Bodies Electric

by Colin Harrison

  I didn’t add that it was usually the detail guys like me who took the fall. Morrison was protected. He had an ironclad contract. He could be fired, he could quit, he could rape a ten-year-old boy on national television, and the Corporation still had to pay him two million dollars a year until he was ninety years old. I was just some guy in a business suit.

  “This is wrong,” I said.

  Morrison drew invisible boxes on his desk with the index finger of his good hand. “You know what stockbrokers say when they try to get little old ladies to trade in their safe, little U.S. savings bonds for new stocks?” he asked.

  “Tell me.”

  “No risk is a big risk.”

  I shook my head. “I won’t do it. I’m already fondling the Chairman’s brain for you. You get a look at DiFrancesco? This kid is a kid. He’ll fuck it up somehow—”

  From his desk drawer, Morrison pulled out a small pocketknife with handles of inlaid turquoise and picked at the remaining fingernails on his bad hand with the blade. On the other side of the world lay the scattered bones of Vietcong boys he had killed a quarter century prior. “They tell me he’s the best there is.”

  “I won’t do it.”

  “I want you to. I’ll be very disappointed if you don’t.”

  He pick with the knife quietly, intently, as if I weren’t there. Perhaps he knew things I didn’t. V-S might be screwing with the Corporation’s negotiating team. Perhaps there were other players, the feared Japanese banks, as the Chairman had predicted.

  Now Morrison looked up. “Well?”

  “I predict that this will eventually be understood to be a stupid, costly mistake.”

  His irritation was unmistakable. “Hey, Jack,” he grunted. “Don’t you realize I don’t give a fuck about your predictions?”

  When do we suddenly know we are on a steep and dangerous slope? I found my way to my office and shut the door, wondering what Morrison was doing with me. He was freezing me out, marginalizing me, setting me up. This was just the kind of tension that my internist had told me to avoid. And it didn’t help that a homeless woman and her child were probably now in my house that very moment, doing God knew what. I got out one of my little plastic bags and the can of aerosol air freshener. None of them knew I did this, not even Samantha. I waited, wanting it to happen. Then I felt the burning in my throat, the dragon, and vomited in bitter, methodical silence into the bag. And again. It always hurts; I’ve never gotten used to it. I sprayed the oily bile with the aerosol before tying off the bag and dropping it into the trash. Above me the air-conditioning duct vibrated and droned, resonant of boilers and miles of pipes, as if the Corporation were a fat ocean liner under way, where the party was up on the top deck under the stars and where sooner or later a few of the revelers would be thrown overboard.

  SEVEN

  MAYBE SHE HAD TAKEN MY TWENTY-DOLLAR BELL AND HIT the streets. I rode the subway home that evening and lingered under the leaves of the Japanese maple in front of my house in the last long light of the day, nervously wondering if Dolores and her daughter would be inside, and whether I wanted them to be there or not. Old Mrs. Cronister, now dead, had shown me where she’d kept a spare house key hidden, wedged in a joint between the slabs of brownstone, and I retrieved it and pushed through the front door.

  Dolores and Maria were sitting on the couch in the living room, facing the high windows fronting the street. Their belongings were set next to the stairs. Nothing in the room had been touched or moved or changed, but as soon as I saw them everything was different. They were in my house. I wasn’t sure how to greet them. It seemed stupid to shake hands. Somehow we were already beyond formalities.

  “You made it all right, then?” My words echoed loudly. I wasn’t used to hearing my voice at home.

  “Yes. I locked the door soon as we came in and we just been sitting here. I gave her a little milk from the refrigerator—”

  “That’s fine . . .” Maria wriggled close to her mother and watched me. “ . . . of course.” I pulled off my coat and loosened my tie, stalling for time to think. “So—” The question hung in the space between us. Dolores lifted her dark eyes toward me and they seemed to peer into me and yet beyond; I learned nothing from looking directly in them except that I was experiencing again that same weakness that I’d felt first seeing Dolores on the subway; she was incomprehensibly beautiful. How could she not realize how I felt? And then, seeing that same gruesome bruise next to her brow, now healing, I realized that it was only survival that Dolores cared about at the moment. The falling light from the windows showed the shadows of exhaustion and worry in her face. Her lips were apart, as if she was about to say something. “So,” I began again, “you don’t have any place to stay tonight, I’m assuming.”

  “No, Mr. Whitman.”

  “Jack,” I corrected her.

  “Okay.”

  Our words were bouncing off the high ornate plaster ceilings. “You’re welcome to stay here . . . stay for a couple of days,” I stammered, trying to sound casual, “or whatever . . .”

  She let out a tense little breath of relief. “I really appreciate this . . . I don’t know how everything got so messed up. Me, I can take anything, but she’s just a little girl, you know.”

  I nodded silently. The brass heat register rattled quietly as a train passed beneath. Maria took her mother’s hand and played with several of the fingers, counting them softly to herself, and in the sweetness of this, I saw that no matter what happened next, at least I was that moment providing this child with a place to sleep.

  Dolores looked around the room, her eyes resting on the sliding French doors leading into the dining room. “I never saw a house like this.”

  “Well, they used to make them with all the mahogany woodwork and everything.”

  “I always lived in apartments,” Dolores went on. “I lived in little apartments my whole life.”

  I was looking at her eyes and nose and lips. I didn’t respond.

  “And this furniture?” she asked.

  “My wife bought a lot of it.”

  Maria hopped off her mother’s lap. “I like it!”

  “We kind of peeked into the other rooms, you know, to look,” Dolores admitted, with a hint of a smile. “Just on this floor. It’s so big. You could put three or four apartments in this house, easy.”

  I realized that it was late and they had probably not eaten any dinner. I ordered some Chinese food for the three of us and then led Dolores and Maria down the stairs to the apartment on the garden floor, feeling her eyes on the back of my shirt. The apartment still needed work, but the paint was reasonably fresh, and the bedroom backed onto the small brick patio and flower beds, where the summer jungle of morning glories was getting started. “I used to rent it out,” I told Dolores. “When my last tenant lost his job and left town, I never got around to renting it again. Here, there’s a bed and table and stuff. I don’t actually need the room. It was going to waste, no one was here.”

  Dolores looked at me as if I’d protested too much. The fight had faded from the sky but we went out to the back and stood intimately under the dark maple trees. Maria set about the garden, touching the flowers, luminous in the dusk.

  “I just need to ask you a few questions,” I said to Dolores quietly. “I would have asked this afternoon, but I didn’t have any time. I need to ask about your husband, what the story is with him.”

  She nodded. “Hector is very angry I left him, you know? We were a family but I left him with Maria—things got too crazy.”

  “What happened,” I asked instinctively.

  “Nothing happened,” Dolores responded. “I just—things got too crazy and we kept fighting and everything.” She looked away from me. “We didn’t have any money, things were always hard, you know.”

  “Could he come here, looking for you?”

  “No, because he doesn’t know we’re here,” she said. “He won’t hurt anybody, not really.”

  This about a man who had b
utchered two dogs. I felt a need to know this Hector, know who I might be dealing with. So I pressed the issue. “What does he do for a living?” I asked.

  “How many questions you got?” Dolores said irritably.

  I reminded myself that she was probably exhausted and just as scared as grateful to have a place to sleep.

  “Look, Dolores,” I said gently, “your husband—Hector is his name?—he tore the hell out of my friend Ahmed’s place. He smashed windows and broke a hole in a wall and killed two dogs looking for you. I have a right to know this. Just tell me, I mean, is Hector jealous, or—”

  “He’s not going to hurt anybody.”

  “Just tell me something about the guy, okay? So I know what I’m getting myself into.”

  Dolores watched Maria touch the flowers. “Hector’s always done a lot a different jobs,” she answered dully, as if trying only to convey information, without consciously acknowledging any memories. “You know, anything to make money. He used to clean rich people’s apartments. Vacuum and wax and everything. And he used to have a store that sold linoleum and stuff, maybe like four years ago. Now he installs cable. And he sells cars on the weekends. He works hard.”

  “Installs cable?” I asked.

  “Cable TV. They put in the cable all over Queens and Brooklyn. He brings in the little wire from the trunk cable into the house. They also put the satellite dish on the roof.”

  “So he’s the one who works for Big Apple Cable?” I concluded.

  Dolores nodded. “That was why when you gave me your card, I knew about the company you work at. Remember, in your office? I told you I knew somebody who worked at the cable company and that was Hector.”

  “You said he sells cars too?”

  “On the weekends, there’s a lot down on Fifth Avenue near where we used to live.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Sunset Park.”

  I was vaguely familiar with the area—a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood of apartment buildings and modest row homes many blocks to the south, heavily Hispanic and Chinese, bordered by the sprawling Green-Wood Cemetery to the north, where something like a half a million souls were buried. I’d become lost in Sunset Park once, after getting off the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway at the wrong exit.

  “New cars?”

  “Used,” Dolores said. “They don’t give him much time, only the shifts the regular salesmen don’t want, like Friday night and Sunday morning.”

  “Does he make any money from it?”

  She shrugged, watching Maria. “Maybe once every couple of months he sells a little bit to make a decent commission, you know.”

  “What’s the name of the place?” I asked casually.

  “The name?”

  “Yes—”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. No particular reason.”

  “Waitaminute. I’m done talking about him.”

  “Okay.” It didn’t matter. How many secondhand car places could there be near Sunset Park? Three or four at most. I knew enough to find Dolores’s husband if I ever needed to, without going through the Corporation.

  “Okay, there’s something I need to talk about.” Dolores’s dark eyes watched mine for signs of disapproval. “I hate to ask for more charity, but I don’t have enough money for things like food.”

  “Eat whatever I have,” I told her. “Of course. Anything in the house.”

  “Thank you. Also, I need to get some stuff for Maria, you know, very cheap, like a plastic hairbrush, maybe two dollars—”

  “You can get it for her tomorrow. I’ll make sure you have some money. Whatever she needs. Clothes, whatever.”

  “I guess—I guess I don’t know what our arrangement is,” Dolores said, looking hard at me.

  “Anything reasonable Maria needs I’m happy to pay for,” I explained. “And for you too.”

  “But no one asked you to pay.” Dolores frowned.

  “That’s right.”

  “I mean, this wasn’t exactly what you had in mind when you gave me your card on the train, right?”

  I shrugged. “I never expected this, no. I didn’t expect anything, actually. Did I want this to happen? Probably not. Do I mind? No. Is it weird? Yes.”

  “Is this called moss?” came Maria’s voice. She was stooped down on the bricks.

  Dolores looked over at her daughter. “Yes, mi’ja.” She turned back to me. “I’m not some homeless person, okay? I always lived in an apartment and we had food in the refrigerator and things. We paid our bills, okay? You know what I’m saying? My father worked until the day he died and that’s what kind of background I got. I’m not some kind of some lazy ass—”

  “Dolores, you don’t need to say this—”

  “Yes, I do gotta say it. I want you to know that I’m not somebody just off the street, like. It’s just . . . things got messed up with my husband. And I don’t have any money.”

  “Okay, I understand.” I heard the front doorbell. “That’s our food.”

  “I mean, what am I supposed to do?” Dolores continued as we went inside. “Come on, Maria, we’re going to eat. Just ask for the money? I don’t like doing that.”

  I looked into her anxious, lovely eyes. The small sum that Dolores and Maria might cost was infinitely more meaningful to me than the piles of cash and debt and profit we tossed around at the Corporation. But I could see that Dolores and I needed to begin with some sort of formal understanding. She wanted to know where she stood. She had pride.

  “Basically, Dolores, you and Maria don’t have a place to go, right? Against my better judgment, perhaps, I’ve taken you in. If you want to leave, you’re free to do that at any time.” I walked to the front door under the stoop and paid the delivery man. He’d come on a bicycle. “But while the two of you are here, I’ll take care of you, meaning I’ll pay, within my ability, for food, necessary clothing—whatever is sensible. For how long, I don’t know. A few days, a week, more, whatever. I don’t expect that you’ll stay and I don’t expect that you’ll go. I don’t expect anything. I don’t have a plan. I’m making this up as I go along. I’m doing it because I want to. No expectations. You don’t need to feel—I’m saying you don’t owe me—okay?”

  She just looked at me.

  “If there’s something you want me to buy at the supermarket—”

  “Wait—” Dolores interrupted, shaking her head. “Wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  “I just want to be sure. Just because you don’t have any expectations doesn’t mean I don’t. Now I got to ask a few questions, okay?”

  I nodded.

  She glanced up the stairs. “First off, who else lives in this house?”

  “No one.” I set the steaming cardboard cartons out on the table. There were still a few odd plates and silverware in the apartment’s cupboard and I got those.

  “This whole house?”

  “Just me.”

  “You drink?” she inquired, folding her arms together. “I mean you get drunk?”

  “Rarely. I relax with it, you know.”

  “You got drugs in this house? I won’t have Maria around people who do crack.”

  “I would never use crack, not in a million fucking years, Dolores,” I told her, remembering Roynell Wilkes, who did use it. “I tried drugs years ago but not since then. What about you? You do drugs?”

  “I swear on my father’s grave no.”

  “Good.”

  “You gonna keep your hands off of Maria?”

  I looked at Dolores, stunned that she could even ask that. But some men would touch a child. “I’m not going to do anything—”

  “Because I don’t want to come home someday and find you doing something, okay, you know what I’m talking about, and then hear you say that it was just friendly, you know?”

  “Yes,” I began in irritation. “But—”

  “Because I’ll kill you if you touch her.” Dolores whipped a straight hand through the air. She stared a
t me, her lips set tightly against each other.

  “We’ve got to have respect going both ways here, Dolores.”

  “I don’t like shrimps!” Maria said, pointing at one of the containers of Chinese food. “I want chicken.”

  Dolores spooned some food onto Maria’s plate. “Maria, you eat that, it’s good.” She looked back at me. “She’s all I got left. I figure the deal is like this: You trust me with your house and I trust you with my daughter.”

  “Fine.”

  “Number three,” Dolores said. “I’m not a cleaning woman. I’ll clean up after Maria and myself and everything, but I’m not making your bed or washing out your toilet or any of that.”

  “Of course not,” I told her.

  “I mean, I’m gonna go out and get myself a job soon as I get some rest. Then I’ll be moving out. I’ll be out of here real soon.”

  “There’s no rush so far as—”

  “Now,” Dolores interrupted, appearing to have a complete list in her head, “the last thing. You better not be expecting sex.” She gave a derisive laugh, almost a snort. “Because that’s just not part of the deal. I mean, we kidded around back at the hotel, okay, but that was just kidding around, so I want to get straight on that. You might be thinking that I’m gonna pay up that way, you know? No way.”

  “Look,” I answered, “I’d be lying if I said you weren’t an attractive woman, but just remember, Dolores, I wasn’t planning to invite you to come live with—”

  “Well, I don’t see a new wife or girlfriend here and no sign of one neither, so if you think I’m gonna fuck you for my room and board, then you got another thing coming, you got a lot of things coming and they’re not too nice.”

  “I do understand—”

  “ ’Cause that has only gotten me in trouble.” Dolores gave a dismissive little wave with her slender brown hand. “I’ve had enough of that.”

  We ate the rest of dinner in a difficult silence and afterward I left them to take a walk around the neighborhood to contemplate the new situation. Outside the stoop I looked back through the ground-floor windows and saw that Dolores had already set about straightening up the apartment. She’s scared and tired and strung out, I told myself, but then again, maybe you are a fool and this is an immense mistake. I’d taken them off the street and all I’d received from her was grief. Of course I could simply change my mind and kick the two of them out of the house. But I would never do that, not now. The little girl seemed happy to be here. It might be sort of interesting to have the two of them in the house; I’d never ever truly gone out of my way for my fellow human being. Not in the manner of my father, who had spent many thousands of hours quietly listening to the members of his congregation—deaths and divorce and family ruin. His son was not the type to feed the hungry, clothe the naked. And, of course, I was acting out of self-interest, a desire to fill the house with lives other than my own. Liz and I had envisioned the two unused bedrooms on the top floor as children’s rooms, and now they were empty. The echo and the unfilled shadows of these rooms mocked my old intentions to be a husband and a father. No child-sized bed, no toy box or child’s dresser or dolls or reading books or any of it. We’d been a few days away from buying a crib and a changing table when Liz was killed. And I’m glad we never did buy that stuff, for I would have never been able to get rid of it. As it was, I still had all of Liz’s clothes and books and shoes, her papers and hairbrushes—everything. What should you do with the belongings of the dead? You should examine them, put them in a box, and give them to a church. I knew this but I hadn’t done it.