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birds. And I watched the birds pause, tilt their heads, and consider his song. I glanced over my shoulder at my mother. She smiled at me. I don’t recall what I was thinking, but it was clear that whatever it was she understood so her empathy made me feel good. I turned my eyes back to the birds, then shifted them just enough to see Donnel purse his lips and whistle more. I couldn’t whistle, both because I didn’t know how and because my teeth were missing. But then, that didn’t stop me from trying. I watched Donnel’s lips for a moment more and listened to his airy tune. Then I turned my face to the birds again, took a deep breath, pursed my lips as best as I could, and breathed a gentle wind that joined Donnel’s song as it crossed through the bars and ruffled the birds’ feathers on the other side of the cage.
    II
    A s a child, I was obsessed with flight. Sometimes, before I went to sleep, I’d lie beneath the sheets and pretend I was a bird, a cloud, an astronaut, a superhero with the super power of not speeding or soaring, but floating, drifting according to the whim of wind. When a plane passed over Ever, I’d stop whatever I was doing, stop playing, stop teasing, stop walking, stop talking, and look up. Later, when I became a teenager and I began to develop a sense of the world and where I was in it, and when I was feeling awry and no one was around to say Nigga? What’re you doing? I threw things at planes that passed overhead. I threw anything that was near, anything I could snatch and heave: rocks and basketballs; bricks and books, chewing gum, pens, pencils, glass bottles; even spit; and when there was no object to be found, when I stood amidst nothing, I hurled fistfuls of emptiness, sometimes one after the other, sometimes at the same time.
    I wasn’t the only Icarus in Ever. Far from it. Percival, a dark-skinnedbrother whose angry disposition was lost the moment he spoke about his son Shakeem, taught Shakeem how to fold perfect paper airplanes, and together they spent Sunday mornings throwing their planes from their window and watching how far they sailed before landing on the concrete that surrounded Ever, the concrete courtyard—the cracked concrete parking lot, the concrete sidewalk that shrank in the winter, then swelled, heaved, and fractured more and more each summer. And Mr. Lucas, an old, gangly flutist from the fourth floor who had once lived in France, had a parrot named Charlie Parker that he never placed in a cage, so it flew, shat, and shelled peanuts wherever it wanted. And Tariq Abdullah, a stout, muscular, reckless blasphemer who’d become Muslim and grounded during his stay in Franklin Correctional Facility, fed the pigeons on the roof with saltines while pacing and reading aloud from the Qur’an. On the basketball court, brothers argued over who jumped higher, who had the greatest hang time; who flew. The best-looking women were fly. Everyone wanted Air Jordans. Crackheads got high. You smoked dope and got lifted. When I was sixteen, Anthony Roberson, an effeminate, bespectacled fifteen-year-old with a chipped front tooth and the best dance moves anyone in Ever had ever seen, spread his lithe arms like wings, ran as fast as he could, then hopped, skipped, pirouetted, and leapt from the roof of my building and screamed all the way down.
    Then there was Tyrone Jackson, the Vietnam veteran who was first mocked, then, eventually, reverentially dubbed Lindbergh. A helicopter mechanic, Lindbergh served two tours fighting for democracy and freedom. Some said he had been the most handsome man in all of Queens before America dropped him in Da Nang and Lindbergh, a toothless loon with half a head of short, dry dreadlocks and a shopping cart full of miscellany, replaced him. Lindbergh collected cans and scrap metal and anything else he could sell to make an honest living. Seven days a week, rain or shine, oppressively humid, fiercely hot, and in the