Brother

A great lookout, my brother told me. One of the best in the neighbourhood, but step badly on a line, touch your hand to the wrong metal part while you’re brushing up against another, and you’d burn. Hang scarecrow-stiff and smoking in the air, dead black sight for all. “You want to go out like that?” he asked. So when you climbed, he said, you had to go careful. You had to watch your older brother and follow close his moves. You had to think back on every step before you took it. Remembering hard the whole way up.

He taught me that, my older brother. Memory’s got nothing to do with the old and grey and faraway and gone. Memory’s the muscle sting of now. A kid reaching brave in the skull hum of power.

“And if you can’t memory right,” he said, “you lose.”

A cop car pulled up beside a group of young men who had been walking down the sidewalk. The siren was quickly cut, but it triggered every one of us. The baby woke and started crying. The mother’s eyes snapped open, and when she recognized me, she stared as if I were a stray and possibly rabid dog. The fragile peace was broken, nerves flayed once again, but could this really explain what Aisha did next? She looked down and spotted a broken chunk of asphalt that she loosened further with the heel of her sneaker. She picked it up, stepped back for balance, and hurled. It hit a window of the empty police car, making a sharp sound like the breaking of hard candy in your mouth, spider-webbing the glass into a pattern of pale blue without breaking it.

“She’s getting older…”

“It’s got absolutely nothing to do with age. You know that. Your mother’s like this because she’s still mourning. Or else she’s unable to mourn. It’s been ten years and she still can’t accept. She’s stuck.”

I know that Aisha is talking about “complicated grief.” I’ve heard the term used by doctors, and I’ve read books from the library. There are losses that mire a person in mourning, that prevent them from moving forward by making sense of the past. You become disoriented, assailed by loops of memory, by waking dreams and hallucinations. I don’t need any of this explained to me, but I’m reminded by Aisha’s face that she’s grieving too. I breathe out, nod in a noncommittal way.

“Let me think about it,” I offer. “She’s been doing all right lately. I just don’t want to complicate things for her.”

The water in the creek is tinged brown and olive, and it makes a nice rushing noise over the smooth grey stones. Tendrils of moss blow under the water. There are some small flowers already beginning to bloom at the water’s edge, very light blue, very small. Mother moves towards them now […] eventually standing right at the creek’s edge. She reaches down to the nearest petals, cupping them tenderly in her hands.

Here, the pillars of the bridge are covered with graffiti tags and drawings, faces of people like those in the Park, and higher up, in the wedge of shelter just beneath the street level, there’s a stained mattress and evidence of a fire and crushed cans of food and beer. Aisha is quiet. And when I look there are flashes of light upon her arms, sun speckling through the moving trees. Coins of light on her face.

There were updates, columns, letters to the editor. A lot of people angry about the way Goose had suffered. Some called for a crackdown on crime, others for much more. One columnist wrote in that old and ready-made language about “immigrants” and “ethnic neighbourhoods” and “sending people back where they came from,” even tough most in the Park knew that the suspects had all been raised in the surrounding city. But what caught my attention in one story was a photo of Anton, identified as both known to police and deceased. It was one of those high school photos that for so many of us always seemed to go wrong. The photographer didn’t choose the right background or adjust the light settings, and so the outlines of Anton’s face and hair bled into the navy behind him. His eyes steeled, his mouth screwed tight upon his face.

“Are you Michael?” asks one of the cops.

She’s a woman with short blonde hair, green eyes. She’s young, maybe in her mid- to late twenties. Her name is Bev, and I actually know her. She’s a regular face in the Park. I’ve seen her talk down a drunk man when a confrontation could have easily escalated into violence. I’ve seen her chat casually with teenagers in the neighbourhood, really talk with them, not fish for information. She gets things, I know. She’s a good cop, but none of this helps me right now. Every nerve in my body is alert. I can smell leather and strong underarm deodorant from her partner, standing a few feet away. I can hear her creaks when she subtly adjusts her stance. Maybe the equipment on her belt, the black nightstick, holstered gun.

He spent hours every day at his set-up of Technics 1200s, the turntables easily the most expensive thing in the shop, and probably our lives. [… Jelly] was a master [… but] he was weird even among the new class of DJs, for his genius was all about continuous flow, about ceaselessly mixing in one sound, one style, one era with another. He worked magic with the cross-fader and the different equalizers, allowing us to recognize connections we’d never otherwise imagine. Between ska and blues. Between Port of Spain and Philadelphia. Between the 1950s and the late 1980s. Sometimes it failed, and the noise had no resonance. Even I could understand that. Other times it worked, the old and elsewhere summoned back and enthroned in an amplified rhythm that sent everyone in the shop suddenly pouting and nodding and calling back.

I learned it then, their big plan. A major hip-hop concert at the CNE was just days away. Big names and acts were coming in from the cities that mattered, New York and L.A. At the promotional events leading up to the concert, there’d be talent scouts and official auditions, and record deals might be on offer. […]

[…]

“It’s true,” Francis said to Jelly, touching hands and pulling him close. “We’re gonna do it.”

Francis had always before played cool and sensible. He protected himself, the way you had to. But now I glimpsed in him not only a strange and dangerous hope but also something else […visible] in touched hands, in certain glances and embraces, its truth deep undeniable but rarely spoken or explained. Sometimes never even truly spotted. Although now, in the midst of my own thing, I could see.

My father lived only a short walk away from that church, but he told me nothing about it. He told me so little about his past. He didn’t mention how his parents couldn’t always feed their children. He never mentioned his dead brother and dead sister, both taken in childhood, or that his aunt had “entertained” American soldiers to survive. He never explained why he worked his whole life here as a security guard. Even his cancers was something I had to learn, too late, from a nurse.

“It is a new day,” she says firmly.

[...] Shifts are changing from night to day, and passing us are cleaners and nurses’ assistants and security guards. We pass the first window we’ve seen in hours, and Mother is right, it it’s a new day. It’s bright outside.

In the atrium, I’m surprised to see them. And then somehow not surprised. They’re precisely the sort to ignore a command to go away. They are exactly what my mother would call harden.

Aisha rises when she sees us, and she taps Jelly, who does the same, carrying a very small bunch of flowers in his hand. They are blue and pretty and wild.