The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [35]
“It’s been so many years,” the dream aunt said. “Are you sure he’s the one?”
He took the empty room in the barber’s basement. He couldn’t sleep for months, spending his weekends in nightclubs to pass the time. He visited the barbershop regularly for haircuts, arriving early in the morning soon after he opened. He would sit and watch the barber, now a much thinner man, turn on his radio, then sweep the entire shop before lining up his tools and calling him to the chair. His heart would race as the barber draped a black cape over his chest, then sheared paths through his hair until barely a stubble was left on top of his head. All the while he would study the pictures on the walls, campaign posters for local elections, hairstyle samples that he never chose from, asking the barber only to “cut as much as you can.”
The barber never made conversation, never said, “How do you like the basement?” He only asked in a soft voice that sounded nothing like the hoarse and angry voice that had threatened him so many years ago, “Would you like a shave?”
He never turned down the shaves, for he thought it would give the barber a chance to have a closer look at his face, to remember him. He always expected the barber’s large hands to tremble, but it was his own body that quivered instead, his forehead and neck that became covered with sweat, melting the shaving cream on his chin, forcing the barber to offer him extra napkins and towels and warn him to stay still to avoid nicks and cuts.
Finally, two nights ago, when the barber’s wife was away at a religious retreat—he looked for such opportunities all the time and hadn’t found one until then—he climbed the splintered steps to the first floor, then made his way with a flashlight to the barber’s bedroom.
“What did you do?” the dream aunt asked.
He stood there and listened to the barber breathing. The barber was snoring, each round of snores beginning with a grunt and ending in a high-pitched moan. He lowered his face toward the barber’s widow’s peak, hoping he would wake him up and startle him to death. When he was a boy, he’d heard about political prisoners being choked in their sleep, their faces swelling, their eyes bulging out of their heads. He wanted to do the same thing now to the barber. Or maybe press a pillow down on his face. Or simply wake him up to ask him “Why?”
Looking down at the barber’s face, which had shrunk so much over the years, he lost the desire to kill. It wasn’t that he was afraid, for he was momentarily feeling bold, fearless. It wasn’t pity, either. He was too angry to feel pity. It was something else, something less measurable. It was the dread of being wrong, of harming the wrong man, of making the wrong woman a widow and the wrong child an orphan. It was the realization that he would never know why—why one single person had been given the power to destroy his entire life.
He was trembling again. His whole body, it seemed, was soaked with sweat as he tiptoed out of the barber’s room. Even when he was back in the basement calling about flights to Port-au-Prince, he couldn’t shake the feeling that after all these years the barber might finally make good on his promise to shoot him, just as he had his parents.
Dany woke himself with the sound of his own voice reciting his story. His aunt was awake too; he could make out her outline in the dark. It looked as though she was sitting up in her cot, pushing the chamber pot beneath her, to relieve herself.
“Da, were you dreaming about your parents?” She leaned over and replaced the chamber pot back under the bed. “You were calling their names.”
“Was I?” He would have thought he was calling the barber.
“You were calling your parents,” she said, “just this instant.”
He was still back there, on the burning porch, hoping that his mother and father would rise and put out the