LITMIR.BIZ

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my neck dragging paint cans up here last night. We’ve got to complain to the landlords . . . For some reason, the hallway was always well lit for me.

      Autumn, I saw snakes crawl from the garden up to the roof. Manhattan had snakes?

      I’ve never lived anywhere in New York that had no pigeons on the sills—ever. Now, she had a point there.

      As Mama became more fragile last year, Asha donated Reiki. She said it was a solution to the story our bloodshot eyes told. Asha proved purple curtains, nag champa incense, and Santeria-emblemed candlelight could lure enough business to pay Manhattan rent. What was I doing with a CV and master’s degree aspirations? Asha showed all it took was potions, herb pots on sills and in hedged patches of a cement garden, a shelf of books in odd languages, a tincture cabinet, mats on the floor, tarot cards, and a cash box. She even had a crystal ball squished between a lava lamp, spider plant, and bong.

      Asha hung a few small watercolors and what looked like facial composites on her walls because they were her “ancestors.” She explained them as “they’re my spirit guides.” When Asha mentioned them, Mama became quite lively to show she had artistic tendencies, too. In contrast, her framed Chinese calligraphy and posters of new age quotes came from Marshalls and Target. The bathroom was in the back of her place, across a wall kitchen with a checkered tile floor, rare and dizzying and hypnotic.

      “Lemongrass and licorice tea?” Asha asked.

      “Yeah, sure. Thanks.”

      This was our ritual. I pressed to Asha’s door rather than sit in my apartment alone waiting for a meeting or for Chase to show up at night, or thinking about Summer all day. Our building’s owner was a woman named Fran. She and her husband, Gregory, appeared to be well into their sixties, with working tattoos and retired piercings. Nobody could pinpoint their professions beyond collecting rent from us and timeshare tenants in the Poconos. Including them with Chase and Asha, my urban tribe was whittled down to four people. I did not count those I had to commute for.

      Asha walked to the kitchen and her black porcelain kettle. I lay on her futon and scratched my neck against a hemp throw. Boys cursed and laughed on the sidewalk outside her window. I wondered if any of them knew Jaylyn Stewart. I felt compelled to ask Asha if she was following the news, and if she had any prophecies on this enemy nearby. But the teakettle started screaming.

      So I imagined snatching open the curtains to curse the boys out, to ask if they knew how their women neighbors felt to be washed down with bitch and pussy and hoe on such a lovely day. I had a Foxy Brown inside. She carried a rifle and cursed like a drill instructor with a fresh crop at boot camp. She never smiled. She punched the teeth out of any man who told her to “Smile, sexy.” She left a dark cave in their filthy, boring, typical mouths. I bought a toy pistol in the dollar store. I would try it one day. I fantasized pulling it on all the men who hit on us without our permission. I bought Asha one, too. We had plenty of targets.

      Past the window stood beautiful boys with ancient faces, the kinds I may have married without mitigating circumstances I could write a dissertation on. Instead of walking down the aisle with one, I cringed to walk past one on the street. I spotted a common familiar face, dented from acne, with yellow teeth marijuana smoke left. As usual, the boy stared at me but also looked past me. In my stare, I questioned him: Was it you? Do you know? Where were you on a dark and cold night three months ago when all I knew changed? Had one of these been obsessed with my sister—stalked her, hunted her, taken her away?

      “I hate that shit too,” Asha called out.

      “Wha—?” I asked.

      “Brothers can be so insensitive,” she answered. “I should go throw cold water on ’em. That’ll clean ’em up. The kids nowadays ain’t got no home training. Or wait. Girl, those ain’t kids. Those are grown Negroes. Jesus to the Lord have mercy . . .”

      What I thought were my silent conversations were out in the open more and more these days.

      In came Asha with a tray of two teacups slick with mist and a mason jar of molasses.

      “You need the iron, my dear,” she told me.

      She squeezed in more molasses than I would have permitted had she asked. We sat at edge of her futon and sipped in silence.

      Asha was a personality I could share quiet with. Silence was no awkward pause. She said all she wanted to say when she felt like it. She never diced off a syllable. She seemed to have no back of her mind, only a front. I could trust her. She rarely brought up Summer anymore, and this was a welcome courtesy. At first she was more hysterical and disoriented than Chase and I were. She lived with Summer longer than I did, after all. Soon, probably because none of that got us anywhere, Asha resumed her wizened recommendations and pillared disposition.

      “History is stubborn,” was her last theory on my sister’s vanishing. Then she probably sank into a bad memory where both a room and a sentence could include melting ice cream sandwiches, a silent TV on caption, and a nice old lady’s body on the floor. Even if she could hunt down the poltergeist that jinxed all of us here, we couldn’t afford to move.

      Now, she gulped a molasses spoonful and said, “I remember when the boys were nice. Harmless. They just used to pull braids your mama chunked up in three parts, maybe four. You know: one at the top and in the back, and two on the sides?”

      “I sure do,” I told her. “My sister wouldn’t go for it, though. We always had our hair twisted round with ribbons to match our outfits. She was fancy like that.”

      “I wish I’d had a sister,” Asha said. “May have changed things. I didn’t grow up with a teammate to take a tomahawk to the boys, right in the middle of their pants, under the zipper. I was all by myself. Two brothers running me ’round Stankonia.”

      “Where?”

      “Georgia. You know, where I’m from.”

      “You told me you were from Atlanta.”

      “Honey, that’s cause don’t nobody know where Lithonia, Georgia, is. What I look like running around Harlem saying ‘I’m from Lithonia’? You hear what we gotta contend with outside this window. Georgia’s bad enough.”

      “You make me feel like a hillbilly,” I told her. “So should I stop telling people I’m from Hedgewood, Illinois?”

      “You do what you want to do. I’m only telling you what works for me.”

      What worked for Asha was heavy cotton head wraps, tarnished ankh rings, painted moons and stars on her nails, clamoring bangles, bracelets stacked to her elbows, and Roy G. Biv eye shadow. She had a past she dropped almost unheard, like a morphine drip, as she treated her customers, answered to our problems, calmed our nerves, and gave us touch to tune our spirits. That past included a father who ran dogfights (he made her bandage the wounds after), a Morehouse boyfriend who slapped her onto the UGA dropout track, a girl crew who pushed weed and was too busy to bail her out before the weekend, a fire she started herself to collect renter’s insurance, a bumpy Greyhound ride to Penn Station to try working in fashion rather than stand out so much where she was. The closest she got was folding jeans at Old Navy for a while.

      Any time I left her place with complimentary treatment and readings (as her prop and practice), I did feel better. Something squeezing at my temples stopped for a while. My eyesight sharpened. I tipped her for this: a train pass in the days after we paid rent, free time on my hi-speed Wi-Fi, my plunger, Drano. I once gave her a Donna Karan winter coat on my way to drop it at a consignment in Chelsea. January off the Hudson had proven her quilted parkas and handmade saris wrong.

      It was Asha who first showed me the roof. We went out with coats but no shoes, to smoke some good weed Asha traded for administering a sitz bath. I was never much into intoxicants, yet I was culture-shocked when I first came to join Summer, and grateful for assistance in relaxing. My high came down as all that smart hip-hop Bad Boy and Def Jam once made barreled out of the radio Asha brought up with us. Our four-story brownstone kept us lower in the sky than the upscale Manhattan high-rises

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