What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (most important books to read txt) 📗

silence behind it, then another car came north behind him. This one slowed; he saw the flashing turning light as it swerved into him. He stopped. Two cops came out of the car. He can’t remember if they called him, if they told him to stop. His arms rose easily as if reaching for an embrace. One cop reached for him. He can’t remember what they said or what they wanted. He only remembered that it was like an accustomed embrace. He yielded his body as if to a lover, and the cop slid into his arms. That was the fucked-up thing about being dangerous. It was a surrender to violence, to some bruising, brutal lover. He remembered how instinctively his arms opened, how gently, as gently as they would have opened to embrace Jackie. But this was another kind of impeachment. A perverse fondling. Another car sped by, slowed to look and then sped on again. The cops didn’t find anything on him, and he said nothing to them, just smiled and shook his head. They asked him his name, he smiled again. Their fondling became rougher. Oku let his body go limp. The cops folded him into their car with a few more shoves. He laughed. He was still high. They took him to fifty-two Division. They couldn’t find anything to charge him with and let him go around 6 A.M.

He had come to expect this passion play acted out on his body any time he encountered authority, and it was played out at its most ecstatic with the cops. Whenever he encountered them, he simply lifted his arms in a crucifix, gave up his will and surrendered to the stigmata. Some of his friends didn’t. They resisted, they talked, they asserted their rights. That only caused more trouble. They ended up in the system fighting to get out. They ended up hating everyone around them. Homicidal.

Perhaps it was his father’s tenacity that took him the other way. His father was so voracious, yet so bitter—and that was the part that Oku hated—that in the middle of loving, or eating, everything seemed bitter.

Jackie, he thought, Jackie was somehow the solution to it. If he could one day find the precise words, she would come around. There was some specific thing he had to say, and then the two of them would fall into place. It was like a series of locks: when particular words were said, each lock fell open. Which is why he’d been silent with the cops. There were no words for the doorway they emerged from, no word that would send them back or pacify them. The words to Jackie, on the other hand, were only hidden. He knew, too, that Jackie was only half of it.

Twenty-five years old, living with his mother and father, and heading nowhere. The university was such a straitjacket, it all made him hunger for another world. Maybe he was fooling himself that he could think his way out of this box. Did Jackie want a man like that? A man who was stable? And what did the Nazi boyfriend have that he didn’t? His white skin, for one. Oku laughed at himself. Not fair. Okay, a mother with a lot of rundown properties across the city. Okay both, white skin and a mother who was a slum landlord. This cynicism aside, wasn’t he, Oku, depending on the dark tenor of his own skin to woo Jackie? So why couldn’t the Nazi boy use what he had?

Oku would spend hours going over the arguments he would put to Jackie. When he did see her, it came out in intolerant bursts, like the last time he’d seen her at Tuyen’s. He didn’t yet have the words to make that lock fall open.

And what about the lock for himself? His father said he lived too much in his head. The truth was living in his head was what kept him safe. Living in his head meant he didn’t react reflexively to the stimuli of the city heading toward him with all the velocity of a split atom. That’s why he kept pretty much to himself. That’s why he risked being called a “flake” and a “faggot” by the guys in the jungle. That’s why he cultivated the persona of the cool poet—so that he wouldn’t have to get involved in the ordinary and brutal shit waiting for men like him in the city. They were in prison, although the bars were invisible.

“Don’t be a faggot, man. You never, never let people fuck with you,” Kwesi had lectured him.

“You bide your time and you take your opportunity,” his father had lectured him.

Christ, he was scared sometimes, scared of something lurking in himself, in his body—some idea threatening to overpower him. It took all his power to shut down the crazy person inside of him who wanted to tear things up. He avoided the guys from the jungle more and more. And soon he would have to move out because his father’s alchemy was just as potent.

He had nightmares of putting his fist through his father’s face; of lifting the breakfast table and smothering him with it. He was afraid that one morning he would wake up and do those things. He would actually wake at times in fear out of a dream thinking he had done just that. He would lock his bedroom door to prevent himself from sleepwalking into these acts.

Oku stayed in his room in the basement until his father left. He didn’t want to talk to his mother. His mother could get things out of him. She probably already knew that he had dropped out. He heard her come back to the kitchen. He let himself out the basement door, yelling to her, “Bye, Ma!” He heard her faint calling but pretended he didn’t.

Exams were supposed to be happening now. It was the end of May. His father, making him feel like a child, insisted on seeing grades. “Let