The Fugitivities, стр. 2

commotion surrounding a double-parked Grand Cherokee directly across from his building. The vehicle was loaded down with equipment for living: a cream leather sitting chair crammed in at an angle, trash bags full of clothes, a plastic crate stuffed with video-game accessories, assorted lotions and hair products. Foodstuffs, cooking appliances, a bottle of Crisco, remained stranded on the sidewalk awaiting transport. A man carrying a stereo unit emerged from the brownstone across the street and hollered. At the boom of his voice, a somber boy in a durag, one earbud pendant, looked up. At the man’s side stood a little girl with beaded braids, wearing a backpack; she saw Jonah and ducked behind her father’s knee. “You heard him, go help your father,” shouted a woman from the front passenger side, where she must have been trying to find more room. Her gaze passed over Jonah, assessing and dismissing in one sweep, before turning to the stoop as she called out the girl’s name in a high sweet voice.

It took Jonah a moment to understand what he was seeing even though it was the simplest thing in the world. The expression on the face of the man carrying the stereo was concentrated and severe. He arranged the equipment in the back seat, then turned to go back in for whatever remained. The boy still stood curbside, staring blankly at nothing in particular. They would have been neighbors, but as it stood, Jonah was only a straggling stranger who happened to be moving in while they were moving out. There was no trace of sadness in the boy’s face, no trace of fondness or regret for the street he was leaving, only an intimation that fairness was something he had never known and never would.

The scene stuck in Jonah’s mind as he struggled with the chair up two flights of stairs to the apartment. Isaac was in the living room unpacking his records. Jonah shoved crumpled newspapers and packing materials out of the way and set the chair in the corner facing the window with the fire escape, then dropped his exhausted body into it. Focused completely on his own task, his roommate barely registered Jonah’s entrance. The brother had more records than a DJ. Isaac wasn’t actually that involved in the music scene; mostly he just listened to a small handful of albums on rotation. When they had first moved in, Jonah would find him there at all hours, sitting on the bare floor in the unfurnished room with his back up against the wall, one leg outstretched, locked in deep concentration, now and then murmuring a word or two, nodding his head in solemn agreement with the sound.

“Folks next door are moving out,” Jonah said as he watched his friend digging through the crates, meticulously arranging his collection, unfazed by the room’s stifling heat. Everything had to be strictly alphabetical—his Main Source record, with its splash of atoms, he held aloft momentarily like a rare talisman, before sliding it in next to Madlib and Mahalia. That was Isaac, cool as a fan.

“Oh yeah…it’s gonna flip.”

“I feel like I should say or do something, you know…and then I’m standing there looking a fool with this vintage armchair in the middle of the street…like I’m a harbinger of doom or some shit.”

“Yeah, I don’t know, man. It’s like the migration all in reverse. Same old story though, chief. Black folk moving out, white folk moving in…you know the deal. They stay on top like an apostrophe.”

The conversation moved on to a recent television show, dropping the issue without acknowledging they were doing so, though both were eager to change the subject for reasons they didn’t yet feel they could share. There would, in any case, be no conclusions to that conversation, and the concrete reality they shared was the next day’s dawn commute to another training session in Canarsie.

Jonah had met Isaac one month earlier at the orientation assembly for a teacher-training program at the Canarsie High School auditorium. They were around the same age and had followed the call to fill the ranks of the city’s teaching corps, decimated by decades of decay and demoralization that had driven the most qualified teachers out to better, wealthier, and whiter districts, where the parents were on the right side of the law.

He found himself among a hundred or so would-be teachers crammed into the school’s gymnasium. There was no ventilation and like the rest of the educator corps, Jonah sweated into his interview attire as he tried to make sense out of the raucous commotion, the bleating cell phones, the shouted orders and pleas for attention. A team of young folk in matching polos circulated frenetically through the rows of folding seats thrusting documents into people’s hands. A beleaguered administrator shouted into a microphone until the hive cooled to a bearable hum. A series of officials took to the mic to enumerate rules and policies. They made frequent use of the words “rigorous” and “compliance.” The intimidating legalism culminated with a deadline to report to the Department of Education on Court Street for fingerprinting.

Something about the way the brother seated next to him kept his quiet made Jonah think he must be there to teach math. After a quick glance and a hesitant pause, Jonah turned to him and they settled on an awkward dap. Jonah commented on the heat and the hectic crowd. If the teachers were this bad, Isaac said softly, he hoped the students would be saints.

When the teacher orientation broke for lunch, they went out together in search of a bite. Jonah was thinking sandwiches, but Isaac seemed to ignore that proposition and they ended up gravitating to a Crown Fried Chicken. After waiting in line and getting their orange trays with menu items #1 and #2, they secured a table of their own with a view looking out onto a set of mid-rise housing projects arranged like Tetris blocks along a stretch of Ralph Avenue. Over wings,