Novelist Kola Boof

The One You Meet Everywhere

  by Kola Boof

(taken from the book "Politically Inspired")

People talked about her man like a damn dirty dog, and who was she, being such a lonely soul, to dispute them?  But still, she longed for him every waking moment.  In her mouth, on the I.R.T. going to work in the mornings, she could almost taste his flesh and would tense her throat muscles for up to half an hour so as not to lose his flavor by swallowing.  She saw him from the back, his squared ego-worthy shoulders entering the World Trade Center (a building she’d never paid any attention to until terrorists blew it and her man to smithereens).  And she tortured herself, imagining him from the front, his “trust-in-me/In-God-We-Trust” brown eyes lurking the corridors with a nutcracker’s anticipation.

          Waiting to see that pretty receptionist girl.  Again.

          Noelle had worked a job everday, not him.

          “He was cheat’n on yoh ass”, her Mama told her while ironing clothes in the livingroom and watching Young and the Restless at the same time.  “That’s how he got kilt up in that World Trade Sin-ah.  Uhn Huh.  No good Arab nigga, served his ass right.  Prally was after you to marry him so he could get his citizenship.  He ain’t fooled me from day one.  I told you to get you a black man.”

          “Don’t no black man want me mama”, was all Noelle  managed to say through the pain of hearing her mother trash Hisham yet again, but right then, quick, her mother shouted back, “Don’t tell me that mess!  Yall young black women today kill me.  Good as you cook and clean house.  Got a decent job mak’n a white girl’s salary.  Plenny of black men would want you!”

          “O.K., then I don’t want them!”

           She slammed the door behind her.

          Dogs of Brooklyn barked in the background, but Noelle’s heartbroken intellect reached for her loneliness and placed it, the loneliness, overtop her eardrums as though her ears had filled up with water or been muffled by some mountainous altitude.  The blue sky hung over New York as though God had draped it there to tease rather than give inspiration, and Noelle realized that she wasn’t going anywhere.  She walked until the water blurred her vision, forcing her to come to a complete stop.  Through the blindness of rage she saw a human figure moving towards her and instinctively thought to stretch forth her right arm in a pushing away motion, but then, unable to make out the person, she was scared to do that.  They might chop her damn arm off.  Shit.

          She came not only to a stop, but a clutzy one and rocked on the balls of her feet, leaning here and there, totally filled with the sudden fear that she and this blurry figure might be snatch-pitted by the bump of the universe, and then just as she almost keeled over the other way, her body sensing that they were about to collide, a hoarse voice admonished her, “Don’t you run yoh cry’n ass into me!”

          It was a man.  An elderly black man, tall and wiry with a cane. He passed her muttering his complaints about having to have his “feel’ns hurt” by seeing a grown ass nigra child crying on the damn sidewalk.  “Don’t brang yoh ass to my church!”

          Noelle stood stock still, swathing her eyes into a damp dryness and clearing her vision, but the clearer it became, the more dashing the thoughts in her head.  Television images that danced into the coffins of memory cells as the sky in New York fell. 

          Her mother, Zapporah, back when the city had been clutched by pandemonium, had made a very concise observation that never left Noelle.  It was in those first crowded, choking, pedestrian days when the burrows were without birds and white ash dimmed the sun.  She had said, “Just think how lonely it must be for the people that are buried alive up underneaf all that shit.  Having to keep on living, not knowing if somebody’s coming to get them out or not.  Now that’s loneliness.”

          How do I get out? 

          Noelle stood there looking at the ground, because even after all this time, she still felt as though Hisham was buried underneath all that shit, guarding her heart for her, holding it.  Still alive.  Not knowing if she was coming to get it or not.

          So she made herself walk.  Inside her head she hummed one of the songs that she’d written during that long, lonely time before she knew Hisham.  She sang to herself:

          Once you said you love me, times my phone would ring

          Come and get these memories

          cause

          Children, oh, Children

 shouldn’t play with dead things.         

~~~

          Federal authorities had shown up at Noelle’s apartment a few days after the bombing.  In fact, they were inside searching the premises one afternoon when she’d come back from getting groceries.

          Agent Dick Vickers, a thin white rail of a man, asked her questions about Hisham’s likes, dislikes, habits, his family, his way of screwing her.

          “You’re not thinking my boyfriend was a terrorist are you?”

          “Just how deep off into Islam would you say he was?”

          “Not much really.  It was sort of like he had his own religion.”

          “What about you, Ms. Reason.  Were you interested in Islam?”

          “Yes.  I told him that I would become a Muslim, to be closer to him, of course.”

          “What did he ever say about Palestine?”

          “Nothing.”

          “He ever mention Osama Bin Laden or the word jihad?”

          “No.”

          “What did you two talk about most often?”

          “Uhm, music. What we were gonna do when we had money.”

          “What proof do you have that he was in the World Trade Center when it was bombed?”

          “None.”

          “Do you think he might still be walking around then?”

          “No.  I take Braid Bitch’s word.”

          “Braid Bitch?”

“Ah, that’s my best friend, Colleen, but no one’s called her Colleen like since she was fourteen.  She’s a white girl who wears braids and hangs around black people all the time, she likes everybody to call her Braid Bitch, because she braids hair on the side.  She saw him go in there.  She used to work across the street and saw him go in there several times.  He always went to something like an investment firm and talked to this girl at the receptionist desk.  Braid Bitch called me at work and told me that she’d just seen him go in.  And then fifteen minutes later, it was all over the t.v. that terrorists had crashed a plane into the main floor of the investment firm where Hisham always went to talk to that girl.”

          “Who did you vote for in the last Presidential election?”

          “President Clinton.”

          “Any particular reason?”

          “Uhm, because he’s cute and he plays the saxophone.”

          “What do you think about affirmative action, Ms. Reason?”

          “I’ve heard that term before, but what is it?”

          “What did Hisham say about America?”

~~~   

Hisham was the one who used to say it!

          Marijiana smoke curled out of a cough.

          Noelle nodded vigorously, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, nearly pointing a finger in agreement with herself.  It was him who said it.

          New York is a good place to make love if you want to make it like a memory.

          And Noelle remembered asking him, “Why did you come up to me that day?  Did I look cute to you?”

          “I came up to you, because you reminded me of the one you meet everywhere.  God.”

          “I reminded you of God?”

          “Yes.  Because I never saw a girl like you.  That’s the thing about you black ones.  Each of you looks so different.  The colors, the shapes, the weird African hairdos, the accents.  Of all the American women, it’s you black ones that intrigue me the most.  I don’t know if you’re supposed to be like that on purpose or if you’re all fucked up.  I never saw women like you before, not even Africans.  African women are normal like whites.  I saw a few African women back in Amman, they’re just normal wives and mothers.  But black American girls.  I don’t get what your meaning is about.  I always look at black girls and wonder, what do you mean in this country?  Where do you belong?  So I thought she’s the one you meet everywhere.  She’s God.”

          He could have been lying, but his bang was sore and warm inside her and the heat of his body felt like the sun.

          “When I first saw you Hisham, I thought you were a Latino or a Greek guy.  I thought you were soooo handsome.”

          “Did you want me to kiss you?”

          “Uhm no, but”, she laughed and laughed.

          Between his fingers, he took two of her soft braids and rolled and squeezed them in the dark.  He loved the way they smelled like a combination of fresh rain and coconut at the moment you crack it.

          “Do you think I’m pretty?”

          “Why do you always ask me that?”

          “Why do you never answer me?”

          “Because I don’t think the word pretty does you justice, Noelle.  You’re like God.  You’re above beauty.”

          “You don’t think God is beautiful?”

          “Hell no.  No one that is beautiful can remain beautiful forever, that’s the whole lesson about beauty right there.  Beauty is not a virtue.  God made beauty for the same reason he made sex, to show us what hypocrites we are.  I don’t like beauty.  Not the kind you’re talking about.  I like the kind of beauty like--have you ever seen two dogs stuck together after they’ve fucked?”

          “Now yoh ass is sick!”

          “I’m dead serious.  Hey, look at me, I’m serious, Noelle.  That’s beautiful.  That’s real, that’s God.”

          “Yeah.  Tell me anything.  You had me going until you said that, Hisham.  Your ass is just too much for the report.”

          “My ass?”, he asked with a straight face.  “How come black girls talk like that?”

          “Because.  We’re God.”

          He had kissed her, inserting his tongue, as an olive colored hand sqeezed her brown titties into oneness.  He said, “New York is a good place to make love if you want to make it like a memory.”

          “Are we in love, Hisham?”

          “I am.”

          It tortured her now to think that whatever he had felt for the pretty receptionist at the World Trade Center had been strong enough to blow them up together and cast them, united in death, forever after, beyond the fervor of Noelle’s longing.  It should have been us    not you and her, thought Noelle.  We were the ones in love.  We should have been together on September 11^th.

            I had thawed out taco meat for dinner and everything, Hisham.  I was finally gonna suck your dick.  I had decided that our relationship had become serious enough for me to do that.

          I even bought this head scarf.  I was going to wear it that night so that you could see how I look with my hair covered up Muslim style.

          Hisham, before I met you, it had never occurred to me that I could know any other men but the ones like my father.

          I was invisible until you looked at me. 

All I did, everyday, was daydream.   

          On my copy of the New York Observer, the one that showed that the sky was falling, I took a blue ballpoint pen and wrote all over the color photograph:  Love is the drug.  Love is the drug.  Love is the drug.  I wanted to crawl beneath the World Trade Center and die with you.      

~~~

          Goodbye, Noelle.

The sight of Braid Bitch’s white flesh and her long, beaded African rope braids was enough to make any black girl’s daydreams dissipate.  Noelle hugged her back, though. 

“Hey girl.”

A pair of brown eyes watched them from a studio sound booth.

          The American flag took up the entire wall behind them.  Red, white and blue.  White stars.  Noelle had taken her braids loose and wore her hair in a soft springy afro.  It looked like a bush, a glorious tumbleweed.    

The brown eyes sparkled, the stare owning the beauty before it as though the movement of the eye controlled them.

Noelle said, “Did you hear about that new disease over in China?  SARS?  It’s killing people in Canada now.”

“Population control”, sniffed Braid Bitch.  She waved her newly painted red, white and blue acrylic fingernails for effect.  “Girl, men made that shit in a lab, they already got the cure stashed away and everything.  And you know damn well that Saddam Hussein’s fat evil ass ain’t dead.  Bush just trying to front so we’ll re-elect him, or should I say, finally elect him in the first damn place.  Me, personally, I want Clinton back.  That nigga was foine.”

          “Won’t he though?”  They slapped hands.

          Braid Bitch shook a Newport out of its green box, seeming to light it, puff it and blow smoke all in one motion.  She said, as though announcing a close friend’s unexpected death, “I had a dream last night.”

          Her wild eyes, slate gray, commanded Noelle to look at her. 

          “I dreamt about that time when we were kids and we found that dead baby in the abandoned church behind the basketball court.  Remember how rubbery it was?  We almost thought it was a doll when we saw it.  But it wasn’t fake, it was a baby.  A real baby.”

          Noelle’s lips formed the words, but no sound came out as she nodded, “I remember”.

          “I dreamt we were in there again.  The baby was barely alive, but she was breathing, and she wanted me to name her.  She said that she couldn’t be free from this world until somebody named her.” 

          Noelle’s mind flashed to a different memory.  She and Braid Bitch, not yet pubescent, pulling down their panties and rubbing up against one another, kissing and groping one another in the trashy forbidden corridors of the dead boarded up church. 

          Tears suddenly filled the brown eyes that watched them.  Night and moonlight tears, shimmering bright as joy.

          Braid Bitch said, “We come here to be named.”

          Noelle snapped at Braid Bitch, “Stop it!  I don’t want to remember that shit.  There are some things that just shouldn’t be remembered.”

          “I named her Euphoria”, said Braid Bitch, defiantly.  “I told her that she was soft and beautiful and that her name was Euphoria.  I told her that she was the thing that made people cry with joy.  And then I saw her spirit leave her body, but her eyes    she had the prettiest brown eyes    and they were watching me.  Everywhere that I went, they followed me, watching over me.”

          Noelle’s chest heaved as though about to vomit, but instead her eyes burst with a hot wet rage.  She bowed her head and felt the unexpected might of her weeping contort her face and flood her throat.

          Braid Bitch blew smoke and smiled as the brown eyes shut and let them go.

~~~

          Noelle told her mother, “It’s just that sometimes, I don’t think he’s dead.  I think he’s somewhere out there.”

          “I wouldn’t be surprised if he was”, smirked Zapporah, flipping pancakes.  “Your Aunt Cookie’s old man walked out the front door to get a pack of cigarettes and never came back.  ‘Course, he ain’t have no World Trade Center to blame it on.”

          “No, he’s dead”, snapped Noelle.  “Hisham’s dead.”

          “Well, if he’s dead, then why you always feel like somebody’s watching you?”

          “Because it’s the government.  They’re watching everything I do now.  I slept with an Arab.  That makes me suspect, you know.”

          “Well, go fuck a few white men.  Prove you’re an American.”

          “Mama, I wish you would take me seriously.”

          “Look, girl, you need to go on with your life.  Any woman obsessed over a dead man is wasting precious daylight.  Youth is the only free wealth that a woman gets, Noelle.  Say it with me   youth is the only free wealth that a woman gets.  Now let his ass go!”     

~~~

          He had passed Noelle again that morning.  His cane pressing the unkind numbness of his scrotum into the sidewalk.  He had looked into her face, and this time without tears, she had looked back and known that it was him again, and he had seemed so black and arrogant, so anciently powerful that he must have been God.  A real asshole with power as she had always considered the good lord might just be.  For what else could explain the distance between herself and this white haired chocolate deity whose marble black eyes burned against her baby face as though surely she were the stone that  had come out of his own bowels.

          Who else but God could explain the loneliness that human beings feel even when surrounded by one another?

          People, not insects, but people had crashed their souls into buildings so that other souls would be snatched out of the killer’s reality and ripped from the noontime of the ones who needed them.  Noelle had seen the rage in his eyes as he passed her on the street.  She had felt the arthritis in his withered hands and the gathering spit that rested just inside the pretty catepillar shape of his pinkish lower lip.  Her mother and a lot of people had those West African lips.  Even some white people nowadays   the ones you meet everywhere.

          But with his watching brown eyes he thought about artistic people like Noelle who crafted stories expressing their being lost, their being lonely, their lust and pride and despair.  The living for the love of God people   the ones all over the world that you meet everywhere.

          As though she could hear him, he spoke and said, “I’m going back to my used to be.”

          His feet moved across the gritty floor as a radiant sunny Brooklyn sidewalk awaited him outdoors.  Then he heard her voice.  Noelle’s small, plaintiff singing voice.  It stopped him in his tracks, because by the sound of it, he could tell that he was no longer there.  Her loneliness draping her like a favorite sweater as she sang:

          Blow me a charge of your love.

          Show me a picture of your life.

          Blow me a charge of God up above--

          tell me every thang

          is gonna be alright

_____________________

*Read another classic short story by Kola Boof: (Click here)

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