Eating Memories (20 page)

It’s not that white men ever really did anything bad to me. It was just the little chicken-shit stuff that wore me down. It’s hard living with power like that, rubbing right up next to you.

They had power over my body.

HERE, HERE’S A DIME, BOY, GO OVER THERE AND GET ME A PAPER.

They had magic over emotions.

WIPE THAT SMILE OFF YOUR FACE, BOY. WHAT’RE YOU LAUGHING AT?

Their power just wore me down.

And if plain white men had so much power, then what would the power of a white God be like?

So why doesn’t God know I’m awake? This can’t be God, right? Am I right?

Jesus. You think you know what to expect out of life, know what I mean? You think you know your place. You got it all figured out and suddenly everything’s upside down. No way. This isn’t God at all.

Maybe it’s only General Gabriel.

“I think probably he does, sir,” the angel in green says.

General Gabriel swivels and focuses those small, cold eyes of his on me. I feel the power in them.

WHAT THE FUCK YOU STARING AT, BOY? he’s thinking.

* * *

The sisters came back a few days later with a pot roast. Yuri stopped them at the electronic checkpoint and didn’t want to let them in.

“Open it,” Robert said. “And then get your damned shirt and tunic on. You don’t greet visitors half-dressed.”

The Russian gave him an incredulous glance, but then he hit the button to open the barrier and, putting his
Newsweek
away, got up to put on his shirt. He didn’t seem happy.

“I know how you boys are,” Minnealetha said when she came in the station. “You just don’t cook for yourselves.”

Robert didn’t like the word “boys,” but including Yuri in it took the sting away. The sisters were old. A white man his age would be a boy to them, too. He lowered his nose to the warm, foil-covered pan when Minnealetha pushed it into his hands. The pot roast smelled like heaven.

The women stayed about an hour, knitting vague, rambling sentences about nothing in particular, the way old white ladies do. When they went home, they left a gentle aura of lilac behind them, and Yuri got on the phone and talked a mile a minute in angry Russian to somebody on the other end.

“What’d you tell them?” Robert asked when Yuri hung up.

“I tell them I think you are naïve.”

Robert’s lips twisted. He rose, went to the refrigerator, and got out a can of beer.

Yuri followed him, raising a censorious eyebrow. “We shouldn’t have liquor. It is against the regulations. We will get in trouble if they find it.”

“It’s just beer, not your rotgut vodka.” Robert loosened the plastic garrote from a second can of Bud and held it towards the Russian. “You want one?”

‘After a brief hesitation, Yuri took it, wandered over to the sofa, and sat down, Robert trailing after.

“Why naïve?”

“I think you hide the fact that you, too, are afraid of this place. I think you feel as if you must be friendly to everyone else. You put yourself in the hands of these women to snow that you are a nice fellow, and I believe they will take advantage of that.”

“They’re just old ladies.” Robert slammed back his beer, belched, and went to get himself another. He stared a long time at the contents of the refrigerator: the remains of the sweet potato pie; a wilting head of lettuce, a single-serving container of pudding, and the beer. All of a sudden he felt a crushing, exceptional loneliness, as though he were the last member of a dying species.

“Tell me about yourself,” he asked the Russian.

There was a long silence from the other room and then the bland reply, “There is not much to tell.” Yeah. Growing up in the old Red Army had made Yuri careful, all right.

“You’re from Moscow, I hear. I guess one big city’s like another. Boston was nice, for example. Good classical music.

“I like jazz,” the Russian said flatly.

“No kidding. Jazz. That’s strange.”

The voice from the other room was defensive. “Why is it strange?”

“Well, jazz sort of demands soul, know what I mean?”

Now the tone was chilly. “No, I do not. Russian musicians play good jazz. Because jazz comes from America, must you be American to play it? And if so, to play Bach, must you be a good German?”

Since Yuri couldn’t see his face, Robert allowed himself an impish grin. “You ever hear blues?”

“Yes. I like the blues. At home I have many records.”

“So I don’t understand how you can understand the blues, man. Know what I mean? You gotta have a background for blues. It comes from the whole culture. White people in this country can sort of do it, if they’re familiar with the cultural roots. The blues are my music.”

There was a short, bitter sound from the living room: Yuri laughing. “And not mine? I cannot like blues because I am not black? I think you are being a snob.”

“Snob?” Robert asked in disbelief. A cultural snob. He’d never thought of himself that way. “Listen. I was the only kid from my family to graduate from high school, you know that?” he asked over the hum of the refrigerator motor. In a moment he popped another can. “I got two brothers and two cousins in the pen. Funny, isn’t it? None of my white friends had ever known anybody who’d been to jail, and I got four relatives there. Those white kids I studied with at MIT might have liked the blues, but they couldn’t understand it, either. For them it was like going to the zoo and seeing the elephants and thinking they were neat. But no matter how hard they listened, they couldn’t hear the voice of the elephant.” With his thumb he wiped a stripe down the condensation on the can. “At MIT I didn’t talk about my family a lot.”

“So?” the Russian asked.

Leaning one arm over the refrigerator door, Robert stared towards the doorway blankly. He’d utterly forgotten the point he’d been about to make. “So we don’t know much about each other, do we? You like the blues, huh? You got relatives in the pen?” he laughed.

“No,” Yuri said. “Nor do I know anybody in prison.”

Face hot from sudden embarrassment, Robert slammed the door shut. “God, you’re a tightass. You should get into classical, man, where a mistake is always a mistake and you play all the notes like they’re written.”

“There is a way music should be played and a way it should not. There is nothing wrong with order. For example, if I had relatives in prison, l doubt my government would give me this assignment.”

“What’s -that supposed to mean?” Robert walked into the other room, his hand in a tight fist.

Yuri stared up him. “I understand jazz one way; you hear it another. Why did your government assign you to a place where people hate you for your color? Have you ever asked yourself that?”

Robert’s lips twitched. He wondered if the station were bugged and then hated himself for wondering. Suspicion was an infectious disease. If Robert didn’t watch himself closely, he knew he’d catch it from Yuri. “Come on. You know in the military there’s never any meaning to anything.”

“So you hate your government.”

“No,” Robert said quickly.

“But you are afraid to be here. As afraid as I am.”

“I grew up here. Alabama’s my home.”

“Is it?” the Russian asked. “Well, Alabama may have what you call soul, but I think you are not happy here.”

Robert thought about it for a minute, then shrugged. “I had no choice but to come when I got the invitation. You does what Uncle Sam wants and you goes where he sends you.”

A puzzled expression worked its way across the Russian’s face. “You does? You goes? Why do you suddenly use incorrect grammar?”

Robert threw up his hands in surrender. “And you say you like jazz. Jesus Christ. I don’t know why I bother talking to you.”

A brother would have completely understood; even a white American would have known what Robert had meant. One thing they didn’t have much of in Russia, Robert reminded himself, was brothers. “You don’t understand me. You don’t understand my music. You don’t understand shit.” He finished the beer in his hand and, feeling very sad, went to get himself another. It had been a long time since anyone had understood anything about him.

* * *

“I don’t understand. Why don’t you talk to me, Major?” The head angel’s voice is self-righteous. “I’m here to help you, but I need to know why this happened.

The lights of heaven are too bright. They make my eyes water. Maybe the lights are trying to tell me I don’t belong here.

Yeah? Well, big surprise. I never belonged anyplace.

I never felt good in the South, but I never felt at home in the North, either. The Yankees expected me to fall down in gratitude because they were letting me live with them, as if they thought the white people in Alabama kept me in chains.

Well, only sort of. Chains of a different sort.

But chains is chains. And sometimes those Yankees would stand back and give me the gimlet eye, just waiting for me to thank them.

Oh, thank you, sir. Thank you. Thank you for letting me go to a white college and study white things like electrical engineering.

As long as I stayed with Yankees I never picked up the skills to understand them. And just like a wife longing for her abusive husband, damned if I didn’t start getting nostalgic for Alabama.

Oh, Jesus. I hate it when I cry. Tears are just sort of sliding down my cheeks. My hands are tied and I can’t move them to wipe my face.

I try to close my eyes, but Gabriel, who understands the wisdom of preparedness, shakes me hard, hard enough to wake the dead.

Being black means always feeling guilty for shit, for all the brothers who ever held up 7-Elevens; for all the black men who ever killed white men on the TV news; for a whopping part of the infant death rate; for welfare mothers; and for a good portion of the illiteracy statistics.

“Answer me, “ Gabriel says.

I would. Believe me I would. But I forget what the question is.

* * *

Robert dreamed of tornadoes.

He woke up, disoriented by a sudden adrenaline high. Next to him, Yuri was screaming.

“Get up!” The Russian shoved at his shoulder hard, pushing Robert out of bed.

There was a bad storm outside.

As he flailed his way up from the floor, night flashed from black to stark blue-white. Lightning boomed and sizzled just outside the window.

Robert ran to the control room feeling a manic pulse in his temple, his throat. His mouth tasted of stale beer. The alarm was buzzing, the computer on.

He stared at the monitor stupidly. Then he turned to the Russian. “You bastard!” he shouted. “What did you do?”

When Yuri didn’t reply, Robert stumbled back to his room in the strobing dark and searched a dresser drawer for his weapon.

By the time Robert got back into the living room, 9-mm in hand, he was fully awake. That’s when he realized that the lightning wasn’t lightning at all. The directional satellite feed was off target. Incandescent electricity was playing along the cells, and something huge, invisible, and very hot was walking the pasture.

Yuri looked terrified, but he ignored the gun. He pulled frantically at Robert’s pajama sleeve. “You were drunk. You don’t wake up.”

Robert pushed the Russian away and ran into the control room. “Jesus Christ,” Robert whimpered as he logged on the terminal.

“You don’t wake up!” Yuri was screaming over the earth-rattling booms from the field. “Suddenly it is arcing, and you won’t wake up when I call, so I go to the computer to see what is wrong, but I can’t log onto the program. In emergencies I should be able to get into the program
—”

Robert tapped the keys, nudging the satellite back into position. The backup had gone catastrophic. And in the field, not two hundred yards from where they sat, microwave energy had been loosed like Satan from the deep.

“Get it back on target!” Yuri screamed. “Can’t you get it back on target?”

Robert stood up from the terminal. “Goddammit! It
is
back. The damned thing’s sitting right on top of the collector!”

Yuri stared at him stupidly.

“Don’t you get it? The cells have been compromised. We have to go out there and see what’s wrong.”

The Russian backed away into one comer of the concrete control room. Each sharp crack of electricity made him flinch. “Call somebody. Let somebody else do it.”

“They’ve already been called,” Robert said. “That’s an automatic with the program. Besides, I guess they’ve figured something’s wrong. They should be able to see the arcing from here to the plant.”

Yuri was breathing in uneven jerks. “We must shut it down.”

Blink, the open doorway was dark. Blink, it was bright again.

“You’re an electrical engineer and you’re afraid of electricity?”

Yuri ignored the American’s tone. “Yes! God, yes! Who better to be afraid of that sort of power? Who better to understand what it means?”

* * *

Power. It wears a white face and a badge. It’s worn them for as long as I can remember. That’s the law of God. And my brother, who understands Yin and Yang although he’s never heard of it, always figured that since he was my opposite, he should act the opposite, too.

God never sleeps. He’s the one from my childhood who knocks on the door at two o’clock in the morning, wakes Mama and Daddy, and asks where my brothers are. God wears a uniform and carries a pistol and that must be one of the reasons I love the military, why I am fascinated by electrical engineering.

Power. All I ever wanted was just a little of it.

* * *

Robert grabbed the Beretta from the table and pointed it at the Russian’s chest.

Walk out that damned door. You’re going to help me.”

After a moment he realized how melodramatic he looked, how useless was the gesture. After all, he couldn’t hold a bead on Yuri while they worked the outside controls. He shoved the gun into the waist of his pajamas, but the 9-mm was too heavy for the elastic. It slid like a cold hand down his thigh and landed with an anticlimactic clunk on the floor.