It shows a man driving a car. It is the simplest sort of family video. You see a man at the wheel of a medium Dodge.
It is just a kid aiming her camera through the rear window of the family car at the windshield of the car behind her.
You know about families and their video cameras. You know how kids get involved, how the camera shows them that every subject is potentially charged, a million things they never see with the unaided eye. They investigate the meaning of inert objects and dumb pets and they poke at family privacy. They learn to see things twice.
It is the kid's own privacy that is being protected here. She is twelve years old and her name is being withheld even though she is neither the victim nor the perpetrator of the crime but only the means of recording it.
It shows a man in a sport shirt at the wheel of his car. There is nothing else to see. The car approaches briefly, then falls back.
You know how children with cameras learn to work the exposed moments that define the family cluster. They break every trust, spy out the undefended space, catching mom coming out of the bathroom in her cumbrous robe and turbaned towel, looking bloodless and plucked. It is not a joke. They will shoot you sitting on the pot if they can manage a suitable vantage.
The tape has the jostled sort of noneventness that marks the family product. Of course the man in this case is not a member of the family but a stranger in a car, a random figure, someone who has happened along in the slow lane.
It shows a man in his forties wearing a pale shirt open at the throat, the image washed by reflections and sunglint, with many jostled moments.
It is not just another video homicide. It is a homicide recorded by a child who thought she was doing something simple and maybe halfway clever, shooting some tape of a man in a car.
He sees the girl and waves briefly, wagging a hand without taking it off the wheel-an underplayed reaction that makes you like him.
It is unrelenting footage that rolls on and on. It has an aimless determination, a persistence that lives outside the subject matter. You are looking into the mind of home video. It is innocent, it is aimless, it is determined, it is real.
He is bald up the middle of his head, a nice guy in his forties whose whole life seems open to the hand-held camera.
But there is also an element of suspense. You keep on looking not because you know something is going to happen-of course you do know something is going to happen and you do look for that reason but you might also keep on looking if you came across this footage for the first time without knowing the outcome. There is a crude power operating here. You keep on looking because things combine to hold you fast-a sense of the random, the amateurish, the accidental, the impending. You don't think of the tape as boring or interesting. It is crude, it is blunt, it is relentless. It is the jostled part of your mind, the film that runs through your hotel brain under all the thoughts you know you're thinking.
The world is lurking in the camera, already framed, waiting for the boy or girl who will come along and take up the device, learn the instrument, shooting old granddad at breakfast, all stroked out so his nostrils gape, the cereal spoon baby-gripped in his pale fist.
It shows a man alone in a medium Dodge. It seems to go on forever.
There's something about the nature of the tape, the grain of the image, the sputtering black-and-white tones, the starkness-you think this is more real, truer-to-life than anything around you. The things around you have a rehearsed and layered and cosmetic look. The tape is superreal, or maybe underreal is the way you want to put it. It is what lies at the scraped bottom of all the layers you have added. And this is another reason why you keep on looking. The tape has a searing realness.
It shows him giving an abbreviated wave, stiff-palmed, like a signal flag at a siding.
You know how families make up games. This is just another game in which the child invents the rules as she goes along. She likes the idea of videotaping a man in his car. She has probably never done it before and she sees no reason to vary the format or terminate early or pan to another car. This is her game and she is learning it and playing it at the same time. She feels halfway clever and inventive and maybe slightly intrusive as well, a little bit of brazenness that spices any game.
And you keep on looking. You look because this is the nature of the footage, to make a channeled path through time, to give things a shape and a destiny.
Of course if she had panned to another car, the right car at the precise time, she would have caught the gunman as he fired.
The chance quality of the encounter. The victim, the killer and the child with a camera. Random energies that approach a common point. There's something here that speaks to you directly, saying terrible things about forces beyond your control, lines of intersection that cut through history and logic and every reasonable layer of human expectation.
She wandered into it. The girl got lost and wandered clear-eyed into horror. This is a children's story about straying too far from home. But it isn't the family car that serves as the instrument of the child's curiosity, her inclination to explore. It is the camera that puts her in the tale.
You know about holidays and family celebrations and how somebody shows up with a camcorder and the relatives stand around and barely react because they're numbingly accustomed to the process of being taped and decked and shown on the VCR with the coffee and cake.
He is hit soon after. If you've seen the tape many times you know from the hand wave exactly when he will be hit. It is something, naturally, that you wait for. You say to your wife, if you're at home and she is there, Now here is where he gets it. You say, Janet, hurry up, this is where it happens.
Now here is where he gets it. You see him jolted, sort of wire-shocked-then he seizes up and falls toward the door or maybe leans or slides into the door is the proper way to put it. It is awful and unremarkable at the same time. The car stays in the slow lane. It approaches briefly, then falls back.
You don't usually call your wife over to the TV set. She has her programs, you have yours. But there's a certain urgency here. You want her to see how it looks. The tape has been running forever and now the thing is finally going to happen and you want her to be here when he's shot.
Here it comes all right. He is shot, head-shot, and the camera reacts, the child reacts-there is a jolting movement but she keeps on taping, there is a sympathetic response, a nerve response, her heart is beating faster but she keeps the camera trained on the subject as he slides into the door and even as you see him die you're thinking of the girl. At some level the girl has to be present here, watching what you're watching, unprepared-the girl is seeing this cold and you have to marvel at the fact that she keeps the tape rolling.
It shows something awful and unaccompanied. You want your wife to see it because it is real this time, not fancy movie violence-the realness beneath the layers of cosmetic perception. Hurry up, Janet, here it comes. He dies so fast. There is no accompaniment of any kind. It is very stripped. You want to tell her it is realer than real but then she will ask what that means.
The way the camera reacts to the gunshot-a startle reaction that brings pity and terror into the frame, the girl's own shock, the girl's identification with the victim.
You don't see the blood, which is probably trickling behind his ear and down the back of his neck. The way his head is twisted away from the door, the twist of the head gives you only a partial profile and it's the wrong side, it's not the side where he was hit.
And maybe you're being a little aggressive here, practically forcing your wife to watch. Why? What are you telling her? Are you making a little statement? Like I'm going to ruin your day out of ordinary spite. Or a big statement? Like this is the risk of existing. Either way you're rubbing her face in this tape and you don't know why.
It shows the car drifting toward the guardrail and then there's a jostling sense of two other lanes and part of another car, a split-second blur, and the tape ends here, either because the girl stopped shooting or because some central authority, the police or the district attorney or the TV station, decided there was nothing else you had to see.
This is either the tenth or eleventh homicide committed by the Texas Highway Killer. The number is uncertain because the police believe that one of the shootings may have been a copycat crime.
And there is something about videotape, isn't there, and this particular kind of serial crime? This is a crime designed for random taping and immediate playing. You sit there and wonder if this kind of crime became more possible when the means of taping an event and playing it immediately, without a neutral interval, a balancing space and time, became widely available. Taping-and-playing intensifies and compresses the event. It dangles a need to do it again. You sit there thinking that the serial murder has found its medium, or vice versa-an act of shadow technology, of compressed time and repeated images, stark and glary and unremarkable.
It shows very little in the end. It is a famous murder because it is on tape and because the murderer has done it many times and because the crime was recorded by a child. So the child is involved, the Video Kid as she is sometimes called because they have to call her something. The tape is famous and so is she. She is famous in the modern manner of people whose names are strategically withheld. They are famous without names or faces, spirits living apart from their bodies, the victims and witnesses, the underage criminals, out there somewhere at the edges of perception.
Seeing someone at the moment he dies, dying unexpectedly. This is reason alone to stay fixed to the screen. It is instructional, watching a man shot dead as he drives along on a sunny day It demonstrates an elemental truth, that every breath you take has two possible endings. And that's another thing. There's a joke locked away here, a note of cruel slapstick that you are willing to appreciate even if it makes you feel a little guilty. Maybe the victim's a chump, a sort of silent-movie dupe, classically unlucky. He had it coming in a sense, for letting himself be caught on camera. Because once the tape starts rolling it can only end one way. This is what the context requires.
You don't want Janet to give you any crap about it's on all the time, they show it a thousand times a day. They show it because it exists, because they have to show it, because this is why they're out there, to provide our entertainment.
The more you watch the tape, the deader and colder and more relentless it becomes. The tape sucks the air right out of your chest but you watch it every time.
Marian Shay drove up to Prescott on business, allowing herself one cigarette for the two-hour trip, which she managed not to smoke until she was ten miles from town, where the mobile homes began to gather and the fast food blazed, and she felt good about this, controlled and disciplined and clean deep through.
There was something going on in the courthouse square. She parked a block away and walked back down to the square and it was one of those days in the high pines when the sun and sweet breeze get into your underwear. There were cars arrayed on a closed-off street, four rows of vintage machines extending two city blocks along the edge of the plaza, and loudspeakers on the lawn did dance-party rock-and-roll.
She had fifteen minutes to spare and walked among the cars, many with hoods raised for the pleasure of connoisseurs. It was early, not yet eleven, and only a dozen people wandered about. She saw a red-haired man who looked faintly familiar and watched him bend under a hood and then stand back to appraise a customized Buick with a black lacquer chassis.
He stood donnishly posed with jutted elbow and cupped hand and she realized after a moment that he worked with Nick at Waste Containment and that his name, which took another moment, was Brian Classic, which rhymes with classic, which describes these cars.
He saw her and showed a beam of recognition. Then he did a little dance from half a block away, the slowest of clinging fox-trots from out of the fifties.
About two hours later they met for lunch in the dining room of an old hotel just up the street. The room was close and warm and she held the glass of ice water up against her face.
He said, "You are here?"
"For a job interview. There's a small design firm here that renovates old structures. They want to open a Phoenix office. I would be it."
"How did it go?"
"All right, I think."
"You've done this kind of work?"
"Not exactly. Before the kids I helped manage a small real estate operation. Since the kids I've done part-time things now and then."
"Your own office. This is a fantasy of mine. To come wandering in just before lunch. Like a private detective. Hungover, a faceful of stubble. Riffle through the mail. Throw it down."
"Do you get stubble?" she said.
"Yes, eventually. Why do you ask?"
"I don't know. I thought maybe the smoother and fairer the complexion."
"We do shave," he said.
"I don't think my office will resemble a private detective's."
"You want light and air."
"Great thick proposals in strong binders."
"You want scale models, with trees."
"Maybe."
"And little bland people on the sidewalk."
"Multiracially bland."
"Brava. Want a drink?"
"Why not?" she said.
Brian ordered drinks from an old fellow who probably doubled as hall porter.
She said, "And you are here?"
"For the cars. I read about the show last night and felt a sort of schoolboy itch."
"Couldn't even wait for the weekend."
"Crowded. I deserve a day off anyway."
"You had to wait around for lunch. I'm sorry. I thought you had a business appointment."
"I'm not finished with the cars. They're worth a second look. And what could be nicer than sitting here waiting for someone to bring our drinks and fix the air conditioner and do something about the stuffing in the banquettes?"
"Is that what smells?" she said.
She smoked of course. Once she ordered the drink she knew the facade would crumble. It took very little to bring it down. She would smoke all she had and then find more. He made her laugh a few times and was funny even when he wasn't trying to be. She thought he probably had a rabbit for a pet when he was small but she wasn't sure why this made sense.
"You're tall, aren't you?"
He asked this suspiciously, as if she'd been concealing it.
"No taller than you."
"My wife is small. Have you met her?"
"I'm not sure."
"She wants me to take her to New York next month. I have to consult with engineers at the Fresh Kills landfill, which is sort of the King Kong of American garbage mounds."
"Does Nick like this kind of work?"
"You're asking me?" he said.
"Yes, I'm asking you."
"I think he likes it more than I do. I think he sees it in purer terms. Concepts and principles. Because this is Nick-the technology, the logic, the esthetics. Whereas I, in my little gringo mind-set."
"You're moving into new quarters. That may help your self-image."
"Yes, a great bronze tower. Just like an investment firm or media giant. Of course the structure resembles a geometric turd but that's only fitting, no?"
The man brought their drinks and they looked at the menus in the nearly empty room, they talked and looked, not really looking-looking and forgetting. Marian felt the nice bite of the gin and wondered what it was about Brian that made him so easy to talk to. She thought he went around scared most of the time but did not try to hide it from women, some women anyway, maybe the rare woman he runs into a hundred miles from home, and he falls all over himself with honesty and self-scathing insight, the things he does not normally show the boys.
To reciprocate perhaps. She didn't know why else she'd tell the dog story if not to strut her own confessional skills. They had another drink and ordered lunch.
"The dog barked and whined incessantly, Dukey, but the kids were small and they loved their dog and he barked, he cried, he went bye-bye in the house, he yapped at other kids and the neighbors complained and I secretly tried to give him away but no one would take him and so I finally, on an impulse-this is awful, why am I telling you this?"
"Because the story haunts you. Because you see mercy in my eyes."
"Yes, a frantic impulse. I convinced myself the dog was miserable and sick and suffering some irreversible thing and I drove out on 85,1 think it is, down past some dam into stark stony desert, much farther than I absolutely had to go, and I just kept going and going and finally stopped the car and opened the door and set Dukey out on the ground and then drove home and told Lainie, Sweetheart the dog ran away and I'm so sorry. But I did not let it go at that. I went reeling out of control. I started driving them through the streets, both kids, day after day, calling out the windows for Dukey, Dukey, and it haunts me, yes, like something I only dreamed and what a relief it is to realize it didn't actually happen."
"And then you realize it did happen."
Brian was enjoying this immensely and so she began to enjoy it too, which was probably the point, she thought.
"Driving through the dead summer streets in the long afternoons. I can hear their voices. Dukey, Dukey. They were five and three, I think. Calling out the windows for their dog."
She was nearly laughing-crying, looking at Brian's mug alight with pleasure and feeling the misery and shame of her act and smoking in the middle of a meal in an empty dining room where the air conditioner is not responding.
He said, "Dukey, Dukey."
"Duchino actually. Little Duke. Nick came up with the name. Do you know he's half Italian?"
"Our Nick? When did this happen?"
"You don't see it in his face?"
"I hear it in that voice he does."
"What voice?"
"The gangster making threats."
"What gangster?"
"It's a voice he does. Expert, stereotyped, pretty funny."
"Speaking of backgrounds," she said. 'And if this is too personal, you don't have to answer. But did you ever have a rabbit for a pet?"
They were having a fine time. When he talked she found herself sorting through the responses, getting them ready, one after another, and sometimes she broke in irresistibly and watched his face go bright. She told him she played field hockey in school and missed it. She missed drinking from a garden hose. She missed her mother and father more than ever and they'd been dead nine years and six years and were stronger forces now, so deeply present in her life that she understood completely how people see ghosts and have conversations with the dead. She had a garden hose but did not drink from it and did not allow her kids to drink from it and this was the difference, less in lost things than in knowledge become suspicious and alert. She told him she missed smoking even though she hadn't been able to stop.
When they were finished they walked up a stairway to the lobby and in her mind she kept ascending to a shadowed room at the end of a long empty hall and saw herself folding down the bedspread and standing above the cool sheets waiting for a knock at the door. Then they heard plaintive falsettos from the loudspeakers on the courthouse lawn and they walked down to the cars in the easy heat.
Brian went into a state of body rapture over a lime sherbet Chevrolet, a '57 Bel Air convertible with white upholstery. He draped himself over the hood and pretended to lick the hot metal. Marian thought this is what men get instead of fatty deposits around the thighs. But she had to admire the car, which was carefree and racy and even great in a way, the chromium sweep of it and the funny and touching music that bared its innocence.
Brian detached himself from the hood.
"Did you own one?"
"Too young," he said. "My oldest brother had one for a while. Brendan's Bel Air. We still talk about it in awed tones. It was the high point of his life. It meant everything to him. Girls, love, personality, power. It meant the moment. All those cars had the so-called forward look. Sleek as jet fighters. But it turned out that forward didn't mean the future. It meant do it now, have your fun, because the sixties are coming, bow wow bang bang. The engine had a throaty roar. We couldn't know it at the time but it's been downhill for Brendan ever since."
They walked under the elms at the edge of the square. His car was parked by the old city jail, which was the chamber of commerce now. They spoke oddly polite goodbyes. She thought maybe they felt guilty about something and needed to prepare their faces for the journey home, get the noise out of the system. She walked up the street to her car and felt the liquid pulse of the sun in every step.
Brian drove due north, looking for a sign that would lead him to the bridge. A sludge tanker moved downriver, funky and low-slung. He felt the old foreboding. It wasn't widely known, it was narrowly known that he experienced terrible things every time he crossed a bridge. The longer and higher the span, the greater his sense of breathless abyss. And this was a major bridge over a broad and historic body of water. The truth of bridges is that they made him feel he was doing some mobius gyration, becoming one-sided, losing all purchase on name and place and food-taste and weekends with the in-laws-hanging sort of unborn in generic space.
Then he saw it in the distance, steel-beamed and cabled, sweeping to the palisaded bank. He followed the signs, made the loops and started out across the bridge, choosing the upper level because the long gray Lincoln in front of him went that way. Lincoln and Washington, keep me safe. The radio was ablast with call-in voices, they're griping, they're spraying spit, it's the sidewalk salvo and rap, and he imagined a long queue of underground souls waiting to enter the broadcast band and speak the incognito news. He listened in solemn gratitude. It was a clamor so strong it amounted to a life force, carrying this Ohio boy through his white anxiety and across to the Jersey side.
He was looking for 46 west. He'd written out directions that the man had recited over the phone. The man had recited the routes and streets in a manner so automatic that Brian realized many pilgrims had made the trip across the river.
He had the directions written on hotel stationery and he kept the page on the seat next to him, snatching a look every ten seconds. After a mile on 46 west he spotted the Exxon station and made the maneuver onto 63 south, racing along the three-mile stretch to the Point Diner. Then he made a left turn out of the howl of highly motivated traffic and into residential streets, beginning to relax at last, approaching the circle on Kennedy Drive, another dead president.
Down a side street to an old frame house. Marvin Lundy opened the door, a hunched fellow with a stylized shuffle, in his late sixties, holding a burnt-out cigar. Brian thought he resembled some retired stand-up comic who will not live a minute longer than his last monopolized conversation. He followed the man through two rooms steeped in aquarium dimness. Then they went to the basement, a large finished room that held Marvin Lundy's collection of baseball memorabilia.
"My late wife, she would serve us tea with popovers that she made fresh, all other things being equal."
The room was filled with objects on tasteful display. Flannel jerseys draped along the walls, caps with souvenir buttons pinned to the visors, there were newspaper pages framed and hung. Brian did a reverent tour, examining autographed bats ranked on custom wall fittings, game bats beautifully grained, some with pine tar on the choke. There were stadium seats labeled like rare botanical specimens-Ebbets Field, Shibe Park, Griffith Stadium. He nearly touched an old catcher's mitt set on a pedestal, the object gashed yellow, spike-gashed and sun-smoked and patriarchal, but he managed to hold back. He looked at autographed baseballs in plexiglas globes. He leaned over display cases that held cigarette cards, ticket stubs, the signed contracts of famous players, nineteenth-century baseball board games, bubblegum wrappers that carried the pinkish likenesses of men from Brian's youth, their names a kind of poetry floating down the decades.
"You would put strawberry preserves on the popovers, which forget it, all life from the Renaissance onward it pales by compare."
None of this amounted to an astonishment. It was interesting, even moving in a way, but not great or memorable. The wondrous touch, the outlandish and surpassing fancy was the large construction along the far wall, a replica of the old Polo Grounds Scoreboard and clubhouse facade. It covered an area about twenty-two feet long and twelve feet high, floor to ceiling, and included the Chesterfield sign and slogan, the Longines clock, a semblance of the clubhouse windows and parapet and finally a hand-slotted line score, the inning by inning tally of the famous play-off game of 1951.
"You would have to eat them hot. She made a strict rule of no dawdling, Eleanor, because lukewarm you lose the whole experience."
Brian stood near the Scoreboard, looking at Marvin for permission to touch.
"I had a draftsman, a carpenter, an electrician and a sign painter, not a house painter, very temperamental. I showed them photographs and they did measurements and sketches so they could respect the proportions and get the colors. The hit sign and the E light up, for error. Where do you live?"
"Phoenix."
"I was never there."
In the stronger light down here he could see that Marvin Lundy's hair was a swatch of loomed synthetic, ash-brown, combed sleekly forward, and it made Brian think of Las Vegas and pinky rings and prostate cancer.
He said to Marvin, "I grew up in the Midwest. Cleveland Indians, that was my team. And I was flying in on business last night and saw an article in the airline magazine, the piece about you and your collectibles, and I felt a strong compulsion to get in touch with you and see these things."
He fingered the silky lapel of Babe Ruth's smoking jacket.
"My daughter talked me into doing the interview," Marvin said. "She thinks I'm turning into a what-do-you-call."
"A recluse."
"An old recluse with half a stomach. So now my picture's in twenty thousand seat pouches. This is her idea of get out and meet people. They put me in with the vomit bags."
Brian said, "I went to a car show and it did something to me."
"What did it do?"
"Cars from the nineteen-fifties. I don't know."
"You feel sorry for yourself. You think you're missing something and you don't know what it is. You're lonely inside your life. You have a job and a family and a fully executed will, already, at your age, because the whole point is to die prepared, die legal, with all the papers signed. Die liquid, so they can convert to cash. You used to have the same dimensions as the observable universe. Now you're a lost speck. You look at old cars and recall a purpose, a destination."
"It's ridiculous, isn't it? But probably harmless too."
"Nothing is harmless," Marvin said. "You're worried and scared. You see the cold war winding down. This makes it hard for you to breathe."
Brian pushed through a turnstile from an old ballpark. It creaked sort of lovingly.
He said, "Cold war? I don't see the cold war winding down. And if I did, good. I'd be happy about it."
"Let me explain something that maybe you never noticed."
Marvin was sitting in an armchair alongside an old equipment trunk bearing the stenciled inscription Boston Red Stockings. He gestured toward the chair on the other side of the trunk and Brian went over and sat down.
"You need the leaders of both sides to keep the cold war going. It's the one constant thing. It's honest, it's dependable. Because when the tension and rivalry come to an end, that's when your worst nightmares begin. All the power and intimidation of the state will seep out of your personal bloodstream. You will no longer be the main-what do I want to say?"
"I'm not sure."
"Point of reference. Because other forces will come rushing in, demanding and challenging. The cold war is your friend. You need it to stay on top."
"On top of what?"
"You don't know on top of what? You don't know the whole thing is geared to your dominance in the world? You see what they have in England. Forty thousand women circling an air base to protest the bombs and missiles. Some of them are men in dresses. They have Buddhists beating drums."
Brian didn't know how to respond to these remarks. He wanted to talk about old ballplayers, stadium dimensions, about nicknames and minor league towns. That's why he was here, to surrender himself to longing, to listen to his host recite the anecdotal texts, all the passed-down stones of bonehead plays and swirling brawls, the pitching duels that carried into twilight, stories that Marvin had been collecting for half a century-the deep eros of memory that separates baseball from other sports.
Marvin sat staring at the Scoreboard, his cigar slightly shredded at the burnt end.
"I thought we were going to talk baseball."
"We're talking baseball. This is baseball. You see the clock," Marvin said. "Stopped at three fifty-eight. Why? Is it because that's when Thomson hit the homer off Branca?"
He called him Branker.
"Or because that's the day we found out the Russians exploded an atom bomb. You know something about that game?"
"What?" Brian said.
"There were twenty thousand empty seats. You know why?"
"Why?"
"You'll laugh in my face."
"No, I won't."
"It's all right. You're my guest. I want you to feel at home."
"Why so many empty seats for the most important game of the year?"
"Many years," Marvin said.
"Many years."
"Because certain events have a quality of unconscious fear. I believe in my heart that people sensed some catastrophe in the air. Not who would win or lose the game. Some awful force that would obliterate- what's the word?"
"Obliterate."
"Obliterate. That would obliterate the whole thing of the game. You have to understand that all through the nineteen-fifties people stayed indoors. We only went outside to drive our cars. Public parks were not filled with people the way they later became. A museum was empty rooms with knights in armor where you had one sleepy guard for every seven centuries."
"In other words."
"In other words there was a hidden mentality of let's stay home. Because a threat was hanging in the air."
"And you're saying people had an intuition about this particular day."
"It's like they knew. They sensed there was a connection between this game and some staggering event that might take place on the other side of the world."
"This particular game."
"Not the day before or the day after. Because this was an all-or-nothing game between the two hated rivals of the city. People had a premonition that this game was related to something much bigger. They had the mental process of do I want to go out and be in a big crowd, which if something awful happens is the worst place to be, or should I stay home with my family and my brand-new TV, which common sense says yes, in a cabinet with maple veneer."
To his surprise Brian did not reject this theory. He didn't necessarily believe it but he didn't dismiss it either. He believed it provisionally here in this room located below street level in a frame house on a weekday afternoon in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. It was lyrically true as it emerged from Marvin Lundy's mouth and reached Brian's middle ear, unprovably true, remotely and inadmissably true but not completely unhistorical, not without some nuance of authentic inner narrative.
Marvin said, "Which the whole thing is interesting because when they make an atomic bomb, listen to this, they make the radioactive core the exact same size as a baseball."
"I always thought it was a grapefruit."
"A regulation major league baseball no less than nine inches in circumference, going by the rule book."
He crossed his legs, he stuck a finger in his ear and jigged an itch. Marvin had enormous ears. For the first time Brian became aware of music playing somewhere in the house. Maybe he'd been hearing it all along at the assimilated edge, music blended with the room tone, the airplanes drifting into Newark, the faint wail of bullet traffic on the speedways out there-a moderated sorrow, piano work that had the texture of something old and gentled over, a pressed rose faded in a book.
"People sense things that are invisible. But when something's staring you right in the face, that's when you miss it completely."
"What do you mean?" Brian said.
"This Gorbachev that walks around with that thing on his head. It's a birthmark, what he's got?"
"Yes, I think so."
"It's big. You agree with this?"
"Yes, it's quite big."
"Noticeable. You can't help but notice. Am I right?"
"Yes, you are."
"And you agree that millions of people see this thing every day in the newspaper?"
"Yes, they do."
"They open the paper and there's the man's head with that amazing mark high on the dome. Agreed?"
"Yes, of course."
"What does it mean?" Marvin said.
"Why does it have to mean something?"
"You take it at face value."
"It's his face," Brian said. "It's his head. A blemish, a birthmark."
"That's not what I see."
"What do you see?"
"You asked so I'll tell you."
Marvin saw the first sign of the total collapse of the Soviet system. Stamped on the man's head. The map of Latvia.
He said this straight-faced, how Gorbachev was basically conveying the news that the USSR faced turmoil from the republics.
"You think his birthmark? Wait a minute."
"Excuse me but if you rotate the map of Latvia ninety degrees so the eastern border goes on top, this is exactly the shape that's on Gorbachev's head. In other words when he's lying in bed at night and his wife comes over to give him a glass of water and an aspirin, this is Latvia she's looking at."
Brian tried to conjure the shape of the winestain mark on Gorbachev's head. He wanted to match it with a memory of geography tests on mellow afternoons, his limbs faintly aching with biological drives and the sweetness of school's end. The old melodic line came lullabying back, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania. But the map shapes escaped him now, the precise silhouettes of those nestled anatomies.
Marvin was looking at the Scoreboard again.
"People collect, collect, always collecting. There's people they go after anything out of wartime Germany. Naziana. This is major collectors looking for big history. Does that mean the objects in this room are total trivia? What's the word I'm looking for that sounds like you're getting injected with a vaccine in the fleshy part of your arm?"
"Innocuous."
"Innocuous. What am I, innocuous? This is history, back-page. From back to front. Happy, tragic, desperate." Marvin shifted his gaze. "In this trunk right here I have the one thing that my whole life for the past twenty-two years I was trying to collect."
Brian had an inkling.
"I tracked, I searched and finally I found it and bought it, eighteen months ago, and I don't even put it on display. I keep it in the trunk, out of sight."
Now it was Brian who looked at the Scoreboard.
Marvin said morosely, "It's the Bobby Thomson home-run ball, which I traced it back starting with rumors in the business. It wasn't even a business back then, just a few interested parties with someone's telephone number or first name, the skimpiest kind of lead that I pursued with a fury."
He paused to light his cigar. It was old and stale and looked like a soybean sausage from the school cafeteria. But Brian understood that a cigar was tribally required, even if the smoke stung his eyes.
For the next three hours Marvin talked about his search for the baseball. He forgot some names and mangled others. He lost whole cities, placing them in the wrong time zones. He described how he followed false leads into remote places. He climbed the stairs to raftered upper rooms and looked in old trunks among the grandmother's linen and the photographs of the dead.
"I said to myself a thousand times. Why do I want this thing? What does it mean? Who has it?"
Through the narration, the whole wandering epic, skimmed here, protracted there, Brian was confident that the man was slipshod only in the telling. The search itself had clearly been hard, fierce, thorough and consuming.
At one point Marvin hired a man who worked in a photo lab and had access to special equipment. They studied news photographs of the left-field stands at the Polo Grounds taken just after the ball went in. They looked at enlargements and enhancements. They went to photo agencies and burrowed in the archives. Marvin had people sneak him into newspaper morgues, into the wire services and the major magazines.
"I looked at a million photographs because this is the dot theory of reality, that all knowledge is available if you analyze the dots."
There was a slight crackle in his voice that sounded like random radio noise produced by some disturbance of the signal.
He acquired original film. He brought in darkroom equipment. He ate his meals with a magnifier around his neck. The house was filled with contact sheets, glossy prints, there were blowups pinned to clotheslines rigged through several rooms. His wife and child fled to England to visit relatives because Marvin somehow married English.
He hired a private detective with an intermittent nosebleed. They placed ads in the personal columns of sporting magazines, trying to locate people who'd sat in section 35, where the ball went in.
There was the photographic detailwork, the fineness of image, the what-do-you-call-it into littler units.
"Resolution," Brian said.
And then there was the long journey, the suitcase crawl through empty train stations, the bitter winter flights with ice on the wings, there was the weary traipse, a word he doesn't hear anymore, the march into people's houses and lives-the actual physical thing, unphotographed, of liver-spotted hands and dimpled chins and the whole strewn sense of what they remember and forget.
1. The widow on Long Island turning a spoon in her cup.
2. The gospel singer named Prestigious Booker who kept a baseball in an urn that held her lover's ashes.
3. The ship on the dock in San Francisco-don't even bring it up.
4. The man in his car in Deaf Smith County, Texas, the original middle of nowhere.
5. A whole generation of Jesus faces. Young men everywhere bearded and sandaled, bearded and barefoot-little peeky spectacles with wire frames.
6. Marvin's sense of being lost in America, wandering through cities with no downtowns.
7. The woman on Long Island, what's-her-name, whose husband was at the game-she served instant coffee in cups from a doll museum.
8. The Coptic family in Detroit-never mind, it's too complicated, riots and fires in the distance, tanks in the streets.
9. The detailed confusion of Marvin's narrative, people's memories mixed with his own, shaped to bending time.
10. A tornado touching down, skipping along the treetops in an evil weave, the whole sky filthy with flung debris.
11. Whose husband was in the footage Marvin analyzed, scrambling for the baseball, and all she had in the house was instant.
12. Riding up the side of a building in an elevator that's transparent.
13. The ship on the dock-please not now.
14. What a mystery all around him, every street deep in some radiant amaze.
Brian listened to all this and he heard the music end and begin again, the same piano piece, and this was not the second time he was hearing it but maybe the eighth or ninth, and he listened to Marvin's dot theory of reality and felt an underlying force in this theme of the relentless photographic search, some prototype he could not bring into tight definition.
"A thousand times I said. How long do I look? Why do I want it? Where is it?"
He advertised for amateur film footage of the game and acquired a few minutes of crude action that showed a massive pulsing blur above the left-field wall shot by a man in the bleachers. He brought in an optical printer. He rephotographed the footage. He enlarged, reposi-tioned, analyzed. He step-framed the action to slow it down, to combine several seconds of film into one image. He examined the sprocket areas of the film searching for a speck of data, a minim of missing imagery. It was work of Talmudic refinement, zooming in and fading out, trying to bring a man's face into definition, read a woman's ankle bracelet engraved with a name.
Brian was shamed by other men's obsessions. They exposed his own middling drift, the voice he heard, soft, faint and faraway, that told him not to bother.
Marvin's wife and child came home and went away again. The house had become a booby hatch of looming images. The isolated grimace, the hair that juts from the mole on the old man's chin. Every image teeming with crystalized dots. A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide inside the smallest event.
This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rambling past. It makes reality come true.
Marvin Lundy opened the trunk.
The baseball was wrapped in tissue paper inside an old red-and-white Spalding box. There were deep stacks of photographs and correspondence and other material related to the search. Birth certificates, passports, affidavits, handwritten wills, detailed lists of people's possessions, there were bloodstained garments in Ziploc bags.
He took some still frames out of a manila envelope and showed them to Brian.
This was a sequence that involved the scramble for the ball, people in bevies, Marvin said, scratching and grabbing, and a man in the last photo standing starkly alone, white-shirted, looking down at the exit ramp, looking hard, glaring at someone, probably at the person who'd come away with the ball, but Marvin could not find a way, for all his mastery of the dots, to rotate the heads of the people on the ramp so he could see the face of the individual in question.
"But you identified the man in the white shirt."
"From running the picture in the back of magazines where they did waterbeds and dirty personals."
"And you went to see the wife."
"This is many years after the game. What happened he died. The widow sits in a cold house turning a spoon in her tiny cup. I try to find out what he might have said to her about the game, the ball, anything. What game, she says. I try to explain the extenuations of the thing. But it's more than twenty years later. What game, what ball?"
A woman came down the stairs carrying coffee and cheesecake on a tray. She seemed to issue from Marvin's story, a recollected figure taking material form. Marvin shut the trunk so she could place the tray on top. She was his daughter, Clarice, determined to tend to dad whatever his objections.
"I didn't hear you come in. She comes in like she's Chinese, with muffled feet."
"You were talking. I could be an armed robbery in progress, you wouldn't hear a thing."
She was in her late twenties, blondish and gym-fit. She told Brian she lived ten minutes away by car and worked as a court stenographer. He thought he could easily fall in love with the sitcom tilt in her voice and the swerve of her thigh lines under the linen skirt.
"We're almost finished here, Clarice."
"In a hundred grueling hours. Your guest may have other things he needs to do."
"What could he have?"
"It'll be dark soon."
"Dark, light. These are words."
The baseball box was on its side among scattered photographs on the floor and the ball had dribbled out, still crinkled in tissue. Clarice pulled up a chair and she and Marvin finished the story, more or less, through mouthfuls of cheesecake.
"For how many years, Clarice, I'm looking for a man named Jackson orjudson?"
"Get to the point," she said.
"Because there were roundabout hints that pointed to him as someone I should be interested in. And the ball has a history by this time that I've been inching along, where different things match and join. But I can't locate the man or even-what?"
"Ascertain," Brian said.
"His correct name. By this time, forget the footage-I'm using rumors and dreams. There's an ESP of baseball, an underground what, a consciousness, and I'm hearing it in my sleep."
"Faster, daddy, faster."
"Meanwhile there's this woman. I'm trying to find Judson Jackson Johnson and there's this woman who got my name from the memorabilia market and she's been calling me long-distance collect day and night. She says she used to own the thing I'm looking for. Mysteriously missing for years, she says, from the little locked box where she used to keep it."
"Genevieve Rauch."
"Whose name I can never."
"Genevieve Rauch," his daughter said. 'And the two of them try to establish the basic, you know."
"Indicators," Brian said.
"That would make her baseball at least a remote possibility."
"The marks and scratches," Marvin said. "The trademark if it's correct. The signature of the league president who was in office at the time. Her memory is iffy. I make some leeway, then she talks about something else. This is a woman she has an extra chromosome for changing the subject. A thousand times I'm tempted to hang up the phone."
"Then it happens," Clarice said.
"A man in his car."
"A man's driving along in his car, someone shoots him dead. Turns out the victim is the long-lost former husband of Genevieve Rauch. Turns out further his name is Juddy Rauch, Judson Rauch. So the two rivers meet. Took a homicide to reveal the connection."
Marvin lowered his head to the trunk top to sip his coffee and Brian stared into the weave of his woeful toupee.
"When I had my stomach I used to eat this cheesecake unconscious."
Clarice explained how he went to Deaf Smith County, Texas, where he hired a local lawyer on behalf of Genevieve Rauch and finally located the baseball sealed in a baggie and vouchered and numbered and stored in the property clerk's office. Impounded by the police along with the body, the car, all the things in the car, of which this was one, crammed in a cardboard box filled with junky odds and ends.
Marvin puffed on his stogie.
"I go all the way to the Bronx to buy this cheesecake. A kosher bakery that you couldn't find it if I gave you a road map, a guidebook and whatever he's called that speaks five languages."
"An interpreter."
"An interpreter," Marvin said.
The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.
"And so finally," Brian said, "you bought the baseball."
"And I traced it all the way back to October fourth, the day after the game, nineteen hundred and fifty-one."
"And how did you finance this operation for so many years? The travel, the technical end, all of it."
"I had a local chain of stores, dry cleaning, which I sold after my wife passed away because I didn't need it anymore, the aggravation."
"Marvin the Clothes King," his daughter said with a little affection, a little regret, some irony, a certain pride, a touch of rueful humor and soon.
She talked to her father about a doctor's appointment he had in the morning and he listened the way you listen to the TV news, staring indifferently into India. She took the tray and headed up the stairs. Brian imagined following her in his car and pulling alongside and catching her eye and then accelerating loudly and leading her to a wayside inn where they get a room and undress each other with their teeth and tongues and never say a word.
He listened to the music drifting through the house, the keyboard lament, and he finally identified the lurking presence in the story of Marvin's search, the strange secondhandedness of all that exacting work, the retouching, the enhancements-it was an eerie replay of the investigations into the political murders of the 1960s. The attempt to reassemble a crucial moment in time out of patches and adumbrations-Marvin in his darkroom borrowing a powerful theme and using it to locate a small white innocent object bouncing around a ballpark.
Brian said, "So we know the lineage of the thing in the later stages. Rauch to Rauch to Lundy. But how did it all begin?"
"You asked so I'll tell you. With a man named Charles, let me think, Wainwright. An advertising executive. I have the complete sequence back to him. The line of ownership."
"But not back to the game itself."
"I don't have the last link that I can connect backwards from the Wainwright ball to the ball making contact with Bobby Thomson's bat." He looked sourly at the Scoreboard clock. "I have a certain number of missing hours I still have to find. And when you're dealing with something so many years back, you have to face the mortality rate. Wainwright passed away and his son Charles Jr. is forty-two years old now and stuck with the name Chuckie and I've been trying to talk to him for a long time. He was last seen working as an engineer on a freighter that plied-you like that word?"
"Plied."
"The Baltic Sea," Marvin said. "Speaking of which."
"Yes?"
"You should train an eye on the mark on this Gorbachev's head, to see if it changes shape."
"Changes shape? It's always been there."
"You know this?"
"What, you think it recently appeared?"
"You know this? It's always been there?"
"It's a birthmark," Brian said.
"Excuse me but that's the official biography. I'll tell you what I think. I think if I had a sensitive government job I would be photographing Gorbachev from outer space every minute of the day that he's not wearing a hat to check the shape of the birthmark if it's changing. Because it's Latvia right now. But it could be Siberia in the morning, where they're emptying out their jails."
He looked at his cigar.
"Reality doesn't happen until you analyze the dots."
Then he got to his feet with a certain effort.
"And when the cold war goes out of business, you won't be able to look at some woman in the street and have a what-do-you-call-it kind of fantasy the way you do today."
"Erotic. But what's the connection?"
"You don't know the connection? You don't know that every privilege in your life and every thought in your mind depends on the ability of the two great powers to hang a threat over the planet?"
"That's an amazing thing to say."
"And you don't know that once this threat begins to fade?"
"What?"
"You're the lost man of history."
It seemed the visit was done. But first the host led his guest to a shelved alcove near the stairway. This is where he kept his collection of taped ball games, radio and TV, hundreds of slotted cassettes going back to the earliest broadcasts.
"People who save these bats and balls and preserve the old stories through the spoken word and know the nicknames of a thousand players, we're here in our basements with tremendous history on our walls. And I'll tell you something, you'll see I'm right. There's men in the coming years they'll pay fortunes for these objects. They'll pay unbelievable. Because this is desperation speaking."
Brian wished the man could be lighter and sweeter. He looked at the Scoreboard one last time. He thought finally it was an impressive thing but maybe a little funereal. It had that compact quality of preservation and exact proportion and respectful history that can produce a mood of mausoleum gloom.
They went up the stairs and walked through the shadowed rooms to the front door. Marvin stood there with his dead cigar.
"Men come here to see my collection."
"Yes."
"They come and they don't want to leave. The phone rings, it's the family-where is he? This is the fraternity of missing men."
"I understand."
"What's your name?"
"Brian Classic."
"Nice to meet you," Marvin said.
Brian asked about a way back to Manhattan that did not include the George Washington Bridge. There was a tunnel here and a tunnel there and Marvin gave both sets of directions with a number of choices attached to each. Brian the fool narrowed his eyes and nodded yes although he knew he would retain none of this once he was in the car.
He drove along turnpikes and skyways, seeing Manhattan come and go in a valium sunset, smoky and golden. The car wobbled in the sound booms of highballing trucks, drivers perched in tall cabs with food, drink, dope and pornography, and the rigs seemed to draw the little car down the pike in their sheering wind. He drove past enormous tank farms, squat white cylinders arrayed across the swampland, and he saw white dome tanks in smaller groupings and long lines of tank cars rolling down the tracks. He went past power pylons with their spindly arms akimbo. He drove into the spewing smoke of acres of burning truck tires and the planes descended and the transit cranes stood in rows at the marine terminal and he saw billboards for Hertz and Avis and Chevy Blazer, for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers of the cars were dousing in their ashtrays-all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality, and of course he thought of Marvin.
When he went past Newark Airport he realized he'd overshot all the turnoffs and their related options. He looked for a friendly exit, untrucked and rural, and found himself some time later on a two-lane blacktop that wended uncertainly through cattail mires. He felt a bitey edge of brine in the air and the road bent and then ended in gravel and weeds.
He got out of the car and climbed an earthen bank. The wind was stiff enough to make his eyes go moist and he looked across a narrow body of water to a terraced elevation on the other side. It was reddish brown, flat-topped, monumental, sunset burning in the heights, and Brian thought he was hallucinating an Arizona butte. But it was real and it was man-made, swept by wheeling gulls, and he knew it could be only one thing-the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island.
This was the reason for his trip to New York and he was scheduled to meet there with surveyors and engineers in the morning. Three thousand acres of mountained garbage, contoured and road-graded, with bulldozers pushing waves of refuse onto the active face. Brian felt invigorated, looking at this scene. Barges unloading, sweeper boats poking through the kills to pick up stray waste. He saw a maintenance crew working on drainpipes high on the angled setbacks that were designed to control the runoff of rainwater. Other figures in masks and butylene suits were gathered at the base of the structure to inspect isolated material for toxic content. It was science fiction and prehistory, garbage arriving twenty-four hours a day, hundreds of workers, vehicles with metal rollers compacting the trash, bucket augers digging vents for methane gas, the gulls diving and crying, a line of snouted trucks sucking in loose litter.
He imagined he was watching the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza-only this was twenty-five times bigger, with tanker trucks spraying perfumed water on the approach roads. He found the sight inspiring. All this ingenuity and labor, this delicate effort to fit maximum waste into diminishing space. The towers of the World Trade Center were visible in the distance and he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one. Bridges, tunnels, scows, tugs, graving docks, container ships, all the great works of transport, trade and linkage were directed in the end to this culminating structure. And the thing was organic, ever growing and shifting, its shape computer-plotted by the day and the hour. In a few years this would be the highest mountain on the Atlantic Coast between Boston and Miami. Brian felt a sting of enlightenment. He looked at all that soaring garbage and knew for the first time what his job was all about. Not engineering or transportation or source reduction. He dealt in human behavior, people's habits and impulses, their uncontrollable needs and innocent wishes, maybe their passions, certainly their excesses and indulgences but their kindness too, their generosity, and the question was how to keep this mass metabolism from overwhelming us.
The landfill showed him smack-on how the waste stream ended, where all the appetites and hankerings, the sodden second thoughts came runneling out, the things you wanted ardently and then did not. He'd seen a hundred landfills but none so vast as this. Yes, impressive and distressing. He knew the stench must ride the wind into every dining room for miles around. When people heard a noise at night, did they think the heap was coming down around them, sliding toward their homes, an omnivorous movie terror filling their doorways and windows?
The wind carried the stink across the kill.
Brian took a deep breath, he filled his lungs. This was the challenge he craved, the assault on his complacency and vague shame. To understand all this. To penetrate this secret. The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed except the engineers and teamsters and local residents, a unique cultural deposit, fifty million tons by the time they top it off, carved and modeled, and no one talked about it but the men and women who tried to manage it, and he saw himself for the first time as a member of an esoteric order, they were adepts and seers, crafting the future, the city planners, the waste managers, the compost technicians, the land-scapers who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and lost and eroded object of desire.
The biggest secrets are the ones spread open before us. This was Marvin Lundy talking, filling Brian's head with that dry staticky voice that seemed to come out of a surgical slit in his throat.
The wind carried the stink from the mountain of wrack.
Specks and glints, ragtails of color appeared in the stratified mass of covering soil, fabric scraps from the garment center, stirred by the wind, or maybe that teal thing is a bikini brief that belonged to a secretary from Queens, and Brian found he could create a flash infatuation, she is dark-eyed and reads the tabloids and paints her nails and eats lunch out of molded styrofoam, and he gives her gifts and she gives him condoms, and it all ends up here, newsprint, emery boards, sexy underwear, coaxed into high relief by the rumbling dozers-think of his multitudinous spermlings with their history of high family fore-heads, Stranded in a Ramses body bag and rollered snug in the deep-down waste.
He watched several gulls veering near and saw a hundred other gulls positioned on a slope, all facing the same way, motionless, regardful, joined in consciousness, in beautiful empty birdness, waiting for the signal to fly.
Marvin was out of his basement, wincing in the light. He steered his car tenaciously, choosing a lane and sticking to it. He wore a tan windbreaker with a plaid lining because this is what he always wore when the leaves began to turn. It was the faithful change of apparel, an adjustment to the cosmos that made his life seem regular. He wore the jacket through the decades, giving the old one to the Salvation Army and buying another just like it, the everyman tan that he could spot on a store hanger from fifty yards in one of those vast hushed areas just before closing time where ranks of suits are arrayed like executives in hell.
He also wore a pair of latex gloves, a precaution he took whenever he went to the city.
When he got to the Lower East Side he drove through the streets a number of times before he found a space that looked okay, where he wouldn't get towed and he wouldn't get broken in, and he locked the car and then stood back and studied the parking job he'd done and the street in general, old furniture sold cheap and a truck lot in which every inch of every truck was covered with graffiti. The humans walked by looking touchy and unbeloved. He saw two men in wheelchairs who scooted after cars stopped at the light to scrounge a little change.
Marvin walked in his sliding step, his sort of explanatory shuffle, it was a comment on the literature of shuffles. He went down Orchard Street looking at the clothes in the windows and stalls, dry goods by the mile. He stopped to read the writing on a collection of what-do-you-call, T-shirts, a nasty remark on nearly every item, words unprint-able through history wearing shirts in a window. A young man stood next to him, thin-limbed and tattooed, a mustache that's half fin-ished, glaring at him. He felt the glare, a tapered look directed straight into the side of his head.
Marvin glanced over.
"What? I'm looking in the window," he said.
"I look means you gotta look?"
"I can't look? What? It's a window."
"You seen me looking. Means you gotta look?"
"What? So I can't look?"
"I'm looking."
"It's a public window," Marvin said.
"You want window? I give you window."
"All of a sudden, this?"
"You think you want to look? I show you look."
Marvin walked away because what else could he do, flexing his fin-gers inside the latex gloves. It was impossible to live. You couldn't walk down the street one foot follows another. Because what happens? They kill you. They come out of a door and stab you because you look at them. This is the latest word in death and menace. You look at them, they kill you. One look where you catch their eye, it gives them the right to end your life.
Later he crossed Essex Street and found the bakery. What he likes, the backroom business right up front, the ovens and mixing table where they make bialys in front of your eyes, a man in a white shirt and a white apron with sifted meal on his hands and arms, and Marvin was struck by the force of the moment, a simple drama in a window, the whiteness of bread and work. He thought he could stand here all day and watch the baker shape the pasty mass. He bought for later, for his daughter, flat rolls, onion-flaked, that were a thing you eat and a city and a religion and a war.
He walked down the street with the bakery bag warm against his ribs. He passed a playground, kids crouched and darting on the handball court, and half a block later it was all Chinese.
When he had his stomach he used to come here with Eleanor.
It was the old mystery of Chinese things, food on steam tables, vegetables he could not identify, the secret minds of the people. He stood and watched the living fish toss in homemade tanks. He bought a fried dumpling and took a bite, more for the gesture than the taste because he didn't taste the way he used to. It was like the memory of food, the ghost of ginger and minced chives.
He shuffled back to the car. He saw the wheelchair beggars with their scraggle beards, they raced each other to a stopped car, bodied forth, hands screwing and cranking. It was a competition of gyrating arms, their eyes peering through the dusty glass for some sign of contact within. But the drivers looked away. The drivers shut their windows against, the window washers, the flower sellers, the carjackers, against the medium mad intent on conversation.
You look at them, they kill you.
He drove home, leaning tensely toward the wheel. An English girl from Somerset, you couldn't make it up. He played the piano elegy that was Eleanor's favorite music, once a month or so, hitting the repeat button so it never stopped. It was her voice he heard at this time of year, reminding him to get out the tan windbreaker. Time to don the old McGregor, Marv. In that simple little sentence, word for word through the years, was all the what, the deep dependency of two people who met during the war, wrote letters back and forth, finally got married, had a child after a while, it took some doing, two hearts joined in the habit of the days. Dry cleaning. He dry-cleaned McGregors by the ton.
The phone was ringing when he walked in the door. He went into the kitchen, put the bakery bag on the table, took off his jacket, the phone was ringing, he opened the refrigerator and got out the celery tonic and took a swig from the bottle, he was free to do that now, there are compensations too. He took off the gloves, so tight they resisted separation, peeling them down to the wide part of his hand and then yanking each clinging finger, a process that made him feel part artificial. Then he went across the room to the phone, which was a white wall model with a photograph next to it showing President Reagan standing in the Oval Office between Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca, which was the only baseball reference anywhere in the house above the basement, a tasseled flag behind them. Because she could be a pain in the ass, Eleanor, on the subject of drinking from the bottle.
The phone was ringing. He looked at it and lifted the receiver, they call it a handset now. He was finally selling the house to go live in Clarice's apartment building, the daughter and son-in-law up on four, the father down on three in an easy-to-manage flat with bananas going brown on the windowsill. He would take showers sitting down while Clarice and Carl went running on their running machine upstairs, they were training to live forever.
"I'm calling from Phoenix," said the voice.
"The city or the bird?"
"Some months ago a man I know. Ten or eleven months ago. Paid you a visit."
"I wouldn't recall."
"Named Brian Classic."
"If you tortured me, I wouldn't remember. I have people they come here half a dozen times. I see them on the street they could be garment bags on their way to the airport. I function inside my mind."
"In any case he recently mentioned the visit. I wonder what you can tell me about the baseball in the trunk."
They would knock on his door to see if he was all right. He'd poke his head past the shower curtain. All right, I'm fine, all right.
"You're a loyal fan retired in Arizona with a heart valve they implanted with dacron cuffs and you developed a sweetness for the old days. You spent your career in mergers and what, acquisitions. Made millions but you're still dissatisfied. You want one last acquisition that's personal from the heart."
"Brian said it might go like this."
"You want to talk about the ball, you get approximated first. The fact is I'm ready to sell. People know this. I get calls from men with grainy voices. They have polymer packed in their gums. They have openings that were drilled in their sides for human waste to detour. They come home from the hospital echo-dopplered. I hear from men with quadruple bypass, with nitroglycerin in their bloodstream that you manufacture dynamite."
"I'm not a fan anymore. I don't follow the teams."
"I'm in the category myself where I'm undergoing tests. This means I have cancer recurring in so many parts of my body the doctor gives me group rates. Don't worry, you're not supposed to laugh. I'm trying to make you feel bad."
"And you're a Dodger fan, yes?"
"From before I was born."
"Raised in Brooklyn?"
"Raised in Brooklyn, get my cheesecake in the Bronx, go to the Lower East Side for this and that."
"A Dodger fan. But you've reproduced the Polo Grounds Scoreboard in your basement."
"To remind me," Marvin said. "Or prepare me. I forget which."
"I'm not retired. And I haven't made millions. And I don't know exactly why I want to buy the ball."
This was good. Marvin liked this. It was good to hear from someone who was not palpitating in his mind for the old Giants or the old New York. They have stools you can buy in surgical supply outlets that you place in your shower so you can sit and do the far-flung parts of your body without falling and breaking a hip, which he saw one day on the hip replacement channel, with molded seats and nonskid legs. They have a channel for every body part.
"Irbu call me out of nowhere," Marvin said. 'And you want to do a deal. But you don't know why."
"That's right," said the voice.
Good. Because this was Marvin's situation for a long time. This was Marvin's exact status. For years he didn't know why he was chasing down exhausted objects. All that frantic passion for a baseball and he finally understood it was Eleanor on his mind, it was some terror working deep beneath the skin that made him gather up things, amass possessions and effects against the dark shape of some unshoulderable loss. Memorabilia. What he remembered, what lived in the old smoked leather of the catcher's mitt in the basement was the touch of his Eleanor, those were his wife's eyes in the oval photographs of men with handlebar mustaches. The state of loss, the fact, the facticity in its lonely length. This was a word he never thought he'd need to use but here it was, crouched for years in his secluded brain, coming out to elongate the loss.
"I have a mushroom-shaped tumor."
"Yes."
"The doctor calls it a fungating mass."
"I don't know that term."
"I don't know it either. It's not in the dictionary because I looked in two dictionaries. When they get their terms outside the dictionary, it means they're telling you goodbye."
They went to Chinatown. They went to the Jersey shore and ate harpooned swordfish, which it's tastier when the fish dies unstrangled by a net, with olive oil and capers, the last great fish thing on the planet.
"I have to tell you first thing. I don't have the what-do-you-call completely established."
"The lineage."
"The lineage. I don't have the lineage all the way."
He told the caller some things about the ball. He said he would make a long story short. Then he made it long. He entertained the man, why not? And he saw it coming even as he did the bits and routines, delivered the reliable lines. Clarice would have to rent a hospital bed for the apartment, high sides so he wouldn't tumble to the floor. Strangers would come to wash his genitals, immigrants from countries on the travel channel, they had lives of their own that he could not imagine a single minute of. He would forget how to eat, how to say simple words. His body would lie there trying to put together the needed elements to take a breath. An oxygen tube in his nose and bananas on the windowsill, he hates them when they're spotted and soft. Clarice speaking slowly, putting a cool cloth to his naked head. All right, I'm fine, all right. Carl in his pressed white shorts and tube socks, a stockbroker disguised as a boy
"Do we want to talk about price?" said the voice.
The word for water is water but he wouldn't be able to say it. The body forgets the basic things. He talked on the phone to Phoenix and looked at his windbreaker hanging on a chair.
They went to the Jersey shore. They made love, they made salads. This was when the terms were in the dictionary.
That night he ate half a cantaloupe with grapes clustered in the scooped-out part. This is how they sold it in the supermarket, packed in clinging wrap.
When people tell rat stories, the rat is always tremendous. It's a drag-belly rat the size of a cat because this is a satisfying rhyme. There was a fair amount of rat lore in these streets when Nick Shay was growing up. Not that rats were frequently seen. They were heard in the walls and down the yards, indelible half fictions, running across rooftops in the moon. Enormous rats with rat-brown fur. There were rats in sewers and demolition sites and coal bins, a rustling in the flung garbage of empty lots.
He got out of a taxi near the building where his mother lived. The building was not here thirty, forty years ago, a large brown structure, tall and broad and defined by a sense of fortification-fences and ramps, cameras angled from the brickwork.
This used to be a row of five-story buildings, tenements, and that's where he saw the rat, wet and dead, lying next to a coal pile on the sidewalk. He was nine or ten at the time and the incident came back to him, taxi easing from the curb, with a detailed directness. Just a dead rat but he could see it clearly, feeling a kind of doubleness, a shaped transparency, die-cut, that fit him to the moment. He remembered how he'd studied the limp body, feeling a grisly thrill to be so close, able to trace a faint pink line down the underside of the tail, and the rat was brown and gray and pink and white all together and separate but he was disappointed by its size-he would have to exaggerate the rat, put some heft and length in his story, some mouth drool and yellow eye.
There was a man in a plexiglas booth. Nick signed a register and was buzzed into the lobby, which was occupied by kids, small and smaller, playing, milling, their voices shrieky in the bare space. He took the elevator to twelve. The other rat was later, when he was in his twenties, also ordinary in size, your common Norway brown, but ordinary is big enough when you talk about rats.
Matt opened the door, his brother Matty, still looking a little boyish, short and blocky, cowlicked, with thick glasses and a fresh haircut and some gray, maybe, on top, that seemed extraneous. Midforties he would be. They hadn't seen each other in a few years and it was only an accident of timing that brought them together today.
They shook hands and exchanged the wry smile of adversaries who are enjoined from mauling each other by some inconvenience of context.
Nick said, "Where is she?"
They talked about their mother, about medications, doctors' appointments, not unusual matters, but there was a rigor in the older brother's questions, a particularity of interest and concern that amounted to a kind of challenge.
Matt said finally, "She's okay, she's good, she eats and sleeps normally. You want to know about her natural functions, you'll have to ask her yourself."
"You're staying over?"
"Two nights. You've totally forgotten what it's like, Nick. A night in the Bronx."
But Matty had long since filled out the small boy's sketchy torso, developed some mass in his upper body, a certain sturdiness of bearing.
Nick said, "I have to go to Jersey in the morning or I'd take her to the doctor myself."
"What's in Jersey? Chemical waste eating people's houses?"
"Personal business."
"How's Marian?"
"Fine, they're all fine."
They drank seltzer and took turns looking out the window. There was a picture window with a broad view west. El Bronx. People sat on lawn chairs on the roof of a motel nearby. Nick could tell these were local men and women who'd gained entry to the roof from an adjacent building, carrying their chairs and newspapers. He knew it was evidence of brisk improvisation, people extracting pleasure from the grudging streets, but it made him nervous, it was a breach, another opening, another local sign of instability and risk.
"I took her to the zoo," Matt said. "She has the zoo across the street but it's the first time in twenty years I could get her to go. Practically forced her out the door."
"You're on a mission."
"She says she has more animals on television than she can handle. I can't make her see the point of living breathing creatures."
"I'm getting her out of here," Nick said.
"Is that right?"
"To Phoenix. That's right. There's no reason anymore for her to be here."
"She has friends here. You know this."
"I know this? How many friends? What friends?"
"To Phoenix," Matt said.
"How many friends?"
"We haven't done a head count lately. But if she wanted to go, we'd take her gladly."
"You don't have room."
"We have room," Matt said.
"Listen to me. You don't have room. We have room. We also have climate."
"Climate."
"This is important at her age."
"Janet's a nurse. You want to make a contest out of it? Janet's a nurse."
"This is stupid."
"Of course it's stupid. This is why we're doing it," Matt said.
Nick was at the window again.
"Why would they put a motel in a place like this?"
"I don't know."
"It's a convenience, this motel, for sex and drugs. Because what else is it here for? Or homeless. A shelter for homeless people. They put them in motels now."
"She likes it here, Nick. It's her life, it's what she's used to. She has her church, her stores, all the familiar things. And the friends that are still alive. Ask her for a list."
"You don't know. I know. It's a convenience, this motel, for what they're doing."
Nick went into the kitchen and started opening cabinets. He inspected the area under the sink. Kids were riding tricycles in the hallway. He poured another seltzer and went into the living room. The bike bells sounded down the hall.
"How's Janet? Janet's all right?"
"She had a lump removed from under her arm."
"Did I know this?"
"It's okay. She's doing okay. The kids are okay."
"These lumps are everywhere. Everybody's looking for lumps."
"I read something in the paper not long ago. Made me think of you," Matt said. "Remember those machines they had in shoe stores? Tall consoles sort of like old radios, but with a slot down near the bottom."
"Jesus, yes. I haven't thought of that."
"The clerk puts shoes on the kid's feet and then the kid goes and stands with his feet inside the slot."
"I haven't thought of that since I was, what. They stopped making them."
"And the clerk looks into a viewer at the top of the device and can see the feet inside the shoes."
"To check the fit," Nick said.
"To check the fit. Well, the machine was a fluoroscope and what it did was transmit x rays through the shoe and into the foot, it's called differential transmission and it makes a shadowy greenish image. I just barely remember this. Jimmy's buying you a pair of shoes and then he's lifting me up so I can look into the machine and see your feet inside your shoes and your bones inside your feet."
"The question is, Where are those shoes now?"
"No, the question is, Did you do this enough times to suffer bone damage because the machine was basically spraying your feet with radiation."
They heard the key in the lock.
"I have healthy feet," Nick said.
"I'm relieved."
"But thanks for the scare. I'll do the same for you someday."
Rosemary Shay came through the door with a shopping bag in each hand, her body slanted toward the heavier bag. She saw that Nick was here. She stood and looked at him, eyes alive and searching. She was always searching him for something, some sign, some change. He moved toward her to help with the bags. Her face had furrows nearly everywhere, gathers and tucks, little parchment pleats above the mouth. Her hands were old, they were long and worked, milky blue veins lapping the scored knuckles.
They took the bags away from her, complaining that she did not allow them to help her sufficiently. They warned of back strain and heat exhaustion. She told them to shut up even as she tried to take the groceries away, items passing hand to hand. Nick embraced her, laughing, and she felt unpersuadable in his arms.
They ate and talked, took second helpings, corn on the cob, enormous tomatoes the grocer kept in the back room for special customers, grown in his yard on City Island-the old deep tomato taste, summery and blood-buttery and voluptuous.
"Tell him about the job," Rosemary said.
"He doesn't want to know."
"He's your brother. Tell him."
"Another job change?" Nick said.
"Yes. A research institute."
"Then this is not a change."
"A different one. Nonprofit. We draw up studies to help third world countries develop health services and banking facilities."
"Goody-goody stuff."
"Yes," Matt said happily. "We produce paper. We smoke pipes, those of us who smoke."
"A think tank," Rosemary said.
They let this term hover above the salad. Year by year, job by job, Matt was separating himself from the science he did in the 1970s, work whose precise nature eluded Nick, government work that involved classified projects and remote locations. Not that Nick was eager to reach him. It was strange, that's all, for younger brother to be the tight-lipped guy for a change, not inclined to answer questions readily.
"My kid's learning the game. Jeffrey."
"What game?" Matt said.
"What game. What game would I be talking about? Your game."
"My game."
"He plays against his computer. His computer has a chess program with a take-back option so he can undo his dumber moves."
Matt said nothing.
The cats came out of hiding. They curled around the chair legs, hooked their backs, rubbing against the legs of the people, undulant in the mazy space down there, and they went swaybacked and yawned, asses up.
"We have room for you," Nick said to his mother.
"Where did this come from?"
"It was always here. You know that. We've been waiting for you to say you're ready."
"Well I'm not. We have dessert. Who wants coffee?" she said. "I have the decaf. I know Matty takes it."
Then she told them a story about Jimmy downtown. She told it over coffee and they listened with a shared intensity that no other subject could remotely provoke. It was the thing that made them a family, still, after all the silences and distances-the father in his lost glory, making book.
"It was a funny thing, funny-strange I mean, but the first bets he ever took were from cops. He was a plumber's helper at the New Yorker Hotel. Then he was moved into the security office, which I visited several times, we were keeping company then, a big noisy office in the freight delivery area, and the security chief had made a space for the local bookmaker to come and do his tally every morning. He charged him rent, very reasonable, I'm sure. Soon the bookie makes Jimmy his runner. Jimmy loved this. He made payoffs to winners, he collected money from losers. He did the rounds every day, all through the garment district this was. He was light on his feet, dodging the boys who pushed the racks. He started picking up extra action, action for himself, sitting on bets it was called-he selected carefully, a bet here and there. And it was often the police he was getting his business from. So you have the security people and the police and what else is new? Then once a month a detective, this is the bagman, he went to the Solomon Brothers car dealer and he picked up the protection money to distribute in the precinct house. So the money's flowing back and forth and everybody's happy. The Solomon brothers ran the bookie operation for the whole area, Arthur and I forget the other Solomon, Arthur and Bernie, and Arthur and Bernie wore beautiful suits and had a box at the Polo Grounds and knew ballplayers and show people, and eventually Jimmy got his own small piece of action, on the up-and-up, and the Solomons paid him eighty dollars a week, this is after you're born," she said to Nick, "and after he already left me once, plus a bonus for a good business month."
Matt said, "But who kept other gambling interests from moving in? A couple of car dealers couldn't do that, could they? They must have imported real gangsters."
"They didn't have to. The money they paid the police was double coverage money. They paid the police to let them operate. And they also paid them to roust the competition. When competition showed up, the borough detectives or precinct detectives came down on them like a holy terror."
"Gangbusters," Matt said.
"Like gangbusters. Which is the story I started out to tell before I got involved in the fine print. The police making arrests. They even had to arrest the bookies who were paying them off. They got pressure when people complained, upstanding citizens, you know, or straight from City Hall. These were called accommodation arrests. The sergeant would apologize, he would book you at the precinct on Thirtieth Street and then you went to Centre Street, where the lawyer for the Solomons was waiting, and you said, Guilty, judge, and paid a twenty-five-dollar fine and went back to work. And the day you were born," she said to Matt, "your father was arrested twice. Confusion inside the precinct. They arrested him in the morning and when he finally got released he took the subway to the Bronx, where I was in the hospital getting ready to deliver, it was one of those steamy sticky days and he came in the room and mopped my brow and fanned me with the racing form and said, Did you have it yet, and after a while he said he has to see a man, very important, be right back, and he went downtown and got arrested again, different cop, same desk sergeant, I don't know about the judge, and when he got back to the hospital, with the running around and the heat and the subway, he looked worse off than I did but he got no sympathy, you can believe it, from me."
Matt said, "Interesting day."
"It was a dizzy comedy but we had no one to share it with because it was one thing to take bets but not so acceptable to get arrested for it and I've never told this story until now."
Nick watched her carefully, absorbing every gesture and expression. A depth in her eyes that she dared her sons to interpret-the gnaw, the rankling pain that sits inside the good-natured telling. And the voice in its factual carry, vowels extended and bent a bit, a sound out of the old streets, the old demotic song gone to the near suburbs now, and a slight Irish pitch teasing the piece from somewhere deep in childhood.
There was a noise in the street, a customized car speaker bombing the night with music, a car that was all sound, a mobile sound bomb, and Nick glanced sharply at his brother, who shrugged and grinned.
"He wants you to sit on his patio, Mama. Bright stars above. Cactus outlined in the moonlight."
"Imagine me and cactus."
"No noise in the street. They arrest people for noise out there. If your front yard isn't neat and clean, your neighbor's kids won't talk to your kids."
Nick waited for her to speak again. He opened himself to everything inside her, to the past that never stops happening, and the passing minute, and what she feels when she scratches the back of her hand, pulling at the skin, then scratching. He tried to hear the rustle of her life, the fly buzzing in the room of the woman who lives alone.
One of the cats rubbed against his ankle, the orange torn his mother had found in the street. He shook it off and poured coffee all around.
They sat at the table talking in low tones.
Rosemary was in the bedroom and they talked across the dishes and cups and the flick of spilt milk.
"Where do you sleep?"
"I make up the sofa," Matt said. "Where do you sleep?"
"Park Avenue South. The Doral. You drove down?"
"Took the shuttle. Tell me in all seriousness. Do you really want to take her out there?"
"More than ever."
"Itbu have to understand this woman is not afraid. She lives a free life. People know her. They respect her. The neighborhood's still a living thing."
"Lower your voice."
"Lower my voice."
"Did you see the hallways?" Nick said.
"The hallways. These hallways? Which hallways?"
Matt stacked some dishes and took them to the kitchen.
"Listen to me. Stand at the elevator. Look to your left. Then look to your right. What do you see?"
"I don't know What do I see?"
"You see the longest, saddest, scariest, most depressing-that feeling, you know?"
"It's a hallway," Matt said.
"It's that feeling. A nightmare out of some Stalinist-all right, I'm overreacting."
"It's a hallway. Filled as a matter of fact with little kids most of the time."
"Lower your voice."
"Look, it is well within your experience to invent a fantasy of events as you think they transpired or are transpiring. This is not un-up your alley."
Nick could not look at his brother without wanting to pop him a shot across the mouth. Same reason as ever-the father, not the mother. The deep discordance, the old muscling of wills, that ungiv-ing thing in the idea of brothers.
"No one came for him, Nicky. No one got him and took him away. He left because of us basically. He didn't want to be a father. Being a husband was bad enough, what a burden, you know, full of obligations and occasions he couldn't handle. He was a loner, to use the romantic word, only worse than that, clinically self-involved, not out of vanity or stupidity but out of some fear, some inbred perspective, some closeness of perspective that amounted to fear. It made him unable to see other people except as encumbrances, little hazy shapes that interfered with his solitude, his hardness of being. He should have joined the French Foreign Legion when he was twenty. Not that I'm ready to renounce my existence. But speaking honestly and realistically. That's what he should have done."
"You know a lot. How do you know so much?"
"She tells me things. She tells me things she never told you."
"I'm looking at you saying this."
"You're looking at me."
"That's right."
"You're giving me the look."
"That's right, I am."
Matt was at the sink doing dishes now, running the tap at low volume so they could hear each other, and he didn't turn to check his brother's look.
"He had some trouble. Some sharpshooter hit a long shot on him. A big bet at long odds. Jimmy had his own operation by then, independent of the Solomons. I even know the horse's name."
"You know a lot. How come I'm not impressed?"
"It was the final weight, the final pressure, and it pushed him out the door."
"Listen to me. I'm confused here. Help me out. First he leaves because of us. Then he leaves because somebody hits a long shot and he can't pay off."
"Terra Firma. Jimmy hadn't laid off the bet with bookies who could handle those sums. Maybe it was a late bet and he didn't have time to shop it around."
"You know this and I don't?";
"She protects you."
"I am completely fucking unimpressed. Why is that?"
"There was no drama of men pushing him into a car and speeding away. He owed money he couldn't pay. He was a small operator. He paid a buttonmaker ten dollars a week to help figure out his tally. He dealt in small numbers."
"Listen to me. This is not an invitation to violence? When you owe money to someone and can't pay off? In that environment?"
"What environment? You heard her. They didn't need enforcers."
"No, they had cops. But not for this kind of situation."
"He left before a situation could develop. He had one foot out the door for years. You heard her. He left her once before. He was looking for an excuse to make it permanent."
"You know all this. And I don't. And yet I'm remarkably unimpressed. Help me out. Explain this to me."
Matt turned off the tap and looked at his brother, who sat leaning over the table.
"He did the unthinkable Italian crime. He walked out on his family. They don't even have a name for this."
"He didn't walk out. They came and got him."
"Keep believing it," Matt said.
He turned on the tap, sponging and rinsing the dishes. The car came back, the car-sized boom box, causing a fuzz storm out there. Nick leaned heavily over the table, lazy-eyed now, brows lowered and mouth open just a chink, forming a lifeless grin. He resembled a man who'd started out drinking hours ago determined to reach a point of particular abandon.
No one spoke. Matt washed and dried a dish, then tried to find the place in the cabinet where it belonged. The car moved off now, finally. Then Nick got up. He took the remaining objects from the table and carried them into the kitchen area. He didn't walk, he moved. It was heavy movement, sluggish and brooding.
"She has her church," Matt said.
"What?"
"She has her church. Her priest."
"We'll get her a new church."
"It won't be the same."
"We don't want it to be the same. We want it to be different. That's the point."
Matt handed him a glass to dry. They worked quietly for a time, doing the dishes and putting them away, finding the right place for each item.
"How's the waste business?"
"Booming. The waste business. Bigger by the minute."
Til bet it is."
"We can't build enough landfills, dig enough gaping caverns."
"You get in there? See the stuff up close?"
"I drive by sometimes. Inspect from a distance."
"You smell the smell?"
"I've done this, yes."
"You see the rats? It must be the Planet of the Rats."
Nick found the place in the cabinet for dessert dishes.
"Did I ever tell you about the rat downtown?"
"I don't think so," Matt said.
"I was thinking about it coming up here. I had a date, a jazz date, we went to see Charles Mingus. I'm trying to think. I think I was living in Palo Alto then, doing textbook work. Came back for a conference. Maybe I was twenty-six. And my date was a German woman, a philosophy student, yes, and a sort of future, now that I think of it, terrorist type, and we went to see Mingus on Hudson Street somewhere, and Mingus stood up there rocking his bass and glaring down at the cash register every time it rang. Mingus was big and he was wide. He looked like three men sharing a suit. And I walked her home, we walked way across town and then downtown and we get to her place, a basement apartment in an old building, and we walk in the door. The second we walk in the door she turns on the light. And then this rat. I'm standing there thinking whatever I'm thinking. Sex is not external to these thoughts. And then this rat. I see this rat go right up the wall. It runs up the wall, a very tremendous rat, and it makes a sound I can still hear, like a whistling corpse. And my date. My date says something in German and picks up something from a table and goes after the rat. I stand there dead still. I'm immobilized by frozen desire. My desire has frozen in my loins. And my date is charging across the room after the rat."
Matt placed a wet cup in the dish towel that Nick held in his hand. Nick could see the pleasure of the kid brother who is invited into the action, given the privileged details of some infamous event. All the more dimensional, the rarer and sweeter when the narrator allows an element of foolery to attach itself to his sober persona, some hapless-ness or slippery shame. All the more intimate and appealing.
"And the rat runs down the other side of the wall and goes zip into the bathroom like a toy on a string, only a thousand times quicker. A phenomenal rat, big and fast, and my date goes right after it, wielding whatever she was wielding that I never actually identified. She turns on the bathroom light and goes right in. I'm feeling frankly a little neglected. But never mind. I stay where I am. I think, What is happening to my jazz date? It's disintegrating into a rat hunt. And then she sticks her head out the door."
Matt studied his brother's face, perceptibly moving his lips to Nick's account, anticipating a word, changing expression when Nick did.
"I am standing as far from the bathroom door as I can stand and still be said to occupy the apartment. I have the front door open. My date is battling the rat in the bathroom and I can hear the rat's sick whistle. And my date sticks her head out the door and says, I am not believing this! I am killing this fucking rat two times already! Rat poison with skulls! And now it is coming back! And she goes back in and resumes the hunt. And I feel totally unworthy. Sleep with her? I have no right being in the same city. I can hear the rat running across the bathtub. Did you ever hear a rat run across a tub? I'll tell you, man, it's awesome."
Matt was strangling with pleasure. He made a sound in his throat, an involuntary quaver. Nick finished the story-the rat squeezing neatly through a vent in the wall, the evening completely queered. They drank another cup of coffee and then his brother found the phone book and called a cab. Nick stood by the window in the living room. He was looking for hookers in spandex tights on the motel roof.
The Italians. They sat on the stoop with paper fans and orangeades. They made their world. They said, Who's better than me? She could never say that. They knew how to sit there and say that and be happy. Thinking back through the decades. She saw a woman fanning herself with a magazine and it seemed like an encyclopedia of breezes, the book of all the breezes that ever blew. The city drugged with heat. Horses perishing in the streets. Who's better than me?
She heard them talking out there.
He wants me to go to the zoo because the animals are real. I told him these are zoo animals. These are animals that live in the Bronx. On television I can see animals in the rain forest or the desert. So which is real and which is fake, which made him laugh.
It would have been easier to believe she deserved it. He left because she was heartless, foolish, angry, she was a bad housekeeper, a bad mother, a cold woman. But she could not invent a reliable plot for any of these excuses.
But it was the sweetest intimacy, his whispered stories of the gamblers and the police, lying in bed the two of them, his days with the garment bosses and bellhops. He made her laugh, telling these stories late at night, love nights, whispering to her afterward, lying close in bed, and even when he was flat-pocket broke he told her funny screwy stories in the night.
She began to drift into sleep now and said a Hail Mary because this is what she always did before she went to sleep. Except she wasn't always sure anymore whether the last Hail Mary she said was a Hail Mary from last night or from two minutes ago and she said this prayer and said this prayer because she mixed up the time and didn't want to go to sleep without being sure.
She had more material things than most people she knew, thanks to sons who provided. She had nicer furniture, a safer building, doctors left and right. They made her go to a gynecologist, with Janet calling and then Marian calling, women of the world hooray. But she still couldn't say, Who's better than me?
She got the Italian without the family, the boy who just showed up, like a shadow off a wall. She didn't mind that at first. She liked it. She didn't want relatives turning up with pastry in white boxes. She liked his slimness, his lack of attachments. But then she began to see what this meant. The only thing preserved in the man's dark body was a kid in empty space, the shifty boy on the verge of using up his luck.
Then she slept and then the car music woke her up. She heard their voices again, the cupboard doors shutting.
She did not show her love. She showed it but not enough. She was not good at that. But it was partly his doing. The more she loved him, the scareder he got. He was scared in his eyes, telling funny stories in the night.
She heard them opening and shutting the cupboard doors. They'd never known where things belonged. Why should they know now? Jerks. She scratched the back of her hand, fiercely, and said another Hail Mary in case the last one she said was last night.
This is how she was brought up. Go to mass, mind your parents, marry the hardworking boy, the ordinary boy, the ham-and-egger they used to say. And the nuns used to say, You're a child of Mary and you don't have to kiss him. But he wasn't ordinary and she kissed him.
She could not bear to think that Nick might be right. Someone came and got him. This would make her Jimmy innocent. Which Nick believed from an early age. But maybe the other was worse, the truth was worse. It did not happen violent.
She slept and then woke up. She listened and knew that Nick had left and Matty had gone to bed and then she listened for noises in the street and she thought of the animals in their cages and habitats, lions near Boston Road coughing in the night.
They were showing the videotape again but Nick wasn't watching. He stood by the window in his hotel looking at cars move soundlessly on the avenue, sparse traffic in the sodium glow of the streetlamps.
He was waiting for room service to show up with his brandy.
On the trip down here the cabbie had driven left-handed all the way, a Dominican in a net shirt, his right arm extended across the seat back. He told Nick about the murders of gypsy drivers, a regular event lately, a game of chance you play every night.
Nick did not like cats. Once he got her to say yes, the cats would have to be sent into retirement.
Either they rob you and kill you or they rob you and let you live or you take them somewhere very efficient, the man said, and either they pay you or they don't.
I live a quiet life in an unassuming house in a suburb of Phoenix.
Once he got her to say yes, they'd be able to spend untrammeled time remembering together.
He'd tipped the man nicely. What do you tip a man who risks his life when he answers a call? Nick was confident he'd tipped him nicely, handsomely, but not ridiculously, not in a way that would have exposed him as a stranger here.
He looked at the TV screen, where the tape was nearing the point when the driver waves, the crisp wave from the top of the steering wheel, and he waited for room service to knock on the door.
When Matty was real small and his brother used to sit on the pot and read comics to a peewee audience, neighbor kids ages four and five supposedly being minded by a grown-up somewhere near, with Matty in the doorway ready to shout out chickie, which was the warning word, and there's Nick on the pot reading to them from Captain Marvel or the Targeteers, his pants hanging limp from his kneecaps, and he did lively dialogue, declaimed and gestured, developed a voice for villains and for women and an airy stabbing screech for gangster cars cornering tightly in the night, scaring the kids at times with his intensity of manner, then pausing to loose a turd that would splattingly drop, that would plop into the water, the funniest sound in nature, sending a happy awe across the faces of his listeners-it was the creepiest delight of all, better than anything he might deliver from the paneled pages.
Matt walked through the neighborhood to see the old building, number 611, and wondered idly who lived in their third-floor apartment, what language spoken, how many grinding lives, but mainly he thought of nine-year-old Nicky asquat the glory seat. Who else would read the comics to them, acting out those vibrant dramas of crime fiends and bounding heroes?
He went to see Bronzini, his old chess mentor, a sweet-natured man and not-so-willing drillmaster. Living now in a sad building with an entranceway marked by specimens of urban spoor-spray paint, piss, saliva, dapples of dark stuff that was probably blood. The elevator was not working and Matt made his way up five flights. A child's sandal on the landing. He knocked and waited. He sensed an eyeball on the other side of the peephole and he thought of his own street and house and the life of the computer suburb, those huddled enclaves off the turnpike, situated to discourage entry, and the corner store that sells eleven kinds of croissants and twenty-seven coffees, which are somehow never enough, and the life he led before this, the weapons he studied and helped perfect, the desert experience, so completely unconnected to root reality, compared to this man, he thought, on the other side of the peephole, who watches the ruin build around him on the actual planet where he was born.
The man's smile was in his eyes, a warm fizz that had an eagerness in it, a desire to know. This is what remained, his curiosity. He looked too old, too spare, his face a boxy outline, an underdrawing of the original likeness, the fleshed-out and tinted-in Bronzini. A couple of days of gray stubble surrounded his untrimmed mustache and Matt thought the man had seized upon old age, embraced it with a kind of reckless assent.
"Please, no misters. It's Albert now. And you look well. Robust, I'm surprised. I remember a matchstick. A matchstick with a fiery head."
Evidently the man had forgotten more recent meetings. They sat at a table near the window and drank brewed tea. Bronzini lived with his sister now, who'd never married, who sat in her room and spoke in chants, he said, of reduced informational range. Such compression. But once he'd learned to be patient with her repetitions and attenuations he began to find her presence a source of enormous comfort. A rest, he said, from his own internal rant.
He said, "Sometimes I take the train downtown. There's a chess club that's also a coffeehouse, in the Village, and I play a game or two. I lose but I don't get embarrassed. Or I play down there, in the playground, with a neighbor. We share a bench. They leave us alone, the kids."
"I don't play," Matt said in a voice emptied of any shading.
"I used to wonder about your father. He taught you the moves but was he a serious player, I used to wonder. I didn't know him well enough to bring up the subject, any subject. He was not a man who encouraged, shall we say, inquiries."
The eyes fizzed like carbonated water.
"He taught me quite a bit. We practiced openings and played many games. We played speed chess for fun. He called it rapid transit."
When his father went out for cigarettes Matty was finishing first grade. He found a book of chess problems Jimmy had kept in a bureau. It was a major discovery and he worked his way through the book and sat in front of the board, squares and pieces, pushing wood. His brother used to walk into the room and knock the pieces off the board and walk out of the room without a word. Matty picked up the pieces and set them on the board exactly as positioned earlier. He'd study black's defense. His brother would walk into the room, knock the pieces off the board and walk out again.
"Your mother petitioned me. But you were a problem," Bronzini said. "I needed help to deal with you."
"Hard to handle."
"Volatile, yes, and very quick to dismiss my advice. Of course you saw things I did not. You had remarkable skills and insights. It was exhilarating for me but also humbling. I lacked the deep feel of the master player."
"As a team we were maybe a little shaky. But we managed to last a few years. We tasted a little glory, Albert. I can tell you I don't like that little boy. I don't like thinking about him."
"I study theory now and then. I read a little in the history of the game. The personality of the game. This is a game of enormous hostility."
"I came to hate the language," Matt said. "You crush your opponent. It's not a question of win or lose. You crush him. You annihilate him. You strip him of dignity, manhood, womanhood, you destroy him, you expose him publicly as an inferior being. And then you gloat in his face. All the things that gave me such naked pleasure, I began to hate."
"Because you began to lose," Albert said.
It was true of course and Matt laughed. All that concentrated power, the implosive life of the board, black and white, the autocratic beauty of winning, what a chestful of undisguisable pride-he defeated men, boys, the old and wise, the vigorous and quick, the bohemian cafe poets, friendly and smelly. But then at ten or eleven he saw his edge begin to muddy and he took some losses, suffered consistent reversals that made him sick and limp.
"The competition changed. We found better opponents for you to play."
"And I slowed down."
"Your development hit a wall. Not a wall. But it no longer grew exponentially."
Matt looked out at the playground, surprised at the desolation, the basketball court potholed and empty, only one backboard still standing. Directly below him the old boccie court grown over with weeds. Everything empty. Up on the second level the softball field empty and tar-hot, a heavy sweltry indolence, the dark surface flashing with broken glass, two or three men, he sees them now, standing out near the left-field fence, sort of mortally posed like figures in spaghetti westerns, lean, nameless, unshaved-he didn't think they were acquainted with the language of life expectancy.
He said, "IVe been walking around. It's a complicated thing. I find myself trying to resist the standard response."
"You don't want to be shocked. You're reluctant to blame anyone. But you went to the old streets."
"Yes."
"Irbu saw your building. The squalor around it. The empty lot with the razor wire."
"Yes."
"The men. Who are they, standing around doing nothing? Poor people. They're very shocking."
"Yes, they are," Matt said.
"And these were your streets. It's a curious rite of passage, isn't it? Visit the old places. First you wonder how you lived so uncomplainingly in such cramped circumstances. The streets are narrower, the buildings smaller than you ever remembered. It's like coming back to Lilliput. And think of the rooms. Think of the tiny bathroom, shared by the family, by the grandparents, by the uncle who's slightly upazz. But what else do you see? These people that you barely glance at. How can you see them clearly? You can't."
"No, I can't."
"And you want to ask me why I'm still here. I see your mother in the market and we talk about this. We want nothing to do with this business of mourning the old streets. We've made our choice. We complain but we don't mourn, we don't grieve. There are things here, people who show the highest human qualities, outside all notice, because who comes here to see? And I'm too rooted to leave. Speaking only for myself, I'm too rooted, too narrow. My mind is open to absolutely anything but my life is not. I don't want to adjust. I'm an old Roman stoic. But then I was always too old, too narrow. Klara used to attack me on this subject. Not attack me. Chide me, urge me to see things differently."
"Do you talk to her at all?"
"No. Go to Arthur Avenue, Matty. Look at the shops and the people shopping and the people weighing the fish and cutting the meat. This will restore your spirits. I took your mother into the pork store the other day to show her the ceiling. Hundreds of hanging salamis, such bounty and fullness, the place teeming with smells and textures, the ceiling covered completely. I said, Rosemary, look. A gothic cathedral of pork."
They shook hands at the door
"You used to wear glasses, Albert."
"I didn't absolutely need them. I needed them a little. They were part of my schoolteacher's paraphernalia. My accoutrements. Take the elevator."
"It's not working."
"It's not working. Then I guess you'll have to walk. But don't tarry," Bronzini said, eyes bright. "There are dangers in the woods."
Matt went shopping for dinner and then headed back to his mother's building, walking directly toward the western end of the zoo. Out over the trees he saw the residue of a jet contrail, the vapor losing its shape, beginning to spread and rib out, and he thought of the desert of course, the weapons range and flypaths and the way the condensation in the sky was the only sign of human endeavor as far as he could see, a city boy out camping, taking his soul struggle to the back-country, and the mach-2 booms came skyclapping down and the vapor formed an ice trail in the heavens.
They were showing the tape again. The TV set was on in the empty room and they had the tape going, they had the victim at the wheel, the random man in the medium Dodge, alive again in sunlight-they were running it one more time.
Matt came in, surprised to find the TV on, and he sat on the footstool near the screen. When it was running he could not turn away from it. When it wasn't running he never thought about it. Then he'd get on line at the supermarket back home and there it was again on the monitors they'd installed to keep shoppers occupied at the checkout-nine monitors, ten monitors, all showing the tape.
But this time something was different. There was a voice-over, barely audible, and he looked around for the remote control device. He hit the button a couple of times and the voice came up and it had something in it that matched the tape. The voice was naked the way the tape was naked. A man's voice, flat and stripped, saying something about the weather.
A set of words appeared, superimposed across the bottom of the tape.
LIVE CALL-IN VOICE OF TEXAS HIGHWAY KILLER.
The voice was asking about the weather in Atlanta. They cut from the videotape to a live shot of a face above a desk, a woman with red hair and amazing green eyes. The anchorwoman. The anchorwoman was telling the caller that the weather desk said rain.
Then she said, 'And clearly this is not a true voice we are hearing over the phone lines. This is a manipulated voice, an altered voice."
And the voice said, "Well, it is a device that disguises the sound. It is a device that's a little more than three inches by two inches and you fit it to the talk part of the telephone and it makes the sound hard to identify as an individual."
Then she said, "Just to recap. We are taking a call from an individual who identifies himself as the Texas Highway Killer. He has given us information known only to the real killer and to the authorities and we have checked this information with the authorities in order to verify the caller's credentials."
Then she said something to the caller about his reason for calling.
Matt looked at her, half mesmerized. Those eyes were an amazement, like offshore green you see from an airplane.
The voice said, "Why I'm calling is to set the record straight. People write things and say things on air that I don't know from day one where they're coming from. I feel like my situation has been twisted in with the profiles of a hundred other individuals in the crime computer. I keep hearing about low self-esteem. They keep harping about this. Use your own judgment, Sue Ann. How does an individual with this kind of proven accuracy where he hits targets in moving vehicles where he's driving with one hand and firing a handweapon with the other and he's not supposed to be aware of his personal skills?"
The anchorwoman looked into the camera. She had no choice of course. The camera was on her, not on the caller. She was a live body and he was just a voice, or not a voice. The odd sound, the devoicing, with contour and modulation strained out. Electronically toned but not without a human quality, Matt thought, a trace of jerkwater swerve. The struggle to speak, the bare insides of the simplest utterance.
The anchorwoman listened.
"I keep hearing about history of head trauma whereby an individual, you know, can't control their behavior."
They cut to the tape again. It showed the man at the wheel of the medium Dodge.
"Let's set the record straight. I did not grow up with head trauma. I had a healthy, basically, type childhood."
The car approaches briefly, then falls back.
"Why are you doing it?"
"Say what?"
"Why are you committing these murders?"
"Let's just say it's a nice seasonal day where I'm located here, with scattered clouds, and if that's a hint to my location, then take it as a hint, and if this is all a game, then take it as a game."
On the screen the man at the wheel does his little wave, the friendly understated wave to the camera and the future and all the watching world, his hand wagging stiffly from the top of the wheel.
"You are aware, are you not, that one of these crimes is said to have been the work of a copycat killer. Can you comment on that for us?"
Now here is where he gets it. Matt could not look at the tape without wanting to call out to Janet. Hurry up, Janet, here it comes. Getting her mad. Mad at the tape and mad at him. And the more often they showed it, the more singsong he put in his voice. Hur-ree u-up, here it co-omes. An anxious joke, a joke in somebody else's voice, not meant to be funny. Janet swore at him and said enough. But it wasn't enough. It was never enough.
"Let's just say, okay, the police have their job and I have mine."
The eeriness of the car that keeps on coming after the driver is shot. It approaches briefly, then falls back.
"Which the correct term for this is not sniper by the way. This is not an individual with a rifle working more or less long-range. You're mobile here, you're moving, you want to get as close to the situation as humanly possible without bringing the two vehicles into contact, whereby a paint mark might result."
The car is drifting toward the guardrail now. The odd sound of the caller's voice, leveled-out, with faint tremors at the edges, odd little electronic storms, like someone trying to make a human utterance out of itemized data.
They cut to the face above the desk. The anchorwoman live. Her elbows rested on the desk now, hands tucked together beneath her chin. Matt wondered what this meant. Every shift of position meant a change in the state of the news. The green eyes peered from the screen. And the altered voice went on, talking in that flat-graphed way, he was actually chatting now, confident, getting the feel of the medium, the format, and the anchorwoman listened because she had no choice and everybody watched her as she listened. They were watching her in Murmansk in the fog.
The voice said, "I hope this talk has been conducive to understand the situation better. For me to request that I would only talk to Sue Ann Corcoran, one-on-one, that was intentional on my part. I saw the interview you did where you stated you'd like to keep your career, you know, ongoing while you hopefully raise a family and I feel like this is a thing whereby the superstation has the responsibility to keep the position open, okay, because an individual should not be penalized for lifestyle type choices."
They began to run the tape again. It showed the man at the wheel of the medium Dodge.
When his mother came in he was scouring a frying pan with a short-handled brush. She stood there and looked at him.
"You'll wear it out," she said.
"I did this in the army. I liked doing it. It was the best thing about the army."
"That was a long time ago. Besides, the pan is already clean. Whatever you think you're doing, you're not getting the pan any cleaner."
"The TV was on. When I walked in," he said. "You normally leave the TV on?"
"Not normally. But if you say it was on, I guess it was on. Abnormally."
"I always thought you were careful."
"I'm pretty careful. I'm not a fanatic," she said. "You're wearing out the steel. You'll clean right through it."
He made dinner for them and they kept a fan going because the air conditioner seemed to be running at half strength.
"I walked over there today. Quite a few buildings are gone. Nothing in their place. Parking lots without cars. It's very strange to see this. There's a skyline, suddenly."
"I don't go over there," Rosemary said.
"Good. Don't."
"I don't like to go."
"I looked at 611."
"I don't want to see it."
"No, you don't. Eat your asparagus," he said.
He heard thunder in the west, the promise of rain on stifling nights, one of the primitive memories.
"I caught Nick just before he left the hotel. Told him the doctor said you were in great shape."
"Don't get carried away."
"They'll send me printouts of all the tests."
"Does he ever say anything to you?"
"Nick?"
"Does he ever say anything?"
"No."
"Not to me either."
"He erased it," Matt said.
"I guess what else could he do."
"What else could he do?"
"I don't know," she said.
They ate quietly for a while. Two of the cats came out of the bedroom. They slipped past the chairs like liquid fur.
"I went to see Mr. Bronzini."
"Albert. He's the last rose of summer. I told him last time I saw him. See a barber. He goes out in his house slippers. I said to him."
"He lost weight."
"What did I say? You're turning into an old eccentric."
They finished eating and Matt went into the kitchen and got the fruit he'd bought, huge ruby grapes that did not have the seeds bred out of them, and peaches with leafy stems.
"What time do you want me to wake you up?"
"Don't bother," he said.
"What time is your plane?"
"When I get there."
"You have your ticket all set?"
"I'm taking the shuttle."
"The shuttle."
"I don't need a ticket."
"What's the shuttle?"
"I go to the airport, I get on the plane and we go to Boston. Unless I get on the wrong plane. Then we go to Washington."
"Where was I when they stopped using tickets?"
"I pay on the plane."
"What if all the seats are taken?"
"I get the next plane. It's the shuttle. One plane goes, there's another waiting."
"Where was I when they did this? The shuttle. Everybody knows this but me."
He waited for her to say something about the enormous grapes bunched in the ceramic bowl, or to eat one, rinsed and glistening.
"What about Arizona?"
"What about it?" she said.
"I don't know What about it?"
The last cat came out of the bedroom, the shy white one, and Matt scooped it onto his thigh.
"Scrubbing pots and pans."
"That was the best part of basic training," he said. "Because it was the most civilian part."
"I don't know how many nights I stayed awake when they sent you over."
"How many letters did I write saying I was nowhere near the combat zone?"
"You were in the country. That was near enough for me."
"The country's not that small. If they fired a shot in Khe Sanh, I wasn't about to get hit wherever I was sitting, comfortably indoors, doing my drudge work."
"You were luckier than a lot of others."
"You sure you don't want to go?"
"I'm staying here," she said.
They sat there with the fruit between them. He heard rain glancing off the window, sounding cool and fresh, and he looked at his mother. She didn't see peaches with leafy stems as works of art.
"I'm going to early mass."
"Say hello to God for me. I'll have coffee waiting when you get back."
"He erased it," she said. "Because what else was he supposed to do?"
She said good night and went inside. The cats vanished while he made up the sofa. Nick was always the subject, ultimately. Every subject, ground down and sifted through, yielded a little Nicky, or a version of the distant adult, or the adolescent half lout looking to hit someone. These were the terms of the kinship. He lay in the dark and listened to the rain. He felt little. He felt small and lost. His wife was little. He had undersized kids. They did nothing in the world that would ever be noticed. They were innocent. There was a curse of innocence that he carried with him. Against his brother, against the stature of danger and rage he could only pose the fact of his secondness, his meek freedom from guilt.
There was a noise near the door. He didn't move for a moment. He lay there listening. The rain hit hard now, splashy, rattling the window. He heard the noise again and got up. He put on his glasses and looked through the peephole. He edged the door slowly open. He looked into the hallway, long and prison-lit, left and right, rows of closed doors, all blank and still, and he was a grown man in his mother's house, afraid of noises in the hall.
How deep is time? How far down into the life of matter do we have to go before we understand what time is?
The old science teacher, Bronzini, moved through the snow, slogging, dragging happily, head down, his cigar box tucked under his arm-the scissors, the combs, the electric clipper to do the nape of Eddie's neck.
We head out into space, we brave space, line up the launch window and blast off, we swing around the planet in a song. But time binds us to aging flesh. Not that he minded growing old. But as a point of argument, in theory only, he wondered what we'd learn by going deeper into structures beneath the standard model, down under the quantum, a million billion times smaller than the old Greek atom.
The snow came down, enormous star-tipped flakes, feathery wet on his lashes, stuck and gone, and he raised his head to see parked cars humped and stunned, nothing moving in the streets, snow on the back of his hand-touches flesh and disappears.
He climbed the stairs to Eddie's apartment and rang the bell, No ding or buzz, no sawtooth whine. He knocked on the metal sheath that covered the door and heard Mercedes approach in her slappy shoes.
She opened up, calling back to Eddie, "You'll never guess who is it."
Bronzini handed her the cigar box, Garcia y Vega, fine cigars since 1882. He took off his checked cap and gave it to her. He got out of the old belted greatcoat he'd bought cheap at Freight Liquidation, where you go for factory discounts, for irregular suits and dresses, cardigans hijacked by mistake-they thought they were getting cigarettes. He gave her the coat. He wiggled his hands to show no gloves. Then he bent to unbuckle his galoshes, stepping out of them half dizzy from the bending.
"Eddie, look, he wears slippers under his boots. The man is unde-scribable."
He embraced the woman and the coat and then moved into the living room rubbing his hands like a man treading across a Persian rug toward a birch fire and a snifter of rare brandy. Eddie sat there smiling, the real Eddie Robles who lived inside the imposter, inside the haunted likeness, arthritic, emphysemic, with ulcerated veins in his legs, retired more or less from everything.
"I woke up this morning and I knew it," Bronzini said.
"You knew it."
"Time for Eddie's haircut."
"In a blizzard. You woke up but you didn't look out the window."
"It's a gentle snowfall. Old-fashioned. You should go walking."
"Walking," Eddie said. "You have any idea what you're saying? Sit down, you're making me nervous."
"I can't give you a haircut sitting down. Where are my tools of the trade?"
"I should give you. You're the one who needs his hair cut. You should carry a violin, Albert."
"You don't want to play chess with me anymore. There's no one left in the world I can defeat in chess, trounce-I can trounce the way I trounce you. So you have to submit to the barber's moves. It's a beautiful snowfall from out of the past. Incidentally, Mercedes. Where is she? Your doorbell's not working."
They sat drinking hot chocolate. What Albert wanted was a shot of hootch from an imported bottle. He imagined the warm wincing sting of a trickle of scotch. Durable, that was the beauty of the thing. It hit you so it lasted. The chairman scotched rumors of a takeover. A wedge you stick behind a wheel to keep a vehicle from rolling. That's a scotch. So is a line drawn on the ground, as in hopscotch, he thought.
"Doorbell. Only the doorbell?" Mercedes said.
"The elevator of course. But we know about the elevator."
"You know about the plaster?" she said. "I put newspapers in the cracks. Someday they find this place and they know exactly when the trouble started, from the newspapers."
"Let the man live," Eddie said. "Talk about something else."
"My own elevator, this is a problem," Bronzini said. "Periodic breakdowns."
"Four flights?"
"Five flights."
"Let the man live," Eddie said.
"Five flights with his heart?"
"Talk about something else."
Mercedes was heavy, disposed to gesture, swaying in the chair, hand-sweeping, but ably taking care of feeble Eddie, the imposter, the aching and stiff-jointed and gasping man. The old Eddie of the subways was a robust guy, selling tokens from a booth in that cinema dimness of bad air and sprocketing trains, immune to the hell rattle of the express, and she tended him now with expert love, with knowledge and command, and when she got mad at something it made Albert want to hide because he was a coward of blunt emotion, things met head-on and direct.
"They put up the bobwire to save us from drug dealers. But what about the water when it rains? Comes right in. I don't want to see winter end. I rather be cold. I rather jam newspapers in the cracks. Because when the snow melts."
"The man is happy. Let him live," Eddie said.
She got a kitchen chair for Eddie to sit on. She got the cigar box and put it on the table and opened it. She went away and came back with a bath towel, which she placed over her husband's upper body and then spread down around his knees. She fastened the two upper corners at the back of his neck, loosely, and then she looked across at Albert, who shared her satisfaction with all the collateral matters, the stir of preparations, crucial to the business of the haircut.
Albert took the implements out of the cigar box. He set them on the table a couple of inches apart. The short black rubberized comb, tapered for sideburns. The tortoiseshell comb with a handle and three missing teeth, called a rake comb. The beautiful pair of scissors, made in Italy, a family possession for generations, one of those things that turns up among the effects of the deceased, suddenly seen anew, an everyday treasure, filigreed shanks and a spur attached to one loop, a curved projection to support the middle finger. You put your index finger in the loop and rest the middle finger against the suitably shaped appendage. What else? The shaving brush, not needed. The nose scissors, let him do his own nose. The electric clipper, heavy and black, Elk Grove, Illinois, blade still a little wispy with Eddie's shorn hair of six weeks ago. What else? Tube of lubricating oil for clipper. Five-and-dime whiskbroom, soft-bristled.
He had no idea how to cut hair. He'd done Eddie's hair a number of times but hadn't worked out a method. He paused often to study the effect, snipping, stepping back. Mercedes did not stay around to watch. Working slowly, snipping. The idea was to get the hair off the guy's head and onto the floor. Mercedes did not seem to think this was a thing she had to see.
"They have a new thing, maybe you heard," Eddie said. "Called space burials."
"I like it already."
"They send your ashes into space."
"Sign me up," Bronzini said.
"They have orbits you can select. There's an orbit around the equator. This is one orbit. The earth turns and you turn. Not you, your ashes."
"Is there a waiting list?"
"There's a waiting list. I saw it on the news. Plus the premium shot. This is way out there."
"Deep space."
"Way out. You and the stars."
"But you don't go up alone."
"You go up with about seven hundred other ashes in the same shot. Humans and their pets, "ibu call the company, they'll put you on the list."
"What if you're already dead?"
"So your children call. Your lawyer calls. The important thing is how much do your ashes weigh. Because this is costing you-guess."
"I can't guess."
"Guess," Eddie said.
"You have to tell me."
"Ten thousand dollars a pound."
Eddie worked this line with a finality that had a grim pleasure in it.
"A pound. What do we weigh, in ashes, when we're dead?" Albert said. "I think it sounds reasonable myself."
"You think it sounds reasonable. Then you ruin my story."
"A pound of ashes, Eddie. That could be a whole family. For burial in space. Preserved forever."
"You ruin my story," he said.
Albert used the rake comb, working the top of his friend's head. He combed in sweeping motions, letting the hair settle, then combing again. He loved this work. He used the scissors sparingly up here because a mistake might show. He moved the comb softly through Eddie's thinning hair. He lifted the hair, then let it fall. Mercedes played the radio in the kitchen, making dinner or maybe lunch. Albert was vague, lately, on the subject of time. A heartbeat, a wrist pulse, a tapping foot. This was discernible time. He lifted the hair, then let it fall.
"You miss the booth, Eddie."
"I liked my job."
"I know you did."
"All those years and never once."
"They never robbed you."
"Never even tried," he said.
That's the genius of New York. Eddie Robles with a miniature chess set practicing moves at two in the morning in his token booth and don't think people didn't pop their faces in the slot and challenge him to a game, and don't think he didn't play them because he did, behind five layers of bulletproof glass, with trains blowing by in the night.
"I never thought today's the day they rob me. I never had this thought. And it never happened. I had a woman vomit in the slot. My worst incident personally. I never thought what I would do if they tried to rob me. I had the psychology you plan for it, then it happens. She puts her hands on the ledge and out it comes."
"Middle of the night?"
"Just her and me. You have to vomit, why can't you do it on the tracks? Her and me alone in the station, she comes right over like the coin slot they intend it just for this."
He plugged in the clipper and did the back of Eddie's neck. He went down under the towel and the shirt collar and did the hair that grew up from the shoulders. He cleared the neck completely and dusted with the brush and asked Mercedes for some talcum powder, which was the one thing he did not have in the cigar box, and he made a mental note to resupply, for next time.
Space burial. He thought of the contrails on that blue day out over the ocean, two years ago if that's when it was-how the boosters sailed apart and hung the terrible letter Y in the still air. The vapor stayed intact for some time, the astronauts fallen to sea but also still up there, graved in frozen smoke, and he lay awake in the night and saw that deep Atlantic sky and thought this death was soaring and clean, an exalted thing, a passing of the troubled body into vapor and flame, out above the world, monogrammed, the Y of dying young.
He wasn't sure people wanted to see this. Willing to see the systems failure and the human suffering. But the beauty, the high faith of space, how could such qualities be linked to death? Seven men and women. Their beauty and ours, revealed in a failed mission as we haven't seen it in a hundred triumphs. Apotheosis. Yes they were god-statured, transformed in those swanny streaks into the only sort of gods he cared to acknowledge, poetic and fleeting. He found this experience even more profound than the first moonwalk. That was stirring but also a little walkie-talkie, with ghosted action, movements that looked computerized, and he could never completely dismiss the suspicions of the paranoid elite, the old grizzled gurkhas of the corps, that, the whole thing had been staged on a ranch outside Las Vegas.
In the spring they were still there, Albert and Laura. How was it possible his sister had not fallen into some calamitous illness? You sit there, you let your body go weak and slack, you don't walk, you don't see people, or mingle, or feel the bloodflow of inquisitive interest.
But he was grateful for her presence. There had always been a woman close to him, one woman at least, a woman or a girl, sharing the bathroom, the kitchen, long ago the bed. He needed this company. Women and their pride of time, their vigorous sense of a future. He married a Jew and loved her but Klara's future did not include him. He took care of his mother, a Catholic of the old eloquence, wearing a scapular, blessing herself and touching her thumb-knuckle to her lips, and he loved her and watched her die. He raised his daughter to make her own fate, to be a worthy individual outside compliance with religious rites, and he loved her, she lives in Vermont now, very much. And his sister, drifting in and out of the past but knowing him always in uncanny ways, seeing straight into his unadorned heart, and he loved her for all the stammered reasons you love a sister and because she'd narrowed her life to a few remarks that he found moving.
He had a portable phonograph, sleek-seeming once, advanced design. Now looked drab and squat but still played music after all these years. He found the record he was looking for and polished the vinyl with a treated cloth and placed it hostlike on the spindle. Saint-Saens, piano works, gentle and pensive, a change of pace from the gorgeous torment of Bronzini's operas, the tabloid sensation that shatters teacups. He turned to make sure Laura was here, shapeless in the armchair, head resting against the hand-knit antimacassar, face lifted to the chords. He clicked the dial and watched the tone arm rise and the record descend, a jerky downslide to the turntable. Then the tone arm shifted laterally and the disc began to spin and this series of laboriously linked actions with their noises and pauses and teeterings, their dimwit delays, seemed to place him in some lost mechanical age with the pendulum clock and hand-cranked motorcar.
The needle slurred some notes but he was used to that. He sat at the edge of the room, where he could feel the kitchen sun and look at Laura's face. The music joined them edgewise. He believed he could enter her reverie. He could know her, almost know her, feel her innocence through the music, know the girl again, the spinsterly twelve-year-old who walked behind her parents in the street, he could see her in the face of the somber older sister, she was almost there, the girl, in the pouches and moles and smoky hair. There was a brief moment in one of the pieces, after passagework of mellow recollection, when something dark seemed to enter, the soloist's left hand urging the tempo, and it made her raise an arm, slowly, a gesture of half shock, thoughtful and fraught-she'd heard a boding in the bass notes that startled her. And this was the other thing they shared, the sadness and clarity of time, time mourned in the music-how the sound, the shaped vibrations made by hammers striking wire strings made them feel an odd sorrow not for particular things but for time itself, the material feel of a year or an age, the textures of unmeasured time that were lost to them now, and she turned away, looking past her lifted hand into some transparent thing he thought he could call her life.
"You have to tell me, Albert, when you're going out. So I know." "I did tell you." "You never tell me." "I do tell you."
"I don't know if you forget or what's the reason." "I will tell you." "If you tell me, then I know." "I will tell you. I will be sure to tell you." "But I forget, don't I?" "Sometimes, yes." "You tell me and I forget." "Sometimes. It's not important." "But you have to tell me." "I will. I will tell you." "So this way I know," she said.
He took his coffee black with a stab of rye in the morning, a nip, a pin drop, and with anisette in the afternoon or early evening, a shot, a jolt of the licorice sap, and maybe a beady tongue-taste of rye again before retiring, without coffee this time, medically forbidden of course but just a driblet, a measured snort, the briefest swig in the history of guilty drinking.
"You have to tell me. So I know." "I will tell you. I promise." "This way I know," "This way you know." "If you tell me, then I know." "That's right." "That's right, isn't it?" "Yes, that's right." "But you have to tell me. That's the only way I know."
He cleaned the kitchen windowsill, dust, hair, fly heads, flakes of plaster-stony little spalls.
When they made dinner together she hit Albert's hand every time he got in the way, a jurisdictional tap on the back of the hand.
He set his three pills next to his plate on the table, lined up for consumption. His heart pill, his fart pill and his liver pill.
He spent more time indoors when there were people in the halls. He'd seen a hypodermic syringe on the second-story landing and now there were people in the halls, busy and inert at the same time, busy inside their eyes but also body-dead, barely able to drag a hand through the air. When it stops raining, he thought, they'll go to the playground or empty lots. And the elevator was stuck between floors so he was better off not leaving the apartment anyway because it was not a good idea for him to be climbing stairs.
He slipped her glasses off her face and cleaned them with a tissue and put them back.
And when he went out they were on the front stoop muttering something that sounded like Wall Street and Albert finally surmised this was a brand of heroin for sale, Wall Street, Wall Street, and he could hear them in the halls, strangers in the building, breathing in and out.
He told her he was calling his daughter Teresa long-distance. He announced every phone call to keep Laura involved, including weather and time, and because he liked to make announcements.
His daughter ran a child-care center in a small city and had expenses and two children of her own and a lapsed husband trying to start a new career and Albert sent her a little money now and then, out of his teacher's pension.
A long-distance call was an act of predeliberation that filled a span in his mind much more extended than the length of the call. He planned an evening around it, waiting for the hour of the rate change and then placing a chair by the telephone and working the numbers carefully, his face down in the rotary dial.
He heard them breathing in the halls and knew he had food for two days easy and when the milk went sour he could open a can of peaches and dump the fruit and syrupy juice on the breakfast cereal. Clingstone, flesh that clings to the pit, to the stone, as with a peach. He heard them late at night and knew he could stretch the chopped meat, bulk up the tomato soup with macaroni, and they didn't live in the building and would find another place.
When his daughter answered the phone he looked across the room to Laura and nodded-contact made, the century of progress marches on.
Apples and cheese, they had apples and cheese, that was a meal in itself.
He was taking a book back to the library, another spring or early summer, a mild-hearted day, and he saw a familiar figure crossing the street and going toward the convent that was part of the Catholic grammar school. Anciently familiar, a figure from the land of the past. He hadn't realized she was still alive, Sister Edgar, how remarkable, the same blade face and bony hands, hurrying, a spare frame shaped by rustling garments. She wore the traditional habit with long black veil and white wimple and the starched clothpiece over the neck and shoulders, an iron crucifix swinging from her waist-she might have been a detail lifted from a painting by some sixteenth-century master.
He watched her open the convent door and disappear. This was a nun who'd been notorious for the terror she spread among the children, fifth-graders or sixth-graders, beatings, vituperations, keep them after school, send them out to clap erasers in a rainstorm. He'd never exchanged a word with Sister Edgar but felt half an urge to knock on the convent door and speak to her now, find out who she was after all these years. He'd been proud to teach in a public school, never mind the lax discipline. He worked among humane colleagues and heard stories about this nun and her routine cruelties.
He walked with a cane now and it gave him a feeling of professor emeritus. At the local library, named after Enrico Fermi, there was a photograph on the wall showing the scientist with an early model of the first atomic bomb. Years ago Albert used to entertain the idea of certain affinities between himself and the great Fermi. Illness in early childhood, marriage to a Jewish woman, science itself of course, cultural heritage-the allowable flush of Italian pride, only not so rousing in this case, attached to such destruction. The library was a movie-house then, known to neighborhood kids as the Dumps for its sour odors and unswept debris. Let's not forget how some things get better, he thought. Books now, the hush of decimaled stacks.
He walked to the social club where he played cards sometimes, less than he used to, and took an occasional glass of wine. Some pictures on the wall, old days, fishmongers in aprons and caps, waiters outside a restaurant with sharply parted hair, dignified by time. He heard the church bell at Mount Carmel, half a block away, and poured himself a glass of red. He sat alone at a formica table and studied the legs of the wine, the trickles of swirled liquid that run down the inside of the glass and tell you how much body the wine has. This wine had legs. It was all legs. It had the legs of a sumo wrestler.
The videotape was running on the TV set in the corner. He'd seen the tape only once before, right here, and knew that they would keep running it until everyone on the planet had seen it. And when they started running it again after an interval of not running it, he knew it meant the shooter had shot someone else, someone new, and because there was no film or tape of the new shooting, they had to show the old tape, the only tape, and they would show it to the ends of the earth.
Steve came over, Silvera, one of the Silvera brothers, he wore a suit and drove a hearse. Albert always asked, Who died?
"You drink that wine?"
"I tried talking to it but that didn't work," Albert said. "Sit down and join me."
"I got a funeral."
"Who died?"
"What's-his-name, from the fish market."
"Bury or cremate?"
"They put them in a wall nowdays. It's a popular thing."
"Encrypted," Albert said with satisfaction.
When the church bell rang again Steve hurried out. Albert could lean a bit and see the other drivers and pallbearers put out their cigarettes and start up the steps. It was nearly time for them to carry out the coffin. Another fishmonger, one more photograph that will seem decades hence to be an emblem of a certain stately innocence, some old lost sweet-tasting time. How memory conspires with objects of human craft, pressing time flat, inciting a tender reminiscence.
Later he went into the empty church and sat in the last row to spend a moment alone with Eddie Robles. A pigeon flew across the transept and landed on the edge of a swivel window near a bank of candles. He admired this old church. Corinthian columns and niched saints. Lighted candles in rosy glass containers. The neighborhood changes, the church remains the same. In the days that followed Eddie's mass he began to see again how the loss of a friend, how any loss was an aspect of Klara's departure, repeating the impact, the devastation.
The pigeon was aloft again, fluttering up near the dome. He thought he recalled that the Holy Ghost took form as a dove, was it? Every ghost is holy, he supposed, but you'll have to point one out to me before I genuflect. Still, he liked to sit here alone, brood and mourn amid the architectural details, the faith of stone and wood, pigments mixed in glass.
When Klara left him it turned something loose, a rant, an unworded voice that incited feelings so varied and confused and bled-together, so resistant to separation and scrutiny that he felt helpless in its surge. It was a hindrance to living. It made him distrust the man he was supposed to be, soft-spoken, well-spoken, gently reflective. Oh that bitch and how unworthy of him to think of her that way. It was his sister, eventually, who kept him from despair, another kind of voice, a woman marooned in introversion, only oddly loving.
He needed to walk, shake his muscles loose, and he went out into the street. Yes, people talking, eating, the loyal shoppers, they came from other boroughs, other counties, the double-parked cars, the coronary throb of the immediate streets still palpable. He walked west across Arthur Avenue and then edged warily north, an old route lately forsworn, toward the high school where he'd taught for thirty years.
Eddie dead, Mercedes in Puerto Rico now. Stop walking and you die.
When he entered a street behind the high school he was surprised to see it was closed to traffic. A play street, the pavement marked with painted game grids, with the numbered spaces of hopscotch and skelly, bases for slapball, and Albert was delighted. He'd thought this old custom of closing off streets for children's games was long dead, decades dead, a mind relic of life not yet dominated by cars and trucks. He stopped and watched the kids play, holding his cane across his waist as if gripping a stadium rail. Small children, slim and quick, Jamaican cadence in some of the voices and a girl with mottled skin maybe Malaysian or South Indian, he was only guessing, who jumped the hopscotch boxes with a measured deftness, doing a midair whirl so economical her hair was barely ruffled-bronze skin that went darker and lighter, olive-drab beneath the eyes. He wanted to stop her in midjump, stop everything for half a second, atomic clocks, body clocks, the microworld in which physicists search for time-and then run it backwards, unjump the girl, rewind the life, give us all a chance to do it over. He recalled the word for do-it-over, a word that kids used to shout during a game interrupted by a rare passing car or a lady crossing the street with a baby carriage. In-do, someone cried. In-do or hin-du, he wasn't completely sure. The Indian girl in sneakers and jeans.
Cheeky chose always goes. That's what the kid said when he got a second chance and did the same thing he'd done before the interruption. Hit a homer, kicked the can, shot a marble on target through the gutter dust. Cheeky chose always goes.
He saw a vendor selling sugarcane from an open-sided van, mangoes in wooden crates and tall cane sheaved with twine. Some things get better, Albert thought. A library, a play street, prods to his optimism block by block.
But what does do-it-over mean? He didn't want to lose his soul over compromises, second chances that turned him inside out. And anyway we don't depend on time finally. There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it's true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second. He thought that we were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time. Think about it, Einstein, my fellow Albert.
He walked around to the front of the high school, tempted to go up on the portico and talk to the boys and girls standing there-but, no, they didn't know him and didn't care. Then why come here? The old squat pile of limestone and brick held his teacherly corpus, a million words spun into tepid air, and there was no reason to think he'd need to pass this way again. One documentary look to freeze the scene. He made a circuit of the block and headed home.
In one of the bare streets he came across a large stray dog that looked diseased, all ribs and flecked slaver, and he sidled away from it. In a culture of guard dogs there are always a few that fall from grace and end up haunting the streets. The trick is to skirt the animal without publishing your fear. Festina lente. Make haste slowly.
He cleaned the windowsills with a damp rag, fly wings, fly parts, the crumbled husks of glassy green beetles.
He had his teacher's pension and a small tax-deferred annuity and an old passbook with interest posted in cozy broken type.
Seasons ran together, the years were a stunned blur. Like time in books. Time passes in books in the span of a sentence, many months and years. Write a word, leap a decade. Not so different out here, at his age, in the unmargined world.
He put a record on the turntable and Laura sat in the chair seeming not to hear the music so much as see it.
Bread was dependable, bread with nearly every meal, bread fresh from the brick ovens. He kept library books stacked by the breadbox so he would be sure to return them by the due date.
"Are we moving, Albert?"
"No. We're not going anywhere."
"Someone told me, I don't remember, we're moving."
"Maybe we'll go see Teresa again. We'll take the bus. It's a beautiful ride. That's the only move we're making."
"Did you tell me you were going out?"
"You like the ride. Vermont. We'll go when the leaves turn. You like it then."
"Albert."
"What?"
"If you tell me, then I know."
Seasons and years. Laura read a soap opera digest to keep track of TV characters even though the TV had gone on the blink so long ago it was another life.
Oatmeal bubbled on the stove.
He came along and took her glasses off and cleaned them with a tissue, then placed them on her face again.
The old nun rose at dawn, feeling pain in every joint. She'd been rising at dawn since her days as a postulant, kneeling on hardwood floors to pray. First she raised the shade. That's creation out there, little green apples and infectious disease. Then she knelt in the folds of the white nightgown, fabric endlessly laundered, beaten with swirled soap, left gristled and stiff. Sister Alma Edgar. And the body beneath, the spindly thing she carried through the world, chalk pale mostly, and speckled hands with high veins, and cropped hair that was fine and flaxy gray, and her bluesteel eyes-many a boy and girl of old saw those peepers in their dreams.
She made the sign of the cross, murmuring the congruous words. Amen, an olden word, back to Greek and Hebrew, verily-the most familiar of everyday prayers yet carrying three years' indulgence, seven if you dip your hand in holy water before you mark the body.
Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.
She said a morning offering and got to her feet. At the sink she scrubbed her hands repeatedly with coarse brown soap. How can the hands be clean if the soap is not? This question was insistent in her life. But if you clean the soap with bleach, what do you clean the bleach bottle with? If you use scouring powder on the bleach bottle, how do you clean the box of Ajax? Germs have personalities. Different objects harbor threats of various insidious types. And the questions turn inward forever.
An hour later she was in her veil and habit, sitting in the passenger seat of a black van that was headed south out of the school district and down past the monster concrete expressway into the lost streets, a squander of burnt-out buildings and unclaimed souls. Grace Fahey was at the wheel, a young nun in secular dress. All the nuns at the convent wore plain blouses and skirts except for Sister Edgar, who had permission from the motherhouse to fit herself out in the old things with the arcane names, the wimple, cincture and guimpe. She knew there were stories about her past, how she used to twirl the big-beaded rosary and crack students across the mouth with the iron crucifix. Things were simpler then. Clothing was layered, life was not. But Edgar stopped hitting kids years ago, even before she grew too old to teach, when the neighborhood changed and the faces of her students became darker. All the righteous fury went out of her soul. How could she strike a child who was not like her?
"The old jalop needs a tune-up," Gracie said. "Hear that noise?"
"Ask Ismael to take a look."
"Ku-ku-ku-ku."
"He's the expert."
"I can do it myself. I just need the right tools."
"I don't hear anything," Edgar said.
"Ku-ku-ku-ku? You don't hear that?"
"Maybe I'm going deaf."
"I'll go deaf before you do, Sister."
"Look, another angel on the wall."
The two women looked across a landscape of vacant lots filled with years of stratified deposits-the age of house garbage, the age of construction debris and vandalized car bodies, the age of moldering mobster parts. Weeds and trees grew amid the dumped objects. There were dog packs, sightings of hawks and owls. City workers came periodically to excavate the site and they stood warily by the great earth machines, the pumpkin-mudded backhoes and dozers, like infantrymen huddled near advancing tanks. But soon they left, they always left with holes half dug, pieces of equipment discarded, styrofoam cups, pepperoni pizzas. The nuns looked across all this. There were networks of vermin, craters chocked with plumbing fixtures and sheetrock. There were hillocks of slashed tires laced with thriving vine. Gunfire sang at sunset off the low walls of demolished buildings. The nuns sat in the van and looked. At the far end was a lone standing structure, a derelict tenement with an exposed wall where another building had once abutted. This wall was where Ismael Munoz and his crew of graffiti writers spray-painted a memorial angel every time a child died in the neighborhood. Angels in blue and pink covered roughly half the high slab. The child's name and age were printed under each angel, sometimes with cause of death or personal comments by the family, and as the van drew closer Edgar could see entries for TB, AIDS, beatings, drive-by shootings, measles, asthma, abandonment at birth-left in dumpster, forgot in car, left in Glad Bag stormy night.
This area was called the Wall, partly for the graffiti facade and partly the general sense of exclusion-it was a tuck of land adrift from the social order.
"I wish they'd stop already with the angels," Gracie said. "It's in totally bad taste. A fourteenth-century church, that's where you go for angels. This wall publicizes all the things we're working to change. Ismael should look for positive things to emphasize. The townhouses, the community gardens that people plant. Walk around the corner you see ordinary people going to work, going to school. Stores and churches."
"Titanic Power Baptist Church."
"What's the difference-it's a church. The area's full of churches. Decent working people. Ismael wants to do a wall, these are the people he should celebrate. Be positive."
Edgar laughed inside her skull. It was the drama of the angels that made her feel she belonged here. It was the terrible death these angels represented. It was the danger the writers faced to produce their graffiti. There were no fire escapes or windows on the memorial wall and the writers had to rappel from the roof with belayed ropes or sway on makeshift scaffolds when they did an angel in the lower ranks. Ismael spoke of a companion wall for dead graffitists, flashing his wasted smile.
"And he does pink for girls and blue for boys. That really sets my teeth on edge," Gracie said.
They stopped at the friary to pick up groceries they would distribute to the needy. The friary was an old brick building wedged between boarded tenements. Three monks in gray cloaks and rope belts worked in an anteroom, getting the day's shipment ready. Grace, Edgar and Brother Mike carried the plastic bags out to the van. Mike was an ex-fireman with a Brillo beard and wispy pony tail. He looked like two different guys front and back. When the nuns first appeared he'd offered to serve as guide, a protecting presence, but Edgar firmly declined. She believed her habit and veil were safety enough. Beyond these South Bronx streets people may look at her and think she is a quaint-ness of ages past. But inside the strew of rubble she was a natural sight, she and the robed monks. What figures could be so timely, costumed for rats and plague?
Edgar liked seeing the monks in the street. They visited the home-bound, ran a shelter for the homeless, they collected food for the hungry. And they were men in a place where few men remained. Teenage boys in clusters, armed drug dealers-these were the men of the immediate streets. She didn't know where the others had gone, the fathers, living with second or third families, hidden in rooming houses or sleeping under highways in refrigerator boxes, buried in the potter's field on Hart Island.
"I'm counting plant species," Brother Mike said. "I've got a book I take out to the lots."
Gracie said, "You stay on the fringes, right?"
"They know me in the lots."
"Who knows you? The dogs know you? There are rabid dogs, Mike."
"I'm a Franciscan, okay? Birds light on my index finger."
"Stay on the fringes," she told him.
"There's a girl I keep seeing, maybe twelve years old, runs away when I try to talk to her. I get the feeling she's living in the ruins. Ask around."
"Will do," Gracie said.
When the van was loaded they drove back to the Wall to do their business with Ismael and to pick up a few of his crew who would help them distribute the food. Ismael had teams of car spotters who ranged across the boroughs, concentrating on the bleak streets under bridges and viaducts. The nuns represented his North Bronx operation. They gave him lists that detailed the locations of abandoned cars along the Bronx River, a major dump site for stolen, joyridden, semistripped, gas-siphoned and pariah-dog vehicles. Ismael sent his crew to salvage the car bodies and whatever parts might still be intact. They used a small flatbed truck with an undependable winch and a motif of souls-in-hell graffiti on the cab, deck and mud flaps. The car hulks came here to the lots for inspection and price setting by Ismael and were then delivered to a scrap-metal operation in remotest Brooklyn. Sometimes there were forty or fifty cannibalized cars dumped in the lots, museum quality, a junkworld sculpture park-cars bashed and bullet-cratered, hoodless, doorless and rust-ulcered, charred cars, upside-down cars, cars with dead bodies wrapped in shower curtains, rats ascratch in the glove compartments.
The money he paid the nuns for their locational work went to the friary for groceries.
When the van approached the building Edgar felt along her mid-section for the latex gloves she kept tucked in her belt.
Gracie parked the van, the only operating vehicle in human sight. She attached the vinyl-coated steel collar to the steering wheel and fitted the rod into the lock housing. At the same time Edgar force-fitted the gloves onto her hands and felt the ambivalence, the conflict. Safe, yes, scientifically shielded from organic menace. But also sinfully complicit with some process she only half understood, the force in the world, the array of systems that displaces religious faith with paranoia. It was in the milky-slick feel of these synthetic gloves, fear and distrust and unreason. And she felt masculinized as well, condomed ten times over-safe, yes, and maybe a little confused. But latex was necessary here. Protection against the spurt of blood or pus and the viral entities hidden within, submicroscopic parasites in their soviet socialist protein coats.
The nuns got out of the van and approached the building.
Squatters occupied a number of floors. Edgar didn't need to see them to know who they were. They were a society of indigents subsisting without heat, lights or water. They were nuclear families with toys and pets, junkies who roamed at night in dead men's Reeboks. She knew who they were through assimilation, through the ingestion of messages that riddled the streets. They were foragers and gatherers, can redeemers, the people who yawed through subway cars with paper cups. And doxies sunning on the roof in clement weather and men with warrants outstanding for reckless endangerment and depraved indifference. And there were shouters of the Spirit, she knew this for a fact-a band of charismatics who leapt and wept on the top floor, uttering words and nonwords, treating knife wounds with prayer.
Ismael had his headquarters on the third floor and the nuns hustled up the stairs. Grace had a tendency to look back unnecessarily at the senior nun, who ached in her movable parts but kept pace well enough, her habit whispering through the stairwell.
"Needles on the landing," Gracie warned.
Watch the needles, sidestep the needles, such deft instruments of self-disregard. Gracie couldn't understand why an addict would not be sure to use a clean needle. This failure made her pop her cheeks in anger. But Edgar thought about the lure of critical risk, the little love bite of that dragonfly dagger. If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.
Gracie knocked on the door.
"Don't get too close to him," Edgar said.
"Who?"
"Ismael."
"Why?"
"He's not well."
"I saw him three days ago. I was here. You weren't, Sister. How do you know he's not well?"
"I can sense it."
"He's well. He's fine," Gracie said.
"I've sensed it for some time."
"What do you sense?"
"AIDS," Edgar said,
Gracie studied old Edgar. She looked at the latex gloves. She looked at the nun's face, emphatic of feature, eyes bird-bright. She looked and thought and said nothing.
One of the kids unlocked the door-latch bolts, dead bolts, steel shafts.
Ismael stood barefoot on dusty floorboards in a pair of old chinos rolled to his calves and a parrot-print shirt worn outside his pants, smoking a whopping cigar and resembling some carefree islander wading in happy surf.
"Sisters, what do you have for me?"
Edgar thought he was quite young despite the seasoned air, maybe midthirties-sparse beard, a sweet smile complicated by rotting teeth. Members of his crew sat around on scavenged sofas, improvised chairs, smoking and looking at comic books. Too young for one, too old for the other. She knew in her heart he had AIDS.
Gracie handed over a list of cars they'd spotted in the last two days. Details of time and place, type of vehicle, condition of same.
He said, "You do nice work. My other people do like this, we run the world by now."
Edgar kept a distance of course. She looked at the crew, seven boys, four girls. Graffiti, illiteracy, petty theft. They spoke an unfinished English, soft and muffled, insufficiently suffixed, and she wanted to drum some hard g's into the ends of their gerunds.
"I don't pay you today, okay? I got some things I'm doing that I need the capital."
"What things?" Gracie said.
Retroviruses in the bloodstream, acronyms in the air. Edgar knew what all the letters stood for. AZidoThymidine. Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti. Yes, the KGB was part of the multiplying swarm, the cell-blast of reality that has to be distilled and initialed in order to be seen.
"I'm making plans I get some heat and electric in here. Plus pirate cable for the Knicks."
Here in the Wall many people believed the government was spreading the virus, our government. Edgar knew better. The KGB was behind this particular piece of disinformation. And the KGB was responsible for the disease itself, a product of germ warfare-making it, spreading it through networks of paid agents.
She'd stopped talking about these things to Gracie, who rolled her eyes so far up into her head she looked like science fiction.
Edgar looked out a window and saw someone moving among the poplars and ailanthus trees in the most overgrown part of the rubbled lots. A girl in a too-big jersey and striped pants grubbing in the underbrush, maybe for something to eat or wear. Edgar watched her, a lanky kid who had a sort of feral intelligence, a sureness of gesture and step-she looked sleepless but alert, she looked unwashed but completely clean somehow, earth-clean and hungry and quick. There was something about her that mesmerized the nun, a charmed quality, a sense of something favored and sustaining.
She gestured to Gracie. Just then the girl slipped through a maze of wrecked cars and by the time Gracie reached the window she was barely a flick of the eye, lost in the low ruins of an old firehouse.
"Who is this girl," Gracie said, "who's out there in the lots hiding from people?"
Ismael looked at his crew and one of them piped up, an undersized boy in spray-painted jeans, dark-skinned and shirtless.
"Esmeralda. Nobody knows where her mother's at."
Gracie said, "Can you find the girl and then tell Brother Mike?"
"This girl she be real quick."
A murmur of assent.
"She be a running fool this girl."
Heads bobbing above the comic books.
"Why did her mother go away?"
"She be a addict. They un, you know, predictable."
All street, these kids. No home or school. Edgar wanted to get them in a room with a blackboard and then buzz their heads with Spelling and Punctuation. She wanted to drill them in the lessons of the Baltimore Catechism. True or false, yes or no, fill in the blanks.
Ismael said, "Maybe the mother returns. She feels the worm of remorse. But the truth of the matter there's kids that are better off without their mothers or fathers, Because their mothers or fathers are dangering their safety."
"Catch her and hold her," Gracie told the crew "She's too young to be on her own. Brother Mike says she's twelve."
"Twelve is not so young," Ismael said. "One of my best writers, he does wildstyle, age eleven or twelve. Juano. I send him down in a rope to do the complicated letters."
Edgar knew about Ismael's early career as a graffiti master, a legend of spray paint. He was the infamous Moonman 157, nearly twenty years ago, and he told the nuns how he'd marked subway cars all over the city, his signature running on every line, and Edgar believed this was where he'd started having sex with men, in his teens, in the tunnels. She heard it in the spaces in his voice.
"When do we get our money?" Gracie said.
Ismael stood there coughing and Edgar moved back against the far wall. She knew she ought to be more sympathetic to the man. But she was not sentimental about fatal diseases. Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday. She intended to meet her own end with senses intact, grasp it, know it finally, open herself to the mystery that others mistake for something freakish and unspeakable.
People in the Wall liked to say, When hell fills up, the dead will walk the streets.
It was happening a little sooner than they thought.
"I'll have some money next time," Ismael said. "I make practically nothing on these cars. My margin it's very minimum. I'm looking I might expand out of the country. Don't be surprise my scrap ends up in North, you know, Korea."
Gracie joked about this. But it was not a thing Edgar could take lightly. She was a cold war nun who'd once lined the walls of her room with Reynolds Wrap as a safeguard against nuclear fallout. The furtive infiltration, deep and sleek. Not that she didn't think a war might be thrilling. She often conjured the flash even now, with the USSR crumbled alphabetically, the massive letters toppled like Cyrillic statuary
They went down to the van, the nuns and five kids, and they set out to distribute the food, starting with the hardest cases in the projects, just outside the Wall.
They rode the elevators and went down the long passageways. Unknown lives in every wallboard room. Sister Grace believed the proof of God's creativity eddied from the fact that you could not surmise the life, even remotely, of his humblest shut-in.
They spoke to two blind women who lived together and shared a seeing-eye dog.
They saw a man with epilepsy.
They saw children with oxygen tanks next to their beds.
They saw a woman in a wheelchair who wore a Fuck New York T-shirt. Gracie said she would trade the groceries they gave her for heroin, the dirtiest street scag available. The crew looked on, angry. Gracie set her jaw, she narrowed her pale eyes and handed over the food. They argued about this and it was Sister Grace against everybody. Even the wheelchair woman didn't think she should get the food.
They talked to a man with cancer who tried to kiss the latexed hands of Sister Edgar. She backed rapidly toward the door.
They saw five small children being minded by a ten-year-old, all of them bunched on a bed, and two infants in a crib nearby.
They went single file down the passageways, a nun at front and rear, and Edgar thought of all the infants in limbo, unbaptized, babies in the seminether, and the nonbabies of abortion, a cosmic cloud of slushed fetuses floating in the rings of Saturn, and babies born without immune systems, bubble children raised by computer, and babies born addicted-she saw them all the time, three-pound newborns with crack habits who resembled something out of peasant folklore.
They handed out food and Edgar rarely spoke. Gracie spoke. Gracie gave advice. Edgar was a presence only, a uniformed aura in regimental black-and-whites.
They went down the passageways, three boys and two girls forming one body with the nuns, a single swaybacked figure with many moving parts, and they finished their deliveries in the basement of a tenement inside the Wall, where people paid rent for plywood cubicles worse than prison holes.
They saw a prostitute whose silicone breasts had leaked, ruptured and finally exploded one day, sending a polymer whiplash across the face of the man on top of her, and she was unemployed now, living in a room the size of a playpen.
They saw a man who'd cut his eyeball out of its socket because it contained a satanic symbol, a five-pointed star, and Edgar talked to this one, he'd popped the eyeball from his head and then severed the connecting tendons with a knife, and she talked to him in English and understood what he said although he spoke a language, a dialect none of them had ever heard-finally flushing the eye down the communal toilet outside his cubbyhole.
Gracie dropped the crew at their building just as a bus pulled up. What's this, do you believe it? A tour bus in carnival colors with a sign in the slot above the windshield reading South Bronx Surreal. Gracie's breathing grew intense. About thirty Europeans with slung cameras stepped shyly onto the sidewalk in front of the boarded shops and closed factories and they gazed across the street at the derelict tenement in the middle distance.
Gracie went half berserk, sticking her head out the van and calling, "It's not surreal. It's real, it's real. Your bus is surreal. You're surreal."
A monk rode by on a rickety bike. The tourists watched him pedal up the street. They listened to Gracie shout at them. They saw a man come along with battery-run pinwheels he was selling, brightly colored vanes pinned to sticks-an elderly black fellow in a yellow skullcap. They saw the ailanthus jungle and the smash heap of mortified cars and they looked at the six-story slab of painted angels with streamers rippled above their cherub heads.
Gracie shouting, "Brussels is surreal. Milan is surreal. This is real. The Bronx is real."
A tourist bought a pinwheel and got back in the bus. Gracie pulled away muttering. In Europe the nuns wear bonnets like cantilevered beach houses. That's surreal, she said. A traffic jam developed not far from the Wall. The two women sat and waited. They watched children walk home from school, eating coconut ices. Two tables on the sidewalk-free condoms at one, free needles at the other.
"Granted, he may be gay. But this doesn't mean he has AIDS."
Sister Edgar said nothing.
"All right, this area is an AIDS disaster. But Ismael's a smart man, safe, careful."
Sister Edgar looked out the window.
A clamor rising all about them, weary beeping horns and police sirens and the great saurian roar of fire-engine klaxons.
"Sister, sometimes I wonder why you put up with all this," Gracie said. "You've earned some peace and quiet. You could live upstate and do development work for the order. How I would love to sit in the rose garden with a mystery novel and old Pepper curled by my feet." Old Pepper was the cat in the motherhouse upstate. "You could take a picnic lunch to the pond."
Edgar had a mirthless inner grin that floated somewhere back near her palate. She did not yearn for life upstate. This was the truth of the world, right here, her soul's own home, herself-she saw herself, the fraidy child who must face the real terror of the streets to cure the linger of destruction inside her. Where else would she do her work but under the brave and crazy wall of Ismael Mufioz?
Then Gracie was out of the van. She was out of the seat belt, out of the van and running down the street. The door hung open. Edgar understood at once. She turned and saw the girl, Esmeralda, half a block ahead of Gracie, running for the Wall. Gracie moved among the cars in her clunky shoes and frump skirt. She followed the girl around a corner where the tour bus sat dead in traffic. The tourists watched the running figures. Edgar could see their heads turn in unison, pin-wheels spinning at the windows.
All sounds gathered in the dimming sky.
She thought she understood the tourists. You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of torture and war. Emergency vehicles were massing about a block and a half away. She saw workers pry open subway gratings in billows of pale smoke and she knew she ought to say a fast prayer, an act of hope, three years' indulgence, but she only watched and waited. Then heads and torsos began to emerge, indistinctly, people coming into the air with jaws skewed open in frantic gasps.
A short circuit, a subway fire.
Through the rearview mirror she spotted tourists getting off the bus and edging along the street, poised to take pictures. And the schoolkids going by, barely interested-they heard shootings all the time out their windows at night, death interchangeable on the street and TV But what did she know, an old woman who ate fish, still, on Friday, beginning to feel useless here, far less worthy than Sister Grace. Gracie was a soldier, a fighter for human worth. Edgar was basically a junior G-man, protecting a set of laws and prohibitions.
She had a raven's heart, small and obdurate.
She heard the yammer of police cars pulsing in stalled traffic and saw a hundred subway riders come up out of the tunnels accompanied by workers in incandescent vests and she watched the tourists snapping pictures and thought of the trip she'd made to Rome many years ago, for study and spiritual renewal, and she'd swayed beneath the great domes and prowled the catacombs and church basements and this is what she thought as the riders came up to the street, how she'd stood in a subterranean chapel in a Capuchin church and could not take her eyes off the skeletons stacked there, wondering about the monks whose flesh had once decorated these metatarsals and femurs and skulls, many skulls heaped in alcoves and hidey-holes, and she remembered thinking vindictively that these are the dead who will come out of the earth to lash and cudgel the living, to punish the sins of the living-death, yes, triumphant.
But does she really want to believe that, still?
After a while Gracie edged into the driver's seat, unhappy and flushed.
"Nearly caught her. We ran into the thickest part of the lots and then I was distracted, damn scared actually, because bats, I couldn't believe it, actual bats-like the only flying mammals on earth?" She made ironic wing motions with her fingers. "They came swirling out of a crater filled with red-bag waste. Hospital waste, laboratory waste."
"I don't want to hear it."
"Dead white mice by the hundreds with stiff flat bodies. You could flip them like baseball cards."
"Cars starting to move," Edgar said.
"Ever wonder what happens to amputated limbs after the doctor saws them off? They end up in the Wall. Dumped in a vacant lot or burned in the waste incinerator."
"Drive the car."
"And Esmeralda somewhere in those shrubs and junked cars. I bet anything she's living in a car," Gracie said.
"She'll be all right."
"She won't be all right."
"She can take care of herself."
"Sooner or later," Gracie said.
"She's quick. She's blessed. She'll be all right."
Gracie looked at her and drove and looked again, hearing the engine knock, and said nothing. Edgar was never known to take an optimistic position. Maybe this worried her a little.
And that night, under the first tier of scratchy sleep, Edgar saw the subway riders once again, adult males, females of childbearing age, all rescued from the smoky tunnels, groping along catwalks and led up companion ladders to the street-fathers and mothers, the lost parents found and gathered, shirt-plucked and bodied up, guided to the surface by small faceless figures with day-glowings.
Weeks later Edgar picked up a copy of Time on her way out of the refectory and there she saw it, a large color photo of a white-haired woman seated in a director's chair beneath the old weathered wing of an Air Force bomber. And she recognized the name, Klara Sax, because she recognized everything, because people whispered names to her, because she felt stirrings of information in the dusty corridors of the convent or the school's supply room that smelled of pencil wood and composition books, because she sensed some dark knowledge floating in the smoke of the priest's swinging censer, because things were defined for her by the creak of old floorboards and the odor of clothes, a man's damp camel coat, because she drew News and Rumors and Catastrophes into the spotless cotton pores of her habit and veil.
All the connections intact. The woman once married to a local man. The man a tutor in chess to one of Edgar's own former students. The boy with necktie ever askew, Matthew Aloysius Shay, fingernails bitten to the pink, one of her brainier boys, male parent missing.
She knew things, yes, chess, all those layers of Slavic stealth, those ensnarements and ploys. She knew that Bobby Fischer had all the fillings removed from his teeth when he played Boris Spassky in 1972-it made perfect sense to her-so the KGB could not control him through broadcasts made into the amalgam units packed in his molars.
She put the magazine in her closet with the old fan mags she'd stopped reading decades ago when she lost her faith in movie stars.
The faith of suspicion and unreality. The faith that replaces God with radioactivity, the power of alpha particles and the all-knowing systems that shape them, the endless fitted links.
That night she leaned over the washbasin in her room and cleaned a steel wool pad with disinfectant. Then she used the pad to scour a scrub brush, cleaning every bristle. But she hadn't cleaned the original disinfectant in something stronger than disinfectant. She hadn't done this because the regression was infinite. And the regression was infinite because it is called infinite regression. You see how fear spreads beyond the pushy extrusions of matter and into the elevated spaces where words play upon themselves.
She cleaned and she prayed.
She said brief prayers while she worked, simple pious pleas called ejaculations that carried indulgences numbered in the days rather than years.
She prayed and she thought.
She went to bed and lay awake and thought of Esmeralda. They'd spotted her a number of times but hadn't been able to catch her. Not Gracie or the monks or the agile writers in Ismael's crew. And Edgar's sense of her safety was beginning to grow less assured.
She welcomed every breath of knowledge that came her way, all the better for its element of disquiet, but this time the foreboding shook her strongly. She sensed something out there in the Wall, a muddled shuffling danger that waited for the girl on her lithe passage through car bodies and discarded human limbs and acres of uncollected garbage.
Mother of Mercy pray for us. Three hundred days.
Nick was trying to find the magazine he'd been saving to take to Houston. He saved certain kinds of reading for business trips, things he never got around to looking at otherwise, magazines that stacked and nagged and finally went to the sidewalk on the designated day. There was a noise that started, a world hum-you began to hear it when you left your carpeted house and rode out to the airport. He wanted something friendly to read in the single sustained drone that marks every mile in a business traveler's day.
The magazine was Time, missing about a month. He found it finally in the bathroom, stashed in a basket that Marian kept filled with mostly glossy fashion books-every shadow brushed to an anatomical polish, contoured against crumble and waste. Just the thing to browse when your body is squatted and your pants are down. The copy of Time had an article on Klara Sax he wanted to read, not the first such piece he'd spotted through the years but maybe more interesting than most, some desert project she'd started, bristling with ambition.
His suitcase was on the bed, small enough for the overhead bin, and he zippered the magazine into an outer pocket and finished packing. Marian walked in wearing her catwoman shades. They came with the job. She worked for the city's arts commission now and wanted a sleeker look.
"Don't you need to hurry?"
"The car's not here. I trust the car," he said.
"The car is dependable."
"The car knows things we don't know."
"The car is never late."
"The car and the plane are in constant touch."
She always looked great when he was walking out the door. Why is that, he thought. Some soft-bodied mood, some tone that half insisted on being noticed but was also a shy secret, afraid of disturbing the air between them.
He moved her into the wall and put his hands on her thighs, kiss-biting her mouth and neck. She said something he didn't quite catch. He put his hands between her ass and the wall and moved her into him. Her skirt slid against her parted legs, fabric stretched out and up, the tensile whisper of friction he counted on to carry him through life. He stepped back slightly and looked at her.
"Why is that?" he said.
"What are we talking about?"
"And why is it that when I get back, the whole thing's gone and lost and forgotten?"
"What thing?"
He took off her sunglasses and handed them to her. When he walked out the door, seconds later, the company car was waiting.
A few hours later Marian stood in a small room in a two-story pale brick building near Jack in the Box and Brake-O. Cars were parked under a lopsided shed out back and there was a man's abandoned shoe in one of the empty slots. She stood naked in the room by the edge of the window. Then she walked to the long mirror and edged her hip against the surface of the glass, feeling some small coiled chill of body and object. She looked all right. All the exercise, the diet, the diet, the exercise. All the butt repetition, the toilsome boredom she endured in the name of keeping fit. She was not the twisted perfect woman she used to be but she still kept fit. Fuck you, keep fit. She stood squared up to the glass. Nothing she could do about the needle nose but otherwise not bad. She never looked at herself so closely at home. It was easier to see herself out here, inside strange walls. She let her nipples touch the glass and when she backed away she saw they'd left a moist-ness, a pair of pressed kisses like winter breath.
When Brian arrived she was wearing a robe she'd found in the closet.
"I shouldn't be here," he said.
"Neither should I. This is the point, isn't it?"
He sat on the edge of the bed taking off his shoes, a little like the class crybaby undressing for gym.
"Whose place is this?"
"My assistant's."
"Are you serious?"
"Why not? We need a safe place," she said.
"But your secretary?"
"My assistant. And it's better than a hotel."
"I shouldn't be here."
He walked around the room barefoot, unbuttoning his shirt. He had clown feet, long and bunioned, and he didn't loosen his tie until he'd pulled his shirt out of his trousers.
"Is she young?"
"How do you know it's a woman?"
"Seriously. Young?"
"Yes," she said.
He walked around touching things, looking at photographs and matchbooks.
"Good-looking?"
"You want to check out her underwear? Look, I'm wearing her robe. Fuck me fuck me fuck me," she said drily.
"She can't afford better?"
"We're underbudgeted."
"It's a roomette."
"Small but intense," Marian said.
She was standing against the wall, arms folded, and he stepped into her. She freed her hands and worked at his pants. She liked having sex with Brian because she could handle him, turn him, get him to match her mood, rouse him easily or make him talk, talk-acid candid shameful stuff, bitter-funny.
"I think he knows," she said.
"What?"
"I think he knows."
"He doesn't know."
"I think he knows."
She had her hands in his pants and a smile on her face. He moved the robe off half her body, smeared it-rubbed it against her shoulder and breast before he got it off her, almost off her, pulling her arm through the hole and letting the garment drag.
They eased onto the bed. She tried to get clear of the rest of the robe but he wouldn't let her. He wanted a woman in half a robe. The phone rang and they stopped to listen. Every time a phone rang in a borrowed apartment they stopped and thought about the thing they were doing and maybe at some level about the life of the person whose apartment they were using. It made them feel the wrong kind of guilty trespass, she thought. The bed. The mystery of the other person's life and medicine cabinet and bed. It was the one thing she didn't like about this, one among others, and she couldn't have sex to a ringing phone.
She felt around for her handbag, which was on a chair at the side of the bed. The ringing stopped. Brian got off the bed and finished undressing.
"You trust her to keep quiet?"
"She keeps quiet about everything else."
"This isn't everything else."
Marian found her cigarettes and lit one up and he handed her an ashtray.
"I thought you stopped."
"I'm down to five a day."
"I thought you were wearing the patch."
"I'm not," she said.
He stretched out next to her, on his side. The ringing phone had brought them prematurely to a lazy state of small caresses and mellow bends of conversation and streams of smoke.
He said, "This job of yours. Real or fake?"
"I work with structural engineers, urban designers. I fight with citi-zens' groups all the time. But I get things done, pretty much."
"I had lunch in a mechanical mist the other day In some mall somewhere."
"We don't do malls. We do parkways."
"What do you do to a parkway?"
"Make it livable, bearable. Tell little stories. Sculpture on the road dividers. Piers that are shaped like animals."
"What's your secretary's name?" he said.
She tipped a length of ash onto his pubic hair.
"Long hours, single-minded devotion. Stuck in that Japanese thing," he said. "Death from overwork."
"Disappear in the company and die. Only I don't do it to disappear. I do it to be visible and audible. And I'm not sure what you mean by real or fake."
He picked the ashes out of his crotch and blew them off the tips of his fingers.
"Most jobs are fake," he said.
They'd been late starters and had never developed a reliable pace. Only three or four apartments in all this time and they'd used each apartment only once or twice. She'd learned not to notice her disappointment. This was an aspect of being twistedly perfect. But Brian's reluctance was fairly maddening. She had to arrange the apartments, make the assurances, calibrate the timing and then wonder if he'd show. They talk about demon lovers. She had a demon husband. Her lover was a loose-jointed guy with a freckled forehead and nappy hair. But this was the dare she had to take, a way into some essential streak of self, some possibility that felt otherwise sandy and scanted and unturned. These times were hers, however brief and infrequent. And he was enormously easy to be with and growing dear to her. She liked to tease and scare him but did not want to think about giving him up.
"Blow smoke my way," he said. "I want all the aromas. Tobacco, bedsheets, women."
She was herself with Brian, whatever that meant. She knew what it meant. Less enveloped in someone else's figuration, his self-conscious shaping of a life.
"And don't let me forget, I have a meeting at three," he said.
"I'm a little put off by the fact that you haven't, you know," sort of dangling the words, "fallen in love with me, Brian."
"You're my age, you're my height. I fall in love with small brisk women I see from a distance."
"And they have to be young."
"They have to be young. You and I, we're buddies. And I'm too guilty to fall in love with you. I'm very guilty. I'm guilty as shit."
"Then why are you doing it?"
"Because you want it so much," he said.
She bent the cigarette into the ashtray.
"And you're that accommodating? Because I want it? You're willing to do it?"
"I want it too. But you want it like life and death."
She didn't like him when he was serious. It was outside the rules. He let his head flop toward her, whispering.
"It's stupid and it's reckless and we shouldn't do it anymore. Because if he finds out," he whispered.
"What if your wife finds out? She's the one who'll cut your balls off."
"Nick will only kill me."
"And he doesn't have to find out. He already knows."
"He doesn't know."
"I think he knows."
He whispered, "Let's make this one last happy farewell fuck."
She started to tell him something but then thought no. They fell together, folded toward each other, and then she leaned back, arching, shored on her back-braced arms, and she let him pace the occasion. At some point she opened her eyes and saw him watching her, measuring her progress, and he looked a little isolated and wan and she pulled his head down to her and sucked salt from his tongue and heard the sort of breast-slap, the splash of upper bodies and the banging bed. Then it was a matter of close concentration. She listened for something inside the bloodrush and she spun his hips and felt electric and desperate and finally home free and she looked at his eyes stung shut and his mouth stretched so tight it seemed taped at the corners, upper lip pressed white against his teeth, and she felt a kind of hanged man's coming when he came, the jumped body and stiffened limbs, and she ran a hand through his hair-be nicer if we did it more often.
She waited for their breathing to settle so she could ease free and get her handbag off the chair.
He went to the kitchen and drank a glass of water.
It was a fairly large bag, a drawstring bag, and she pulled out a length of aluminum foil and unrolled it and spread it on the bed. Brian stood watching from the kitchen entrance. Then she took out a small transparent packet. It looked like a pleated sandwich bag, only smaller, and it carried a stick-on label reading Death Trip #1.
"Come here," she said.
She opened the packet and let the contents, half the contents, spill onto the aluminum sheet. It was a resinous substance, chunked up, nubbed up. She told Brian to sit on the bed and pick up the sheet and hold it straight, hold it by the edges so the stuff, the tarlike chunks, didn't run off the ends.
"What the hell is it? And how can it run off if it's solid?"
Then she went into the handbag again and took a small rolled-up straw of some kind, a foil straw a few inches long.
"Yo, Marian, what are we doing here?"
Then she reached for her matches and lit one and held it under the aluminum sheet in Brian's hands, heating the substance on the sheet.
"It's heroin," she said, watching the tar slowly begin to liquefy.
"It's heroin," he said. "What am I supposed to say to that?"
When the tar started evaporating and smoking up, she shook out the match and put the foil straw in her mouth and trailed the curling smoke, sucking it up and holding it in her lungs, conscientiously.
"Okay. Where'd you get it?"
She watched the tar melt and run and evaporate and she followed the smoke off the stretched foil and sucked it through the straw.
"Mary Catherine."
"Who's that?"
"My assistant."
"Whose bed we're on? Your secretary's your dealer? When did you start doing this?"
"I never actually thought of her."
She trailed the smoke off the sheet and put her head right into it and sucked it through the straw.
"I never thought of her as my dealer but I guess she's my dealer and I'm her whatever."
"This is something new?"
"Fairly new yes. Here, take a chase."
"No, thanks."
She trailed the smoke into the air.
"I'm, you know, completely prudent. I use it rare, rare, rare. I don't get out of bed puffy-eyed, or pain, or nausea. Take a chase."
She sucked up the smoke.
"Nick knows this? He can't know this."
"Are you crazy? He'd kill me/Take a chase."
"Get the hell away from me."
"I want to get you in deeper. Take a chase. I want to get you in so deep you'll stop eating and sleeping. You'll lie in bed thinking about us. Doing our things in a borrowed room. You'll be able to think about nothing else. That's my program for you, Brian."
"Mary Catherine. I like the name," he said. "Sexy."
They sat on the bed, side by side, listening to traffic roll by on Thomas Road. When she was finished they cleared the things away and brushed off the bed and lay back talking.
"I think he knows," she said.
"Where is he?"
"On his way to Houston or there already. Then he drives out to that nuclear waste site wherever it is exactly."
"The salt dome."
"At the mercy of the Texas Highway Killer."
"He doesn't know," Brian said. "But we ought to think about ending it. We ought to make this the end."
"I'm not nearly ready. So just keep quiet. You're making me feel like some old dowd barely hanging on."
"You're not a dowd. You're a bawd."
"Be nice to me," she said.
The day had slipped down to a drowsy pulse located somewhere near her eyes. When she stretched she felt the jismic crust in her pubic hair speck out and crackle slightly.
He whispered, "Let's have a civilized final fuck and get out alive."
She listened to the traffic and wondered what she would say in the movie version.
He whispered, "Let's fuck the sayonara fuck and get into our suits and dresses."
She smiled faintly. The air had the feel of some auspicious design. She was feeling faintly L.A.ish and she rolled over on Brian and talked while they were doing it, on and off, sweetness, dearness, blowing the words, sensing an unseen design of completely auspicious things.
When they were side by side he raised up on an elbow and looked at her
"You have that molten ball of defiance in your eye."
"Just don't talk about ending. It's not yours to end."
He laughed. When Brian laughed he became semitransparent. You could see blood racing under his skin, a freshet of rose pink. He got up and began to dress. He picked up a fashion magazine and held it open to a looming photo of some casually muscled bisexual, maybe a white guy, maybe not-dangled it over the bed as if to indicate how dated he was in his own body, his very life, Brian himself, a man without a fitness video to sling in the oblong groove.
"Underwear. Everything, suddenly, is underwear," he said. "Tell me what it means."
He checked the time and got a little panicky. She attempted to help, handing items of apparel across the bed, and he fumbled things intentionally, he wore a sock inside out and tied his shoes together so he could scuttle and lurch to the door. The later it got, the more he capered. It was Brian at his best.
"But what if he knows?"
"He doesn't know," she said.
She had a demon husband if demon means a force of some kind, an attendant spirit of discipline and self-command, the little flick of distance he'd perfected, like turning off a radio. She knew about his father's disappearance but there was something else, hard and apart. This is what had drawn her in the first place, the risky and erotic proposition.
Brian was looking at the photographs on the wall by the door.
"Which one is her?"
"Get out," she said.
She made the bed and bagged the dope and put the robe back in the closet. She washed the glass Brian had used, standing naked in the kitchenette, and it seemed completely reasonable and natural, all of it, earned, needed, naked, and she took a shower and got dressed.
She was feeling pretty good. She felt lazy-daisy, you know. You know the way something's been nagging and dragging and then it gets unexpectedly sort of settled.
She felt all the good things would find her, which they usually don't. She would know them when she saw them with her L.A.-type eyes.
She stood before the mirror adjusting her sunglasses. Because if she didn't have this thing to do, to plan and maneuver and look forward to, this far-too-infrequent Brian, and this is what she'd almost told him earlier, she would become lonely and shaky, driving along the decorated highway under the burning sky, and maybe a little indistinct.
She felt well liked. She liked who she was today. She felt a little lazy-souled. She thought anything L.A. seemed right today. She'd even say she was more or less euphoric, although she wasn't ready to commit to that completely.
Before she left she inspected the room one last time. These were the things that opened the world to secret arrangements, the borrowed flat and memorized phone number and coded notation on the calendar. Childish spy games really that made her feel guiltier than the sex did, a sheepish kind of self-reproach. She patted down a pillow to remove the indentation. She wanted things to have an untouched look so Mary Catherine would not mind when she asked to use the place again.
He spread the mayonnaise. He spread mayonnaise on the bread. Then he slapped the lunch meat down. He never spread the mayonnaise on the meat. He spread it on the bread. Then he slapped down the meat and watched the mayo seep around the edges.
He took the sandwich into the next room. His dad was watching TV, sitting in that periscope stoop of his, crookback, like he might tumble into the rug. His dad had infirmities still waiting for a name. Things you had to play one against another. If one thing required a certain medication, it made another thing worse. There were setbacks and side effects, there was a schedule of medications that Richard and his mother tried to keep track of through the daily twists of half doses and warning labels and depending on this and don't forget that.
Richard ate about half the sandwich and left the rest on the arm of the chair. In the kitchen he called his friend Bud Walling, who lived forty miles into nowhere and wasn't really his friend.
He drove out to Bud's place through old fields marked off for development, with skivvy strips on narrow posts running stiff in the wind. Out here the wind was a force that seized the mind. You left the high school a quarter of a mile behind still hearing the big flag snapping and the halyard beating nautically on the pole and you powered your car into the wind and saw dust sweep across the road and you drove into a white sky feeling useless and dumb.
Bud's place could have been something blown in from the hills. It had a look of being deposited in a natural spree, with lumber warping in the yard and sprung-open doors and an unfinished porch on cinder blocks, one of those so-low porches the house looks sunk in sand. Bud had a coydog that lived in chains in a ramshackle hut out back, part coyote, part alley mutt. Richard thought this dog was less dangerous than legend would have it. Richard thought Bud kept this dog basically for the juvenile thrill of having a chained beast that he could feed or starve according to his whim.
He realized he'd forgotten to give his dad two glasses of water to take with the blue and yellow capsule despite the bold-faced reminder on the prescription bottle. These little failures ate away at his confidence even when he knew it was his father's fault for not managing his own intake or his mother's for not being around when she was needed. There were constant little wars of whose fault is it and okay I'm sorry and I wish he'd die and get it over with, all taking place in Richard's inner mind.
He did the dumb-joke thing of knocking on Bud's door and saying, "Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms."
Nothing happened. He went in and saw Bud in a large open room sawing a two-by-four that he'd set between benches of unmatching height. The house was still mainly framework although Bud had been working for many months in a conscientious struggle that Richard thought had less to do with gutting and reshaping a house than destroying some dread specter, maybe Bud's old drug habit, once and for all.
"Your phone's out of order," Richard said. "I thought I'd drive on out, see if everything, you know's, okay."
"Why wouldn't it be okay?"
"I reported it to the phone company."
"My only feeling about the phone."
"Sometimes they correct the problem from the office."
"It brings more grief than joy."
Bud finally looked up and noted his visual presence.
"It brings personal voices into your life that you're not prepared to deal with."
Richard kept to the edges of the room, running his palms over the planed sills, examining the staples that kept plastic sheeting fastened to the window frames. It was empty distraction of the type that forestalls the pain of ordinary talk.
"I'm putting in parquet," Bud said. "Herringbone maybe."
"Should be good."
"Better be good. But I probably won't ever do it."
The sound of the wind in the plastic sheeting was hard on the nerves. Richard wondered how an ex-addict could work all day in this scratching and popping. The sheeting popped out, it whipped and scratched. Crack cocaine fools the brain into thinking dope is good for it.
He thought of something he could say
"Tell you, Bud. I'm forty-two years old next week. Week from Thursday."
"It happens."
"And I still feel like I'm half that, pretty much."
"That's because it's obvious why, you living as you do."
"What do you mean?"
"With your folks," Bud said.
"They can't manage alone."
"Who can? My question to you is."
Bud tossed half the length of sawed wood into a corner. He studied the other half as if someone had just handed it to him on a crowded street.
"What?" Richard said.
"Don't they smell?"
"What?"
"Old people. Like bad milk."
Richard heard the plastic windows pop.
"Not so I notice."
"Not so you notice. Okay. You want to feel your correct age. Get yourself a wife. That'll do it for you. It's horrible but true. A wife is the only thing that can save guys like us. But they don't make you feel any younger."
Richard fidgeted happily in his corner. He liked the idea of being included in the female salvation of wayward men.
"Where is she?" he said.
"Working the late shift now."
Bud's wife worked on the line at Texas Instruments, mounting microchips on circuit boards, Bud said, for the information highway. Richard thought he was half in love with Bud's wife. It was a feeling that came and went, secret and sort of semipathetic, like his heart was made of some cotton product. If Aetna ever had a clue to what he felt, what would she think? The fear this question carried made him experience actual physical symptoms, a heat, a flush across his upper back, and a tightening at the throat.
He thought of something else to say.
"Left-handers, I read this the other day." And he paused here trying to recall the formal sentences in the narrow column of type. "Lefthanders, which I am not one of, live typically shorter lives than righthanders. Right-handed men live ten years longer than left-handed men. You believe that?"
"We're talking this is mean life span."
"Left-handed men die typically at age, I think, sixty-five."
"Because they jerk off facing the North Pole," Bud said in a remark that Richard could not analyze for one shred of content.
He watched Bud pry nails out of the old floorboards and offered to help, looking around for a claw hammer.
"So, Richard."
"What?"
"You drove fifty miles to tell me my phone's not working."
Richard didn't know if this was a setup for a scathing type of Bud Walling remark or maybe just an ordinary thank-you.
"Forty miles, Bud."
"Well that's a relief. I'd offer you a beer, but."
"No problem."
"Maybe it's Aetna who drives fifty miles. I forget exactly."
It was not outside Bud's effective range to say something personal about his wife, maybe her sex preferences or digestive problems, and whenever he mentioned her name old Richard caught his breath, hoping and fearing something intimate was coming, and even though he knew Bud did this to shock and repel him, Richard absorbed every word and image and smell description, watching Bud's long creased face for signs of mockery.
"She'll be sorry she missed you," Bud said, looking up from the wood rot and hanging dust.
He was not left-handed but taught himself to shoot with the left hand. This is what Bud would never understand, how he had to take his feelings outside himself so's to escape his isolation. He taught himself based on the theory that if you are driving with your right hand and sitting snug to the door it is better practically speaking to keep the right hand on the wheel and project the left hand out the window, the gun hand, so you do not have to fire across your body. He could probably talk to Bud about this and Bud might understand. But he would never understand how Richard had to take everything outside, share it with others, become part of the history of others, because this was the only way to escape, to get out from under the pissant details of who he was.
Bud was saying, "So cop says, Feet together, head back, eyes shut please. Which Aetna starts to laugh when he says please. Now spread your arms wide, he says. Now bring your left hand around and touch your nose with your index finger. Which I'm standing there in sheets of rain and he's advising from the car. Touch your nose with your index finger, he tells me."
"You're a left-hander driving a car you're five times likely to die in a crash."
"Than a right-hander."
"Than a right-hander," Richard said, religiously convinced.
Bud ripped a board out of the floor.
"Not my problem." /
"Mine neither."
"I die from stress," Bud said. "I'll tell you where my stress level's at."
Richard waited for the rest. He used to sit in a glass booth at the supermarket batching personal checks and redeemed coupons and giving out rolled nickels to the checkout personnel but he seemingly messed up somehow and was out at the counters again, running items over the scanner, keying fruit and vegetables into the register, subject to the casual abuse of passing strangers in the world.
"We have to do our business outside because the toilet's not ready for human habitation. So I built a thing outside where this is the only workable method pending I figure out the toilet. And Aetna, well you can imagine."
"Coming home from work."
"The stress builds up real personal."
"Driving that drive," Richard said.
"And she has to go. And then she remembers. There's no working toilet in the house. And she looks at me outright murderous."
They said unbelievable things, obese women in the express line, with him having two sick parents at home, or one sick and one bad-tempered, like that's sixteen cents off on the tomato paste or that's not a red pear that's a an-jew They forced him to ask across the aisle. Can't you see it's not red? He charged me for red, this here's a an-jew. He had to speak across the aisle to the other checkout, where any person on either line could hear what he said.
"For myself I don't mind," Bud said. "Because it makes a certain amount of sense to take your business outside. When you think about what's involved."
They talk about head trauma. They talk about is he adopted or was he abused? The problem is all in the spacing. If you fire out the window on the driver's side, which you have to do if you don't want to shoot across the width of your own car and the space between your car and the other car, you still face the problem of having to fire across the space between cars and the width of the other car because the other driver's side is the far side in relation to your position at the wheel. You are not going to shoot a passenger. If you shoot a passenger, then the driver is liable to take evasive action and note your license number and make of car and color of hair and so on. So you are going to shoot lone drivers and you are going to fire out the window on your side using the left hand to hold the weapon. But the fact is, as he eventually figured out, that if you shoot with the right hand, the natural hand, your projectile travels the same distance across the same spaces, pretty much, as the self-taught method of the left hand. He figured this out after victim five or six, he forgets which, but decided to stick with the left hand as the shooting hand even though it made more sense to steer with the left hand and shoot with the right. Because the right hand was the born hand.
"I just noticed what it was I couldn't figure out," Bud said.
They heard the dog barking and Richard looked through the dusty sheeting and saw the animal thrust up on hind legs at the end of its chain, dog balls taut, and he hoped it might be Aetna come home early. Aetna made a pie for them once that had a latticed crust. This was something he remembered. Seeing it wasn't her coming home but likely some critter in the woods that roused the dog, he felt a sadness out of all proportion. But then everything was out of all proportion. The wind beat at the sheeting, making it shiver and pop. Crack cocaine is supposedly the cravingest form of substance abuse, according to studies made over time.
"You're wearing a tie," Bud said.
Richard paused, wary about how to take this, peering inwardly ahead for a setup, a possible remark.
"Well that's from work," he said. "I went home from work and didn't change."
"But you wear ties? To check out groceries?"
"It's a company regulation, statewide, pretty much."
Be calm, he thought.
"And there's the thing Aetna said, which she's right for a change. That you look like a guy that wears glasses. Except you don't. Except when she said it, we weren't sure. We said, Does he or doesn't he?"
"Never did," Richard said.
When he first walked in the house and Bud barely noticed him, it was like the normalcy of dying. It was the empty hollow thing of not being here. A forty-mile drive into being transparent, awful but not unaccustomed. But now this scrutiny as to what he wears and what he looks like. A panic set in. He tried to think of what to say. There might be something he could say about the dog. He searched for a glimpse of the dog through the sheeting. How nothing gets dirtier than plastic sheeting, retaining, absorbing the dirt.
! "Well maybe you should. Glasses give appearance to a person. Get yourself some thick dark frames that match your tie."
He didn't know why Bud would want to talk to him this way. Bud sat cross-legged over the narrow rent in the floor. He held the hammer at rest on his shoulder and looked directly into Richard's face. Richard tried to smile, make the whole thing humorous. He felt the stupidity of the look on his face, as if a turn of the mouth can alter the outside world.
"I can think about it."
"You do that."
"I should probably be getting back."
"She'll be sorry she missed you."
"Tell her I said."
"I'll be sure and do that."
The only person he ever talked to from the heart was Sue Ann. She made him feel real, talking on the phone. She gave him the feeling he was taking shape as himself, coming into the shape he'd always been intended to take, the thing of who he really was. It was like filling out-did you ever feel things pouring out from the center of who you are and taking the shape of the intended person? Well that's what Sue Ann did and you can disbelieve it or disrespect it but he was never really who he was until he talked to her.
He heard Bud ripping up wood as he walked out the door to his car.
With mental killers roaming the earth, the checkout boys wear neckties.
That's what he thought Bud might say.
He made the call to Sue Ann from a house he broke and entered. Switched on the TV and called the superstation in Atlanta and touched things with a hanky and placed the voice device on the phone that he'd ordered from the back pages of a mercenary magazine. This was not a publication Richard normally perused. He was not a surveillance man or gun lover. His gun was his father's old.38. It did not have massive knockdown power and it did not shoot through concrete blocks or make fist-size holes in silhouette targets. It just killed people.
He drove out of the wooded area and into the open sky, where the road dropped down to the floodplain and he felt the true force of the wind.
He made the call and turned on the TV, or vice versa, without the sound, his hand wound in a doubled hanky, and he never felt so easy talking to someone on the phone or face-to-face or man to woman as he felt that day talking to Sue Ann. He watched her over there and talked to her over here. He saw her lips move silent in one part of the room while her words fell soft and warm on the coils of his secret ear. He talked to her on the phone and made eye contact with the TV This was the waking of the knowledge that he was real. This alien-eyed woman with raving hair sending emanations that astonished his heart. He spoke more confidently as time went on. He was coming into himself, shy but also unashamed, a little vain, even, and honest and clever, evasive when he needed to be, standing there in a stranger's house near a lamp without a shade and she listened and asked questions, watching him from the screen ten feet away. She had so much radiance she could make him real.
This was an untraveled road. Travel thirty miles on this road and you may not see another car. You see power lines extended to the limits of vision, sinking toward the earth as a matter of perspective. When the wind dies there's a suspense that falls across the land and makes you think about the hush before the Judgment.
Then they cut away to the tape. He was suspicious of the tape because it had a vista different from his experience and he kept thinking the girl was going to move the camera and get him in the picture. He'd watched the tape a dozen times sitting with his pain-racked dad and every time he watched the tape he thought he was going to turn up in his own living room, detached from who he was, peering squint-eyed over the wheel of his compact car.
He called Sue Ann twice after that but the switchboard would not put him through because many others were trying to reach her now and the switchboard was leery and abrupt and unbelieving. He needed her to keep him whole. He probably would have told her his name. She would have broken him down completely over a number of calls over a number of days, watching him from the screen. He would have surrendered to her in a blaze of lights, Richard Henry Gilkey, hustled down a hallway with Stetsoned men all around him and Sue Ann Corcoran by his side.
He drove past the flagpole with the banging halyard. The wind was banging the halyard against the pole and it made him weak somehow, the repeated meaning of this noise.
He went in the house and saw his dad twisted whole in front of the TV set. Mother was in the kitchen running a beater inside a white bowl.
"Look what got dragged in by the scruff."
"I went out to Bud's."
"Do we have time for you to go out to Bud's?"
"We need to give daddy his Nitrospan."
"Well go ahead and do it."
"Well aren't we supposed to call about the new dosage?"
"I didn't call. Did you call?" she said.
The glass booth had a talk hole where you talked. But they sent him out to the checkout and forced him to talk across the aisle.
"I'll call," she said, "but he's not there."
"Irbu'll get the answering service."
"I'll get the answering service and they'll tell me he's not there."
"I meant to call," he said.
"I'll call," she said, "and you do the ointment."
After dinner he did the ointment on his father's chest. His father lay back on the bed with the stubbled look of an old man turning into a castaway, a reject of the islands, except for his eyes-they were moist and deep, pleading for time. Richard spread the ointment and buttoned his father's pajama tops and he thought about the time, any day now, when he would have to wipe his behind.
Pending notification of next of kin.
He came alive in them. He lived in their histories, in the photographs in the newspaper, he survived in the memories of the family, lived with the victims, lived on, merged, twinned, quadrupled, continued into double figures.
He stood at the kitchen door watching her stir some solution for his father's first intake of the next day.
"Well you have a good night now."
"You sleep well," she said.
He went to his room and sat in a chair to take off his shoes. All the meaning of a given life was located in the act of leaning over to untie your shoes and set them in a designated place for the start of the following day.
He thought about the other person.
When he was stationed in the booth he had the talk hole to talk through. But when they put him back at the checkout he had to talk in the open space where anyone could hear.
He kept the gun hidden in the car and he thought about this as he drifted near sleep and he thought about the other person who'd shot a driver on one of the highways where he had shot a driver, just one day later. The so-called copycat shooting. He did not like to think about this but found it was lately more and more, a taunting presence in his mind.
He was an early riser. He heard the rain on the roof and he dressed and ate a muffin standing up, a hand cupped under his chin to catch the crumbs. He had three and a half hours before it was time to report to work. He heard the rain dripping off the eaves and hitting the pie tin where he left food for a stray cat when he remembered.
I know who I am. Who is he?
He zipped up his jacket. Then he put the glove on his left hand, a woman's white glove, and he went out to the empty street, where his car sat waiting under the sheet-metal sky.