The Dead Zone

So this your real, ehm, body? The real you? No silicone for Ms. Velvet Lace?

I say it’s really me, of course. I say it pleasant as can be, like I’m still working the register at Key Food, even though these men don’t look like nobody I know or want to know. It’s two of them in the VIP room with us. I just keep grinning at the producer, the one asking me questions, a short bald-headed motherfucker that look Filipino or Mexican—he got him a good tan—but say he’s Japanese.

I say, Who you think it is? Nigga, I’m the one standing here. Feast yo eyes, I say before my laugh crack straight through me and roll my head for the camera like I had shook my ass before, on stage. Like I’m still on stage, I can hear the music bumping from outside the dressing room.

I’m Velvet Lace. Ms. Velvet Lace, like the man say. That’s the name I dreamed up for myself when I started dancing. The words just came out my mouth one day. I must’ve pulled them out of my past. It sound sophisticated, and I wasn’t used to being sophisticated. That’s how I knew I was ready to leave my old life. Or, I thought I was leaving it. But the older I get, the more I realize you don’t know. You never know what life you living. Or what life you leaving behind. Just like my mother, Dorla, she used to have nightmares, sometimes about the past. Couldn’t sleep. You could think you in the present, living away from what you were, then your past’ll come and sit next to you someday. Your past’ll lay down in your bed and sleep, and you right there watching. Like this bald man, the producer. He keep staring at me like he some animal, or like I’m a animal. Anyway, I’m used to that. That’s why I stand up to show them what I mean by feast they eyes.

You see that booty, mister? my girl Gigi say. Is a monster.

She point at me with her long-ass nails, each one wettish and silver like a dagger in the glare of these hot lights. Me and Gigi the only girls in the VIP. Everybody else working the stage, being somebody they could never be. My first set finished already, but Gigi getting ready to go out. She take her bottle of Dior in one hand and spritz some spray up under her neck, then her navel, then between her thighs. Her brown skin sparkle everywhere like a bad dessert, but beyond the sparkle, she’s scarless, spotless, with endless legs and that high, hard ass like a Olympic drag queen.

Gently, Gigi lay the bottle down by the bright mirrors fanning out behind her, then she spread her legs and bend down. It look like she stretching for a track meet, but it’s for the cameraman that’s taping everything, every movement we make. It’s all for the video calendar. Our club, Sinful, is doing they first one. They calling it Platinum Bodies. It’s not all the girls, neither, just the baddest and the biggest earners: Gigi, Black Madonna, Unforgettable, and me, Velvet Lace. Whatever Gigi doing, it work like a charm. The cameraman keep shuffling around us. He don’t have a big camera, but he wheezing and snorting like a eighteen-wheeler on the Deegan. He ask Gigi to pose with one leg up on the benches, where the girls usually sit to catch they breath and count they money.

All a sudden, Taco, our manager, come through the door. First thing you see when Taco come through ain’t even Taco, it’s the big bowl of his stomach. Second thing is his bad skin that’s pocked and pimpled and scarred and scabbed, like the land of the moon. Black Madonna told me and Gigi that Taco’s mother used to burn him as a kid as punishment. I pretend I didn’t care, and mostly I don’t. Taco been at Sinful forever, and even if he ain’t built the place, I swear he think he own it. He treat all the girls, even us thoroughbreds, like we got three heads, like we should be worshipping him to even see the light of day, let alone be on stage performing.

This one here, he say, watching Gigi pose, she’s a bona fide superstar.

The cameraman grunt, sounding greedy. Taco stare for a second, then pull off his sunglasses slow. My skin start to crawl because I know what’s coming. Talking to the cameraman but grinning dead at Gigi, Taco say, Just don’t fuck up and put that toe in my calendar.

That’s the first time the cameraman take his eye out the lens. He look panicked, like a boy someone threw in a body of freezing water.

What do you mean? he say.

The toe, Taco say, real smooth and calm.

Gigi look dead at his eyes, like the nigga better not say what we both know he about to say.

Taco say, Show him your other toe Gigi.

Gigi glance at me. Then she let her eyes fall. If you didn’t know her, like this cameraman, you probably think she being coy. She unstrap her left heel and show that white man her foot, with all six of them pretty painted toes on it.

Whoa! is all the cameraman say in a low voice, taking a half step back. Taco laughing so hard he have to clap and run, just to leave the room.

Niggas at Sinful love that sixth toe, they say it make Gigi unique, but she hate it. When we first met at the club, she said as a kid, back in the DR, she swear she was a alien because of that toe. We don’t have no six toes in my country, she clarified one day. No. We got fat bitch and skinny bitch, we got la luna y la tierra, we got Jesus y Maria, we got El Diablo. But six toes? No no. And hell, I’m with her. The shit ain’t human. That’s why me and Gigi hit it off like we did.

The bald producer that’s sitting behind me check off some shit in his notepad and suck on the tip of his pen. Pretty soon, he start talking to the notepad. Least I think he is, but then he look me over again with his wild eyes.

So, as I say, Ms. Lace, I want to ask you about your past.

What you mean? What past? I say. How you know I got a past?

I mean … you tell me whatever you think. Anything you can tell us about you. Like for example your education. Religion. What you get from working at Sinful. Whatever you want to tell. Maybe something that could explain, you know, how you ended up doing this. I mean, it’s not your everyday job. If I may.

Right off top, I laugh and say he may, but I don’t know why I say it. I look over at Gigi. That’s when I see Gigi’s gone. That bottle of Dior and the sweet ghost of the spray, that’s the only sign of her. Something in the man’s question make me stare at the shadow on the wall, then at them blinky, Christmasy lights strung across the top of the mirrors. I don’t want to look in the mirrors. If I look, I’ll start to go into character, like I’m going on stage. But then I do, I get up and look. I start thinking about the projects and about Darius. Only, we didn’t call him Darius as kids—that was only when he came home. After his time, after doing his bid. When we was kids, he was still Tony.

 

2

He was the one that first took me to see the dead men’s blood, I tell the producer, though I’m not looking at him—I’m looking in the mirror, trying to forget where I am. Tony kept wanting to go and look ever since the shooting happened. It had been all over the news. For at least a week or two, I heard my mother talking about the shooting, trying to sound tough and light at the same time, barking and laughing about it on the phone or whenever somebody stop by our apartment, especially Antonea, Tony’s mother. Tony, thinking he was convincing me to go with him, had copped the cover of her New York Post and brought it upstairs to my crib. The headline went: NYPD COP-OCALYPSE: Two cops slain in Bronx.

I don’t want to go, I told him.

Why not? he said. You scared to see where they got them niggas?

No, I said. I ain’t scared.

I think you scared, he grinned, or why else wouldn’t you come?

That was almost true. Tony was almost right, even if he ain’t know it. In fact, we was already twelve that year. Like I told him, I wasn’t afraid of death, or the idea of it. Really and truly, I felt fascinated, like I was hooked in a spell, when I thought of it. That was what scared me. But at the time, I ain’t know how to tell that to Tony.

It’s just … nasty, I said, glaring over that newspaper to keep from looking at him and his thickish glasses. Next to the headline, they had this smiling photo of one of the dead cops in his blue-black police uniform. Plus, I said, I’m a lady, and ladies don’t do nasty shit.

Why do you have to be a lady? Tony said, scratching his chins. He had two or three chins, depending how he looked at you. That don’t have nothing to do with it, he said, like he made the law about being a lady. He must had a little Taco in his blood, come to think of it. Then he said, Ladies can do whatever they want. In the Knights of the Round Table, ladies have a lot of power.

Yeah, right, I said, I bet they don’t. But I didn’t know. Tony was the one always reading books—usually big, thick, heavy ones with a blue planet or a dragon belching fire on the cover. When I asked him, he said the books was about witches and wizards and kingdoms that never existed, or that existed in the same way, here on earth, a thousand eons ago.

Listen V, he said real serious, his voice whispering so much it almost whistled. If you go with me this time, I’ll do whatever you want next time we go to my mom’s. Ma said y’all supposed to be coming over this weekend, anyway. I heard her on the phone.

All a sudden, Tony got quiet and still, like something heavy had slipped his mind. I knew what he meant, and he knew I knew. He meant messing around and touching each other. He just was staring at me out them goggly glasses he had. Sometimes, when he had them on, he seem to forget himself and go far away—at least, his eyes did—so his big body be right there with you and yet his eyes be sort of waving down at you from a distance, as if through the glint of an attic window. His glasses was dirty so I reached over and plucked them off his face and cleaned them. I wasn’t nervous and I didn’t laugh. I drooled right on the lenses, then rubbed them dry in my shirt, and while I was rubbing, I glanced up at Tony. I mean, I gave him some side-eye, like I seen my mother do with certain men. Tony look so strange! Not just because his mouth was hanging open, which it was, or because I saw two single hairs standing on his chin for the first time, which I did, but mostly because of his eyes, which seem blind to me and, being blind, useless and enchanted.

The next day, or maybe it was the day after that, Tony brought me way out behind our projects, to where I hadn’t never been before. We had to even cross the old railroad tracks, the ones used for freight trains headed upstate, that had been fenced off with barbed wire since before I was born. I knew why we was going, but I didn’t understand. The story was that two weeks before, these two cops on a drug bust, a stakeout, was sitting in they unmarked car, a black Ford something. It was so late at night, it might’ve turned early morning. The two cops just sitting there, dressed in black in they blacked-out car, waiting and watching. According to Tony, or maybe the story in the Post, they only there in the first place to catch sight of a big coke dealer that got a baby and baby mama in one of these bruised and burnt-out buildings in Melrose. From what they heard from they source, this kingpin come through once a week to see his kid under cover of darkness. It’s his ass they trying to take down. So they waiting across the street from this building that’s by a little loading dock and right next to a couple bodegas and a big abandoned lot. You ask me, being from the hood, that’s the last place I’d ever want to be when the sun is falling and the sky start to fade.

Suddenly, it’s a knock on the cops’ window. They windows black as the night, so it’s black inside and out. They can see it’s two niggas knocking, one on either side of the car. They young, or they look it, and dressed in black like the cops, and just like the cops, they got heat. I don’t know what happens next. Nobody don’t know, so I never heard exactly. Just that the cops end up killed, two shots each to the head, and dragged from the car to the loading dock. Them boys left them there. That’s where Tony want to find, except Tony described it his own weird way, half rapping, talking about the two of them got annihilated, like they was soldiers in a civil war.

Tony kept hunting for the spot, and I followed him. I was scared, too scared to stop what I was doing, and plus, I had nothing better to do. It seem like Tony had to be in the same spot where they died. He never could tell me why, not when I asked that day or even later, once I stopped asking, when him and Pontiac, his boy, got sent away. Pontiac had to go up north, to Fishkill, but Tony only went to Rikers Island. They put him in solitary at the drop of a hat. He spent all his time in solitary, dreaming. But that day, he was desperate to be in the exact spot where the 5-0 breathed they last breath. He’d talk about it with a mysterious and excited tone, captivated, like a fucking madman. At a certain point, I even started to wonder if he felt bad for the cops for getting waylaid like he said they did. Or if he felt like the cops was honorable. A lot of people in the hood, like my mother, didn’t feel sorry for the police. They didn’t feel nothing. Not at first. After a while, when it was on the news, people said it was funny how they died, but they never laughed when they said it. Ma’s boyfriend, Six Speed, he described the situation with a frown, as if he’d swallowed something distasteful. Six said Black people was mad because the cops out here locking up hookers and pimps and a lot of petty drug dealers. He said it’s sad to think of, but that’s like hunting down people’s family. He said everybody in a place like the Bronx, in New York City—he always seem to get a kick from giving the location—had somebody broken in they family. He said that was American history. Then he start talking about cotton and tobacco and niggas slaving in the master’s house. His mouth was wet from his drink. My mother had brought him more beer, her robe splitting open at the thigh as she glided from the kitchen to the living room. Anyway, I don’t agree with Six now and didn’t then. That ain’t why people ain’t like the police. People had plenty of reasons, but that wasn’t one of them.

We almost there, Tony said in a low voice. I could feel it, V.

Feel what? I said, dying to feel something too, even if it wasn’t like what he was feeling.

Tony didn’t answer me, just kept walking. He walked like he talked, crouched and cramped, like somebody might overhear him. But it wasn’t nobody around. It was just us.

I looked up in the clouds to calm my head about being there. I had to. I was stunned there was any light in the sky, even covered up under the clouds. The cold air kept snatching at my clothes—it was so gusty—and the rain from that morning and the night before was still wet on the ground, still gleaming in the gutters, so the streets and everything else felt spoiled and sickly. I heard what sound like two or three girls, probably my age, squealing way far off in one of the buildings. Black phone wires whirled up in the wind like jump ropes, except the wires seem weighed down with witnesses, strung up with empty names. There was this one lump of hair up there by itself, white as a ghost, and so many rotted sneakers all along the wires, sometimes one or two, sometimes a cluster dangling like dangerous fruit. Every time I seen sneakers way up on phone wires, laces twisted, my eyes start to sting me. Every time I had to swallow hard. I always thought about somebody murdered, somebody cut down or snatched away in the dark, a limp body leaving just some dirty shoes behind.

The sun seem lost in the clouds, but even then it couldn’t hide what it was, so you seen this shape of burning gold buried in the sky. For a second, I swore I heard the same singy, screechy girls’ voices from before, but I was just hallucinating, hearing things, because it was Tony.

Over here, V! Come on! he said up ahead of me, tiptoeing close to this scraggly wall that was all cracked at the top. On the sidewalk next to the wall, there was a lot of red bricks broken up in pieces.

Wait for me! I shouted at him.

I followed Tony fast. His shadow got bigger while he went crouching between the cracked wall and an abandoned car. It was the only car anywhere in sight.

It ain’t nothing here, I said once I got close behind him. We came all the way out here and—

Tony stabbed his finger through the air. I shivered, the wind grabbing and gusting, but Tony wasn’t feeling the weather. He was focused on the dimmer side of the loading dock that was all in shadow. It seemed to be at the edge of the world. From where we were, I could see there was this alleyway that went behind the dock toward another building. I suddenly could hear my mother and Six Speed, splayed out on the living room couch, talking about certain parts of the Bronx that was poor compared to ours. If I didn’t know, I’d a thought they was white, talking like they did. I’d a thought they was two people that had something in life. Maybe that’s what they thought too. Anyway, that must be where I got the sense that we was in hell, since it wasn’t even the white bums and greedy Guatemalans that Six Speed called a bunch of drunks and accordion players in cowboy costumes that lived out here, through the thick weeds. Not even pregnant crackheads with they poor cracked kids, and not even the niggas who lived like women—who Six Speed said was the worst of the worst because who would choose to be a woman instead of the man you were born, he wondered—not even they lived out here. Only monsters lived here.

I bet I know where it’s at, Tony said, looking sneaky and glorious. He stood up straight for the first time, winked at me over his shoulder. We were close to the building behind the loading dock. I was hanging back, but now Tony waved me over, mad impatient, like a crossing guard in cold weather. So I ran up to him. It was only a few steps, but when I got to him, it felt like I had went somewhere. Like I arrived. That’s why I put my hand on his shoulder. I knew what I really wanted to do this whole time on the walk was touch him. I wanted to feel him against me. It was even more than that, though. I had had the feeling before, the time when I cleaned his glasses, and I wouldn’t admit it to myself. Now, with him standing there twisted sideways, staring back at me, I couldn’t hardly resist. The gut that dribbled over the stiff lip of his pants seem to me like the paunch of a king.

The building was gigantic. I came up closer to Tony as we went inside. My heart was beating in front of me. Before I realized it, he had gone a few steps ahead and stopped, leaned over a little, looking dead at his feet.

Told you it was here, Tony said, breathing hard and quiet. Straight execution-style.

It was splotches of dried blood between his feet. Some looked like a necklace of jewels. Others, ruined and runny at the edges, seem like bursted planets. Tony bent down all a sudden, and I bent with him. I had a weird sensation, the feeling I get on stage, like I wasn’t really myself, or like I was playing myself in a movie of my life.

So, what you think, V? Tony said.

I don’t know, I said. I can’t even believe we came out here.

It’s crazy right? This right here is where them cops in the news got killed.

I didn’t say nothing. I just watched him. Meantime, I got all the way down on the ground. When Tony finally stop staring at that spot, he looked over at me. His eyes was even bigger than when he found the blood. He asked was I okay, sounding stunned and sad. I didn’t say shit. I was okay, but if I’d tried to say something then, my voice would’ve broke, and I would’ve cried out. I started to pull his thick, soft hand down to me, thinking of putting it on my chest, but I changed my mind. Or changed my heart. I wasn’t thinking. I pulled him over so his gut, that puffed and strained his shirt out of his pants, was all I could see. I unbuttoned the shirt, then I dragged down the zipper of his pants. I did it slowly, since it seemed I was unlocking a chest of secrets.

Tony wasn’t saying nothing—he was only breathing. I could hear the wind hushing and rushing outside. I start to lick Tony, then I was kissing and sucking his flesh, not knowing where I was or what I was doing. I heard Tony groaning stop stop, his voice struggling over the word like it was heavier than anything under gravity. I could tell he ain’t want me to stop. And I ain’t stop. I knew what I wanted, or I thought I did, and Tony was the only one that could give it to me.

Next thing I knew, Tony sort of shook me awake. I opened my eyes and squinted. It was white light behind his head, less like a halo and more like a flashlight burning. His face invisible in the hard light. He was closing his pants and trying to get me up off the ground. He was pulling me hard, like he was mad.

We gotta get out of here, he said. We gotta go. Now.

What happened, I said, as if I had been sleeping. It almost seem that way, and I felt new and different, even if I realized I hadn’t been asleep at all. I had only had my eyes closed. But something had happened.

On the way back, all Tony would say was he heard a noise and saw something moving. A body, he said, and that’s all he would say before he stop talking.

I remember it was cold and blue out, dark but not black. I know it was cold as death. I wanted to run all the way home.

 

3

We lived in the Jackson Houses on Park Avenue in the Bronx. Looking at all the niggas that live there, niggas like me and Tony and our moms, you would think whoever it was that made the projects should’ve named them buildings for Jesse Jackson, or Michael Jackson, somebody our people could identify. Maybe somebody we could love. If you thought that, you be dead wrong. It was the Andrew Jackson houses, which meant we all lived in these skyscrapers named after a plantation president, one of them confederates or whatever that went all the way to Washington to run shit. By shit, I mean the United States. Don’t make no damn sense at all, if you just think about it. But when you stop thinking, when you just look around you at the way shit is, and the way shit always been, that’s when you know.

The projects was big, with lots of floors, but I still seen Tony almost every day, most days. He only lived two flights down from me, on ten. If I didn’t want to hop on the elevator and go down—because it was always somebody’s used rubber in there, just sitting on the shiny floor by a shattered blunt or a bag of Funyuns filled with chicken bones—I just take the stairs. Except, after the loading dock stuff happened, it seem like I didn’t see Tony for a minute. But that can’t be the truth. We did see each other. We had to. Our mothers was good friends from school, and we was always over at the other one’s house. That’s just how it was, and that’s how come I knew shit about Tony he wouldn’t think to tell nobody, shit he never did tell nobody, even me. All you had to do was be around his mother, Antonea. That’s how I learned, for instance, that Tony’s father was called SagiDarius, that SagiDarius was Tony’s real first name, that since the name was fairly shameful—and since his father had left the family without a thought, like they was a bad dream he had one night, something that’s there to be ignored or forgotten—Tony had vowed to go by his middle name. Tony never talked about his daddy a day in his life. That was Antonea, who loved nothing more than running her mouth. So it didn’t hardly matter, really, if me and Tony wasn’t talking. Me and Ma just had to go over his house.

That’s what happened a few days after we seen the blood. From how Tony opened the door for us, I felt like a shadow had crept over me. Soon as we got in the living room, that was full of bright lights and picture frames and furniture dressed in plastic, Antonea snatched me in her arms like if she ain’t seen me in years. I about choked on the smell of her stinking perfume.

Look at this fine young thing! she shrieked at me. She was so loud my heart start racing.

I ain’t know what to say to her starvy look, so I ain’t say nothing. Antonea didn’t care if I was quiet, she just kept looking. She was chewing something while she looked, which only added to her hungry vibe. The hair that flowed on her head was all brown roots and orange highlights, and it sparkled like it was alive, like a grease fire on her brain. Her face was pretty and puffed-up, with startled, sore-looking eyes, like every time we seen her, she’d just finished sobbing.

I told Tony he better lock you down, girl. She winked heavily, then turned to Ma and laughed in that shouty way she had. She said, I told Tony, You better lock Vylet down before she find out the truth about you. I said, Don’t no chick worth her salt want to talk about them fantasy books you be reading. I said, Go play you some football or something, stop reading about these aliens in another world. I said, That don’t got nothing to do with you.

Oh, stop it, my mother said, grinning. She sat on the big couch with Antonea. You need to stop. It’s nothing wrong with Tony. He a sweetheart.

That’s exactly what I’m worried about, being sweet, Antonea said in a voice that was low for her but loud for any normal human being.

Girl, where you get this new TV from? my mother said, switching topics. Ain’t this new? Is this bigger than the one before?

Bigger and better. It’s nice, right?

I need a new TV, but they so expensive. I can’t spend money like that.

You know I couldn’t pass up a good sale. They had this on sale at Best Buy. I went in there with Rocky the other day. You remember Rocky, from Fordham? I know you must remember—

Oh yes, Ma said. The one I said you need to leave him alone? Stop letting him buy you things? The same Rocky that don’t believe in working for the man? My mother pinched the space in front of her to drop air quotes around the man. She was smiling but not really. The Rocky that live with his mama? Yeah, I remember Rocky.

You ain’t right, Antonea frowned, swiping hair from her face with her hand’s fingers, not the hand itself. Rocky, he’s good to me. But you ain’t here to talk about him.

My mother agreed—this time with a sudden laugh like a sneeze—and when she gave me the eye, I knew it was time for me to leave.

I wasn’t half thinking of where I was going. I went looking for Tony down the one hallway in their apartment. It was a dark, long corridor, narrow as a pant leg, with three or four gray doors on either side of it and one yellow light in the ceiling. Every time I was there, it made me feel like somebody might jump out and choke me, even if usually Tony was next to me. But he wasn’t this time. And he wasn’t in his little room at the end of the hall. I know now that I didn’t really believe he would be, and I’m not sure why I went in the first place.

I ain’t have to look too far for Tony. He was sort of hunched by himself in the kitchen. From behind, where I came from, it seem like he was staring at the wall, except when I went over next to him, I could see he had one of his books with him. The cover said The Dead Zone.

Oh, it’s you, he said, the words flying out in a sigh.

I didn’t say nothing. I just looked at the smooth side of his face and his long, black lashes.

I’m, I’m, I was tryna find something to drink, he stuttered, closing the book between his hands and holding it there in front of him.

Yeah, I said. I frowned and nodded and was quiet a second. Then I said, How come you in here by yourself?

Tony had turned around. Just staring. I had the idea—not the idea, more a sensation—he might kiss me. I realized right then, that’s what I wanted him to do. But he didn’t kiss me.

From the living room, we heard music start to play.

You ever think what it’d be like to live in a different world? he said.

No. That was the truth. My world was the world of Andrew Jackson. What kinda different world? I said, thinking of the joke his mother had made.

I dunno. Just not this one.

I ’unno, I said. I was torn between wanting to tease him and wondering why he still held that book in both hands.

Maybe a world, he said, where you had special powers. Supernatural powers. Don’t look at me like that. I’m dead serious. Like, if I could have a superpower …

He stopped himself, still clenching the book. He looked away from my face real quick, and when he looked back, it’s like he had decided something.

What power would you want to have? he asked me.

I want to be able to fly, I said, in this voice I didn’t recognize and would’ve taunted if I had the chance.

I’d probably have an invisibility cape, he said, then laughed. I’d want to be able to become invisible. Shit’s stupid, I know. But I can never think of a better power.

As soon as we stopped laughing, Tony put down The Dead Zone, leaned toward me, and kissed me on the cheek, or right behind it sort of, between my jaw and neck. He said he was thirsty, and did I want something to drink? and I said, Yes.

The fridge tipped a little, like a boat in dancy waters, when he pulled on the door, his fingers a fat fist on the handle. He stooped some to look inside. I knew he was lying about being thirsty, even if he wasn’t no liar. It was something in the way he said it, on top of the fact I just knew his mother made him antsy, uncomfortable. Mostly, that was when we was over their crib. I’m still, to this day, trying to figure out what it was. Maybe because Antonea took up space. I know that’s why my mother liked her and followed her like a disciple. That’s how come most times when we was over there, or they was over at our crib, drinking and shooting the shit, me and Tony ended up together. He wanted to get as far away from her as he could.

I can’t remember the last time I drank one of these, Tony said like he was relieved or in disbelief. He pulled two Capri Sun packs out the fridge. They were these silver bags of juice, the weirdest shit in the world, only even as a child they made you think of childhood.

We both laughed when he handed me one.

It didn’t last because suddenly, as if she had been listening to our convo, Antonea called out from the living room.

Tony, get your big dinosaur ass in here, she said, not even yelling, honestly. Just talking for the world to hear. Tony’s face went sour, curdled.

In the living room, Antonea was already on her feet. The music playing was something my mother would’ve put on when Six Speed came over, and they start petting each other, no words but sounds, and I have to go in my room. Maybe it might’ve been Sade, or it might’ve been Barry White. Antonea held up her arms with the hammocks of flesh falling underneath them. Tony went to her slowly, without looking one way or another, like he was walking a plank. My mother’s eyes touched mine, then looked away.

SagiDarius McGee, Antonea said, announcing him for no good reason, like she was shouting his existence, bringing him to life on the spot. She laughed and swayed with herself as he came over.

Ma, I don’t want to dance, Tony said.

That’s all right. Just bring your big, black ass over here, boy. Let me show you how to dance with a lady.

I don’t want to dance with you, Tony said in this sad and sunken tone.

Your father knew how to dance, Antonea said as her son came before her. That’s probably the only reason your ass is here. This our song, too. When I seen that man dance, I knew he had something I needed. Something I wanted.

Don’t we know it, my mother said, laughing and looking at me like I’d understand.

The music seemed louder as they touched hands. Tony was almost his mother’s height, but when they came together, and he twisted his face from her, she pressed his head down on her breasts. This how you move your feet, one two, one two, Antonea told him as the room around them thumped. Tony, though, he was hardly moving. He was a mixture of a live body and a corpse. Now and then he’d twist his face to move it away, and Antonea would guide it back between her breasts, pressing her whole palm on the back of his head like a mother soothing an angry child. One time, Tony tripped and almost fell, and he pulled her with him to one side. She laughed like they were in front of an audience—I guess they were—and dragged him up by his arms. Watching them, I thought of what Tony had asked about having superpowers, but at the time, I couldn’t remember what he’d said. I was confused by what was going on. My mother looked like she was in pain. I wanted to go to her, but I couldn’t, since I was on the other side of the room, with the dancers in between.

I was thinking about my mother and trying to find her eyes and mouth, as if I was putting her together. That’s when I heard the slap. But it wasn’t a slap. It was a shout. I thought it’d came from my mother, but when I looked up, I seen Tony on the floor. He was on his knees, a blank look on his face, his right hand covering that side of his face. His nose was gushing blood on his shirt and on the floor. Antonea ain’t do nothing at first, she just start talking, still moving with her arms held up and arm meat flapping like a wing underneath them.

What’s the matter, you don’t love me? Don’t you love me? I’m tryna teach you about love, she said. But Tony was leaving. He had his face in his hand.

Little nigga don’t want nothing I can give him, she said. The hell with him.

 

4

I found him by tracing the trail he left behind. He was sitting in his room on his bed. His shirt was covered in a storm of blood. Seem like he knew I was coming, or he was waiting for me to come, because soon’s I closed the door, without even looking to see who it was, he start spitting curses.

I hate her ass, he said. I can’t fucking take it no more. I fucking hate the bitch.

I was almost too shook to speak, too afraid to go near him, but I did. I sat on the bed. I told him he ain’t mean it. It scared me to hear him talk that way. It was all that blood on his clothes and on his hands. But it was the feeling I had next to him that got me. A feeling of danger. He didn’t say nothing—neither did I. We just sat there in the breathless quiet. Then he got up off the bed and went to his dresser. He had stacks of books on top of it, too—all those books about fantasy lands and ghosts and things. He pulled open one of the drawers and lifted something out of it.

When he brought it back to me, I just seen a white t-shirt. Tony gently unwrapped it.

He had him a knife. It was a long, smooth blade with a black handle. Tony took it out of the shirt, put it on the bed between us, and didn’t say a word.

 

5

After that, I tell the producer through the lit-up mirror, it’s like a film on fast-forward. Time and everything else start getting blurry on me. It just seem like everything sped up all a sudden but slowed down too. Me and Tony stop hanging once we got older. I started junior high, then high school. My mother got sick out of nowhere. She must’ve been hiding stuff from me for a while. When she got sick, she was always in and out the hospital, in and out, and she wouldn’t never want to tell me what was going on. She kept losing weight. Every now and then I find clumps of hair in the drain or in the toilet. She stop eating and stop leaving the house. She dreamed that Six Speed disappeared, and then he did. It wasn’t till she was almost dead that she told me about him. Then she said it: she said she had cancer. I don’t know why she ain’t tell me before. But I don’t even want to think about that.

Part of me can’t believe I’m even saying what I’m saying, but I keep going.

It’s other things that happened, I say:

I drop out of school;

I get a job at the Key Food around my way;

I get stuck on pills for a minute and start fucking for money;

I get pregnant;

I go back to school;

I become Velvet Lace and start dancing at Sinful;

I get rid of it;

I get rid of the baby;

I get my own place, with a dishwasher and flat-screen TV;

Here I am.

The producer scribble what I’m saying, biting his pen, then stop like he had a idea. He glance at the cameraman like he had forgot his ass was there, but he don’t say shit to him, just point him over to the other side of the room where Gigi and Black Madonna sitting, talking, just back from a set.

What about this Tony character? the producer whisper. What happened to him?

I start to not answer, to say it’s my story I’m telling him, not nobody else’s. I just glance through the VIP room, look at the light and the darkness. Peep my girls. I start to tell the motherfucker I don’t know what happened to Tony. I don’t know nothing about Tony, I start to say. But I ain’t lied yet and don’t want to.

The little bit I know, I know from Darius, who once was Tony. He starting a new life now. He got his new name and everything. I asked him the same question you asking me. I said, What happened to you, D? He say the day he met Pontiac and his crew was the beginning of the end. He tell me, and I swear on my mother I believe him, that he went to jail as an innocent man. Darius say he never stole nothing from nobody, even if Pontiac and them did. He say I know him, and he wasn’t raised like that. He say he never was a criminal, even if he did want to cut his mother that time, even if he did leave his books and run the streets. He say Pontiac and his boys doing real, hard time. He say Antonea got religious, and she won’t let him come home. He say you can’t come home after what he been through. He say he trying to remake his life, whatever life he got left. That’s why he going by Darius, short for SagiDarius. He say all he got is his name. He say he still don’t know his daddy, and he don’t give a damn. He say all this before he asked can he stay with me. He say I’m the one nigga in this world that wouldn’t judge him. The only thing, he said, cracking up laughing, is he ain’t working. He can’t work. I say that’s fine, it’s whatever. I tell him I got some money from my mother. That’s a lie, or mostly a lie, and I think Darius know it’s bullshit. I think to ask him about his books. He just laugh and shake his head and say he can’t read them no more. He say he try to sleep and not think about none of the old life, but he suffer from bad dreams.