I CAN TELL you in a few words who I am: lover of woman and language, in terror of tlw history wlwse responsibility I bear, a man awake at night and alone.
At 3:52 A.M., to be precise.
I put the book down and picked up, for the second or third time, my empty glass. The radio was on, Art Tatum silk-pursing some well-nibbled sow's ear of a popular song. Zeke had turned up around nine and now was installed, and asleep, upstairs. I could hear the window unit in his room laboring; whenever its compressor kicked in, lights dimmed momentarily, like a caught breath.
This time of night, this circle of light with music welling up outside, this solitude-we were all old friends. Over the years we'd sat here together many nights just this way. With houses and apartments empty around me, with Alouette asleep upstairs, with Vicky away at the hospital taking on the nightly freight of violence that finallysent her, low in the water, home to France.
Or with LaVeme out working. We'd climb from bed at five or six, when most of those caught up in the world outside our window (so very, very different from the world inside) were ending their day, to begin ours.
Suddenly Bat emerged from the darkness around me and sprang onto my lap.
Ezekiel had been something of a surprise too. Not long after I got back home, he'd come knocking at the door and when I opened it, said, "Lewis?" Peering up, because he topped out at about four foot six. "Here I am."
He looked not at all like any of the photos of him I'd seen. What he looked like was a cypress knee someone had carved into the likeness of a man.
I fed him leftover red beans and rice while we sat at the kitchen table going through a couple of pots of coffee together. Topics? How exciting and scary Zeke'sfirst months at the prison paper were, and how uninspired the last years, when only a sense of duty and need of something to do kept him plodding doggedly on. Praise for Hosie Slaughter's crusading work with Tlie Griot -now published out in Metairie and given over exclusively to "aits and entertainment." Excited questions about movies like Boyz N the Hood and Spike Lee's, which of course he'd not seen. Mention of the novel Zeke thought he might someday write. Until finally he said, "Okay, Lewis. Point me to my comer. 'Cause this ol'fighter's'bout to fall down."
High point of the afternoon had been when I dropped by Deborah's, about six, to say hello and make a date for dinner the next day. "You mean I'm getting asked out? Like normal people?" she said. I asked her if Commander's would be okay, and she told me it always had been. "But let's go early. Because afterwards, I have a surprise for you."
Low point of the afternoon was everything else.
Following that morning's three phone calls, I'd sketched out my itinerary: head uptown to see what I couldfind out about Daryl Anthony "Dap" or "Dapper" Payne at Tulane's registrar; revisit the tract house on Old Metairie Road where I'd come across the body and where surely some subtle, obtuse clue awaited me; along the way, check out outlying missions and shelters.
That was an awful lot of moving about.
I called Don back.
"You using your car?"
"What for? No way they're letting me leave here, not with all this shit going down. For all I know they've got it booted, so I can't get away."
"Okay if I borrow it?"
"Why not? It's in the lot out back. I'll send the keys down, let them know you're coming-Hang on, Lew, I've got another call, supposed to be urgent." He was gone four, five minutes. A couple of times other people came on, asking if they could help me, and I told them I was holding. Then Walsh was back.
"That was Danny, Lew. He's okay. Says he met an old friend at one of the malls, some guy he went to school with. Been staying over with him, catching up on old times. They saw a movie or two, had some burgers. He's home now. Said he'd probably sleep right through to tomorrow."
"That's good, Don."
"Yeah. So, you gonna bring the car back here when you're through with it, or what?"
"I'll bring it back."
Though for all the good it did me I might as well have left it there in the lot, and sat in it myself the whole time.
Yo, black sheep. Got any wool? I'm down for it, man. Three bags full.
And wool's all it was.
No one at Tulane could tell me anything I didn't know already. Out on Old Metairie Road a lawn mower had been run through the ankle-deep rotting leaves and sashes of yellow police tape clung to trees, but nothing else had changed. The two or three mission-looking places I found were closed-whether permanently or just for the day, I couldn't tell.
So around six, swimming upstream of outbound traffic, Middle America making its way home, I drove back into New Orleans, dropped by Deborah's to say hello and set up our date (parking illegally out front: most cops knew Don's god-awful old Regal by sight), and returned the car. Don and I had dinner together, my treat, at Felix's. Danny wasn't mentioned.
Then I'd come home by streetcar and, within minutes, answered the door to find Ezekiel peering up at me.
Once he was tucked in, I poured a Sharp's and settled down in the rocker to read, sleepy but still wired. I tried going back through what I'd written in the legal pad that morning but couldn't concentrate, couldn't stay afloat on it. Next I tried a small-press book I'd bought several months past, on pure impulse, at Maple Street. It had sat on the coffee table ever since, cover curling from humidity so that I'd kept turning it over, back to front and back again.
They come in the dark and do terrible things to me. They go away.
But I didn't do much better with that than I'd done with my own stuff.
I found myself thinking about the notebook Lola Park had given me at the hospital that morning.
I went over and got it from the breast pocket of the coat I'd hung on the back of the hallway chair.
I'd carried the notebook for over a year. It was about eight by four, the size of a large wallet and half the thickness of a deck of cards, tape binding pulled away in the middle from constantrecontouring to pocket and body. Stitched pages, blue and white composition cover.
As with many good ideas, at first I'd used the notebook readily and often, before letting it slip into neglect. A dozen pages or so bore scribbled notes for classes and stories, snippets of overheard conversation, bits of description, the occasional address or phone number, errand lists, wobbly columns of Dewey decimal numbers copied from the school library's computerized catalog, lists of trees or of lawyers' and street names. Some of the notes were impenetrable, whatever import they once may have had now lost in the folds and trouser cuffs of time.
All of that had been entered the first month or so I carried the notebook around. Therest of the pagesremainedempty.
Now, though, they were filled-literallyfilled, top to bottom, left to right, had to be fifty, sixty lines to the page-with a tiny script that managed simultaneously to look like a continuous, unbroken line and put one in mind of cuneiform.
"My book. One of them," the accident victim, the man I'd first thought to be David, Lew Griffin2, had said.
And what he'd done in this notebook I'd left him (I realized upon reading several pages) was recast The Old Man in diary form. The central situation, individual scenes, settings, dialogue: all were there. But so were elements that had nothing to do with my story-scenes and language that never belonged to it, never belonged in it, never would.
The notebook's unnamed, transparent diarist lives on the streets, moving freely through the city, watching people come and go and afterwards, in an attempt to understand them, making up stories about them: who they may be, how they pass their days or nights, what's important to them and what scorned, memories, dreams.
One day on Magazine he watches two men, thefirst older, white, the other a young black, leave a bar together, shake hands and strike out their separate ways. He thinks how very much, for all their visible differences, the two men resemble one another, self and shadow. And from that moment of unpresuming observation, the story-the notebook's remaining pages, its retelling of my novel-gains force and spins itself out.
When, years later, I met the younger man's son, it was with mutual, quiet recognition. You're David, I said.
Yes.