Cameron was furious-and terrified. The ghetto seemed to be closing in on him. He told her that he refused to be manipulated. He was going to college. If she thought she could stand in his way, she was mistaken. He recommended an abortion. He would scrape together the money to pay for it. He couldn’t do any more than that.
At the mention of abortion, she stopped crying and grew very quiet. “You want to kill our baby?” she asked. “It so important for you to get away from your people?”
He started saying that the mess he saw every day around him was not his people, and he wasn’t alone in wanting to get away. All around him young men were enlisting in the army, being shipped to the jungles of Vietnam. But she was wringing her hands. No, she was making some kind of a complicated design in the air with her fingers. Was Imani putting some kind of voodoo on him? He shook off the ridiculous idea.
“It do you no good,” she said. “No matter where you run, you be ending with ashes in your mouth.” She walked across the parking lot. He considered hurrying after her, grabbing her by the hand, saying he was sorry. But that would reopen the coffin of their relationship, and he didn’t have the energy to go through the ups and downs of the last months again. She would probably come running to him soon enough-for the money, if nothing else.
Over the next weeks he waited-at first with trepidation, then with concern, then with a strange disappointment-for her to make contact. She didn’t. One day Latisha cornered him in the canned foods aisle and told him Imani had had an abortion the week before. He couldn’t bring himself to ask Latisha-whom he didn’t like-if Imani was okay. Instead he inquired if Imani needed money-could Latisha ask her? Latisha gave him a hard look and walked off. Cameron felt terrible, but the rush of getting ready for college didn’t allow him time to dwell on the whole complicated mess.
REMINISCING ON THE BUS STOP BENCH HAD MADE CAMERON late, and this annoyed him. He jogged the last few blocks (though jogging through this kind of exhaust-laden air sometimes brought on his asthma) and arrived at the hospice sweaty. The sweat wouldn’t matter too much since he worked in the garden.
When he had started volunteering, they had tried him with the inmates (that’s how he thought of the patients, prisoners with a life sentence). He sat with them, read to them, adjusted pillows. But watching the seemingly interminable process of dying made him nervous and snappy, and after a couple of incidents the management had asked if he could do something with the barren strip of land behind the building. Now the Pacifica Hospice Care boasted a garden, lush with lavender and daylilies, where patients could be wheeled in to watch the hummingbirds flit around brightly colored hanging feeders.
As he hurried down the passage to the back, where gardening supplies were kept, Cameron was surprised to see Jeff emerging from a patient’s room. Jeff tried to engage Cameron in conversation, but Cameron sidestepped him with a curt hello. When, a half hour later, he saw Jeff wander into his garden (that’s how Cameron thought of it), Cameron felt a frisson of annoyance. Was the man following him? Cameron turned his back on the intruder and went on planting sweet alyssum. But Jeff sat on a bench peaceably, ate a sandwich, and watched the clouds. When he finished eating, he sat very still with his eyes closed. After an hour, he left quietly. Cameron, intrigued by the stillness, made some inquiries and learned that Jeff was a lay Buddhist priest. The management had asked him to come in and minister to their Buddhist patients.
In the following weeks, Cameron saw Jeff every time he came into the hospice. Jeff ate his lunch in the garden and meditated there. He always gave Cameron a friendly nod but made no further attempts to talk. (Cameron was surprised to feel a twinge of disappointment at this.) One day, Jeff didn’t eat but sat rubbing his eyes tiredly until Cameron couldn’t stand the suspense and asked what was wrong.
“Louie died,” Jeff said.
Cameron suggested that maybe that was a good thing. Louie, a skeletal young man with AIDS, had been suffering for months.
“He was so afraid of death,” Jeff said. He punched the bench in frustration. “Nothing I said could comfort him.”
Cameron abandoned his weeding and sat beside Jeff on the bench. That was how their friendship began.
TO HIS BITTER ASTONISHMENT, CAMERON DID NOT DO WELL IN college. First, he developed severe allergies that deepened into asthma. It could have been from moving to a different part of the country, but he couldn’t help thinking of it as punishment. The Bricanyl cleared up his breathing at first, but soon he had to increase his dosage for it to work. It felt like he was moving underwater. He couldn’t perform as well as before. Imani’s words echoed in his bones: no matter where you run. The coach kept him on for the year, but his scholarship wasn’t renewed. His brain, too, felt submerged. He sat for hours with textbooks that seemed to have been written in a foreign language. In class, where he was often the only black student, he fell dull and unprepared. The privileged kids with their smart answers intimidated him into silence, which his teachers took as indifference. Outside of class his touchiness pushed away the few students who tried to befriend him. By the time he understood that he should have gone to a large state college where there would have been more of “his people,” his grades had plummeted and he had no money. Ashamed to write to his biology teacher, who might have given him better advice, he quit school. Keeping his health issues secret, he joined the army-and was plummeted into the last desperate days of the Vietnam War.
CAMERON BEGAN TO SPEND A GREAT DEAL OF HIS FREE TIME with Jeff. Jeff had a small apartment in the Mission District and taught Comparative Religion at a local college. He also volunteered at a small Tibetan monastery, helping with everything from paperwork to fixing leaks to chauffeuring the monks, who had fled from Tibet to a small Himalayan village before arriving here. Some days, Jeff cooked, odd dishes with flat noodles and tofu and seaweed, or mushrooms that plumped up when you soaked them in water, dishes that Cameron was distrustful of at first but grew to like. Jeff was no saint; he tended to impatience and took it hard when things didn’t go the way he wanted them to. But Cameron admired the quickness with which he was able to return to cheerfulness.
Jeff had a way of listening without interruption or advice that Cameron appreciated. As they sat on the balcony of Jeff’s apartment with steaming mugs of coffee, he found himself telling Jeff things he hadn’t shared with anyone. He went backward, beginning with his current job. He was the head security guard for a large bank building downtown, but each day the gun he carried at his hip seemed heavier. He lived in a tiny one-room place in a too-expensive neighborhood so that from his window he would be able to see the ocean. Every morning he tucked his inhaler into a pocket and went for a run. With the wind whistling in his ears, he could forget the decisions he regretted. He had to take pills at night to sleep. He hated insomnia but feared sleep because of the nightmares. None of his activities since he left the army-helping at the hospice, serving food in soup kitchens, donating money to organizations that rescued abused children-had stopped the nightmares. The worst was that of a tiny child afloat in an oval room. The boy would open his black eyes and look at Cameron without reproach, and that was the hardest thing.
Cameron told Jeff about his deployment to hot, mosquito-infested countries supposedly threatened by Communism, where he had been feared and detested because of his uniform. He described the men he had killed-sometimes apathetically, because their lives hadn’t seemed as real as his own. Jeff grew white around the mouth, but he put a hand on Cameron’s shoulder and left it there.