Harry Sylvester Bird by Chinelo Okparanta

Author:Chinelo Okparanta [Okparanta, Chinelo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

This was the way my life went those days: at 10 a.m., I reported to work at the specialty shop (more on this later); at 4 p.m., I took my one-hour lunch break by attending my Transracial-Anon meeting; at 7 p.m., I left work and returned to my hostel.

After a long and arduous eighteen years of being confined with frenzied and unloving parents, I had been eager to be elsewhere. The particular night in June 2020 after which I had suffered my series of breakdowns, when I by chance picked up my Tanzanian crystal, my path forward suddenly became clear to me. What followed were days—no, weeks—of Internet research to set up my plan. I won’t bore you with the details, but as soon as I could, I packed a duffel bag with some clothes and a third of the KN95 masks Chevy had ordered from Xinxiang and headed for the train to New York. I arrived in Manhattan in August.

It was fortuitous that I was eighteen and could legally inherit the money left to me by my grandfather. After settling the inheritance tax with the help of the executor, I was left with a cash sum of just under $40K. With this, I found lodging in an Upper West Side hostel, complete with two twin beds (a curtain between them), an in-room bathroom, free Wi-Fi, a restaurant café, and a sunken garden, just a ten-minute walk from Central Park, all for sixty dollars per night. It was supposed to be a shared room, but perhaps because of the pandemic, no roommate arrived. Moreover, due to the pandemic, common areas were closed off, buffet-style service was altogether done away with, and one had to wait in line, six feet apart of course, to pick up bagged breakfasts and bagged lunches. I was grateful to be lodging alone. I imagined that all other would-be lodgers had either chosen to remain safely in their own homes, or had been sick and confined in their own homes, or had been confined sick in some hospital somewhere, or, sadly, had died from the disease. This last thought always caused my arms to twitch and my breath to catch. If I did not immediately ward off the thought, I sometimes felt the urge to vomit, so I became efficient at suppressing it.

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