Gray City

Who takes up Death's mantel once he passes?

  Gray City
      “The dead cannot cry out for justice; it is a duty of the living to do so for them.” -Lois McMaster Bujold
      
      December 13th, 1211.
      Detroit, Michigan.
      
           Detroit was never a beautiful city. Infamous as one of the most dangerous places to live in the middle of the United States, flesh crawled when people from out of state heard the name. When people who lived in state heard the name, they felt pity for the people who lived there. And when people who lived in the city itself heard the name, it was only a reminder that they would be stuck there for the rest of their lives.
            The place was gray. The smog was suffocating. There was always some sort of siren in the air. Homeless people begged for change on the side of the streets and in the alleys. Reeking, dying people who weren’t the privileged kind of homeless who would take the money they were given and spend it on booze. Detroit didn’t have homeless people like that. Detroit had the kind of homeless that hadn’t eaten in nine days and hadn’t showered in two months, that would take anything they could get because they felt themselves die and little more with each passing day. Nobody ever gave them change. Thousands of people were out of work, their old, empty business buildings a reminder of their failure, and that they were not alone. Most people couldn’t afford to give change.
           Summers were sweltering hot, bordering on ninety degrees Fahrenheit daily. Winters brought ice storms and bone-rattling winds. The first few years of my life, Lake Michigan and Erie overflowed a few times from all the rain. It doesn’t rain here anymore. Spring is dry, but it wouldn’t make much of a difference if it weren’t. There aren’t many trees left in Detroit or it’s suburbs. The ones that still stand are dead. Hideous year-long Halloween ornaments, reminders of our imminent death. In autumn, there are no leaves left to fall.
                  Detroit was never a beautiful city. That hasn’t changed.
           My school is in the middle of this gray city. It’s run down, among the other lonely and forgotten buildings ravaged by time and graffiti. It smells of rot. What used to be white paint is chipped and peeling, like old wallpaper. Most of the old windows couldn’t be pried open with a crowbar. The air success would let in isn’t welcome as it is.
           The hallways are covered in the slimy residue cigarette smoke and joints leave behind, turning the white paint to a disgusting brown. The linoleum floor is speckled, trying to mimic granite or some other form of rock. Not even in the glory days of this school did it fool anyone. The lockers were painted a gray that matched the gloom outside; old, burnt out lights hanging from the ceiling which no longer provided a service other than false hopes of light chasing away the darkness of the day.
              Seventy percent of the students are of mixed races. Fifty percent of the students are members of one type of gang or another. Forty percent of the female student body is pregnant. Fifteen percent have killed someone. Ten percent of the students brought weapons to school. There are 527 students at Jefferson High School. The teachers don’t try anymore.
           Most days I don’t stay at school for the whole day. My brother doesn’t know. I’m tired of wallowing in the hallways that smell of pot and worse things, where men bigger than me examine their blades and dare to sneak a peek at their guns. The clocks seem to cease in their telling of time, giving up on the children of eternal hopelessness. I will not waste eternity away among the statistics.
            I am bi-racial. My mother was Hispanic, my father English. I have her tan skin, her dark brown eyes, her black hair. All I have of my father is his last name. I’m not in a gang, or involved with them in any way. I haven’t gotten a girl pregnant. I wouldn’t want to touch any of the w****s here, anyways. I haven’t killed anyone. I don’t own any weapons to bring to school.
            My name is Arturo Norwood. I’ve aged seventeen years in this city. My brother is my keeper, my guardian, my safety, my only way out of insanity.  We have no parents. Both our mother and father died in a car crash when I was twelve. My brother had to go straight from high school to working dangerous, crappy jobs to keep food on the table. His current employer is going out of business. I’m ready for another week without food on the table.
            I leave the building between classes, shivering as I push my way out into the cold, thick winter air. My breath condenses before my eyes, rising to the gray sky.  All around me are ghosts of what this city used to be: business buildings, houses, restaurants, gas stations, rusted cars, things tossed carelessly to the side of the road that are now obsolete.  Somethings that were useless even way before my time. In the reflection of broken glass, I see this city. It’s tall buildings that reach to the heavens, crumbling with shame. It’s brickwork, old and meaningless. The darkness of it’s alleys, weighted by what they allowed to go on inside the shadows they offered. The sidewalks where people died: shot, their lives stolen.  In the reflection of broken glass, I see the grayness of Detroit. And it makes me sick.
            I walk down the collapsing concrete steps, my eyes everywhere at once and yet nowhere at all. I don’t want to accidentally make eye contact with someone for too long. People took it as a challenge, and I couldn’t win in a fight against most people in this place. I’d like to keep my head.
            Normally I ride one of the RTD buses home. There are only a few of them left running, never on time and schedules abandoned. The drivers smoke and act as if every person who rides the bus is a personal inconvenience to them. I decide to walk home today. It snowed a few days ago. Most of it melted away. There are still patches of the dirty stuff here and there, crunching into slush beneath my old sneakers. I need new shoes, but know that I won’t be getting them anytime soon. Food is more important to the survival of my brother and I, not my shoes.
            Sometimes I feel as if I need to go home and cry until all that comes from my chest is a dry cough. I never let myself, though releasing my crushing emotions would feel great. But crying will do me no good. Crying is giving in, and I am no quitter. It’s a dog eat dog world that we live in. When the time comes, I’ll eat my kin. It’s not a question of if it will happen, it’s a fact that it will happen. I’ll be ready when it does.    

      Though my destination is home, my feet carry me elsewhere. I don’t want to enter an empty house, thick with lost memories that hung in the air like thunderclouds, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. It was still too early for Alexander to be home. On a normal day he’d come home around six in the afternoon. Some days he came home a few hours early. Others, I didn’t see him at all. I hoped tonight wouldn’t be one of those nights.
              Alexander and I have a weird relationship.
       We don’t talk very often. We don’t have one of those silent communication deals that old couples have. But I know what he thinks. I know how he thinks. Alexander is scared and desperate. It’s a miracle he’s been able to hold a job as long as he has. I’ve applied for several, but have never been acknowledged.  He’s the only source of income, and I’m only dead weight. He doesn’t feel that way, but it’s the truth. I eat the food he works for and bring nothing in return. He loves me. And he’ll do whatever it takes to put food in both of our mouths. My love for him is mutual. He’ll cry at my grave. I’ll only miss him.
       Even with our lack of communication, we are all the other has left. I’ve said it all before. But it’s nearly all I think about. That, and all the things that this city has done to us. All the misery this place has put us through, stealing our parents, forcing us to struggle to survive. It’s not fair. I loathe the corpse that this city has become, and the rot that is my life. I want to get out. I want to make the liars, the thieves. . . the murderers pay. Every day on the news, the anchors bring word of more deaths, more rapes, more assaults, more stolen cares. Never do they tell of their capture, their trails. It’s because they’re never caught, and never tried.
       No one else will stand up. No one has the guts. Maybe I don’t, either. Perhaps I should be just as ashamed in myself as I am everyone else who lets criminals push us around like sardines and pluck us from the pack whenever they felt hungry. But I’m not ashamed of myself. Alexander is all I have on the surface. But beneath, there is. . . more.
       The park is deserted, blanketed by snow and ice that had not been plowed or shoveled away. In this place, all time seems to stop. One could sit for hours, lost in their own mind, consuming their sanity. The deepest, darkest thoughts emerged when one allowed time for them to do so, and the community park reflected everything it had brought to mind, eating it like a starved animal until it bulged with grotesque, horrible things that seeped from it’s pores like puss from an infected wound. This park, it’s name long forgotten and uncared for, was the only thing still alive in Detroit.
       This festering wound, in this gray city, knows everything about me. It knows my deepest thoughts. My darkest secrets. It knows of my rage. It knows of my hurt. It knows the contours of my mind like a lover would another’s body. It talks to me. It tells me things about itself. It tells me about the other people who come here, longing for a break from what went on in their daily lives but getting more what they bargained for.
       I love the invisible atmosphere of the park, hanging thick in the air like fog over a moor. It made others uneasy, but once I pass through the tree trunks and under their canopies of twiggy shadows, I can feel it caress me. It calls to me, and like a dog, I come. Like a weakling, I surrender to a higher power I cannot battle against. As if I have no control over myself, I let the darkness of the park take me.
       Whenever I come here, I am always alone. Not once have I ever seen another human being wandering the cracked concrete path along the now frozen lake, or sitting on one of the few benches on the north, east, west, or south side of it. Always, I am alone. The park wants that. It wants to focus it’s full attention on me, as if I were some precious jewel under examination. Or perhaps, a criminal up for interrogation. I don’t care what the park thinks of me. Only that it thinks of me.
       The wind blows, and I hear it whisper my name between the dead, rattling twigs. The cattails along the lake rustle together with excitement, happy to see me again. Something turns over in my chest- more specifically, my heart. And I am happy to see the park again. The wind blows again, and it asks me why I’ve been gone so long.
       “I don’t know,” I answer softly, and everything seemed to fall silent. The sounds of outside are there, or cars and sirens, but I cannot hear them. The wind had died, the twigs still and the cattails giving me the silent treatment.
              I don’t know, the park says, is not a good answer.
       My eyes drift over the frozen lake: a thick sheet of ice mottled with wind-swept snow. It looked unbothered by ducks or any other sign of life. The park tells me it didn’t want anyone on it’s ice. I walk through the thin layer of snow in my old, beaten shoes and sit on a cold, black bench. It numbs my butt completely, but I ignore it.
              The wind blows softly again. The cattails whisper.
              The park is pleased.

       At times, when I’m far away from the park, I wonder whether or not the voice I hear when I’m in the park is one inside my own heart, or if it’s really there. I doubt my own sanity, considering the fact that I may be schizophrenic. But the park never tells me to do things. And though I’m not a medical doctor, I think that one is a schizo if voices tell them to perform certain actions. Or maybe that’s just a certain type of schizophrenia. I don’t know. Either way, it doesn’t really matter.
              I will always come back to the park.
       Perhaps that is some other type of disease altogether. Or maybe it’s obsession. Maybe I’d go so far as to say. . . lust? I am helpless to it’s power.
       I sit for hours. I don’t know how long my eyes were glazed over, barely blinking, my fingers frozen, and my toes numb beneath my worn shoes. The park speaks to me all the while, whispering to me sweet nothings that burrow into my brain, where they would later reemerge. Finally, the park tells me to leave. And unable to feel my feet, my rear end, my hands, my everything, I get up and absently head away from the park, and to home.
       It felt unfair that the park could know so much about me when I hardly ever spoke to it, yet I know so little of it, though it never stops talking. It asks me questions about myself, but most of them are rhetorical. I never have time to give an answer before it goes off answering the question itself, or asks a new one.
       The sun is starting to set in the sky, turning it odd shades of orange, gray, and red. Every year the colors become more strange, the atmosphere rapidly being destroyed by the gases released into the air. By the smog that comes from our cars, our houses, our boats, our trains. It changes the colors in the sky. The little warmth the sun had to offer was melting away like an ice cube in hot weather, forcing me to shiver more often and more violently than I had hours before. The grayness of the sky is overpowering, drenching Detroit in shadow as even the oranges and red fade into nothingness. It put a new layer of unwanted gloom over the city, dampening spirits. I almost hate the weather more than I do the people here.
       I walk, my breath forming a puffy, white cloud before my face, and wonder if Alexander will be back when I reach home. I have to walk for at least another half an hour to reach my destination, but I don’t think of the expanse of time it will take. It’s too cold to think about it. Cold enough to make you worry one of your fingers may be gray by the time you reach home.
       People hurry to get home. An RTD bus rumbles by, pushing it’s way through brown slush and chunks of hardened snow.  For a moment, I wish I was on it. But then I realize that the heater on the bus was probably broken, that someone on the bus probably had a sinus infection and made the whole place smell, and that someone was probably listening to crappy music too loud for the liking of anyone else. Only for a moment I wish I was on the bus, and then I know I’m better off without.
       Across the street, a group of three people began to tag the side of a brick building. I don’t bother to look and see what image they dare create. This block had obviously changed hands again. My own had been fought over several times in the past few weeks. The screaming of the ambulances kept me up at night, the gunfire still ringing in my ears. It was sickening to know that so much blood was shed, every day, over something as lowly as a block of concrete in one of the most ravaged cities in the world. The very sidewalk on which I now travel probably has blood stains caked to it, invisible to my eye, but not to ultra violet. Or whatever those CSI people used.
      

- - -

       I unlocked the front door, entering the main hallway of my home. It was small, with two bedrooms, a living room, one bathroom, and a kitchen. They all branched off of the hallway in which I now stood. To my right was the living room, to the left, the kitchen. Beyond those rooms were my bedroom, on the right, and Alexander’s, on the left. To the left of his bedroom was the bathroom, across from that was a closet. We didn’t keep much in there. In the middle of the hallway was a small, square, knobless door on the ceiling. With a chair or a step stool (which we didn’t have), one could push the cover away and climb into what could be considered an attic of sorts. We didn’t store anything up there. At least, not that I knew of. Behind the door was a light that clung to the ceiling, identical to the one that hung just above my head. When turned on, they bathed the hallway in dim, yellow light.
              Alexander isn’t home.
       As I pull off my shoes, already tossing my backpack from my shoulders and elsewhere, I take a look around the dark house. It was gray, lifeless, loveless. The silence fell on me like a ruthless dog, tearing at me with teeth and claws that I could not see, and could not stop. The hallway is empty, as it always was. Which made me feel, whenever Alexander was not home, that there was something lurking behind one of the few doorways, reading to pounce as I passed. It felt as if something were sitting and waiting, stalking prey that knew it was there, but didn’t know where. I hate this place.

 

- - -

 

       It is late. Too late for me to be up, but I don’t care. I am trying to fall asleep. But when you are locked in a dark room when you know that there are things going on just outside of your home that should, but didn’t, make all of humanity ashamed of itself, it was just a little bit hard to go to sleep. And when you opened your eyes, and saw the things that crawled around in the shadows and up and down your walls, it made you feel a little uneasy. And when there was even the slightest creek of a floorboard, the thoughts that instantly pop into your head scare you a little. Sleeping in Detroit, Michigan is a feat I’m not sure anyone has perfected.
       But even when sleep does find me, it is not an easy sleep. I frequently have nightmares. My brother dies in them. And there is never anything I can do to save him. And in some of them I die, too. I always wake in a cold sweat, sometime around three or four in the morning. As hard as it was to fall asleep the first time, it is always harder to fall asleep the second time around. No amount of praying, no amount of wishing keeps the nightmares from coming. No amount of strength or bravery I could posses ever saves Alexander. And even the strange man with x’s for eyes won’t do anything until both me and my brother are dead.
              I hate my home.
              I hate my school.
              I hate this city.
              I hate my nightmares.
       But most of all, I hate that man who stands there and watches with his empty, eyeless eyes while me and my brother lose our lives.
       He could stop them. I know he can. But he always waits. Always waits until there is not a breath left in my lungs before he finally does anything. I detest him for it.
       My body tenses as the sound of the front door unlocking reaches my ears. I know it’s Alexander, but what I don’t know is why he’s so late. He’s never been out this late. I don’t need to check the time to know that it’s sometime after midnight. I surprise myself by realizing that what is churning in my gut is anger, rather than worry. I surprise myself further by finding no reasons to feel as such.
       I roll over under my sheet, gazing outside of my crappy, cloudy window at the lights of the dying city. In this part of town, most of the lights have gone out. The street lights work in few places. Mostly, the only light is from the bigger parts of the city, polluting the darkness. And then, of course, there were the cop cars. Suddenly, I realize that tonight is strangely quiet.
       I stare out the window, without blinking, until my eyes go dry. Alexander has passed through the hallway and disappeared into his room, after taking a peek into my own. He does that sometimes, and though I don’t know why, I don’t dwell on the possibilities for very long. I squeeze my eyes shut, and become dead to my gray city.

 

  Rebirth
      “He not busy being born is busy dying.” -Bob Dylan
      
      December 23rd, 2011
      Detroit, Michigan
      
       Alexander keeps coming home later and later. I have started to feel a strange mixture of anger and sadness towards him. I see him even less than I used to just a week ago, but I feel as if even if I were to see him face to face for more than ten seconds, I still would have nothing to say to him. He is doing his job by keeping food in the cupboard.
              I don’t know where he’s been finding work.
       Last Friday, I found notice of his firing at his job. For at least four days, Alexander has been out of work. In a place like this, that’s long enough to put two people like and me and him out on the street. But we still have a roof over our heads. He wouldn’t tell me if he lost his job. He would tell me if he got one. Something is up.
       And I wouldn’t suspect anything if he hadn’t come home late with people I didn’t know for the last three nights. They weren’t women. They always spoke in low tones, whispers. As if they were cautious of waking me. Twice, Alexander had peeked into my room. And in the gloom, it wasn’t hard to appear as if I really was asleep.  Every time, I have only been able to hear their voices, but not their words. Whatever they discuss is unknown to me.
       I have no solid evidence, but I suspect Alexander has gotten involved with a gang. Perhaps he had asked for a loan, or maybe he’s doing dirty work for them. I find it hard to imagine that he’d do such a thing- either of them, really. Our parents had never raised us to ask for things from others. If we wanted something, we’d get it ourselves. And my brother couldn’t hold a gun steady in his hands. Alexander wouldn’t hurt a fly.
       But desperate times call for desperate measures. And in a dog-eat-dog society, I begin to find it easier and easier to understand that even someone like my brother could be driven to do things that even he never thought he would do.  I’m not sure if part of my anger comes from that, or if it is something else entirely. And I definitely can’t interpret whether or not the new emotion that has risen in me after my hunch emerged is shame for him, or an emotion I am totally unfamiliar with.
              I don’t like not knowing.
       I visited the park every day since last Tuesday. Except for on Sunday. That day, I found myself incapable of getting out of bed. I was too tired, exhausted.
       But what scares me most- more than not knowing what my brother has been up to, or how I am feeling towards him, more than the awful nightmares which have only gotten worse, is the fact that the park has been silent. Totally silent, except for five words: my son, you will die.
       Those words should be obvious enough to understand, but I did the stupid thing and asked what the hell that was supposed to mean. The park didn’t answer me, and has been ever since.
       I don’t want to die. I don’t want my brother to die, even if he is doing things that I do not approve of. Things that turn him into a hypocrite. I don’t want my brother to die. I don’t want to die. I wish that the park hadn’t said what it did. I know that I’ll die. Eventually, I will. Everyone dies. But I have a terrible feeling that the park was not talking about the imminent future of every life form. The park is telling me what’s going to happen soon. I’m going to die. And I wish I didn’t know that.
       Now, I always die in my dreams. And the man with x’s on his face steps closer, and I can see the rest of the face. It scares me, and the image that stays in my mind more than anything else is the sight of his scraggly, lipless mouth, pulled into an ear-to-ear smile. That is, if he has any ears. His mouth never moves. But I can hear him. And he laughs at me.

   Last night, he leaned in close to me, and I could see that what I thought were his eyes weren’t really eyes at all. The x’s instead looked like black ribs from a very small baby, shifting beneath his pale, pasty skin. They move, and move, always crossing each other in some sort of way but looking as if the skin should be pinching and welting and blistering and bleeding. But it never does. I don’t think he has any blood in him.
       And he smelled like death: rotting corpses and dead, decaying things that would not decompose in peace or far away from anyone’s noses.  He didn’t breathe, thank God he didn’t, and upon his close inspection of me, I could see that the scraggles on his face were his mouth, sewn shut, the points of the lines shifting just as his eyes did in that terrible smile of his. I don’t like the fact that he doesn’t have a mouth. That I can still hear him making the noises he does, but that I don’t know how he does it.
       And although this. . . thing terrifies me, though I’ve begged for it to go away and leave me alone, though I’ve wished that it wasn’t real, I know that it is. Perhaps a ghost of something wicked, or maybe a demon from the deepest bowls of Hell. Maybe even the Devil himself. An entity capable of evils that I cannot even begin to comprehend. Things I don’t want to think about.
      
      
      December 24th, 2011
      Detroit, Michigan
      
       I’m waiting at the bus stop. They aren’t running today, but I’m waiting there regardless. I still don’t know where Alexander is, and on this day, Christmas Eve, I don’t particularly care. He has already made it plenty clear that he has more important things to be doing.
       It’s snowing. Thick, fat flakes that fall softly, but in huge, massive clusters that allow little visibility. It’s cold outside, cold enough for all this snow, but I somehow can’t feel it. And the air is still, as still as the waters at the bottom of the ocean. And though it’s still early, the sun should be up by now. It’s not. My only guess is that the sun is being blocked out by all the lumpy, gray clouds. Detroit is in near darkness. And though there are cars that are driving by on the snow-covered street, their headlights do not offer much light. They cut through the sluggish snow, specters in the silent strangeness.
       There are a few people that pass by, and even if we could make out more than just a silhouette of one another, we wouldn’t do so much as to give a nod of greeting. I feel alone, scared, and yet somehow at peace. More so, I think I’m feeling sleepy. I don’t entirely know what I’m doing here. And I don’t really remember much of getting out of bed, getting dressed, and then walking out here. I think it’s the snow’s fault. I want a shower.
       I can’t tell how long I’ve been outside. Perhaps I no longer feel the cold because I have gone numb. Numb of feeling, numb extremities. Numb everything. I rather like the feeling. On a day like this, families were supposed to be together. And though Alexander and I no longer had parents, he was all I had and I was all he had. And that made us family if anything else, and he was supposed to be at home. Maybe I was, too. But being able to toss away the difficult thoughts of such a subject made my chest feel a little lighter, and pushed something else into my throat. I don’t like that there. But I don’t know what it is or why it is there. So for now, I leave it.
       I think for a little, and take a guess that I’ve probably been out here for an hour or so. I leave the rusting bus shelter, with the schedule outdated and wet from the elements, and begin to wander the streets. Living in Detroit is dangerous, period. Walking around Detroit on your own added to the danger. And walking around Detroit when you could barely see ten inches in front of your nose was even worse. Especially when you’ve been having nightmares about a pasty-skinned thing that would easily blend in with the blankness of the morning. Especially then.
       I wander for another hour or so before the snow begins to ease up a little bit, enough to let me see a few feet in front of me. I start to recognize my surroundings a little better, and realize that I’m near home. Without my brain consulting my body, or my body consulting my brain, I head home, gazing at the sidewalk with only the footprints of a few others indented in the sparkling snow.
       I reach my stoop in a matter of minutes and look up, and the sight that I beheld should have worried me. For what feels like an eternity, I only stand there, my hands jammed in the pocket of my gray hoodie and cold making my jeans feel like cardboard. The door is hanging by one hinge,  kicked in from the center, where there is a huge dent with a few splinters jutting out from it like newly grown stems on a sapling. I go up the steps, still numb, still deaf, still in the slowness of outside.
       A small amount of snow has gathered on the inside of our entranceway, an amount small enough to tell me that whoever had kicked open my door had done it recently. Absently, I step inside, and then the reality of what has happened- what may still be happening, finally crashes down on me. I hear voices, voices that are familiar. Voices that Alexander has brought into the house late at night for the past couple of days. And panic catches in my throat, and my nose starts to sting, and my dry eyes suddenly feel wet, and my chest feels like it’s being compressed, and before I have time to think, I’ve already screamed my brother’s name.
       And what I saw instead made a weary, tired me sway on my feet, and I hit the floor before I could tell if I had passed out, or if the massive figure before me had done the deed instead, perhaps with a blunt object already doused in my brother’s blood.