Jeffery Allen - Song of the Shank

She informs Mr. Hub about their luggage waiting down in the vestibule. Okay squeezes out of his eyes faster than his mouth. He holds out a new key to her. You’ll be needing this, he says.

She takes the shiny new key, wondering how it confirms or contradicts his theory of contraction and expansion.

He starts back down the stairs, Tom still, waiting. Only when Mr. Hub’s footsteps have died away does he move, half-stumbles half-dances into the apartment. Continues on, the fingers of one hand touching the wall, a map to orient him, the carpet muting the sound of his and her feet.

They gain the sitting room. Using the candle, she lights a lamp and steps to the center of the chamber, surprised to find that the entire space has been dramatically transformed into a cube of dazzling white. In their absence someone — Mr. Hub? — had entered the apartment and liberally coated the walls in several layers of fresh wash. The room seems otherwise undisturbed, furniture and lamps collecting dust and spiderwebs. Tom’s piano is the dominating object, black and shining (had Mr. Hub polished it?), rising like some rocky formation — a butte or cliff — out of the carpeted floor. Overall, the room produces (the long view) a strange impression, spacious (airy) but subdued, because of the limited light, the shadows, black vectors. The first thing she’ll have to do is to open all the windows, for the apartment has not been allowed to breathe for months now.

We have returned, she thinks. Feels her body subsiding to the calm thrill at being home.

Tom gives her a sudden and delighted embrace, squeezing her to his steeping softness, her body crushed against his. The back of his jacket is wet with sweat, and his body reeks of coal and exhaustion. He speaks into her neck.

Lait , please.

A clean form in her line of sight: Tom seated on the piano stool, arms crossed at his waist, clutching the corners of his body (elbows), guarding his borders, trying to remember where he is. He is in a bad fix, dejected, has been for days, since their return. Has seen reason to do little more than position his slack pounds on the stool, head bowed, the piano blankly waiting for him. No music has broken from his fingers for hours, having long since moved away from the morning’s mazurkas, inventions, and variations. The only sound that of her struggling to remain upright on the thickly upholstered settee, along whose velvety seat she has been sliding all afternoon. All of the furniture feels wet — the room filled with the pungent smell of salt, scales, and sand — as if deep in the insides of something living. Sitting with her feet in water hour after hour, that dark expanse of carpeted floor beneath her, she could not have gauged with any accuracy the duration of the silence. (What is it she wants to say?) Sunlight expanding and contracting with passing clouds, creating the feeling that the room is a great bellows, opening and closing around them. The whole while her own quiet voice carrying across this fluidity of space, nothing to answer to, its sound coming back at her again and again, never failing to make her feel useless and alone, at fault, as if they have both failed. A gradual falling away of words until no words at all. This is just how he is, mute and inaccessible, he looks flat and unreal, like a silhouette cut from paper, the resident shadow flickering in and out of vision, lips folded, biting something back, and she must suffer the effort of watching him. She smiles to comfort him, an instinctive but utterly useless response. Strange how she still slips up even after so many years. Of course, he can’t see the smile, can’t even guess at her expression, since all he knows is confined within the reach of his fingers. Other acts of kindness surface in her mind but she knows better than to try. (Her claim on honesty.) Only Time will put everything to rights.

He shifts his bulk on the stool, and she bobs slow passage across the room, trawling past the piano’s oblong front to windows that cut the sky into four sparkling pieces. Where sea and boats can be had. Why this feeling of out of placeness? She lifts one window as high as it will go and props her elbows on the sill, upper body on the other side, head lowered. What is it that she hopes to see? Edgemere perhaps, but the dazzling light hides the island from view although she knows it is out there only a few miles away. Is Edgemere where Tom belongs? Would he find life on the island with other black people more suitable? The urge to take him there sometimes comes over her. (Admit it.) However, the world below her window (the city) is absolute in both its certainties and its dangers.

She thinks of her life with Tom as necessary, pressed on her. Not that her situation is all bad since there is the music to console and comfort her. (When he plays.) And when she gets her fill of his company, when she needs to put some distance between herself and Tom, she can put her head outside like this. She compels her aching chest to hold in lungfuls of pure ocean air and lose them quietly, breath rattling along her ribs. Her unbound hair drops, thick, flying, far short of the street five stories below. Empty distance. Nothing touching. Nothing close. (Is that what this is about, things falling short?) Perhaps it is best that way. Birds dive close to the water, too close, catch the currents, carried under. (This detail strikes her as excessive, pure invention.) The boats — white triangles, tiny pillars of black smoke — going backward now, like retracted thoughts, half-told secrets.

She remembers it this way, how she came to on the settee, faint moonlight floating in the air, unsure what had awakened her, unwilling to believe that she had actually dosed off. In truth she could not tell, having lost track of time, a terrible lightness to her body. Deprived of sleep over the past crush of days, maintaining a pitch of vigilance at the windows for hours at a time, mornings/nights curling around her like smoke, taking in shouts screams gunshots hurled obscenities sobbing pleads hurried prayers spit-laced laughter rollicking applause invading her apartment from the streets below. Heard urgencies that sounded completely different, depending on whether her eyes were open or closed. Which brought pictures upon entering the brain, her attempt to map the featureless surround, for what she could actually see — flickers of fire shooting upward — was limited since her apartment offered no view of the street, only the usual, the sea.

The more she watched the sea, the more it proved it could hold: a dozen crashing colors, schools of Negroes gone fish — fleeing the city was not a thought that had crossed her mind; her husband was out there — in the dhows that made their livelihood possible (fishing, ferrying, the transportation of cargo), in other small crafts, or with nothing but their bodies, a kind of oceanic monster of faces and limbs, sails and oars, tossed around in the rough exhaustive currents. Lights shining far across the water from the island of Edgemere — how else could it be seen? — were uncertain and distant. She supposed the island was within reach, even for those with only their bodies to carry them. In reach but far away. Some would not make make it, would drown. If only these Negroes had some Moses who could part the water. If only — not to put too fine a point on it — they could walk on water.

Had she already put an end to any form of hoping? How many days had it been since Tom had left the apartment in the company of Sharpe and the manager? Close to a week? Even as chaos was breaking loose in the city neither her husband nor the manager had considered canceling the concert. Days of waiting and wondering — Sharpe? — spreading in her head, on the verge of shattering it. Sleep was compensatory. Stripping her of consciousness.