God's Gym (18 page)

I can only write the present, he claimed, because the past is too complicated. I remember the past too well. The present's easy to forget. Nobody remembers it, nobody believes it, so the present's easy to forge, easy to turn into fiction.

She recalls the notion of negative dependability from some literary pundit's discussion of narrative. How certain characters couldn't help themselves. They lied because they knew no other way. Lied even when the truth obviously would serve them better. Always twisting or exaggerating the facts or flat-out making up shit to suit their purposes, their only purpose—to lie. Do these liars offer a ray of hope in an undependable world. If you precisely discounted what the American president said, scrupulously deflated or inflated or reversed or ignored or denied, could you approximate truth. Reliably estimate at least what wasn't so. Is that why Paul declared his Fanon book must
be fiction. Is it why she reads romances voraciously, giggling at her dopey gullibility while she turns pages and weeps. If she subtracts the lies she wishes to believe and adds untruths liars tell, can she calculate the truth of her life, the truth of this dying city through whose wet, heavy air she sends Paul a greeting this morning, wishing it were a song, wishing he'd hear her voice, jump up and dance.

She can name the day and month but can't recall where they last spoke face to face. A bench in Central Park. A sidewalk café on the Lower East Side. Sitting outdoors. Somewhere public. Safe, neutral ground. Why had they grown so afraid of each other. Afraid of being alone together in the dark.

I miss you

I miss you

It's better this way, I think

Who says so

I should have listened the last morning on Martinique. You told me you could never forgive me. You were telling the truth. You'll always blame me for the past, for things that happened before we met.

I was in love. Confused because I was hopelessly in love.

We both were. And love made both of us insanely jealous. Me more than you, probably, though you were the one who used your jealousy as a weapon. Questioning me. Pushing till I said too much or too little. Until something broke. I never had a chance to speak of my own fears. I would picture you naked with a woman. Your hands in her hair. Touching her. Her looking at your body. Sometimes I'd want to scream. Those images could shatter my confidence. Who was I. The
newness
would wear off and you'd look somewhere else for newness. And then it happened. We hadn't been back here a month before you fucked another woman. So much for love. So much for our island.

A dumb thing to do. Dumb. Dumb. No excuse. I still don't
understand why it happened. Not the woman. Only once. No desire to see her ever again.

You used her to punish me. She was payback. As if I owed you something for the men in my past. As if it was your turn to hurt me. You had warned me in Martinique. My fault I didn't listen.

You wouldn't talk to me. Why did you keep everything inside.

Talk. What could I say. Should I have talked the way you talked to me.
White bitch.
Waking me up in the middle of the night.
White whore
. Refusing to look at me. Touch me.

I loved you and it scared me. I needed to understand everything about you. I needed you to help me understand.

Fanon's face on the shed. Remember.

What's his face got to do with it.

You needed him more than you needed me.

Whoa. Who said I didn't need you. You're the one who flew away to Paris.

I came back.

I'm still not clear why. Or why you split.

You left me no choice. Maybe when we saw Fanon painted on the wall, it was already too late. I should have listened. Fanon speaking from the grave.

The last morning on Martinique plays again, the rainy window a screen.

I want to hear the whole story this time. So tell me again. About you and him that night on the island.

We shouldn't have been there. I knew it, even before I heard a man following us through the street.

Yes. She'd known it that night on the island with Antoine. Knew it in the deep place where things people don't want to know are known. The knowledge of things that sooner or later will hurt you or kill you because you pretend they're not there.
They'd stayed in the newspaper office too late. Their color all wrong when they stepped from the building into the dark streets, all wrong and begging for trouble in a back-of-the-wall ghetto, barrio, slum, estimate, medina, favela. She'd learned lots of words for the entrapping evil and saying none of them helped.
Merde ... plus vite, marche, Chantal ... marche plus vite.
She'd caught panic in Antoine's eyes, a split second of naked pleading when he thought she couldn't see his face.

Wrong and stupid. I know, Paul.

Very stupid. Night or day.

Yes, you're right.

So what happened.

Well, nothing happened, really. We were stupid but lucky, I guess. I'm positive somebody followed us. Footsteps behind us clack-clack-clacking in a long narrow street with walls almost up to the curbs. You feel you've blundered inside someone's house. Totally deserted ahead and neither of us dared turn around, but out of the corner of my eye I saw movement, a shadow maybe, maybe my own shadow. Whatever, it was enough to make me sure the man stalking us was about to catch up. We were in a place we shouldn't be. He'd found us and we belonged to him.

He's always there. You sense it in your bones, whether or not you see or hear him. In certain parts of town, after dark your color makes you guilty. You're scared when footsteps start clack-clack-clacking behind you, clack-clack on the cobblestones, almost matching yours but a little before or after. Footsteps playing with your head the way one of those smiling African smoothies in a club gets you out on the dance floor and you can't keep up, it's his music, he's in charge.

Bet you weren't thinking about dancing in the dark, sweetheart.

No. I was frightened. Very frightened. And furious at myself because I'd lost my chance to speak. What could I say if he
pulled out a gun or knife.
Please don't hurt poor, innocent me.

So there you were. White woman with a white man in the blackest, poorest, most dangerous section of one of the most dangerous black cities anywhere on earth and you weren't thinking about dancing, right, you were scared shitless and this big-deal, big-guy buddy or boss or lover or fellow fool, whatever, he's shaking in his booties too. What I want to know is not so much why. People usually have reasons, lamebrained or otherwise, for what they do, so I assume your reasons probably made sense to you at the time—a deadline maybe for your project and pushing to finish or maybe the work fascinating and you lose track of the hour or maybe you'd been on the island long enough to start feeling comfortable everybody nice to you showing you around hanging out at night in the clubs with the locals smoking ganja with Rasta brothers in the hills feeling you're loved here in spite of centuries of white crimes against black people the daily misery and humiliation of arriving at the threshold of the twenty-first century and still being starved robbed beaten in what's spozed to be your own country still a boy or a wench still bending over and taking it up the ass for tips tourists toss at you maybe you believed you'd transcended that boring old-school colonized and colonizer oppressed and oppressor bullshit and could start fresh a new world order and everybody just people after all, all colors shapes sizes smells but just plain folks after all. Shit. Or maybe you and your white fella finished work in the office he'd rented for his project and got horny thinking about pretty, naked brown flesh surrounding you every day on the island, the island lilt of voices, how hips sway and shoulders dip and butts pout, flimsy native costumes more come-on than cover-up, to say nothing of the drums, the singing and dancing, the sunshine and sparkling sea pumping you up so you turn off your cell phones, pack away your papers and computers, lock the office door, and get it on, the whole sweaty, heavy-breathing nasty atop a desk, spiced by images of
handsome natives brushing past you on the busy streets, brown muscles brown dicks and titties brown funk and bushy hair. Maybe a sudden irresistible pussy call kept you late at the office but like I said before the reason's not what really interests me. I want to know what you imagined. Who you believed you were. Two white Europeans parading after dark through the grungiest, most unforgiving, most violent, blackest quarter of the town. The two of you well fed, tanned, pretty,
Beg pardon folks, just passing through,
through the cesspool your bad intentions and good intentions created, the sewage in which human beings must make lives for themselves swimming in centuries of your filth. What did you imagine yourselves doing. What do you imagine you're doing with me. What gives you the right to rub the privilege of your whiteness, your immunity, in dying people's faces. Slinking through a place so down and out even niggers with nothing to lose avoid it if they can. Dog-eat-dog back-of-the-wall and at night too. Who the fuck did you think you were. What kind of daydream were you strolling around in.

She survived it. That's all she can say for sure. Or wishes to say to herself. Survived the stupid, trespassing night. Survived Paul's angry words years after the night. Survived his betrayal, the breakup, the end of their time together. Survived their trip to the island Paul could not keep separate from other trips, other islands, other men. Survived Paul's hands on her, hurting her shoulders the last morning on Martinique. His screaming, crying. Hers. Survived in a fashion, she's quick to add, reminding herself or whomever she's speaking to this rainy morning that surviving covers lots of ground, that survival may be everything and it's also nothing. Checks herself, wonders if she really means that, checks the eyes of the one she's addressing, it could be Paul, him here next to her quietly listening, eyes filling up with tears as he follows where she leads, into the abyss, the chances they'd squandered, the scorched earth, his scorched fingers digging into her scorched flesh, wanting to hurt, to rip,
shaking her till she submits, her head flopping side to side as he looms above her, shaking, shaking, shaking whiteness out and blackness in or blackness out and whiteness in, she remembers thinking some crazy true thought like that just before she stopped caring and let her body sink and die.

They say that toward the end of her life, or you could say when her life was over, the cops gathered what was left of Marilyn Monroe after she'd finally binged enough booze and pills to kill herself and rushed her body to Bellevue or some other mental ward, where she was stripped and deposited in a padded, brightly lit rubber room. Throughout the night, as word of her presence spread, a steady trickle of cops and hospital personnel arrived to take turns peering through the peephole of the cubicle where Marilyn Monroe lay on display naked, sleeping her drugged last sleep.

I think of poor Marilyn Monroe when I try to visualize Frantz Fanon's final days in a Bethesda, Maryland, hospital room, curious doctors, nurses, interns trooping in and out to observe him, this Fanon they'd heard awful things about, a fiery, white-hating black revolutionary, prophet of terror, now helpless, dazed, unable to speak, dying of leukemia, a disease characterized by an overload of leucocytes, white corpuscles in the blood that suppress other cells. Fanon seized by fits of vomiting and diarrhea as he fights to rid his system of poison, poison causing hyperpigmentation, Fanon's skin blacker and blacker, like Patrice Lumumba's skin when his body parts cooked in a rusty oil barrel. Fanon and Marilyn chained together, stuffed in the hold of a slave ship crossing the Atlantic. Naked, shitting, pissing, throwing up on each other as the creaking wooden vessel's tossed by stormy seas. Then during a calm they are hauled on deck to dance. What should we name the dance they perform under the eyes of the crew, the dance timed by a crackling cat-o'-nine-tails a drunken sailor snaps at their bare, filthy, bloody, beautiful backs.

Hello. My name is Marilyn.

Hi. I'm Frantz.

Haven't we met before.

It could have happened.

Hard to be sure, isn't it. It's so dark below. And so dazzling up here. I have to squint to see you. How can they keep staring at us without going blind.

Perhaps they are blind. Perhaps we are too.

Here, take my hand, Frantz.

Take my temperature, my blood pressure, my pulse.

Why are they doing this. Why can't they take their eyes off us. What do they expect to see.

I'm very sick. I arrived in this country sick and they put something in my food every day to make me sicker. I'm worried I won't survive to finish my book.

Don't worry. You'll finish. And I promise to read every word.

Thank you, miss.

Oh, Frantz. I'm so cold. Hold me. Never let me go. Maybe we won't die. Maybe there's hope.

I never thought you ... I never thought we would end up like this.

It doesn't end like this. This is just a dream. We're trapped in someone's evil dreaming. Sleep, sleep, my pumpkin. Soon we'll wake up in another dream. Everything will be different...

Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday, dear Frantz,
Happy birthday to you.

W
HEN ARCHIE SATTERWHITE
went down, you could hear it all over the arena, from courtside reserved to the corporate boxes to the cheap seats in heaven, the dull thud of Archie's back slamming the hardwood floor. Did his skull strike first. Did we censor the sharp crack of bone. Is Archie ever going to stir or speak. We've formed a circle. We've done it before, so the circle's wide, with plenty of room for trainer, coach, and Archie in the center, for a doctor if one's in the house. Breathing space for the fallen one. For us. Though none of us seems to breathe for a while. Every player in the circle as still as Archie's dark, long body stretched on the arena floor. Damn, Archie. You got some big feet, man. Look at that boy's size nine-teens sticking up in the air. Be eight foot tall if so much of him wasn't turned under. You think dumb stuff like that when somebody goes down hard, bad hard, and no thought fits, just like no look feels right on your face. Some guys smirk. Some freeze their features into impenetrable masks. Some wag their heads as if in conversation with another innocent bystander shocked by a sudden, brutal accident. Some faces are happy: I told you so, didn't I, their faces say. Didn't I tell you so. And there are the stunned, the glaze-eyed, the painfully concerned or unconcerned. Some can't hide their impatience. Blame the fallen one for disrupting the flow. Some guys turn their backs and stroll to the bench. Some bow their heads to conceal their
reaction. Me, I'll study the rafters, pan the other players' faces. Staring at the dome's ceiling, I wear a look of detachment, resignation. I've heard the verdict, await the sentence. Or, since any face serves as well as any other, I check out my teammates, let one be my guide.