🕯️🕯️"Goliath" by Tochi Onyebuchi

The train rumbles in silence.

“You ain’t chained like a nigger.” She shifts, makes herself more comfortable. “You chained like a man broke into a family’s home, kidnapped a mother’s kids, sold one into a camp, and kilt the other.” Sun’s shining straight through the window, but it’s no match for the shadows covering the marshal’s face.

“You sayin’ I deserve this, then?”

“I’m sayin’ deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.”

“You gonna watch me hang?”

“I don’t think so.” She says it like she’s deciding which boot to put on first or whether she’ll roll herself a smoke or just spit ’bacca instead. It unnerves me. “What’s it to you? Me showin’ up or not to see you hang.”

“It’d be the completion o’ yer duty, for one.”

She squints at me, has trouble figuring me, it seems.

“For another, I’d need someone to bring my message back to Ma.” I shrug, but it seems a heavier, more mournful gesture than I’d intended. “I don’t know too many people in Texas I’d trust with that.”

“I ain’t a courier, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“It ain’t.”

Out the window, the pasture is charred and brittle.

It looks how I remember it from the thunderstorms that attacked the homesteaders on the prairie when I was younger and stupider and runnin’ with men just as violent and hungry and desperate as me. Blackened patches where lightning struck and where tiny homes had turned into conflagrations, swallowing up the year’s harvest before the locusts had a chance. But this burn has a different smell to it; I can tell that much through the winda. It smells like salt poured into open wounds, like kicking a downed man, like rampaging after the war’d already been won. Or lost. It smells like the planet took revenge on us. It smells like Specials.

I don’t catch a reaction either way from the marshal as we near the devastation, passing indications of carnage and whispers of sabotage, military maneuvers practiced on civilians, a few garrisons sparsely populated, the occasional horseman paused, lone and silhouetted, on the hilltop, scanning our passage, maybe wondering at our mission.

Through the window, the air smells of cedar and burning, though there ain’t a forest for miles.

[May 17th, 20—, 8:58 p.m.]

After college and droppin’ out of grad school and a few years sort of wandering, I came back to Connecticut. Moved in with a Boricua friend from when I was younger and we got a two-bedroom in Hartford. Downtown. You wanna hear the story of America, just look at Hartford. Used to be the Insurance Capital of America. So much money was made there, they called it America’s Filing Cabinet. But none of the money stayed. You could walk through downtown Hartford, even in the middle of the day, and feel completely, utterly alone. Not like in New York, where the city’s whole business is being anonymous, knowing it’s heads or tails whether someone would help you if they saw you in trouble on the street. This was different. Even full of people, the place was a ghost town. People talked about making it a sort of tech city, a New England Silicon Valley or whatnot, but that never took. There’s no downtown scene. People drive in to see the theater at the Bushnell [Performing Arts Center], then drive back out to the suburbs. The little café where we lived opened at 10 a.m. and closed at 3 p.m. Even the Dunkin’ closed early on Fridays. At some point, they built a Dunkin’ Donuts baseball stadium, but whenever we drove by it, we were always asking, “Who did they build that for?” We chuckled when we said that to each other, me and Freddie. But you could hear the sorrow in it if you really listened. Living there affected Freddie more than it did me. Park Street was where the Puerto Ricans lived and all the Blacks lived in the North End. Main Street was kind of the dividing line.

It’s a shame, because there’s so much damn history in that place. Take the Wadsworth Atheneum. When I was in grade school, we went on field trips there around Christmastime and the whole place would just light you up. The art, the Christmas trees. Oldest public art museum in America. And by the time Freddie and I moved there, they redid the library, freshened up Bushnell Park, even though you could still catch the crackheads there if you went at the right time. Or the wrong one. But, yeah, man. Those office buildings. When the people working in those places left, it’s like they evacuated. That’s what it was. They don’t leave, they escape. I was old enough by that time to know about tax bases and property taxes and the way schools are funded, so you could see the injustice in it, you see what I’m sayin’? You look at the statistics and read about “economic activity,” but it’s all just white folks moving money from one pile to another, and none of it stays in Hartford. No art scene, no nothing. If you wanted to be a writer or an artist or whatever, you could go and starve in Boston or New York. You didn’t have to do it in Hartford, even though we paid $525 a month for our apartment at the time.

That mighta been why I came. I mean, I was close to Auntie, who was getting older. But I guess I thought that maybe I could do something for the place. Improve it. Fix it. Make it alive again. But you just can’t get money to stay there. Try walking around that place and buying a cup of coffee. Mayor after mayor, governor after governor, all trying to get business to come to that city by giving them tax breaks, and look at what it did.

I don’t want to say it was a difficult time. Maybe it was. It’s all sort of foggy now. But I was in my twenties and drifting between postgrad study and unemployment and temp jobs. If you were my age, left college in those years, you could kinda blame the recession. The country never really recovered from that outbreak. But sometimes you feel like it’s a personal thing, know what I mean? Like there’s something wrong with you. Everywhere I landed, I didn’t really feel like I belonged. Doing postgrad stuff, I felt like I didn’t have any skills. Just felt unaccomplished. I was just there to ride out the downturn, and I felt like everybody knew it. Then there’s the shame of unemployment, because I wasn’t really unemployed. There were plenty of people who were actually looking for jobs. Auntie had lost her job as a tax analyst, turned around and became a nurse. Felt like I was ducking and dodging responsibility. I was just overeducated and useless, taking a job from someone who needed it and deserved it more than me. Got put in a psych ward after a suicide attempt, and when I was in that place, I didn’t even feel like I was really depressed or really going through it. Felt like I was faking it to get out of something. Like I was avoiding work. Felt like there was no place for me, because I wasn’t capable of working. All my friends who studied econ got jobs overseas, and I was just walking around taking up space. Led to my first try quitting the drink. Really quitting it.

I did it in the middle of a winter. Hartford was getting as cold as it would get all year, and I moved to New Haven. [Inaudible.] It was too cold for a jacket. Too cold for a hoodie. So I put them together and I really dug how it looked, you know? How it made me feel. Throw on some snow boots and I looked exactly like the kid they didn’t let into the Ivory Tower. Outside churches, donning my uniform, huddled in little circles on the sidewalk around the light of a half-dozen Newports, I felt like that kid too.

We’d do meetings on our phones or whatever, but sometimes we would meet up anyway and of course we’d have to get our temperatures checked or whatever, but sometimes we would just hang outside and shoot the shit. Inside the Rooms, I met people who looked and felt like I did. I mean, they were mostly white folk, but they had the same insides as me. They hated themselves and they probably felt like some potato-bug shell of a human being. But they said “hey” and your name every time you announced you were there and introduced yourself. They said it collectively. And when they did, they sounded like the church choirs back home. And over the next couple of months, it felt like they were sacrificing to help me. May not have looked like it. But, the shape we were in, you give a stranger your number, you’re opening yourself up to a person who, once upon a time, was used to lying and stealing and doing whatever to feed their fix. And they did it without asking. Didn’t expect no repayment. Sometimes, they did things like that without me even noticing. We were in the foxhole together. With our hoodies and the jackets we wore over them and the jeans and the snow boots and the Newports. That was our uniform. We were doing the work. The necessary, dirty work. Rebuilding our capacity for love. And we knew, somewhere deep in our hearts, that we’d never see the completed building. We’re building this church, this cathedral, but we’ll die before it’s finished. We could imagine it. Most days, it was that image in our heads, this idea of our repaired lives and rebuilt existences—the way we could take up space in the world—that was what got us through. You know what they say: scar tissue’s stronger than skin.

Thinking that way made me feel hopeful about people and places, you know? Like when cancer happens to a neighborhood and mutates it, maybe people can come and change it back, you know? Maybe the cancer goes into remission. Places like Hartford or other parts of Connecticut, you saw it all over the country. Sure, rich people were leaving, mostly white people, but they were sometimes takin’ their juice shops and their yoga studios with them, know what I mean? We were getting our cities back.

I love New England. It’s where I’d spent so much of my life. But I think some of it is made up. Told myself lies about myself, made it seem I was made out of different stuff than I was really made out of, you understand what I’m saying? I have these memories of being a kid and raking leaves on the lawn in autumn and standing on the front porch beneath this tree that had a branch over our front yard and the leaves were just on fire they were so red. Velvet. That’s what color they were. And I have these memories of Auntie eventually calling someone to cut that branch down, even though the tree was rooted in our neighbor’s yard, because she didn’t want that branch falling on the car or on any of us. And it’s so vivid, that memory, but I don’t know if it’s mine really. You tell stories to people in your life and they tell you their stories, you exchange things. And after a lifetime of doing that, you sometimes forget which are yours and which are theirs. [Inaudible]

I’m sorry. I don’t know why I’m crying all of a sudden. Shit just kinda happens like that when you get older. Sneaks up on you. I don’t know if it has to do with loss, plenty of people die. Happens in waves, you know? You’re young and it’s birthdays, then you get older and it’s weddings, then you get older again and it’s funerals. Not even funerals, even. Sometimes, you hear about a person, what happens to them. Whether it’s violent or not. Natural causes and all that. Sometimes, people just drop out. And you don’t think at the time that you’re talking with that person that it’s the last conversation you’re gonna have with them. Last time you’re gonna hear them speak right in front of you, close enough to touch. I dunno. Been a long time since I got to speak this long all at one time. Just remembering a bunch of last conversations. Whole lotta last conversations.

It was like that in the Rooms, you know. I don’t know how much you know about AA, but it was like that for me in my twenties. People drifting in and out. You get sober with your cohort, and as broken as you might be in the beginning, it always does your heart good to see the same people showing up over and over. Means they’re doing at least that thing right, you know? They might relapse but they come back. They might find some other way to backslide, give in to their character defects, but if they’re in that room next week or their face is in that little box on your screen, you know they’re doing at least that thing right. But then a face goes missing. Maybe one week they don’t come because they got themselves a new job and they gotta go to new meetings. Maybe they move away. Maybe there’s a family thing. Or maybe they’re dead. You lose people like that. They just turn into absences. There’s no marker. Just one week they’re there and the next they aren’t, and they don’t come back. Gave the whole thing high stakes for me in the beginning. I was desperate. I wanted to help Auntie out after she lost her job and I couldn’t do it while I was in my cups. That was part of it, but another part of me also just wanted to live. And wanted to do it different than how I was doing it. I just wanted to not be in pain anymore. Maybe, at least, know where the pain was coming from. Some of it’s just the knowledge you come into, growing up Black in this place, seeing all the ways you can be hated, all the places you’re kept out of. I’m sure there was other stuff too. Losing my uncle when I did didn’t help. And I never really dealt with Mom and Dad dying either. Never really gave myself time to. I know diagnosis ain’t cure, but it’s close, right? I dunno. I think I just preferred knowing to not knowing, you know?

Fellowship at the time was mostly white. Poor and white but still white. Never felt like they were hostile against me, but whenever we got together, it was like, “hold up, you gotta leave your Blackness at the door.” So, in the beginning, it was like being a Black dude and my political consciousness and all that had to be separate from being sober. Online was different, though. Big fellowship of people of color. I remember, the first POC meeting I logged onto, the speaker was this Bangladeshi cat, and he started out talking about being the son or grandson of immigrants and how the rap he listened to as a kid helped him get politically conscious and got him more involved in being Muslim, and he’s talking about how he had to basically be this chameleon to fit in with all the white kids at school or at parties or whatever, and it’s like five minutes into his share and I’m bawling. Thank God my video was turned off. [Laughing] Never got to meet any of them in person, but that fellowship saved me. Didn’t have to conveniently forget I was a Black dude in those meetings. Saved my life.

Still, you’re lonely, know what I mean?

It’s just hard being with people sometimes. I mean romantically. Found out somewhere in the mix after college that I had bipolar, and I remember what it felt like to hear that. I’d been so hyper and productive as a kid, even in college. I could get all the work done and then some. Could party as hard as anyone. And then some. But I just figured I was makin’ up for the time I lost not bein’ able to get out of bed. Kinda explained why I loved the drink, but it wasn’t the kinda explanation that’s one-and-done, you understand what I’m saying? The bipolar and the drinking, they danced together. I could drink while I was hypomanic and be the life of the party. Or I could drink to pick me up from the depression, but sometimes it would just bring me lower. You know how sometimes you’ll be in a depressive episode and it feels like you’re locked in a room with no ventilation? No windows, no doors. And there’s no conceivable way of getting out. And someone on the outside, someone bigger than the whole room, keeps raising the temperature. Up and up and up and up and up. Till you’re suffocating, and you’ll do anything to get out. Even something stupid.

IF survival instinct was such a goddamned primitive function in beasts, then why are flies so intent on getting themselves killed? In my prison cell, the mindless things seem to have been created for no other purpose than to remind me of just how far my chains allow me to stretch. I’d reach to swat at some buzzing beside my head only to have my shackles yank my delinquent wrist back to its proper place. Maybe they aren’t earthly creatures but rather totems of torment. Creatures governed by powers and principalities beyond my seeing, powered by the same wills that shook autumn leaves from trees and cracked the sky open with thunder and set families at war with each other when the red dust came.

The fly I thought I’d killed—I’d felt its plump body crash against my fingers—alights on my thigh and, in the dying sunlight that comes through my window, is showered with motes of dust like snowflakes in miniature, a small devil of everyday life basking in celestial luminescence.

Sometimes in the cell, I will hear a voice, not speaking anything intelligible or anything I recognize as speech, but a voice nonetheless, humming, familiar and alien all at once, and I’ll sit up from where I’ve been napping and I’ll look vainly for who had spoken, only to realize that the humming has turned into the buzz of a nearby fly and the air isn’t so much populated with spirits as it is with insects.

They sound like Samuel sometimes, and in those moments when I’d get up from my nap and think he was near, my frustration links with a new sorrow in my chest and I feel like I’ve been falling forever, even though I’m sitting down on a cold hard slab of rock. I’ll hear his voice, unmistakable, despite him humming a tune he had no way of knowing and the fly that will settle on my shoulder or the top of my ear or somewhere in my hair would be spared another swat, for I’ll, in that moment, become convinced that it holds the reconstituted essence of my brother who, before I head off to go lose a war, gets himself cut in half by a Special he’d thought was his friend. He was simple like that.

The same feelings catch me when the dying light would bleed on the wall in front of me a silhouette I recognize of a more shapely Virginia or sometimes Dora’s face in profile, the stone and light mixing to make something that rests somewhere between the physical and immaterial, a thing I’m convinced I can touch but that will fill me with fear and wonder upon that touching. An angel, even in the shape of a fly, is an artifact of glory and who am I, a degenerate horse thief and Marauder, to kill such a thing?

Stars are on their way. I can tell from the lessening of light through the window. And the flies’ buzzing grows even louder now that there are fewer animals about, my prison guard retiring for the evening. Maybe this is Dora’s last attempt at reforming me or maybe it’s Sam finally saying that, as they were cutting the ears off of every white they could find, maybe those Blacks tearing hell through our country weren’t so bad.

Maybe I’m just desperate.

Hoping, in my desperation, that I’m a bigger man than this. That if one squints and takes my life in its brief entirety, one might see a pun, a thing vaguely resembling the universe, my own dereliction mapped to cosmic movements.

The fly hops up off my thigh and disappears into the night that has invaded my jail cell.

A dog barks outside and I twist on my seat to watch the figure of one of my jailers duck-walk under the nighttree with a metal saucer in hand. He kneels to where the dog, back arched, tongue lolling, stands and barks, and he takes the bits of meat from the saucer and holds them out to the dog, who licks and chews and is quieted. There’s flatness for miles. In the near-silence, absent the buzzing of flies, I can hear the man whispering nonsense to the beast he has just fed. Loving, considerate nonsense.

I sit back down, waiting for the flies to return. Or at least the one that sounds like Sam.