The Nowhere Man

63 The People No One Wants

The battered row house leaned against its neighbors, the whole lot of them tall and narrow and crooked, drunkards staggering arm in arm from a bar. The flaking paint was a different shade of green now. Same front window that the pack of kids used to peer through when the Mystery Man made his mysterious appearances. Same basketball courts across with the same chain-link fence surrounding the same cracked asphalt. Same handball walls layered with new graffiti.

The Lafayette Courts projects that used to loom in the background were long gone, replaced with a health clinic. Satellite dishes perched pigeonlike on balconies and rooftops. A licensed marijuana dispensary now squatted on the plot that once housed the apartment building that had gone up in smoke when Jalilah’s nana dozed off smoking a blunt.

Evan turned back to the dilapidated row house. Bumblebee hazard tape crisscrossed the front door, orange cones lining the sidewalk in front. Bulldozers and backhoes lingered in the wings, construction workers chewing sandwiches, shooting the shit. Flyers fluttered from telephone poles, announcing that the building was slated for demolition.

The street had been blocked off, a crowd gathered at the sawhorses as crowds did in East Baltimore. The same faces on different bodies. Crack-ravaged cheeks. Coyote eyes. Elaborate press-on nails. A few industrious souls rolled coolers across the chipped concrete, selling bottled water and Doritos to the spectators for a buck a pop. Dinner and a show.

Evan walked over to a worker crouched near a spool of cable.

“Mind if I take a closer look?”

“Not safe, pal. The boom’s kicking off in a half hour. Don’t wanna get your hair blown back, ya feel me?”

“I feel you.”

The worker swept an arm at the piano-key row of façades. “I wish we could take down the whole lot of them. You wouldn’t believe what a shithole the place was.”

“What was it?”

“Housing for the elderly — and I use the term loosely. ‘Housing,’ that is. My cousin had his mother-in-law here, said it was worse than the dog pound. Asbestos in the ceiling, mold in the drywall, rats beneath the floorboards. Used to be some kind of facility for retards and before that a foster home for boys.”

“I’d heard something about that.”

“All the people no one wants. They cram ’em in, let ’em rot. It’s a crime, really. Not that anyone gives a shit to do anything about it.”

Evan stared at that front window, saw his own twelve-year-old face pressed against the pane with all the others. Danny and Jamal and Andre. Tyrell, who caught shit because his sister was a whore. Ramón, so skinny his hips could barely hold up his stolen Cavariccis.

“Look, man, I’m sorry, but you gotta clear out before my supervisor comes over.”

Evan nodded and withdrew.

He circled the block, cut through the glass-strewn alley next to Mr. Wong’s ancient dry cleaner, where they used to loot the dish of Tootsie Pops every chance they got. The back of the row house appeared at the alley’s end.

In his memory the rear slat fence towered overhead, a castle wall. Now it came up to his chest. Resting his hands on the top, he looked down onto the stamp of crumbling concrete that passed for a backyard. When he hopped over, his shoulder was none too happy about it.

Hazard tape blocked the back windows and door. The kitchen pane had been shattered, shards poking up from the frame like teeth. He peered through the mouth. Explosive charges had been placed on the walls and ceiling to make the building implode. It would collapse in on itself like so many of the lives lived here.

Carefully, Evan pulled himself through and climbed down off the sink. Piles of beer cans. A heap of stained blankets. Cigarette butts worming up from a pickle-jar lid. The place had been abandoned for a time, no doubt in preparation for the demolition. But the bones were the same.

There was the ghost of the kitchen table where plates slopped with generic, no-brand mac and cheese had conveyor-belted across the days and nights, a neon orange blur.

I’m trapped here. There’s never enough food.

Here the counter edge Danny shoved Andre into, earning him seven stitches across the forehead.

I don’t want this life. I didn’t ask for it. I didn’t ask for any of it.

And across in the living room, the spot where Papa Z reclined in his armchair, remote in hand, Coors nestled in his crotch.

No one cares. If you don’t exist, then it doesn’t matter, right?

Evan walked over and stepped on the floorboards two feet inside the threshold. Sure enough, they gave off a creak.

He and the boys had done a lot of sneaking in and out of the Pride House Group Home.

Staring at the ragged carpet of the living room, Evan saw a specter of the scene that had played out between these walls so many years ago: the Mystery Man talking to Papa Z about the boys, weighing pros and cons, a chef at a butcher counter. And Evan and the boys spying from down the hall, elbowing and whispering and wondering what the hell it all meant.

In the hall the det cord wrapping an exposed beam in the mold-eaten drywall was a few inches off the stress point. Probably wouldn’t make much of a difference. Next to the gaping hole, the wallpaper seam bubbled out. Evan grabbed a lifted tab and peeled it away, revealing a dagger of the old wallpaper, an awful plaid pattern that Tyrell had christened White Man Pants. Evan stared a moment, the memory vibrating his cells.

Then on down the hall to the bedroom he’d lived in for two and a half years, a submarine-berthing area crammed with bodies. Closing his eyes, he pictured the bunk beds lined side to side like livestock pens.

You should see how they keep us here. Like cattle, all lined up.

He stepped inside the room. It smelled the same — rot, dust, desperation. He crossed to where his mattress used to lie on the floor. The other foster kids would trample him half inadvertently when they hopped out of their bunks. He looked at the ceiling, found the crack that forked into a lightning bolt. The one he’d gaze up at in the dark like it was some kind of wishing star and wonder who he was.

Where are you from?

I don’t know. I don’t remember.

Do you have a family? Parents?

I don’t … I don’t know. It’s been so long.

Machinery revved up outside. A jackhammer screamed into asphalt. Gears clanked, a bulldozer lurching forward, blade lifted like a metal claw.

Will you help me? Will you?

Evan had sworn a promise to his twelve-year-old self: I’ll get to you. Here he was. But what did he want?

The echo of the voice came again: You have to remember me.

He walked to the doorframe. Carved into the wood with Papa Z’s trusty pocketknife were the boys’ height markers. The undertaking had lasted one summer month, until it became clear that given turnover and growth spurts, the notches would chew up the entire jamb.

Evan ran the pads of his fingers over the nicks and the carved initials next to them.

There at the top, the highest by a good six inches, were three letters: CVS.

Charles Van Sciver.

Then Ramón. The others descended in a cluster, the initials overlapping, turning the wood into a crosshatched mess.

Way down at the bottom, as far below the scrum as Van Sciver’s was above, there was a solitary notch.

It has to be you.

Evan had to crouch.

There it was, the E still holding on after the years, though the initial of his original surname had long been effaced.

How small he’d been. He’d known it back then, of course, but he’d never let himself recognize it. He’d been too busy scrapping and fighting for his life, for his sanity, for a way out. He had neither size nor strength, so he’d had to rely on grit and tenacity. Only these he could control. Everything else he had to ball up and cram down deep inside himself.

It has to be you.

That nick, set apart so far below, made it undeniable. His vulnerability. His powerlessness. His loneliness.

What had he hoped for back then? What kind of future had he dreamed of when he’d stared up at the lightning-fork crack in the ceiling? Had it been visions of Wilson Combat 1911 pistols and encrypted virtual private-network tunnels and trauma surgeries to patch himself back together? Drinking vodka at his counter, sharing each night with a wall of herbs and a city view? Sleeping inside a penthouse prison cell of his own making?

He’d been desperate enough to grab the first ticket out. Had he stayed behind, he’d be in prison by now, long dead, or jackaled out from the streets or drugs. Jack Johns had saved his life as surely as when he’d swooped in on that Black Hawk. And yet Evan hadn’t looked back since climbing into Jack’s dark sedan as a scared twelve-year-old kid. Hadn’t reconsidered whether the tooth-and-claw skills that had gotten him out of East Baltimore were still the best ones to carry him forward. When he’d driven off with Jack, the world had yawned open to him like a summer day, but a part of him had been put on pause, as stalled as a stuck DVD.

He fought his way back to that scared little kid, pried open the rusty hatches, and looked at what was locked inside. It was hard to acknowledge, harder yet to feel.

And yet crouching here in a slant of afternoon light filtered through a filthy window, he felt it.

This part he wasn’t very good at.

It has to be you.

He wiped his mouth. His throat felt parched, his voice husky. “Okay,” he said. “I see you.”

On his way out, he adjusted the charge wrapping the beam in the hall.

Standing in the crowd a few minutes later, another anonymous body jockeying for position behind the sawhorses, he watched the building crumble. A slow-motion cascade, all that rot and mold collapsing inward until nothing remained but a heap and a cloud.

You have to come.

I got here, he thought. I promised I would.

One moment he was in the heat of the crowd. The next he was gone.

This part he was good at.