Victor LaValle - Ecstatic

Once the stage cleared the thirty-nine-year-old guerrilla hurled balloons up there. She was right at the front, but no one bothered her. Afraid to tackle the saboteur.

Her friends joined. Four throwing balloons and three facing the audience, waving their can-horns threateningly. They didn’t have to. Everyone was scared of them. Even me.

The balloons wobbled heavily. When they hit they splattered greenish grease across the stage. Five balloons. Then fifteen. Great globs of oil stained the boards.

I tried to comfort Grandma, but she didn’t want it. I wondered if she’d seen me open the double doors. It was her hearing, not her sight, that sucked. I touched her shoulder and she pushed my hand away. Head forward, screaming, — Nabisase! into her lap.

Around us whole families stood to run and sat again. They didn’t know what to do.

I wished I had Uncle Arms in my hands so I could squeeze his lying neck. This was monstrous. I regretted helping.

When I went to the door a second time it was because I knew that I heard knocking.

It wasn’t forceful and I thought of Uncle Arms’s rapping from the other side.

My lightest touch made the doors move. I said, — Uncle Arms, I want to talk to you.

But he wouldn’t have heard me over the echoing chorus in the room. I was surprised the can-horns weren’t hoarse by now. If anyone but Maximilian was speaking I couldn’t hear it. All other voices became traffic in the auditorium. A long vowel sound; a cloud of despair; or one ecstatic outburst from the mouths of God.

One door slipped back three inches. A light was on in that service hallway now. 10,000 watts. It was a clear, vivid, luminous, incandescent, flaring flaming fucking corridor now. I covered my eyes. Twenty-five more anarchists ran past me, into the auditorium.

We should have stayed in Rosedale. I could have cheated fate. It was November 12th. I remember.

Nabisase found Grandma.

I heard my sister calling a name, but hardly recognized it as my own.

Grandma and Nabisase were to my left, twenty feet. I held the door open with my hand; I was framed by the hallway light. Easy to see me. And to see them. Grandma in her seat. Nabisase kneeling in the aisle. Both of them looking at me. Misunderstanding.

My eyes began to flutter as I let go of the door. It shut. My family was in the auditorium, but I was stuck outside. Not alone. There was one last figure here, wide as an oven and twice as tall. It wouldn’t let me in its cabin, but had come to take me now. It touched both sides of my face with its very small hands. The taste of salt water was on my tongue from crying. I opened my mouth, tried to talk, but there was a lion’s egg in my throat. Two of us, in the service hall, became entangled.

Ledric Mayo could go ahead and die because I wasn’t going to help him. I was saying that to myself the whole seven-hour drive from Lumpkin, Virginia. If Nabisase and Grandma had been speaking to me I’d have told them that very same thing.

It’s what I told myself as I called in sick at Sparkle on Monday morning.

Then again at noon when I went outside to do yard work because I just couldn’t sleep. To illustrate the mood of my family: I hid the kitchen knives and that’s no joke.

— Aye nigga.

— Get that nigga!

— Get that nigga to stop cutting them bushes!

Three times Pinch yelled at me and three times I ignored him. He was with a few other guys in the yard next to mine, on the front steps of Candan’s house.

Pinch stood up when I didn’t heed his command to stop chopping at my hedge and he walked out then around into my driveway. Now I couldn’t ignore him because his beefy hand was on my shoulder. I let go of the trigger of the hedge clipper and the high — chip— chip— noise faded away.

— Those bushes never did anything to you.

He and I surveyed the hedge, which ran the length of my driveway. Twenty-five feet before it reached the backyard, where we had a less formal row of shrubs.

I was proud of myself because I’d really gone hell with the cutting. It wasn’t fair that in the summer this bramble was going to bloom into one impossible green afro which would have to be trimmed every two weeks and yet it wasn’t even really our property. The damn thing was growing from Candan’s side. The President was the one who’d planted it, so why did I have to tend one half of its features.

— That’s called being neighbors, said Pinch.

There were plenty of other reasons to be agitated, but the one that irked me most was Mr. Ledric Mayo. I really didn’t see how I could go administer to an idiot who’d poisoned his own stupid self.

The two other guys, Candan one of them, stood in Candan’s yard but came closer to disapprove of me from fewer feet away. Through the tindersticks of this bare winter hedge I watched them shake their heads.

Candan said, — Now that’s too much, Anthony. Next time you don’t have to cut a lot.

Who knows. Maybe the guy spoke to me that way because he truly meant to be kind, but it was the tone one takes with a guy who separates clear and colored glass for a living.

— You took the top two feet off that thing, Pinch said. The President’s not going to be to happy about it.

— He’s no one’s boss, Candan said quickly.

Even I was surprised to hear him sound so ferocious.

Then the President came round the corner in his Lincoln Town Car.

His Town Car was a big mess; not even old; a ’94 model, but damn that front end was battered. The headlights were held by gray duct tape. One of the rear-door windows was veiny from having half-shattered.

Pinch smiled. — Candan, you tell the President what you just told us.

The guy next to Candan was as fat as me. Out in Queens this wasn’t as rare as the Surgeon General would wish. It was like, say, semi-rural Pennsylvania. I am the unattractive America.

The President didn’t make it easy on his car, weaving like he did. He bumped against curbs a couple of times.

Going twenty-five miles an hour and without once tapping a brake the President spun that black car to the right just as he reached home. As the car entered the driveway it bumped one of the poles of their fence, making it shake rattlesnake-loud.

The President was not a drunk. It wasn’t alcohol making him weave. — Youngbloods! The President yelled happily. He rolled down the electric passenger-side window, but still sat in the Town Car. Candan and the fat guy were on one side of the hedge, Pinch with me on the other.

Candan spat.

The car was turned off.

Out stepped the President in a turquoise track suit.

It was his eyes that were wrecked. I had never seen them this close before. They went in two directions and neither was straight ahead. His driver’s license had gone out of style three years ago, but try telling him to renew it. Men never believe their powers will fail.

— Youngbloods, he said again.

Pinch smiled first. — How you, Mr. Jerome?

He shrugged. The President was that kind of man who meant to be weary, no matter. If he was in bed he’d say his back hurt from being prone then when on his feet he’d swear the most he wanted was to spread out on a board to sleep. The President said, — They got me on the run, Chester. They got me out of breath.

Candan walked toward the car without greeting his father.

— I got the damn car keys! C.D. Come back over here. Where you been hiding? the President asked me.

— Took my family away for the weekend.

— How far? he asked.

— Viriginia. Seven hours’ drive. We got back at four this morning.

— Are you all here? Candan asked.

— Where else would we be?