Miles from Nowhere Read online

  With no money for the diner, I waited outside and watched people walk by in their long black coats, hats over ears, their lips blowing smoke. Some people ran and ducked into cabs, their bodies swallowed up in one gulp. Others vanished in sections, inch by inch, as they stepped down the subway stairs. Then there were the people up the block whose bodies turned to black strings until they thinned out of sight. All these people, rushing through the streets as if something good waited for them back home. Inside the diner, President Carter was waving from an airplane until an old waiter climbed up onto the counter and clicked the TV off. The waiter then shuffled around, flicking off the lights with the crook of his cane. Somehow, the diner going dark made the sidewalk seem colder. A diner. That was what my mom had wanted to open our first year here, a Korean one. She told us she would waitress, I would work the register after school, and my dad would have to cook because of his English. When she got to this part of her plan, my dad grabbed her wrists. “Who do you think you are, telling me to work in a kitchen,” he said, strangling her tiny bones.

  The old waiter came out and slammed the door behind him. In a thick accent he shouted that he was closing up, and shooed me away so he could pull the gate shut. I stepped aside. The stubble on his face looked like snowflakes. “She’ll be here any second,” I assured him.

  “I am very happy for you,” he said, and yanked on the padlock to make sure it had fastened.

  That’s when I saw Wink. Zipping up his jacket, he strolled out of the shelter and casually jogged across the street toward me. I stopped myself from running to him, and for that long second he was my best friend.

  “I thought you weren’t gonna leave,” he said, giving me a hug. I was surprised by the hugging thing, but it felt okay. We let go quick.

  “Knowledge has some kind of... a plan,” I told him.

  “Man, she stinks of trouble.” Wink was already shivering, blowing into his cupped hands. “She doesn’t care about nothing but herself, and her shit, and—Excuse me! Excuse me, sir! Can you spare some change so me and my little sister could get something to eat?”

  A man bustling by stopped to search his coat pocket. While digging for money, he glanced at me, and then at Wink, who kept his head down. “You two are related, that’s what you’re telling me, right?” The man handed over some coins anyway.

  Wink saluted. “Thank you, sir. My sister thanks you, too.” As the man walked off, Wink counted the money. “Twelve cents?” he shouted. “You fucking dick!”

  He seemed different outside the shelter, older maybe. Even his eyes looked darker. I wondered about Knowledge, if she would look older, too. I didn’t have to wonder for too long, though.

  Knowledge bolted through the shelter doors, screaming, “We made it!” and charged the street as if she’d just barely escaped an explosion. Behind her, Reggie swiveled in his chair with his back to us, still on the phone.

  “We made it!” she hollered again, putting her hand on my arm, and I thought she wanted to lean on me so she could rest but instead she hauled me across the street, stopping traffic, and practically tossed me down into the subway.

  The train rocked us from side to side.

  “Who the fuck invited you?” she yelled.

  “Ah, shut up. You’re just pissed ’cause you ain’t got a dick.”

  “I’m still more man than you, you skanky fag.”

  “Hey, guys?” I said, mostly to myself, which was why I was surprised when they both actually stopped shouting. “Do we know where we’re going?”

  Knowledge tapped her chest. “You leave that to me,” she said, and propped her legs on the seat in front of us. Wink stood by the doors with his arms folded and feet apart. “I ain’t a queer,” was all he said.

  The tracks made a dry, whistling sound.

  “Give me your shoelaces,” Knowledge told us, and started untying hers.

  Wink and I shared a look.

  “Do you even know what a freak you are? I ain’t giving you my laces or anything like my laces,” he said, and turned to me. “Joon. What’re you doing?”

  “Giving her my laces.”

  “Why?”

  Because it was easier to do what others wanted. And quieter. I didn’t say this to Wink, though. I just shrugged.

  A few stops later, a black man carrying a McDonald’s bag came on, and our car instantly smelled of fries. He looked tired. The light behind his eyes had been turned off for the night. I liked him because of his construction boots—the mud on them made me believe he was hardworking and honest. After taking a seat in the middle of the car, he bit into his burger, stared down at it while chewing, and then looked out the window, which only gave back a darker version of him. At the end of the car, another man sat by himself, too, but him I didn’t like, especially his mustache the size of a rat. The skin on his face was too tight and too shiny, as if you could peel it off and find underneath a skull made of porcelain. Plus, when we’d first hopped on the train, he cinched up his overcoat and glared at us, as if we were looking to steal his kidneys.

  I wouldn’t have noticed this man again except that Wink was now walking up to him, dragging his sneakers a little since having given up his laces. He grabbed the top rail and dangled his body in front of the man’s face, pretending to read an ad, while the man slowly stroked his mustache, pretending not to see him.

  Knowledge plopped down next to me. “You seeing this? What did I tell you?” She shook her head and gave a few tut-tuts while braiding all of our laces into one long rope. Green gems of light streaked the windows as our train went through what seemed like an endless tunnel, and Knowledge babbled about sex being a weakness and how all men were sick with this disease. The man stood up, and Wink led him toward the next car. “If you can’t control yourself, something else will,” Knowledge said, and I secretly wished for her to shut up. Using all his weight, Wink jerked open the sliding door and walked on through without looking back.

  We shot out of the tunnel and all the sounds of the train turned loose in the air. I took a breath. The subway had turned into an El, and the shaky tracks reminded me of a tired roller coaster. Down below, dark bodies in fat hooded jackets walked by tenements. Some buildings were empty, some burned black. One had pretty flower planters on every windowsill, with a little white boy or a little black girl staring out and smiling stupidly from every window. But everyone knew the kids weren’t real—they were the fake window posters the city had pasted up. The front of our train curved into an S, and just like that, the streets disappeared and the apartment buildings were now only inches away. We moved slowly, and each family’s window clicked by like View-Master frames. They were so close, I could’ve touched every one of them—the man and his kids watching TV, the big-breasted aproned mother tying up a garbage bag, and then a girl my age talking on the phone, ignoring the Christmas tree standing right beside her. It was too cold to pull down the window but I did it anyway. I wanted to put my face out there and smell every home.

  When my mother came back from the hospital, she wouldn’t speak to me. She wouldn’t even look at me. After a few days of silence, I tried shocking her into talking—I chopped off my hair, played Meat Loaf really loud, stared at her without blinking while she prayed by her bed, but nothing. She eventually spent her days locked in her room, and I hung out at a diner near our house, sipping Mello Yello at the counter, eavesdropping on conversations long enough until I felt I could join in. My mom and I only saw each other once in a while, in the kitchen or the hallway. We ate alone, we cried alone, we didn’t answer the door. My dad never called.

  One night I found her reading her Bible on the sofa. I sat next to her and begged her to say one word, just one. I even gave her some suggestions: Apple. Lotion. Jesus. Rice. She didn’t look up from the pages.

  This lasted six months. This lasted until the day I left.

  Our train stayed in the station awhile with all the doors open. By the stairs I waited for Wink. He stood with his back against a platform column, talki
ng to the man without touching him. The snow kept falling. It was hard to tell if he knew we were waiting for him, and I didn’t think I could interrupt. Knowledge was jogging up and down the subway stairs, losing her patience. “We got things to do,” she said during her fifth lap, and I couldn’t blame her. She tugged the elbow of my sweatshirt, gentler than I’d expected, and we walked down the steps and out onto Tremont Avenue.

  I looked up at the sky, and at the little snow-guppies swimming in streaks of light. It was colder here than in the city, not enough tall buildings blocking the wind. My jeans, crusty and cold, scraped against the skin of my thighs as we walked beside a row of double-parked cars, passed fire escapes ringed with bicycle wheels and windows draped with towels and pillowcases. A long car without headlights floated by in darkness. Across the street a small dog raised its leg and the wind blew its pee onto a liquor store sign that advertised CHICKEN LIVER & HOT CHOCOLATE $2.35.

  Knowledge marched with hands in her pockets, her shoulders hunched, her face chiseled with determination.

  “Do you think you’ll ever tell me where we’re going?” I asked.

  She stopped short and put a hand on my arm. “You should trust me more.”

  “Okay.”

  She squeezed harder. “No, I mean it. We can’t be friends if you don’t trust me.”

  “I said okay.”

  “Okay you trust me or okay you don’t want to be friends?”

  “Okay I trust you, but it’s really cold.”

  “What’s that got to do with anything?”

  My face felt like a crackling mask. “Can’t we just get to where we need to go?”

  “Sure,” she said, whipping out the rope she’d made from our laces. “But we’re already here.”

  We’d stopped in front of a building, under a fire escape ladder. She tossed the rope up several times. When it finally lassoed the bottom rung, she tugged on the ends of the rope until the ladder squealed and slid down a few inches. Without saying a word, she put on her sock-gloves, stepped back about five paces, took a running leap, and just barely caught the bottom rung with the tips of her fingers. “Pull me,” she said, after securing her grip, and I hugged her knees and pulled, which drew the ladder down the rest of the way.

  She started to climb. “C’mon. I wanna show you something.”

  I looked down the street, in both directions, searching for something or someone to decide for me. The sidewalk was empty, except for an empty potato chip bag skidding toward me with the wind. I could see the train tracks, but I didn’t see Wink. I wanted to look for him, but I wasn’t sure if he wanted to be found. I understood this, the difference between getting lost and staying lost. I had left home to bring back my father, and when my search failed, I knew that meant that he wanted to stay gone. Which made me sad. And then jealous of his freedom. So I stayed gone, too, and left my mom to live alone, inside that tunnel of grief. I didn’t even go back to say goodbye.

  “Pssst!” Knowledge waved me up from the third floor.

  By the time I caught up to her, she was trying to open a window.

  “It’s unlocked,” she said. “Help me get it open.”

  I got next to her and the two of us looked like weight lifters—our knees bent, our hands by our ears, straining to lift up a window that wouldn’t budge. I felt queasy. I knew this was wrong. “Can you please tell me what we’re doing?”

  “You’ll see,” she said, and right then, the window burst open. A gust of snowflakes rushed inside, and before I could say a word, she slinked in.

  I stepped onto a table, then down to a chair, then to a floor that creaked when I landed. The kitchen smelled of fish grease. It was dark but not so black that I couldn’t see Knowledge opening the refrigerator. She poked her head in and turned to me, pinching her nose and shaking her head. How she could even think about food, I didn’t understand. I was sick to my stomach—my whole body felt heavier, muddier, sneaking around someone else’s home. I heard every sound I made as I followed her across a hallway and into a room that was blinking red, white, red, white.

  And then I saw it, what she had wanted me to see—a humongous white Christmas tree that was as tall as the ceiling and as big as the tree at Alexander’s department store. Knowledge stood with her hands on her hips, studying every Santa head and every strand of silver tinsel clumped on the plastic branches. The flashing lights changed the color of her face, and she smiled up at the tree as if the black angel perched on top were singing secrets. I didn’t see any presents, though. Not under the tree or anywhere else in the living room, which was crowded with a deflated couch, a mini refrigerator, record players stacked three high, and a coffee table held up by two TV sets. Above the couch hung a poster-sized photo of a black couple. The woman had thick pretty lashes and sat with her hands folded on her lap. Behind her stood a stocky man with tinted glasses and Jheri curls, wearing a velvet suit. The picture made him look as though he had only one hand—a fat one, with a gold pinkie ring, resting on the woman’s thin shoulder. I was about to point the poster out to Knowledge when I saw that she was under the tree.

  “Don’t worry,” she whispered, “it’s lighter than you think.”

  She was bent over, picking the tree up by the stand and telling me to grab the top.

  “Are you crazy?” I checked behind me.

  “Just shut up and help me,” she whisper-shouted.

  Right then a light came on down the hallway. I didn’t even think—I ran. And for some reason I thought Knowledge would, too. With one foot out the window, I turned back to find her dragging the tree into the kitchen, stand and all. I begged her to let go of it but knew she wouldn’t listen, so I helped her, and we had almost half the tree shoved out onto the fire escape when the kitchen light came on.

  It was the man from the photo, only much thicker. I hadn’t expected him to come out wearing a velvet suit or anything, but I was surprised to see him in his black socks and tiny underwear, his beefy stomach large enough to house the woman standing next to him. She stood with her hands covering her nose and mouth, like she was about to cough.

  “Knowledge,” the woman finally said.

  The three of them stood frozen. The woman, with a pink curler in her bangs, stared at Knowledge. The man, with his arms folded, stared at the tree. And Knowledge, unable to face either of them, stared at the refrigerator. Me: I couldn’t believe Knowledge was her real name.

  “Let’s go,” she said suddenly, and pushed the tree out the window. She didn’t care about the ornaments anymore. The angel had fallen off by the hallway.

  As soon as we got outside, we tossed the tree over the railing, watched it land in the middle of the street, and scrambled down the fire escape.

  “She’ll be back. You watch. You’ll be back!” the man shouted, his head out the window. I kept waiting to hear the woman’s voice but it never came. We jumped down to the sidewalk. “And what, you think I’m just gonna give you my damn tree?” the man went on.

  Knowledge looked up and shot him the finger. “You didn’t give it to me, asshole. I took it from you.” She propped the tree up and started skipping around it, singing, “I took it, I took it, I took it, and I ain’t gonna take it anymore!”

  An old lady on the second floor poked her head out and threatened to come down and wring our necks with her own bare hands, so help her God.

  “You know why you’ll be back?” the man started again. “Who the hell would want you? You’re too damn ugly to get anyone else. Look at her, she don’t even look like a—”

  A blur of white flew over the man’s head right then and shattered his window. The sound of glass breaking was so clear, almost cartoonish. Knowledge and I both turned to see Wink across the street, smiling at his aim.

  “C’mon!” Knowledge screamed, and Wink snapped to. He ran toward us, now laughing, and only then did I see he was carrying a paper bag.

  “Shermaine, call the police,” the man yelled, and, as if we were of one body, the three of us grabbed
the tree at the exact same time—Knowledge in front, me in the middle, and Wink with a free hand holding up the base—and we ran as if a gun had gone off and a race had started. The cold air bit my nose, and my sneakers felt as if they might slip off any second, but by the end of the block we were laughing. Wink hollered, “Merry Christmas, I love you all,” over and over again while Knowledge screamed, “Fuck you, barbershop. Fuck you, butcher. Fuck you, basketball court and playground,” just fuck you to every place we ran past. Leaving a trail of Santa heads behind us, Knowledge sped us through the neighborhood. “Look at them fools, running with a damn tree,” a skinny old man said, standing in front of the liquor store. “Fuck you, old man,” Knowledge shouted. And with the snow hitting my eyes, my fingers almost numb, I suddenly felt like one of those people who walked the streets as if something good were waiting for them.

  We turned a corner and ran across an entire square block that looked to have been bombed. I’d seen it from the El. Piles and piles of rubble, of broken buildings. We trampled over bricks, cement blocks, toilet bowls, and tire rims until we finally rushed into a tall, burned-out building. “Up here,” Knowledge said, tugging on the tree, and we followed her to the third floor and into a room.

  The room was big. We dropped the tree in the center. We didn’t know what to do first, laugh or catch our breath, so we did both, and hugged and gave each other high fives, saying, “Aw man, that was the fucking best,” and things like that and looked up at the tall empty tree, which seemed so different in this room. The floor was covered in sheets of newspaper, cereal boxes, liquor bottles, and dried shit. A burned mattress with spirals poking through took up a corner, and the wall beside it had a hole the size of a small car that let us see where we’d come from. Wink opened up his paper bag, which was now soggy, and, to our surprise, he handed out Styrofoam cups. Knowledge peeled the lid off and took a sip. It was hot chocolate. And not even Ovaltine, but the real thing, with whipped cream and sprinkles, at least that’s the way I remember it. “Goddamn! This is good, isn’t it?” Wink shouted, almost scaring me. He paced the room and took sips, one right after another. “You know what it tastes like?” He touched his chest, right where his heart was, and scrunched his jacket. “It tastes like love,” he said, and fell to the ground, pretending to have been shot. I laughed and dropped down next to him, and then Knowledge next to me. “Tastes like love, my ass,” she said.