PROLOGUE
See, What Had Happened Was
I sing the city.
Fucking city. I stand on the rooftop of a building I don’t live in and spread my arms and tighten my middle and yell nonsense ululations at the construction site that blocks my view. I’m really singing to the cityscape beyond. The city’ll figure it out.
It’s dawn. The damp of it makes my jeans feel slimy, or maybe that’s ’cause they haven’t been washed in weeks. Got change for a wash-and-dry, just not another pair of pants to wear till they’re done. Maybe I’ll spend it on more pants at the Goodwill down the street instead… but not yet. Not till I’ve finished going AAAAaaaaAAAAaaaa (breath) aaaaAAAAaaaaaaa and listening to the syllable echo back at me from every nearby building face. In my head, there’s an orchestra playing “Ode to Joy” with a Busta Rhymes backbeat. My voice is just tying it all together.
Shut your fucking mouth! someone yells, so I take a bow and exit the stage.
But with my hand on the knob of the rooftop door, I stop and turn back and frown and listen, ’cause for a moment I hear something both distant and intimate singing back at me, basso-deep. Sort of coy.
And from even farther, I hear something else: a dissonant, gathering growl. Or maybe those are the rumblers of police sirens? Nothing I like the sound of, either way. I leave.
“There’s a way these things are supposed to work,” says Paulo. He’s smoking again, nasty bastard. I’ve never seen him eat. All he uses his mouth for is smoking, drinking coffee, and talking. Shame; it’s a nice mouth otherwise.
We’re sitting in a café. I’m sitting with him because he bought me breakfast. The people in the café are eyeballing him because he’s something not-white by their standards, but they can’t tell what. They’re eyeballing me because I’m definitively Black, and because the holes in my clothes aren’t the fashionable kind. I don’t stink, but these people can smell anybody without a trust fund from a mile away.
“Right,” I say, biting into the egg sandwich and damn near wetting myself. Actual egg! Swiss cheese! It’s so much better than that McDonald’s shit.
Guy likes hearing himself talk. I like his accent; it’s sort of nasal and sibilant, nothing like a Spanish speaker’s. His eyes are huge, and I think, I could get away with so much shit if I had permanent puppy eyes like that. But he seems older than he looks—way, way older. There’s only a tinge of gray at his temples, nice and distinguished, but he feels, like, a hundred.
He’s also eyeballing me, and not in the way I’m used to. “Are you listening?” he asks. “This is important.”
“Yeah,” I say, and take another bite of my sandwich.
He sits forward. “I didn’t believe it either, at first. Hong had to drag me to one of the sewers, down into the reeking dark, and show me the growing roots, the budding teeth. I’d been hearing breathing all my life. I thought everyone could.” He pauses. “Have you heard it yet?”
“Heard what?” I ask, which is the wrong answer. It isn’t that I’m not listening. I just don’t give a shit.
He sighs. “Listen.”
“I am listening!”
“No. I mean, listen, but not to me.” He gets up, tosses a twenty onto the table—which isn’t necessary, because he paid for the sandwich and the coffee at the counter, and this café doesn’t do table service. “Meet me back here on Thursday.”
I pick up the twenty, finger it, pocket it. Would’ve done him for the sandwich, or because I like his eyes, but whatever. “You got a place?”
He blinks, then actually looks annoyed. “Listen,” he commands again, and leaves.
I sit there for as long as I can, making the sandwich last, sipping his leftover coffee, savoring the fantasy of being normal. I people-watch, judge other patrons’ appearances; on the fly I make up a poem about being a rich white girl who notices a poor Black boy in her coffee shop and has an existential crisis. I imagine Paulo being impressed by my sophistication and admiring me, instead of thinking I’m just some dumb street kid who doesn’t listen. I visualize myself going back to a nice apartment with a soft bed, and a fridge stuffed full of food.
Then a cop comes in, fat florid guy buying hipster joe for himself and his partner in the car, and his flat eyes skim the shop. I imagine mirrors around my head, a rotating cylinder of them that causes his gaze to bounce away. There’s no real power in this—it’s just something I do to try to make myself less afraid when the monsters are near. For the first time, though, it sort of works: The cop looks around, but doesn’t ping on the lone Black face. Lucky. I escape.
I paint the city. Back when I was in school, there was an artist who came in on Fridays to give us free lessons in perspective and lighting and other shit that white people go to art school to learn. Except this guy had done that, and he was Black. I’d never seen a Black artist before. For a minute I thought I could maybe be one, too.
I can be, sometimes. Deep in the night, on a rooftop in Chinatown, with a spray can for each hand and a bucket of drywall paint that somebody left outside after doing up their living room in lilac, I move in scuttling, crablike swirls. The drywall stuff I can’t use too much of; it’ll start flaking off after a couple of rains. Spray paint’s better for everything, but I like the contrast of the two textures—liquid black on rough lilac, red edging the black. I’m painting a hole. It’s like a throat that doesn’t start with a mouth or end in lungs; a thing that breathes and swallows endlessly, never filling. No one will see it except people in planes angling toward LaGuardia from the southwest, a few tourists who take helicopter tours, and NYPD aerial surveillance. I don’t care what they see. It’s not for them.
It’s real late. I didn’t have anywhere to sleep for the night, so this is what I’m doing to stay awake. If it wasn’t the end of the month, I’d get on the subway, but the cops who haven’t met their quota would fuck with me. Gotta be careful here; there’s a lot of dumb-fuck Chinese kids west of Chrystie Street who wanna pretend to be a gang, protecting their territory, so I keep low. I’m skinny, dark; that helps, too. All I want to do is paint, man, because it’s in me and I need to get it out. I need to open up this throat. I need to, I need to… yeah. Yeah.
There’s a soft, strange sound as I lay down the last streak of black. I pause and look around, confused for a moment—and then the throat sighs behind me. A big, heavy gust of moist air tickles the hairs on my skin. I’m not scared. This is why I did it, though I didn’t realize that when I started. Not sure how I know now. But when I turn back, it’s still just paint on a rooftop.
Paulo wasn’t shitting me. Huh. Or maybe my mama was right, and I ain’t never been right in the head.
I jump into the air and whoop for joy, and I don’t even know why.
I spend the next two days going all over the city, drawing breathing-holes everywhere, till my paint runs out.
I’m so tired on the day I meet Paulo again that I stumble and nearly fall through the café’s plate-glass window. He catches my elbow and drags me over to a bench meant for customers. “You’re hearing it,” he says. He sounds pleased.