The shop windows are baffling. The prices are absurd. He wanders into a convenience store and retreats again, disturbed by the white aisles and fluorescent lights and the glut of food in cans and boxes with color photographs that scream the contents. It makes him feel nauseous.
It’s all strange, but not unimaginable. Everything extrapolates. If you can catch a concert hall in a gramophone, you can contain a bioscope in a screen playing in a store window, something so ordinary it doesn’t even attract an audience. But some things are wholly unexpected. He stands entranced by the whirling and flaying brush strips of a car wash.
The people remain the same. Hustlers and shit-heels, like the homeless boy with the bulging eyes who mistook him for an easy mark. He saw him off, but not before he was able to confirm some of Harper’s suppositions about the dates on money or where he is. Or when. He fingers the key in his pocket. His way back. If he wants to go.
He takes the boy’s advice and gets on the Ravenswood El, which is practically the same as in 1931, only faster and more reckless. The train skelters through the corners so that Harper clings to the pole, even sitting down. Mostly, the other passengers avert their eyes. Sometimes they move away from him. Two girls dressed like whores giggle and point. It’s his clothes, he realizes. The others are wearing brighter colors and fabrics that are somehow shinier and tackier, like their lace-up shoes. But when he starts moving across the carriage towards them, their smiles wither and they get off at the next stop, muttering to each other. He has no interest in them anyway.
He ascends the stairs onto the street, his crutch clanging against the metal, drawing a pitying look from a uniformed colored woman who nevertheless does not offer him assistance.
Standing under the metal pylons of the railroad, he sees that the neon of the Loop has intensified ten-fold. Look here, no, here, those flashing lights say. Distraction is the order and the way.
It takes only a minute to figure out how the lights work at the crosswalk. The green man and the red. Signals designed for children. And aren’t all these people exactly that with their toys and noise and haste?
He sees that the city has changed its color, from dirty whites and creams to a hundred shades of brown. Like rust. Like shit. He walks down to the park to see for himself that the Hooverville has indeed gone, leaving no trace.
The view of the city from here is unnerving. The profile of the buildings against the sky is wrong, shining towers so high the clouds swallow them up. Like a vista of hell.
The cars and the crush of people makes him think of woodborer beetles eating their way through a tree. Trees riddled with those wormy scars die. As this whole pestilential place will, collapsing in on itself as the rot sets in. Perhaps he’ll see it fall. Wouldn’t that be something?
But now he has a purpose. The object burns in his head. He knows where to go, as if he has been this way before.
He gets on another train, descending into the bowels of the city. The clattering of the tracks is louder in the tunnels. Artificial lights slice past the windows, shearing people’s faces into fragmented moments.
It leads him, ultimately, to Hyde Park, where the university has created a pocket of pink-faced wealth among the working-class rubes, who are overwhelmingly black. He feels edgy with anticipation.
He gets a coffee from the Greek diner on the corner, black, three sugars. Then he walks up past the residences until he finds a bench to sit on. She’s here, somewhere. As it is meant to be.
He slits his eyes and tilts his face as if he is enjoying the sunshine, so that it doesn’t seem that he is examining the faces of all the girls who pass him. Glossy hair and bright eyes under heavy make-up and fluffy hairstyles. They wear their privilege like it’s something they pull on with their socks in the morning. It blunts them, Harper thinks.
And then he sees her, getting out of a boxy white car with a dent in the door, which has pulled up at the entrance to a residence barely ten feet from his bench. The shock of recognition goes all the way through to his bones. Like love at first sight.
She’s tiny. Chinese or Korean, in mottled blue-and-white jeans with black hair that has been fussed up like cotton candy. She pops the trunk and starts unloading cardboard boxes onto the ground, while her mother laboriously clambers out of the car and comes round to help. But it is obvious, even as she struggles, laughing in exasperation, with a box that is splitting at the bottom under the weight of books, that she is a different species to the empty husks of girls he’s seen. Full of life, that lashes out like a whip.
Harper has never limited his appetites to one particular kind of woman or another. Some men prefer girls with wasp waists or red hair or heavy buttocks you can dig your fingers into, but he has always taken whatever he could get, whenever he could get it, paying for it most of the time. The House demands more. It wants potential – to claim the fire in their eyes and snuff it out. Harper knows how to do that. He will need to buy a knife. Sharp as a bayonet.
He leans back and starts rolling a cigarette, pretending to watch the pigeons fighting the seagulls for a scrap of sandwich yanked from a dustbin, every bird for himself. He doesn’t look at the girl and her mother fussing and fretting as they carry the boxes inside. But he can hear everything, and if he stares down contemplatively at his shoes while he’s rolling, he can see them out the side of his eye.
‘Okay, that’s the last one,’ the girl – Harper’s girl – says, lugging a half-open box out of the back of the car. She spots something inside and reaches in to pull out a doll, shockingly naked, holding it by the ankle. ‘Omma!’
‘What now?’ her mother says.
‘Omma, I told you to drop this off at the Salvation Army. What am I supposed to do with all this junk?’
‘You love that doll,’ her mother reprimands her. ‘You should keep it. For my grandkids. But not yet. You find a nice boy first. A doctor or a lawyer, seeing as you are studying sociopathy.’
‘Sociology, Omma.’
‘And that’s another thing. Going into these bad places. You’re looking for trouble.’
‘You’re overreacting. It’s where people live.’
‘Sure. Bad people, with guns. Why can’t you study opera singers? Or waiters? Or doctors. Good way to meet a nice doctor, I think. Aren’t they interesting enough for your degree? Instead of these housing projects?’
‘Maybe I should study the similarities between Korean mothers and Jewish ones?’ She tangles her fingers absently in the doll’s long blonde hair.
‘Maybe I should slap your face for being rude to the woman who raised you! If your grandmother heard you talking like this …’
‘Sorry, Omma,’ the girl says, sheepish. She examines the doll’s locks twirled around her fingers. ‘Remember that time I tried to dye my Barbie’s hair black?’
‘With shoe polish! We had to throw that one away.’
‘Doesn’t that bother you? The homogeneity of aspiration?’
Her mother waves her hand impatiently. ‘Your big college words. It bothers you so much, you take the kids you working with in the projects black Barbies, then.’
The girl tosses the doll back in the box. ‘That’s not a bad idea, Omma.’
‘But don’t use shoe polish!’
‘Don’t even joke.’ She leans over the box in her arms to kiss the older woman on the cheek. Her mother bats her away, embarrassed by the show of affection.
‘Be good,’ she says, climbing into the car. ‘You study hard. No boys. Unless they’re doctors.’
‘Or lawyers. I got it. Bye, Omma. Thanks for your help.’
The