By Mark de Silva.
The following extract comes from de Silva’s new novel, The Logos, which Splice is releasing today. Clash Books will bring the novel to North America in September.
A dusty tumbler sat next to the easel. For how long? Weeks at least, to judge from the grime in it. I washed it out in the sink, then returned to the window and poured myself a measure of whiskey. I held it just beneath my lips and drew in the vapors. It felt like our second encounter, this wheat spirit and I, given how closely I’d observed my colleagues partaking in Queens. The nose, it was apparent once I’d uncorked the bottle, was profoundly gentle, without a trace of pungency, yet with no sacrifice of complexity. Baking bread, that’s what occurred to me. Each of its visible traits was recapitulated on the tongue: the peculiarly lambent flavor that never threatened to blind, only clarify, an ethereal pianissimo of a grain so utterly familiar from other contexts, but not in a whiskey; the contrasting tactility, a light stickiness in the mouth, just as those slow ripples lapping against the walls of the bottle had presaged. It was this body, almost universally lacking in young spirits, that promised more.
Just as I was about to finish off what I’d poured, a dispute convulsed the street, acrimonious enough to reach me through closed windows. I couldn’t see the participants below, but the voices, male, female, even infant, were all gilded with the spontaneous anger I’d grown used to on this block. Remarkably, the argument turned out to be over a parking space, an objectively improbable dispute, given how few of my neighbors had operational cars. As I listened more closely, I realized that the clash issued merely from hypotheticals—apparently the belligerents were philosophers—conjectures concerning the entitlement to park rather than about actually parking a vehicle. But abstraction only intensified the discord, through a purification of all real-world complications, the things that make for gray areas, compromises. Strangely, I’d discovered that conflict wasn’t just a means toward the resolution of disagreements around here; instead it seemed to hold intrinsic value, often more value than conciliation could deliver. Hence disputes tended to conclude only when people had spent themselves and not before. For this reason I finished my drink in some equanimity, the heated words scudding outside bringing an innocuous piquancy—innocuous for me, anyway—to the occasion.
The first few times this sort of thing had happened, of course, I’d reacted differently. I’d felt something akin to terror, in fact, and I would have trouble working or sleeping for hours afterward, fearing all sorts of potential outcomes from the incident. By now, though, having found that usually there was no upshot, just a flaring scrap in the manner of angry dogs, the disturbances began to hold for me the pleasant terror of horror movies. Although punches were sometimes thrown, knives pulled, blood spilled, cops summoned, I in my person had come to accept my total and complete safety. I was a pure spectator, as removed from what was occurring as anyone watching a police procedural, except that I had a better seat, so I could see the real color of things. Even though I was stationed only on the second floor, the artificial hill the slumlord had built beneath the house meant I always held the high ground, the same ground that necessitated the abnormally long stoop I had to climb each time I returned to my place, as if I were approaching the monuments of Lincoln or Jefferson and not a simple profiteer. I was always slightly winded when I made it to the door.
A few incidents, I should say, were so intense they managed to shatter all sense of remove. Not even a month ago, I’d heard an outburst at three in the morning, an hour that increased the odds of consequential violence. But this drama sprang from a single voice, which in fact only ratcheted up the tension. I could have stayed in bed. I was actually terribly tired that night, having fought with Claire in my dreams, but the sheer force of the man’s voice, which arrived like a conflagration, drew me to my feet. I delicately tiptoed ahead, with exaggerated high-steps. For me, the man owning this voice had to be something more than mortal; he would hear footfall any heavier from the street itself. I slowly headed for my northern window, which faced onto the tenements, the source of all this bile. But I left all the lights off. I drifted through my kitchen and living room from memory alone, experimentally, trying to recall what I’d left lying around, so as not to stumble and alert him to my approach. Once I’d drawn close to the window, I crouched down as low as I could, inching the last few steps on all fours so that my head just peeked up above the bottom lip of the frame. There below me, under the high-pressure sodium lamps, was a black man of less than twenty draped in giallo-film red. The T-shirt was so large, its sleeves ran to his forearms and its hem fell to his knees, just where white enveloped him down to his sneakers. He blurred phantasmagorically under the lamps as he skipped and twirled up and down the street; it gave his rant an unmistakably ecstatic dimension, I thought. This went on for a full eight minutes, too—I timed it on my kitchen clock, whose glow-in-the-dark hands cut easily through the black—this soliloquy of purest contempt, somehow shunted into a single phrase, all of this menace and pain. And not even a threatening phrase, but a couple of numbers: Six two.
What his tongue was able to do with this little incantation, I cannot fully account for. Dozens of times, though, there was six two, in every possible inflection, sometimes in one breath, sometimes in two. Some of these soundings betrayed real despair, fear, self-pity, though the varieties of menace with which he was able to charge the numbers far outnumbered them. I’d not known so much life could be extracted from a pair of syllables, from such a mundane utterance hitched to that little dance, up and down and back again. For all I knew, this was it, the whole of what he was offering, and in its own unfathomable way, it was probably plenty. Yet eventually, like any actor, he couldn’t resist bringing a touch of sense to proceedings. I stared into his face as he screamed out the kicker: Right here. The six two. Who wants it? I’m right here. Because every bit of this is mine. There was only a cavernous silence as he held his face aloft for the first time, staring up into the windows all around him.
This was enough for me to work out the significance of his chosen number. He meant 162nd Street, and he was laying claim to the entire block, to exclusive dealing rights, I presumed, if not other illicit enterprises as well. Indeed, I realized, as he peered into the apartments, seeking some rejoinder, that I had seen him around before; I circulated so much through these blocks, everyone and everything fell under my gaze eventually. He always wore a bug-eyed look, I recalled, as if he’d been awake for days; and his short dreadlocks were perpetually blown back by some phantom headwind that never stopped fronting him, whichever way he turned.
He wasn’t done, apparently: I’m telling you—I am. This mine. This the six two. Ain’t nothing none of y’all can do. See that? I see you.
He whipped his head my way and I thought his eyes met mine.
So see this.
I ducked beneath the window and leaned my head against the wall, wondering if he’d just pulled out a pistol. How could he have seen me in the dark? And when was all this bluster going to draw a response from someone, on a block this hardened? Not necessarily a retaliation, but something: maybe just an old man screaming out, I can’t sleep like this. I will not do it, son! And then what would this kid’s response be, if not some higher violence than mere words can conjure? My legs were shaking.
But the street stayed quiet. Not that the challenger had gone unnoticed. Not at all, to my chagrin. Looking around at all the neighboring buildings, I was made ashamed by the sight of people, whole families, including young children, filling at least a dozen lighted windows of the high-rises. They had the courage—though only a coward would describe it that way, I knew—they had the mettle for high-stakes guerrilla theater without any need for a cloak of darkness, something that was simply out of the question for me. Worse still, as far as my pride went, as their eyes met the young man’s squarely—eyes I avoided even while I returned to his face through the dark—not one of them flicked out his light.
Eventually his voice frayed, he shook his head at the onlookers, his dreadlocks flew. Then he reared back to declaim one last thing, I sensed, with arms operatically stretched toward either side of the street. What followed was just the slow flexion of his fingers around what could only be the necks of two rather tall ghosts. He wrung them thoroughly, face held low, before shoving those murderous fists into his pockets and shuffling off, barking something to himself like a lost dog.
I don’t know if he actually flashed a gun at any point during his monologue, though he had brought his hands down to his waistband several times while prancing to suggest as much. And his tone certainly implied the presence of arms. But now I think it might all have been wild bluff, and my neighbors had somehow sniffed this out, though I don’t know how. To me, it seemed foolhardy to press so hard without a gun. I almost wanted him to have one, for his own sake. But this might have just been the logic of a foreigner.
Today, though, was different. As I sipped Garrett’s whiskey, an atonal polyphony wafted up from the street, and far from discomfiting me, I found my nerves positively soothed. Communion took many forms, I was learning. Here it could come through fractiousness and contempt, even if no-one understood this to be a kind of fellowship. Yet what did that matter, knowledge, I mean, so long as fellowship existed? I drained the tumbler and pushed off from the stool, where I posed people like dolls, to the formless couch where no-one sat but me these days, to lie down and savor the fading screams and the drink’s decay.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Mark de Silva is the author of two novels, Square Wave and The Logos, as well as the essay collection Points of Attack. He is 3:AM’s fiction editor.
