The Dead Circle (16 page)

Sammy dove under the AMC Rambler as the National Guard’s machine gun started roaring in response, sending a hail of bullets at the top of a building to his left. Tracers lit up the sky and pieces of brick and plaster rained down from the façade. More rocks and bullets flew over his head in the opposite direction from the rioters. Sammy had been completely forgotten when the fighting began.

Knowing he had to get out of there, Sammy crawled on his hands and knees out from under the car and ran back down the side street as if his life depended on it. In fact, it did. He ran not really knowing where he was headed. He just had to be away from the sirens, the fire, and the gunshots. He eventually stumbled onto Grand River Avenue as it crossed diagonally over Trumball. He wanted to go home, but was too frightened to head back north, so he followed Grand River Avenue all the way down to where it ended in midtown.

As he slowed to a jog and then a walk, police, firemen and National Guard troops were mobilizing and heading north and east. Moving in the opposite direction were scores of wounded people, scrambling to get away from the violence. Hundreds of people, mostly black, were being loaded onto stretchers with gunshot wounds and broken bones. Most were dazed and bleeding. Some had obviously been beaten and many others seemed to be suffering from burns or smoke inhalation. While he was watching, he saw at least five stretchers go by covered with white sheets. The fabric covered the faces of the dead, but it didn’t prevent their blood from seeping through the cotton, creating slowly expanding bright red splotches. The blood seeping into the fabric made the red color seem unnaturally bright and cartoonish. It reminded Sammy of a clown’s face paint.

Thousands of people, almost entirely black, had been arrested and were roughly being handcuffed or chained together, loaded onto buses or just being locked down and ignored. He could hear a woman wailing with grief. Nobody seemed to be listening as she screamed over and over that her baby had been gunned down in her own bedroom by police haphazardly shooting into a neighborhood. He watched a car fight its way through the crowd driven by a middle-aged white woman in horn-rimmed glasses who was holding a pistol in the same hand with which she held the steering wheel.

He kept searching for David, but he knew his chances of finding him in this chaos were slim. He felt the fear, the horror and the sadness, but his feelings seemed to be growing duller. He couldn’t tell if it was because of the smoke, or from his own clouded mind, but Sammy gradually began to see the world through a thick haze. Eventually the persistent sounds of sirens, gunfire and screaming seemed to blend into the environment so much that he didn’t even notice them anymore. Nobody paid any attention to the dazed teenage boy as he continued walking slowly down the street.

Is that a-?
Sammy had never seen a tank in real life before. Of course he’d seen them in movies or on his neighbor’s old black and white TV, but seeing one in real life was an altogether different experience. And this one was not rumbling up the street in a Fourth of July parade. In that context, he would have been impressed, even excited by its size and obvious power. That night, he wasn’t impressed; he was intimidated by the huge green monstrosity charging into his neighborhood. The barrel of its cannon loomed over Grand River Avenue looking aggressive, malicious. The tank didn’t seem to care what side it was on, it didn’t care who was right or wrong or justified or monstrous. It wasn’t there for ceremony. It was there to destroy, to maim, and to kill.

Sammy had always loved playing with his brother’s toy M26 Pershing tank, running it over the living room carpet killing Nazis who camped out in a secret base on the couch cushions. He always fought his imaginary wars in Asia or Russia or the moon or some other far-off place. He never imagined the war taking place in America, and certainly not on the streets of Detroit. He was getting a little old for playing with toys, but even if he wasn’t, he knew his days of playing war were over. He stared at the tank as it disappeared down the street and without much thought, continued walking south.

After crossing the Fisher Freeway, the street came to an end in a huge empty lot. Even in all of the chaos, he was startled by the huge black space in the heart of downtown.
Why is there nothing here?
He stopped walking and turned around to look back uptown. What he saw took his breath away. Coming from three different points in the horizon were advancing walls of flame and destruction. The city glowed with firelight and mountainous thick clouds of smoke choked the skyline and blocked out the stars. He had the sickening sensation that each of the rivers of destruction were headed in his direction, as if they were moving towards this very spot. As if this very stretch of abandoned pavement had some sort of magnetic pull that drew devastation and ruin to itself.

He sat down on the dirty sidewalk and put his head in his hands. There in his home of Detroit, there in that spot, society had broken down.
Is this the end of the world?

***

The next morning Chris plays the piano with a furious intensity, practicing the difficult passages over and over, refining his fingering, and slowly working up to tempo. The music is the one thing that still seems normal to him—the only thing that still seems sane. He rehearses like his life depends on it, perhaps because it’s the only thing his life
doesn’t
depend on at the moment. But of course, he is practicing for a concert that will never take place.

Sarah sits at a table on the other end of the library. It took years for her to get used to listening to him play—to be able to do anything other than watch his fingers and marvel at the sounds he was able to make with such ease. It was one of the things that drew her to him when they first met.

***

The year after getting her master’s degree, Sarah was a young intern at a prestigious architectural design firm. The job was hard to get—there were almost three hundred applicants for the single unpaid position—but Sarah was an overachiever. It was obvious to her interviewers that she was brilliant and dedicated. Unlike many of the other applicants she was also charming and sociable. It was clear she could collaborate with her co-workers and that was an advantage in a field filled with talented people who did not play well with others. But what really intrigued them was that beneath the friendly smile and quirky-smart sense of humor was a drive unmatched by the other twenty-four-year-olds vying for the job. By the time the firm’s Christmas party rolled around she had already established a reputation as a rising star. There were half-awed, half-annoyed whispers that she would be offered a job when her internship ended.

Despite her obvious talent, she never balked at menial tasks like sorting mail or answering phones. She never complained about staying late or working through the weekend. She looked as if she needed to be in motion 24/7. When she was tasked with arranging the Christmas party, she threw herself at it with this same zeal. She even went as far as to call the University of Michigan School of Music to hire a pianist to play the cocktail party.

Chris arrived at the event feeling completely out of place. The building was opulent and the people at the party were wearing suits and cocktail dresses that looked like they cost more than his rent. He was just a gawky kid in a wrinkled tuxedo. Despite feeling like a rat who had sneaked into the kitchen, he was more than happy to get paid three hundred dollars to play a couple of Christmas carols for drunken executives. Chris wasn’t the first recommendation when Sarah called the piano department, his professor had recommended a classmate who was a more gifted pianist. But when she turned it down, Chris got the call. He didn’t mind, he knew that this would probably be the case for most of his career. He’d take the jobs that the stars didn’t want.

Playing a cocktail party was not a glamorous gig. Nobody at the firm paid much attention to the pianist, but Chris was used to being ignored. Corporate partygoers tended to focus on the cocktails and cock tales. They mostly talked about who was sleeping with whom and whose wife was the wiser. But, there was one person at the party who was paying attention. Sarah was enraptured. While she listened and watched, the rest of the party seemed to fade into the background. All she could hear was his music. All she could see was that man. He was still practically a boy, still sporting a touch of teenage acne and wearing glasses five years out of style. There was a mustard stain on the collar of his tuxedo that looked as if it had been there for a while, but Chris made that piano purr. The poor baby grand spent most of its days sitting in the lobby as a decoration, ignored and un-tuned. But with his hands on the keys, it sung like it was meant to when it rolled out of the Steinway manufacturing plant in Astoria, New York.

Sarah worked up her courage and brought him a drink.

“Hi there. You’re really terrific. I brought you some eggnog. Is that OK?”

Chris smiled, not missing a beat of ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ while he talked. “Of course. Thank you. I didn’t know anybody was actually listening.”

“I am. I’m Sarah.”

She offered her hand to shake, but then realized how silly that was because his hands were occupied. She blushed and rolled her eyes at herself. Chris grinned and reached his right hand out for the shake while somehow covering all of the notes with his left hand.

“Chris.”

 He spent the rest of the evening dazzling her by working little musical commentaries into his Christmas carols. When the douchey guy from accounting, still sporting his high school class ring, made a drunken pass at her, Chris worked Springsteen’s ‘Glory Days’ into the harmonies of ‘Silent Night’. The chorus of ‘Ding Dong the Witch is Dead’ found its way into a verse of ‘Jingle Bells’ when Sarah’s canker sore of a boss spilled a martini down the front of her ostentatiously expensive dress.

Sarah laughed and laughed at her co-workers who were oblivious to Chris’ musical subversion. They were puzzled by her mirth. Sarah had been charming and warm as a co-worker—she was the type of person who smiled easily, but she almost never really laughed. She giggled frequently, but it was never really because she was actually amused. It was for their benefit—to smooth out a bad joke or to ease the tension in the room. She was very much attuned to the emotional needs of others, but didn’t seem to have any herself.

But that night she wasn’t laughing for them or for Chris, she was laughing from a part of herself so deeply buried that she hadn’t really remembered it was there. Chris didn’t think his game was actually that funny, but he was delighted to bring such obvious joy to the beautiful woman who had sat down on the piano bench with him. He was very conscious of the feeling of her leg against his and even more conscious that the hem of her skirt seemed to creep its way up her thigh just a bit more every time she laughed. He couldn’t make jokes fast enough.

Sarah had been a very serious person in the years after what happened to Mikey. She had turned from a decent, but not perfect, student into an obsessive overachiever overnight. When she got to college, she held a perfect 4.0 with many notations for extra credit projects. She joined the debate team, the chess club, the technology committee and was well known for her volunteer work. She rarely slept more than five hours a night, but seemed to be pulling from an endless reserve of energy. Sarah did anything, everything, that could keep her busy.

Very few of her friends noticed the tremendous amount of guilt Sarah carried with her. Had they known, they would have expected her to fall into a pattern of self-destruction, alcohol, drugs, sex or even just isolation. Sarah was the opposite. She was friendly, popular and successful. What could be wrong?

It was Chris who intuited what was happening almost immediately. He had spent most of his time in classical music, a world filled with obsessive over-achievers trying to hide something behind their twelve daily hours of violin practice. Concealing something from themselves or someone else, or both. Sarah had the same feel about her. Or perhaps it was just that he noticed that despite her warm gregarious exterior, she had a strange way of avoiding being looked at. It felt like eye contact made her really uncomfortable. She always cleverly drew his attention away from her face—pointing out a cute dog or a new restaurant—if his gaze became too fixed. He wasn’t sure if she even knew that she was doing it, but it became clear to him. Sarah, who appeared to be the ‘golden-child,’ the rising star of the office, the intern everybody knew would be the boss someday, was really a woman in a great deal of pain.

Sarah cried for almost an hour after the first time they made love. They had waited for almost a month before they took the relationship into the bedroom. She had offered sex to him on their first date in a jarringly matter-of-fact way, but Chris turned her down. He suspected she might have been play-acting what she thought she was supposed to do, and that her true desire didn’t seem to be present in the offer.

Instead they dated. Chris took her bowling, to the aquarium, to the ice-skating rink. They did silly, almost child-like activities and spent most of their time roaring with laughter. By now, Chris was not surprised that Sarah hadn’t done any of these activities since she actually was a child. The innocent happiness seemed to sneak up on her, but her joy was fresh and genuine.

About a month after they started dating, they walked home in falling snow after an evening at the movies. They had seen Jurassic Park 3 and Sarah had been completely dazzled by the special effects.

“I just don’t get it. How did they do that?”

“Where have you been? You realize this is the third Jurassic Park movie right?”

“I haven’t seen the first two. I mean, I haven’t seen a lot of fantasy movies.”