They let him out one week later. By that time his burden of gauze and plaster had been reduced to two small casts on his little toe and right wrist and three fat bandages wrapped around his chest. He was given a large bottle of codeine tablets to take with him, that and a set of orders, the major one being to stay put and not walk into burnt-out houses in the middle of the night.
"Don't worry," he told the doctor, leaning on a two- pronged cane that he'd been given, or actually been made to purchase, "I have no intention of walking anywhere."
"Good boy," said the doctor.
William didn't know if he was supposed to say thank you or just wag his tail.
A car service was waiting for him in the circular driveway-courtesy of Medicare. The driver peered out at him with unmistakable distaste; one old man and one new cane meant he'd actually have to get out and help once they'd arrived wherever it is they were going. He didn't look quite as homicidal as the driver from the other night, that night, but he looked like he wouldn't mind tripping William on the way in. William sympathized- after all, it was hot.
When they arrived at their destination, Mr. Brickman was waiting, Mr. Brickman and Mr. Leonati too, so the driver was able to stay where he was, his only manual labor the handing back of change. This brightened his mood considerably, leading him to actually say something solicitous.
William thought it must be something solicitous, because of the tone-the words were in Russian or Greek or Lithuanian or maybe pig Latin. Not speaking English seemed to be the taxi driver's rule of thumb these days.
Mr. Brickman and Mr. Leonati did speak English though.
"You don't look too good," Mr. Leonati said as he helped him out of the car. "What do you think?" he asked Mr. Brickman, who'd flanked him on his other side and was already grunting from the exertion. "You think he looks good?"
"Better than when I saw him before. You should have seen him then. He looked awful."
William felt as if he was caught in the middle of a stage routine-Leonati and Brickman, Brickman and Leonati-and him, the stooge, the butt of their hilarity. What next, he wondered-a pie in the face?
They helped him upstairs, one stair at a time, as if he were an infant learning to walk. Mr. Brickman appointed himself cheerleader and surrogate dad.
"Whoa… that was a nice big step. A very nice step. Now let's go for another. Whoa, what a step that was. A beauty of a step. Think you can do another."
Finally they got him to the top of the stairs and then to his room. They'd added pillows to his bed to make it more comfortable, and Mr. Brickman even had a card for him.
Roses are red, violets are blue, I here your sick, get well soon. Signed Laurie.
"So," Mr. Brickman shrugged, "she's not too good with rhymes. But it's the thought that counts."
"Yes, it's a nice thought. Thank her for me."
"I already did."
Mr. Leonati said, "Look, if you want food or anything, anything at all, I'll go out for you. Till you get back on your feet."
"I appreciate that, Mr. Leonati." And he did. He appreciated everything: them helping him up the stairs, the extra pillows, even the card-he appreciated that too. Being alive-he had a little appreciation left over for that too. In fact, he'd like to give being alive his sincere appreciation. This was okay, all of it, okay. They were playing house here, him, Mr. Brickman, and Mr. Leonati, and they were all doing a bang-up job. It suddenly occurred to him that if you acted like a family, you became one, enough of one anyway, to take the chill off. And it was cold out there, colder even than he'd remembered.
But now he was back inside. And just as before, when he'd left a hospital to go back to his room, left it with a bullet lodged in his shoulder and a certain hard-won understanding of his place in the scheme of things, he felt as if an elephantine weight had been lifted from his shoulders. Atlas hadn't had such a weight. Okay-so there was a certain dignity in bearing a thing like that, even, occasionally, a thrill or two, but by and large it was just plain wearisome. When you let it go, you realized that.
But now he was back in the bosom of his little family, safely ensconced in his bed, surrounded by pillows and well-wishers. A veritable oasis of peace. The only thing, in fact, that marred this oasis of peace, marred it at all, was the box still sitting by the doorway, that box, and occasional names that came flitting into his head like a list of items he'd forgotten to pick up at the store. Mr. Waldron, Mrs. Ross, Mr. Shankin. Okay-a pretty long list maybe, but every one of them a luxury item, not part of the four basic food groups at all. You'd have to pay for those little items, they'd cost an arm and a leg-at least two ribs and a navicular bone. And he was a little strapped now, now and for the completely foreseeable future. The box would have to be thrown out. And the names? He'd forget them, the way old people always forget names-after all, names are the first to go.
He didn't, of course-though not through lack of trying. If he was graded on trying, it'd be strictly A plus. He watched a lot of television-became quite fond of television-the game shows, those talk shows, even the commercials, all of them like gabby friends absolutely intent on keeping his mind from wandering into dangerous waters. They did keep his mind from wandering into dangerous waters. Well, maybe he waded in a little here and there, strictly up-to-the-knees stuff. But then his attention would be grabbed, absolutely yanked, by Housewife Hookers or Stripper Postmen or that ever spinning Wheel of Fortune or the latest Shaq-A-Tack.
And the time television couldn't fill was taken up by Mr. Brickman, who showed up with alarming regularity as if he were pulling guard duty. In his mind, he probably was on a guard duty of sorts, for Mr. Wilson's death had turned him into a sentinel of vigilance. Not to mention a general purveyor of doom. The actual doomed here were the elderly-whom he'd elected himself guardian of in the general, and of William in the specific. In his mind, they were an endangered species, threatened on all sides by a host of evils. And William, newly back in the fold as he was, found Mr. Brickman's attitude almost pleasing, comforting even, an affirmation of his own new credo.
Mr. Brickman kept a running score of the ongoing holocaust, replete with some of the more lurid stories concerning their fellow brethren.
"An eighty-eight-year-old woman," he read to William one day, "found gagged and beaten in the closet of her Brownsville apartment. And raped."
Another day's lead story: "An elderly married couple in Washington Heights threw themselves out the window in a suicide pact. Couldn't take the constant muggings."
There were a lot of stories like those, and Mr. Brick- man found all of them. Senior citizen set on by guard dogs, elderly couple dead of dehydration, ninety-year-old poisoned by pet food, elderly people beaten, robbed, stabbed, garroted, evicted, raped, sodomized, run over, and euthanized. See, Mr. Brickman was saying, one by one the herd is being decimated.
And William listened, listened and nodded in soulful agreement. An old man's place is in bed, in bed with the television on. He understood that again; he'd be sure to remember it.
And yet he couldn't forget everything. He could forget a lot, but not everything. So there he'd be, glued to Men Who Date Canines, or listening peacefully to Mr. Brick- man recount the latest atrocity against some elderly woman, when he'd remember some other elderly woman-Mrs. Ross maybe. Tiptoeing into the room and tapping him on the shoulder like a little sister he'd been ignoring, the one whom he'd been told to look after. And even though he'd say go away, sometimes she didn't listen to him, and she'd stay there, right by his shoulder, breathing down his neck. Of course, then, more often than not, he'd remember something else-that house on Cherry Avenue for instance. He'd remember that voice telling him to come right in, and how it felt to fall into absolute nothingness. He'd listen to his old bones going ouch, and then, before you could say codeine, she'd be gone, poof, vanished. Memory, then, could be your friend. It could sometimes kick the crap out of other memories you didn't want to deal with.
One day he asked Mr. Leonati to get rid of the box, for he thought that it was deliberately staring at him. Anyway, every time he opened his eyes, it was there. Sitting there like some icon of a religion he'd lost his faith in. He wanted it thrown out. But just as Mr. Leonati was lifting it, he said no, never mind, maybe he should look through it once more and Mr. Leonati said fine, whatever, and put it back down.
But William didn't look through it. He turned on Nuns Who Strip instead. He played checkers with Mr. Brick- man. He puttered around with his two-pronged cane. He taught himself old again, not that he'd actually forgotten how. It was like falling off a bicycle-that easy.
But in the corner of the room was that box, and that box kept bothering him. There was no place in the oasis for that box. So one day he decided, really decided, to throw it out.
This time he asked Mr. Brickman to do it, and though Mr. Brickman wasn't happy about it, he agreed. He tried lifting it from several angles, like a golfer lining up a particularly difficult putt. When he finally decided on his approach, he dug in with both hands, grimaced for his audience of one, and lifted it slowly up off the carpet. And dropped it.
The box opened and almost everything came spilling out of it.
And that's how it happened, the way most things happen-not by design, but by simple, stupid accident-that William finally discovered what the numbers meant.
It was so simple, so ridiculously obvious, that for a good half minute or so he thought he must be mistaken, that it would dissolve like a thirst-induced mirage as soon as he gave it a second look.
But it didn't.
And he remembered again how there's two kinds of seeing, just like there's two kinds of reading. By rote, where every letter's letter-perfect, every word sounded out just the way Webster's tells you, but with just the most rudimentary understanding, without any real comprehension at all. And the second kind of reading, which is like reading with a third eye, like reading between the lines, where you suddenly understand everything. And William had been reading things the first way, not the second, so though he'd gone through Jean's box and made note of everything, he'd seen nothing. And he hadn't been listening either, not really. What had Weeks said? For a long while he did nothing, really nothing. That's right. He did nothing. Because he didn't read or have a television or even an interest. He didn't read. Or have a television, or an interest, or a hobby, or maybe even a friend. But he did have something. A baseball program, a little black book, two salt and pepper shakers, a couple of flyers. And a library card. He didn't read. But he had that. "Mr. Brickman," William said, "could you do me a favor and pick up that library card for me." Mr. Brickman, still smarting from his previous blunder, smiled meekly and picked up the card. "Does it have a date?" "A date?" "A date of issue?" "Oh… let's see…" Mr. Brickman peered at it. "Yep… March, of this year. Expires in 2000. Made out to-" "So it's a new card," William said, "brand-new," cutting him off, but not so much speaking to Brickman as to himself. "Yeah. It's a new card. So?" "So…?" So. So we stay in bed, so we turn on Teenagers Who Marry Their Fathers, so we bet the OTB, so we stay put. Or so we start over.
"Want to go to the library, Mr. Brickman?"
Mr. Brickman said okay.
Why the Flushing library, Mr. Brickman wanted to know, once they caught the bus on Northern Boulevard- William waving hello to his old friend, the black woman driver. Why the Flushing library when there was a perfectly good one right in Astoria-no more than ten blocks from them? And-if he hadn't noticed, it was hot outside, and-if he hadn't noticed, he could still hardly walk, so why then go all the way to Flushing?
"Because that's the library that's got what I want," William said.
That shut Mr. Brickman up-but only temporarily. He began, instead, to point out all the probable muggers among their fellow bus passengers-which was every man between fifteen and fifty who exhibited the slightest signs of antisocial behavior: not talking to the person next to them, or talking too much to the person next to them, or rolling their eyes, or dropping their chin, or cracking their knuckles, or biting their nails, or sleeping, or, more ominously, pretending to sleep-which just about, ladies and gentlemen, convicted each and every man on the bus. Muggers all.
And ladies and gentlemen, here's the amazing thing. William might have dismissed it with a condescending smile, he might have, all things being equal, but all things weren't equal; Mr. Brickman was old and they weren't, Mr. Brickman was old and so was he. And now that he'd been suitably reminded of that, he found himself scanning the would-be Murderers Row right along with Mr. Brickman, listening to his commentary with a judicious ear, and wondering if maybe that one did look a little suspicious, if that other one did have some bad intentions hiding somewhere behind his seemingly harmless demeanor. The problem with the younger ones was they all looked like that now-like hoods, they all had the hood look. Looking dangerous was in fashion-even your face had to look dangerous, you had to have the sneer. The problem was, some of those sneering delinquents were grade A honor students, but okay, some weren't- some of them were the Puerto Rican kid who'd spit in his face. The problem was, the only way to tell them apart was to wait until one of them knocked you down and the other one picked you up and walked you across the street. No doubt about it, this getting-old thing was tough-you had to be able to see a little keener just when your eyesight was walking out the door.
Then too, there was the way they looked at you. Or didn't. William had become aware of that only gradually, the way you gradually become aware that you've grown fat-one article of clothing after another growing tighter till suddenly they're all tight, too tight to wear, and you have to stop blaming it on shrinkage, on that stupid Chinese cleaners down the block, and face facts. That's sort of the way William discovered that he'd grown invisible. That he'd become, without the slightest help from Claude Rains, the Invisible Man. No doubt about it. He'd walk down the street and no one saw him. No one. And the older he got, the more invisible he became. To pretty girls, attractive women, to homely women, to just about every variety of woman there was, he'd suddenly ceased to exist. That's what he'd noticed first. Then he noticed men weren't seeing him either. Most men. They saw through him, around him, behind him, but not him. Which is just the way most people see the old-they don't, and the ones that do generally have something bad on their minds, like rearranging your face.
Back to Mr. Brickman's fear then; it was a real fear. William felt it, and being old, he caught it, and catching it, he was forced to sit with it for the entire twenty- minute ride into Flushing. Right now they were passing over Flushing Bridge, the river beneath them so pumped full of pollutants it resembled one of those tar pits, handy graveyards for numerous woolly mammoths. This one had swallowed cars though, cars and washing machines and garden hoses and rusted train tracks. There was a sandpit warehouse right at its edge, but the river refused to reflect it, or its clock, which was frozen, had been frozen for years, at precisely 2:17. It was like a reminder, that clock-that the only way to stop time was to drop dead.
The library was dim, and considering the lack of working air-conditioning, surprisingly cool. It had the look and feel of a church-the same portentous quiet, the same expression of serene contemplation on the faces of the adults there. The non-adults looked about the same too-they looked like they'd rather be somewhere else. Mr. Brickman looked like he'd rather be somewhere else too-back in Astoria on his home turf. William felt a little like a transgressor here himself-he hadn't been to a library in years, or, in fact, to a church either. The sound of his cane echoed through the rows of books causing reader after reader to look up at him as if he'd made a particularly rude noise. Once they'd seen him though, or not seen him, it was back to the books in a flash.
The librarian, a long-haired young man who seemed imprisoned by his tie and jacket, walked over to offer his assistance-either that, or to tell him to get out. It was hard to tell from his expression, which was decidedly neutral. But courtesy won out.
"What can I do for you?" he asked.
Everything, William was tempted to say. Only everything. But he restrained himself. Instead, he took the list of numbers that was folded in his hand, Jean's numbers, and dropped it onto the counter, flattening it out as if it were a road map and he was in need of directions. Which, as a matter of fact, he was. For I'm lost, he might have said. I'm lost and I need to know where I am and where the place is that I'm looking for. And I have to know how to get there, that too, I have to know the route.
But what he actually said was: "These are call numbers. Do you think you can tell me where they are?"
Mr. Brickman, who was peeking over his shoulder said: "What are they… novels?"
"Periodicals," the librarian said. "I'll have to look downstairs. Take a seat."
So they sat. Mr. Brickman drumming his fingers on the table, William doing his own sort of rat-ta-tat-tat in his head, Shankin to Waldron to Ross, wondering exactly what periodicals Jean had been so interested in, and why.
Then the librarian was back upstairs, two magazines in his hand and an apologetic expression on his bemused face. No doubt about it-if it was possible to be both, both amused and sorry, he was.
"One magazine isn't here anymore," he said.
Okay, William thought, that took care of the I'm sorry part.
"Here's the other two," he said, dropping them on the table.
Which took care of the I'm amused part.
The first magazine was called Tattoo and had some sort of biker chick on the cover. The second magazine was called Healthy Skin and had some sort of Swedish chick on the cover. Those were the periodicals he'd asked for. He'd have been amused himself, if he hadn't been in pain and hadn't been in need of answers and hadn't been at the short end of the rope. He'd have smiled too-the way Mr. Brickman was smiling, or trying not to.
"What gives?" Mr. Brickman said.
Yes, what gives? The Table of Contents-that gives. It gives the contents. The contents it gave of Tattoo were "Biker Babe of the Month-Inside Foldout." "Snakes, Scorpions, and Scythes-The Tattoo Artists of San Fran." And "Getting Your Last Year's Girlfriend Out of Your Heart and Off of Your Chest-The Off and Ons of Tattoo Removal."
And what did the Table of Contents of Healthy Skin give? It gave these contents: "Sun or No Sun-The Latest Facts." "Cucumbers-Myth or Miracle?" "How to Pamper Your Derriere." And "Tattoos-The Newest in Laser Removal."
So, all in all, they gave a lot. They gave William what he'd asked for back in that Florida hotel room. For Jean to show him the way. And Jean had, he had. He'd tapped him on the elbow and said I will talk to you. If you listen, I will tell.