Night Hawks Read online

  Frances was not a bad person to work for, far from it, and she knew my girlfriend was a first-rate cosmetologist. Even so, the owner of Sassy Hair Salon didn’t want to lose a city councilwoman who was a twice-a-month, high-spending customer able to buy and sell her business twice over. That night, as I was fixing our dinner of Top Ramen, Ieesha quietly came through the door of our apartment, still wearing her salon vest, her eyes burning with tears. She wears her hair in the neat, tight black halo she was born with, unadorned, simple, honest, uncontrived, as genuinely individual as her lips and nose. To some people she might seem as plain as characters in those old-timey plays, Clara in Paddy Chayefsky’s Marty, or Laura Wingfield in The Glass Menagerie. But Ieesha has the warm, dark, and rich complexion of Michelle Obama or Angela Bassett, which is, so help me, as gorgeous as gorgeous gets. Nevertheless, sometimes in the morning, as she was getting ready for work, I’d catch her struggling to pull a pick through the burls and kinks of her hair with tears in her eyes as she looked in the mirror, tugging hardest at the nape of her neck, that spot called the kitchen. I tell her she’s beautiful as she is, but when she peers at television, movies, or popular magazines, where generic blue-eyed Barbie dolls with orthodontically perfect teeth, Botox, and breast implants prance, pose, and promenade through the media, she says with a sense of fatality and resignation, “I can’t look like that.” She knows that whenever she steps out our door, it’s guaranteed that a wound awaits her, that someone or something will let her know that her hair and dark skin are not good enough, or tell Ieesha her presence is not wanted. All she has to do is walk into a store and be watched with suspicion, or have a cashier slap her change on the counter rather than place it on the palm of her outstretched hand. Or maybe read about the rodeo clown named Mike Hayhurst at the Creston Classic Rodeo in California, who joked that “Playboy is offering Ann Romney $250,000 to pose in that magazine and the White House is upset about it because National Geographic only offered Michelle Obama $50 to pose for them.”

  Between bouts of blowing her nose loudly into a Kleenex in our tiny studio apartment, she cried that whole day she got fired, saying with a hopeless, plaintive hitch in her voice, “What’s wrong with me?” Rightly or wrongly, she was convinced that she would never find another job during the Great Recession. That put everything we wanted to do on hold. Both of us were broke, with bills piling up on the kitchen counter after I got laid off from my part-time job as a substitute English teacher at Garfield High School. We were on food stamps and got our clothes from Goodwill. I tried to console her, first with kisses, then caresses, and before the night was over we made roof-raising whoopee. Afterwards, and for the thousandth time, I came close to proposing that we get married. But I had a failure of nerve, afraid she’d temporize or say no, or that because we were so poor we needed to wait. To be honest, I was never sure if she saw me as Mr. Right or just as Mr. Right Now.

  So what I said to her that night, as we lay awake in each other’s arms, our fingers intertwined, was getting fired might just be the change in luck we were looking for. Frances was so busy with customers, she didn’t have time to change the locks. Or the code for the ADT alarm system. Naturally, Ieesha, who’d never stolen anything in her life, was reluctant, but I kept after her until she agreed.

  Finally, after a few minutes, she enters the density of the storeroom’s sooty darkness, her arms outstretched and feeling her way cat-footed. Among cardboard boxes of skin crèmes, conditioners, balms, and oils, she locates the holy grail of hair in three pea-green duffel bags stacked against the wall, like rugs rolled up for storage. She drags a chair beneath the storeroom window, then starts tossing the bags into the alley. As planned, I’m waiting outside, her old Toyota Corolla dappled with rust idling behind me. I catch each bag as it comes through the window, and throw them onto the backseat. The bags, I discover, weigh next to nothing. Yet for some reason, these sacks of something as common and plentiful as old hair are worth a lot of bank, why I don’t know. Or why women struggling to pay their rent, poor women forced to choose between food and their winter fuel bill, go into debt shelling out between $1,000 and $3,000, and sometimes as much as $5,000, for a weave with real human hair. It baffled me until I read how some people must feel used things possess special properties. For example, someone on eBay bought Britney Spears’s used gum for $14,000; someone else paid $115,000 for a handful of hair from Elvis Presley’s pompadour, and his soiled, jockey-style shorts went on sale in September 2012 for $16,000 at an auction in England. (No one, by the way, bought his unwashed skivvies.) Another person spent $3,000 for Justin Timberlake’s half-eaten French toast. So I guess some of those eBay buyers feel closer to the person they admire, maybe even with something of their essence magically clinging to the part they purchased.

  As soon as Ieesha slides onto the passenger seat, pulling off her ski mask and drawing short, hard breaths as if she’s been running up stairs, my foot lightly applies pressure to the gas pedal and I head for the freeway, my elbow out the window, my fingers curled on the roof of the car. Within fifteen minutes, we’re back at our place. I park the car, we sling the bags over our shoulders, carry them inside to our first-floor unit, and stack them on the floor between the kitchenette and the sofa bed we sleep on. Ieesha sits down on a bedsheet still twisted from the night before, when we were joined at the groin, knocking off her shoes run down at the heels and rubbing her ankles. She pulls a couple of wigs and a handful of hair extensions from one of the bags. She spreads them on our coffee table, frowning, then sits with her shoulders pulled in as if waiting for the ceiling to cave in.

  “We’re gonna be okay,” I say.

  “I don’t know.” Her voice is soft, sinus-clogged. “Tyrone, I don’t feel good about this. I can’t stop shaking. We’re not burglars.”

  “We are now.” I open a bottle of Bordeaux we’ve been saving to celebrate, filling up our only wineglass for her, and a large jam jar for myself. I sit down beside her and pick up one of the wigs. Its texture between my fingertips is fluffy. I say, “You can blame Frances. She should have stood up for you. She owes you. What we need to do now is think about our next step. Where we can sell this stuff.” Her head twitches back in reflex when I reach for one of the wigs and put it on her, just out of curiosity, you know. Reluctantly, she lets me place it there, and I ask, “What’s that feel like? A stocking cap? Is it hot?”

  “I don’t know. It feels . . .”

  She never tells me how it feels.

  So I ask another question. “What makes this hair so special? Where does it come from?”

  Hands folded in her lap, she sits quietly, and, for an instant, the wig that pools her face with obsidian tresses makes her look like someone I don’t know. All of a sudden, I’m not sure what she might do next, but what she does do, after clearing her throat, is give me the hair-raising history and odyssey behind the property we’ve stolen. The bags, she says, come from a Buddhist temple near New Delhi, where young women shave their heads in an ancient ceremony of sacrifice called taking pabbajja. They give it up in order to renounce all vanity, and this letting go of things cosmetic and the chimera called the ego is their first step as nuns on a path to realizing that the essence of everything is emptiness. The hair ceremony is one of 84,000 Dharma gates. On the day their heads were shaved, they kneeled in their plain saris, there in the temple naos, and took 240 vows, the first five of which were no killing, no lying, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, and no drinking of alcohol. They didn’t care what happened to their hair after the ceremony. Didn’t know it would be sewn, stitched, and stapled onto the scalps of other people. But Korean merchants were there. They paid the temple’s abbot ten dollars for each head of fibrous protein. After that, the merchants, who controlled this commerce as tightly as the mafia did gambling, washed the hair clean of lice. From India, where these women cultivated an outward life of simplicity and an inward life free from illusion, the merchants transported their discarded dead hair halfway around the planet, where it w
as cannibalized as commerce in a $9 billion industry for hair extensions devoted precisely to keeping women forever enslaved to the eyes of others.

  As she explains all this, Ieesha leaves her wine untasted, and I don’t say anything because my brain is stuttering, stalling on the unsyllabled thought that if you tug on a single thin strand of hair, which has a life span of five and half years, you find it raddled to the rest of the world. I didn’t see any of that coming until it arrived. I lift the jar of wine straight to my lips, empty it, and set it down with a click on the coffee table. When I look back at Ieesha, I realize she’s smiling into one cheek as if remembering a delicious secret she can’t share with me. That makes me down a second jar of Bordeaux. Then a third. I wonder, does the wig she’s wearing itch or tingle? Does it feel like touching Justin Timberlake’s unfinished French toast? Now the wine bottle is empty. We’ve got nothing on the empty racks of the refrigerator but a six-pack of beer, so I rise from the sofa to get that, a little woozy on my feet, careening sideways toward the kitchenette, but my full bladder redirects me toward the cubicle that houses our shower and toilet. I click on the light, close the door, and brace myself with one hand pressed against the wall. Standing there for a few minutes, my eyes closed, I feel rather than hear a police siren. My stomach clenches.

  Coming out of the bathroom, I find the wig she was wearing and the weaves that were on the coffee table burning in a wastebasket. Ieesha stands in the middle of the room, her cell phone pressed against her ear.

  “What are you doing?” Smoke is stinging my eyes. “Who are you talking to?”

  Her eyes are quiet. Everything about her seems quiet when she says, “Nine-one-one.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s the right thing to do.”

  I stare at her in wonder. She’s offered us up, the way the women did their hair at the temple in New Delhi. I rush to draw water from the kitchen sink to put out the fire. I start throwing open the windows as there comes a loud knock, then pounding at the door behind me, but I can’t take my eyes off her. She looks vulnerable but not weak, free, and more than enough for herself. I hear the wood of the door breaking, but as if from a great distance because suddenly I know, and she knows, that I understand. She’s letting go all of it—the inheritance of hurt, the artificial and the inauthentic, the absurdities of color and caste stained at their roots by vanity and bondage to the body—and in this evanescent moment, when even I suddenly feel as if a weight has been lifted off my shoulders, she has never looked more beautiful and spiritually centered to me. There’s shouting in the room now. Rough hands throw me facedown on the floor. My wrists are cuffed behind my back. Someone is reciting my Miranda rights. Then I feel myself being lifted to my feet. But I stop midway, resting on my right knee, my voice shaky as I look up at Ieesha.

  “Will you marry me?”

  Two policemen lead her toward the shattered door, our first steps toward that American monastery called prison. She half turns, smiling, looking back at me, and her head nods: yes, yes, yes.

  Prince of the Ascetics

  Once upon a time, my companions and I lived in the forest near the village of Uruvela on the banks of the Nairanjana River. We were known far and wide as five men who had forsaken worldly affairs in order to devote ourselves completely to the life of the spirit. For thousands of years in our country, this has been the accepted way for the Four Stages of Life. First, to spend the spring of one’s youth as a dedicated student; the summer as a busy householder using whatever wealth he has acquired to help others; the fall as an ascetic who renounces all duties at age fifty and retires into the forest; and the goal of the winter season is to experience the peace and wisdom found only in the Atma (or Self), which permeates all parts of the world as moisture seeps through sand. My brothers in this noble Fourth Stage of tranquillity, which we had just entered, were Kodananna, Bhadiya, Vappa, and Assajii. We had once been family men, members of the Vaishya (trader) caste, but now owned no possessions. We lived, as was right, in poverty and detachment. We wore simple yellow robes and fasted often. Wheresoever we walked, always in single file, Vappa, a small man with a snout-like nose, took the lead, sweeping the ground before us with a twig-broom so we would not crush any living creatures too small to see. When we did not leave our ashram to make alms rounds for food in Uruvela, we satisfied our hunger with fruit, but not taken off trees; rather we gathered whatever had fallen to the ground. Each day we wrote the Sanskrit word ahum or “I” on the backs of our hands so that we rarely went but a few moments without seeing it and remembering to inquire into the Self as the source of all things. People throughout the kingdom of Magadha affectionately called us Bapu (or father) because they knew that we had just begun the difficult path described in the Vedas and Upanishads. The scriptures say that a fast mind is a sick mind. But we, my brothers and I, were slowly taming the wild horses of our thoughts, learning the four kinds of yoga, banishing the ego, that toadstool that grows out of consciousness, and freeing ourselves from the twin illusions of pleasure and pain.

  But one day it came to pass that as we made our monthly rounds in the summer-gilded village, begging for alms, the merchants and women all looked the other way when we arrived. When Assajii asked them what was wrong, they apologized. With their palms upturned, each explained how he had already given his monthly offering to a stunning young swami, a mahatma, a powerful sadhu who was only twenty-nine years old and had recently crossed the River Anoma, which divided our kingdom from the land of the Shakya tribe. They said just being in his presence for a few moments brought immeasurable peace and joy. And if that were not shocking enough, some were calling him Munisha, “Prince of the Ascetics.”

  “How can this be?” My heart gave a slight thump. “Surely you don’t mean that.”

  A portly merchant, Dakma was his name, who was shaped like a pigeon, with bright rings on his fingers, puffed at me, “Oh, but he is such. We have never seen his like before. You—all of you—can learn a thing or two from him. I tell you, Mahanama, if you are not careful, he will put you five lazybones out of business.”

  “Lazybones? You call us lazybones?”

  “As your friend, I tell you, this young man gives new meaning to the words sacrifice and self-control.”

  Needless to say, none of this rested happily on my ears. Let it be understood that I, Mahanama, am not the sort of man who is easily swayed, but whatever serenity I had felt after my morning meditation was now gone, and suddenly my mind was capricious, like a restless monkey stung by a scorpion, drunk, and possessed by a demon all at the same time.

  “This sadhu,” I asked, helplessly, “where might we find him?”

  Sujata, the unmarried daughter of a householder, with kind, moonlike eyes, stepped forward. “He lives at the edge of the forest by the river where the banyan trees grow. I have never seen any man so beautiful. Everyone loves him. I feel I could follow him anywhere . . .”

  Now I was in a mental fog. There was a dull pounding in my right temple as we trekked forthwith at a fast pace back into the forest. Vappa was sweeping his twig-broom so furiously—he was as angry and upset as I was—that billowing clouds of dust rose up around us, and we must have looked, for all the world, like a herd of enraged, stampeding elephants. Soon enough we tracked down the brash young man responsible for our alms bowls being empty.

  The villagers had not lied. We found him meditating naked, except for a garland of beads, in a diagonal shaft of leaf-filtered light from the banyan tree above him. Straightaway, I saw that his posture in meditation was perfect, his head tilted down just so, leaving only enough space that an egg could be inserted between his chin and throat. He was twenty years younger than I, no older than one of my sons, his body gaunt and defined, his face angular, framed by a bell of black hair. As I glanced between his legs, I noticed that his upastha was twice the size of my own. He looked up when we approached, introduced ourselves, and pressed him to explain how he could have the nerve to install himself in our forest. I
n a sad, heavy way he exhaled, holding me with eyes that seemed melancholy, and said:

  “I seek a refuge from suffering.”

  “Who,” asked Bhadiya, cocking his head to one side, “are your teachers? What credentials do you have?”

  “I have studied briefly with the hermit Bhagava. Then with Ālāra Kālāma and Udraka Rāmaputra, who taught me mastery of the third and fourth stages of meditation. But,” he sighed, “neither intellectual knowledge nor yogic skills has yet led me to the liberation I am seeking.”

  I felt humbled right down to my heels. Those two venerated teachers were among the greatest sages in all India. Compared to them, my own guru long ago was but a neophyte on the path.

  Twilight was coming on as he spoke, the blue air darkening to purple the four corners of the sky. A whiff of twilight even tinctured the shadows as he unfurled what I surmised was a bald-faced lie, a fairy tale, a bedtime story so fantastic only a child could believe it. Until a year ago, he said, he had been a prince whose loving father, Shuddodana, had sheltered him from the painful, hard, and ugly things of the world. The palace in which he was raised, with its parks, lakes, and perfectly tended gardens, gave you a glimpse of what the homes of the gods must look like. He was raised to be a warrior of the Shakya tribe, had a hundred raven-haired concubines of almost catastrophic beauty, and ate food so fine and sumptuous even its rich aroma was enough to sate a man’s hunger. He said he would have continued this voluptuous life of pleasure and privilege, for he had all that this world could offer, but one day while he and his charioteer, Channa, were out riding, he saw a man old and decrepit. On a different day he saw a man severely stricken with illness. On the third day he saw a corpse being carried away for cremation. And when he recognized that this fate awaited him, he could not be consoled. All satisfaction with the fleeting pleasures of his cloistered life in the palace left him. But then, on a fourth trip, he saw a wandering holy man whose equanimity in the face of the instability and impermanence of all things told him that this was the life he must pursue. And so he left home, abandoning his beautiful wife, Yashodhara, and their newborn son, Rahula, and found his lonely way to our forest.