Commonwealth (19 page)

They had never set a fire inside before, had never seen one, and so they wrongly used the skills they had developed by setting fires outside: they stood perfectly still and watched, the theory being that they had made the fire and so the fire was bound to respect them. Then the school's fire alarm went off. They knew that bell, so loud it seemed to be going off inside their brains. They loved fire drills, everything dropped, the girls always so upset because they weren't allowed to take their purses with them, everyone lined up and rushed outside in an orderly manner. The bell brought them back to their senses. The bell saved them. They had practiced and practiced so that in this moment the boys did what they had been drilled to do: duck low, stay together, run for the door. A flame reached out and caught hold of Albie's Red Baron T-shirt, burning his back. In the hallway Edison pulled it off him and burned his hand. As they ran for the door, the sprinklers they had never noticed doused the long, empty hallway, dissolving the entries for the art contest. They pushed out the side door, ran into the sunlight, and fell on the grass by the parking lot, gasping and coughing, panting and singed, the smell of smoke ground into their skin. Albie thought for an instant of his brother. He wondered if dying had been anything like this for Cal. The four boys lay there in the grass, tears streaming over their blackened cheeks, so exhilarated by the force of their own lives they were unable to move. That was where they were when, a scant minute later, the firemen found them.

It had been a nearly impossible decision for Teresa to send Albie to Virginia to live with Beverly and Bert. Clearly he needed a father, but some other father, any other father, would have been preferable.
Beverly and Bert had not killed Cal. Teresa knew this very quietly inside herself. They had been negligent in the details of supervision but as Albie's most recent catastrophe confirmed, so had she. Still, it felt better to blame them. It felt almost good, although good probably wasn't the word. She could call Bert up on the phone and ask him, “Does it feel good to blame me for Albie? Is ‘good' the word?”

What Teresa knew for certain was that she couldn't keep her second son, and since there was no one else volunteering to take him, she didn't see what else she could do. In the end, Albie went to Arlington, and when he failed in the private school there he was sent to a boarding school in North Carolina, and then military school in Delaware. He was eighteen the summer he came back to Torrance, a junior in high school given the fact that the boarding school had held him back. Holly and Jeanette were both home from college and tried to take him to the beach, to parties with their friends he might remember, but Albie was lodged like an anvil on the couch, watching game shows and eating bowls of cornflakes covered over with a thick sludge of sugar. He kept his collective communication to twenty words a day. He counted them. He worked his way through the liquor cabinet from left to right, though the cabinet itself had no organizing principle. He never started in on any bottle until he'd finished the one preceding it.

Then one day he claimed to have gotten a call from Edison. His old friend had a job setting up bands in a club in San Francisco, and he said that all Albie had to do was carry the amplifiers off the buses and plug them in. Edison had an apartment with some other guys and Albie could throw a mattress on the floor. Albie seemed to be almost excited about this, as excited as Jeanette and Holly and their mother could remember him being about anything. Lifting things, plugging things in, sounded like a job he was qualified to
do, so Teresa bought him a bus ticket to San Francisco and made him a stack of peanut butter sandwiches. Holly and Jeanette each gave him a hundred dollars out of their savings. He loaded his bike underneath the bus with his duffel bag, and Jeanette and her sister and their mother waited until he took his seat by the window so that he could see them wave goodbye. He was going away again. He would be someone else's impossible problem to solve. They were each privately giddy in their relief.

Fodé came into the bathroom that night while Albie was brushing his teeth, one tap and he let himself in, shutting the door behind him. The bathroom was a good place to talk, even if there really wasn't the space for two adult men to stand comfortably together. Albie was pressed up against the sink, and Fodé, wearing flannel pajama bottoms and a white T-shirt, moved around the stacked plastic milk crates full of folded towels and bath toys and Pampers. “My brother,” he said, “listen to me, I want to tell you, you will stay here with us. A week, a year, the rest of your life, as long as you need to be here, we welcome you.”

Albie had the toothbrush in his mouth, minty foam trailing from his lower lip, when his sister's husband put a hand around the back of his neck and touched their foreheads together. A tribal custom? A sign of earnestness? A pass? All he knew about his sister was what he dimly remembered from when they were teenagers, and about her crazy African husband he knew nothing at all. Forehead to forehead, Albie nodded. He still needed a place to sleep tonight.

Fodé smiled. “Good, good, good. Your sister needs her family. Calvin needs his uncle. And I could use a brother. I am very far away from home.”

“Sure,” Albie said.

“You can talk to me. That's what we do. You look around this house, your house, and you think things are busy.” He shook his head. “I am very good at stopping. You say, ‘Brother, stop, come and sit with me,' and here I am. You tell me what you need.” Then Fodé stopped and looked at him again, his face so close it was difficult to focus. “Albie, what do you need?”

Albie thought about this. He leaned forward to spit his toothpaste into the sink. His head was about to split open. “Tylenol?”

At this small request Fodé beamed, his teeth, his glasses, his broad forehead, so many reflective surfaces for light. He reached across Albie and opened the medicine chest, pointing to the second shelf. “Tylenol,” he said proudly. “Are you unwell?”

“Headache.” His eyes did a quick inventory of what was available, which was pretty much the Tylenol and the pediatric Tylenol, eardrops, eyedrops, nosedrops.

Fodé filled the small yellow cup on the sink and handed it to him, the communal cup. “Soon you will sleep. That's what will help. You've had a long trip home.”

Albie swallowed four pills and nodded, a nod which was also meant to cover thank you and goodnight. Fodé nodded solemnly in return and backed out of the bathroom, shutting the door behind him. Jeanette had told him where this friendliest of creatures had come from but damned if he could remember, Namibia, Nigeria, Ghana? Then it came to him.

It was Guinea.

Even with the additional incentive of Bintou, who, if she wasn't actually the second wife of his brother-in-law could probably be made while the baby was down for a nap, Albie could not sit in that apartment for the entire day. For one thing it was tropically hot. The radiator hissed and clanked like someone was beating it to
death with a lead pipe down in the basement. Neither Bintou nor Dayo even flinched at the noise but it made Albie want to take off his skin. Small wonder Jeanette and Fodé left for work so early. A humidifier blew a steady mist through the tiny room, very possibly an attempt to re-create a sub-Saharan climate in this Brooklyn terrarium. “Good for the lungs,” Bintou said, smiling when Albie got up to see if it could be turned off. The window that led to the fire escape was jammed and so he went down the four flights of stairs to smoke. The third time he went to smoke he carried his bike with him and rode away into the softly felted snow. By one o'clock he had a job as a bike messenger.

It was the work he found in every city, the only employment he felt that life had prepared him for. He couldn't even call himself an arsonist since he was now twenty-six and hadn't so much as set a fire in a fireplace since he was fourteen. When asked when he could start work he said now, and then went on to spend the day figuring out Manhattan. It wasn't a complicated place.

“I am so proud of you! And this means you will stay. Visitors don't get jobs on their first day in town. Houseguests don't get jobs. You are a resident now. One day here and you own the city.”

Jeanette smiled at her brother, a small Jeanette smile, rolling her eyes slightly.
Africans
, she seemed to be saying.
What can you do?
She was still dressed in her own work clothes, a skirt and sweater. She had been in her second year of graduate school for biomedical engineering when she got pregnant. Jeanette, it turned out, was the smart one. She had explained to Albie the night before that instead of following her original plan to have an abortion, she and Fodé had decided to conduct a radical social experiment they called Having The Baby, and because of the outcome of that experiment, she had dropped out of school and now worked as a field service engineer for Philips. She did set-up,
instruction, and service for MRI machines in hospitals stretching from Queens to the Bronx.

“I plug them in,” she said flatly. “I show people the manual.” She would have to continue to do so, she explained to Albie last night while making up his bed, despite the mindless, soul-crushing nature of the work, at least until Fodé had finished his doctorate in public health at NYU and Dayo was of an age that it seemed bearable to send him to day care.
Dayo care
, they called it. “If I don't go back to school,” she whispered while she tucked a sheet over the sofa cushions, “the radical social experiment will have failed because I'll have to kill myself.”

Albie held the baby while Jeanette heated up the dinner Bintou had left for them. Fodé set the table and opened a bottle of wine, telling them the story of his day. “Americans love the idea of vaccinating Africans. What could be nicer than a photograph of dusty little Nigerian children lined up for inoculation on the front page of the
New York Times
? But for their own children the mothers of New York City find vaccinations passé. They say the vaccination is not sufficiently natural, that it could possibly cause something worse than it could prevent. I have spent the day trying to convince women with college educations to vaccinate their children and they argued with me. I must go to medical school. No one will listen to me if I am not a medical doctor.”

“I'll listen to you,” Jeanette said. “Don't go to medical school.”

“One woman told me she did not believe in epidemiology.” He covered his face with his hands. “It is appalling.”

“Measles are no longer applicable in New York.” Jeanette patted his shoulder. “We've transcended measles.”

Jeanette washed the salad greens. Fodé wrapped the sliced bread in tinfoil and put it in the oven. They worked around one another in the tiny space, each one stepping out of the other's way.

“Tell me about
your
day instead,” he said to her. “Let's think of something better.”

“You want to think about MRI demonstrations in hospital basements?”

Fodé stopped for a moment, then smiled and shook his head. “No, no.” He turned then to his brother-in-law, so pleased to have another opportunity. “What I meant to say is—Albie, please, tell us about your day.”

Albie shifted the weight of his nephew in his arms. He spoke to the baby. “I was stopped by security guards in four buildings today. I showed my ID, was told I could go up, and then I was stopped by a second guard at the elevator who told me I couldn't go up.”

Fodé nodded with appreciation. “This is most impressive for a white man.”

“And I was almost hit by the M16 bus.”

“Stop it,” Jeanette said, putting a bowl of salad in the middle of the table. “No more about your day either.”

“That leaves us with Dayo,” Albie said.

Fodé took the baby from his arms. “Dayo. There is no one I would rather hear from. My son, tell us, was it a beautiful day to be alive?”

“Uncle,” Dayo said, and held out his arms to go back.

Albie, who had lived close to the edge for so long, and at times had strayed past the edge, looked out the window to see the lights shining down from all those countless Brooklyn apartments. He wondered if this was what people were doing—were they making dinners with their family, holding babies, recounting days? Was this what life was like for them?

Albie's bicycle was an amalgamation of so many different replacement parts it could no longer rightfully be called a Schwinn. It was
his job to deliver small packages and notarized insurance forms and promising manuscripts. Sometimes it was a contract and he was to wait for a signature before riding it back to where it had come from. Sometimes he was asked to sign as a witness. New York was the land of limitless deliveries. There was always someone who had something that needed to be someplace else, and so the day went on until he stopped it. He cut in front of buses and between taxis, startled drivers from Connecticut like the Goddamn Boy on a Bike he had once been. The tourists saw him bearing down on them and hung to the curb. When he arrived at his destination, he lifted his bike onto his shoulder like it was his younger brother and carried it with him into the elevator. While Albie was three inches taller than his father, he was only very tall and not extraordinarily tall. He was, however, extraordinarily thin, and the thinness gave him the illusion of additional height. Often the receptionists would blanch ever so slightly to see Albie approaching their desk with a manila envelope in his hand, the bicycle wearing a dent into his acromion. He was a living skeleton with his black tattoos and his thick black braid, like Death himself had come for them, ready to ride them out on his handlebars.

“You should consider upping your caloric intake,” Jeanette said when he came limping back into the apartment in the evenings.

“Occupational hazard,” he said. True and not true—he'd seen some fat messengers in his day.

Albie made money, and after a couple of months of thinking he would leave tomorrow or the next day, he started giving half of it to Jeanette for rent and coffee and wine and Dayo's education or her education. The other half he changed into hundreds and folded into the zipper compartment of his duffel. He had tried to give the money to Fodé first but Fodé wouldn't even look at it. The next day he waited for his sister at the subway station and
gave it to her instead. Jeanette nodded and pushed the bills into her pocket.