Speak No Evil Read online

  Meredith has left me alone because I will not give her what she wants, but what about what I want. What do I want? More than anything I want to be home right now with the thermostat high enough that I can feel comfortable in a T-shirt. I want to smell my mother’s chicken-pepper soup, her anti–cold weather charm, but there is no way towards that now.

  Meredith. I hiss her name. In the darkness it feels like soft voices are more appropriate. I creep along the landing trying to feel my way while the house clicks and cracks as it settles around me. I am cold and tense partly because the joke that the black guy always dies first seems too real in the middle of this rapidly accelerating horror show. Meredith, where are you? I try each of the doorknobs I pass as I make my way towards another set of stairs. They open into a bedroom, a study and a bathroom, all empty. I move slowly because it’s entirely within Meredith’s character to play a practical joke by hiding behind a bed or a door to scare me. She has a harsh sense of humor, especially in difficult situations. Sometimes it makes things better but mostly it just creates more tension. (I’m misunderstood, she likes to say. No, you’re just an asshole, I tell her.) Dude. It’s not funny anymore. This isn’t cool, I say.

  I hear a sniffle behind me and spin around. The landing is still empty. I’m not trying to be funny, she says, but I still can’t see anyone. I follow her voice back toward the stairs up to the guest room, feeling along the wall with my fingertips. There are no knobs or handles but my fingers touch a seam in the drywall. Where are you, I whisper. Meredith coughs. It’s really cold out here and I think you have my shirt, I say. Fuck your shirt, she says, but I hear rustling through the wall. I’m not playing, Meredith. Neither am I. I shiver and rub my arms. What if her parents come back to find a half-naked black man standing in the middle of their upstairs hallway. This kind of thing never ends well for the black man, no matter how innocent. I really should have driven home. Any accident could not have been more of a wreck than this evening.

  Meredith groans. I don’t get it, you keep rejecting me, she says. She sniffles again as she works herself into sobs. I try to swallow but I can’t. Meredith, it’s not—I can’t continue because I don’t know what to say. I wish for a steady voice, for some of OJ’s confidence, my father’s single-mindedness, my mother’s calm. I pinch my arms and dig my nails into my own skin and scratch. The burning is relief, the pain a welcome distraction. Is it my face, she whimpers. No. You don’t like my body? No. I’m not cool enough for you? I bring my palm to my mouth and bite down against the fleshy pad of my thumb. I raise my knuckles to my lips. I’m not black enough? No. Is it my lack of booty? Meredith manages a chuckle. No, I say. Well what the fuck is wrong with me then?

  I’ve asked myself the very same question since that first time something felt different when I wrestled with Zhou, my next-door neighbor, until his father got a job with an aerospace company in San Diego. We threw each other to the carpets and lay down on each other. I felt Zhou’s breath against my face and neck. His chest moved against my chest and it felt nice with our legs tangled together.

  Because boys aren’t supposed to like other boys, my mother said to me when I asked what the pastor meant when he said America was living under the shadow of that abomination, homosexuality. But OJ likes boys and I like Zhou, I said. Abeg, leave that thing, my mother said. She only ever speaks pidgin when she’s surprised or angry. Otherwise she sounds faintly British. She fidgeted in the driver’s seat and turned up the radio so I knew she didn’t want to talk. She said, God said man is for woman and woman is for man. That’s how it’s supposed to be. And God was always right; so I decided I would only like girls even if I could feel that I liked looking at them less than I should. I didn’t watch the porn my classmates shared on their phones in the hallways before class or sitting on the lawn in front of the Cathedral. At home, I would watch women with women and men with women on my phone, trying only to focus on the women as I touched myself. But those men, their bodies, their sounds. I wanted to gouge out my eyes. Sometimes I asked God for deliverance. Sometimes I held my own breath and circled my hands around my throat and squeezed until they grew tired and I coughed saliva over my lips and onto my chin. Sometimes I cried. When my mother asked me what was wrong I said homework. She never probed any further. Sometimes when Meredith touched me, when she circled her arms around my neck or pinched my butt, I felt something, but never very strong or for very long.

  There is nothing wrong with you, I say into the darkness. I slump against the wall and slide to the floor. I say, Meredith, I think—I’m gay. She slides the door back and thrusts her head out from the closet. She has wrapped herself in a blanket and her hair covers her face. She says, what?

  She stretches an arm out from the darkness and lets it fall. Then she emerges and envelops me fully in her blanket. She holds me as she murmurs, I’m right here. She says, I’m with you. I start to cry. I’m overwhelmed by the sound of my own pain. She tries to slow things down the way our track coaches slow us down. Count your breaths, Niru, she says. Follow my voice, Niru. I follow for a moment, but my thoughts are strong and I choke on a mixture of relief, embarrassment, and fear. She pulls me closer and rocks with me. She drapes an arm over me and clasps my hand. She says, I’ll always be here. I say, what do we do now?

  2

  I’m late, the kind of late that suggests I have no regard for the emotional health of my Nigerian parents who probably think I’ve been kidnapped by the enemies of progress. To make matters worse, I still can’t find my phone so there is no way to call home and offer excuses. They will worry in their own ways, my mother sunk down in her red lounge chair trying to focus on patient charts or a medical textbook in her lap, nodding in and out of sleep, my father at the kitchen table staring with disinterest at whatever food she has set in front of him. But my problem is that they’re worrying at all and that never ends well. For all the years they’ve lived abroad, they are still so very Nigerian. I can sometimes see the mental strain on their faces when they try to assimilate to some of the more grating aspects of American life. My father doesn’t understand the desire to “hang out.” What are you “hanging” from, my friend, he says. Do you think that Apple man made his money by hanging out, talkless of Bill Gates. My father thinks the safest place for a man to be, especially in America, is inside his own house. He relishes coming home and as soon as he enters our kitchen through the garage door, his anger and stress fall away. He takes off his tie and tosses it on the counter before he grabs a beer from the fridge, and then he is calm. You don’t disrupt this routine without profound negative consequences. My not being home will disrupt this routine yet again, especially since I couldn’t come home for two days during the blizzard, and for the first twelve hours, my parents couldn’t reach me after my phone died and the power went out. This is not good.

  My own routines have been completely busted since I spoke my truth, as Meredith now calls it. I can’t seem to remember anything. My body and brain feel numb. At night I lie awake staring at shadows that float across my ceiling. In the mornings, I forget to take out the trash and then I forget to bring the bins back up the driveway when I come home at the end of the day. Is everything okay, my mother has asked me and I’ve mumbled back, yeah I’m fine, but I can tell she doesn’t believe me. She’s decided to give me some watchful space because she’s a very perceptive woman. She says it comes from having to communicate with the barely verbal and nonverbal children, unwilling teenagers, and frantic parents she sees every day at her practice. She also says she’s a woman, that she knows things.

  Do you think people can tell I’ve changed, I’ve asked Meredith over and over again, before class, after class, in our Snapchats long after we’ve gone home. Do you think they know, I asked her one afternoon as we sat in our special place beneath the buttress. It was still too cold to be outside, but the start of track season meant the unofficial start of spring where people believe acting like the world is warm will suddenly make the world warm. She asked, has anyone said
anything to you? No one had said a word to me, but that was almost beside the point. You need an outlet, Meredith said and plucked a blade of grass from the ground.

  The new track season also meant a return to the crowded locker room full of half-naked boys and their banter, their bodies. I’m no stranger to locker room antics, hiding clothes, shower wrestling, pantsing people, twisting nipples. I know that someone will slap or grab my ass and pretend to ride me. Now, I don’t know how I’ll respond, or if that response will be involuntary, and that scares me.

  But you’ve probably always been gay and if no one has said anything for the last eighteen years then why would they say anything now, Meredith said. It just feels different now, Meredith. Before I said it out loud, I could pretend I didn’t know, I said, but speaking the words out loud, I feel like I’ve let something loose that I can’t control. You definitely need an outlet, she said, if only so you’ll stop asking me the same question over and over again, and she tossed me my phone. The lock screen was filled with Grindr alerts and Tinder notifications. What the fuck did you do, I asked as I fumbled the catch and it dropped to the grass. You’re welcome, Meredith said. You forgot your phone in Ms. McConnell’s class, I just took the liberty to install a couple apps. You can delete them if you want, or you can check it out—it can’t hurt, can it? She crossed her arms and stared into one of the halogen lights buzzing in its casing. I slipped the phone into my pocket. Come on, I said, we’re late for practice.

  At a stoplight, I rummage through a stack of old papers and cassette tapes in the glove box. I sweep my hand between the seats but feel only years of crumbs and old popcorn kernels in the creases. They stick beneath my fingernails, a testament to the earlier days when my mother used to drive OJ and me to school. She likes Volvos because her mother liked Volvos and because they are safe. OJ drove this car before he went to college and now I drive it. I’m forced to burn my music onto CDs because there’s no tape deck and it doesn’t have an auxiliary-cable port. Meredith calls the cracked black leather seats distressed. I dream of a BMW. I slam the glove box closed and try to breathe against a growing panic. I was late to class because I searched this car for fifteen minutes looking for my phone. It’s now a liability and has been from the moment I didn’t delete the apps Meredith installed. More important, I need it now to call and broker peace with my parents, but it’s nowhere to be seen.

  You can just delete them, Meredith said as we sat in my car after practice. But I’ve always been curious and there is also desire. I looked at my phone and felt the tingling creep, the stiffness rising. Pick someone for me, I said. So she swiped and tapped and picked Ryan with his short twists and aggressively attractive bleach-white smile. His profile pictures showed him suspended in various forms of dance, in various stages of undress above the caption Movement Is Life. Oh match, she squealed, see it’s easy. Now all you have to do is go.

  Ryan’s avatar texted me the next day: we can have coffee and then whatever. I texted back, sure, completely uncertain of what I’d just done. Coffee I understood, but the whatever rattled around my head. The word sounded so much like the “whatever” Reverend Olumide railed against from the pulpit on Sundays. You have kids saying whatever, doing whatever, whatever whatever. And then they have boyfriends or babies. Yes. They find themselves experimenting with lesbianism and homosexuality and all manner of unclean things.

  I am not unclean, I say aloud as I barrel down Sixteenth Street, but I’m not convinced. I haven’t done anything yet, I say to myself, I ran away from doing something. Temptation must always come, Reverend Olumide says almost every service. Sin will never go away, he shouts, it’s for you not to go toward it. I pick up speed. It’s late enough that traffic is light and the remaining cars move freely. I pass our church and its stone lions out in front of the entrance, then the Carter Barron amphitheater nestled inside the woods of Rock Creek Park. There are fewer lights up ahead so I press down on the gas.

  Maybe you forgot it at home, Meredith said as we walked down to the track earlier that afternoon. Our warm-up pants swished with each step and a gray sky threatened rain. At lunch I looked around at all the track team members silently praying for thunderstorms while we ate salads in advance of the season’s first speed workout. I hadn’t eaten much because of the workout, but also because of nervousness. Ryan’s text beneath his smiling face flickered before me, coffee and whatever. I’m actually going to do this. Niru is actually going to do this, I repeated to myself. And why not? It was just a quick meetup, coffee after practice and then home. There wasn’t going to be any time for whatever. I didn’t forget it, I said. I could swear I had it with me this morning when I got in the car. Maybe it’s a sign, maybe I’m not supposed to go. What if it’s like God’s way of telling me that he’s a serial killer, or he has AIDS? Because the probability of both of those things is so high, Meredith said. Reverend Olumide would say so. Or you could just go and see what happens, Meredith said.

  I felt completely unclean by the time I stopped the car at Fourteenth and U. I couldn’t shower after practice so I was conscious of my own smell as I watched the yuppies trooping home from the Metro station. They hurried past the homeless men with their bags and shopping carts and avoided the puddles collecting in the potholes and dips at the intersection. I don’t have to do this, I told myself. I don’t have to sit behind those rain-streaked windows with my fingers inches away from another man’s fingers and the threat of whatever hanging between us. I could still go back. I could still repackage whatever had been let loose by my telling Meredith and go home to an uncomplicated life with my Harvard early admission and two proud parents. I could go to church on Sunday and beg forgiveness for this temporary submission to wayward thoughts and for the strength to resist the ever-present temptation. No one would know. It wouldn’t be cowardice. It wouldn’t be running away. It would be the textbook example of taking the hard right over the easy wrong. I rummaged around the driver’s side pocket. The right thing to do would have been to send a text bowing out: I’m so sorry, my car broke down. Then I could delete the app and forget the last few weeks—except that my body wouldn’t let me leave. I watched the entrance to the café from across the street where a flow of young and attractive men arm in arm with women in their skinny jeans and high heels, even in this rain, streamed in and out. I should have this too, I thought.

  I saw Ryan walk up the block. He was shorter than I expected, but he moved with real confidence. He bounced through each step, presumably to the rhythm of the song playing through large red headphones straddling his head. I gripped the wheel. My skin buzzed. If only whatever could happen without any impact on the rest of my life, but that’s why we dream. I started the car.

  Now I pass houses on Sixteenth Street that sit quietly, softly lit in the night. My parents considered living in this area when they first moved to Washington, in one of these affordable large brick homes surrounded by other black faces, near other black families with black kids also enrolled in the city’s private schools. My mother would have been closer to Children’s Hospital, where she has admitting privileges, and she liked the idea of a larger connected community. But my father wanted more space, and more prestige. My father likes to say that he lives in the same neighborhood as Ted Koppel. He likes the seclusion and the horse trails separating the properties. It drives me crazy because it means I have to get up that much earlier to beat slow drivers on the scenic single-lane roads. Normally it means fighting the same people who don’t want to get home after work. But at this time of night, I can fly down the stretches of road between speed cameras to make up time.

  My rearview mirror flashes with light from another car’s high beams and then the darkness behind me pulses with red and blue lights. Shit, I yell, fuck me. There’s no escaping this, not at twenty-five miles over the speed limit, after rush hour with fewer cars on the road. One of my classmates likes to brag about how he outsmarted the police after running a red light on the way home from a party over the weekend. He was going
too fast for even the police to catch up and turned onto the first available side street into the first available driveway then quickly turned off his car. The police drove right by. But George Gilvert Monson Jr. has blond hair, blue eyes and a wealthy father who can afford his foolishness. I only have a wealthy father who won’t subsidize mine.

  I pull to the shoulder, turn on my overhead lights and place my hands on the steering wheel. Never take your hands off that wheel OJ said to me last Thanksgiving when he was stopped while driving my father’s Range Rover on the way to buy extra chicken for my mother’s pepper soup. Three police cars pulled into the Safeway parking lot as he tried to get into the car. They approached him with their weapons out and made him lie face-down on the wet ground while they cuffed him in front of everybody. OJ said that if our next-door neighbor hadn’t walked by, he’s sure that he’d have been in jail or maybe dead. But also, I kept my hands visible, he said. Always keep your hands in sight. They told him just before they left that someone had called to describe a black man trying to boost luxury cars from the village parking lot. In broad daylight, on Thanksgiving? Well you never know, the police said.

  Stay calm I tell myself. Breathe easy. Breathe slow. My hands tremble as I watch a black officer approach through the rearview mirror. A white officer approaches from the passenger side. Evening son, I’m Officer Williams, I’ll need to see your license and registration, the officer says. His white partner at the passenger door crosses his arms over his chest. I’m so sorry officer, I say. I know I was speeding, I’m just really late getting home. Well you might be a little bit later, he says. Your license and registration. My license is in my wallet which is in my sports bag which is in the trunk where I tossed it after practice. Your license and registration young man. I open the door and it bumps the officer. He steps backwards. The white officer raises his head, but his eyes are bored. He picks at his fingernails while looking through the passenger window. Son, what are you doing, Officer Williams says, can you please put your hands back on the wheel? I put my hands on the wheel. I’m really sorry, I say. My license is in my bag, in the trunk. Officer Green, you can step back from the vehicle please, Officer Williams says. Young man, I want you to take the keys out of your ignition and toss them out the window, can you do that for me. My keys jangle as they hit the ground. Now you can open your door from the outside, I want to see your hands. Keep them visible for me as you exit your vehicle. I push open the door with my foot and step onto the wet asphalt. The air smells of wet leaves and damp earth. I squint against the headlights of the police car. Officer Williams says, Now I’m going to hand you these keys and you can open your trunk nice and slowly for me. I pop my trunk open. My backpack sits atop a mess of empty CD cases and used towels that I meant to wash weeks ago. I reach for my bag. Can I take it out, I ask. Slowly, he says. I remove my wallet and hand my license to the officer. You can shut the trunk, he says, go back and sit in your car.