THE TALK | Chapter 9
The Talk
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This is the Ninth and final section of an excerpt from one of my pipeline novels, THE TALK, sometimes described (by me) as “Coraline meets Interior Chinatown.” THE TALK explores the implications of willful blindness—to color, to history, to many things—through a kid in a mysterious suburb who notices the seams in his off-kilter world, gradually coming to realize just how carefully they’ve controlled his perception of it, and how carefully they’ve controlled his perception of himself.
The excerpt starts here.
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“Then your due date came,” Dad says.
The colorless boy startles. He’d forgotten this story was about him. Why does the past keep creeping up on his present?
“I came home one evening and the lights were off. But her car was in the garage. ‘Honey?’ I called. When I finally managed to flick the first-floor switch I nearly jumped out of my skin. She was sitting in the dark, hands on a belly near to bursting with you, wearing the huge grin you know so well. At the time it felt like I was missing some inside joke, between her and The Mayor, or everybody in town but me. But later I learned: it’s not that I was missing a joke, it’s that she was missing part of the world.”
The colorless boy is pretty uncomfortable with how uncomfortable Dad is with his own wife’s signature smile, like he doesn’t want her to be happy. But there’s more. “She was wearing sunglasses that night. Indoors. ‘Everything okay?’ I asked, even though it clearly wasn’t, ‘You get your eyes dilated?’
“‘Sort of,’ she chuckled, ‘Everything is amazing.’ She took off the shades and…” Dad looks like he might vomit just thinking about Mom’s most distinctive, most shimmery, most classy feature, “...and… and, her eyes-”
"She's not a creature!" This convo is circling things he is not ready for, will never be ready for, unless he's ready for his skin to blister and fall off. "She's not a monster! She’s beautiful! Don't you love her?"
"Woah, buddy." His father looks up at the police car again. He puts a hand on his son’s shoulder. "I know this is a lot to take in. I will always love your mother. She’s not a monster, she just… I’m just trying to tell you what happened. It’s important."
“And why do you keep looking up at Officer Pantaleo? You’re being weird! He’s a nice guy!”
“Maybe he is. But everything he hears or sees gets back to your mother. And everything she wants gets relayed back to him, as a suggestion that's also kind of a command. It's part of the deal she made back then, part of the arrangement. And she doesn’t want you out here, on The Edge, listening to my side of the story, instead of getting ice cream and listening to the lame excuses we prepared for why we hid the basement from you. Mainly because she’s almost forgotten the story herself, forgotten there was a before. So I’m waiting for Officer Pantaleo to come down here and send us home. We don’t have much time left together.”
“Maybe that’s a good thing!”
Then Dad’s phone rings. He immediately rejects the call and puts it back in his pocket.
“Was that Mom?”
Now the colorless boy’s phone rings. He’s always supposed to answer when Mom calls. He picks up by habit, even as Dad makes the universal cut it sign, his hand doing DJ moves by his neck.
“Hey Sport, how’s guy time going?”
“Good.”
“Your father isn’t picking up.”
“Yep, sorry, um, his phone is on silent. He’s looking at a missed call from you now.” Has he ever lied to his mom? Oh yeah, he tried to this morning. Also three days ago. This feels different, though. “Gotta go.”
“I'm still working on real estate stuff. I don't think that prospective buyer is a good fit with the neighborhood after all. Everything alright over there?”
“Yep, this ice cream is amazing! I’m feeling better about last night. We’re actually on our way home right now. See you soon! Bye!” He shoves his phone back into his pocket.
Dad shakes his head. “You can’t really lie to her. Think of those eyes of hers like satellite dishes for receiving and broadcasting on police radio frequencies. She knows what we’re up to, or she will very soon.”
Above them, the police car begins to roll, very slowly, toward where the bridge meets the land.
And someone taps the colorless boy on the shoulder.
He cries out and spins around. Then spins around again, his heart racing. There’s nothing but blank whiteness and grayed-out river water and half a bridge and a grassy pebbly incline. There’s no one here except Dad and Officer Pantaleo.
“What’s up? What’s wrong? Something bite you?”
“I don’t know. Someone…” and it happens again.
“Goodness,” his dad watches his face with alarm. “Looks like you saw a ghost.”
A ghost. He pulls out the little donut-shaped stone and holds it up to his eye (his flesh-and-blood one). He does a couple of 360 scans. But everything still looks the same.
“What’s that doo-dad there?”
He puts the stone away, still not ready to share.
“It was just a bee, I think. Something stung me. You should finish your story while you still can.”
“If you’re sure…” Dad is more concerned with the police car pulling off the bridge than with any alleged bee stings. “Where was I? Your mother took off her sunglasses and I expected the brown eyes I fell in love with. I still miss those eyes.” The colorless boy realizes he’s seen those eyes himself, five different sets of them, in the basement last night. “Instead, there were two huge black buttons sutured above that odd toothy smile, with crusted blood rimming their edges. ‘Don't you like it?’ she said, as if she had only gotten a small tattoo or a second ear-piercing. I went off. It was easier to hide behind anger than give into fear and confusion and disgust. And anyway, I knew who must’ve helped make this happen. ‘Where is he? Take me to him right now!’ I was screaming as I marched up to her seat. ‘Soon,’ she told me, calmly. ‘It’s almost time for him to meet the whole family.’ When she stood up her water broke.”
Officer Pantaleo turns the corner and begins to roll slowly, so slowly, down the slope toward the father-son chat on the riverbank.
“You came pretty quickly. An intense five or six hours, your mother screaming, the fresh wounds around her eyes reopening. And then there you were. And I fell in love in a way I never knew was possible. But I hardly got to enjoy the moment before he showed up.” Dad shakes his head. “I had wanted to meet him so bad just hours ago, but now it was the last thing I wanted. We’d just had a baby! ‘Honey, meet The Mayor,’ your mother said. I turned around to watch the strangest man I’d ever seen enter the delivery room. I literally can’t describe him to you, except that I was speechless with fear.”
“Is he tall? Or short?”
“No, no. Nothing like that. He's literally indescribable. I said, ‘Um, maybe we can set up a meeting after we’ve all recovered.’ She ignored me. ‘He can perform the procedure on our son, right here in the hospital, with the support of these nurses.’ I was appalled, and it was clear to everyone in the room that I was appalled. I was holding you at that point, and I froze in shock at the idea that someone might do to you whatever the hell had just been done to my wife. Everyone was just staring at me, waiting. I hoped maybe I’d heard her wrong. Then your mother beckoned me over. She held my face in her hands and looked into my eyes, and I looked anywhere but hers. And she whispered, ‘Du Bois.’”
The colorless boy recognizes the name from the spine of a dusty black book.
“I’m not sure how far you got through those boxes in the basement. But one of them holds my favorite work by W.E.B. Du Bois, who had this idea called the double consciousness. It’s about how people like him—people like you and me—have to see ourselves twice: once how we see ourselves, and once how they see us. But your mom and I never wanted you to have that kind of self-consciousness. We didn’t want you wasting time on a perspective of yourself from outside yourself. We wanted you to be able to just live. You catch my meaning?”
The colorless boy is trying not to catch his meaning. People like him. People like you and me. How THEY see US. Meaning that doesn’t feel any safer to catch than the Black Death, based on the fever it's giving him.
“Your mother was telling me that this operation was the way to make that happen for you. And for just a moment, in my disorientation, it sounded like a good idea. So I handed you to The Mayor. And he began.”
The colorless boy dry swallows. “He began?”
Dad grips both of his shoulders and looks him in the eye. Maybe one eye in particular. “I left the room,” he whispers, like he’s confessing a murder. “For that I’m sorry, and I don’t think I deserve your forgiveness.”
He lets go and continues at his normal volume, rushing to finish the story. “I wandered the hospital hallways in a daze. It was surreal. I didn’t know whether I was celebrating or mourning. I found myself staring through glass at rows upon rows of other people’s healthy babies, with all their little healthy eyes. That’s when I snapped to my senses. I didn't know how long it had been. Five minutes? Fifty? I just know they were halfway done with the procedure, because when I burst back into the delivery room-cum-operating room, one of your eyes had been mutilated like your mothers’, and the other was still pristine. You were screaming bloody murder as I shoved everyone aside, and before they could react I scooped you into my arms and ran.”
The police cruiser comes to a stop beside Dad’s car, idling menacingly as it faces down the father and son. The officer remains faceless behind the tinted windshield, apparently content to let the drama before him play out, listening through his cracked driver’s-side window with the patient confidence of the powerful. And the colorless boy and his dad are content to ignore their new audience, locked into this parent-child transfer of history until the download is complete, for better or worse.
“You inherited your speed from me. They couldn’t mobilize hospital security fast enough to stop me on the way out. I had the element of surprise, the legs of a former track star, and a brand new kind of fear on my side—fear for the safety of my child. I dashed through the parking lot and buckled you into our new carseat. I whipped out of the spot and started speeding down the main road.
“At first I wasn’t sure where I was going, other than away. But as I headed south it became clear that there was only one real option. It wasn’t enough just to drive away from the hospital. I couldn’t hide in the house we had bought, or anywhere else nearby. The problem was the culture of this place, the invisible fog that had descended on the suburb and controlled what we see and say, that had thickened until it somehow became okay to blind an infant to the world as his parents knew it. I had to get my son out of Everywhere-Nowhere.
“I sped toward the river with the pedal on the floor, hoping I could somehow escape into the city, praying that I could cross back over to the Southside like a prodigal son, that the hood would grant me asylum, that my old friends would forgive me for leaving. Cause don’t we all wanna get out, if we can?
“The cops were after me the whole way, but you were my secret weapon. They couldn’t ram me, or set up a blockade that I might smash into, or do anything that risked a high-speed collision with a newborn in the vehicle. So they kept their distance and demanded that I pull over. I ignored their constant loudspeaker demands and made it safely to the bridge.
“I couldn’t understand what I was looking at. The bridge ended in empty space. A white nothingness waited for me where the city skyline should’ve been. Utterly blank in every direction as far as the eye could see, up down left and right.”
The colorless boy’s mind is reeling with something like deja vu. He realizes that he and his dad just retraced their steps from the day he was born. He can almost sense what it must be like for his dad to relive his first day of fatherhood. The past and present seem to collapse into one another as he looks up at the bridge where this final showdown took place. He watches it unfold in his mind’s eye. He can almost convince himself that he remembers.
“I skidded to a stop in horror. There was no name for it back then. The Edge hadn’t been there the last time I’d come so far south. Tears flowed down my face as I stared. Fear and frustration and confusion and guilt. I’d been cut off. I’d been away so long that my privileges to my old life had been revoked. While I was busy stacking my paper, out of sight out of mind had morphed into out of sight out of existence. Was it all still there behind the strange veil? Was the strange veil created by my own selfishness, or was it part of your mother’s bargain with the powers that be? Had my whole life been transferred to some Truman Show dome that’s nothing but one big suburb? Was I in an episode of the Twilight Zone? Or some twisted virtual reality? Or Hell? Whatever it was I knew I deserved it.”
It dawns on the colorless boy that he might actually know more than his dad about how all this happened, even if he doesn’t fully understand it himself. If last night was real, and Caroline was telling the truth, then there might be a whole multiverse of pocket worlds and mothers and monsters and beldams who build neighborhoods that seem perfect on the surface, at a cost. And if Dad doesn’t know all this, then maybe they could combine what they know and try to find the truth together. The truth. Right. But the thing about that is-
“I couldn’t wallow in shock or self-pity. The police pulled up behind me and began getting out of their cars with guns and cuffs at the ready. I got out, took you out of your car seat, and ran the rest of the way across the bridge. If I couldn’t escape with you, I’d go as far as I possibly could before giving up.
“I watched the asphalt beneath my feet lose its color the closer I came to The Edge. I stumbled once, not out of clumsiness but because the road seemed to glitch, or flicker, as if unsure of its own reality at the transition point, or reluctant to hold us up. I stood with my toes almost touching the line where the bridge vanishes. I stood face-to-face with the end of the world.
“I had been thinking it was some kind of mist. But it didn’t churn or flow or move even slightly. It was just utterly featureless white, like the border of a flat-Earth universe. I wondered what would happen if I took another step. Would I be able to keep walking? Would we fall forever through white void? Would we poof into nothingness? Or would I just bounce off of a hard white wall like a pigeon slamming into a clean window? I felt desperate enough to consider finding out. I felt the eyes and guns trained on my back. I knew that once again you were my armor, the cops unwilling to shoot a newborn. I held you close in gratitude as you wailed. But a standoff is not a solution.
“I psyched myself up until I got to a point, mentally, where even I wasn’t sure what I would do the next moment. To step? Or not to step? Step/not-step. The choice was binary and I initiated the equivalent of a coin flip in my brain. The coin was weighted toward not stepping, but I was committed to re-flipping it each second. Not-step. Not-step. Not-step. But eventually…
“‘Honey!’
“I turned at your mother's voice, still raw from screaming in labor, and watched her clamber out of the back of a cop car. She was bloody and weak as she limped toward us, but she smiled nonetheless, somehow casual in the midst of the crisis. She stopped where the road began to lose its integrity, just a few yards away. I unleashed my despair.
“‘Where is our home?’ I wailed.
“‘Our beautiful house is waiting for us. Come back with me.’
“‘Not that home! Where’s my family? Where’s yours?’
“‘I’m right here. Our son is right there. Our family is right here.’
“‘What about our roots! Our ancestors! Our history!’
“‘That’s all behind us. What good is it to us? You have a child now. Look to the future! The next generation can be free of our hang-ups!’
“‘Where’s the fucking ghetto?! Did you let them erase us? Did you help them wipe us off the face of the Earth like they always wanted?’
“‘Erase us? How can you say they’ve erased us? Here we are. I’m right here. Our son is right here. Our family is right here, alive and well.’
“‘Not us! I mean us!’
“‘We are comfortable. We are wealthy. We are happy. We are successful. Our children will be healthy, educated and safe. They will be judged not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. What more can you want? There is nothing else.’
“‘We’re -----! You’re B----! I’m BL---! Our son is BLA--! Our children will be BLAC-! We are a BLACK family, and you can never forget that, because neither will anyone else!’
“‘That’s the beautiful thing. They’ve already forgotten. I’ve earned us an exception. I got us passes.’
“‘At what cost?’
“‘Just a smile and a minor makeover.’ And then she laughed and laughed until she cried bloody tears down her cramping, smiling cheeks.
“At that point I was ready to give up. All my fight evaporated. I had made my case, and my case had been ignored. Besides, was I really going to jump out into an abyss with a baby in my arms? Just to escape the micro-aggressions of an upper-middle-class neighborhood? Talk about first-world problems. My wife had gone crazy, but she was right about at least one thing: you could have a good life here. Maybe I was just being selfish. Or clinging to the past.
“But I had one condition.
“‘You can’t finish the procedure,’ I said.
“‘We’ve already started. It’s good for him. It’s part of the deal.’
“‘No.’ I looked down into your screaming, toothless face, at the crusted blood around the missing eye that had been removed and replaced, at the beauty of the one good eye that opened whenever you took a breath to refuel your screaming. I couldn’t stand that your introduction to life had been this kind of pain and abuse. Amazing, really, that I was considered the criminal in all of this.
“‘No,’ I said again. ‘He’s been through enough. You’ve already changed him halfway. Leave the second half alone, so that part of him can choose how he wants to see the world. Just as much as health and wealth, don’t you want our child to have the freedom of choice?”
“Your mother paused for a long moment. Then she said, ‘Okay. Alright. That’s fine.’
“I handed you over. She freed one of her breasts and you latched immediately. The quiet was deafening. You hadn’t stopped yelling at full volume since the moment you’d been born. I had thought you were screaming in pain. But it was almost like you were merely hungry. Or you just wanted the arms of your favorite parent. You were a momma’s boy from the beginning.
“I was arrested, spent a few hours in jail, then was bailed out. No charges were brought against me, and as far as my record, it’s like the incident never happened. Your mother’s doing. I can’t act like her Faustian bargain hasn’t come in handy. You and I have been benefiting from her influence ever since that day. I rarely see The Mayor in person, so it’s easy to pretend he doesn’t have his fingers in our lives.
“The rest is history. We raised you for the following decade. We raised you colorblind.”
The colorless boy is having some trouble absorbing this. It would be hard to overstate how much trouble the colorless boy is having. By now you know him. You understand the dynamic here. It’s not great. This kid has grown up blind to the color of his skin, deaf to any words that label the color of his skin, and completely unaware of the history that might still make his skin color mean something today. How could it possibly mean something, when the color of the grass and the birds and the houses means nothing? He was always just a kid, like any other kid, playing and learning and living, with no need to reference history to know who he was. He was just himself. Until this week, when he noticed people looking at him like something other than himself, less than himself, more than himself. Until this week, when a man he thought he knew looked at him and saw only the color of his skin, not his self at all.
He's in pain. He slaps his hands over his ears and closes his eyes, like a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil monkey. He shakes his head. He wants to keep out these new stories that claim he's one of their characters. Relatively rich dad, Jamal's father, Caroline; they've all got their own idea of where he fits into some narrative they've been telling since before he was born, and they're ready to drag him in like a school play he didn't sign up for. And getting dragged in hurts. Each new incident this week was like a laser hitting his force field, heating up with each strike until approaching a total meltdown, all systems red. Except the field is his skin. And the last straw is his own dad.
"We're not different! Why do you keep saying we're different?" His words are desperate defense mechanisms as much as beliefs, patches on the failing force field. At this point, he’s just trying to reduce the pain. It's the only goal he can imagine. Because the pain is unimaginable. The bonfire heat he felt last night is more like center-of-the-sun heat now, and this time it radiates inward, filling his stomach and chest and brain with lava. He's never had a migraine but he has one now. He can feel his pulse in his button eye. In fact, he can feel the worst of the pain pulsing into his skull behind that eye, as if the button is actually the head of a nail lodged in his head, and each time it's hammered it stokes his torture, like the bellows at the forge on that field trip to the blacksmith. Each time his dad said BLACK was a hammer stroke; a word that would usually sound like garbled static to him—in the rare times that it came up—had used his father's trusted voice to break through the noise with excruciating clarity. Now the word echoes in his mind, delivering new hammer strokes in tandem with his heartbeat.
BLACK! BLACK! BLACK!
He has to shut it up. He has to unhear it. Which is why he's covering his ears and shaking his head and closing his one closable eye so it can't see his skin or his dad's face in the light of that wild story. It’s why he’s spouting words to start an argument that might drown it all out. "We're the same as anybody else! We're just people!"
Dad is walking the precarious line between trying to calm him down and not backing down from his own truth. “But you’ve always known that your skin is much darker than all the other kids, right? You’re not literally blind!”
“Well, sure, maybe, I guess.” The colorless boy still doesn’t open his normal eye, afraid his dad will be instantly proven so right that there’s no room for argument. “But it doesn’t matter. Everyone’s skin is a little different. Some are darker. Some are lighter. There’s a tanned girl at my school almost as dark as me!” He whines his words through gritted teeth. “So it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t mean anything. Not anymore.”
“It’s more complicated than that.” Something about the tone makes him peek, and before he closes his eye again he realizes his dad is crying. Actual tears are coming out of his dad’s face. “Maybe it shouldn’t mean anything. Or doesn’t mean some of the things it used to. Or shouldn’t mean some of the things it does now. But it still does. It just does.”
“Well, it doesn’t mean anything to me!”
His father grabs him by the collar with both hands and shoves him against the car. For a second he wonders if he should call out to the eerily silent Officer Pantaleo for help. It’s a weird thing to wonder about his dad, since his dad is usually the one he’d want help from.
“Don’t say that! It should mean something to you! It does mean something! You’ve just forgotten. We’ve forgotten. I’ve forgotten to teach you.”
The colorless boy thinks it's an interesting feeling, being in this much pain. Time slows. It's so distracting that the outside world shrinks, and the inside world swells to match it. His father's face seems blurred, his words muffled and far away like right after the hero survives a flash grenade in action movies. The cop, faceless and quiet behind his one-way glass, content to let the domestic drama play out in front of him, possibly munching popcorn behind the wheel, may as well no longer exist. Meanwhile, the galaxies of pain within his flesh are more real. More urgent. More demanding.
It's actually pretty simple now, inside the colorless boy. As his dad would say, it's become binary. Because even though the pain and its causes are complicated—he's a colored boy who identifies as colorless in a world where color used to matter in a neighborhood that claims it no longer sees color and believes that claim even though the claim is false because color still matters in this world in more subtle ways—there are really only two possible reactions in this moment.
There’s forward, and there’s backward.
He finds himself in the middle of a painful process that he didn’t ask for, and to make it stop he can either push through to the unknown on the other side where his dad is pulling him, or abort mission at all costs and flee back to the familiar world where his mom and his teachers and his button eye have cradled him in ignorant bliss his whole life.
If he were a good protagonist, he would choose forward. He knows the shape of the Hero’s Journey. But his protagonist-juice is low. The pain depleted it. Last night depleted it. He actually doesn’t feel like a hero at all anymore. Instead, he feels like one of the class caterpillars in the biology terrarium. Some of them stayed caterpillars forever and seemed pretty dang happy crawling around the awesome habitat. Some of them became colorful butterflies that the class released into the air outside like a fluttering rainbow. And in between those stages was the chrysalis, which dangled from the sticks for weeks.
The teacher said they don’t go directly from caterpillar to butterfly in there. First the caterpillar completely dissolves into liquid mush, then the mush gradually solidifies into a butterfly. Still, the kids were impatient with the miracle. The colorless boy is thinking that he didn’t have enough sympathy for how much violence can happen beneath a quiet shell. He feels that the fire shooting into him from his button eye might melt his insides to mush, with his father none the wiser. He wonders if it hurt for the caterpillars. He wonders if the reason it takes them so long is because they have to decide whether to go through with it. How does a caterpillar know if they’ll become a beautiful butterfly instead of the ugliest moth? How do they know they’ll become anything other than a failure to launch, stuck in mush phase, dangling forever in a living hell? How do they know if it’s worth it?
It isn’t worth it, the colorless boy decides. All he has to do is say:
"I don't believe you."
As soon as he says it, the pain evaporates. So he knows he made the right choice.
Saying it makes it true. He doesn’t believe his dad’s crazy story. He opens his eye and puts his hands by his sides and looks out at the world as it should be: without noticing the color of his father’s skin or his own, without any colors mattering except to a few weirdos who are stuck in the past and should be ignored.
“Huh? You don’t…” His dad is taken aback. All of that thinking only took a couple seconds, but his dad can hear the new clarity in his voice, the finality of the decision.
“I don’t believe you,” he says again, because it feels so good. He begins to smile. He can’t help it. The relief and joy from banishing the pain curls his lips up as far as they can go. Now he is wearing his mother’s smile, and his father stares with the horror of recognition.
Bloop bloop.
The police siren makes his dad jump, but to the colorless boy it sounds like a friendly honk from a long-lost friend. The cruiser’s brights come on and are partially blinding even in broad daylight, beaming out over the grayscale water. Officer Pantaleo has chosen this moment to get involved, now that the argument has turned physical, with a grown man shoving a child against a car.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen,” Pantaleo says as he gets out of the car. “What brings us way out here today?”
"Is there a problem with two law-abiding citizens chatting on the riverbank? Is there some issue with the way I've chosen to spend my day off with my son? Or is the issue who we are and what we look like?"
Officer Pantaleo steps closer, hand hovering near his holster. Dad steps between the officer and the colorless boy. "Sir, if you know what's good for you you'll watch your tone. Anybody can come down to the river, but nobody can loiter here suspiciously for an hour and then lay hands on a minor."
"Right, we were loitering. We look suspicious. We're probably up to no good. Maybe you saw me make a gang sign while I talked with my hands. I've heard it all before. Maybe you should frisk me for guns and check the car for drugs, get it over with."
The colorless boy has never seen his dad talk like this, angry and taunting. It's almost like he's putting on a show.
"But if you know what's good for you, you'll keep your hand far away from your weapon, or you just might use it, which would piss off my wife, which would piss off The Mayor, which would piss off the chief. Keep the boss happy by keeping the tokens happy. Be a good soldier, sir."
"If you got a problem with me-"
"My problem is far bigger than you."
"Only problem I see is you, out here raising your voice in a quiet area, then shoving your boy here against the car door. Which I got on camera by the way. How do you think that'll look to the ice queen who's got you pussy whipped while she fucks the most powerful man in town? Sorry kid."
"Sure, add disturbing the peace to my charges. Last I checked, raising your voice was only a crime for men of a certain complexion." Appropriately, Dad is raising his voice. Shouting, really. "How would it look for you if you took the model minorities down to the station, the family that everybody loves to love? You need us."
"It won't look like anything. It'll look like law and order."
At that point Pantaleo is finished talking. He whips out his baton and strikes Dad on the leg, bringing him to one knee. Grimacing through the pain, Dad tries to push the officer away, but Pantaleo just grabs one of his wrists. With this grip he spins Dad around and pins his arm against his back at an awkward angle just shy of a dislocated shoulder. Then he marches Dad to the cruiser and slams him face down onto the hood. Dad struggles the whole way, but Officer Pantaleo is apparently very good at his job, and Dad is only good at business.
"See?" Dad growls against the hot metal hood. "Are you watching, son? You see how they treat us?" His voice is strained from getting the wind knocked out of him.
"Stop resisting arrest," Pantaleo advises as he pulls out his handcuffs. "If you've got something to prove, you just might prove it."
The colorless boy has been watching the whole thing, of course, but he doesn't see it how his dad sees it. He is still euphoric from pain relief, and nothing can bring him down. His huge grin is frozen to his face. His force field is back in place and even stronger than he remembers. A lot of Dad’s words deflect off its surface or filter through in sanitized form. From inside it, watching the violence in front of him is like watching a friend play a video game, all emotions turned down to low settings. He watches through his mother's eyes. He doesn’t know what his dad means by My problem is far bigger than you or see how they treat us, and he’s relieved to notice that he’s not even curious. There’s no us as far as he knows. All he sees is what’s directly in front of him. All he sees is a grownup making a fool of himself. A grownup who happens to be his father.
“That won’t be necessary.”
Oh. Now this is new. The colorless boy not only sees through his mother’s eyes, but speaks with his mother’s persuasion, her effortless charm. Pantaleo pauses with the cuffs dangling awkwardly in his hand. He looks over at the colorless boy.
“These? Yeah, you know what, maybe that’s overkill.” He puts the cuffs away. “I’ll just put him in the back unrestrained.”
“No need.”
The secret here is that the colorless boy expects to be obeyed. How else would he be treated by a nice man whose job is literally to serve and protect him? He certainly doesn’t expect to be beat up, shot or arrested if he hasn’t done anything wrong.
Everything is still and quiet for a moment.
“Sorry, kid. But your pops is out of line and I’m gonna have to take him-”
“Looks like you already taught him his lesson.”
The colorless boy looks at his dad with that huge smile, and Pantaleo looks down at his victim sheepishly. It suddenly looks absurd, this show of force, to everyone involved, including and especially the perpetrator.
“How about you let him drive me home. You can escort us, then forget this ever happened. Save yourself the paperwork.”
He heard that paperwork line once in a movie he wasn’t supposed to be watching. He winks.
His expectation becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The colorless boy waves at Officer Pantaleo as they all climb into their respective cars. Three doors close. The sedan turns and begins to slowly climb the slope, with the police cruiser close behind.
"I won't let them turn you -----," Dad grumbles beneath his breath, smoldering with some obscure emotion, refusing to look at his son.
"Hm?"
"I said I won't let them turn you W----."
"Okay."
“There’s this middle ground we had to find, between warning you that bad things could happen, and turning you into the kind of kid to whom bad things happen. You know?”
The colorless boy does not know, does not want to know, and is effortlessly failing to know as he lets his father’s voice fade to white noise.
“When we decided not to give you The Talk, it made sense to me. Because if we gave you the talk, living in an area like this, we might’ve been lying to you."
Dad is driving very slowly up the slope, as if he’s stalling. But the colorless boy doesn’t mind. He feels amazing and is looking forward to the drive back. They’ll get there when they get there.
“But there’s a whole lot of other stuff we never talked about either. And the longer we didn’t talk about it, the weirder it felt to bring up. So here we are.”
Here they are, at the top of the slope where the grassy, pebbly ground becomes the road. To the left is the bridge that ends at The Edge. To the right is the rest of Everywhere-Nowhere, where Mom and their perfect life await them. Dad puts on the right blinker to let Officer Pantaleo know where they’re headed. As if there’s any question.
“I would not have you descend into your mother’s dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.”1
“This whole place is a dream?” He says it just like his mother would say it, innocent and upbeat and a little condescending all at the same time, not necessarily asking the question for real. He is dimly aware of this comparison.
His dad laughs bitterly.
“No, that would be way too easy. Whatever else this place is, it’s undeniably real. The effect it’s had on our family is real. And I think it’s past time that you and I discover its true nature.”
“How?”
Bloop bloop. Pantaleo signals his impatience, his bumper nearly tapping the back of Dad’s car. Dad is unphased. He begins to fiddle with the CD player that the colorless boy has never seen him use before. Typically they listen to NPR. He can hear the soft mechanical noise of disks shifting and moving behind the control panel. Cool beans, they’ll have some throwback music for their leisurely drive home. Dad flips through tracks until he seems to find what he’s looking for.
“Fuck the police!” is the refrain. The colorless boy recognizes it from last night. All of a sudden, his force field takes a hit.
“Young blood, buckle your ----- ass up.”
Dad turns the wheel left and presses the gas to the floor. The tires spit pebbles then find traction. The car shoots onto the bridge. Pantaleo turns on his lights and sirens. But the officer has barely enough time to begin pursuit before the colorless boy and his father hurtle into white nothingness.
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Adapted from my favorite line in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me