James Sallis - Eye of the Cricket

But you're going to be okay, Lewis. We both are.

You've been here just over three weeks. Don't suppose you remember much of it. Police picked you upfinally. You'd been sitting on curbs outside Cooter Brown's and a string of bars up on Oak berating custom-el's as they came out, demanding what you kept calling donations, going in these places and, before they heaved you back out, grabbing half-finished beers and drinks off the tables.

Sound familiar?

You still feel like you're underwater looking out, what you told me a few days ago, it's because the doctors have you on some pretty heavy sedation. You've been off IVs a couple of days now. You were so dehydrated when you got here you could barely pull your tongue away from the roof of your mouth. Another day or two now, you might even be able to keep food down again. Be a while before you're up for boudin or grillades, I'm afraid.

Much of those last weeks come back to you?

Well, maybe some of it will, in time. You never know. What does it matter? You're here, you survived. That's the important thing.

Okay. You're right, it does matter. And not only to you.

You sure you want to hear this again now? I've already told you twice.

Three, four in the morning, I had a phone call. Dan the Man two flights clown, I hear him stomping up stairs like he's driving railroad spikes with his feet, eveiyone in the house awake for sure and lying there listening to this, no way anyone's gonna sleep through it. Then there's this polite knock at the door: You got a call Brother.

Brother's what most people call me here. Started out like so many things do as a joke, someone going Hey, bro, because I was black, someone else picking it up, calling me Brother Theresa.

I'd never had a call before.

Guy on the other end tells me his name is Richard Garces.

No, I didn't know him, only met him last week. But he told me how over the years he'd built up this loose network of people like himself, social workers, mental-health nurses and techs, people he'd talk to over the net on a regular basis, and how some years back he'd started hearing things he got curious about. So he pushed a little, asked a few strategic questions and kept his ears open, started putting it together.

Hairiest thing he ever did, he said, not telling you. But he had to figure it was my own life-that I had my reasons which Reason could not know, and so on.

But that night on the phone he told me things had gone upside down. "Lew might have said bouleverse." And that he thought I should know.

Ten minutes tops, I was on my way. They were holding you at University Hospital pending court hearing. Don Walsh came in not long after. Didn't say much. Just shook hands, a little sadly I thought (I didn't learn about Danny till later), and introduced his friend from the DA's office, woman named Arlene. Arlene's wearing jeans and a pink dress shirt with a man's tie at half-mast and a leather fanny pack. Steps through, around and past legal formalities like she's off somewhere else reading a book or having a good meal this is so simple, and before any of us know it we're out the other side. Standing on the sidewalk with this miserable six-in-the-morning rain slopping down us and into clogged gutters. Whole city starting to smell like wet sheep.

You and Deborah been together long?

Just wondered. She was there too by then. Asked if it were possible the two of you might be alone awhile. She had her car, she'd bring you round to the Center.

Three weeks, or just over. You came in on a Sunday. It's Monday now. Late afternoon.

Funny. I never imagined I might be sending out smoke signals, to Richard Garces or anyone else. Makes meremember what you wrote: "Signals we're set here to read."

I did keep track of your books. Every new one that came out I'd read it, thinking: Okay, he's managed to pull it off one more time. I'd try to figure out the people I knew, which of your apartments you were describing, the bars and restaurants and women you wrote about. The Old Man's still my favorite.

You all right? Need to rest? That's some strong stuff you're behind right now. Know how it is.

Maybe later we'll have the chance, be able, to talk about all that.

Remember how when I was a kid you used to recite the prologue to Tlw Canterbury Tales to me in Middle English, tell me about Rimbaud? Je est un autre. You must become a seer. Ilfaut que vous changer votre vie.

Okay, changiez. Present subjunctive. Whatever. Hey: I was close.

I used to think a lot about that story you were always telling. How back home your father took you to breakfast one morning at Nick's, on the levee by theriver, and how once you'd ordered and got your plates through a side window into the kitchen and were sitting there on the steps of the old railway station, watching all the white folks so warm at the tables inside and balancing greasy paper plates on knees shaky with cold he told you that no matter what you did-raise his children for him, fight his wars for him, keep his economy afloat-to the white man you'd always be invisible.

Mirrors weren't made for the likes of us, you said.

But of course I knew there was no way I was going to be kept away from those mirrors. Mirrors, hell. I'd be on the covers of their goddamned magazines.

We're kids, stuff like that goes through us like water. What's my old man know? Or your old man? Any old man. Things are different now. World's different. I'm different. Sure.

So I go on readingmy books and then one day, it seems all at once now when I look back on it, how the hell did this ever happen, there I am, in Europe, halfway to being an old man myself.

Biggest damn mirrors you ever saw. Here's everything I've been taught is most important, everything I've made so much a part of my own life, of what I am. Eiux›pean ait, European history, European literature, eveiything that defines the cultiue I live in. Put out a hand and you touch it Knock over some monument of imaging intellect if you're not careful.

Then one day I realize I can't see myself in those mirrors anymore. I'm simply not there. Not there at all, however hard I stare.

Because my skin is black? Because I'm not European? You tell me. I haven'tfigured it out. But everything I'd based my life on was suddenly gone.

I came back to the States only to findthat this had all become every bit as alien to me now as Paris, Berlin or London, Brittany with its cattle, Kent with its sheep.

The whole country was forts now. Fort Lakeside, Fort Prytania, the Walled City of Metairie. Malls and parking lots and fast-food chains. Everybody zipping past at forty, fifty miles an hour like trapped flies banging against windows. Everybody shut away in his own little world.

And the more you're alone, the more natural seems the importance, the supremacy, of self. Other lives become little more than contrails dissolving on the sky.

Somehow, I knew, I had to break out of that tyranny. Get the windows open, learn to move slowly again, break the mirrors, embrace others' lives.

I called you twice, but couldn't figure out what to say. I waited till the machine cut off, then hung up myself. But you know that, of course. You wrote about it.

I've been here at the Center almost the whole time. Here and other places like it. Found out pretty quickly that the pain I carried around with me, thought I couldn't bear-compared with others', that pain was nothing.

These faces, they're the mirrors I can see myself in.

Every one of them.

"Yours more than most, though," my son had said there in the He'p-Se'f Center out in Gentilly, on Elysian Fields, New Orleans' own Champs-Elysees, for which (like so many other things in the city) there had been all manner of grandiose plans, none of them ever within sniffing distance of fruition, the street, built at great expense, all its life little more than an interminable bus stop lined with rathole cafes and cut-rate stores, step-up cottages with cheap cement steps and gaps between thin shingles of siding hurriedly hammered on, nothing at all by way of internal walls.