What We All Long For by Dionne Brand (phonics story books txt) 📕

“Yeah.” Tuyen was in the hallway looking in. Carla was looking out the window. Oku was always talking. That’s why Tuyen liked him. He could fill any space with talk. Sometimes she barely listened to the details. She loved his voice and his continuous enthusiasm. Even now he was dancing about the room, talking wildly about Ornette Coleman.

“Check it out!”—as Coleman’s horn chattered desperately—“Hear that thick mass of horns? They do this harmolodic modulation, different instruments playing in different keys but in another communion, right, and all that rushing energy, dozens of themes just rushing together. See, everything makes sense when you listen to this, right?”

“Yeah, that’s cool. Every horn is alone, but they’re together, crashing,” Tuyen said moving into the room. She and Oku were both on the same thought.

Carla hadn’t turned from the window. Down on the sidewalk the man who sold lottery tickets was passing by. Oku turned up the music; it seemed to move the glass window pane in front of Carla. He grabbed Carla and began dancing her around the room against her will. Finally she started to laugh and dance around the room with him.

Oku had slept over. Where? Tuyen wondered, her misgivings surfacing again about Oku and Carla. “You two must be still high from last night.” She thought of running to her place across the hall to get her camera but didn’t.

Oku scatted along with the music. They danced and danced, then they whirled around Tuyen, swinging her back and forth, whirling her around the small room. Ornette Coleman punched notes from his horn like a fighter, jabbing and uppercutting; Charlie Hayden thrummed and pulled on the base; the drummer went mad; and it was as if the musicians were there in the room with them. From across the alley, Kumaran put his head out his window and shouted, “Hey, what’s that?” “Ornette Coleman!” Oku shouted back. Even when the music went into its short melody, their bodies stayed in confusion, waiting for Ornette to take them back. Carla lost herself in the dance, she wanted to be lost, her scythe-like body leaned on Oku’s, it hung on Tuyen’s like a leaf on a stem. Tuyen’s misgivings vanished again. No way they had slept together. She began laughing hysterically. It was a hysteria that was infectious. They fell on the floor when the music stopped.

“See what I’m saying?” Oku laughed.

Tuyen wanted the music to last longer. She tried to untangle herself from the two to go play it again, but she felt comfortable with Carla lying on her shoulder. She didn’t want to move.

“My father would never understand that,” Tuyen said. “Order and practicality is all he sees. It’s like anything that’s complicated they see as waste.”

“Not mine. Mine would see it, right, but he’d ignore it. He’d say, ‘Boy, that can’t feed you.’ And he’s the one who turned me on to Ornette Coleman.”

They waited for Carla to say something. She sensed their waiting. This time she would say something, but she stayed quiet until it seemed that they had accepted, acknowledged, her accustomed silence. She was fighting herself, fighting her whisper. “There was never any sound in my house. There was never any music after my mother.” She’d heard, of course, the coarse songs of terror each time she remembered the day her mother died.

Oku felt like telling her about hymns, how wonderful they could be, but she had offered a lot again in that whispery speech and he didn’t want to spoil it.

“Let’s eat,” he said. “I feel like I haven’t eaten in a month.”

“Well, don’t look at me, bro. There isn’t a thing at my place. I almost burnt the last of my potatoes last night.” Tuyen rolled over.

“We could smell it. How could you burn potatoes? That’s like burning water. Who would think you grew up in a restaurant?”

“Anyways …”

“You know what? I gotta go see my father.” They fell silent. “The thing is,” Carla picked up, “while I’m listening to the music, I can hear it. It’s like a puzzle. It makes us seem understandable. Like why Jamal is in jail and everything.”

“Whaddya mean?”

“I mean, why he would be in jail, you know, like why not? What made me think that he wouldn’t be … that he could be free or something … but what makes him not scared of that?”

“Babylon, star. You can’t let them frighten you.” Oku was scared of jail himself, of course. All the time. For no immediate reason. He felt the hair at the back of his neck rising at the mention of the word.

“I wonder if he’ll let me do a body cast of him when he comes out? For my installation? I think the body must record something. An imprint …”

“You’re a freak, Tuyen. Shit, you’re a freak.”

“Carla doesn’t like my installations. She feels her way up the stairs with her eyes closed.”

Carla didn’t think that Tuyen had seen her, closing her eyes on her way up the stairs. But it would be like Tuyen to be watching. She kept still. The truth was that Tuyen’s photographs stirred some response in her that she wasn’t quite sure of. Just disturbing, that’s all. And how Tuyen could keep taking pictures that time while Oku was being roughed up or some horrible thing happened, she couldn’t understand. But Oku didn’t seem to mind. He’d never said anything about it. He acted as if he was a movie star, acting a part for Tuyen’s pictures.

“Gotta go.” Carla jumping up from the floor.

“Whoa, listen, can I stay here for a few days?” Oku asked.

“Are you hiding out from somebody?” Tuyen probed.

“Hey, lend me some money, Carla, and how about it, a few days?” He didn’t answer directly.

“I notice you’re not asking me.”

“Tuyen, where can anybody stay in your place?”

Oku was really hiding out from Kwesi. He was used to hiding out at Carla’s when his father was on the warpath. He would spend days there, then finally go home because his mother wanted him to