“I’m going back to sleep,” he says. “I mean, I’m waking up.”
“Boy bye,” I say and turn over.
With that he disappears.
A few nights later we wake to the sound of Mama’s house breaking. Before I open my eyes, I know it is him beside me. Of all the people I could dream of waking up to, it’s his ass. Not Mama, so I can tell her I’m sorry for not saving her life, for not seeing her dream sooner, not Aunt Dissy or one of the other Dissys, so I can tell them to kiss my ass, not an ex-lover I didn’t really want to kick out of the bed, but him. Now I have grown accustomed to his scent. Irish Springs and strong minty toothpaste. He is using mouthwash before he goes to bed. I think I smell the hint of cologne or some kind of dime store aftershave. I am almost flattered that he has started to clean up for me.
He doesn’t say anything about my ruined skin. My scars were like tree rings, bloody palm prints, maps of all the horrid dreams I’d ever had. He doesn’t stare at them but he doesn’t look away either. My scars are my shield. They remind me, even with so much death around, that I still live.
His eyes wonder briefly over the gown I had put on. It is the closest thing to a nightgown I own, and calling it lingerie would be a stretch. I have braided my hair neatly and hid the black satin bonnet I usually sleep with.
We spend the night plastering the cracks, caulking breaks and holes. We think if we make the repairs in our dreams, we will wake to fewer holes in our waking life. I suspect that neither of us can afford to regularly repair our houses. It sounds like he is almost as broke as I am.
This time the breaking sound is louder. We hope the walls will hold themselves. I don’t know about him, but I definitely cannot afford to move. We clutch our pillows and hold our breath as the sawdust and plaster float down from the ceiling like fairy dust. I’m so tired in this dream, I can barely keep my eyes awake. There is nothing sexy about any of this. My house is dying all around me. It seems like each crack I fill reveals another gaping wound. We are afraid of what the house will do in our sleep, so now we rest in shifts.
When I wake after he’s softly snoring, the front wall has moved. The door to my bedroom is gone altogether. Three of the Dissy portraits lay on the floor, facedown, silent as corpses. I panic. I feel trapped. But then I feel cool air tickle my scalp. The ceiling opens up and all the stars look in. I am more surprised at the sight of them than any of the other changes to my room. Suddenly the stars I never see in this city of light and noise and loneliness fill the night sky.
I need a witness. I shake him but he won’t wake up. I look for paper and a pen. This is not something I want to write in Aunt Dissy’s dream book. This is something I want to keep for myself.
We leave each other notes now. Not love notes …just … notes.
“The west wall, near the kitchen is going next. I think I heard it rumbling near the bookcase.”
“A new set of stairs may appear out of nowhere.”
“You overslept! There were more cracks in the hall. I woke to two sets of double doors before I could use the damn bathroom!”
I spend my days at the hardware store. I lug heavy panels, hammers and nails, cans of paint, brushes, and glue. My upstairs tenants don’t even bother asking anymore. They know I’m not repairing their shit. They owe me two month’s rent and are counting on losing their deposit. And how can I explain? I don’t have the heart or the energy to kick them out anyway. I wobble into the brownstone and trip up the stairs, crashing into the walls. Cornrows pokes his head out the door.
“You OK, sis?”
I wave. Now they look at me like I’m the fuck up.
I scrape the old paint and smooth out rough edges. I can’t remember what my mother’s house looked like before, before Aunt Dissy moved in and came to take care of me. The only thing that remains the same are the walls of Dissys. And even they are changing. Their backs are still turned to me, but now I see here and there, a hand on a hip, the jut of a jaw, a bell-shaped hat turned to cover a side-eye in profile. I don’t need to see the pictures or their poked out lips to know how much they disapprove.
Our hallways are now labyrinths. I say “our” because he and I now share the same dreaming hell—or purgatory. I can’t tell which. We lurch through the house, shoulders stooped, eyes squinted up and frowning.
After a month of midnight renovations, the full moon returns again. To my surprise, the ravens disappear and the sky is washed clean. I turn away from the mirror and return to my empty bed that is not really empty anymore. I push his pillow over to his side of the bed. By now I know he likes to sleep with his back to the window.
In my dream, I see him as he cannot see himself. The landscapes of his spirit, as level and gentle as an open hand, without one fist for boundary. His goals and joys, memories and defeats are mine now. They lay glittering in small pools of green and brown and gray as he sleeps, continents on a bright unfolding map reaching out, unbroken across the sea.
I see myself, too, reworking a scene that is my own. Not buck naked this time, but wearing the shimmering scraps of clothing like rainbow strips of skin. Instead of running, I’m dancing, and all the breadcrumbs lead back to me.
I think I will tell him someday. On one of these nights when the wind sounds like the rustle of a blackbird’s wings, when the stars look sharp enough to slice the black sky into ribbons. I will tell him of Aunt Dissy’s book, of all the Dissys who are pretending not to watch us now, and of the woman whose face still holds my unimagined dreams.
NIGHTFLIGHT
Three o’clock in the morning, Old Mama Yaya walks at this hour unobserved, past tumbled-down apartment buildings, empty lots, and shuttered storefronts dark and asleep. She limps slowly in the streetlight, but there is another light. She looks up to her left, grimacing as if the gang graffiti has suddenly come to life, her gaze arcing toward the candle burning in the second-floor window. “Close your eyes, child,” she mutters. “At this hour, even haints sleep.” Adjusting her cart, she continues down the sidewalk, rattling as she goes.
The child sits at her makeshift desk made of cinderblocks and her daddy’s old albums. Led Zeppelin, Muddy Waters, and Parliament Funk stare back at her. The child likes the album art, although she does not understand it. What does it mean to get funked up? She wants the P-Funk, too. She loves Minnie Ripperton’s Afro, so lush and wild as a black sun. These are her friends, the music and the beautiful math behind the music. She imagines it as a kind of sacred geometry, a language that speaks to her when words are too difficult to say. It gives her the same feeling as when her daddy lifted her up into the sky, lifting her by her elbows, as beautiful as seeing a moonrise over stunted willow trees. In her daddy’s hands she feels neither too fat nor too black. Skyborn, she is no ordinary, plain girl. She is a magician.
After the sun stopped shining in Memphis, Nelse decided that she was better suited to theory than to operations. After all, theory was not a product and Nelse was a ponderer. Her grandmother, who raised her after her father got shot in a failed home invasion, had called her a natural-born Figurer. All math was figurin’ to her grandmother, and all math came easily to Nelse. She was inexplicably moved by it, the possibilities shifting like a multicolor Moebius strip, like the rainbow ribbons in her hair when her daddy’s arms lifted her as a child, skyrocketing her into that other space. There she could sit with the cinderblocks that now looked like two ancient columns, sit with the paper Big Mama collected from the office building’s trashcans, ‘cuz most people wasteful and the rest ain’t got no good sense.
Theory allowed her to work mostly alone, and alone was how Nelse preferred life. There was less margin for error.