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By the time Michael met Nico and Raoul he'd already begun looking for a subject through which to extend his writing from the pages of a magazine to the pages of a book. His desire to be an author hadn't ebbed when he turned his back on a novel. With a clutch of respected pieces under his belt, and a cast of characters rendered through his immersive style, he was ready to try again.
It was a policeman who'd put Michael in touch with Nico and Raoul. They were chatting outside the subway entrance on Broadway and 201st, a couple of take-out coffees steaming in their hands. It was February and smudged banks of snow still bordered the street. A flat winter light fell upon the storefronts. Men and women commuted to work in padded coats, wearing gloves and hats made for the mountains.
Michael had travelled up to Inwood Hill Park that morning to see the site where Dutch traders first bought Manhattan, trading it from the Lenape Indians for a bag of trinkets worth twenty-four dollars. He'd only recently got to know the area north of Washington Heights, but its rawness had already got under his skin. The street theatre he'd discovered up there in the blocks off Inwood, Dyckman, and Broadway seemed more varied than that a hundred blocks south, more explicitly immigrant in its nature. Dominican men played dominoes outside O'Grady's, The Gael Bar, The Old Brigade Pub, their walls still painted with shamrocks and IRA flags. Dark-windowed Yukons throbbed with Reggaeton at the stoplights. Puerto Rican drag queens drank cocktails in the salsa clubs, youths in thug nighties to their knees catcalling them from the corners. Farther off, in the park itself, rangy black kids surged between the hoops of basketball courts while Italian grandfathers watched Little League baseball, the hollow punts of a Mexican soccer game filtering up from the field below.
Up there, above 200th, as he'd wandered the streets, Michael had felt he was within touching distance of Manhattan's original desire. That whatever had driven those Dutch traders could still be tasted in the air, and unlike farther south in the city, where origin had been diluted by money, the island's history of immigrant fuel was still on display. Each community he saw up there—the Dominicans, the Mexicans, the Irish, the African—seemed like the rings of a tree to him, ethnic watermarks of the island's growth and change.
Michael had got talking to the policeman at a coffee stand on the edge of the park. As they'd stirred in their sugars he'd asked him if he'd seen much change in the neighbourhood. The cop had laughed, shaking his head. "Oh, man," he'd said. "Like you wouldn't believe. Always changin' up here." They'd carried on talking as they'd strolled back towards his position at the subway entrance, Michael asking him if they got much trouble in the area. The cop had shrugged. "Some," he'd said. "Mostly drugs, domestics." Then, blowing on his coffee and stamping his feet, he'd told Michael about "a couple of punks," two Dominican brothers who'd walked the length of Arden at four in the morning the night before, smashing the roadside window of every car. They'd left the street thick with alarm sirens, shirtless men shouting down at the sidewalks from tall apartment blocks swirling with car lights.
As Michael had listened to the policeman describe the scene, he'd known immediately that he wanted to meet these boys, to find out who they were and why they'd landed on such a dramatic gesture of vandalism. He could already sense the hinterland behind the act, the stories emanating either side of the moment. He asked the policeman if he could meet them, these brothers. The cop raised his eyebrows, then sucked in the air through his teeth. He was Latino, broad-faced, with a full moustache. Michael pulled a fifty from his wallet and folded it twice. The policeman looked at it for a moment, then took it, shrugging again as he slipped it into his pocket, as if to say who was he to change the order of things? The following morning, in the office of their caseworker, Michael came eye-to-eye for the first time with the mistrusting stares of Nico and Raoul.
Excerpted from I Saw a Man by Owen Sheers. Copyright © 2015 by Owen Sheers. Excerpted by permission of Nan A. Talese. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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