by Jack Livings
I will pay you! Good money! He is just a boy. You must have some compassion in your hearts? He is only thirteen years old!
But Bonny must have seen that he was pleading with the mewling faces of a nursery, fat cheeks and drooling mouths, black eyes open wide but unseeing. He was at that moment as alone as he’d ever been in his adopted country, an alien among aliens, searingly afraid that his boy, born and raised here, was well on his way to becoming one of these bloated, weak American creatures, which was exactly why he was lost in the snow, having fallen prey to one of the gangs that roamed Riverside Park.
Sal reached for the lights, but Bonny caught his wrist. I beg you.
You’re about to lose that hand, Sal said, trying to wrench his arm free, but Bonny’s unwavering strength suggested a different outcome. You call the police? Sal said.
The police? The police do nothing, Bonny said. Call the police? Am I mad?
Your, ah, what, community, then?
What community? You are my community! Bonny yelled.
Sal was at his wit’s end. You check the hospitals? he said, and, finally released, cut the lights.
Pardon me? Bonny said.
If the hospital’s no good, you check the morgue. If he’s not home and he’s not here and he’s not at the hospital—
Bonny stared through the dark into Sal’s face, unbelieving.
I’ve got paying customers here.
My son!
This is my place of business. This my place of business! My business is to show film, not run search parties.
Twenty dollars a man! Bonny said.
Not for sale! shouted the Marxist in front of John.
Sal put his hands on Bonny’s shoulders and began to turn him toward the stairs.
You know my son. He’s a good boy. A paying customer, Bonny said.
I can’t do anything for you.
John almost offered his help. How different things might have been if only he had. But he reconsidered. As far as he could make out, the boy had seized the opportunity to escape, however briefly, the watchful eye of his loving jailer.
Sal marched him down the mezzanine stairs, across the back of the library, and out through the blackout curtain. Bonny’s voice beseeched the audience from outside, rising over the soundtrack: You have children of your own, do you not? Are you not the fathers of children? And if your children went missing in the night? In a storm like this? Would you not do everything in your power to save them? Would you not?
There was not one man in the audience who had a child. Not one.
John went back to the movie and his pipe, the soundtrack rising and falling. His attention drifted, then snapped back to the whirring spin of professional eavesdropper Hackman rewinding a tape of the fateful conversation, the recording revealing its layers as Hackman carefully adjusted the levels on his machines, drum noise lifting away like balloons, exposing the central line of dialogue, He’d kill us if he got the chance. Right, right. Stupid premise. John’s mind returned to Bonny, and the more he thought about the man’s hysterics, the more he disliked him. Yet as he thought about the exchange and his own reaction, he began to worry that it had not been his reaction at all, but his father’s reaction. It was his father who would hate another man for committing the sin of vulnerability. His father had no use for a person who couldn’t protect his own and looked to other men to solve his problems. These were the men his father had served every day of his professional life. Wealthy, vulnerable men, heads of corporations, unable to fend for themselves when they found themselves caught in the vise of the legal system. He hated them all.
John stayed until the end, and then watched another showing, then another. More after that? He had no idea how many, or what time it was when he decided to leave, only that the desire to stay unraveled within him slowly, after he’d become an inhabitant of the movie, after he’d been shaken loose of his own convictions and feelings and had taken up those of the actors. The only way to mark passage of time at Cinema West was to keep track of how many beginnings you’d watched, and he hadn’t. The man with the lost son was forgotten. Briefly, his own lost son was forgotten. He was fully immersed in the movie now, eager for certain parts to arrive. The sonic baffling of the opening scene, sure, but other parts, too. The woman in the green dress, the bus rides. It’s genius, John thought. The acting is genius. The directing is genius. The editing is genius. It’s nothing less than the human condition in full. The mime, the raincoat, the frosted glass, everything opaque, a haze, everything unspoken, everything misunderstood. Harry Caul, an unborn baby experiencing the world only by pressing his ear to the wall of the womb. Exactly, exactly. Sons of bitches! Those smart-asses! Who the hell do they think they’re tangling with?
* * *
When he left he exited into snow dense as a fog, the wind off the river tearing at his coat and scarf, and he immediately felt whitewashed, cleansed by the astringent precipitation and the wind thumping his back, pushing him toward the city. For a lesser mortal, the stairs might have been a problem, as they’d been completely obliterated by the snow, but he dug in his toes and climbed slowly up to the street. Clear of the rail yard, he turned to look down at the old YMCA but could not see it through the whiteout.
From a deep brownstone porch across the street, well enough protected from the storm and wearing the best snow boots and parka a doting father could buy, Vikram Patel watched John hoist himself up the iron staircase. Vik was out in the storm for no reason other than he was thirteen and subject to the same urges that had driven his father to leave Mahuva in 1961, that same intense curiosity and fearless embrace of solitude. Vik had been back to the office and, finding it empty—Bonny’d had no choice but to set out on his own in search of Vik—assumed his father had left for home. He knew he should do the same, but the empty city beckoned to him. On this night, New York as barren as a desert, he only wanted to survey the storm, snag some samples for himself, examine them under the portable microscope he’d brought with him. He wrote poetry when he was thirteen; maybe he wrote one about that night. I never thought to ask. Sweet boy, my Vik, my vanished husband.
20.
By order of the freshly anointed Mayor Koch, Vik had spent most of the day hanging out with Bonny. New York public schools had closed early, and while his father slept off a long night haggling at the dock warehouses, Vik spent the afternoon in the office double-checking his father’s entries into the cloth-bound rokat khata and jama nakal, zeroing out the previous month’s nutmeg, cinnamon, fennel, cloves, tamarind, turmeric, pepper, and chili sales. December was always good, then January like a cliff, but they’d done okay. Once he’d squared everything, he stamped the checks and nudged his father, snoring on the settee by the heater, into a state of near-consciousness.
Sign, Pita, he said, dangling pen, deposit slip, and checks. Bonny, without sitting up, cracked his lids to allow the barest sliver of light, and scratched the pen across the checks. His eyes closed and he patted his boy on the arm.
Going to the bank, Vik said.
Bonny raised his hand, his gold pinkie ring glinting, and was asleep before it fell back to his belly. Vik zipped everything into the pouch, clicked the little padlock, and slipped it inside his coat. He went down the stairs, past the blackout curtain over the entrance to the library, the piano theme from The Conversation lilting out.
It was nearly dark outside even though it was not yet four o’clock. Feathery snow was dipping around in the air, and the sky was baggy, foil and slate. Even though he knew the banks were probably closed along with the schools and the office buildings and everything else, he had to get outside, out of the pickled air of the office where his father had been asleep all day and where the soundtrack from Sal’s film would soon be drifting through the wall at a volume just loud enough to distract him from his reading. He was a good kid, ever attendant to the letter of the law. He would try to deposit the checks, but he was also a teenage boy with an ulterior motive. In his other pocket was a Hensoldt Wetzlar T
ami pocket edition microscope, a square of black velvet, and a penlight. Extra Rayovacs for the flashlight.
The Chemical branch was on 72nd, five minutes’ walk. A typed notice on letterhead was taped inside the glass:
CLOSED DUE TO STORM
Beneath that, a rectangle of cardboard, dual hole-punched by a pencil, suspended from a length of string, declared in heavy black Sharpie:
CLOSED
So he roamed. He had pocket money. He saw two movies, The Bad News Bears Go to Japan and Coma. He ate dinner at the Cosmic: meat loaf, mashed potatoes, cubed vegetables, a grape Fanta. He stole glances at the bandaged counterman, who had gone back to his post and was doing his woozy best to stay on his feet after his dustup with John a few hours earlier.
Afterward, Vik rambled some more, down to Columbus Circle, along Central Park South to the Plaza, up Fifth a bit, east on 60th, back down, west on 58th, proscribing a Keanesian pattern of loops and reversals along the southern rim of the park before heading west, for once unconcerned by the vigorous beatings normally awaiting any loner who passed the kids from the Amsterdam Houses and the Lincoln Towers. They were out as usual, but too busy pelting cars with snowballs to bother with him.
By the time he returned to the edge of Penn Yards, his father had already left on his own wild-eyed expedition, the search for Vik that had begun so ignominiously at Cinema West. That father and son didn’t cross paths was just another cruel coincidence on a night full of them. Vik picked a brownstone just east of the yard, one whose windows were dark, climbed the stoop, and tucked himself into the lee side of the porch.
From his pocket he took the Tami, a black and silver cylinder that, collapsed into its protective cup, fit neatly in the palm of a hand and might have been mistaken for a candle snuffer. It was German-manufactured, an artifact from the 1920s that fifty years later remained a coveted item among botanists doing deep fieldwork. Vik was enormously proud of the scope. It had been the first-place award, middle-grade division, 1977 New York State Science Fair, for his experiment tracking Brownian motion in smoke cells.
He cleared a protected corner of the porch of snow, unscrewed the Tami’s hood, and set it down next to the velvet to allow them to equalize to the air temperature.
The blizzard howled off the river, its shoulders down, plowing through the open air above the rail yard. Yet when Vik told me about that night, he never mentioned being cold. He never mentioned the stinging slap of precipitation against his face. When he talked about it, it sounded as if that night he’d gone into a trance, a sort of spiritual snow blindness. I have my suspicions but he insisted he wasn’t stoned. The only thing he mentioned about the weather was that the rail yard was concealed by a variegated wall of snow undulating in the air—his words, not mine. His presence in the blizzard was an act of poetic import, an experience of the same rare clarity I was about to lose, his vision unencumbered by linguistic blinders. The night was transient, not a future page in the brief history of his life. He had no way to record the snowflakes he observed, no camera, no sketchbook. He intended only to catch them on the velvet bed, observe their structure up close, perhaps report back to his science teacher that among the needles and prisms he’d spotted some stellar dendrites, a signal that cloud temperature and humidity were oscillating, a sort of exciting phenomenon to observe from down among the terrans, picking through the diamonds coughed up by the heavenly volcanoes.
And when a figure emerged from the old YMCA, a black blur within the snow globe, and climbed the stairs up to Freedom Place, Vik embraced the poetic visitation he’d been waiting for all along, some untamed, untranslatable figure emerging from the wastes, a welcome mystery. Odd, since he knew the crowd at Sal’s, the cross-eyed weirdos who stashed tacos in their coat pockets and on a good day exuded all the personality of wet plaster, and he must have known that whoever had decided to trek home through the blizzard could only be an exemplar of that homuncular brotherhood, yet he watched the man cross the yard, slowly ascend the iron stairs, and pass directly in front of his bivouac in the shadowed portico of the brownstone.
Before the man turned onto West End he stopped and looked up at the brownstone. He shielded his eyes. Vik raised a hand in greeting, but the man didn’t wave back. He tucked his head and turned north onto West End.
Vik collapsed the Tami and followed him. When the man stopped at 72nd and West End to dig into a snowbank, Vik hung back, a detective shadowing his perp. When the man lifted a table—a full-sized dining table!—onto his back and continued up West End, Vik maintained tail discipline, keeping a block’s distance. His gaspingly lonely adolescent brain was filling out the man’s résumé to fit the form he so desperately sought. A rambler, a stranger in a city of strangers, a quiet outlaw, one whose cutting insights sought a receptive and finely tuned ear, which Vik happened to have two of.
But Vik got too close. John Caldwell was, after all, a New Yorker born and bred, eyes in the back of his head, and he’d already had one run-in that night. It’s not that John feared for his physical well-being. He knew the kid on his six was the missing boy. But he’d already done him one favor by leaving him alone. Now he’d gotten himself into some kind of lost-puppy situation, and John had already made his decision, back there at Cinema West. Around 75th Street, he ditched the table, spun toward Vik, and charged. Not a jog or a slippery trudge through the snow, but a full-tilt attack-speed charge. He was waving his arms and yelling, and Vik fled through the intersection before cutting toward Riverside Park. He didn’t slow down when he hit the waist-deep snow that covered the open field between Riverside and the Hudson. Vik crossed the park, fighting the drifts until he saw nothing but icy river in front him.
He crouched against a tree by the river, roughed up by the wind, bummed out. And it was there that he encountered his second Caldwell of the night, making passage through the blizzard, leaning into the driving wind as he picked his way along the railing that was intended to keep pedestrians from falling into the Hudson.
21.
At grade, the average American walks a mile in about twenty minutes, at a speed just a hair over three miles per hour, and an average American heart prefers to beat about seventy-five times a minute. Between the two exists a proportional, rhythmic relationship. You ask most people in the city and they’ll tell you the average New Yorker covers a block a minute (and then they’ll qualify it with, Not avenue blocks, obviously). But the average New Yorker in truth walks twenty blocks, or one mile, in fifteen minutes, at an average speed of four miles per hour, more like one-point-three blocks a minute. How do we account for that extra point-three? Okay, New Yorkers are on-the-go, unstoppable, undaunted by all manner of street-level effluvia that might cause the heartiest Topekan to retch and reach for the Lysol. However, it’s when we consider the myriad obstacles that confront a pedestrian in this city that the extra point-three gets really mysterious.
Even by a conservative factoring of waiting times at crosswalks, crowd density, sidewalk blockages caused by incidentals like vegetable pallets, stroller phalanxes, the old and infirm, flying wedges of tourists, bike messengers, construction fencing incursions, scaffolding, dumpsters, and the insane who walk in front of you pulling ooda-loop maneuvers on the widest stretches of unpopulated pavement, telepathically predicting your every countermove, the average New York pedestrian burns five to seven minutes over the course of a twenty-block transit jagging, zigging, charting a path that consists more of diversions than adherence to any single bearing, to say nothing of the decelerations required, occasional near-dead stops (though, notably, never actually stopping, always shuffling left, right, jockeying, inching ever farther into the street at a DO NOT WALK signal, timing a gap to shoot). After all that, what could account for the point-three? Is it possible the average unencumbered, obstacle-free New Yorker actually walks an average of six miles an hour, which is in most corners of the world considered a decent pace for a jog? It’s the only possible explanation. New Yorkers, weaned on smog, tilted ever forward into
the oncoming barrage of whatever, living in fear of the faster whoever coming up from behind, have developed bigger hearts than the steadfast Topekan, their sinus rhythm/leg-speed ratios increasing to the point that they’re basically running even though it looks like they’re walking.
When John Caldwell left the Apelles for Roosevelt Hospital, he knew he’d be walking. The MTA had stabled the Broadway local at the Inwood depot, silent and dark. The buses were long gone. Taxis, with the exception of the one that had nearly killed my father, had evaporated. Roosevelt was twenty blocks south, a mile.
My father, compelled by fears about his own elbows-deep relationship with whatever was going on vis-à-vis Albert Caldwell, insisted on going with John, and they agreed—first thing first, according to the law applied to a group of two or more men on an excursion of any effort and distance: establish travel time in as expedient a manner as possible—that they would be at the hospital by 1:00 a.m. Strictly speaking, it didn’t matter what time they got there. It was a hospital, after all, it wasn’t going to close. But as the unacquainted do when forced into close proximity, they had seized on that minor point of procedure with the single-minded focus of a pair of physicists on an equation binge.
Once they’d agreed that they’d be there by 1:00, they settled into silence. My father, not normally given to conversation anyway, but definitely predisposed to worrisome thoughts, was occupied by a real behemoth. He was thinking that he, of all the people in the world, he was the one who could have stopped Albert. To put it another way (the way his ghastly brain did), my father was the one who had facilitated whatever fate had befallen Albert.