals, his shame.
But no point, he had decided that day in a faraway courthouse, no point in killing a nasty old man. Tutsi corpses don’t return to life no matter how high the piles of Hutu corpses. Or vice versa.
At home in his bedroom, old-man eyes stare into emptiness between remembered/forgotten steps of untying his tie, loosening laces, removing shoes, rolling down crusty-toed, silk socks. Why commit a crime, he had asked himself. Risk his freedom killing the bastard when surely disease will rot his old body and perform a more impeccable, patient, subtle, sustained, excruciating assassination than he could ever hope to achieve.
Story of any country’s citizens massacring fellow-citizens is many stories coming true, he will say to his niece. Also many stories becoming untrue. Yours. Ours. Thought experiments. Many stories redone. Stories crucified. Halal. Kosher. Bled white. Sanctified. Eaten. Goodness born inside each person along with evil, my dear, but goodness doesn’t prosper like evil prospers. The woes an old, naked man—warden, keeper of the flame, keeper of coloreds, fellow-colored, colored fellow—has inflicted upon others defy words. Best revenge not to take his life, but to wish more years on him. Life everlasting interrupted daily, every hour on the hour, by death of one thousand self-inflicted cuts.
Maybe more mercy than he deserves, his niece or someone else might suggest. Too much mercy for a person who remains, until their dying day, willing to abuse others. How many times to please himself had he, like the old man, violated another person’s trust. Acted as if he knew the world going to end in a quick minute and no consequences that matter would follow his actions. As if whatever comes next could never matter more than the sweet pleasure of pretending no tomorrow for him or his victim to fret about. No questions asked. No hesitation. Just a game, after all.
Of course, more than contempt had motivated him to spy through a window on an evil old colored man fumbling around in a dark room. Whose story was he attempting to tell anyway. To whom. He already understood more than enough about the man. Knows him much too well. Bitter, bitter knowledge. Studies him because he fears him. And you should fear him, too, girl, he will say. Always, he will say. Beware. Beware. Sorry as I am to admit it, dear heart, yours truly is very much like him. Both of us men who should know better. No excuse. Way, way, way too greedy. Too busy. Way too selfish. Too accomplished at getting what we want. Everything. Nothing. No matter who or how many we destroy.
II.
Afew days ago on his early-morning walk—no risk of getting hit by a car, sweet niece—dawn and streets more quiet and deserted than usual, even at dawn, even during the unnatural calm of lockdown and sequestering the city has imposed upon its residents to slow the spread of an epidemic sickening and killing thousands. He’d encountered almost no people, no traffic. Nearly absolute silence on streets leading to the walkway along the East River.
Close to the water’s edge, he turned left, headed uptown, in the direction of Harlem, not on the paved, guardrailed, concrete walkway, but on a path through growing things—grass, bushes, shrubs, moss, flowers, weeds, trees—life someone had the good sense to preserve or plant and create park-like stretches paralleling the river. On his side of tall, black cyclone fences that protected tennis courts, running tracks and ball fields, he saw the same discarded paperback book he had been noticing for a couple days, a pale, bulky lump still lying there atop late-May grass, near the mud-colored path scuffed into brown earth by many, many footsteps, the skittering trail he was negotiating, only a bit wider than a shoe length, mile of path, improvised about a yard away from fifteen-foot-high black wire fences. Curiosity he had managed to resist on previous sightings won this time. He stopped, used a foot to turn it over, and discovered the book’s title, “Snow,” on its torn cover, a novel by coincidence he happened to have read, its author a famous Turkish writer, and he was trying hard to remember the writer’s name, remember more about the book, unable to take another step until he forced himself to remember more, embarrassed, ashamed when he couldn’t. Silence of the morning, stillness of the streets on his way to the East River all he could recall.
Then snow. Instantly the green grass, the brown earth, the book are buried under whiteness. Huge snowflakes filling the air around him. If it had been a scene he read in the novel’s pages, he might have dismissed it as “magical realism.” But no, it was not words. No. Snow present. Snow a deluge of giant flakes slowly descending, snow dropping into the East River, turning edges of water into icy sheets, snow beginning to obscure tall towers—most completed, some under construction, crowned by skeletal arms of cranes—looming a half mile away on the river’s opposite bank, snow falling until it buries that distant cityscape and all the buildings disappear.
Will he ever be able to express to her (or maybe she already understands—smart pretty niece by way of smart pretty niece—and maybe she will help him understand better) the painful complicity of inhabiting a world that holds his imprisoned brother, and holds another who is a prison.
III.
Not exactly reparations, I say to my brother during the second phone call to me he’s been permitted after a hearing that denied parole, an old colored man (is he a soul brother of the bête noire my dreams spy on) presiding. My brother turned down for the fifth straight year since he became eligible, after twenty-five years, to apply once a year for parole. Not exactly reparations, I smile and wag my head, though my brother can’t see me do it nor do I quite hear his little laugh nor see that smart-aleck smirk that wrinkles up my brother’s face since he was twelve. Silence on the other end of the phone line connecting us, him trapped inside, me trapped outside stone walls, but I keep talking, carefully of course, since our conversations are monitored and my words can be used against him. Say the story I saw on the NBC Nightly News not exactly reparations after four hundred years of damage, but maybe a step in the right direction. Whadda you think, man. Story the feel-good bit in these godawful times Lester always tacks on at the end of each broadcast. A project in a laundromat to teach preschool ghetto kids to read. Good idea, huh, though maybe a better idea, the best idea, just to stop pretending altogether they give a fuck. Excuse me. Give a damn. Probably my own bad mood as much as anything else, bro, but that piece made me so mad, so ashamed, I wanted to scream. Cry. Enslavement a terrible crime—just about everybody concedes that fact today—but all the victims and perpetrators dead, we’re told, if we ask. Not spoken about if no one asks. America’s gaping, cosmic black hole and here they come with another Band-Aid to patch it. Cringed when I saw those video clips of kids listening to grownups read, kids spozed to be learning to read inside some ugly fuck . . . damn laundromat in a raggedy-ass neighborhood. Let it bleed, I thought. Better to let it bleed. All of us falling one day, sucked into a black hole, but some of us encumbered with all the shit they’ve stolen will fall through faster, and the rest of us left behind, separated a blessed minute from those ruthless, greedy, toxic thieves at last, and maybe then at the end we might get a little smidgen of peace then.
Laundromat. Yeah. Yeah. Huge, barn-ass, noisy room and preschoolers stuck there anyway on wash day with mamas or grandmamas or aunts or big sis or whoever washes everybody’s clothes so why not. It’s available, cheap, plenty clients on hand regularly. Just bring in a couple volunteers and organize the locals, encourage them to read to the little burr-heads instead of just sitting around half the day smoking dope or doing nothing while all those machines rumbling, tumbling. Why not get the women involved who spawn too many colored kids. Teach them to sit their babies down and read to them instead of letting them run wild inside a filthy laundromat. And if mama missed that alphabet class in school, teach mama the alphabet, too. Makes perfect sense in a way. You know. Like, yes, please give our children a little extra head-start push. So niggers don’t fail because they start out—first day in kindergarten—far behind other kids. Except everybody knows ain’t no rule says niggers got to catch up. Four hundred years and we ain’t caught up yet.
Makes sense and no sense. Teaching ghetto kids to read a couple hours a week in some loud, crowded, funky laundromat, bro. As if it’s the best school the richest country on earth can afford for them. What kind of fucking catch-up is that. Four hundred years and counting of starting out unequal. That amounts to some serious left-behind. Four hundred years’ worth. And we spozed to catch up while our clothes getting clean. Why not slam up every single colored one of us into laundromats and lock the doors. Only let out a few, now and then. Ones who read well.
IV.
She sticks the check from her uncle back in its envelope, envelope in her bag to deposit next day in the bank after work. Money her uncle sent for her other uncle, the one she’s seen only a few times in life, and never outside prison, where he’s been since before she was born, money her uncle had asked her to begin taking charge of this year, money in a lump sum he sends for her to dispense to his brother, her uncle said, both to connect her more closely with her imprisoned uncle and to encourage more visits to the prison, his hope. Requesting that she dole out to his brother in small, regular amounts the money he sends her, either when she visits and can put cash directly into a prison account or JPay it through Internet, the second option equally available to her college-educated uncle wherever he is, she’s tempted to remind him, though he always claims the Internet “befuddles him.” Smallish portions, he schools her. Best not to forward too much money at one time because my younger sibling has a fondness for gambling and we don’t want to tempt him, do we, dear heart, my uncle said. Little bro’s fondness for risk and his boundless optimism insure he’ll keep chasing after other folks’ bad money until he loses all the little taste of good money in his hand, my uncle says, talking over the phone in that odd, elaborate way of his she thinks he must be as fond of as he claims his younger brother fond of gambling.
Her uncle had asked her once, Do you truly believe you’re colored. Hey. Don’t be looking at me all cross-eyed, young lady. A serious question. Do you, we, all of us still believe we are colored just because they keep telling us we are. Colored. Different. A damned shame.
Her odd uncle, book writer, wanderer, seldom in town. Her dead mom’s uncle, really, Grandma’s older brother. Her dead mom her grandma’s eldest daughter, the man’s actual niece, and that makes her what—great-niece, niece-in-law, second niece—whatever to this man she’s standing next to on her grandmother’s porch and always called Uncle since she was a baby, the wannabe front porch not much larger than a final step up to Grandma’s house. Her house, too. For many years, she and her mom, after her beautiful mom got divorced, got sick, living there with Granddaddy and Grandma, her grandma who still misses a lost daughter seven years gone, mourns her lost daughter as fiercely, unconsolably, it seems and does not seem possible, as she does, daughter of that lost daughter who misses and mourns her mom, yes she does, still does very much, especially now, on this narrow, crooked front porch where she stands in the dark after family had gathered to talk and eat and drink themselves holiday-silly and each one finally at this late hour has had more than enough and begins peeling away into smaller family groups. Or a few, like her, alone, though her uncle beside her now, middle of the night, isn’t it, and dangerous out there in the streets, and Uncle makes it his habit, whenever he’s around, to escort each solitary family female outdoors, a sentinel on the porch until she’s locked in her car, motor running, lights on and car rolls off, up or down the dark, steep hillside upon which his sister’s house perches. Uncle there, bodies lightly touching when his arm goes round her shoulders and he leans down, kisses her cheek, and if her cheek just a wee bit higher or he leaned lower, his lips might have brushed hers, but didn’t, no lip brushing because she’s tough like her mom, though also unafraid like her, and believes, like her mom did, neither in sin, nor in everlasting romance of any mouth, uncle or anybody else on her mouth, knows better, raised better by her dead mom who nods gently, whispers best not, of course not, girl, best go on and get your behind down those treacherous slabs of broken concrete that serve as steps up and down from the sidewalk to your grandma’s red front door. Glad now she chose sneakers and jeans not heels and dress for the family party. Don’t break your butt, girl, careful, careful now, get yourself down step by step till your feet on solid street and your car door locked, and you got yourself sitting behind the wheel, girl.
Her uncle tall. Not as tall as tall, gorgeous Riley. Thirty smiling foot of Riley in skimpy running shorts, T-shirt, fanciest of training shoes postered for months up on a wall next to Kmart entrance to the mall. Liked Riley lots. Maybe still with him. Maybe if he shared fewer of those dumb notions guys his age, especially fine ones like finest Riley, share. Gimme some. Get me some. Cop me a piece of pussy. What in the world did they think we carry around down there between our legs, her mom asked once, think we can break off and wrap it up and send it home with them or they can grab and show off to their friends.
Her uncle had asked her, If you found out, a secret, no doubt about it, world going to end very, very soon, would you tell other people. With that knowledge buzzing around in your brain, my dear, what would you do. Then her uncle had stopped talking. Stopped explaining experiments or games, stopped asking questions. Looked at her. Waited. Waited. As if he expected an answer. Since she had no idea what to reply, she asked him, What would you do, Uncle. He smiled at her, then closed his eyes and whispered, If I knew sure enough the world about to end, think I’d probably kidnap you, girl, and run far away with you, and my, my, wouldn’t that be a trip, and wouldn’t people talk.
And she had smiled back, smile deep as his smile because she believed her old uncle just talking, just teasing. Long, long way for both of them to go. ♦
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