Of their own accord.
Where’s the boy? The damn boy, Jean-Jacques. Find the boy.
The particulars turn to strands of cognizance, short broken reels from the other side. Mind spew or the entirety of the universe? Who could say. Not Jean-Jacques. He didn’t try to hold to them for understanding, not anymore. He forced them away by not forcing anything at all.
Jean-Jacques knew these weren’t good dreams, but they weren’t bad dreams, either. They were dreams. None of it was new.
A sense that he hadn’t been himself on the other side of consciousness sometimes skulked around, though, in the soft corners between sleep and awareness. Like he’d been observing there. Watching, not doing. Like the soldier had been a figment all along. Not a growth. Not a progression. Just a necessity for a fixed place and time.
Too much partying with the guys, Jean-Jacques would think when he came to. Too much comfort and indulgence in Hollywood, not enough time at the gym and the range, staying lethal. But dream, memory, idle thought: all led back to the boy. To the boy he’d lost, to the boy he’d failed. He knew that. All roads led back to the war.
* * *
Jean-Jacques Saint-Preux had come home.
He’d left Little Haiti eight years before, promising to never return. He’d abided by that until now. Jean-Jacques had missed a cousin’s wedding, a nephew’s graduation, an uncle’s deportment. Duty, he’d tried to explain. The profession of arms, a nice, workmanlike way of saying he’d devoted his life to spilling blood and snatching souls in the name of the homeland. Twelve tours between the International Legion, the Rangers, and the Volunteers. Jean-Jacques had earned his honor in the process, and citizenship, too. At some point, though, on one of those twelve business trips, over there had become more normal than back here. Months lost to filming Hollywood propaganda for the government had only exacerbated that dislocation. Jean-Jacques wanted nothing more than to get back to combat, where life made sense.
In the meantime, home had gone on without him.
The differences reminded him of that. Renovated houses, new businesses, closed ones, too, strange streetlights and stop signs. A coffee shop had opened up next to the old boxing gym on Delmas Street. A chain coffee shop. When had—he stopped himself. He didn’t want to care.
The air smelled the same, though. Like hot trash and wildflower.
Jean-Jacques turned the car onto a thoroughfare. He drove slow along the water, window open and looking left, across the bay. The night skyline of Empire City had once meant everything to him. The big, scattershot lights and dark silhouettes like castles suggested something else, something more. And the power of else and more can transform a young mind. It had for him, growing up in the outer reaches of the city, hiding from bored hoods looking for familiarity in a strange land far from the Pearl of the Antilles. And what could be more familiar, more unifying, than beating on a loner?
He’d found refuge at the skate park, where enough kids from surrounding districts showed up to bring out the occasional patrol car. They’d laugh at the fat immigrant trying ollies and grinds on a ragged board from the flower power era, but he didn’t mind. Laughter was peace, even laughter at him. The black Americans could call him whatever they wanted, and so could the cops. They didn’t know who he was, where he came from. They thought he was different in a normal way. He’d liked that. Besides, after they went home with their jokes, he could sit on a park bench and watch the water churn and watch the night come upon the city like a mask and he could think about else and he could think about more and he could just be alone. Most important of all, he could just be left alone.
The skate park wasn’t there anymore. Jean-Jacques had driven past it earlier and found a carry-out Chinese restaurant. But the skyline remained. It had matched the traces of memory, mostly. The Global Trade skyscraper lit up the end of the island, rigid as a longsword. Its force reminded Jean-Jacques of Tripoli for some reason, which in turn reminded him of that specific blend of propellant, hot blood, and emptied bowels he’d come to associate with death. Something about nothingness being something, he decided. Instead of what it was supposed to be.
The lights from the city still washed out the stars above. That left a different type of nothingness.
What kind of place doesn’t have stars? Jean-Jacques considered that in the car. It hadn’t been until he traveled the globe in attack helicopters that he’d seen the night sky for all its glory. The galaxy went on for forever, something that put into perspective the elses and mores offered by one city skyline. Even home’s.
Jean-Jacques turned off the thoroughfare and passed under a stoplight. It was stuck and burned yellow and burned yellow and kept burning yellow, never changing. He parked the car. Across the street, behind a chain-link fence, a pair of teen boys built like fishbones played basketball on a new hoop. They didn’t look his way but he could tell they were side-eyeing him through the dim.
Maybe I should’ve dressed down, he thought, before correcting himself. He’d worn a polo and pressed slacks for a reason. Might as well own it.
Jean-Jacques unrolled the windows and left the doors unlocked; he’d borrowed the car from one of the bohemians they were staying with and didn’t want to return it less than whole. Such an act didn’t seem necessary in this Little Haiti but it had been in his. He walked past the teenagers and their side-eyes toward a cluster of tall, dull buildings made of brick.
“Welcome to General Ulysses S. Grant Houses,” read a blue sign held up on wooden stilts. “A Wonderful Community.”
The courtyard of the public housing complex was a gray slab of cement and cold shadows. Lampposts marked the way to metal tables in the center, forming a sort of concrete pergola. Stereos from different apartment windows blasted out dance songs, the even, pulsing beats filling the courtyard with dueling shouts and sing-along. But other than a group of girls jumping rope, Jean-Jacques didn’t see anyone. Sunday night, he thought. Most people would be walking the Mache. The moon sat tucked behind an armada of gray clouds. Black mass had descended.
Jean-Jacques strolled through the courtyard to the metal tables, head low and hands deep in his pockets. He tried not to betray any hurry. The scent of marinated chicken and sauce piquant drifted through the night air from an open window. His stomach grumbled. It’d been a long time since he’d eaten a proper Caribbean meal. Wog food relied too much on earth flavors, he thought. It needed some fire in it. And army food, forget about it—that paste was for white people. One of the girls jumping rope turned and squared him up.
“Why you walk like a babylon?” she asked. The other girls laughed.
Jean-Jacques considered the question. He’d never been called police before. He was glad to see them jumping rope with one bought from a store, made of nylon. The girls from his youth had made do with lines of telephone cable.
He shrugged. “Just how I walk,” he said in kreyol. The girls widened their eyes. They hadn’t thought he was one of theirs.
He sat at one of the tables. His knees cracked for the effort while his lower back ached from an old slipped disc. Twenty-five going on fifty, he thought. Jean-Jacques was beginning to feel his own mortality.
He looked around, eyes adjusting to the lamplight. A sterile conformity rustled through the courtyard, strips of neat yellow grass and power-washed walkways glinting with forced order. There was one exception: a circle with three arrows spray-painted in blood orange raced across the face of a nearby building. The arrows pointed to the lower-left inside of the circle. Underneath, written in wavy kreyol, was a message: