Underground Airlines(12)
This was how I fooled myself, you see? That was one of the ways I fooled myself. If I was going to do my job, he could do his! The righteous, wry refrain of a long-suffering employee, rolling his eyes at the incompetent desk jockey higher up the food chain. I understand why I did it, hard as it is now to admit, hard as it is to reconcile, as shameful.
As if he and I were—what? Coworkers? As though I were just some harried but ultimately steadfast employee, rolling my eyes at the frustrating flaws of my thick-skulled but ultimately lovable employer?
And then at last, after there were no more pages to review, and after I had steeled myself by sitting perfectly still for five minutes, seated with my hands in my lap, looking at nothing, seated in the uncomfortable armchair and staring at the white wall of the hotel room—when I had no other options, I connected the laptop back to my portable printer and printed out page 7.
I laid it on the grid. I climbed back on the chair and observed it from a distance, looking down. And I swayed atop my chair. Somehow I had known. Somehow I had known how hard it would be. How the man’s picture would make me feel.
Granted, all PB file photos are disturbing in one way or another. Typically the subjects are coldly furious, hatred burning from their eyes toward the lens, or else they’re sapped out, dead-eyed, staring straight ahead into nothing. I had seen some smiling, seen the wolfish, defiant grins of those unwilling to be bowed, and I had seen the lunatic, lopsided smiles of those who had slipped into an alternate dimension, who had let go the hand of reality. And who, after all, would deny them that mercy? I swear to God, man, anyone gives you the old “better-off” line, about the natural state of the Person Bound, about slaves actually preferring their lot and the simplicity of a circumscribed life, well, you just dare them to look at a few of those pictures, or a few hundred of them, as I have looked at a few hundred or more.
This man, though, Jackdaw, PIN 78312-99. His picture was something different. Jackdaw was a handsome man, almost perversely handsome, like when you see a movie star playing a tramp or a wastrel and the face is not only so familiar but also so obviously well cared for, and it just doesn’t ring true. He was thin, with slender cheeks and a slender nose, with something almost feminine in the delicacy of his features. In the picture he looked straight ahead, following instructions, but the eyebrows were half raised and the mouth just barely open, as if the camera had caught him about to speak. His eyes had sadness in them, and sensitivity, and some other thing hard to name. Nervousness? Questioning? There must be some sort of mistake, the eyes seemed to be saying. Some lines got crossed here. I’ve ended up in the wrong room.
I tried to correlate this delicate and sensitive face with the horror show described in the full file. The smears of blood, the broken glass. There seemed to be some Incredible Hulk shit going on here; some Jekyll-and-Hyde kind of shit.
He was tattooed, of course, with the letters GGSI stylized into a logo: three little letters, G and S and I, safe under the curling roof of a sturdy and paternal capital G. This emblem was etched at the root of his neck, just above the low hollow of the collarbone. Beside it were two other boxes, squares of pure black: the logos of previous owners, now covered over.
On my own collarbone was a single black box where there once had been the bell-and-cow logo of my birthplace, long since filled in. This would be a telltale sign of my former status, except that a lot of people marked themselves this way—in some parts of the North, almost every black person did, freeborn and manumitted and runners alike. A mark of solidarity: if we are all former slaves, then none of us is.
I flipped the picture facedown on the bedspread, coward that I was, but the paper was printed on both sides. Jackdaw was on the back of it, too, deaggregated into his stats and identifiers: “PIN 78312-99 (‘Jackdaw’), p.l. unknown, m.l. unknown. Age 23. Height 5’8”, weight 153 lbs (BMI = 23.3).” Shoe size and shirt size, waist and chest. Marks and scars, bumps and moles. A man as a map of his dermatological idiosyncrasies. His pigmentation was given as “late-summer honey, warm tone, #76.”
That was enough. I collected the papers off the bedspread and locked them away. Closed the clamshell lid of the laptop.
I heard car doors slamming beneath my window. The white girl and her black son, making their way across the parking lot, dragging suitcases. The kid, in rumpled jeans and a white sleeveless undershirt, was bent forward at the waist, dragging a giant purple suitcase twice as big as he was, a determined expression like a hunter returning from the kill.
“Boo-boo, come on,” his mom said over her shoulder. “I can take it.”
“I got it, Mama.”
“Yeah, but Lionel, you’re scraping it all up.”
“Mama. I got it.”
I turned the woman over a minute, trying to figure if she’d really been planning to stay here tonight or if she’d shown up just to give Mr. Paulsen the stick. Fifty-fifty, I figured, watching Lionel drag the suitcase. I revised my estimation of Lionel’s age—he was seven at least, maybe even eight. He wore scuffed-up sneakers with yellow stars. His Afro was grown out, more than most kids grew it out these days, a gold halo of curls. Jackdaw was waiting for me, back in the room; waiting for me, somewhere in the city. The kid stopped, right outside the door of the hotel, looked over his shoulder, and saw me, and I saw him, and for some reason—whatever reason it is that little kids do anything—he let the handle of the suitcase fall and struck a funny muscleman pose, raising both scrawny brown arms and flexing. I smiled, then the mom turned around and I ducked back into the room. The last thing I needed, with Jackdaw’s tender, baffled, frightened face floating around, stirred up in me, was some kind of awkward conversation—thanks for the fruit, what have you—with the child’s white mother.