On the 29th of April, in 20—, Bishop died. The precise hour of his passing is not known, but by the time the riot had ended, he was gone, hunched over in Saint Michael Church with a young man asleep on the floor next to him. On the morning of May 2nd, a small, makeshift caravan ferried Bishop to a nearby graveyard, traversing roads made winter by smashed plate glass.
Beneath a sky whose red and whose blue swathes wrapped around each other like rival gang bandannas, the caravan moved through tranquil post-apocalypse. The brutality, enacted with drone strikes and augmented police officers and makeshift radiation rockets, was Old Testament in its indiscriminateness. Looking around, one expects to see the corpses of frogs littering the sidewalks, flanking a stream of blood. One looks at doorposts for any markings shielding that household from the Angel of Death. It is, more than anything else, the realization of a vision. Whose vision, it is perhaps impossible to tell, but the tragedy of this is its inevitability. All throughout the New Testament, the Book of Revelation sits and waits. The Dome above shimmers, the colors of the sky fighting against themselves, and if this isn’t apocalypse, it’ll do until the real one gets here.
I had only spoken to Bishop directly on two occasions, each instance in the basement of the duplex he squatted. On the dresser and the mantel were bricks, mementos from worksites, propping up flower vases or acting as paperweights. One brick, he collected the day he met a stacker named Ace and Ace’s family; he had written the dateon that one. Another, he had picked up to find $100 beneath, all of which had made its way into the collection plate at the Town Green Methodist Church in which he served as deacon. Some of them bear a name and a date, and in our first interview, Bishop had confessed that it was to mark new arrivals. He had been a part of the first generation of Exodusters, making their way from points west and south to the East Coast, where rumor had it things weren’t so bad, the air was halfway breathable and there were no toasters to be seen. “Anywhere without Marauders and police was Eden,” he had said that afternoon. He points to the brick that marks Jayceon’s arrival, the one bearing Wyatt’s visa stamp and Timeica’s, gestures indiscriminately as there is no organizing recent arrivals and old-timers. Mercedes has no brick because she had staked a claim for herself here while Bishop was winding his way through the middle of the country. She’d had a husband he would like to have met. Despite their lack of arrangement, there is an order to them. Spend enough time in the brick fields and you realize that this is what he is replicating here in his home. And occasionally, he moves around to palm one, fondle another, even now after all these years mesmerized by the texture and design, the poetics of the thing in his hand.
Those who didn’t know better considered Bishop a New Haven institution. He looked the part and certainly acted it, his death the final coda ramming home the point that the younger generation never gets around to rapping with the older generation in time. No one knew how old he was. Had he remained in Timmonsville, South Carolina, where he is purported to have been born, the information could have been easy enough to find and maintain, a digital footprint impossible to erase, but the red dust and the massive migrations it preceded were in the business of erasing such footprints, so that there was nothing but desert afterward. Red-bloods like Bishop arrive in a place like New Haven with only what they’ve stored in their unaugmented heads. But he was old enough to have witnessed the building of the first Colony.
A quirk and feature and sadness of the Exodust is the penchant that the first and second generations have for referring to where theycame from as the Old Country. For one the Old Country is Laramie. Another, when asked, spits out Galveston like an epithet. For another, Indianapolis is the land they left. Sometimes, Newark is the city they are trying to forget.
He was a young man just as the pandemic was loosening its grip on the country. The internet was ubiquitous, but what he talks about, when he brings himself back to that time of relative optimism, is the sound of it all. He does it now. Sometimes, when no one else is home, the TV will be left on while he vacuums or washes dishes or sweeps staircases. Sometimes, leaving perhaps to run an errand in the evening or to attend a meeting, the lights will be left on and they will buzz and hum. The white noise of the Internet was the equivalent for children born a decade into this past century. It is the drone and bang of a washing machine at work, when everyone else is gone. Now, without that constant connection, cut off by the Dome, then by the radiation, he has only a thing like a TV to fill a room. The Medusa stare changes forms, but the youthful eye drawn to it is ever overstimulated and jaundiced.
The Internet, despite its vastness and its penchant for self-replication and its bots, the Internet in all its capriciousness and obscenity and power, the very muscularity of the thing, is simply us. And the way Bishop tells it, it has transmogrified our personal experience of silence so that his generation now found their hellos and their goodbyes and their please stay with me’s and their chuckles and their sobs in a series of keystrokes. The emoticon and the animated gif. Noiseless. The music of human communication had become percussion. Complex percussion, laden with implication and innuendo and nuance, but percussion nonetheless. A naked rhythm, rather than a cadence or tempo wearing the sundress of consonance. There is no longer a whine and a series of scratches signaling entry and exit from that world. The gate has been so oiled as to open and close smoothly, so smoothly that one thinks it has remained open all this time.
The TV, the humming of the lights left on, the washing machine. It was all a curative. As was the Internet’s percussion. It was all a curative for the amorphous, unnamable malaise that I realize hadgripped me when I found myself in an air-conditioned bus roaming the urban desert, without the calm and safety of a lie. It is prayer. The gift afforded to those who never cyberized. Who had refused or perhaps had missed the opportunity to have the Internet injected into them. Who bled red instead of black.
Bishop was, by nearly all estimates, handsome. He was young once, too. You often arrive at your destination without any baggage, any totems of your past, digital or analog, but there is always the occasional photo or the corroborated recollection. And sometimes, there is reputation. On occasion, you would hear, at or around a site, whisper of someone who struck you as unbearably kind and trusting to a fault and you would see them suddenly as a chilling wraith hunched over their skid, each motion of their swing the turning gears of an exceptionally cruel machine. You would chastise yourself for rushing to judgment, then you would see the thing acted out, the suspicion confirmed, the mystery of a person partially solved. He grew up knowing to equate Black and beautiful, but to have never seen him around white crowds or in contact with non-Blacks is finally to notice the cracks spiderwebbing that fresco. The Exodusters are nearly uniform in their tales of humiliation and suffering, brought about because the radiation poisoning that moved in clouds over the country was attached, by scientific reconnaissance, by prejudice, to their Blackness. He was always kind to the stackers, was always kind whenever I saw him, grandfatherly, but he had suffered ruin in multitudes and when he looked up from his skid he saw a field full of children and grandchildren, Black and menaced like him.
I will never know him beyond what I saw, see, heard, hear, am told, am shown. It is impertinent for me to assume these things and perhaps there is no small amount of racism in it, but perhaps this is the price to be paid for attempting to understand a man like Bishop, what brought him and others like him here and whether or not the streets on which this caravan travels played victim to the same bomb that had exploded the old man’s heart.
With Bishop’s death, the first generation of New Haven residents has had sustained contact with returnees from the Colonies. Rolesare slipped into seamlessly enough, but the bitter warnings Bishop may have whispered in secret found ears upon which to fall. Bishop had seen this happen before. Though he was, on this point, frustratingly vague, his travels took him throughout the Midwest, then back to the South before he made his way up the Eastern Seaboard. Over a decade spent crisscrossing the country as municipalities declared bankruptcy, people began living in space, cerulean domes appeared over cities that could afford protection from the poison, and much of the country devolved, became the image captured in the nineteenth-century daguerreotype. Linc and Kendrick are at the front of the caravan, stone-faced, and you look at them and realize that what’s in their mind, what was in Bishop’s mind, is not in yours. What killed Bishop will likely kill them. What killed Bishop will likely not kill you.
It is little surprise that Bishop was a long time ill before he was finally taken. By his count, he had suffered two heart attacks, and the story has it that it was his second stroke that finally killed him. On the worksite or elsewhere, his trademark loquaciousness was punctuated by prolonged silence, the mark of a man in close communion with the Divine. Another act of ethnography has me positing that those moments that saw him in that posture, angled toward the transmundane, were moments that saw him caged in his horrors. To spend all of one’s life searching for a place to breathe and not be punished for it, and just as they go and fix the air, it’s too late.
On the first Sunday of March, 20—, the United States Restoration Congress convened in New Haven, and for a week, on the tail end of that winter, more than twenty thousand streamed into the city from ports around the world. Each Colony sent their own delegation. An already-patchworked Dome was put into overdrive, augments hired in droves to speed up repairs to the air-filtration systems. Just as it became safe to walk around without an air mask, tents were erected, and delegates, visitors, those who took any reason whatsoever to come on the heels of this gathering, filed out into the city, attending classes, hosting panel discussions, scorching a debauched trailthrough parts of downtown while some of the local activists looked on, many of them having just reemerged from hibernation to continue working on their homes. The ironies running rampant throughout the episode were lost on many of the returnees, themselves only a few years removed from life on the Colony.
Professional protest coordinators had come from Seattle with the purpose of expanding the Green Wave, a tide meant to lift all boats, but that, to enlist their tortured metaphor, had only dashed already-leaky fishing skiffs into the hulls of corpulent, inebriate yachts. Eco-equity was the charge where eco-apartheid was the reality, with Fairfield awash in solar this and bio that and just two stops over on Metro-North gives you asthma, pollution, and a roof-shattering cancer rate. Their speaker, who carried so many of their contradictions, was an Asian American woman in a blazer, black T-shirt, and jeans, her bees an ever-present cloud haloing the black bob that bounced on her shoulders. Train prisoners to build a solar-powered, energy-efficient community: that was reentry. Construction of clean commerce: the green-collar worker. Green jobs, not jails.
New Haven was known as a market for bootleg augments, often refurbished or remodeled in backyard shacks or Body Shops. A protest march was scheduled to head down College Street through downtown, then fan out to locations indicated in the maps that came up on the leaders’ displays. Red dots on blue mapping marked the locations of suspected Body Shops. Not only was the process of mechanization ruinous to the environment, but the mechanizing of labor took jobs away from those indigents who needed them most. It was understood that this meant ex-cons or high school dropouts, invariably Black or brown.
One branch of marchers found the Body Shop of a Puerto Rican man named Michael, who doubled as a Wrecker for the municipality. They had only found the Body Shop by accident. Residual radiation had worn at their flimsy equipment such that their maps had fallen apart. Michael’s sign out front listed the price rates he charged for repairs.
A smaller event held within the auspices of the congress was aPublic Education Forum. There was less talk of revitalizing a system on life support and more talk of building said system from scratch. Though the panelists almost all sported beards, not one of them looked over thirty-five, though one would be forgiven for forgetting that they were all augments. The forum had been put together to build a future that left behind the destructive forces of privatization, school closings, and high-stakes testing. An audience member, who later identified himself as David (himself a Colonist having arrived the previous December), raised a hand and asked the panel for a definition of “grassroots.” In parentheses was the observation that the community about which the panelists were speaking was 87 percent people of color from the last census. Yet onstage were thirty-two flavors, all of them vanilla.
“I didn’t know it was a racial thing,” replied a panelist, a mixed-race community organizer named Eamonn.
Before the first wave of returnees, the average response time of police to gunshots or a call was an hour. By spring of the following year, the police became ubiquitous. On corners, outside the entryways to apartment complexes, sauntering up and down sidewalks, battling boredom in unmarked cars. Few to whom I spoke seemed to know where they came from or what they were here for, except that, very soon after, the air was fixed. Celebration attended the event, but in many other parts of the city lay, flooding through the streets, a directionless malaise, a coin with helplessness on one side, waiting to be flipped over to reveal relief.
There was no hospital stay for Bishop.
He recalled one of those legendary figures of Black mythology, hardened by slave labor, then, having gained the wiles to survive Redemption, agile enough in body and mind to make it through Jim Crow in one piece. An easy, too-pat image is that of John Henry, the steel-driving mammoth, who raced a steam-powered hammer and won, only to have the effort itself collapse his heart. A symbol of physical strength, emotional fortitude, but also of exploited labor. Achild of the Internet made to fight for his dignity against the degradations of the machine age. By the time his strokes had caught up to him, augments had taken over the brickfields.
More people than expected filled the chapel where his funeral service was held. Despite impediments to cross-country communication, word got out that Bishop had died. Many had come because the stirring that precedes a riot had drawn them, just as it had drawn them to Detroit and Chicago and Philadelphia and Memphis and Cleveland earlier. One could only guess at the relationships all these people had with Bishop, whose life crossed so many paths, who was defined, like so many of his generation, by the very act of wandering. There was no physical demarcation to mark the spiritual progression of the journey. No South from which to flee. The entire country had been cursed, and there was only the running of the rat in the maze. Few of the mourners looked as old as Bishop was when he passed, but for many of them, his terminus would be theirs. He had found peace, then it had left him. But despite the presence of many, including, one supposes, some acquaintance or two from a past Bishop had tried with vigor to erase, grief did not spasm through the crowd or latch on to one mourner in particular, seize that person with anguish, specific or generalized. This becomes all the more remarkable given that many of the mourners have tracked soot into the church and blood and bits of broken glass stuck to their boots. Some of them bear recently dressed wounds. Others enter only with the help of a friend or some family. But these pews inflict numbness. In here, the destruction of out-there is remote; guilt can’t follow them past those doors. The mood was dark and thoughtful.
You search your mind, in your recollection of those interviews, for vocal tics, aural indications of regret. You search for any cue, which you can take for him trying to hide himself or reacting to him trying to hide himself. Because you want to take that bit of evidence and measure it with the recognition or lack of recognition you see in those faces that look up toward Bishop’s face in that casket. Did they know the man the way he’s being eulogized now? Or is this simply what each of them hopes will happen to them when it’s their turn? Whenthe course of one’s life, with all of its lapses and angers and transgressions and animosities, has been ironed into a narrative, has been rendered coherent and clear, has been turned into the Hero’s Journey, what is there to see in that story except the reflection of one’s self? At the bottom of Bishop’s story is that he suffered and now he is dead, and you realize that this is going to happen to you too.
He’s infected you with his God-talk, and you find yourself subscribing to it because it fills in gaps. It’s helpful that way. Like when you’re trying to figure out why it matters so much to you to get Bishop’s story, this story, down right, like he’s your editor, and you get to that realization that both you and he suffer and that you, like him, will one day be dead. And the incompleteness of that hurts, because you want the explanation of this connection to be more than that. So your mouth forms around the word “God,” and it flows like sand into the spaces between the stones. When precious things were abandoned, God heard the heart’s wailing. God heard the quiet sobbing by the campfire. When one of His children, Black and menaced, was faced with the prospect of raising sons who would also be Black and menaced, and enacted on them violence so that they could avoid it elsewhere, it was upon God’s ears that the anguish boomeranged when the tuning fork of the heart sent it flying.
The Lord tasted the heart’s poison, knew its general ingredients to recognize it in others, but could also tell, connoisseur that He is, the uniqueness of each person’s envenomed character.
And just as the Lord testified to Bishop’s travails and his triumphs, so does He to yours.
When Bishop is given to humming “Blessed Assurance” and closes his eyes, you don’t need to try to follow him to wherever he’s going. You know, even in your attempt to write about the impossibility of following him there, that you are trying. You can guess, certainly. You can guess that maybe he is remembering pleasant conversations or painful ones or maybe silence. But perhaps it is most respectful just to watch. To listen.
Just as I reach that thought, deacons begin leading the mourners up the aisle to gaze one last time upon the face of the deceased.
I am trying to assume him back to life. The deeper I try to reach into his mind, the deeper I reach, I realize, into my own perception of him. Thinking there’s truth somewhere at the bottom of that, some potent, earth-shattering truth about him and about race and about writing about both, I meet only this: he is an old man dead.
The food cans, rolls of toilet paper, beer cartons, all hanging out of broken windows, the bedding and the clothes strewn throughout the streets, the dirty gang rags, the charred crescent moons of tires, the bloodstained barriers, the rubble that used to be barriers, all of it had arranged itself out so as to spell, when seen from above, the wordcomplicity.
An image has appeared on newsfeeds, pinging back and forth between the Colonies and cities around the world: a row of stackers, their hammers arrayed before them, while they kneel with their hands behind their heads before a row of riot police, helmets poking above plastic shields, a regiment of Spartans. Bent stalks of smoke flank them. Another has an otherwise tall and muscled stacker with his hammer back, whole body poised to swing, against an Aries mech that stands a foot taller than him. The caption reads: DAVID VERSUSGOLIATH.
The two returnees whose phone call led to the police-involved shooting of the kid I got to know as Bugs claimed that between six and eight Blacks had accosted them. That there was one leader, and that he had threatened them quite explicitly. In the belly of a surveillance drone somewhere is that moment, frozen, perhaps itself deserving of the caption: David versus Goliath.
You leave the city limits and you remember that, before people came here, it was all irradiated jungle. The caravan has passed through the Dome on the way to the potter’s field where Bishop is to be buried. They can’t stay here anymore, so they will scatter. 1 Samuel, chapter 17, verse 51, comes to mind: “Therefore David ran, and stood upon the Philistine, and took his sword, and drew it out of the sheath thereof, and slew him, and cut off his head therewith. And when the Philistines saw their champion was dead, they fled.”
[May 18th, 20—, 3:57 a.m.]
I’d never get the chance to ask him what he meant about Sodom and Gomorrah, whether or not he was talkin’ about us. I came back to New Haven looking for him, heard he was here. Maybe you seen him around. I heard he was calling himself Bishop. Or others were callin’ him that. But they musta moved on. I thought … I thought maybe if he’d found a place to settle, you know, to call home, maybe I could call it that too, you know?
I think he’s still around here somewhere. People clear out, move on, it’s a big country. But I’ma find him. He’s been through a lot, Bishop. And no one lasts forever. But I gotta tell him thank you. That night at Gladden. Don’t know how he did it, but he made me feel it, you know? Like I was safe. World was gettin’ ready to end, and he made me feel safe. And I gotta tell him thank you for that. I think I’ll do it after work tomorrow. Show him my new horse too. I think he’d dig that. Yeah, after I finish stacking, I’m gonna keep askin’ after him. I’ma get to the worksite, I’m gonna find him, and I’m gonna tell him thank you. Tomorrow.
PART IV
SPRING
