Nathan stares and stares, feeling his father's own overblown affections collapsed within him. Arbiter of dead souls.
On the TV, a last microphone is thrust in Milton's face. "I understand the body of the young woman found at Coney Island yesterday was your secretary. What about her murderer, Mr. Stein? Would you be able to defend him?"
Milton's pillowy face fills the screen. He stares hard into the camera. Father and son square off, Milton looking out through the window of bright lights and sunny endings. His eyes, pale and blank, moisten, and Nathan, peering in, doesn't fight off the desolation. Nor does he search his way out of the blackness in which he sits. He can see the calculations in his father's eye, which way to play it: straight and cold and lawyerly or let it go and pull out handkerchief and gut-wrench? Because this is now not just about a rape case. This is the human condition writ large, loss and gain and tragedy and deliverance. Ours. And Milton, maybe now by his own design, has cause to represent us all.
Milton Stein offers his reply slowly and quietly, but Nathan has already heard it. And the TV picture, in a crafty bit of programming, cuts away to file footage of the Coney Island beach. Maybe Isabel is even more of a convenience for his father than he thought. And maybe she's no coincidence. Maybe she was his idea from beginning to her end.
Without looking up, Nathan leaves a hundred-dollar bill on the bar and leaves.
He sags with relief, briefly, against a plate-glass window on the safe side of the revolving door at his Broadway office building. Jorge is nowhere in sight. In his place behind the little booth sits a sullen stranger. His suit is too big and he wears jorge's name tag and looks vaguely like the Mexican delivery boy from the dell down the street.
Where's Jorge?"
The imposter shrugs.
Nathan nods at the name tag. "You're a Jorge, too?"
The boy, apparently not hearing, looks up at Nathan with adolescent gloom.
"Where is everyone? Is everyone in the building gone?"
This elicits a second, even less committal, shrug.
"Is this a fire drill? No? Is it the storm? Hello?"
Nathan heads for the elevators. The doors about to close, a pudgy hand wedges them open and Krivit enters. His overcoat is dry.
They watch the floor numbers pass. Krivit's breath whistles through his nose.
The elevator car passes ten. "It feels like everyone's left town," Nathan says.
It's every man for himself."
"Well, I hope you weren't waiting long."
"I heard you got out."
"You had nothing to do with that, of course."
“You worry about you."
Nathan nods. "Words to live by."
"Don't fuck with me," Krivit says sharply. "Not after last night." Out comes his hanky. His forehead has beaded with sweat. "Where is the writ?"
"It's all upstairs," Nathan assures him, listening to himself almost in surprise. As if it really were done and by his own efforts the little Russian weasel, the little Pushkin, will only hours from now be free to roam Brighton Beach, eat a knish then whack the kids who sold him out then fly home and be king.
The elevator car passes twenty.
Nathan says, quietly, as if not to offend, "You know of course what you've done."
Krivit hits the button for twenty-one and the elevator halts, the doors open. Nathan expects something dramatic in the hallway, as in the movies, a crowd, a gun, a clue. But nothing at all is there.
Krivit braces the doors as if shoring up the world, no mere middleman now but something much more dangerous, someone much farther toward one end, someone in general command. Nathan remembers what Santos said yesterday morning, that he didn't trust Krivit. But it's not that simple. Trust, what is that? He knows his father doesn't trust the fat middleman but he sees now that that doesn't much matter. Krivit is a beautiful thing. Nathan hasn't, over the years, given Krivit enough credit. Not enough credit at all.
"You have one hour to get to court," Krivit says. "They've already postponed twice."
Nathan is sweating again. The air breathes hot, as nightmares will. And the buzz in his ears, the roar lingering from the subway, he'd thought, is instead steadily approaching, getting closer. "You know of course they'll want to talk to you about Isabel."
Krivit's upper lip begins to quiver, as a dog's does at the first evidence of something to defend against, or devour.
But Nathan goes on. "I saw you there Saturday night. I saw your car. I haven't told anyone."
The bag man is holding it in, tolerating him as he would a child.
"Just tell me why," Nathan says, "and who? You wouldn't have done it without orders. Or would you?"
"Just get to court," Krivit snaps, and, as if at the climax of a magic trick, abruptly claps his hands and holds up his quilted palms, scrubbed and empty, setting free the birds. "That, my friend, is you."
Nathan looks upward, away; nothing there, tricked. "That's me."
"I've delivered the message. You're on your own now, buddy boy.
Nathan shrugs. "Like you said. Every man for himself."
Krivit steps back and the doors shut and Nathan, alone, proceeds one flight up, where, whistling, he strolls down the empty and half-lit hallway. The writ in his throat like a wedged lozenge. Swallowing, working it down, he can feel it actually drop, in with the other refuse, the false assurances, the vows disregarded as they were made, dissolving in their juices, adding to his blood the nutrients of his efforts: the money, the blow jobs, the occasional hug of deep thanks, once a declaration of love, one with possibilities – from Claire, who only wanted groceries to whip up her modest recipe for happiness: occasional affection, loyalty, new small life fluttering in their hands, the curbing of his unacceptable pleasures. Was it so much to ask?
The office door of Stein & Stein is locked.
"Hello?" he calls to the presswood veneer, but the door doesn't reply. "Anyone here?" he meekly asks the floor. He pokes at the lock one key after another, achieving, he thinks, success, then leans in with his shoulder, once again breaking into a place he knows and to which he presumably belongs.
The lights are off. Except one. His, he believes, down the hall, the empty fluorescent white splashing out of the open doorway across the floor and up the opposite wall. Two o'clock Monday afternoon, the biggest week in the short, happyish life of Stein Stein and the twenty-second-floor office is vacant, abandoned, it seems-as does the entire building-for even higher ground.
Nathan pauses inside his office. Etched into his windows he finds himself, and he is alone, an outline scribbled in with patches of blazer but otherwise blank. Beyond him, despite the hour, hovers inky night. Sheets of rain coat the glass. Three fingers of lightning split the sky into a map of white rivers, and for a long moment the sky and office and he himself vanish in white flame.
Reluctantly, he opens his eyes. At his feet Baron is draped like a sphinx over his $500 portmanteau, icicles of drool melting on the burgundy leather, his long leash wound twice around the desk. A parking stub for the lot around the block is wedged into the collar, along with a note saying only: He has been fed. A message spike blooming like a flower with little pink slips has fallen to the floor. In the air, the rancid odor of fresh piss. Baron's goopy, sad-sack eyes stare back at Nathan, as if to say, What did you expect?
Nathan drops to his knees to praise and pat the dog, who cocks his massive, purebred head in confusion. Nathan slips him some Cheez-lts bought downstairs then turns to his stereo and calmly, as if he has all the time in the world, contemplates his office music collection, his mood inversely proportional to the chaos outside. He has chosen for this moment Monteverdi. Angelic lamentations bridged by long silences. Bending to address his messages, he peels the papers one sheet at a time, peeking at the names. The paper shivers in his grip, which means his hands must be shaking, too. He's now been two days without sleep, or is it three?
There must be thirty messages, dutifully scribed in impeccable, acquiescent penmanship
, obviously by one of Chang's cadre. The usual suspects: Clarido twice, Schreck once, as if he could have forgotten where Nathan was-unless, of course, he knew he'd be back. Amparo called three times; her last message reads: Left me here to rot. Called brother. Look over your shoulder. Look again. Look forever.
Despite himself, Nathan does look, and sees: empty hallway. A spectacular refrain of conflicted violins and cellos reaches his ears.
Another message: Errol Santos. Friend, foe. Curious, Nathan fishes out his beeper: There is Errol Santos, in fact, three more times.
He considers all his messages, voice mail, beeper, answering service: who takes them down? Nathan wonders. Someone on the other end, someone alive. The innocuous, neutral answering service has the power to concoct one's entire life, a life out of reach, telling you who your friends are, who your enemies are. Who called? Who cared? Who didn't? Who won't? It's up to those operators, his message-makers. They are his window out, conspiring with someone or by themselves to paint the view.
He snatches the phone and punches in Serena's number in the Bronx. The phone is picked up instantly. A man barks, "Yeah."
Nathan scrolls through the men in Serena's life, brothers, father-mad, stupid, and dead, he knows them all. Briefly, he attempts to conjure Serena herself but can come up only with general island features, raven-black hair, eyes as black as undreamt night. He seems to recall pink panties. Lately she's been nothing but a miniature readout. Giddily-another joke at his expense – he wonders if this man, this gruff voice, could be Serena, if Serena exists at all.
Nathan hangs up, dials again, this time his 900 number. "This is Nathan Stein and you have fifteen seconds to terminate this call before being charged $99.99." He will pay this bill. He will owe himself. All of him collecting in this one container.
Seated, Nathan dials a new number altogether and hears on the other end a calm, cheerful voice, a man, his proxy: "Nathan Stein's answering service. Message please?"
In the background, the murmur of other operators, keyboards clacking. The world may be falling to pieces, but there will always be messages to leave.
Officiously, Nathan declares, "This is Nathan Stein."
He commiserates with the confusion in the operator's silence. Then he listens for and detects the disapproval. Imagine all that this clerk has heard. All the piss of Nathan's life that has run through the tips of his fingers, collecting as through a catheter in the electronic pouch at Nathan's waist. Despite the doctors and the tests and the retests and the diagnoses and the pills, it is of this that he is dying.
"Message please?" the operator says with tight obedience.
Nathan's eyes widen at the opportunity. His mouth opens. Outside, another round of twitchy lightning. There is a pause in the thunder. Listening for it, he hears instead soft cries and lamentations, wandering, carried by the wind.
"None," Nathan says, and hangs up.
3 P.M.
Hunched low to the ground, the walls patched with corrugated aluminum, the New Life Missionary Baptist Church sits like a converted outlet for discount beverages, a cross fastened like a hood ornament to the front peak over the open door. The inside is a single cavernous room carpeted with mauve industrial wall-to-cinder-block-wall, exploding up front, as if someone has thrown a grenade of violent color: hothouse flowers surround a casket with handles of painted gold. At first Nathan's body will not respond to an order of WALK. The fatigue is one reason. But there is another, and it is naked fear. He has been spotted. Strange eyes aim his way. He does not know their owners, but willing his clay feet to move one then the other he crosses the room smiling soberly and shaking hands, mumbling thank-you's to offers of sympathy and turning from inquiries after his own health. Maria's mother, older sister, and young female cousin have arranged themselves before the open casket, the mother's hand on the shoulder of the one daughter left her. Inspecting him as he comes up the aisle with his hands empty. Nathan's abandoned family.
It is the sister, Carmen, who steps forward slowly, numb with grief, the room hushing in the presence of this gravity, the soulless dance between those with competing claims. The derelict that they had all taken for the son of light himself stands before them chalky pale, withered seduction artist, thief of sweet Maria's soul.
The bloated corpse levitates behind them, the open coffin resting on a platform in a ring of flowers. Why is it open? Maria looks worse. They've greased shut her eyelids and lips; and she looks waxy, like a figurine, as if they've melted and reconstituted her in the black dress he bought for her five years ago on their first spree. Her speckled hands, crossed over her chest, clutch to her heart her thumb-worn Bible. Though after all that they couldn't carve an expression into her: her brow clear, she lies poker-faced before eternity.
Nathan bends to kiss Carmen, but she reaches up to his face as a blind person might and holds him steady, peering into his eyes as if inspecting what-if anything-lives behind them, then quickly snatches away her hands.
"Please go," Carmen whispers.
"Where is the burial?"
"We didn't think you'd be able to come."
Nathan says, half appalled, "I wouldn't have missed it." Then it strikes him that he was let out especially for this purpose. He looks over his shoulder. Two men in cheap suits stand at the doorway like bookends, full of menace rather than comfort, like prison guards, happy to let people in but blocking their escape.
"It's at Evergreens," she says, "in Queens. But you wouldn't come.
"Of course."
She exhales through her teeth a derisive laugh. "Please."
"Where's Benny?"
"No. Say nothing to him."
Nathan spots the boy sitting against the wall in a sharp double-breasted suit, his feet dangling above the floor, staring at his mother's remains. Then, lifting his head as if he's heard a whistle, he quickly bounds over, wrapping his arms around Nathan's leg and burying his face in his crotch. Nathan's hand hovers trembling over the boy's head, repulsed as if by an electric field. He lets it drop, crowning the boy with it, bestowing Benny with – what? – but crowning him nevertheless. He reaches around the boy's head and strokes the soft patch under the cranium, button of innocence, feeling in his fingertips a pulse, sign of beating life.
He is despising this, this little melodrama. Still, his eyes have begun to sting and he wraps his other arm around Benny's shoulders in full embrace, leaning into the boy's hair, sniffing his earthy, vegetable sweetness of sleep.
"Come, Benny."
It is Maria's mother who has taken the boy by the shoulders and for a moment Benny is tugged in both directions, disputed over, actually wanted. Her nostrils flaring wet and red with grief, Carmen protests, not on behalf of one side or the other, just the contest itself. A hand lands softly on Nathan's shoulder and he quickly turns his head and again, as before, finds no one there. Thus warned. He snatches back his hands as from a trap and lets Benny go. Maria's mother steers the boy to safety, handing him off to her daughter.
His face burns. His embarrassment is fierce. The entire room is looking at him. Why is he here? Why did he bother to come at all? Didn't he say his good-byes to Maria this morning with no witnesses but the dead and maybe that priest to clear the way? But here Nathan feels close to the truth, just the simple factual truth. Just as Maria last night watched, spellbound and terrified, her neighbor in her death throes, now Nathan has come to observe Maria, out of the hospital, on her way. His own dress rehearsal. And there lies her outer crust, her pod.
He wipes his hand across his sweaty forehead. "You shouldn't let Benny see his mother like that," he says.
But someone insists, "No, he should see." It is Cleary standing before him, taller somehow than this morning. The priest looks nervous, his face with that blushed, babyish swollenness of someone just woken, or sick with worry.
"Isn't all this a little fast, the funeral, the burial?" Nathan protests. "Don't you have to wait a while or something?"
Cleary's expression darkens. He gl
ances nervously toward the door.
"Who are your friends?" Nathan asks.
"I don't know who they are," Cleary assures him. "I half believed they came with you."
"They may have," Nathan murmurs. Nearby, the heads of those talking quietly wheel around. Nathan looks at his watch. "It's getting late."
Cleary nods. "Yes, it is."
"I'm tired.”
"I understand."
"I don't think you do," Nathan replies, wondering if the pain in his stomach comes from eating nothing but his pills. He looks longingly to the back table where food is piled high.
"This tragedy will unite you and Christ in a sacred way, Cleary says.
His mind shut down behind that delicious hermetic seal, Nathan sidesteps the priest and heads for the back and picks a shortbread cookie of no identifiable shape. He slips it past his teeth. His eyes close. He can taste nothing; there is no feeling on his tongue or the roof of his mouth. The tips of his fingers, for that matter, feel like brass thimbles. It's been climbing him these last two days, this slow paralysis, giving him the strange sensation that he is turning to stone. Bites of cookie thud like pebbles at the bottom of the pail inside. This last pleasure gone.
"Nathan."
Blindly, Nathan extends his hand. But it is Cleary again.
"Do you hear me?" he asks.
"Sure.”
"You should make amends."
"What for?"
"Because a man lives his life and he has to make that important. Whether he's a priest or a lawyer. Or a bum."
"Did Maria?" Nathan demands.
Cleary squints, his expression bitter, as if Nathan has insulted his kid sister. "That woman looked death straight in the eye."
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