Bryan Washington

And how did I
Get back? How did any of us
Get back when we searched
For beauty?
GARY SOTO
and wouldn’t it be nice / if things fit / the way they were
supposed to / wouldn’t that be something / worth dying for.
PAUL ASTA

So Aja wanted to tweak her English (and not just english, but English english, the language of money, the kind we hear in banks) to pull a job as a librarian, or a secretary, or a hostess up north—although really, truly, she’d have mopped vomit at Burger King—because she’d seen on the TV that our public spaces were quiet, and on her island, at that time, quiet was a commodity.
Which is when it happened: she was imagining the sound of nothing when Paul finally made his move.

And so Aja wasn’t present for James’s funeral. A week before they closed the case, long after Paul was in chains.
No family flew down to claim the body. No crying mother at the coroner’s. No wincing aunts decrying our ghetto. No protests, no media, not even a gaggle of friends.
James’s departure was a quiet one, or it certainly would’ve been. Because his desires were untainted. Self-propelled. Without accommodation.
He was, despite everything, still one of us.
So we put our heads together.
We pulled the change from nowhere.
We plugged Big A for the quarters under his bed. We asked Mr. Po for some of his flower money. We drilled Gonzalo and Erica for a little of their comp-pay. We pestered Juana for some alimony, and Rogelio for his overtime, and the three Ramirez daughters for their baby shower stash. We poked Charlie for those international checks, Adriana for her allowance, Neesha for her government check, and Dante for his lunch money. Nigel and Karl for the pennies they stole. LaToya for those side jobs, Benito for his Hazelwood, and Hugo for the paystubs he’d been cashing on the West Side.
We hung streamers from the balcony. Grilled wings from the first floor. Plugged speakers, pitched goalposts, sipped liquor, raised arms.
And from the viejas to the juniors to the Filipinos to the black folks, we danced, danced, danced, to the tune of that story, their story, his story, our story, because we’d been gifted it, we’d birthed it, we’d pulled it from the ashes. Aja was Aja and Paul was Paul and James was James and James was Paul and Aja was James and they were us, and we told it, remixed it, we danced it from the stairwell, and we hung it from the laundry, and we shook it from the second floor, until our words had run out, until our music ran dry, and Five-0 shut it down on account of the noise.

Everybody’s somebody’s villain.

There are plenty of things we should be talking about, but here we are, talking around exactly all of them.

We didn’t actually decide anything, between the two of us. But a nondecision is a choice in itself.

And then he’ll change his mind? I say.
I don’t know about that. It could look like a lot of things. But that’s when he’ll make the decision he wants to make, as opposed to the one that he thinks he should. Or the one that’s actually the easiest path forward.