The Fugitivities, стр. 3
The gears of metropolitan bureaucracy did their thing, and Isaac and Jonah were duly anointed with stamped (or photocopied) city certificates asserting their aptitude for pedagogical instruction in the public schools. A week later they were signing a lease. The rent was steep but between their two salaries they could afford a place within walking distance of Prospect Park. They would live together, but they would be working far apart; an obscure lottery system determined which schools they would actually serve in. When the numbers came up, Isaac was directed to a school in Brownsville—Never Ran, Never Will—and Jonah to a school in Red Hook, a neighborhood he associated mainly with On the Waterfront.
It wasn’t until they were living together, going through some of the same experiences, that Jonah really got to know his new roommate. Isaac’s folks had fled the chaos and violence in Detroit for the suburbs of Richmond where he grew up a little more isolated but a whole lot safer. It was the trade-off people had to make—the lucky ones, those who already had something going, a minister in the family, a funeral-home director, a mother who had broken into one of the public school systems. They took advantage of the affirmative-action door jimmied open ever so briefly after the riots, raised Reading Rainbow kids, and never looked back. That was basically, Isaac told him, how he’d ended up everywhere, in that sweet spot where admissions officers were always hunting for precisely his demographic, the ones who had been afforded all the benefits of a better zip code, but who would also color in the brochure and the website appropriately.
Jonah wondered, as he always did, how his own ambiguous but affluent upbringing would go over. A black dude from Paris? But his new friend was unimpressed, if interested. “That’s cool. A brotha from Paree. They got barbecue over there?” Isaac had a line for everything, but nonetheless this underwhelmed curiosity pretty much summed up the attitude he held generally. Isaac had been all over the US, on school trips, to visit friends and family. But he had never left the country. He wasn’t opposed to the idea; he simply never had the means, certainly not to go somewhere on his own. One time, his junior year of college, he had been on the verge of visiting a girlfriend in Jamaica, but they had broken up a few weeks before he was set to go. Now Jamaica was out of the question. Next chance he got, though, he was hoping to use his first paid vacation days as a teacher to go somewhere else in the Caribbean, maybe Trinidad or Barbados. “Frenchman, you gotta teach me to use them words the way you do,” Isaac would say, screwing up his face. “L’amour, les misérables, les incompétents. Love them French horns, too. I knew a football player in high school named Terrence who played the French horn. He wanted to go to Virginia State and play for the Trojans, but he got injured in a practice senior year. He ended up dropping out and going into the military. Haven’t heard nothing since.”
In spite of the disparate slots and different ladder rungs Isaac and Jonah had alighted on, everything they learned about each other confirmed how significantly their trajectories converged once they graduated with their degrees. Jonah had attended an elite private college in New England, and Isaac a public university in North Carolina. Yet they both knew former classmates who had started more lucrative careers in consulting or banking or found prestigious internships with distinguished institutions and nonprofits, while they were both now engaged in something like charitable work, in “giving back,” as people said.
On balmy evenings, they’d sit with beers in the front room and share stories about hallway incidents. When Jonah was buying, he walked over to Flatbush to purchase one of the new floral microbrews; when Isaac was buying, it was always Miller Time. It was a mellow ritual. They listened to Isaac’s favorite records, originally his mother’s. There had been some tension around his acquiring them. Isaac had started a small collection of his own during his senior year of high school. When he came home from college over spring break of his freshman year, he wouldn’t leave his room for days. He threatened not to go back and eventually showed his mother a note from the school therapist. They talked about it, and she made a deal with him. If he would go back to school and get his education, he could take some of her own records with him. It was, he said, just one of many ways in which she’d probably saved his life.
The poor righteous teachers sat back in their bougie furniture and talked about “the situation” as they half listened to the plush tones of the Emotions or seventies-era Bobby Womack. There was always music in the air. On Sundays, Jonah awoke to the Clark Sisters ringing all down the hallway and into his room. The scratchy records somehow thickened things, popping softly in the air while they bantered until Isaac, without interrupting his train of thought, switched them out.
“The situation” was everything and nothing in particular. Even though the friends almost never agreed on why, or what, it meant, or what was to be done about it, they agreed and mutually reinforced each other’s opinion that something had gone fundamentally wrong. It was in everything. Language and manners, gestures and traditions, entire understandings could be hollowed out overnight. Things had gotten weird, glitchy, like the looping video of the second plane. Twisted creeps were coming out of the woodwork all across America. Berserkers armed with gleaming