by Lee Conell
“Martin,” Neilson said, jostling the plastic bag, “where’s the door?”
“The sewage had backed up and there were at least six inches of wastewater,” Martin said. “The plumbers told me they’d try to fix it but they didn’t show up, so I called the fire department who came by and the fire department said what the hell, that all piss water in there? Said they’d like to pump it out but they weren’t allowed, and eventually the plumbing company sent Fred, the Jamaican guy, and he fixed it.”
When Neilson tried to respond, Martin cleared his throat again and asked, loudly, if Neilson had noticed that big old rusty steel beam near the tank, and before Neilson could reply, Martin said, “That was the framework from the old days when they used coal to heat the building. The coal would get shoved down a chute into the tank room, a lot of ash you’d put on the hoist, and haul up onto the street, and the boiler itself, maybe you noticed this, but the boiler itself is connected to really big steam pipes, the steam pipes have been in the building since 1911 when it was a coal boiler, which builds a fire slow, they have really big pipes, and the pipes are really too big for this oil boiler that the building has now, but the coal boiler pipes are used anyway, and if they were constructing this building today, they’d put in much smaller pipes.”
“Martin—”
“Once a week,” Martin said, “I come in here to clean the oil burner filter, or sometimes more than once a week when the heat is going heavy. We use heavy oil, number four oil, tar, real thick. So thick that in the filter, you get chunks of tar. To scrape the filter clean, I use this chopstick I got ten years ago from China Fun. You remember China Fun? It’s boutique baby clothes now. That’s fine. China Fun’s food wasn’t great, gave me the runs once, bad lo mein. But right, so, oil and wood are interesting. For years I used a China Fun chopstick to scrape out the tar chunks. The chopstick has turned from white cheap wood into this beautiful dark and burnished pretty thing. From years of using it on the oil filter. I think the oil must be good for it, because otherwise you think it’d break. I’d show you the chopstick but it’s in my office. I keep it in a coffee can, with a brass brush and a little thing of WD-40.”
“Martin—”
“The filter itself is smaller than a coffee can. There’s a clamp on the top that you spin and a small round lid you unclamp and you reach in there, right, and there’s a little brass basket with a handle on it, you pull out the basket and let the oil drip back into the container and then you take it to the garbage can and clean it out. It’s pretty, too, the filter is, because brass is pretty. Everything else down there in the oil tank is black and dirty and then you take this filter, it’s all full of junk, but you clean it out and hold it up to the light to make sure the holes are clear, and it’s old, too, the filter, it’s the same one that we’ve always used, for decades, but when you hold it to the light after it’s cleaned, it’s really beautiful.”
“What’s your point, Martin?”
Martin walked Neilson to the back of the boiler, where there were two metal plates, each about two feet by one. “You see those plates?”
Neilson nodded.
“You’d take off the lower plate on the back of the boiler. There are about twenty bolts on it, so you need to remove each of those bolts. Which would take a while. You need tools. That would give you access to the fire chamber and you’d throw your rat in there.”
“Okay,” Neilson said. “I get it. The boiler room isn’t as simple as it seems. I can’t just toss the rat in there.”
“No.”
“Why couldn’t you just say that?”
Why couldn’t he?
Because he wanted his voice to reverberate a little longer in Neilson’s mind. Because the boiler room was not a simple mantra. Because his life, his daily routines, were not as uncomplicated as they seemed to Neilson. Because the boiler room wasn’t a hell, or at least it wasn’t only a hell. There could be beauty in it and stories to tell.
Neilson fidgeted with the plastic bag. Its handles were wrapped around his fingers and the tips had turned white. Suddenly Martin remembered the time he had just returned from Montauk with Debra, their anniversary, and one of his rare trips away from the building, at Debra’s insistence. Ruby had been messing around in the garbage room while he was away, stealing from Rafael’s pile. When he returned and took her to the front of the building where the bottle pickers lined up—a probably overdone effort to show her why messing around in the garbage room wasn’t her place here in the building’s cycle of trash—she’d been carrying a plastic bag, like Neilson, gingerly, nervously, as if she did not want Martin to notice. Which of course made him want to ask what was in the bag. But he didn’t, he had respected her space, just like Debra would have asked him to do, just like a respectful paternal figure should.
But now he wondered if she, too, had asphyxiated a rat that day, and had been ashamed to tell him because she’d realized the suffering she had caused. Oh, Ruby. He was hit by a wave of love for his daughter, who had been mortified, who had carried a bag with a dead rat all the way upstairs and said nothing while her father lectured her. She was, in her humiliated foolishness, behaving not like a child that day (as he’d believed then), but like an adult. Aware of the suffering she caused.
Martin took out his phone. Reception in the boiler room wasn’t great. Still, he got a weak signal, and he texted Ruby. I’m sorry. I was harsh in park. dumb ole dad. come home soon.
After he sent the message he looked at Neilson.
“What?” Neilson said.
“I think we should meditate.”
“Here in the boiler room, Martin?”
“Here in the boiler room, Neilson.” Martin sat down. And to his surprise, Neilson sat down, too, on the floor, which was dirty and hard. Martin was leading their meditation session! “Stay present,” he said, over the sound of the machines. “Stay present.” They closed their eyes. They breathed in and they breathed out. Lily said not a word. Somehow, he’d silenced her.
Ruby had said Caroline wouldn’t tell about the stone, but Martin knew better. Of course Caroline would say something to Kenneth. She wouldn’t be able to help herself. When Caroline’s father called to check in, when she heard the familiar tenor of his general concern, she would feel the need to speak specifically, to share the distress Martin had put her through with the coffee, with the stone, and she would say, “Dad, here’s what happened.” Martin did not blame Caroline for wanting to tell her father about her day.
Soon, he would go back to the basement apartment. He would check the message he’d neglected on his machine. Maybe the message had nothing to do with the stone in the coffee. Or maybe the message was exactly what he feared. It didn’t matter. His action would be the same. He’d press play. He’d let a voice out of the answering machine and into his mind.
He breathed in. He breathed out.
He wondered where Neilson would end up dumping the dead rat and then he wondered where Ruby was. As quietly as he could, he took out his phone again. Neilson did not even open his eyes. His eyelids were veined and paper thin, about as veined and paper thin as Martin’s. Why had Martin convinced himself that Neilson’s eyelids were so much smoother?
He texted Ruby: But really it is getting very late. Where did you go after our dramatic park fight haha. Did you go to the party? Are you ok? did you get food today bc I forgot until very late and got dizzy and almost fell but I am ok.
16 UTOPIA
Ruby sat in Utopia diner near the subway station. It was well after eleven at night and she was eating strawberry pancakes with Andy’s money. No, her money now. Each pancake bite tasted better than the last. Her mouth stung from the syrup’s sweetness. She ate everything in front of her and then she ordered more pancakes, with blueberries and a scoop of ice cream this time, and a coffee refill. There was a man reading a newspaper at the counter, and a middle-aged couple talking in a booth near the back.
“I just didn’t think it’d be that crowded,” the woman said. The sky was dark enough that Ruby’s own face reflected in the window, a pink swatch of forehead mirrored back at her, dimming her view of passersby.
When Lily took Ruby to Utopia as a kid, they played a game where they’d look at the people on the street and give them names. She looks like a Jody, he looks like a Daniel, that kid looks like a Sue. A game of classification, really. When her second round of pancakes arrived, Ruby had the impulse to name all three of the pancakes, too. But instead she looked up at the waiter—an old man with a dark brown spot in the white of his right eye, Angelo she would name him—and asked for extra butter. He put three small packets of butter before her. Then he looked at her harder and put two more packets down. She slathered the butter across the pancakes’ soft warm faces. She watched the butter and the ice cream scoop melt.
Her phone buzzed and buzzed. All of a sudden, like a Greek chorus of concern, the non-Carolines were texting her en masse. There was a party here, a brunch thing tomorrow, a new coffee shop opening up and looking to hire, wasn’t Ruby still searching for a job, didn’t she want to grab a drink soon?
She couldn’t bring herself to respond.
And after pancake number five, she realized why.
Because she was leaving them.
There had been more in Andy’s wallet than she had initially guessed—several hundred dollars—enough cash to get on a bus and go somewhere else. She wasn’t sure where she was going, but what seemed clear was that she needed to get out of the city. She would go somewhere with cheaper rents and work off her debt and she would be okay.
The man at the counter rolled up his newspaper. When he left, Angelo looked at Ruby and said, “We’re closing soon.” He gave her the check.
“I’m almost done.” She pointed to the remaining scraggles of pancake.
“You’re too young and cute to be here alone,” Angelo said. “I mean that not in a creepy way. I mean, are you doing okay?”
“I’m doing great,” Ruby said.
“Me, I’m very old, so it makes sense that I’m still here.” Angelo gestured out the window. “You know that park? By the subway? What would you call that place?”
“Verdi Square,” Ruby said.
“Good for you. So you know its name. But I knew it when it was called Needle Park. Crime, crime, crime. They made a movie about it with Al Pacino! You know him or are you too young? The Panic in Needle Park. Amazing, right? When you look now?”
“Amazing,” said Ruby.
“Amazing! Needle Park! Right there. Then they open this diner and call it Utopia. The only Utopia in all of New York City. That is what I heard. The only Utopia in all of New York City, right next to Needle Park. Now, every other hair salon, it’s called Utopia Hair Salon. Utopias everywhere. But we were the first in this city.”
“Is that really true?” Ruby asked.
“Now there are no needles in Verdi.” The waiter did not seem to hear anything other than his own voice. “Now there are just buttercream cupcakes with one bite taken out of them, yes, no needles, only cupcakes and Utopias all over.” The waiter shook his head slowly back and forth. “Crazy! Well! Are you ready for the check? Because we’re closing. You ready?”
“I’ll be ready in a minute,” Ruby told him.
Ghost stories of gentrification. What people here said to spook each other. You or your favorite bagel place could be next. To spook each other or, sometimes, to connect. She wanted neither to be afraid nor connected right now. She simply wanted to leave.
She would go to Port Authority first thing in the morning and figure it out. Maybe she hadn’t even wanted to work on dioramas. Maybe she hadn’t cared about building or restoring them. This whole time maybe she’d just wanted to live inside them, to make her home in frozen moments. In her tote, still, was the book she’d stolen from Lily. She took it out to see if examining the images might change her mind, cause her to want to stay. But instead of paging through it, she looked out the window again at Verdi Square. When Ruby was a young girl, her mother had instructed her not to make eye contact with strangers passing by. Watching people from the window relieved her of this anxiety—pedestrians usually didn’t stare back through the glass at you. They were entranced by their own momentum.
The neighborhood didn’t look too dirty now, but it also didn’t look too clean. Probably there were still quite a few needles in Verdi Square. Definitely there was still trash. A grocery bag tumbled past. A man hulked next to the M7 bus stop with an expression that suggested he was somewhere else entirely and wouldn’t be getting on any bus anytime soon.
“It’s after midnight,” Angelo said. “Officially. We’re closing.”
The couple in the back got up and left, the man saying to the woman, “What I didn’t understand was the ending.”
“I told you. It was too crowded.”
They left. “Miss,” Angelo said. “Are you listening?”
Her father had texted her a little while back. He forgave her. A little show of benevolence. Now, with Angelo standing over her, she replied to her father’s text with a smiley face. After midnight. She should go pack her things so she could get an early bus out of Port Authority. She paid for her meal and she headed home.
But when she neared her father’s building, she paused, and then, for the second time that day, she veered. Not westward to the river’s stink. She walked uptown instead, watched the numbers of the city streets climb, still dizzy with her theft, with the money in her pocket. The shoes of 2D clacked loudly down the street, rubbed part of her right heel shiny and raw. The pain didn’t feel bad, was just a different kind of heat to warm the bones. Yes, there was a new openness inside—some part of her seemed as if it had been excavated to make room for a different horizon. As if the moment she’d taken Andy’s money, she’d paid for a secret lobotomy and now her brain had a view. She’d given the waiter at Utopia what she thought of as not a big tip, but a handsome tip. Old man, bearer of pancakes, I shall reward ye handsomely. Yes, she was a secret princess, a concealed heroine this whole time.
When she reached the steps of the Museum of Natural History, the cart and the rhino head were nowhere in sight. She had not expected they would still be out here, but it was good to know for sure. She could not return the rhino head to Andy now even if she’d wanted to. Which was fine, because she didn’t want to.
At the top of the museum stairs was a guard, a young woman with short hair, smoking and checking her phone. She would keep out visitors. If Ruby went up to her now, she would say, Come back during the day. We’re closed. A powerful person in her way. She put out her cigarette under her shoe. Ruby stared at the guard, hoping she’d start a chain of looking again, like she had at the pier. But nobody else passing on the street looked at the guard and the guard didn’t even grant a glance to gawking Ruby.
That weight in her bag. The diorama book. Behind the Glass: A Chronicle of Habitat Dioramas. She’d been carrying it all damn day.
She walked a couple of avenues west to the St. Agnes Library branch, and she pitched the book into the gleaming metal return box, where it dropped like, what, a stone? No, like exactly what it was: like an old book. A large stubble-faced man on the street whistled to her. “I’ll stamp your library card tonight,” he said, which didn’t even make any sense, and Ruby said to the man, “That doesn’t even make any sense.” She added, “Fuck off,” and was surprised she had said all the words not under her breath, but loudly, with eye contact. “Cunt,” the man said, in an almost sweet way, like she was a pancake he was naming.
She turned and began to walk south again, and the man didn’t follow. She wanted to be in pajamas, out of this dress and out of these shoes. She wanted a few hours of heavy sleep before she left first thing in the morning.
* * *
—
When she got back to the apartment, her father was standin
g in the middle of the living room. At first she thought he was staring at a small cockroach making its way across the wall. But no, he was staring at the answering machine. It was blinking red.
“Hi, Ruby,” Martin said, not moving.
“Dad. I’m sorry. About everything.”
“It’s okay. It’s fine.” He pointed to the answering machine. “There’s a new message. Well. Not that new. It’s been here for a few hours, I guess.”
“You don’t want to listen to it?”
He shook his head. He said he and Neilson had meditated together for a long while and he was feeling too Zenned out for bad news. Also, the rats were for sure back, infesting the building again, and he’d have to figure that out, he’d definitely have to deal with the situation, but he hated killing rats. “I never told you that before, did I?” her father said. “How much I hated killing rats?” Then he sat down on his meditation bench.
Ruby lifted her hand. “I’m going to play the message. Okay?”
“I already know what it is.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know, I’m in tune with the energy of this place, and I know, and I’m feeling good, like, except for the rat thing I’m grooving. I led the meditation session, Ruby! And I don’t want to ruin how I’m feeling quite yet.”
“You think Caroline said something? I told you she wouldn’t.”
“You did tell me that.” He sighed. “You’re right. The message is probably just about a package.”
“Or it might be the exterminator.”