The First Day Read online

  My friendship with Oki continued, grew easily. He was boisterous, large-hearted. His demands were a form of generosity, such was the freedom he carried in himself, which could transform the energy of a room he entered. We went to parties together, met girls, drank—standard college fare—and I watched Oki move from person to person, group to group, with a looseness, an abandon unconcerned of the expectations or opinions of others. I could never manage this ease, much as I envied it, and Oki was abundant enough unto himself not to be troubled by my awkwardness.

  During my first semester Anna came to visit. I hadn’t returned home before my studies began, had continued the sparse, simple life I had lived during the summer, so Anna filled a couple of duffels with the clothes and books I’d left behind and brought them to me. She stayed with her friend who had secured me the gardening job. Even in the sultrier years of my teenage angst, my mother and I had maintained an affection, a humour, fuelled in part at least by our own solitariness, our sense of belonging to no one except each other. So it was easy to return to the routine of eating together in the evenings, trying out the limited restaurants of Troy, accompanied occasionally by Anna’s friend or Oki.

  My mother and Oki liked each other immediately. He’s something else, she said to me, after the first time they met.

  What do you mean? I asked her.

  That swagger, she said. His feet barely touch the ground.

  I laughed.

  I’m sure the girls line up, she said. He reminds me of your father.

  Anna had rarely mentioned Orr in years. She had had a couple of relationships as I grew up, though never anything serious. A handful of men at various stages passed tangentially through my life, barely registering. She did not need them, I suspect. Anna had found in Curran (another married man, Mr Freud?) the confidant she wanted, and sex was bracketed off into another territory, a zone for visiting but not setting up camp. As a teenager, desire growing in me as a forced, unwelcome appetite, I followed her in developing a capacity for keeping it at a remove, turning it from a need to a choice.

  It felt like a betrayal, then, when she told me that she and Curran were now together. His wife had died the year before. Edie. I do not remember her very well, more taken as I always was by Curran himself. I recall her only as always ill, though Anna told me this was not the case. But to me her health was always fraying; I was afraid of her sometimes, her unknown precariousness. She collapsed once while we were at the beach at Murlough. I remember Curran’s panic and my mother’s quiet, steady action: calling an ambulance, setting Edie in the recovery position, holding both her hand and Curran’s, like a Renaissance scene. Anyway, she recovered. But a decade later she died, and between Anna and Curran everything changed. She told me that they had found that the limits of their friendship, once so easy in their clear demarcations, quickly blurred. At first, she said, we did not really know what was happening. I knew I loved him but I did not know I loved him.

  I hated her then. Not, I still believe, out of jealousy for myself, but—how the mighty fall—for my father. I found myself taking his side; or rather representing him, standing in for his side, a side he’d long abandoned. I didn’t complain, or argue with her, but for the remaining few days of her trip I held my affection in check, gave her so little that she was greedy even for a smile. I hated her and I hated myself, and I was strangely satisfied.

  She returned to Belfast after a week. The night before she left she gave a poetry reading in a local bookshop. Her work was now well known, even in the US, and she drew a small crowd, both of students and visitors from nearby—one couple travelled 150 miles all the way from New York. I was there, of course, and Oki too, and despite the antagonism I was nourishing, I experienced the complicated pride and embarrassment of my mother’s minor celebrity. Oki took the piss, kindly in his way, once Anna had gone home. You are a mummy’s boy, he said, laughing, when we met for a drink a few days later. I didn’t know what to say. Oki threw his arm around me. It’s alright, he said.

  I had been waiting for these moments, preparing for them. My self-containment had trained me for Oki; both in the desire I now felt flooding me, unbidden and perhaps, I was not yet sure, unwelcome, but also in my ability to turn myself inward, to transform my emotion into a flat emptiness, alchemy in reverse. I hid, as much from myself as from him. The year passed without articulation, without even a hint emerging in the open space of our interaction, though by the following summer my dreams were haunted by longing, darkened by a greed that was animal, vigorous.

  For the record, I had relationships with a few women, girls really, nineteen, twenty years old, like me, as uncertain of themselves as I was. Any intimacy was always awkward, hesitant, a fumbling towards something never quite reached. Only with one girl, a sophomore from San Diego called Julia, did I find something disrupting, a longing that extended beyond a few weeks. She was dark, swarthy; her skin seemed to change colour every week as the sun dropped on it. Her green, bright eyes moved lightly, quickly. We found a freedom with each other I had never experienced before. She loved my accent, my round vowels as she used to call them, and the way, so she said, I raised my voice at the end of sentences even when they weren’t questions. We laughed together a lot. She was quick to be amused, and it freed me, drew out of me a similar opening to laughter. I was almost surprised at how much I was able to enjoy myself. We were together for most of my second year.

  At the end of the year Oki announced he was returning to Ghana for the summer. His grandmother was old and frail, and he wanted to see her before she died. He invited me to join him. I had agreed already to travel to Central America with Julia. We were going to Guatemala, to Honduras and El Salvador, working on farms to earn our way. I declined Oki’s offer, but it grated on me, and I began to return to Oki in my dreams, dreams that had for a long time been, if not peaceful, at least largely empty of his presence. But it crept back, the palpable, physical sensation of desire; increasingly at night I would awaken, sweating, breathing tightly, and if Julia was with me she would ask what the matter was. I would shake my head, silently, and drink a glass of water as though swallowing poison.

  Oki left for Ghana early in June, and Julia and I for Guatemala shortly after. It was a brutal summer. The heat in Central America was unbearable, and we were staying in small cabins filled with hot, stale air. We did not so much fight, exactly, as exchange our humour for silence; we retreated inward, each to our own dark story. I stopped, after a while, asking about Julia’s feelings, aware that such a concern would open up questions about my own, for which I could not account, even to myself. He was everywhere; as I pulled plants from the ground, or hacked at the crops I was harvesting, I would find a rhythm, and into that rhythm would move Oki. It was not simply an image, a picture that would appear before me, of his face or his body. It was a more visceral, tentative sensation, a spreading; Oki would move along my nerves, push to the edge of my body, as though, as I experienced in one nightmare, I was a host being eaten at from within.

  Julia moved from concern to anger, and began, fairly enough, to push me for reasons for my reticence, my withdrawal. And I had none, had nothing; nothing that made sense. In the end I left early, before we even reached El Salvador. I hitched from the farm we were on, near Olanchito, all the way to San Pedro, riding in the back of pick-ups and station wagons. I sat alone, or occasionally with peasants and farm workers, who offered me cigarettes that I declined. I tried to tease out the various strands of my desire. I thought that by forcing them into words, even words that existed only in my own head, they might become more manageable. The journey took twenty-four hours. The campesinos who sat across from me watched my flat gringo face, my concentration; the kinder ones asked me, in halting English, if I was okay. I nodded, lied. It did not work. There were no words that would stick long enough to the fleeting mess of my sensations, and I lurched from impression to impression, each shaking off my attempt to capture it.

  I flew back to New York, and took the train into the
city. I had nowhere to be, nowhere to go, and thought I might spend a few days there before returning north. I called a friend who lived in the Bronx; he was away for a week, but told me where I could pick up a spare key. I pushed open the front door of his tiny apartment, threw my bag on the bed—the apartment was one room—and left immediately. I wanted to be alone, but I wanted it in company. It was late, the bars closing already. I wandered the streets aimlessly. Music blared from garages; outside them groups of men and women sat talking and smoking. On a sidewalk in front of a rundown tower block I remember an old couple dancing a rhumba, watched by four or five feral-looking children, transfixed utterly. I walked past a tall, gaunt white man talking loudly to himself, semi-coherent. I heard the phrase repeat as I left him behind: you can have anything you don’t want. I felt myself enlarge as I took it all in, my limits swell to include the mayhem of the city. Over the following days I walked it all, miles on miles. I loved the pulsing havoc, the dissonant music of the streets; but found myself drawn again and again into galleries, museums. I had gone on a field trip to the Met during the first year of college, but my experience had been curtailed by the demands of the course, my focus directed. I wanted to see what I would discover if I wandered on instinct. I lingered among the traditional African masks: the stark, bold beauty of the elongated features, their remarkable emotionality, far beyond what I had expected. I loved being able to move from these rooms to the Picassos upstairs, their unashamed theft of the forms and shapes below, their colonial homage, a complication of love and plunder. I sat in a darkened room and watched Resnais and Marker’s astonishing film, Les Statues meurent aussi, still bold and provocative eighty years later. I walked without direction or chronology, and tried to ignore the labels on the artworks, to see what I would be drawn to without prodding, without the cheating of knowledge. I returned repeatedly to a British painting from the early 1800s by Henry Raeburn, an artist I didn’t then know, of three children. One, a young boy, sits awkwardly on a pony, half turned to face the viewer. To the right of the pony, watching the boy, are another boy and a girl, both a little older. They are watching not the viewer, or the painter, but the boy on the pony, and both of their expressions display a subtle concern, as though they are worried about something that cannot be seen, or named, and is certainly not evident anywhere in the painting. The light is soft; the girl’s dress, a draped white chiffon, hangs on her in loose, unfussy folds. She carries a strange rounded basket, opened at the front, but too dark to see inside. I know this painting so well now. I returned to it each time I visited that week, and was almost shocked when it struck me, on my third visit, that what I was seeing felt like my own childhood.

  At the end of the summer I returned to Belfast, my first trip home since leaving for America. Anna and Curran had decided on marriage. It was just over a year from when she’d visited me. I remember calling my father, to ask him if he knew. He didn’t—they weren’t really in touch by then at all—and he gave away nothing when I told him. He lived alone, was still preaching in the same mission hall, though he wasn’t working with the cars any more. He’d moved to a different house once his youngest moved out. He asked me if I was coming back for the wedding. I told him I wasn’t sure. It was a strange conversation; I remember us saying very little but some connection, some sympathy emerging, in both directions. Conspirators in loss.

  You can stay with me if you like, he said. The if you like felt important.

  I did, though. I told Anna I’d be there but that I’d be staying with my father. I know that hurt her. I knew then too, but I couldn’t help myself. She didn’t say anything, didn’t complain, but the gap widened, that extra pause, the tentativeness. They had, I knew, set a date for the end of the summer so that I could be there before term started. It did not incline me towards generosity.

  I flew home at the end of August. I went straight to Orr’s from the airport. His new place was still in east Belfast, less than a mile from where he’d lived before. He’d said it was small, but I hadn’t expected it to be that small, that contained. It almost felt deliberate, that he was trying to prove something to someone, or himself. Still, it looked well—flowers and plants and pictures, clean air and tidy. A woman’s touch, one suspected. He confirmed he had a young Polish cleaner who came in once a fortnight and looked after it.

  I am not as young as I used to be.

  I believe that’s how it works, I said.

  He took me out for a meal on that first evening. I don’t believe we’d ever gone for a meal before. He’d turned up at birthday parties, came to watch me play football a few times; the stuttering articulations of a distant father. But sitting across from him, across a table with a lit candle, felt like an almost unspeakable intimacy. He wasn’t blind then, I should say. He wasn’t yet sixty, his faculties in full motion. He asked me about university, about studying, about women. I answered, loosening up on a beer, two. I found myself wanting to tell him, wanting to share, up to a point. There was a softness in him that had not previously been there, or that I, at any rate, had not noticed. I found myself longing for some kind of affirmation, for an approval, but could not be sure entirely what form that would take, or what satisfaction I would have from it.

  I remember checking my phone when I got home and seeing two missed calls from Oki. As I looked up Orr was watching me.

  I know what that look is, Sam, he said. Call her back.

  The blunt beat of my stupid heart as he climbed the stairs.

  They got married in the countryside, in a converted barn, a kind of picturesque secular church. During the meal I sat on one side of Anna, Curran on the other. I watched people watch us, bemused. Many of them had not seen me before, some hadn’t even known Anna had a child. I hated myself for it, but the self-consciousness ate away at me all evening. It drew me back into myself, into my hurt, my—sure, why not?—disfiguration. I took a taxi back to Orr’s before the party was done. He was still awake, sitting downstairs, reading his bible and listening to Miles Davis. For what felt like the first time all day, I smiled.

  I sat down in a chair opposite and told him I didn’t want to talk. You’d hardly have called Orr sensitive, but there was a generosity in his refusal to get embarrassed or uncertain; he simply sat there, reading on, and I closed my eyes. I do not often remember my dreams, but I remember that night’s. Orr had set a blanket around me, and I woke in the early hours with a taste of blood, metallic, in my mouth, and the image, solitary and unattached, of an animal—a wolf perhaps, something fanged—dead at my feet.

  When I returned to America I couldn’t settle. My everyday life was the same; my mother’s marriage did not change anything concrete, practical. I had talked to her rarely enough in the previous year, and she had not often taken up time in my thoughts. But I realised, even if I could not have articulated it at the time, that she had always been there, a kind of invisible anchor, allowing me a certain freedom of movement without the fear of ever getting truly, dangerously lost. I did not care much for Belfast, and my sense of belonging was sufficiently loose to permit me to settle anywhere; but Anna had been my home, and I felt—I am not naïve to the whinging absurdity—that she was no longer mine. I was newly alone.

  On a Saturday morning four weeks after I returned from Ireland I was in bed reading. Oki barged into the bedroom. It was October, the air cold outside, autumn nudging towards winter. I could look from my window at the season changing, leaves dying into bursts of colour. I had had a number of opportunities to move into a shared house with fellow students, but I loved the view from my window, and the anonymity of the dorms; I was still in the same room I had moved into when I first arrived.

  Get up, Oki said, agitated.

  Nice to see you, Oki.

  Seriously. Stop fucking around. We have to go. Oki was pacing from the door to the window. Those fucking assholes, he said.

  Which ones?

  Come on, he said.

  Oki, I said. Sit down.

  Oki stared at me. Where a
smile would normally break across his face, realising his unnecessary exuberance, a scowl still hung.

  I relented. Where are we going?

  New York. They’re deporting my brother.

  I closed my book, set it down. Why?

  Oki shrugged. I don’t know. That’s what they do.

  What are we going to do? I asked him.

  Oki stopped pacing, stood in the centre of the room. How the fuck do I know? Are you coming?

  I nodded.

  There’s a train in half an hour. I’ll meet you downstairs in five minutes. He grabbed a towel and threw it at me.

  Oki’s brother lived in Harlem, a few blocks from the train station. The train was delayed on the way there, and it was early afternoon by the time we arrived. His apartment was small, cramped; paint cracked on the walls. The smell of Indian food floated through from the apartment next door; the windows seemed porous, the cold air streaming in. Oki and I sat on the two chairs in the kitchen. The table was sticky. Jonathan, Oki’s brother, stood beside his girlfriend, a Dominican woman a couple of years older than him, who introduced herself as Jasmin. She stared at Oki with what seemed utter disdain.

  Jonathan listed off complaints as though memorising for a test. They deprivated me a proper lawyer, he said. They deprivated me a chance to make my case. They deprivated me for no reason.