The Falconer

by Dana Czapnik

  But that’s not the way it works when you’re a child of the city. The city changes as you stand there. You blink and it’s a whole other place. There’s a beauty to that, right? That’s why people come here, after all. But there is something to be said for a place that remains familiar. A place that can confirm or deny your memories.

  There’s this line in “The Boxer” that I always mangled as a kid. I used to think they were singing, “Just come home from the war zone, Seventh Avenue,” and not “Just a come-on from the whores on Seventh Avenue.” Because I didn’t know what a whore was then, I couldn’t fathom the word. I once told that to Percy, and he said, “Well, Seventh Avenue is a war zone.” Anyway, I’ve never been able to think of that line in the song any differently than I did when I was a kid, even though I know it’s wrong, even though I know what a whore is and what the real words are now. It’s like it has changed in my head to a fact, as though that were the actual lyric Paul Simon wrote.

  I guess New York is like that, in that what you mistake it for matters as much as what it actually is.

  And as I’m standing there, looking out the train window, heading home from the disaster that was prom and then the disaster that was Violet, feeling fucking nostalgic for the whores on Seventh Avenue and the red subway cars that always break down and lose power, with their graffiti and their curse words carved into the plastic windows so they have all become opaque, feeling fucking sad for this dying New York that is pathetic and obliterated and gloomy and overcast and miserable, full of crack cocaine and slumlords and crooked cops and dirty politicians and also art and invention and music and ideas and stories of new lives and salvation and great lies and truth and desolation and enchantment and kinetic energy, the train starts slowing down as we approach the never-ending curve of the Fifty-Ninth Street stop, and something—a kid? A tiny woman, maybe?—a purple sweater flutters in front of the window for a brief second, descends out of view, and then a THUD against the bottom of the door. All that remains is the sound of the metal door bouncing back and forth on its hinges and two small gelatinous flecks of red that have hit and settled on the window.

  The emergency brake is pulled. The train screams. And through the window of the subway car I see the few people on the platform register what has just happened, and they all turn away in horror, and then everything goes red.

  I try to deny my senses. Reflexively. I cover my eyes and my mouth and my ears, moving my hands about my head and face, trying to cover anything that could see or hear or smell or taste what just happened. I don’t want to know it.

  The first car is the only one that had emerged from the tunnel before the emergency brake stopped the train entirely, and I begin to inch my way to the doors that will open onto the platform. Only one other guy in the car saw the person jump, and the few people who are awake start asking us what happened.

  I have no voice in my throat to answer them, but the man says, “I think someone jumped,” and he turns to me and asks, “Did you see it?” and I just nod and people begin to gasp and say “Oh my god” and “Ay, dios mío” and put their hands to their chests, and some people are crossing themselves and some people are stunned and others are still sleeping or listening to their Walkmen, unaware or dreaming of another world. The conductor charges out of her booth in a state of panic, muttering “Oh, god, oh, god” under her breath.

  I see her with such clarity—the laugh lines deeply engraved around her eyes, the dark remnants of acne on her cheeks—and I see how this moment will haunt her forever. Even though it’s not her fault, the woman jumped. But she was driving the train that hit her. Though she will never be convicted of a crime, she will bear the guilt, the feeling of causing another person’s death, until the end of her days. I watch as the realization of all this instantly flashes across her face, how deeply her inner life has suddenly changed.

  She rushes over to where I’m standing by the doors leading out to the platform and begins to try to pry them open with her hands. “Help me, please, help me,” she pleads, so I start pulling on the other door in the opposite direction, and after about twenty seconds of struggle, they open just enough for the two of us to squeeze through before they smack back together behind us.

  I push my way through the small crowd assembled near the edge of the platform and I see the conductor inch her way down to the subway tracks as I leave.

  I bound up the stairs, leaving the commotion behind me, the people talking in hushed whispers, the people asking, “What happened?” as if they don’t know, the people wondering “Is she okay?” as if they don’t know. A day later, my mother will tell me there is an article in the New York Post that reported a woman jumping in front of a train who fell just perfectly in between the tracks, and she was saved by a brave man who climbed underneath the train and pulled her to safety without touching the third rail. When she tells me this, for a moment, I will believe her and will almost say, “Can I see the article?” But I won’t. I’ll stop myself. Sometimes parents need to tell their children the dog is living on a farm upstate.

  * * *

  Out in the night on Columbus Circle, the Earth’s polarity has changed.

  What destroys a person? Is it a fault in the world or a fault in the self? What is the origin of the break that compels a person to choose such a gruesome death?

  It wasn’t a sweater. It wasn’t a child. It was a woman. I could tell that for sure at least. She was petite and her dark hair was pulled back. Beyond that, I could see nothing concrete—her skin tone. Her facial expression.

  When Kurt Cobain killed himself last month, we learned all about suicide statistics. Women attempt suicide at a higher rate than men, but men’s methods are more final: shooting, hanging, jumping off buildings or in front of trains. Women use drugs. So, what could possess a woman to seek an end so violent? Had she been abused and saw this as her only way out? Had she lost a child? Was she pregnant and ashamed? Was she a victim of rape? Was she in love with someone unworthy, someone careless, like Ophelia or Anna Karenina? No, no. A woman goes insane with unrequited love, kills herself—that’s a male fantasy. Was she just sick of being overlooked? Being invisible? Did she want her death to be splashed across the front pages? Did she just want some fucking recognition?

  I walk to the nearest phone booth, drop a quarter in the slot, and dial a number. My fingers act on their own. Pure muscle memory. The three notes of Ma Bell sound before the phone rings twice and a sleepy male voice answers, “Hullo?”

  His voice has gotten deeper.

  “It’s me.”

  “What’s up, Loose? It’s nearly two in the morning.”

  “I just saw a woman commit suicide.”

  “Wait, what? Where are you?”

  Why do I call him? Not because I love him or loved him but because I need a friend. I miss my friend. I tell Percy the whole story, finding it hard to get it out in between gasps for breath. I tell him about Alexis. And Violet. And Shaw. And about Times Square. And loving the red cars. And about my spiral through nostalgia. And about how it was interrupted, or rather, slashed, destroyed, rendered insignificant by the woman who jumped. I tell him about her purple sweater. How it looked like knit angora.

  “Why would a person do that?” I ask him, though that’s not really what I mean. That’s not really the question I want to ask. I think I want to ask him why happiness is so elusive. And whether we’ve underestimated the importance of kindness.

  “Sometimes people just want the world to end. When you die, the world dies with you,” he tells me. His words hardly register. I’m too busy watching a homeless man pushing a D’Agostino’s shopping cart filled with all his worldly possessions across Broadway. I can see his pale skin through his T-shirt, which is ripped and destroyed in several places. As he approaches my side of the avenue, I notice he has a cardboard sign in his cart and it has a whole long story written on it about how he’s living with HIV. The city used to be awash with people like this, sitting on the sidewalk with their depressing-
looking dogs, rattling change in their coffee tins. Attempting to pluck away at whatever human strings we have left in us. So many times we walked by them or stepped over them as if they didn’t exist. As if they weren’t people. And maybe that’s a defense mechanism, because there were so many of them, if we didn’t form some kind of shell, we’d be in a constant state of pain empathy and we’d have no money left. But this man. This man, I want to care about. As he walks by, I dip into my wallet and pull out my only five and give it to him. He thanks me with a nearly toothless smile and puts his hands together in prayer and bows and says, “God bless, God bless” to me. And now that he is close to me, I see the tracks on his forearms. Each one its own event horizon. And I feel all the blood in my body being sucked toward the center of those miniature black holes. I know now his sign is true and his truth is ugly and layered. And the short little story he’s written on a panel of a cardboard box is a paltry, anesthetized retelling of it, for the benefit of other people, most of whom are only looking for half-truths in order to make the world bearable to live in. Still, I can’t help but hope that maybe maybe maybe this little act of kindness might mean something greater than the darkness that surrounds him. That a small gesture might have the restorative power I so desperately want it to.

  “But the world is so beautiful, even when it’s hideous,” I say to Percy as I watch the light of a streetlamp reflect off the man’s back muscles through his torn shirt as he walks away from me, pushing his cart toward Central Park South.

  “C’mon, Lucy, you can’t be that naïve anymore. And anyway, you can’t really consider yourself an existentialist and be upset about a suicide.”

  “What does that have to do with anything right now?”

  “Well, if life has no intrinsic meaning, a singular death doesn’t matter. It’s hardly even a blip on the radar.”

  Silence. “There are more things in heaven and earth,” I mumble into the phone.

  “Finish it. Finish the quote.”

  “There are more things in heaven and earth, Percy, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

  “No, there aren’t. That’s the whole point. This isn’t The Wonder Years—thirty minutes of mild conflict tied off at the end with a sweet lesson. Most people never learn anything. Hamlet was a tragedy. It’s all a tragedy. You know that. You know that.”

  I don’t respond. If I were in the movies, or living in a perfect world—one where I always say what I want to say, damn the consequences—I would tell him to go fuck himself and then slam the receiver down. But that wouldn’t be real, and anyway, not everything in life can be boiled down to three words: I love you. I hate you. You betrayed me. I’m so sorry. I forgive you. I miss you. I trusted you. Go fuck yourself. Good-bye, cruel world. Maybe it can. I don’t know.

  “Thanks for the comfort. Thanks for being a friend,” I say solemnly.

  “Lucy,” he whines, “c’mon. I’m just spitting the facts. You can’t be mad at me for spitting the facts.”

  “Listen, I gotta go. I’m standing here by myself on a pay phone at two in the morning in a prom dress. I gotta go.”

  “Wait, Loose? Wait, you were at prom? Lu—”

  I ignore him and softly cradle the receiver. I imagine the click he hears on the other end of the line and the endless dial tone that follows. It means: The conversation has ended. It means: The connection has been severed. It means: You are now alone.

  I dig into my wallet and check to see if I have an emergency twenty-dollar bill hidden somewhere in a secret compartment, which I try to replace when I remember. But I don’t find so much as a dollar. In the corner, I feel something smooth and circular. I pull it out: Shaw’s marble. He gave it to me for such an occasion as this. I hold it up and look at the warped panorama inside it and then I drop it in the nearest trash can. I have no need to see the world for anything other than what it is.

  I hail a cab, since it seems all of the NYPD and FDNY have descended on the Columbus Circle station and I’m sure there will be no uptown trains for a while. I get into the back seat, which is being held together by loads of duct tape, and I sink into the pleather and tell the driver where I’m headed. Since I have no money, I’ll have to buzz my parents to bring some down while the cab waits, and I try really hard to be independent but I can’t wait until one of them comes down with the cash so I can get a hug.

  The cabbie is listening to “Gin and Juice” on Hot 97, so half the words are scrambled, and I lay my head back against the seat as the lights along Broadway scatter past my window. What was that line from Faulkner? Something about the reductio ad absurdum of all human experience?

  That woman who killed herself—who knew her, really? Will there be someone mourning her? Sure, probably. But life will go on for that person. And then one day, that person will die, and all that will be left of the woman who jumped will be a few uncaptioned photographs in someone’s New York vacation album and a police report sitting in some massive file cabinet collecting dust in some precinct and possibly a headstone with her name on it somewhere in a sprawling cemetery off a highway in New Jersey or Queens. And all that’s well and good. Or at least fine. I don’t need to believe in God or an afterlife or any kind of half-baked idea of an immortal soul, or to feel like life ought to have some kind of larger meaning. I’m perfectly comfortable with the idea that we’re living on a heartless 6.6-sextillion-ton rock and that we were not created on purpose in anyone’s image. That we are a total biological anomaly. A statistical aberration. A blip on the radar. But that’s the exact thing that makes it special. For whatever reason, we exist. It’s the accident part of it—the chance part of it—that’s incredible. That’s the reason we matter.

  Despite all the evidence mounting in favor of the opposition, the axis of my world will always be tilted in the direction of hope. I will always be one of the fools with my ear pressed against the opening of a conch shell, listening to the ocean. I suspect that to be the doom and joy of my time on this rock. And here’s the thing: I wouldn’t change it.

  A fresh rain on pavement smells primordial. The scent burrows into prehistoric neurons in my brain. There’s a connection there to . . . I don’t know. Something before man. I dribble the ball as I trot to the middle court. I pick the only basket that has a semblance of a real net. The rest of the open ones are naked. The net’s crumbling, barely hanging on. The rain has weighed it down, turned it a murky gray color. But I like the way the ball falls through a proper net.

  Beyond the court are trees and a loud rushing—cars doing sixty-five on the West Side Highway, their tires all ka-klunk ka-klunk ka-klunk, hydroplaning every ten feet. Beyond that, the river, and what looks to be a massive barge parked right in the middle. I’ve always wondered what those things carry and where. Maybe some garbage out to Staten Island or some John and Jane Does to Hart Island, the massive cemetery filled with the anonymous graves of New York’s unnamed and unclaimed. I often think about the woman who jumped. Where she ended up. What became of her story. It’s possible it ended on a barge just like this. And it seems to me that all the world is just stories of people you can never know. And that the word “stranger” is an inadequate one. I don’t know you, and therefore you are strange to me. The right word would mean something like “a vessel for an unknowable story.” Something like that.

  The court’s still damp, so tiny little stones stick to the ball every time I dribble it. I’m playing with a real quality indoor leather basketball, which I stole from Pendleton. It’s about the third one I’ve taken from them over the years. You just can’t play with a crappy store-bought rubber basketball after you’ve played with the real deal. And to buy one for myself would mean I’d be out at least a hundred dollars. Which I don’t really have. Especially now. All my babysitting money has to be stashed away for plane trips back home. When you play with a leather basketball on an asphalt court, what happens is that the outer lining of the ball gets all torn up and worn. It makes the basketball’s life a lot shorter, but while it’s al
ive, man, that thing is great. The best grip you can get. It means a lot, those extra feels.

  I put some backspin on the ball and throw it onto the court. It bounces into my hands like a boomerang. I shoot a long-range jumper and it falls right in.

  The season’s been over for a few months, but Alexis and I have been shooting around in the gym after school, playing some intense one-on-ones, so I’m keeping my game up. My body is still calibrated to basketball. Nothing feels off. Plus I haven’t been punishing it during practice or games, so it’s well rested. Fresh.

  I throw up a couple more jumpers before I really get into my routine. I read an article in Sports Illustrated that said that Michael Jordan shoots a hundred baskets a day, every day, without fail. Even game days. So, I’ve been trying to do that, to make sure when I get to school I’m at the optimal level. Berkeley is a decent DI school, so it’s going to be tough to get a starting spot as a frosh. But when we spoke on the phone, their coach said she’s been looking for a solid backup shooting guard with my kind of footwork and ball-handling skills. She told me if I work hard and keep improving, she thinks I’ll log significant minutes as a sixth man by my junior year. I said, “That would be great,” all gracious, but my head was like, I’ll be a starter by then. Watch me.

  I start downing baseline shots, one after the other. Boom. Boom. Boom. Rotating sides as I go. After I’ve hit about ten on each side, I move over a couple feet and start shooting from a bit of a different perspective. Trying to cover every speck of pavement inside the three-point arc so that I have no weaknesses. When something is feeling off, when I hear a clank and I shouldn’t, I stay in the same spot and just hit that basket again. Again. Again. Square my shoulders. Bend my knees, pull my whole body straight to the sky, and release right at the top. Until the ball floats into the center of the hoop. Just net. Then I’ll stay there until I hit five more shots just like it.