We Cast a Shadow Read online

  No. I couldn’t be Zeus. If I went back to the party as the king of gods, the shareholders would think I was conceited, crass, uppity.

  I needed something that would give me a fighting chance against Franklin’s Stepin Fetchit uniform and Riley’s “20 to life.” I had to sink to the level of the shareholders’ expectations. My fellow melanated associates fit in better than me because everyone was used to seeing black waiters tending to tourists or black convicts being led to work in neck shackles. There was a comfort in these familiar images, as reassuring as steaming apple pie or drones dropping barrel bombs on terrorists. The Zulu chief stared over my head. I only had to fulfill an expectation. I only had to say yes one more time, right? Examining the various fasteners and clips of a remnant barely large enough to cover a child’s bottom, I thought: I can totally do this.

  Once I finished changing, I inhaled, threw my shoulders back, and descended the curving staircase with all the resolve of an overlooked but hopeful debutante. I anticipated a collective pause when people noticed me. There was. Entering a crowded room full of intoxicated lawyers wearing nothing but a loincloth, leg tassels, and feathery headdress is bound to attract attention. What I didn’t expect was that Jack Armbruster, who prided himself on never wasting so much as a molecule of bourbon, dropped his highball glass. It shattered with a satisfying crack against the marble. Liquor spread, a pale imitation of lifeblood.

  I gazed at the shareholders in their costumes, a zombie pilgrim, a cheerful Madame LaLaurie, and a diminutive Honest Abe, all silent for what felt like an hour at the bottom of the ocean’s deepest trench. Armbruster whipped out a silk handkerchief from his blazer—I think he was the Millionaire from Gilligan’s Island, but it was hard to tell because that was more or less how he always looked—and wiped his mouth with a flick. Everyone watched him. He chuckled and clapped once. The room burst into applause.

  I realized that I’d walked out smack into the middle of the judging session. The other associates had been cleared out, probably into the field behind the mansion. The big plate-glass windows reflected the interior of the room, the shareholders, and myself. But by concentrating, I caught a glimpse of the world beyond the mirror. Sure enough, amid the restless security personnel who guarded Octavia’s neighborhood with machine guns, Riley and Franklin stared at me from the grass, their faces featureless in that spectral mansion glow. They clapped, too. My chest tightened as if someone were squeezing my lungs from the inside of my chest.

  Then the drumbeat kicked in.

  The firm had hired an Afro-Cuban quartet, trumpet, keys, drums, and congas for the party. Possibly sensing a chance to fill their tip bucket, the band stuttered into a dark tribal beat. Not the kind of rhythm that rock and roll was built on, but the kind of rhythm that predated bluesuede­rockaround­theclock­pleaseplease­fightfor­yourright­toparty by at least a thousand years.

  I danced. I wasn’t a dancer, but I was a decent mimic. I’d watched Mardi Gras Indians buck jump my entire life. I’d seen people around the neighborhood twerk and p-pop. I’d seen crackheads have seizures.

  Facing the shareholders, I couldn’t see myself. But if I could have sprung from my own body and watched myself from Zeus’s perch upstairs, I would have seen a skinny, nearly naked Negro in a sumo squat, flapping his arms and legs as though they were on fire. People laughed and imitated my movements. Flashes popped. The videographer swung in for a close-up. It’s a strange thing to feel so alive even as a part of your soul turns to cold green goo and oozes out of your heel. Every time I raised my spear, they cheered louder. The higher I raised it, the louder they roared.

  And then suddenly the music shifted—like a runaway tour bus transitioning from cliff to air. Silence. Armbruster covered his mouth with his handkerchief, his eyes locked on me. Octavia fanned herself. Somewhere in the room a camera clicked twice.

  It must have been the buzz of the alcohol and pill that delayed the feeling of a licking breeze across my lower body. The loincloth had come undone, and I was naked as a peeled egg.

  Do you know how eerie it is for a hundred people to go completely quiet at the sight of your manhood?

  Toto ran over, and I backed into the wall, all eyes on me against the world. I snatched him up, using his furry body like a pom-pom. I stumbled out of the mansion’s back door and into the field.

  2

  We lived, at that time, in a part of the City once inhabited by Mosopelea Indians who migrated to the marshlands to avoid the white man, then by immigrants from Continental Europe who, having left behind crowd, famine, and disease, fled the City to escape the black man, then inhabited by blacks who were vigorously reappropriated to the penitentiary at the parish line, and finally by the descendants of those earlier whites who returned when the coast was again clear. Except for me and half of my son, there were no other blacks in our neighborhood.

  Our enclave was not without its charms. Sometime before we bought in, our neighbors prosecuted an altogether different kind of war of the roses so that every porch and garden box was an explosion of floral fireworks: elephant ears reared back from mouse flowers, pineapple lilies and calla lilies brushed sisterly hips, a Mexican hen and chicks soundlessly clucked from a terracotta pot left behind on our porch by the previous owners.

  Our house was very fine, long and narrow as a folio book, so it seemed quite quaint from the front. But inside, the house, with its long, left-centered hallway, went on for many chapters.

  Past the den where our frumpy paisley couch nested, past the dining room where the drop-leaf mahogany table gave port to an armada of Penny’s acrylic paint tubes and brushes, past the second bedroom where Nigel’s vintage Rev. ManRay McKintosh poster (gifted by his grandmother) hung, was our kitchen, where my wife and son gathered the morning after my failure at Octavia’s mansion. From the bedroom door in the back corner of the kitchen, I entered in rumpled, kaleidoscopic pajamas, hyperactive gorillas pounding kettledrums in my head. I wore opaque safety goggles left over from a welding-accident case I’d worked years earlier. I could hardly see a thing, but they served a purpose. They were meant to buy me time.

  “You look like you lost a wrestling match.” Penny poured orange juice into the leaf-green carafe without looking at me. As usual, she was already ready for work. Whereas I took an eternity to put myself together, Penny wasn’t the kind of woman to overdo it with hair or makeup. She was a pragmatist. A little foundation. A little blush. No lipstick. She still wore her red curls long, although not as long as she did in the early days of our marriage. Her light green blouse matched the underside of the leaf she had just filled. “Doesn’t he, munchkin?”

  “My dad doesn’t lose fights.” Nigel poured batter onto the well-seasoned iron skillet, a wedding gift from Penny’s mother. My nose twitched to cinnamon and a hint of ginger. Eleven years old, and it was an accepted fact that Nigel was the most talented chef in our tribe. We discovered this at age three when he grabbed a shaker of seasoning salts and dumped it into my bowl of bland grits.

  “He won, and I bet the other guy looks way worse.”

  “Crap.” Penny righted a quart of chocolate milk that had spilled on the counter. I asked if she needed a hand, but she was already pushing the lake of dairy into the sink with a ream of paper towels.

  I returned my gaze to Nigel. “That’s my boy.” I ran my hand through my son’s hair, a velvety tousle of black laurel, and poured a cup of coffee. He didn’t have to attack his hair with noxious chemicals, like I did, to make it unkink.

  Penny jotted a note on the fridge to-do list. Her chicken-scratch was almost impossible to read, except for the note that had been next to the door handle for years. In block letters, it clearly read, “I love my boys!”

  I gestured. She folded the paper she’d just written on and stuffed it into her bra. “I’m calling the City about those surveillance vans,” she said.

  “They’re safety patrols, not s
urveillance vans,” I said. Yes, the City Police van visited our block twice a day. And yes, it had cameras and infrared devices that could look into the deepest reaches of our home. But the vans checked in on any neighborhood where black folks lived to monitor vital signs: low heart rates suggested barbiturate use, elevated heart rates meant conflict, no heart rate was self-explanatory. It was for our—that is, black folks’—own good. When I was growing up, it wasn’t uncommon for people to attack us in the streets.

  Since Nigel and I didn’t live in a black neighborhood, the poor officer assigned to protect us had to ride all the way over from the Tiko. He had to speed to stay on schedule.

  “Those goons almost hit Mrs. Kravits this morning.” Penny tossed the soiled paper towels into the garbage and pressed down with both hands.

  “Okay. I’ll call, if it makes you feel better,” I said.

  “It would.” She washed her hands.

  “May I?” I gestured toward her chest. She smirked. I removed the reminder note.

  “So are you going to explain that?” Nigel pointed at the goggles on my face.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I parked at the head of the table. Penny pitched a look of disgust over Nigel’s shoulder at me. We had fought a few minutes earlier about my behavior. That is to say, my darling dragon fruit did not appreciate my stumbling into the house sometime around three A.M. wrapped in the plaid picnic blanket we kept in the trunk of my car. Nor did she enjoy my bleary recitation of the night’s absurdities before falling asleep on the floor at the foot of our bed or my presentation of red-rimmed eyes on awakening that were a sign of—well, she knew what they were a sign of.

  I caught Penny’s look and stirred it into my bitter coffee. “Oh. You mean these?” I removed the safety goggles. Beneath them I wore a small pair of dark sunglasses.

  Nigel screwed his mouth up in mock derision. “Jerk.”

  On checking myself out in the mirror that morning, my eyes were puffy, pink, a side effect of all I’d ingested the day before, plus a lack of sleep and a bellyful of stress. I didn’t want to miss seeing Nigel off to school, I never missed doing so. So I plied my peepers with the prescription eye drops I kept for just that purpose and donned the goggles and glasses to give the drops time to do their thing.

  Penny asked Nigel to go grab her phone from the bedroom, and he went. Ah. Coffee. No sugar. No cream. I liked my java so black, the police planted evidence on it. And I was such a lucky man. My beautiful wife. My lovely, intelligent, redheaded wife swung across the room, her hips, about which she was unduly self-conscious, clicked in sympathy with my cuckoo clock heart. Then my amazing soulmate whacked me in the back of the head so hard, coffee squirted from my nostrils.

  “Ow,” I said. Penny smiled slightly. Plums were sometimes called zombie pills due to their anesthetic effect. My pain proved to her that I was still with her in the land of the living.

  “Why aren’t you dressed?” she said through clenched teeth so Nigel wouldn’t hear.

  “I told you I’m not going,” I whispered. After the previous night’s debacle at Octavia’s mansion, I had no doubt that Franklin or Riley had already been promoted. The sun was still scrubbing darkness from the sky outside the high window, but I was sure that Administration had already ripped my nameplate from my office door and deleted my biography from the firm website.

  “So that’s your solution?” she said. “You won’t even find out what actually happened?”

  My hand trembled and coffee splashed out of my mug. Without my job, we wouldn’t be able to keep the house, the cars would get repoed, and worst of all, I wouldn’t be able to pay for Nigel’s procedure. But I couldn’t change that. I had been held up to the light and found wanting. I could imagine Penny’s estranged parents guffawing at the thought of her being forced to move back in with them. Interracial marriage was perfectly legal, of course, but it—along with mixed-race births—had been on the decline for years, especially in the South. Our dissolution would be proof that her folks had been right about the folly of such unions.

  Penny wasn’t on speaking terms with her family. They hadn’t come to our wedding, not that they would have, if invited. Penny had grown up in a highly exclusive planned community upstate. The only people of color she knew were her Filipino nanny, Esmeralda, and Mr. Bowman, the elderly black man who handled the lawn care. When she dated a Muslim boy from an equally successful family, her parents almost disowned her. She broke off that relationship, which she would regret, but moved to the City as soon as she finished high school. She was in college when I met her.

  As for my failure to procure Nigel’s treatment, Penny didn’t want some mad scientist fooling with her baby’s face anyway. She thought it best for him to learn to love himself rather than slice and dice his little body in a quest for acceptance. It was the only area of discourse where there was daylight between us.

  Nigel reentered and threw his hands up. “Ma,” he said, “I didn’t see it anywhere.”

  “Really,” she said, rummaging through her burlap purse on the hutch. “Here it is. If my head wasn’t stapled to my shoulders…”

  Penny and Nigel decked the table with pancakes, vegan bacon, and a bowl of raspberries. We ate. The flavors wreathed my stomach in joy.

  “Mm,” I said, drowning the last of my cake in maple syrup. “So good. Who gets to eat like this on a Friday morning?”

  Penny reached out to touch Nigel’s face.

  “Ma!”

  “You’ve got gunk in your eye.” Of course, I didn’t see any gunk. I saw the thing on my son’s face.

  It was very small at first, the spot. After Nigel was born, cleaned, and placed in Penny’s arms, I had to count backward from ten three times before I stopped shaking enough to actually see him. He was a gorgeous ball of fat with a miniature version of my family nose and Penny’s pinkish coloration, the shade a fingertip turns once released. I finally understood why little old ladies, when pinching chubby toes in sequence, often spoke of wanting to “eat the child right up!” Until that moment, the notion had been a dark one, bringing to mind flashes of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son.

  There was a speck, like a fleck of oregano, on Nigel’s eyelid. He had been baking in Penny’s oven nine full months, so it made sense that there would be bits of gristle in hard-to-clean creases. I gently touched the spot and realized it was part of him, a birthmark.

  Nigel pulled the sunglasses from my nose. He gave me a queer glance, then put the frames on his face. The birthmark flashed at me. It had metamorphosed over the years. First, it had grown. By preschool, what had been a dot had spread to the ridge of his eyebrow, and, eventually, down the side of his face. Second, it changed shapes from a rough circle to a wedge to a silhouette the shape of New Zealand or perhaps the Wu-Tang Clan symbol turned on its head. Third, it darkened with him. Nigel’s general shade stabilized to an olive tone so that he might be mistaken for a Venetian boy who spent his summers cartwheeling across the Rialto Bridge, but the birthmark colored from wheat to sienna to umber, the hard hue of my own husk, as if a shard of myself were emerging from him. It was the reason I encouraged Nigel’s love of baseball caps. Anything to keep the birthmark from blackening.

  I asked him where his hat was, the new neon-yellow one that I had gotten him. It was a kind of anticamouflage, really, a target designed to draw the viewer’s eye away from his beautiful but distorted face.

  “Oh”—Nigel glanced at his book sack by the exit door—“I must have left it in my room.”

  “So today is the big day, huh?” Penny said.

  Nigel nodded and grunted, knowing that talking with his mouth full was verboten.

  I wondered what they were talking about. My boy was involved, in varying degrees, in so many school activities that one could easily lose track: the visual arts society, soccer, the Big Fish lit mag, the keyboard chamber orchestra, peer
tutoring in math, speech and debate, the drama club, and kiddie slam poetry every third Thursday. We kept a calendar on the fridge, but the shorthand that Penny used was as indecipherable to me as Chinese hanzi.

  What big day was it? How did I get here? Why couldn’t I ever follow the plot? I bet even that busybody down the street knew what big day it was. A tiny me, feet propped up in the back-theater row of my mind, spilled his popcorn and let loose a Bronx cheer.

  “How do you feel about it?”

  “Like I’m going to win, Ma.” Ah, Nigel’s class at the School Without Walls—an offshoot of the Montessori tradition—was having a creativity show-and-tell. Students were encouraged to “make the impossible possible.” Favorites would be selected for display in the auditorium. Nigel’s project had something to do with the magic of mirrors, but between Elevation Night and working late all week, I wasn’t able to help out. Not that this was any great loss to Nigel. Penny was the hands of the family. My fumbling efforts at arts and crafts usually led to a frantic bandage search, both for my damaged digits and for my ecchymotic ego.

  Nigel skipped away from the table. Penny raised her hand to whack me in the back of the head again but stopped and did that thing she did when she wasn’t whacking me in the back of the head; she swept her hand sideways like a blackjack dealer laying cards on a table. The lower edge of her tattoo said hello to me from behind her blouse sleeve. I could only see the bottom tendril of a vine that led up her forearm to a garden above her elbow where a butterfly—a Leopard Lacewing, if that was the artist’s intention—hovered over a white-haloed flower on her right shoulder blade. She shoved the bowl of leftover raspberries away and held my chin between thumb and forefinger.

  “I know things have been crazy at work, but you worked like crazy to get there. Maybe it’s over, but if there’s any chance of changing their minds, you’re the only one who can do it.” She grabbed the scruff of my neck like a lioness taking a cub between its teeth and pulled me closer. “I’m sorry I thumped your noggin, baby.” Her breath smelled like citrus. Citrus and embers.