fuss, though, telling Deo his time was up—the man’s tone of voice was unmistakable. Deo gestured him
away. There was a woman standing near the phone man, drinking from a bottle in a paper bag. She
began yelling at Deo. He was telling Claude that he would call again soon, when from the corner of his
eye, he saw the woman throw her bottle at him. He was wearing flip-flops. The bottle shattered at his
toes. Deo let out a yell, turning angrily to face the woman. She was laughing at him. Deo even raised a
fist. Seeing this, one of the Senegalese vendors walked over, telling Deo in French not to mess with that
woman. There was a reason why it was the woman and not the man who had done that to him, the street
vendor said. Here in the U.S., you don’t touch a woman. It didn’t matter whether you were the victim or
not. If a woman attacked you like that, the best thing to do was to leave.
Selling streetcorner calls was a competitive enterprise. Once he realized this, Deo haggled every time he
made a call. He could almost always find a phone man who would connect him for three dollars, four at
most. But that was still almost a third of a day’s pay. The money he’d brought with him was long gone,
and his wages seemed to evaporate no matter how careful he was. Money went for the antifungal salve,
for antacids to lessen the chronic churning in his intestines, for the food he could stomach, for his
dictionaries, for subway fare. He studied the dictionary one night and the next morning descended the
stairs to the subway outside the tenement PEN and tried to bargain with the teller over the price of
tokens. The teller was firm but polite; maybe he wasn’t the first who had tried to bargain with her, that
part of the city harbored so many Africans.
He stopped turning down tips. They weren’t easy to come by, partly because he would never allow
himself to ask for one, partly because of Goss. But the more deliveries he made the more chances he
had, he reasoned. For a time he worked on Sundays. But only for tips, and Sundays were so slow that the
most he could hope to get was about four dollars. A dollar was a big tip, fifty cents a decent one. The
transactions were almost always short and impersonal. Once in a great while, a customer wanted to talk
—for instance, a white Frenchwoman in a very tall building on 110th Street. She talked on and on to him
in French, while a baby cried in another room. She seemed to view him as a compatriot. She said she
knew the grocery stores treated people like him badly. He should go to the French consulate and get
them to help him find a better job. She meant well, he thought, but clearly she didn’t understand. France
was the friend of the génocidaires in Rwanda, and therefore his enemy. She was Catholic and would
pray for him, she said. When he left, she tipped him a dollar.
And then there was the American woman who appeared on a day when he happened to be working at the
A&P on the Upper West Side. Deo was assigned to carry her groceries to her apartment. She was, he
thought, quite beautiful to look at, a middle-aged woman with wonderful posture. “So elegant,” he
thought, as he walked along beside her, her bags of groceries in his arms. She asked him a question. He
didn’t understand it, all he could do was smile. But she smiled back, as if she actually enjoyed his
company. He had picked up a baseball cap somewhere, an “I . New York” cap. When they got to her
apartment and he had put the groceries in her kitchen, she looked at him quizzically. She must have been
looking at his cap, because she asked, “Do you really love New York?”
This he understood. “Oh, yes!” He put on his best smile. At the moment, he felt that his answer was true,
or true enough.
She walked him to the door, and he went out to the hallway, thinking he didn’t care this time that he
wasn’t getting a tip. But then he heard her say, “Wait.” He turned back. She said something he didn’t
fully understand. The gist seemed to be that she didn’t believe he loved New York, and she wasn’t sure if
this would really help him. She was holding the door open with one hand, and extending the other
toward him. He stared at her hand. He couldn’t believe it. She was giving him a twenty-dollar bill!
He took it. He was speechless. He was wishing he knew the words to thank her—stronger, better words
than the English equivalent of Merci beaucoup.
“Bonne chance,” she said.
Did she speak French? If she spoke French, he would love to talk with her. But before he could get the
question out, she had closed the door.
He was living mostly on milk and bread and cookies. Once in a while he took a carrot or a few grapes
from the produce bin at the grocery store. Everyone did that. It occurred to him there might be ways to
steal most of his food from the Gristedes or the other stores where he worked, but that would be risky
and worse than begging. Out of mild curiosity, on his way to work, he had looked at a menu posted
outside a fancy restaurant on the Upper East Side. In a place like that, his day’s pay wouldn’t even buy a
napkin. A place like that, he thought, might as well be on another planet, along with the juice bars,
coffeehouses, hot dog stands, pizza shops he passed every day. He hardly noticed those places anymore.
They weren’t just too expensive for the likes of him; they didn’t offer anything he wanted. He could
remember caring about food and wanting certain foods, but over the past months he’d lost his appetite.
He hadn’t studied the physiology of appetite, but it seemed as if a switch in him had simply been turned
off. On the run, he’d learned to stifle hunger, and now he often had to force himself to eat, even on days
when he was feeling well. It was a good thing, he thought, that his system still had lactase. Lately, milk
was one of the only things he could bear to taste.
He had felt puzzled at first at the skinniness of so many of the well-dressed women he saw on the streets
and in the apartments of the Upper East Side, a skinniness that would have marked them as
impoverished back home. He himself was downright skeletal, even thinner than when he had arrived in
New York. Some days he would rise very early and walk the thirty blocks or so to the grocery. Once in a
while, he’d walk back at the end of his twelve hours of work, to save the subway fare and to prolong the
time before he arrived back at the tenement. Sometimes he’d ride the bus instead of the subway, because
the bus took him back there much more slowly. His knees ached constantly. He still couldn’t sleep for
long on the floor of the filthy room he shared with Muhammad, and when he did nod off he often
wished he hadn’t, because of the dreams that came. He would start awake from nightmares, without
much memory of the dreams themselves but with a residue of dread that felt like something interfering
with his breathing, that made him afraid to go back to sleep.
And now Muhammad was heading home to Senegal. The apartment of the Senegalese would still be a
refuge, with a shower and a functioning toilet that Deo could use. But he didn’t like the prospect of
sleeping in PEN, among the drunks and drug addicts and prostitutes, without his burly friend and
protector. Muhammad himself didn’t think this was a good idea. Before he left, he took Deo to another
abandoned tenement in Harlem, on 126th Street, and introduced him to the men squatting there. They
were all African-Americans. None spoke French. Muhammad called them “friends,” but they were not
friendly once Muhammad left. Almost at once they began making jokes about Deo. He couldn’t
understand the jokes, but he knew they were directed at him. After he’d spent a few nights there, one of
the squatters told Deo he had to pay him rent. Deo pretended not to understand. On a morning soon
afterward, another of the squatters came up holding a knife and asked Deo for money. The man was big
—bigger than Deo, anyway. His smile was nasty. Deo said he didn’t have any money. The man jiggled
the knife in one hand and slid the other into Deo’s pocket. “Unh-hunh,” he said, as he pulled out the cash
Deo had managed to save that week. “Yeah! You have money!”
After that, Deo kept his cash in his underwear. And he moved, to another abandoned tenement, another
reeking, rat-and roach-infested place, on 131st and Third Avenue. He had found a piece of floor inside.
On his second or third evening there, sitting by a broken window on the second floor, he heard gunshots.
He knew the sound at once, an all too familiar sound. Deo looked out the broken window and saw
people running in all directions and, on the sidewalk just below, a body lying in a spreading pool of
blood. He thought, “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe I’m seeing blood again.” There were sirens. Police
cars arrived, then an ambulance, and when those were gone, a crowd gathered around the pool of blood.
For hours Deo lay on the floor listening to the excited voices of the sightseers on the sidewalk below. He
had to get away from this place. He had to get away from Harlem.
On mornings when he walked to work, he always went through part of Central Park. He would go down
Malcolm X, and when he reached 110th Street, he would climb a stone stairway, overarched with leafy
trees. Right there, where Central Park butts into Harlem, he had seen small groups of men, some sitting
on benches, some still sleeping on blankets in the grass nearby, each, it seemed, with his own black
plastic bag of belongings. It was Muhammad who had explained to him that some people actually lived
in the park. The day after Deo saw the body on the sidewalk, he went to the West Africans’ apartment,
the clothing factory, and retrieved from his suitcase the things he thought he’d need—a change of
clothes, his toothbrush, his blanket. He put them in a plastic bag.
He slept in Central Park that night, near the 110th Street entrance. He awakened with a foul odor in his
nose, which followed him all day. He realized the grass he’d chosen to sleep on was a place where the
other homeless people usually went to urinate. The next evening, literally following his nose, he found a
better spot, a lovely spot, a grassy slope beneath tall trees, near a public swimming pool. But in the
morning he discovered the reason that place smelled better: the police didn’t tolerate camping there. He
saw the police before they saw him, and quickly moved away. He understood. It was a nice public
swimming pool, and it was beautiful because the police kept the area clean, and the way they kept it
clean was to prevent people from shitting in it. He himself used the toilet at the store or at the apartment
of the Senegalese, where he still went regularly to bathe.
The first few nights, Deo avoided the shadowy figures of other men who were living in the park.
Gradually, he began to observe them from a little distance. He’d hear them talking to each other. Little
by little he made out some of the words they used most often. Most weren’t in his dictionary, though,
words like “mothafucker.” He could tell this was a bad word, from the way the homeless men would use
it, when they were yelling at each other for instance. But he didn’t see real fighting. Actually, most of
them seemed to be generous with each other, even with him, proffering their bottles wrapped in paper
bags, or whatever it was they were smoking. He would say, “No, thank you.” They called him “bro,” as
in, “Hey, bro, where you from?” They’d say, “Whassup?” And when he walked away from them, “Take
it easy.”
“Take it easy, bro,” he’d reply, wondering, “What are they talking about?”
They weren’t much help in learning English. But they didn’t frighten him after he got used to them.
Some could even be trusted to watch his plastic bag of stuff while he went off to deliver groceries. He
supposed that they felt sorry for him, as he did for them. All of them were black. Most of them, he
thought, suffered from one form of mental illness or another. If he got too close, he’d find himself
breathing through his mouth so as not to smell them, but he felt much safer sharing the park with them
than he had in the abandoned buildings, among men like the one with the knife who had robbed him.
He found places that felt private, spots of grassy or leaf-covered ground hidden by bushes. Lying on his
back, looking up through leaves and branches at the stars, he felt almost at home, almost as if he’d been
restored to his proper element. But always memories troubled him, even more than they had in PEN, and
especially on nights when there was a moon. It was automatic: every time he saw the moon, he thought
of a moonlit night when he was a little boy, lying on a mat of banana leaves in the grass of a mountain
pasture, feeling utterly safe because he was with his grandfather Lonjino. Staring up at the sky, Deo had
seen something he’d never noticed before, a profile of a rabbit on the face of the moon. He had told
Lonjino, and Lonjino had exclaimed, “Yes, this is a rabbit!” Lonjino was certainly dead. When the
militiamen came, he would have refused as usual to run away, right up until the last moment. He’d have
stayed near the family compound, guarding the cows with his dogs and his spear, until it was too late.
In the park Deo found what he thought of as his own peaceful corners. Some days after work and on
Sundays when it didn’t seem worth working, Deo would sit facing the fountain in the Conservatory
Garden. It was kept locked at night and was therefore a place where, as he thought of it, his receptors
could recover from urine-saturation. He would sit and sometimes manage not to think of home or
horrors, but simply gaze at flowers and close his eyes and doze to the sound of the fountain, like the
lapping waves on the shore of Lake Tanganyika.
He discovered the big pond in the park, the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis Reservoir. He would stand at
the railing and gaze out at the water and his thoughts. Now and then he would join one of the passing
groups of runners, jogging along with them for a while by the pond, for the sake of what he thought of
as “psychological friendship.” A curious tableau, the joggers in their shorts and spandex, Deo in his long
pants and sneakers and “I love New York” cap. It made him feel as if he belonged there, as if he were
like everyone else. He couldn’t run far anymore. Even the slowest crew of joggers would eventually
