The Fugitivities, стр. 75
“I’m sorry if I’ve frightened you,” she said after a moment.
“No, not at all.”
“I thought, I don’t know, there’s something about you. I think you remind me of a friend I once knew, a dear friend from long ago. I hope you won’t mind me saying this. But I almost never see black people here, you know.”
“I can imagine.”
“Please, I know it’s sudden, but would you come to see me before you leave?”
“I will if you want me to.”
“I do. Come see me tomorrow. I will introduce you to Salvador. I think he may like to meet you.”
She asked Miguel for a menu and, to the maître d’s obvious displeasure, wrote down her address on the back with a rough little map to show him.
“I will see you tomorrow, won’t I?”
“Yes, I’ll be around,” Jonah said.
Satisfied, she left. Jonah immediately ordered another drink. But the bitter sea air in its bite was not enough. The winds had crossed him with Nathaniel’s Laura. There could be no doubt. Indeed, he didn’t dare doubt it, because it was already as if he had spoken too loudly and been overheard. And now the infinity of the world was answering his rudderless drift by crashing him into the rocks.
20
Jonah spent the next morning anxiously going over the whole thing in his mind. On the one hand, he thought of heading immediately to the internet café to send a message to Nate. On the other, he thought about what the meeting Laura had demanded might promise—what was unspoken but powerfully felt in the way she had looked at him. The thought of her desiring him was troubling in the best and the worst way. Telling Nate would have the effect of collapsing the possible future course of his actions. Postponing that revelation would allow him to make discoveries, to inquire more about Salvador, for instance, which might be important in any report he sent back. But he was sufficiently torn that he made his way to Ciudad Vieja to check his email anyway and at least consider sending a note.
He looked first to see if there was any news from Arna, but there was none. On the other hand, there were several emails from Isaac, one being a short letter and the others containing links to news reports from different outlets. Isaac sounded characteristically grim, but there was a hint of anxiety in his tone that was even more alarming to Jonah than the aggressive graphics in the news clips.
There had been another ugly police shooting, this time in Brooklyn. In fact, it was only seven or eight blocks away from the apartment on St. Johns and Underhill. A team of undercover officers had come up to a young couple leaving their wedding party at a club and for reasons that still remained unclear had shot them as they were getting into their car to leave. The number of shots fired was incredible. As Isaac put it, “They just lit the car up like they were at a shooting gallery, for no reason.” The head of the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association had put out a statement to the effect that no investigation would be necessary, it was a tragic incident of mistaken identity, the couple had acted suspiciously and failed to comply with police demands. The man was a local party promoter and the woman a nurse at Woodhull Medical Center. They were both pronounced dead at the scene, but there was additional controversy over whether or not the officers who riddled their bodies with bullets had bothered to call in a timely manner for an ambulance, with some reports indicating that the ambulance had actually responded to calls from others in the wedding party who were in the parking lot and witnessed the shooting. Three of the officers involved were white and a fourth was Hispanic.
There was already a fury in the streets because of the intensification of a campaign to randomly stop and frisk anyone coming in and out of the projects, and the city was now on edge as calls for revenge on the police were being circulated online and peaceful demonstrations in the neighborhood were overtaken by increasingly violent clashes. The police were responding with more brutality, more tear gas, and mass arrests. The images were out of a dystopian nightmare. Phalanxes of cops in military-grade body armor, mounted officers raising batons and smashing their shields into faces in the crowds on the dark streets of Brooklyn. Hundreds had already been arrested, the president had given a speech calling on “the better angels.” But the raw anger in the streets and the grotesque disproportion of the police response were feeding a hopeless downward spiral. Isaac was still supposed to go to work and teach his third graders, but many parents were refusing to even let their kids leave the house as long as the threat of a wider riot was still heavy in the air.
By the time he had digested the news and realized he would have to compose some kind of note to Isaac, Jonah was utterly demoralized. What was there to say? Telling him about his adventures and discovery of Laura in Montevideo seemed somehow both unseemly and vaguely unkind. He wrote and deleted and rewrote several times what amounted to only a three- or four-line email, with banal phrases telling his friend to “stay safe” and “stay strong.” Any thought of writing to Nate evaporated. He couldn’t think straight, and besides, it wasn’t the right time. But when would the right time be?
Outside in the cool breeze, he walked along watching the people of Uruguay go about their tranquil lives. How different it would be to live in some small country like this—with its own complicated history, no doubt, but where, at least at present, one might grow up without ever really thinking that anything one’s country did or failed to do mattered, apart from occasionally making it to