North of Nowhere, South of Loss (18 page)

Jonathan can feel a gust of wild and dreadful laughter, Dionysian, but he swallows it. “That is a tragedy in the classic Aristotelian sense,” he says, solemnly. “The most painful kind.” He dare not meet Stacey's eyes. He focuses on the bunch of keys and on the woven ribbon around Stag's neck. WWJD, the ribbon says every two inches. He touches the cord with his index finger. “Whose initials?” he asks.

“Callisto give it me,” Stag says. “Stands for What Would Jesus Do? And we know what he would've done. He would've listened to his inner voice.”

“And played his mobile number!” Stacey is breathless. “Oh Stag, oh Stag, you're going to start my contractions again.”

“Woe unto them that laugh at me, girl.” Stag pats Stacey on the belly. “I just come by to lay the hand of grace on QP's boy.” He splays his ten fingers across her flesh. His span is enormous. “I come for the laying on of hands”

“Get outta here,” Stacey says.

“You had better believe I am out and gone before the women's business starts. But first I got to deliver my benediction.”

“Idiot.”

He lifts Stacey's graceless hospital smock and lays his ear against the great taut globe of her skin. He listens. Then he puts his lips against her belly and murmurs something. He straightens and salutes. “Message from QP to his son. Message delivered.”

“Get outta here, you clown.”

“I'm gone, girl. Got me a little deal that I got to see to down south in Decatur.” He leaves, singing.
He's got the whole wo-orld in his hands …

“Virgil!” Jonathan says, bemused. “But Virgil could never have thought him up.”

“Only Aristophanes or Plautus, huh?”

“Oh Stace,” he says sadly.

“Don't say it,” she warns. “Don't even get started.”

“Can I ask what you're doing now?”

“I'm having a baby,” she says.

“Okay,” he sighs. “Can I ask who QP is? Can I ask what QP stands for?”

“QP is the father. His name is Quintavius Paul.”

“You're joking.”

“I'm not joking.”

“It's weird. All these classical names.”

“Think about it, Dad,” she says tartly. “Think about it.”

And he thinks about it. He thinks about all the younger sons sent out to the colonies, about the slaveholders sent down from Oxford with Euripides, Homer, Virgil and Terence in their sea chests.

He asks, subdued, “When do I get to meet QP?”

“I'm tired,” she says, her lids turning heavy.

A nurse comes to take readings. Dr Steiner comes. He is short and stocky, and his accent is purely New York. He shakes Jonathan's hand.

“What brings you to Atlanta?” Jonathan asks.

“I could ask you the same, I suppose. I live here. I've lived here for ten years. Life is a surprise to us. How's Boston?”

Jonathan raises his eyebrows.

“Your accent. Plus your daughter told me,” Steiner says.

“My daughter talked to you about me?”

“About Boston. About Cambridge. You know how it is with us Harvard Square junkies, anything for a chance to reminisce. We go on and on.” Steiner shrugs. “Harvard Med. School, I should explain.” He looks sideways at Jonathan and says in a low voice, “Give her time. It's my impression she misses her Latin as much as she misses Harvard Square.”

Zeno's paradox, Jonathan thinks. I will never get beyond the halfway point of knowing how much I do not know. Nevertheless, he notes a thinning of the fog that fills the room. He feels an easing of his congestion. “Can you tell me what this pre-eclampsia thing means?”

“Most of the time,” Steiner says, “it's not threatening. We have to monitor, that's all, to make sure it doesn't turn into eclampsia. That's serious.”

“Serious how?”

“Toxic for both of them. Have to get the baby out before that happens. I've given her something to soften the cervix. She's still not fully dilated. If that doesn't happen in the next couple of hours, I'll probably have to do a C-section”

“No,” Stacey says, coming alive. “No. I'm going to have my baby the real way.”

She makes an effort to sit up, and sinks back.

Dr Steiner pats her hand. “You won't find a gynecologist in Atlanta less inclined to do a C-section than me. That's why we're waiting this out. But if we have to do one, we have to do one. And you have to trust me.”

“I trust you,” Stacey says.

He pats her hand again. “I'm expecting things to start moving quite soon. Rest up. You're going to need every ounce of energy once that kid decides to move house.”

Nurses come and go. Stacey sleeps. Jonathan sits in the dark. It occurs to him, suddenly, that Cathy is avoiding coming back from wherever she went. Could that be possible? Is it possible, for example, that she is as nervous as he is? He levers up the footrest, tilts the armchair back, stretches out. His eyelids droop. He is extraordinarily, exquisitely tired.

Something cold slithers across his ankles. He is aware of it, but cannot open his eyes. He knows what it is. He recognises its stealthy advance, at his calves, at his thighs, at his groin. Anguish. Suppose she really does wait until he leaves? Not that he wants to see her. The room and the engineered twilight are suffocating. He has to have air.

Stacey seems to be sleeping again.

He staggers into the corridor, trying not to make noise.

“Is there somewhere,” he asks the receptionist, “where I can get some air? Somewhere I can smoke my pipe?”

“There's a terrace,” she says, pointing. “End of that hallway. Go one flight down. Push the exit door.”

“Thanks.”

When he pushes through the exit door, he sees he is not alone.

“Hi,” Cathy says.

He has to lean against the wall. His voice will not come to him. It bobs about like a mylar balloon, out of reach.

“You look tired,” she says.

You look good, he would say if his voice should drift within reach. Thinner, but still good. Gaunt suits you.

“I've been here a while,” she says. “Working up the courage to go back in.”

She sips coffee from a styrofoam cup. It smells burned and bitter. She grimaces.

What are you afraid of, exactly? he thinks of asking.

“It's both of you,” she says. “It's everything.” She sips and shudders, then sips again. “I'm afraid of having Stacey pissed off with me for looking as though I might, you know … ”

“Go weepy on her.”

“Yes”

“Unforgivable sin,” he agrees.

She begins tearing little slivers of styrofoam from the rim of the cup.

“How's the west coast?” he asks.

“Warmer. Smoggier. It's okay.”

“And how are you? Really.”

“I'm fine. And you?”

“I seem to manage.”

She turns away and stares out over the city. She sips some more coffee, shudders, and tosses the liquid in a brackish arc toward the skyline. “Too much sadness,” she says. “I had to get away from it.”

“And now she's made contact. She's okay.”

“I think you can die of grief. Literally. I think you can. I've felt as though I'm dying of it.”

“It's over now.”

“It's like a killing frost. It destroys everything.”

“I don't know” Jonathan says. “It seems more like Crazy Glue to me.” He wants to touch her. “It's like Vietnam vets. They can only talk to each other.” He goes to her, holds her, and she does not yield, does not resist.

“I think I've turned into permafrost,” she says. “I won't forgive you if you make me cry.”

“Did you know that Callisto handles snakes?”

“What?”

“And QP Do you know what that stands for?”

“I ask nothing,” she says. “I ask no questions at all. I know what Stacey chooses to tell, which is never much.”

“It stands for Quintavius Paul. Paul, I strongly suspect, as in Saint Paul, who is credited with starting snake-handling cults. Something in the Pauline Epistles about the faithful being able to handle any deadly thing and it shall not harm them. I'm getting eager to meet QP.”

“We won't be meeting him,” Cathy says.

“How do you know?”

“Callisto told me. He's doing time, she says.”

“Oh sweet Jesus.” He leans against the wall. He closes his eyes. We could just float away like balloons, he thinks. At last he says: “She wanted us here. She called. She asked for us.”

“We should go back in,” Cathy says.

They take turns at the bedside and in the armchair.

Jonathan sleeps and dreams. Rocks grate him, surf harries him, a riptide tears Cathy and Ben and Stacey from his side. The undertow rushes them into the dark. Stacey cries out and Jonathan's heart bursts with effort.

“I'm here,” he cries. “I've got you. I've got you. You're safe.”

“Dad!” Stacey's voice is shrill. “Shit, Dad! For God's sake, you're hurting me.”

“It's okay,” Dr Steiner says. “It's okay. Calm down, everyone. Everything's going like clockwork. Now I'd like the two grandmothers to help. One on each side. Take her leg, one each, and hold it like this. Crook your elbow under her knee, hold her ankle with both hands. You're the stirrups.”

And Jonathan, dazed, sees that Cathy is there, and Callisto is there, and the big adventure is underway.

“She's going to brace herself against the two of you,” Steiner says. “Now Stacey, you push when I say, and everyone count out loud with me,
Push
-two-three-four,
push
-six-seven-eight,
push-
nine-and-ten. Three times, and then rest for ten, and then push again. Count, everyone! Nurse, can you attend to Professor Wilson there? I think he's going to black out.”

“Dad!” Stacey calls, reaching for him.

“I'm here,” he says. “I'm fine. I won't let you go.”

He stands by the head of her bed and holds her hand. Stacey clenches and pushes. Cathy, sweating with exertion, catches his eye. “You okay?” she mouths. He nods. His fingers are crushed. He cannot remember such fraught happiness since the day they all clung to each other in a salt-soaked huddle below the lighthouse.

“– eight, nine, ten, and rest,” Dr Steiner says. “– and ten, and push … ”

“Here's the head,” Callisto cries. “I can see the top of the head.”

Cathy's eyes are bright. “You want to see?” she asks Jonathan.

He doesn't. He feels queasy. He prefers to keep placing damp washcloths on Stacey's brow, dipping them in tepid water, wringing them out, applying them again like balm. Cathy puts her hand on his arm. “Sit down for a while,” she says.

“I'm fine, I'll be fine.” And now he is. He touches Cathy's wet cheek.

“Isn't this something?” she whispers. “Isn't this amazing?”

“And push, two three four,” Dr Steiner says.

“I can't,” Stacey sobs. “I can't anymore. I'm too tired.”

“Almost done,” Steiner says. “You're wonderful, you're terrific, you're the world's champion number-one gold-medal pusher. Just the shoulders now, and we're done.”

It is quite impossible, Jonathan thinks, terrified. This time he has looked, a quick stricken glance. It is quite impossible for the shoulders to fit through.

And then Stacey gives a final great roar and his grandchild slithers out like a fish.

“It's a girl,” Steiner says.

“Where is she?” Stacey calls. “Where's my baby?”

Jonathan sobs like an infant and Cathy holds him, Callisto is hugging them both, they are all laughing and crying and hugging Stacey and the baby. Jonathan kisses everyone. He kisses Cathy on the mouth. Merry September, he says. He is babbling, he knows it. He has no idea what he is babbling about. Somewhere in the melee, he sees that Steiner is rubbing at his eyes with the back of a latex-gloved hand.
Et tu,
Jonathan thinks, staring.

“So?” Steiner says, caught out. “It doesn't matter how many times I do it, it gets to me every time.” He is defiant. His tone is aggressive. “It's a great fucking miracle. It's one of the two great mysteries, and I expect it will go on getting to my tear ducts until I slam into the other one.”

Cathy says: “We have to call Ben. Ben asked me to call as soon as the baby came.”

“What?” Stacey says. “My perfect brother wants to know when my baby arrives?”

“He does, Stace,” Cathy says. “He's hoping to talk to you.”

“Why didn't you tell me? That's so damn typical, that you didn't tell me.”

“I try,” Cathy says. “I try never to tell you one damn thing.”

“Get outta here,” Stacey laughs. “Hand me the phone.” She runs a finger over the dark peachfuzz on her daughter's head and says dreamily, “Isn't she beautiful, Mom?”

“She's beautiful,” Cathy says. “She's perfect.”

“Ab ovo usque ad mala”
Jonathan tells Steiner. “Which means, translating loosely, from the egg to the balloons. I have to go buy a bunch of those ridiculous helium things and some cigars.”

CREDIT REPAIR

The sirens start dropping out of the pines like a mess of crows, but Tirana has already smelled smoke.

“Fire!” she cries, jumping up. When she opens my living room window and leans out, something hot sucks at us and a stack of filing papers rises to meet it. The screen fell out months ago and the pages flutter over the parking lot, their little
sign here
flags a whir of colour.

“Now look what you've done,” Carol says sadly. “That's two weeks' work.”

“Something's burning,” Tirana says.

“It's nothing. It's just fire trucks up on the Interstate,” Solana tells Carol.

“There's black smoke.”

“Any diversion.” Solana folds her arms and narrows her eyes. She could be measuring Tirana: for coveralls, for prison garb, for a coffin. “With clients like her …”

“But that's the whole point, isn't it?”

In the lee of the Interstate, all points are blurred by the eighteen-wheelers. We can't see them. Thirty years ago, when our world was called forth from industrial waste and red Georgia clay, the developer had a low mountain range ordered in. Earth-movers planted it. It is forty feet high, and curves as naturally as though God himself put it there. Then truckloads of pines and sycamores arrived. All this was before my time, but I've figured it out. In theory, the steep strip of forest buffers us from levels of noise considered harmful. We are below the expressway. We live in its hip pocket. We rent its basement apartments. We can't see it, its roar is muffled, but eight lanes of tractor-trailers, ambulances, police sirens, blowouts and collisions are a syncopated bass thump in our bones and under our feet.

From my window you can see a slash of blacktop below (fifty parking spaces), then Block H opposite, then the hillslope of pines between us and the Interstate. People often stand at their windows and stare into the pines. Sometimes they gaze and inhale assorted substances. Sometimes they just gaze.

Tirana is reading the tips of the sycamores. She is watching the pine tufts for blips of red. “I see them,” she calls. “They're on the exit now.”

“Tirana knows a bleeding heart sucker when she sees one, Carol, she's a pro. She's got you wrapped around her little finger.”

Carol just looks at Solana.

“It's her funeral,” Solana says, exasperated. “Her mess. She's got the attention span of a ten-year-old. Why do we bother?”

“You're so harsh, Solana.”

“Yes, ma'am,” Solana says. “Throw Tirana's folder out,” she orders me. “She's disqualified herself.”

I look at Carol and she gives me a little smile, puts her finger to her lips, and shakes her head. I like Carol, I like working with her, but she feels guilty for being white. Not me. Already I think Solana was a mistake. When she looks at Tirana, her eyes say: Don't you dare confuse me with one of those.

“They're turning in here,” Tirana calls.

Solana dismisses this with a wave of her hand because ninety-eight per cent of the time, here in Eden Gardens, it's a false alarm. But then we hear a sound like fatback spitting on a grill as big as Texas, and even Solana gets up and puts her weight against the sliding doors and goes out onto my screen porch. It is not a real screen porch, but a second-floor balcony big enough for two K-Mart chairs and a plastic table. About three years ago, to qualify for FHA improvement grants, the landlord had nylon mesh stapled to the uprights, but the mesh sags and bellies out like a sail. A four-lane throughway for mosquitoes and flies, Solana says, which is true. Also, it faces south, and the heat punches you as you open the sliding doors, so the porches are reserved exclusively for doggy doo-doo and Hibachi grills. Carol and Tirana join Solana out there, and I close the living-room window that Tirana left open, and then I go out on the screen porch and push the sliding door shut. It is interesting to me that not one of them thinks about my air-conditioning bill. The sliding door shudders and makes a farting noise. It gets stuck with twelve inches still to go. It isn't hung right, and there is rust on its sliding track.

“Can someone help me?” I say, but no one hears.

The trucks are careening into our little blacktopped saucer of paradise now, trailing long red streamers of sound. In every unit, people are running out to their balconies. Kids are climbing on dumpsters or rollerblading along the footpaths between the blocks. One fire truck is stuck between Block G and Block H and turns its hose on a unit where someone's barbecue is merely scorching steak.

“What the fuck –!” screams the barbecue man, punching a hole through his screen. He is wearing nothing but his jockey shorts, and the blast of water gets him full in the gut. He is on the third floor, which is as high as our projects go because we are low-rise garden units, and he sort of floats at the edge of his balcony, waving his arms, as though he might swim down the rope of water to the truck.

“Serves him right,” Solana says.

Carol looks at her. “Oh, Solana.”

“Oh, Solana
,” mimics Solana. “You sound like my mother. Don't try that long-suffering mama tone with me.”

Tirana turns to look at them. “That's funny,” she says.

“It's not funny,” Solana says. “It's illegal.”

Tirana blinks. “If you talk white and Carol talks black?”

“It is illegal to light a grill on the balconies.”

“But we gotta,” Tirana says. “Where else do we got? Everybody do it.”

Everyone does. The smoke detectors go off twice a week, sometimes more. The firemen are supposed to report false alarms, and then the landlord is supposed to pay the city a fine, and then there are supposed to be fire inspections, but the landlord slips the firemen a summer bonus, and most of the firemen aren't about to report because their own kids live in the projects, if not in these particular ones then in others that look just the same, and anyway, this is July. The children are entitled, the city owes us. There is no public swimming pool within ten miles of this place, and no grass either. The only green things are the pines and sad sycamores on the man-made slopes of I-20 and the odd shag blanket of kudzu. So the children follow the fire trucks in a swarm, cartwheeling, making whoops of sound by wumping their hands against their mouths, waiting for the moment when the blast of the hose will fly them right into Christmas.

“Who on fire?” Tirana calls down to a kid in the parking lot.

“Block F,” the kid calls back up. “I dunno who. Someone told me Jimmy the Pyro's place.”

“I know'd it.” Tirana turns to us. “That welfare-to-work shit just one more exploitation by the Man.”

“Oh my,” Solana says, placing her hand on her heart.

“Jamika go to work every day like they make her,” Tirana says, “and look what happen.”

“We don't know whose unit's on fire,” I point out. We are still all crowding on my tiny balcony, trying to see.

Tirana crosses all her fingers and does something strange with her arms and chants down to the parking lot:
“Jamika-bird, Jamika-bird, fly back home, Your house is on fire and your children alone.”

“Here we go again,” Solana says.

“Fuck you, Solana.” Tirana seems to be crying. “No social worker gonna make
me
leave my kids all day, make me flip Burger-King patties, make me leave –”

“And where were your little ones when you went out clubbing last night?”

“With Denise, Miz Bitch. Me and Denise swap, but we talking 'bout one hour, two hours here, maybe three, not all-day work.”

“All-night work is more like it. Setting the local tomcats on fire.”

“You wouldn't know fire if smoke was coming out o' your ass,” Tirana says. She mimes the act of striking a match and tosses the quick imaginary flame across the room. “Why don't you leave us alone?” she asks Solana.

“You have no idea how great the temptation is.”

“Jamika's Jimmy damn crazy 'bout playing with matches. And why he do that now? Because he sending up smoke signals for his mama, that's why.”

“I do hope it's not Jamika's,” Carol says.

Jamika is our star exhibit, our shining hope.

Now there are flames as high as the sycamore trees. The air is full of black smoke.

“Can someone help me?” I say, pushing my shoulder against the jammed-open door. “I don't want this place to stink of smoke for a month.”

“Hey, you!” Tirana calls at a boy on a skateboard. “Who burning?”

“Block F,” the boy calls back. “Seventeen.”

“Told you!” Tirana says.

Carol turns pale. Jamika is in 17B. “Dear God,” she says. She presses both hands to her mouth.

Tirana looks at her, curious. “Ain't that something,” she asks Solana, “when white folks turn white?”

“Regis and Jo-Jo and the baby!” Carol says, squeezing through the stuck door.

“The firemen will take care of it,” I call after her, but she is gone.

“Fucking Saint Carol,” Solana says.

Tirana is hot on Carol's trail. “I'm gonna go watch,” she calls over her shoulder. “I'll be back, okay? I still need all them forms and shit.”

Solana is so angry, she would scorch the balcony uprights if she touched.

This is the way it works. Carol is the social worker, Solana is Legal Aid (she has only been with us three months), I organise. I do the paperwork. They don't live in the projects; I do. They have degrees and framed certificates. I have no particular qualifications, other than being an expert on how to fuck up a life, which gives me a special kind of usefulness in this setting. Breathing Space is what we call our operation and it runs out of my apartment (my donation). I also run a couple of businesses on the side. My business ventures are not unrelated to the general scope of our enterprise. One business is called Ways and Means
(Bad credit history? No problem. Talk to us about Ways and Means)
which is an essential service in this neck of the woods; the other is Credit Repair, for those who seek a new beginning and are willing to take a slower uphill path.

“These are your options,” I explain to Tirana, “once Solana gets you off.”

“If,”
Solana says. “I'll have my work cut out. Possession of stolen vehicle, driving without a licence, failure to report –”

“How was I s'posed to know it was stolen?” Tirana asks.

“Maybe because of the California plates? Why would someone who lives in Eden Gardens be driving an out-of-state car?”

“Because his friend was visiting, that's what he said. I just
borrowed
it.”

“That might hold water,” Solana says, “if your friend the golden-hearted lender hadn't vanished into thin air.”

“I hadda get Dessie to the hospital, didn't I? What else could I do?”

Solana raises her eyebrows and gives me a look. “You see?” Her tone implies:
might as well try to explain colour to someone born blind.

“You see?” Tirana says to me, meaning:
when your kid has a fever of 103 and you don't have a car or a phone, what's the point of trying to explain to someone like Solana?

“Anyway,” I say, “if Solana can get you off, and if Carol can get you an ‘extenuating circumstances' waiver so you can keep your rent subsidy and your training job, we could start a clean-up operation on your credit.”

“I could charge stuff again?”

“Well, I wouldn't advise that. But you'll be able to get the power turned back on.”

“Carol said you'd do that anyway.”

“We will co-sign for you with the utility company until you're credit-worthy again. The way it works, Tirana, there's a gazillion rules that merchants and collection agencies are required to follow before they report you to a credit bureau, but they break the rules all the time. Sometimes it's unintentional, because they've never checked the regulations, sometimes it's just because they are impatient or boiling mad. Either way, we get them on the fine print. I get a copy of your credit history, I challenge the items one by one, the bureau has to take them off your record.”

“Then I gotta pay all that stuff I owe?”

“No, you don't. The slate is wiped clean.”

“Cool.”

“You'll be free to start a brand new trail of unpaid bills,” Solana says, acidly.

“This takes a while,” I explain. “There's a lot of paperwork. I need your birth certificate, your Social, I'll give you a list.”

“How long's it gonna take?”

“Six months, maybe more, depending on the circumstances for each item.”

“Six months! I got to get my phone back before that. I got to think of my kids.”

“Well, there are ways to get a phone without credit. We can work on both fronts at once. I can have you hooked up in three days, not with Bell South, needless to say, but you'll have a number, and people can reach you there. To call out, you have to dial a whole bunch of other numbers first. You also have to pay the basic fee in advance each month, and you have to use a pre-paid card for long distance calls.”

“How much I gotta give you?”

“$25 when your next welfare cheque comes.”

“Carol will give it to me.”

“Where
is
Carol?” Solana wants to know.

“She's at the hospital,” I say. “She says it's bad.”

“Regis maybe gonna die,” Tirana says.

“Carol wants us to join her when we can.”

“Let's shut up shop and go then,” Solana says. “If I don't get out of this place, I'll go crazy.”

“Could you guys drop me and the kids off at Wal-Mart on the way?” Tirana asks.

“Sure,” I say.

“No,” Solana says. “We could not.”

We drive past the black hole in Block F – the charred shell of 17A, 17B and 17C; Jamika's apartment and the ones above her and below – and out of the parking lot. The entire place smells like an ashtray. “You know,” I say, “her kid may or may not have been playing with matches, but the wiring in these places is sub-standard. They're all fire-traps. In case you wanted grounds for a suit.”