“I’ll manage.”
“I doubt that.” She made more sense than I let on. Still wasn’t sure what about this woman kept me weak, kept me sprung and stupid on a female I didn’t even know. But still, I was immobilized, struck dumb and still by her commanding voice and the bossy way she made me get into shit I just couldn’t believe in.
Like the temple rub. The aura cleanse hadn’t worked. Now Willow was trying massage and meditation. But no way I was gonna let her try “sonic meditation.” Beautiful girl or not, she was not going to touch my stereo. No Hippie-Monk-Chanting mess would come through those speakers.
“I should have never opened the door.”
“Please. You couldn’t resist.”
She paused in the temple massage when I laughed, shaking my head as though I didn’t appreciate the small jab. “I’m a baller. I can resist anything.”
“No, Nash. You’re a computer geek with insomnia.”
I cracked open an eye, frowning with my nostrils flaring, wondering if she’d been checking up on me. But she just smirked and jerked her chin at the wall, right where my framed MIT diploma in Computer Science hung, telling her all she thought she needed to know about me and my baller status. “You are not invulnerable to my temptations.”
I couldn’t deny that. She came right in and I didn’t stop her. She bossed me around like I was her willing bitch and I hadn’t really complained. Still, I wasn’t going to cop to that. “So you say.”
“Hush.” She held my head still, laying the pads of her thumbs over my eyelids. “Be still and concentrate…”
“Not gonna work…”
“And visualize a dark room.” Her voice was low, but calm. It had taken on a deeper pitch, something that reminded me of an old-school club with cigarette smoke hanging like a halo in the air above a small stage. You give Willow something black and tight to wear and I bet all the cash in my Make It Rain savings account that she’d pull off the part of sexy as fuck jazz singer, easy.
“There is no light. No noise. There is only the vastness of space, starless, soundless.” As she spoke it, my mind went gray. There was a lull, the small, silent hum of nothingness you always hear when you slip between asleep and awake. ‘Tween place, as my old Creole gramps used to call it.
Willow got me there quickly. It was less difficult than I thought it would be. For all my protests, this crazy white chick had my mind doing the ‘Tween hum. The smell of her, that soft touch, her calm voice, so easily pulled me right to the edge of oblivion. “You are alone in that darkness and your body is weightless. You are floating. Breathe. Keep breathing in and out. In through your nose, out through your mouth. One, two, three…”
“Not… not working.” Fighting was useless. I knew it, but was too much of a hardass to admit that aloud. Especially not to Willow.
“Shh. Keep floating. You are light and free. There is nothing around you. Only space and the infinite expanse… you are floating… free…”
Willow’s voice faded until it didn’t sound like her at all. I gave up resisting and followed her lead, letting the image of the darkness consume me. There was nothing for me to see, no real images that came together from form and shape to make something real. It was a place I’d never been—in this silence, in the space where there was nothing. Something about Willow had put me there and the harder I concentrated, the fainter her voice became. I floated then, imaging things that could not be real, things that seemed so usual, so familiar.
“Listen to my voice…”
I did. I listened so closely, so intently that after several minutes, I could not hear Willow at all.
I heard nothing—not her sultry tone, not my own breathing, not even the traffic from the street below. Everything faded to silence.
Until there were other sounds; sounds that I couldn’t make out at first. Sounds that had me shaking, had Willow’s grip shifting from my forehead, traveling to hold my fingers tight.
“Nash?” she asked and I recognized the worry in her tone. But her worry was the last thing on my mind.
There, in the center of my living room, a woman I didn’t know held my hand and rubbed my temples until her voice became a distant echo as I slipped away into sleep.
Behind that sleep and the fainting feel of her touch, I left Brooklyn.
Then, the dream took me.
New Orleans
No one had been able to drink hooch for going on seven years. Mama said that’s where all the bad came from—bossy government people telling folk they couldn’t have a drop to drink. Those meddling politicians called it “Prohibition.” My Uncle Aron and his smart mouth self liked to call it “Proha-bullshit.” Anyway, the whole mess made people angry and angry people did angry things. That’s why Mama said to stay clear of Ripper Dell and those bad-seed boys. Never mind Ripper got paid by every fool who ran a hustle on Rampart Street, my mama included. He had money and men with money got whatever they wanted; even fifteen-year-old girls like me. But I did what Mama said because if I didn’t, she’d whip my behind until it was redder than the wattle of Mimi Bastien’s rooster.
I wanted to be out at Bastie’s swamp farm today, not running hooch between the corners where the white policemen kept their eyes tight on anyone that hadn’t paid them their fair share of ‘hush now’ money. Mama said between Ripper Dell and those fat policemen, we’d be lucky to eat come the rest of the month. It was another excuse she gave to that cat-eyed old priest during confession. “I got to feed my babies. Hooch makes that happen, Father.”
Last Thursday, I’d sat in the pew next to the confessional as Mama spilled away the sins she’d racked up for a week since she last time brought me and my stupid brother Sylv to St. Augustine’s to get our souls right and sort out our sassy mouths. At least, that’s what she called it.
She and her good friend Lulu Davenport made the hooch from an old recipe some crop sharer woman had given Bastie when they still lived back in Atlanta. That crop sharer lady had gotten the recipe from her daddy, a poor hillbilly who died in the middle of a gunfight somewhere up in the Appalachian Mountains. Bastie fed the woman, gave her a place to stay in Atlanta because she’d married Bastie’s cousin, and family was family, after all, at least to Bastie's folk. That sharecropper lady’d been a redneck’s daughter and married to a black man which was two strikes against her so no white people in Atlanta would lift a finger for her. So to thank Bastie, she gave my Mimi the only thing in her power to give—the recipe to make good, strong hooch.
Bastie wouldn’t help my mama with making it, not with the policemen greedy to do anything bad to folk who they thought wouldn’t hand out that ‘hush now’ money, but she gave Mama the recipe, and now Mama and Lulu paid Ripper Dell to keep them safe and paid the white policemen to look the other way.
No one was supposed to drink hooch. So said the law. But that didn’t stop a damn person from doing it. Not in New Orleans. Sure not on Rampart Street.
“Sookie! Get your skinny backside over to Miss Matthews. She’s waiting.”
Mama was in a bad way today. It was only the end of March but already hotter than the devil’s tongue, and the humidity around the city, seemed like around the world, was like taking a big ole breath, holding inside your lungs right before you jump into the cold, deep water. It felt like something was coming and it was something nobody wanted showing up.