fireman.
Manden walked on, trying to clear his mind. Heâd had a long night of tossing and turning and had hardly slept. His sparse efficiency apartment on Connecticut Avenue was furnished with only a black-comforter-clad bed, a single lamp with no shade, a metal folding chair, and a refrigerator with nothing but Rock Creek sodas and stale mambo chicken from the Chinese corner store. It was not a home. It was merely the place where he showered and kept his clothes. When his alarm blasted him out of the hazy fog heâd drifted through for most of the wee hours of this morning, all he had been able to do was heave a sigh and head into the kitchen to slump over a cup of bad instant coffee. On so many other mornings, he would stand over the scratched countertop thinking of his Metro job in the subways, where he would soon enter the information booth for another ten to twelve hours, amid the long tubes that emptied into other tubes in a maze of directed indifference. He had dwelled in that tunneled underworld of Washington, D.C., for the last twelve years. And he found an irony in the fact that he had spent more of his time beneath the cityâs surface in the dimness of those tunnels than above ground. More than that, there was a strange and familiar intimacy about the subways, like a place not visited in years but that called to him even when he was not there. This feeling, which drifted to him every morning, was precisely the sort of thing that he did not like to think about, and that first swallow of hot coffee blotted it out.
Manden turned a corner where a bag lady stood arranging an old tattered hat on her head. âSmile, honey,â she said as he walked by. He nodded back, making a face mixed with faint amusement, dread, and pity. He was halfway to the center, where Brenda would be waiting. He could never get used to these kinds of meetings, nor did his apprehension ever wane in the moments leading up to them. They always gave him the feeling of stepping into a minefield or a forest in the pitch black. Never knowing what was coming. Never knowing what to expect. Yet he was drenched in a sense of necessity, of duty to something he had not been able to name since Brenda called to tell him about her pregnancy. What was he to do about the child? The question remained still. And yet when Brenda called yesterday about the appointment, as she had called about the others, he was unable to refuse her outright. He could have made up a reason he wasnât able to make it. Something related to his shift at the subway or another responsibility that he could have made materialize as the cause for having to pass. But that would have meant that something else was more important than his nephew. Something else was more important than his own brotherâs child. Every time, just before he fixed his mouth to tell Brenda that he had other plans that could not be altered, he changed his mind.
He walked a line of rowhouses with quaint little English gardens in the front yards. Now he was going to a meeting with the woman his brother had left a widow in nearly every way. Marriage. It was something he had never been able to bring himself to consider. Sensing how much his mother and father loved each other, for the cause, for their civil rights beliefs, and then watching it all be ripped away in gunshots had cooled his blood to marriage long ago. What had led Horus to it? He could still hear the sound of Brendaâs cheery giggles in the background when he phoned him to announce the engagement. The absence of any conversation or event to pick up from where they left off made the phone exchange all the more awkward, for they had left off in the ether of angst and rage. Had Horus called to let him know that it was possible? That it was possible to erase the sight of their murdered father in front of them, their motherâs screams, her descent into a realm of despair from which she could not find her way back? That he had
Manden walked on, trying to clear his mind. Heâd had a long night of tossing and turning and had hardly slept. His sparse efficiency apartment on Connecticut Avenue was furnished with only a black-comforter-clad bed, a single lamp with no shade, a metal folding chair, and a refrigerator with nothing but Rock Creek sodas and stale mambo chicken from the Chinese corner store. It was not a home. It was merely the place where he showered and kept his clothes. When his alarm blasted him out of the hazy fog heâd drifted through for most of the wee hours of this morning, all he had been able to do was heave a sigh and head into the kitchen to slump over a cup of bad instant coffee. On so many other mornings, he would stand over the scratched countertop thinking of his Metro job in the subways, where he would soon enter the information booth for another ten to twelve hours, amid the long tubes that emptied into other tubes in a maze of directed indifference. He had dwelled in that tunneled underworld of Washington, D.C., for the last twelve years. And he found an irony in the fact that he had spent more of his time beneath the cityâs surface in the dimness of those tunnels than above ground. More than that, there was a strange and familiar intimacy about the subways, like a place not visited in years but that called to him even when he was not there. This feeling, which drifted to him every morning, was precisely the sort of thing that he did not like to think about, and that first swallow of hot coffee blotted it out.
Manden turned a corner where a bag lady stood arranging an old tattered hat on her head. âSmile, honey,â she said as he walked by. He nodded back, making a face mixed with faint amusement, dread, and pity. He was halfway to the center, where Brenda would be waiting. He could never get used to these kinds of meetings, nor did his apprehension ever wane in the moments leading up to them. They always gave him the feeling of stepping into a minefield or a forest in the pitch black. Never knowing what was coming. Never knowing what to expect. Yet he was drenched in a sense of necessity, of duty to something he had not been able to name since Brenda called to tell him about her pregnancy. What was he to do about the child? The question remained still. And yet when Brenda called yesterday about the appointment, as she had called about the others, he was unable to refuse her outright. He could have made up a reason he wasnât able to make it. Something related to his shift at the subway or another responsibility that he could have made materialize as the cause for having to pass. But that would have meant that something else was more important than his nephew. Something else was more important than his own brotherâs child. Every time, just before he fixed his mouth to tell Brenda that he had other plans that could not be altered, he changed his mind.
He walked a line of rowhouses with quaint little English gardens in the front yards. Now he was going to a meeting with the woman his brother had left a widow in nearly every way. Marriage. It was something he had never been able to bring himself to consider. Sensing how much his mother and father loved each other, for the cause, for their civil rights beliefs, and then watching it all be ripped away in gunshots had cooled his blood to marriage long ago. What had led Horus to it? He could still hear the sound of Brendaâs cheery giggles in the background when he phoned him to announce the engagement. The absence of any conversation or event to pick up from where they left off made the phone exchange all the more awkward, for they had left off in the ether of angst and rage. Had Horus called to let him know that it was possible? That it was possible to erase the sight of their murdered father in front of them, their motherâs screams, her descent into a realm of despair from which she could not find her way back? That he had
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