When No One Is Watching(20)

I stand outside on the stoop for a minute; it’s dark out already, but still hot and humid. Kids are heading home in groups of two, three, and four. The whir of bike wheels and flash of spoke reflectors speed by. Sydney’s house is dark—she’s probably still at Mr. Perkins’s place with her friend who lives upstairs from her.

I do what I always do when I’m frustrated: I walk. For blocks and blocks, I wander down streets with names I can’t pronounce, with housing styles ranging from squat two-story colonials, to grand brownstones with all the bells and whistles, to old prewar tenements with dozens of apartments, to housing projects. Lots of new construction, too, in the same bland “modern” style. I’d worked on a few sites for condos like these—and after dating Kim, had been friends with people who could afford to live in them. These were the kind of people who called people trailer trash in one sentence and complained about leaks and thin walls in the next—the same problems that’d plagued the trailers I grew up in. My mom now lives in a beautiful trailer that beats most of these condos, and it didn’t cost half a million bucks, either.

I’m always hyperaware of my surroundings, but tonight I’m on edge, tuned in to how people in the neighborhoods I walk through look at me. A group of dudes my age, all Black, sitting on their stoop, nudge each other, and one of them laughs like jicama going over a grater. A couple of streets down, an older woman eyes me cautiously and gives me a wide berth, as if she can tell there’s something dangerous about me, though she nods a greeting when our gazes meet. As I pass another group, boys and girls in their late teens all sitting on a park bench in one of those green spaces that pop up randomly around here, one of the boys calls out, “Have a good night, bro, have a good night.” I can’t tell if he’s buzzed and feeling overly friendly or making fun of me. Maybe both.

I reply with “You too, man,” and keep walking, trying to shake the weird feeling I’ve had since I left the house. I’d been in a good mood for once after leaving Mr. Perkins’s, like I could be part of this neighborhood and create some snapshots for my own personal photo album, but Kim, Terry, and Josie have gotten into my head so I’m walking around paranoid and jumpy.

I have to wonder if this is what Kim feels like all the time. Constantly suspicious and thinking that everyone is out to get her for no reason. I do have reason, but none of the people I’ve passed are a source of worry for me.

I decide to make my way toward the bar a few blocks down from our house, where they sometimes have jazz on Monday nights, across from one of the pawnshops I’ve been to a few times. When I arrive, it’s quiet outside, so I head in and take a seat. It’s darker than I remember, a polished and cleaned version of the dive bars I used to frequent, and instead of jazz, an old Radiohead album is playing. Each stool is occupied by a white dude with a beard. They all turn and look at me as the door slams shut behind me.

The bartender saunters over to the end of the bar, a cute short girl who I recognize as the college kid who rents from Mr. Perkins.

“Hey, neighbor,” she says, batting her lashes at me. She seems to be going for the smoky-eyed manic pixie dream girl look tonight, and personality, too, judging from how she leans invitingly over the bar. “What can I get you? Beer? Bourbon?”

“I actually came for jazz,” I say. “But I think maybe I have the wrong bar?”

There’s something about the way this place seems manufactured, like a hipster Hard Rock Cafe, that makes my skin itch. Even the customers fit a mold: every guy at the bar is dressed in the same variation of graphic tee and dark denim, slouched over a beer or phone with the same curve of his back. It’s weird.

“Oh, that was the last place,” she says. “They closed down a couple weeks ago.”

“That sucks.”

She quirks a brow. “Does it? We don’t have to go all the way to Fort Greene to find a chill place now.”

I thought the old place was more chill than this prefab dive bar, but I’m annoyed and don’t feel like talking to this kid anymore.

“Right.” I scrub a hand through my hair, nod, then point at the door behind me. “I’m going to head out.”

She leans forward a little more, and the heads of the dudes lining the bar swivel to check out her ass. “See you around.”

I heave a sigh and walk back, the humid air clinging to me along with an even crappier mood. I’m not drunk, or even buzzed, but the two glasses of bourbon paired with the disappointment of the night were just enough to leave me feeling sullen. I glance into dark windows as I walk, noticing how almost all the newly renovated places I pass have cameras pointed at their front doors now. Kim had wanted to get one of those systems, too, but I’d told her I didn’t want her to be able to monitor when I leave and enter the house from the comfort of her phone—though I doubt she cares enough to bother.

I’m passing by the old hospital, and stop to casually look through the fence surrounding the building—there’s all kinds of construction equipment littered around the place, and I wonder what’s inside. Had they already cleared everything out? I hear a noise like scraping metal and lean closer.

The building is dark and the weak yellow-orange glow filtering from the streetlights barely illuminates the area past the fence. The windows are nothing but uniform black, but then a thin line of light flickers somewhere in the depths of that darkness, on the floor that’s slightly lower than ground level. I blink a couple of times and lean closer, squinting to try to catch sight of that weird flicker again . . .