A Love Like Blood (13 page)

R
acing up the stairs, I stumble, catch the rail, and break into laughter. Something within my body has changed. Everywhere, all at once, I'm buzzing. My feet banging against the steps give the buzzing a sound. The knotted muscles in my arms that disable me relax. My arms wave like a piñata in the wind. To ground myself, I slap the rail as I run. Wham, the wood vibrates. I feel invincible. With each wobble of the stairs, I gain a newborn confidence. I know how to hurt him back: through a more cruel form of violence. And, where it'll hurt him the worst, in his mouth.

On the street, I notice a blonde wearing a skirt suit, staring up at me. A question is on her lips. Whatever it is, it doesn't matter. She looks terrified.

I rush into the warmth of the storage room and smash my hand over my mouth, smothering the boom in my laughter. My hand smells like dry earth. I laugh louder looking at the shoe prints on the car from the upstairs window. I count thirty. Stomp marks, dents, exposed metal, power, and hunger displayed for the world. I press harder. Even though I want Father to hear me laughing downstairs, he can't hear me now. Although, seeing his nose scrunched up, would be more exciting than Brett's raised eyebrow and open mouth. I could lie, and tell him I'll marry my ex-girlfriend to spread out in the passenger seat the day his car jerks, possessed with the demon of urine. At that beautiful moment, I could reveal I ruined his payment. And after he rammed my head into the glove compartment, my self-hatred would liquefy and bleed out. I would endure everything he had, punches, elbows, teeth, spit, and insults to show him I'm strong. Then, when his body sunk into his seat, I'd crack him in the chest and listen to his power hiss out.

In my palm, goo drips; blood from a splinter I find. It must've come from the rail. I dig it out with my nails and place it on the windowsill. A thread of blood curls away from the splinter. I close the window, in front of me, and then the rest. When Father's jaw drops seeing the stomp marks, he won't see the open windows and run up here. I hear a chattering noise from the back of the room and stare through the glass. My Father glares back at me. The floor squeaks as I spin around. However, Father isn't standing anywhere in the room. I freeze, listening for footsteps from downstairs. Fifteen seconds. Forty seconds. Five minutes. There's only silence. I turn back to the window, and there he is. Is it possible that a chemical process occurred in my body? My eyes, my nose, my skin color, are his. I hold up my hands, and his hands become my hands. Palm creases and veins rearrange themselves. Moles form on my hand in the same place where they are on his hand. A second thumb appears. My calves tingle. I yank my pants down. Fine black hairs spring up from my knees down to my ankles. Together, we, my father and I, bring a third body into the world. Carsten Reed Tynes is born out of memory and blood, immaculate. Carsten Reed Tynes' specialty is violence: fists and rocks and crosses and sticks. His eyes, our eyes, are bloodshot. Beside my bloodshot eyes, there is a red streak on the window. I step right so that the streak hovers over my face. The high I feel fades watching myself distorted in the glass. There is an irrepressible anger inside my body waiting to turn me into a Tynes man. As pleasurable as it was destroying Father's car, I cannot transform into him, the way he transformed into Grandfather. Grandfather's violence is as talked about in our family's village in Somalia as legendary folktales.

In the window's reflection, behind the third body, is the room. The room, a perfect rectangle, has silences where furniture used to be. Before we dumped it, the room had an identity. They were in the world, and of the world, and now are closer to the materials they had been. Scooping my hand under the collar of my shirt, I pull it over my head and kick off my pants. The chattering continues, then I hear running water. Something flashes in the glass. Through the window, I stare at my face, hands, skin, and body. A heaviness washes over me; it vibrates the room. I'm light-headed. The ground beneath seems to be a window. I lean against the wall.

A blond teenager bites into a croissant sandwich on the street. The white paper bag, tucked under his armpit, reads Havington, in gold lettering. White stuccoed and dangerous, Havington is a froufrou delicatessen on the corner of Main and Beverly Road. For the cost of a croissant, a person living on the street could feast for four days. I wondered where were the homeless when Father and I toured downtown months ago. In Chicago, homeless people are downtown's unofficial ambassadors. Ambassadors buzz around and swoop down on lost tourists to direct them in the appropriate direction, for a donation, of course. Looking at the teenager, I realize being homeless in a moneyed neighborhood is equivalent to laying down a glue trap for mice and lying down in the glue. Hunger is not the scariest part of homelessness; being snatched from the place where a person has rooted himself is. What if kicking Father's car causes him to catch me tonight? As I ask myself that while watching the boy, my stomach growls.

Betray your mistress, I tell myself.

My imagined mentor, Avedon, would work from the start of the day to the fall of the blue hour shooting countless rolls of film, for one dramatic photograph.

“Stopping to eat even a morsel is a distraction,” Avedon told
American Photo
magazine in an interview previewing his exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1978. That issue, with his black and white photograph of Sophia Loren on the cover, is one item I wish I could've packed. Avedon continued the interview saying, “I believe that you have to love your work so much that it is all you want to do. I believe you must betray your mistress for your work, you betray your wife for your work. And, she must betray you for her work. I believe work is the one thing in the world that never betrays you. That lasts.”

Father demanded that I memorize Avedon's quote until the words became imprinted behind my eye, and I could picture the quote upside down, when I looked at the world behind the viewfinder. He called it training, seeing the real world as upside down and seeing the world in front of my camera as corrected. I like to think that Richard Avedon was speaking through my father.

“Stopping to eat,” I would hear Father say on shoots.

Those words are powerful.

“Even a morsel,” I say watching the teenager disappear.

My suitcase shows its inner contents: neatly refolded clothing around camera equipment. Inspired, I reach down, grabbing the long focus lens, and firmly screw it into my Nikon's mount. I turn the lens clockwise, and when it stops, I give it an extra twist. Then I open the window in front of me. Anger, fear, and hunger are equally important to a photographer as an understanding of light; they can ignite the creative spark.

With the lens tightened, I point the camera out the window. I repeat Avedon's trance-like words and take deliberate pictures of the street, changing out film rolls until the blue hour turns coal black, and I hear my father scream.

T
he distance of Father's car complicates the photograph I want. A traffic light casts its color onto a puddle. The car appears to be bleeding from its injuries. With my lens held out the window, I hope the camera captures what I'm after – evidence. The undeniable proof will enhance the picture in my head. Like how children wake from a dream and make-believe, it will be new again. The taillights vanish down the street, and I'm alone with my delight. I wallow in it, forming it into a physical object, then push it in my hand. I squeeze it and spit on the floor. The fluid sticks to the bottom of my feet.

After half an hour, the feeling flips and forms into heaviness. Junior would punch me in the arm while Brett would kiss me hearing I kicked in the car. Their absence increases the heaviness in my head. My body becomes weighted with stones as I slide down the wall.

Around the room, fingernail-like scratches expose layers of paint. A creamy prime coat covers up yellow paint, gray paint, and white paint. Paint chips dazzle the floor. Light from the double-headed lamppost illuminates where the previous owners positioned the posters. Those sections of the wall are brighter from being untouched by sunlight. The corners of the multicolored paper are stuck in time, between the forties and nineties, by heavy-duty staples and tape. I crumple up my shirt and pull two shirts from my suitcase. Placing the shirts behind my head, I practice how I'll tell Junior and Brett about the car and the pictures.
The urine was golden
, I'll start with and I'll end with
running up the stairs
, but instead of running I'll
walk up
the stairs. Walking sounds gutsier.

In the silence, I listen to myself, then I ask questions of myself. Then, I practice talking to myself out loud to become accustomed to how it feels. The words are masculine and massive, much larger than I anticipated. I know what a person says is the mirror to their soul, so I feminize the words, saying them slower and closer to the truth. The truth will lead me to the light. An innocuous humming from the street peels my back from the wall. Listening with intent, I move the mechanical noise into my body, holding on to it, and an unexplainable sorrow enters my bones. Bones in my back, wrist, and legs crack. Even though the room is spacious, the conditions feel coffin-like, cramped and permanent. In Somalia, there is a saying that sorrow is like azuki beans from the market. Take a bowlful a day, and it will come to a delicious end at last. Slipping down the wall, with my shoulders close to touching the carpet of dust, I close my eyes to eliminate a bowlful and fall back asleep.

Hammering outside jerks me awake. A sound like a baritone dolphin whistle reverberates in between the hand pounding. Brett's watch, on my wrist, reveals the time is three thirty in the morning.

“Carsten, open the door,” Father yells.

The other way out of the storage room is through a window. Jumping from the second floor could be fatal. However, if Father is banging, then Junior swiped his key. Splitting the door open is the only way he will wrap his eleven fingers around my throat. Though a locked door has not stopped him before.

“Open it,” Father yells.

My legs tingle. I snatch the knife from inside the suitcase in preparation for his heel to kick in the door. The weakest part is its lightweight frame. Wood even speaks its own language. I press the bar on the handle and unlock the serrated blade. Gripping the knife tightly, I ram the blade in the air, practicing the movement, to allow it to become part of my body. Short and fast swats. The knife becomes my camera. Across my eyes, images from the other side of the door form. His hands, his position, his posture, they are separate images and critical to my safety.

“It's your brother,” the voice says.

As I peek through the crack, hiding the knife behind my back, Junior yells, “Reed came home cursing like a madman. Finally, you grew some balls.”

“It felt great.”

“I knew you had it in you. You're just like Reed.”

“No, I'm not.”

“Yes, you are. You can't let him know you're up here. I brought you a flashlight and my sleeping bag.” Then, from under his arm, he snatches a hidden bag of chips and says, “It ain't easy being cheesy.”

Smiling, the way our father smiles, he shows the gap between his teeth on the side of his mouth. I never acknowledge the missing tooth, because that might remind him how it came out and why I have it in my pocket. Along with it, in my pocket, I have mother's Bobby pin, her wedding band, and the coin that bookmarked a page in her Bible. The love I felt for my brother, as he shielded me from Father, multiplies and overwhelms me now, and I cry. From age five, I assumed Junior despised me for being the opposite of him. Perhaps aggression was his way of expressing love, but his idea of brotherhood was turned on its head and trapped in a chokehold. Although when we were younger, chokeholds were received as frequently as a late breakfast from our Father. And from our Father, we are floating, but it's the brilliance of the morning sun that reminds us Father is predictable. He arrives at eight in the morning every day to work. We hug and don't look at each other as we say goodbye in Somali. The brave interested in speaking Somali also have to understand poetry. Allusion, proverbs, and rhyme pepper the language. So our goodbye wasn't goodbye; it was a flower wrapped in its bulb, like a root-vegetable and thrust into the light. The light will linger a little longer today. Then, I won't be as lonely.

Standing, hunched over the window, I watch Junior's car vanish in the opposite direction Father drove. Across the street, multiple flyers that create a single dollar sign flap in the wind. Five minutes later, Father's car cries like a donkey begging for sugar beets and parks in front at eight o'clock. Then, under my feet, I hear splat, something hefty thrown in the studio, followed by
fuck
, and I smile.

T
he seeing eye Labrador, stuffed under my seat, licks the back of my ankle. Jolted, I swing my foot forward. Blonde hairs are stuck to the vinyl floor. Dried pop has shaped a spider web of sugar. The dog's owner, an elderly blonde, mumbles something that sounds like Russian. Her gold chain necklace has a babushka doll pendant with stripes and swirls of color. The Styrofoam container, in a plastic bag on the seat beside her, reeks of horseradish. Or maybe it's on her breath. All the Russian students in Chicago smelled like horseradish. My sambusa lunches tasted richer with their borscht, lamb shashlik, cabbage pirozhki, or rolled pancakes with fruit jam. My stomach growls. Would she know if I took her bag?

The bus stops at a boarded up building with a mural of an underwater world. The sun, painted lime green and in flames, is the focal point. Multicolored mermaids, bearded mermen, imaginary creatures, and decomposing flowers contrast the sun. The color mixing, shading, and layering creates a photographic image. It looks staged, shot underwater, blown up, and wheat-pasted. I yank the hanging cord gawking at one of the mermen. The stop requested sign glows.

Like Brett, he has soft features but is otherwise unfeminine. The light brown hair and eyebrows and dark eyes look exactly right. In his lips, there is the beginning of a smile. The delicate mouth highlights the prominent nose. Standing behind cameras, pushes photographers to notice eyes, noses, and mouths more than other people. Jewel-toned scales plunge down his fin and spreading tail. The algae-covered rock he sits on accentuates their brilliance. I adjust my camera to prevent overexposure to the picture from the morning sun. Given distance, I realize telling the truth is like taking a picture. Through the lens, the photographer has to find meaning, something necessary to share. Being behind a camera, helped me avoid telling my father I wanted to be with a man. It became easier dealing with what was in my camera lens, than what was in front of me in life. I was afraid. Fear was just as much a part of me as a scar. The shame I covered the scar with was a cocoon, and I became my fear. In my bedroom, I'd stare up at the ceiling, wishing I could remake myself into what a man should be, but what makes a man? Not being female. Having a penis. Testosterone. Thick body hair. Being a copy of the Marlboro Man. Aggression. Presence in a crowded room. An absence of fear. I don't know how to define being a man. However, I do know I want to be a man who isn't afraid to share who he is. There are all kinds of fear. Having to cross out an entire part of your life with a grease pencil, may be the worst kind.

Someone graffitied a French fry carton on a trash bin in front of the building. The carton has a protruding stomach. A miniature fry, drenched in ketchup, is falling from its lips. The fries are knife-shaped. For me, yellow and taste are married. The potatoes in sambusa are saffron. Ripe plantains are brownish-yellow, dappled with black, and ready to fry. Sweet tulumba is the color of burnt sugar. Blended mango juice, with milk, yogurt, and sugar, is more chartreuse than orange. My favorite foods are yellow. Hunger pangs force my feet to follow meat cooking in the opposite direction from the DIA. The scent intensifies. On the sidewalk, yellows become bolder than other colors: the cheese in a window display, the words in junk food wrappers, and the hair on a spray painted bombshell. At the cross street, 6
th
, a hot dog seller set up an elaborate stand with a dog-shaped counter. The position of the grill places his back to the customers. Four rickety tables with foldable chairs are beside the stand. Two blond businessmen wearing black suits sit at one table eating hot dogs. A blonde sitting facing the street looks as if she is waiting for hers. The seller rolls a bacon-wrapped dog through onions, green peppers, and a chili. A clock-sized sign, with neon dots circling around blackness, reads one hundred percent beef. The seller places a paper food tray with the dog and fries on the counter. He pushes a service bell, pushes the bell again, and then removes an uncooked dog from a lower compartment. When the woman remains seated, I realize the food belongs to the man on the payphone nearby.

A liquor bottle shakes on top of the payphone as he leans against it. He yells in Spanish into the phone. His outfit clashes with the Detroit heat: black skullcap, camouflage army jacket, and camouflage pants. The materials look thick. The slower I walk, the less Spanish I recognize. The man is not speaking Latin American Spanish or Caribbean Spanish. When we learn to speak, we are translating. I try translating what he's saying, but hunger drags me further away.

While watching the redness in his neck, I snatch his food then smash my body into a pillar, six buildings down from the stand. I peel off the soggy bacon before devouring the dog. Juice drips from the bacon to the sidewalk. I drop it and peek from behind my hiding place. The way the concrete juts out, I can only see from the counter to the sidewalk. The terrifying man isn't lurking there or on the opposite side of the street, but I'm not worried about him. I'm more worried about the woman. I watch her as I shove fries in my mouth. Faintly, I hear the bell ring and the hot dog seller sets another tray on the counter.

Klunk, I hear close by and drop the fries. I see the man searching for the thief down the street. He hits a trashcan with a pipe and disappears, but I hear the destruction of metal on metal.

As I run in the opposite direction, the banging stops. Black letters C, A, M, and E on a marquee slow my steps. R and A follow, and then store, and my feet stop altogether. His face does not appear when I look for him. Through the thick graffiti on the window, the world inside looks antique, like a snow globe turned over, and fifty years of stillness has fallen. The front door, covered with wood planks, is nailed tight. I run into the side alley to check for another entrance. At first unrecognizable, I realize the back door has been painted the same dark red as the entire side of the building and then graffitied over. Feeling the door, I figure out it has a wood frame, and it swings toward the inside of the store. I kick the door three times, focusing on the tiny space below the doorknob. Whack, the frame splinters. I kick it again, and the store welcomes me inside.

Peeling paint and plaster and pieces of the cottage cheese ceiling cover the floor. On other sections, it appears as if loaves of moldy bread were ground to crumbs then tossed down for dead pigeons. The crumbs are the color as maggots. At my feet, I see pigeon droppings, white bird feathers, beetle carcasses, and decades of decay. A pillbug crawls out of a square-shaped object. The storefront has built-in shelves on each wall and four display cases. Two cases, closer to the window, are like a broken V with a ten-foot gap in-between them. In the center, sits a waist-high circular case. A longer case is in the back, where the cash register would've been. On the top, propped up, there is a face that haunts me. It is Richard Avedon's photograph of Marian Anderson. Even caked in dust I hear her singing. Dried oak leaves, a wooden box, a golf ball-shaped mineral, a brass candleholder, and a glass bowl are beside her. The arrangement of the items suggests it is an altar. A puckered sign, written in black marker, and taped to the back wall reads, “Do Not Enter Area.” The sign reminds me of religious spaces, where only religious leaders are allowed to enter. The sign is a warning. Through time and abandonment, the entire store has become sacred. Air, water, dust, and cobwebs have magnified its preciousness. I trace the shape of a cross on my body. In my left pocket, I fish around finding: keys, tape, lens cap, shower cap, change, knife, and film canister. I grab the canister, kiss it, and add it to the altar. It has a thin strip of correction fluid. The cracked white material has the same innocent appearance as the datura flower. My ancestors in Cuba used it for centuries to induce visionary dreams to reveal the roots of misfortune. The first museum in the town, where my mother's family is from, was a church. Churches can be museums, and museums can be churches. The sign, “Do Not Enter Area” could read, “Do Not Touch The Exhibit.” This space could be both a museum of death and a cathedral of life everlasting. I feel safe here.

I try to imagine how the shelves would have looked alive with Nikons, Canons, Minoltas, Leicas, Yashicas, and Fujis. What the skin of the camera bodies would feel like to my fingers? I would wait in wonder for the morning light to open and know one would sell. The saddest image for a photographer to see has to be an abandoned camera store.

My foot brushes against something spongy. Pictures printed on postcards overflow out of the box beside the case. I tap the bottom. A clump of slimy mush and a second Marian slip into dust. As I flip through the familiar McCurrys, Langes, Evans, Erwitts, Adams, and Halsmans, my camera bag tilts. My business cards spill. I caught the bus to pass them out at the DIA – in hopes of making money.

Behind me, the door creaks open. The wind, I assume. More light tiptoes inside. A black flash on the side of my face turns into camouflage pants. Tall and lanky, scraggly dark hairs from the terrifying man's mustache curl down to his upper lip. His crooked nose has a pronounced bump in the middle. A shadow across his eyes forces his face into a permanent scowl.

“You stole from me,” he yells in a thick accent. Then he smashes his pipe against the display case. “Now I'm going to steal from you. Give me your camera.”

I yell, “no,” matching his rage and run behind the case.

“Give it to me. Or I'll kill you,” he yells. The man slams the pipe against the glass and glass shatters.

Shoving the camera into my bag, I zip it closed and step backward. I feel the wall. He runs toward me, but the face I see is of my father.