The Entropy of Bones Read online

  I danced. Like I was a kid again, like I had the security of knowing my pirate future. Like I was ready to break the memory of bones, I danced. The DJs spun just for me and folks cleared floor space to let me work it out, or maybe that was just how it felt.

  When I stopped to drink water, piss-drunk man-boys came close. Once they looked in my eyes they gained distance. I don’t think they wanted me. After they pulled down the speakers at two in the morning, I left. But I knew I’d be back.

  Now I had a pattern that resembled a life. Training daily, fifty-mile run or thirty-mile swim every other day, and clubbing Thursday through Sunday. Two months into it and I’m at 330 Ritch, a club that looks more like a cathedral than a dance space. I look past the Filipino homeboys, the black hipsters, and the white dreads to the DJ. He was one of those slight looking Latinos with a dirt trail of facial hair on his upper lip. He rocked an old school Eek-a-Mouse yellow T-shirt and had mini flashlights attached to the arms of his glasses, one casting blue light, another red. Another DJ might have been able to carry the look, but the constant head movement conveyed insecurity more than anything. His beats were tight, if a bit academic, mixing current U.S. hits with their Jamaican dancehall remixes. But when I saw him wipe his hands on his pants, his music instantly became irrelevant. I knew the DJ.

  Narayana had put my body through every contortion the Geneva Convention had declared illegal and now he was giving me an intellectual challenge. Through his deformed English, his inflection and syntax, I understood that when he said memory in relation to bone he meant the form a bone takes. It made sense in a way. Every time we bend our backs to not trip on our faces, we’re thankful our bones have enough give and take not to snap. Raj found a way to interrupt the physical recall of bones to their original shape, their memory. Every bone required a memory of sorts.

  Whatever terse truce my mom and I had established over the past year was tested when I came home with Raj’s skeleton to study.

  “No!” she snapped as I tried to slide by her. She was putting on her work uniform prepping to leave. “There’s no way you’re bringing any of that voodoo mojo shit into this house.”

  There’s no magic here, Mom. I stood genuinely perplexed next to the skeleton trying to figure out how she got such a notion.

  “Believe that and you’re a lot dumber than you look,” she said, sliding her thick legs into light tan stockings. “And what the hell happened to the As and Bs you were supposed to be getting in school?”

  And then what? I asked, pissed.

  “Then college. That’s what!”

  You gonna tell me what classes to take as well? She stopped rubbing lotion on her arms and tensed her body. Rather than thinking, I reacted. I cleared my hands and head, focused on her hips for movement, set one foot back prepped for a low kick, and raised my guard.

  She would have been an imbecile to come for me. Mom had never taken a martial arts class. She’d never seen me in action but it was clear I was not going to tolerate any mother-daughter slap action. Still, that woman was never good at holding her tongue.

  “There can only be one woman in this house. You so grown, maybe you can find some place to hide your skeletons.”

  The arrogance of my youth allowed me to forget my mother’s threat less than five minutes after her departure for work. I sat with that skeleton in my room all night just staring at it and remembering Narayana’s grace. Public school, my previous obsession, was a distant priority compared to the perfection of the entropy of bones now.

  At night as the lazy waves of the San Francisco Bay pushed and pulled my room, I fantasized about the end of high school. Narayana would finally take me to his home, to whatever island Indian pirates call home, and I’d learn the final secrets; how to move like poetry, to find the entropy of bones. I’d learn to be like him. Like so many things between us, I never spoke about it with him. There was an understanding. I was his but he was mine as well. And for me to truly possess him, I’d have to understand not only who he was but also where he came from.

  Raj would say as much from time to time. He’d be drunk on the Bekseju and I’d hazard a question like “What part of India are you from?” He’d chuckle internally then breathe deep, like he was about to tell a funny story. Never did, though, just kept his anecdotes to himself. Maybe he thought soon I’d be eighteen, a legal adult not beholden to anyone. I slept that night comfortable in the knowledge I’d soon know all Narayana’s secrets.

  Mom had pretty much stopped drinking. Surprising what that can do to a body. She smiled more, her skin cleared up, lost weight, even went to church on a semi-regular basis. In some ways it made living with her easier. Education was not one of those ways. When she came home early that morning, she was still angry.

  “You plan on going to community college?” she asked me gently yet directly as I prepped for school.

  That’s ok? I asked, falling into the living room couch. Mom sat perched in the kitchen upstairs. From the sound of the folding paper and the question, I knew she was looking at my grades. They aren’t that bad.

  “No they aren’t. Your French teacher even said your comprehension and recitation was excellent,” she said as though she’d just discovered the fact to be true. “But they aren’t good enough to justify me putting you up past eighteen.”

  Huh? I asked, too tired to comprehend.

  “I’m saying, come your eighteenth birthday I’m giving you all the money I saved for your education. Don’t get excited. It’s only about seven thousand. But you can’t stay here anymore.”

  I wanted to say “That makes sense” or “That’s fair.” Or even “I don’t care. I’m going off with Narayana anyway.” But the shock of her compassionate boundary made me press the issue. I poured all my vague and silent power into one statement.

  You know you want me to stay. Without seeing her I knew the sentiment registered on that nameless substrate where my Voice was heard. The echo of a calling back from her nameless place hit my heart. Her mouth said something different.

  “More than anything I want you to stay,” Mom said after descending the stairs to sit next to me. “And if you decided to dedicate even half of the energy you put into that old withered man into your studies, I’d let you. But I know you, girl. You’ve got more loyalty than sense.”

  What’s that mean?

  “It means I failed seriously as a parent letting you spend so much time with that old man all this time.”

  Nothing’s happened, Mom.

  “Oh, I don’t think he’s trying to get some from you. Not anymore. But I know if he wanted it, you wouldn’t even know how to say no to him.” I went numb realizing how right she was. “No, he got your mind now and a woman should never give a man all her mind. Maybe if I’d said more about your father, you’d know that. But I can’t spend the rest of my life apologizing for my failures. I’ve got to get on a righteous path and like I know water is wet, I know that Narayana is not righteous.”

  I’ll be out on the last day of school. I retreated into my room and left her to Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” playing in her room.

  By the time I was at Marin High the next day my mind was obsessing on the skeleton again, but there again, distraction. This time in the guise of a thoroughly green teacher trying to “reach” the class. Most teachers had an understanding regarding my participation. It would always be unsatisfying. Best for both of us to just not call on me. But not this dreadlocked black woman with a southern drawl.

  “And what about you, Chabi?” she asked, smoothing out a dress that was a bit too casual for a classroom. “That’s a beautiful name, by the way.”

  The entire class turned to look at me, some of them acting like they’d never seen me before. It took a second to get out of my hyper reflex fright mode before I could respond. It was the first time anyone had said anything about me was beautiful.

  Thanks, I murmured in my silent voice.

  “So what do you want to do when you graduate?” the teacher pushed.
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  Be a pirate. All but two people in the class started giggling.

  “Like in the movies?” she said, still not smiling, but now more concerned than anything.

  No. Those are old pirates. Now, it’s Indonesia and Malaysia, Somalia and places like that. Broke cats are taking on multibillion-dollar cargos with RPGs and machetes. The paydays are big.

  “And that’s what you want to do?” the teacher said cautiously after a class-wide observation of silence for the loss of my sanity.

  Well, I hear it’s kind of hard work on a woman. Not physically but like the guys will always test. Plus most sailors think having a woman on a ship is bad luck. So I was thinking maybe setting jobs up, driving getaways, something along those lines.

  “Well, Chabi.” The teacher smiled as a way to disengage. “I think you were meant for more.”

  Inside I grumbled. She didn’t even know I wasn’t speaking with my mouth. How could she know what I was meant for? I was kicking myself for opening up and trying when an elaborately folded paper airplane landed perfectly on my desk. It was from the skinny Latino boy I thought of only as the Little Kid. I unfolded it and read, “I heard they make hella money. Who gave you the idea?”

  I wrote “My father,” crossed that out and wrote “Narayana” then crossed that out. I was about to write “Neighbor” but then just became overwhelmed and said a silent “Forget it’” to the Little Kid. And he did.

  That had been happening more and more. I’d been influencing folks around me. Mostly to leave me alone, or forget they saw me. They were minor incidents just as easily chalked up to others being absentminded or forgetful, except for that intimate non-verbal linking I’d feel for a second right before they forgot about me. It was enough to let me know I was doing something.

  The Little Kid was short with a nose curved like an anteater. His face was long and his mouth was small. I wasn’t a big grinner but he was a frowner, forever with his head down and his headphones on as he wandered through the hallways of Marin High. He dressed like he didn’t care about clothes and was quickly proving himself both smarter and weaker than the entire class. When he saw me that day outside on the lawn, I began to realize how smart he was.

  “That idea about pirates is hella smart. They need people on land to negotiate for them and everything. Where’d you get the idea?” he asked as I walked by. No hello, no greeting of any kind. I eye-checked him. He’d forgotten the note. For him, this was a new idea.

  Saw something online, I said and waited, still standing over him as he ate his cold cut sandwich alone.

  “I read an interesting article in National Geographic about the global rise of piracy. I could send you the link if you wanted.”

  I grumbled mentally. Who the hell reads when they don’t have to? The words “smart people” came to mind. So I asked him, You know about entropy, Little Kid?

  “We’re the same age.” He stopped eating and looked at me with different eyes when I said “entropy.” I let my silence speak for me and like all high school geeks, Little Kid couldn’t help but throw up everything he knew.

  “So it’s kind of like when the force in the universe, like it’s cooling. The whole universe started with a big bang, right? Well, that explosion pushed everything, like every atom ever, out across the universe like an infinite number of directions. But after that initial explosion things begin to just slow down. Entropy is the measure of that trend towards coolness.”

  I sat next to him in order to think. Handfuls of grass distracted me as the notion of a cooling universe dominated my mind. A wannabe Latino gangster walked by ready to accost Little Kid. I smiled kindly. He kept walking.

  “Thanks,” the Little Kid said.

  I disregarded it completely. So ice is closer to entropy than fire? I asked.

  “Well, kind of, yeah, I guess. When people talk about entropy they’re usually talking about energy, though.”

  What’s the opposite?

  “Of what?”

  Of entropy. The yin to the yang?

  “Oh.” I had stumped the brain enough for him to grab his juice box. “Not really sure. That’s more philosophy than anything I know.”

  I let him know the answer just before I left. Creativity.

  The Little Kid is all grown up, I said after getting past club security such as they were. The kid looked up at me first in confusion, then comprehension, and finally something approaching sympathy.

  “Oh my god. You’re ok?” He threw his arms around me like some ’50s movie starlet. I let my stillness and silence do the shuffling off of Little Kid.

  You ok? I asked after he readjusted and checked his next tune.

  “I’m good. Good. DJing. I’m at Stanford. Cultural anthropology. And you know . . . Shit, Chabi, what happened to you?”

  I was sick. I got better. It wasn’t that much of a lie. I owed him some version of the truth. I’m here. Come find me when your set is done. That’s what I told him. But then I got scared of him asking why he could hear me perfectly when the speakers were turned up to twenty. So I wrote him a note with my email saying we should hook up and gave it to another wannabe hipster DJ. The kid was from the past, from the bad time. I knew I owed him. But I didn’t owe him right then and there.

  The next day we grabbed a coffee in downtown Oakland near his mom’s sandwich shop. The last time I’d been there was the riot. In my memory, I had been a minor hero there. I couldn’t tell what he was seeing when he looked at me but it wasn’t what I saw in the mirror. The Little Kid viewed something that scared him but he did his best to stay calm.

  Didn’t figure you for the humanities, I told him, as I sipped on my hot water and lemon.

  “I get my science in,” he weak-smiled me. “I’m looking at the connection between music and language in the brain.”

  Ok, I said, trying to not sound confused.

  “It’s really interesting. We’re finding out about these primitive languages that are almost onomatopoeic. Me, I’m looking specifically at the way tonal languages convey emotional states in pronunciation as well as in music.”

  Despite my best efforts I must have looked bored, because he stopped talking about himself.

  “Chabi, the last time I saw you, you were devastated.”

  Someone important to me disappeared, I found myself saying as I held back minor sobs.

  “That’s not what I mean,” the Little Kid interrupted. “I’m seeing you here and now, upright, walking around, even doing your version of smiling. But you still seem wrecked.”

  I had to use my Voice to convince him I was ok. But even then, he begged me to have tea with him every time he came up to Oakland from Palo Alto. He was too sweet to deny.

  I swam the seventeen miles home from Jack London with the question in my mind of what the Little Kid saw. It’d only been two years. Had I changed that much? Visions of a walking, talking skeleton plagued me so much I took a break at Angel Island. I’d gotten used to people being concerned for my Bay swims so didn’t mind when children ran up to me. But as a kid, with Narayana, I always had someone rowing with me, convincing the world it was ok. Now, I was just some random skinny chick coming out of the bay like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. As I adjusted my street clothes in the double plastic bag I kept them dry in, I wondered, probably for the first time, where I was headed. The ability to thoroughly kick ass combined with an addict’s drive to train doesn’t lend itself to many healthy life options. The Little Kid was halfway through college, DJing, and growing the fuck up. I sat on an old junk more days than not wrestling with the ghost of a mystery man. The fitful fire that grew in me could only be quelled by swimming that final distance to Sausalito. But in that time I found a small doable change I could accomplish. I could talk to my Mom.

  I showered as soon as I got home. Rather than my usual sweats, I wore the red blouse and the jeans. I even brushed out my now shoulder-length nappy black hair instead of just braiding it tight. I practiced my smile.

  At her door I hea
rd laughing. Not her drunk back in the day laugh, but sincere sweet laughter. I had to knock. When she came to the door, she almost looked happy to see me.

  “Well, this is a surprise,” she said, though she still blocked her entrance.

  I wanted to know if I could take you out to dinner, I said.

  “Praise Jesus, Brother A.C.,” she shouted back into her house. “It’s a miracle!”

  “Testify!” a familiar voice shouted back.

  “My prodigal daughter has returned offering gifts, praise his name!”

  I can leave if it’s a bad time. I wasn’t used to the religious blabber or someone else’s voice coming from my old home.

  “Meet her well with this feast we got here,” the voice inside offered.

  The house smelled of spicy crab and baked apples. A guy, Latino looking and younger than I expected, descended the stairs looking like a reject from a ’90s rap/rock group. He wore a black bandanna around his head, baggy black cargo pants, and a shiny skin-tight black T-shirt.

  “They call me A.C.,” he said, offering his hand.

  Have we met? I said, holding his hand and feeling like I was pantomiming.

  “Doubt that!” Mom said coming up behind me. “Brother A.C. doesn’t do much but work, praise the Lord, and cook up a storm. I met him at church.”

  I nodded, freaked by the familiarity A.C. had with my mother and my sense of recognition. They seemed like old drinking buddies, but I had met every one of them and he wasn’t familiar from that scene. I sat nice and polite taking bits of crab and shrimp they had baked for a Sunday feast as the conversation shifted between gospels and Skip James.