In the honeyed glow of the lamplight her hands tremble.
The Crisis. The Crisis. Bird has grown up hearing about it: We must never forget the turmoil of the Crisis, everyone has said, his whole life; we must never again go back to that. But it is impossible to explain what it felt like.
Evictions and protests daily, then nightly, people clamoring for assistance, for any kind of aid. The police fired rubber bullets and sprayed tear gas; cars plowed into the crowds. Each night sirens whirred to life and wailed away across the city; the only question was which way. Fires began to spring up all over the country—Kansas City one night, Milwaukee and New Orleans the next—frantic signal fires from those deserted and desperate. In Chicago, tanks rolled past department stores on Michigan Avenue, protecting their glossy wares. No one agreed on who to blame—not yet—and with no focus, outrage and panic and fear swelled over everything, hot and thick, rasping your lungs. It was there in the silent darkened streets after curfew, in the slate-gray shadows of the buildings and the echoing footsteps of your shoes on the deserted sidewalk. It flashed sharp and bright in the lights of the police cars as they went by, always on their way to somewhere else more urgent, which was everywhere.
How to explain this to someone who has never seen it? How to explain fear to someone who has never been afraid?
Imagine, Margaret wants to tell him. Imagine if everything you think is solid turns out to be smoke. Imagine that all the rules no longer apply.
I’m hungry, Bird ventures, and Margaret returns with a jolt, glances at her watch. It’s past noon, and he’s had no breakfast, either. She curses herself mentally. It’s been so long since she’s taken care of anyone.
She sets down the wire cutters and wipes her palms on the thighs of her jeans.
I know I’ve got something, she says, rummaging in a plastic bag beside the sofa. After a moment, she emerges with a single granola bar.
I get caught up in working, she says, almost embarrassed. I forget to keep food around. Here, you take it.
Bird peels the foil from the bar, then hesitates. It’s starting to make sense to him: his mother’s whittled features, the dark rings beneath her eyes. Whatever it is she’s doing, it is consuming her. She is barely eating, maybe barely sleeping, too. All day, all night, she is working—or whatever this is.
Eat, his mother says gently. Get some food into you. I’ll get more tonight.
From under the table she pulls another plastic bag: inside, bottle caps, the kind you’d unscrew from a two-liter bottle. Red, white, orange, sickly highlighter green—sticky, still smelling faintly of cola and caffeine and acid fizz. She sets a handful on the table, picks one up, inspects it. Tallies them two by two. For weeks she has been gathering them, these small bright rounds plucked from the sidewalks and the dark mouths of garbage cans.
But what are you doing, Bird says, between mouthfuls of granola, what are they for?
Margaret takes one cap and sweeps the rest to the side, plucks a transistor from the pile: red and yellow striped, like a sprinkle from a child’s birthday cake. She touches the soldering iron to one of its spindly wire legs and the hot biting scent of rosin fills the air.
Let me tell you, she says instead, about meeting your father.
* * *
? ? ?
She’d been a wild thing, when they met.
Two years into the Crisis: Fuck everything was her motto by then. People came and went, sometimes on purpose, sometimes without warning, and you’d never know where they’d gone, if it was part of their plan or an accident, or worse. Sometimes on her deliveries, people spat in her face, told her this was China’s fault, accused her of wringing America dry; she’d begun wearing a bandanna, pulled high to the bridge of her nose. Fuck this, fuck everything, she and Domi agreed, by which they meant: don’t get attached to anything, or anyone. Just survive. They said it to each other almost fondly, like a greeting, or a good-night kiss. Fuck everything, Domi would murmur as they fell asleep in the living room, and Margaret, rolled in a blanket on the floor, would squeeze her hand and whisper it back, the day’s sweat drying on their skin to a fine crystal grit.
And then came Ethan. Domi’s birthday: still celebrated, celebrated with vengeance in the face of it all. Liquor enough to make a party; the apartment full of people, gathering limits be damned; the air hot and sticky, like someone’s breath. Domi was drunk already and didn’t notice him, but Margaret felt a tingle zigzag between her shoulder blades. A friend of a friend of a friend, out of place in a charcoal-gray suit. A suit! She felt an irresistible urge to dishevel him. The room was dizzy and humid and loud and she drifted away from Domi and crossed the room and put her hand to his throat and caught the knot of his tie in her fist.
They ended up outside, on the fire escape that was little more than a ledge, so small that when they both squeezed onto it they were close enough to kiss. Between their feet: Domi’s broken flowerpot, full of cigarette butts and ash. Ethan, he said. Just finished at Columbia when the Crisis put everything on hold. All night, people came and went in the room behind them, laughing, drinking, forgetting—for the moment—everything else. Neither of them noticed. The night air gathered close like a blanket drawn over their heads. They talked and talked until they found themselves squinting into the peach-colored sunrise spiking its way between the buildings. Inside, the party had burned down like a banked fire. A handful of people curled up on the rug and the sofa, a tangle of lonely puppies. Domi had gone off to bed, not alone.
I should go, Ethan said, and Margaret took his jacket from her shoulders, where he’d placed it in the late-night chill, and handed it back. It was the only time they’d touched all night. She wanted to kiss him. No: she wanted to bite him, hard enough to draw blood.
It was nice meeting you, she said, and went inside.
* * *
? ? ?
The next evening, after curfew, she walked across the bridge and uptown, ducking into the shadows when the few cars still out flashed by. She left her bike in the apartment: outside, even locked-up bikes would be stripped of parts by morning, and Ethan, he’d said, lived on the fourth floor. Now and then she passed someone else and they exchanged a brief glance before moving on, each of them on their own mysterious errands. A hundred and twenty blocks uptown to Ethan’s building, where his window glowed like a wide-awake eye. She climbed the fire escape and set her fingers in the half-open window, and at the noise he looked up, startled, put his book down. Lifted the sash and let her in.
In the morning, a ring of her tooth marks blossomed on his bare shoulder.
* * *
? ? ?
Domi didn’t like it.
You’ve changed, she said, all you think about now is him. She said it like that—him—a fragment of pit she needed to spit out.