Elliot Mabeuse (30 page)

She took my arm and leaned to whisper in my ear, "Conner, I've got a confession. I've never been on the El before. This is so incredibly cool!"

I smiled and looked at her. She was positively gleeful, clinging to my arm and hunching her shoulders as if her excitement had made her as small as a six-year-old.

When I laughed, she pinched me.

"Don’t laugh at me! Tell me everything! Where are we? Which way are we going?

What train is this?"

I pointed out the map above the door. "I'll show you the map later. We'll get a copy and study it. Right now you should be looking out your window. We're going right through town. In Vegas now, they have a hotel that does this as an amusement ride. I mean, this is it, Emma. Look, we can see in everyone's window, down every street. The kids, the college kids who used to live along the El, they used to put on shows in their back rooms when the train went by, try to freak out the people on the train—stage murders, sex scenes, all kind of things. It was a show."

She looked at me, then out the window. Maybe they did back in my day, or years ago, but probably not anymore. Even the apartments backing onto the El weren't cheap anymore. The days of the college ghetto were gone. It was all changing. But it was still the city. In a nation gone flat and bland, it was still wildly vertical and vertiginous and dense, the energy pouring down from above and surging up from below, the train cutting through caverns of brick and steel. The vistas were vertical, the scenes served in slices, snatches, and I was ecstatic and proud that Emma responded to it just the way I'd hoped. I hadn't even known how important it had been to me.

At Armitage, the train slid underground like a hand under a skirt and there was nothing more to be seen. Talking was impossible in the roar of the subway tunnel and the windows became black mirrors. I saw our reflections, me and this young girl, and I

wondered just what hope did we have? Once the novelty wore off, what hope did we have?

But on State Street the store windows took her attention and that was a relief. It was a relief to see Emma the consumer return, the critical eye. She was in her element here and this was a language she understood. I could just tell by her expression, she must have heard about the "downtown stores" and she looked at things as if she were in a foreign country, comparing the clothes to what she knew from her own shopping grounds.

"What do you think?" I asked, waiting for her to catch up.

She looked at me but withheld comment, knowing I wouldn't understand. "Where do we go from here?"

"Number twenty-four bus takes us right to the museum. Over here."

We heard the thunder and thought it was construction, turned a corner and ran into some street musicians—bucket drummers. Four black kids, ages maybe twelve to sixteen, drumming on overturned five-gallon plastic buckets, the kinds of things you get plaster and spackle in at building supply stores, and one old man in bum clothes who didn't quite look a part of them standing a few yards away playing an alto sax.

The kids were fantastic. There was no other way to describe what they did. Three of them had buckets set on bricks like drum sets, the other two held them between their legs and danced and spun around, and they never stopped. They played ensemble and they played solo. They conversed, they argued back and forth. The rhythms were complex, multi-layered, shifting and impossible to pin down, dazzling, turning in upon

themselves and then rising and rolling into rhythmic illusional tricks like flocks of pigeons in flight. They made you want to laugh out loud when you understood what they were doing.

Meanwhile the old man's alto sax soared above the din or dipped down to deliver trenchant, loopy comments that made even the kids laugh. They were obviously ghetto kids, and where they learned this language was beyond me, but they were simply brilliant. The sound of the joyous thunder crashing down off the cold concrete towers had a weird, humanizing effect, like Carnivale come to the city. It was all just perfect.

Emma grabbed my arm and stared. For the second time in two days she was getting an object lesson in what live music was supposed to be and taking it to heart. I stood there and enjoyed her enjoyment.

There was a younger kid, maybe eleven, bopping around with a coffee can filled with change and some bills, shaking it like a tambourine, begging for change, and he came right up to Emma. She looked at him, bewildered, but so caught up in the joy of the music the kid must have seen something in her face, probably the same thing I always noticed as well, that openness, the emotion.

I'd already reached in my pocket and peeled off a dollar and was peeling off another and would have given them more—was ready to give them more, that's how grateful I was—when he just stuck his fist in the can, ignoring the money I was pushing in. He pulled out a handful of silver and held it up for her and let the change just spill into her open hands like a gift from the lord of music, the dimes and nickels and pennies splashing into her hands and bouncing onto the sidewalk as he grinned from ear to ear.

Emma stood there, dumbstruck, and I did too. Then the kid just turned and danced back to his friends, beating on his can with a stick. She looked at me and I shrugged. Our bus was coming.

"I think he liked you," I said.

I pulled her away and she stumbled after me, looking behind her, reluctant to go, confused. The kid waved at her, waved his stick. Another drummer waved, smiling.

They all noticed her. We got on the bus and I found us a seat and pushed her in.

"What was that, Conner? Why'd he give me money? That was so weird!"

"You're charmed, Emma. Magical. I keep telling you and you don't believe me.

We’re in erotic space here, Emma, and everyone recognizes you. You're a queen here and everyone knows you."

* * * * By the time the bus let us off behind the museum, it was drizzling and not as auspicious as I would have liked. On one side, across Lake Shore Drive, the lake stretched out in an infinite gray haze, the sails of pleasure boats lost in the mist, and on the other, the towers of downtown disappeared into the low clouds. In front of us, the huge bulk of the back of the museum looked down on us in the neoclassical grandeur of another era, long, imposing rows of shallow stairs rising up to the entrance, a heavy roofline supported by enormous columns and the figures of giant women who appeared to be holding the huge mass over their heads.

I led Emma around the side to the west doors where my pass got us admitted through an elegant little marble entrance near the private museum offices. I led her

through some out-of-the-way routes, dark corridors and neglected galleries, the noise and buzz of the crowds getting steadily louder, until finally we stepped unexpectedly into the vast, dizzying space of the central hall.

This was a place where worlds collided, where the bones of dinosaurs reared into the air next to thirty-foot-high tribal masks from New Guinea, beyond which was a pair of preserved African bull elephants locked in combat, totem poles from the Pacific Northwest, Incan Gold from the Peruvian Andes cascading in a two-story display, upended Maori war canoes, and a massive stand of million year-old tree trunks dug out of the earth in the process of being turned into coal.

And around this collection of impossibilities, smaller exhibits, kiosks, directories, crowds of prehistoric birds, tours forming, and a swirling, buzzing sea of people—

somewhere between a crowd, a mob and an audience—looking, touching, feeling, running back and forth. Coming from the shadows, it was like stepping into a circus.

We'd arrived.

"Wow. What are we going to see, teacher?"

"I'm not sure, Emma. Come on. I'll show you around. I'm sure it'll come to me."

All along I'd been wondering why I'd brought her down here. I knew it was important. It was part of the pilgrimage, just like the Blue Moon had been, but this was different. This wasn't a piece of my life like the Moon was. This was more like a religion, like taking her to church, and now, standing in the main gallery, I thought I understood why I'd brought her down here.

Emma and I were connected by this little sexual link, this thing we did together that seemed so trivial to her, silly almost. I'd brought her down to the most serious place I knew to show her it wasn't silly. I was going to show this little girl with the whipped ass that what we did together was every bit as serious as these dinosaur bones and the cycads turning into coal and the rise and fall of civilizations and even the evolution of life itself, because somehow, in my mind, it was. I was going to show her that the things she made me feel when she gave herself to me the way she did, were every bit as important as comets in space and the raising of the pyramids. How I was going to show her this, I didn't know. It was just something I felt, and I felt it strongly.

"Come on," I said. "We have a lot to see."

I won't take you through the whole tour. I won't take you through all the dark and shadowy galleries, down the marble stairs, and let the museum's atmosphere of eternity filter down upon you. We grew quiet and we grew close. Even the young kids there succumbed to the feeling of quiet and awe as they walked through the galleries and shifted back in time. There was so much death, so much solemnity, so much preserved behind glass, so many stories that weren't told any more.

Walking up on the second floor among the crowds of people who weren't there, we walked on invisible floors in a time before the earth existed. There were pictures and film clips and diagrams, abstracts and models in forms the human eye could comprehend, distances unimaginable, stars accreting from clouds of gas, atoms forming from boiling clouds of plasma, dust, particles, impossible concatenations of events, coincidences, inconceivable rivers of time.

I held her hand and felt the warmth of her skin as we were blown up from winds of chaos and our planet took form beneath our feet, and at last we stepped from behind some cosmic curtain into a dramatic exhibit where, in darkness, the fragile elements of life shyly took form and I could feel Emma actually rooting for them, just as I did, just as we all did, praying for the blind little nucleic acids to assemble, to push back the night, to find their partners and grow.

And they did, through billions of years of slimes and soups and missteps until finally, when you got to the first basic blind, bald and hungry primitive little cells, it was such a relief you wanted to laugh out loud and weep for joy. Life!
Life!

And then came sex and things started happening fast. I took her hand again and we stepped into the next room. Here was an explosion now as the seas were abloom in an obscenity of living things fucking and eating each other, and sometimes doing both, the whole sea a great vast paradise-sewer-stewpot burning with hot energy and clouds of eggs and semen. We stepped into an environment set beneath the Ordovician sea where creatures lived and died in an unconscious imperative without head or hand and nature feverishly threw one outlandish design after another into the mix. You could almost feel the heat of creation, the feverish hurry.

And then the vertebrates—spinal cords appeared, and bones, and heads, and something like faces, and we were seeing things we almost recognized. It was strange, this exhibit, our excitement—what was it?—it was like something personal. We were caught up in it. It was like being in a foreign country for too long and finally hearing your own language spoken, seeing these cold, stupid fish faces, and the dead eyes of lizards hauling themselves onto the land.

Emma pushed up behind me, staring over my shoulder into the cases, peering through magnifiers at tiny fossils, her warm, motherly breast pressing against me through her raincoat. I wanted to squeeze her. I was horny. I wanted her, and when she looked at me, her face was flushed too.

There were extinctions, huge and cataclysmic, like the fall of nature's guillotine, cleaning the slate and wiping everything clean. I'd noticed them as we walked through the exhibition but hadn't told her. I knew she'd be upset and she was now. She took them personally. Seventy-five, eighty percent of all species wiped out. She was horrified. It happened again and again. She wanted to complain, as if the museum staff could do something about them.

But by then, we were in the dinosaur gallery with hundreds of excited kids and I took her hand and led her out. We'd seen enough, and besides, the point had been made. I'd wanted to show her where we'd come from, where those beautiful tits and legs and ass and pussy had come from, where our minds had come from. How extraordinary we were. How amazing it was that, at some point in all that time, the universe had created a miracle that had sat up and noticed itself, and we were those miracles.

I don't know how successful I'd been. It's a hard thing to make someone see the miraculous when they've been seeing it every day. But that was my job.

"Am I supposed to be getting horny or something, Conner? Because I'm not."

We were out on the concourse on the second floor. I led her over to the rail where we could look down on the crowd below. Two giant figures—Wisdom and Knowledge— guarded the south end of the gallery.

"No, I didn't expect you to get horny."

"Are you going to make me take my clothes off?"

I smiled. "Should I?"