A very tragic reaction to tragedy is to think about what a short time it’s been since things were not tragic. How just last week you were eating tangerines on an abandoned church pew parked outside the squat, throwing the peels onto the heap of uncollected garbage that, in the latest strike, had grown taller than you were. How just last month you were pulling your Goodwill suitcase, full of all your T-shirts and bras and dreams, up the stairs of your lover’s apartment, its ridiculous weight less exhausting than exhilarating: a symbol of sharing a life with the man you loved. How just a few months ago you had basked in the neon PEEP-O-RAMAs and LIVE NUDE REVUEs and XXX’s of Times Square as if they were Idaho moonlight, walked through the maze of rooms and hallways of TIMES SQUARE: ART OF THE FUTURE on the arm of your painter, an arm that felt as sturdy as the branch of a fir. How just after that you were listening to Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band (They really are magic! your painter had yelled to you), and watching him dance in the way he danced: defying everything that already existed, making something entirely new with his body. Somewhere in his movements: the tango. Somewhere in his movements: the nothing to lose.
How he’d stopped like he stopped, when something caught his attention and he couldn’t not move toward it. It was a man in the corner, his head holding up a nest of dreadlocks, his face boyish and his grin beautiful. Your painter had pulled a permanent pen from the pocket of his dirty jeans. The dreadlocked man had taken the pen, pushed up your painter’s sleeve, and written on his arm. SAMO says: Never quit, he had written. Then he drew a cigarette after the words, with the smoke reaching down onto your painter’s right hand. That’s Jean-Michel, your painter had purred afterward, the foreign name sparkling in his mouth. A charge, almost electric, had radiated off the arm afterward, a magic.
That moment had been as heavy as a fruit. It was a moment that meant something, you could tell, the kind of moment people would talk about later, when the moment itself was long since gone.
But the moment had passed, and no one was talking about it. The new moment was a severed arm, a hospital room, turquoise curtains, memories of sweet times that now felt sour. Lucy moved around to the side of the bed and crouched in front of Arlene.
“What happened?” she asked Arlene in a little whisper, though she didn’t know if she wanted to know, or if she wanted Arlene to speak.
“A tragedy,” Arlene said dryly. “A fucking tragedy is what happened.”
Lucy gulped; she wished desperately that Arlene wasn’t there. She wanted to be alone with Engales when he woke up, for him to see her face and find solace in it; she wanted to kiss the pain out of him. She reached up to touch the arm, which was moist and hot, like it got when he danced for too long and too hard, or when they kissed for too long and too hard. . . .
Arlene stood up from her chair. “I have to go home now,” she stated, more to the room than to Lucy. “Or else I’ll drive myself mad.”
But then she surprised Lucy: she clasped her thin arms around her, nuzzled her musky red hair into her neck. She squeezed, and Lucy felt the calming sensation of being held still by another person’s tight grasp.
“Honest to fucking god,” Arlene whispered into Lucy’s neck. “Honest to fucking god I’ll drive myself mad.”
Engales slept for hours, or what felt like hours. Lucy took over Arlene’s post in the plastic-covered chair next to the bed, which squeaked like a dying animal when she moved at all. The hospital room shifted and spun. Nurses hovered, moth-like, but when Lucy asked them questions—When will he wake up? Can it be fixed? What’s the next step?—they flew away. Time was passing—it should have been very late by now—but it all felt like one suspended second, the time before a clock’s hand gathers enough momentum to tick forward. Lucy stood up, sat down, stood up, sat down again. Kissed her lover’s forehead, which was as sticky and warm as an overripe fruit. As hours passed, a singular worry solidified and grew heavy: What would he be like when he woke up? She suddenly longed for Arlene to come back, if only to be a buffer if he were terribly angry.
Lucy had seen Engales angry once since she’d known him, and she never wanted to see it again. It had been an especially wild night at the squat, and they had stayed late, as they often did; they knew that the after-hours were the best hours, when everyone who didn’t matter left, when Chinese food was ordered from Kim’s Lucky Good Food on First Avenue, when a joint materialized from someone’s breast pocket and was lit, when the Dobro guitar with the Hawaiian scene painted on it was picked up and played, when the conversations took on a wavy, fluid, often existential quality. That night, Toby had gotten onto one of his favorite subjects of late, the commercialization of art, or, as he liked to call it, the butt-raping of the creative class. He had stated alternately (and quite drunkenly) that said butt-raping was the artist’s fault—they should not give it up so easily by selling to those rich-prick galleries at the drop of a hat—and that it was said rich pricks’ fault—their own lack of taste meant that they needed to preen the artists for theirs.
“They’ll stick their dick somewhere interesting for once,” he’d ranted. “Just to see what it feels like. And when it feels good, better than anything they’ve ever felt because their lives are boring as hell, they’ll buy it, because they can.”
Lucy had known that this would be a sensitive topic for Engales; he had just signed on with Winona, and had been defending the decision, which he knew would be considered selling out to the artists at the squat, to her and to himself, though no one had voiced any judgment. Until right then, when Toby said: “Well, why don’t we just ask Mr. Golden Boy over here? What does it feel like, Mr. Golden Boy, to have sold your artistic integrity to a woman with a poodle for hair?”
Engales had started off calmly. “In what world”—he had countered, smoke rising from his cigarette like a scarf being tugged out of a magician’s sleeve—“should someone be blamed for taking money for something they make? And likewise, why should someone be blamed for wanting to spend their money on something that someone else made? This is our work, Toby. This is the thing we do instead of sitting in a desk chair. Shouldn’t it allow us to survive?”
“We are surviving,” Toby said. “And on our own terms!”
“Are we, though? You live in an empty factory where you freeze your ass off every night and that you could get kicked out of at any moment. I haven’t eaten anything but beef jerky sticks today. Personally I want to sell the shit out of my paintings. I want a fucking steak and a side salad. With that kind of fancy lettuce that tastes like air.”
“Oh come on,” Toby had said flamboyantly. “That Winona woman’s got your dick on a string! But what she’s telling you? That you’re going to be some star now? It’s all a load of crap. Nobody’s going to remember you, just like they won’t remember the next Joe Schmo who sells a million-dollar painting to a rich dude. They’ll remember us for the way we live, for how we stayed true to ourselves. That’s what they’ll remember. Not how we sold out to make a buck.”
Engales had gotten the coldest look in his eyes then, one that Lucy had never seen. “The reason people come to America is to sell out, you privileged piece of shit. That’s what America is for.”
“Well America can suck my cock,” Toby said as he got up to fetch one of his art projects (a rug he had woven out of parking tickets he’d gotten on his VW van) and held a lighter to its corner. It ignited instantly, creating a glow that made his face look like a cartoon devil. Then the Swedes joined in—when there was fire involved, they couldn’t not—committing a series of pyrotechnic crimes that included burning one of Selma’s booby sculptures (“Not one of my busts!” Selma cried, but with a laugh). When Toby took the match to one of Engales’s drawings, which he had made that summer with Lucy watching on, Engales threw himself on top of him, pinning his shoulders to the cement floor.
“That’s not yours,” he said in a voice that Lucy had not heard before, and that terrified her. The terror was not so much because she thought Engales would hurt her,
or hurt anyone, but because she couldn’t see him. Right then she had had the distinct feeling that she didn’t know the man she loved at all. And even after Engales had gotten off Toby, and calmed down fairly quickly by way of a Budweiser and half of the communal joint, remnants of the feeling remained; Raul Engales had an unknowable shadow inside of him.
She felt the same way now, as she waited for Engales’s eyes to open; she couldn’t see him, and she didn’t know what he’d do when he woke up. If he had been so angry when one of his drawings was destroyed, how would he feel when his whole practice, the whole thing of making art was taken from him? She simultaneously wanted to be close to him when he woke and to be far away: Idaho far, in her mother’s arms. Searching for anything familiar, she grabbed for his plaid shirt on the back of the chair, brought it to her face to smell it, at which point she realized it was covered in the stiff crust of brown blood. As she threw it down she noticed a piece of paper in its pocket, pulled it out. But just as she was about to open it, she felt his eyes on her.
His eyes on her in the back of a cab as they flew through the city at 5:00 A.M.: filled with adoration. His eyes on her as they danced at Eileen’s Reno Bar: filled with lust. His eyes on her as he painted her: filled with curiosity. His eyes on her now: filled with hate.
Pure, unfettered hate, coming from the eyes of the man in whose apartment her suitcase lived now, in whose bed she slept now, in whose life she lived now.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” he said, his voice made of gravel, those eyes—shining metallic with morphine—slicing into her. “Where’s Arlene?”
Lucy’s heart clenched like a fist; he wanted Arlene, not her.
“Arlene called me,” she said, but everything was a dream again, and in a dream one’s own voice did not matter, and she choked on the words.
“I want you to leave,” he said, suddenly turning his head to face the dirty hospital wall. “And I don’t want you to come back. I don’t want to see you again.”
Just last week he’d said: My favorite thing about you is when you look at yourself in the mirror like a teenager. She’d said: My favorite thing about you is your hands.
Just last month: holding each other’s shoulders, jumping around in a circle, like crazy monkeys, around the apartment. His very own show! His very own show!
Now: I don’t want to see you again.
In dreams people repeat the worst things over and over, as if on a loop. I don’t want to see you again. Again again again. Never again. In a dream you can cry endlessly and not even know you’re crying. You can cry so loudly and not even know you’re crying. You can shake your hands like insane fans and a dreamy, mothy nurse will escort you into a hallway. She will hold down your arms and hug you so tightly that you will be forced to stop shaking, like Arlene had. Perhaps this is the only possible thing that could comfort you: being forced to be still. Eventually, after she has held you long enough, she will guide you down the dream hallway, deposit you out onto the street.
There will be no giant parking lot with a car for you to get into, no green hedges or row of pine trees, no mother. Nothing physical to separate the sick from the city, the end of the world from the rest of it. This is trauma in a city: a layering of one tragic space onto another, one surreal picture jutting right up into the next. It has been only however long it had been, and yet you can already tell, as you step out into the night, that everything in the city has completely changed.
It was late. Lucy didn’t know how late, but she knew that it was late. She had learned to read the telltale signs of lateness from her almost-morning walks home from the Eagle: shut grates and alley cats; circles of glowing eyes in the parks, the eyes of people who had spent all day sleeping and would spend all night getting high. Garbage trucks—those nocturnal, mechanical armadillos—roamed, creaked, and banged. Homeless men lurched from their concrete beds. Sirens flew down the streets and then up into the colander of the sky, through the holes of the stars. The moon was somewhere, but she wasn’t sure where.
You were supposed to be scared in these streets, at this hour, but Lucy never had been. The things that scared her—oblivion, wildfires, aloneness—were not hazards here like they were out in the woods, and she had the general feeling that if anything bad happened to her, someone would save her from it. The city, with its million arms and million lights, would scoop her up, absorb her, rock her to sleep in its madness. But now she felt scared for a new reason: the world of the night did not have Raul Engales in it.
How could it be late if he was not here with her? He was lateness; everything late belonged to him. The doorway on Bleecker he’d shoved her into for a kiss, only to hear a homeless man growl underneath them. The vending machine he had kicked because he felt like it, only to have a Coke fall out: another of the universe’s many gifts, meant just for him. Midnight Coca-Cola! he had yelled. Coca-Cola Midnight! The drawing of a chicken with a human’s head he had done with his fat permanent marker on the wooden barricade on Prince Street: still there now. R & K Bakery, where they found each other on that July evening, when someone had been murdered on the roof of the Met, where they had hugged, pressed their bodies together, then fed each other cinnamon rolls until morning, when they emerged into the sticky city with sticky fingers.
As she moved through the lateness, bleary-eyed and rejected and hopeless, she noticed something strange. Cones of white light, shifting in half-moons over the ground and around the corners of buildings. She saw when she got closer that the lights were emerging from hunched, phantasmal forms that scooted and floated through the dark streets. They were sparse at first, and then as she turned onto Prince, they were many.
When she was close enough for the lights to illuminate their faces, she realized that the zombie-like forms were women, in loose-fitting pants or housedresses, their hair in knots on top of their heads, or down and long, thinning at the ends. When she had studied enough of them, she saw that their eyes were like her own mother’s eyes: deep with knowing, maternally frantic, heavy, and alert. They were calling a name.
Jacob! They yelled in husky night-mother voices. Jacob! Jacob! Jacob!
The name rang through the dream of the night as if the dream were a valley, ricocheting off its sky-scraping mountains.
On the corner of Prince and Broadway, one of the women came toward her. Lucy tried to avoid her eyes but then found herself caught in their motherly net. The woman, wearing an outfit made entirely of peach linen, dug a flashlight out of a huge straw bag, handed it gently to Lucy.
“Someone’s lost,” she said, with more than a little desperation. “We thank you for your help.”
She handed Lucy a stack of white fliers and a plastic box of pushpins. When she disappeared down Broome, Lucy wanted desperately to call her back. Those lines forking from her eyes. Those linen clothes; that good face. She needed her. She needed a mother, any mother, more than anything else in the world.
She thought of her own mother on the edge of the bed, reading to her from a chapter book. Her mother who always stopped reading the story at the best part, telling her it was time for bed. She would scream and kick. She wanted to see how it would end! She wanted to know the fate of the main character, who was a girl, just like her. She couldn’t wait, and yet she had to. In vain, she’d stay up all night, trying to teach herself to read the big words on the page. But she was too small. And the world of the book was too big.
MISSING CHILD, the flier read, in large block letters. JACOB REY. Last seen at Broadway and Lafayette at 8:00 A.M. Male. Hispanic. Six years old. 40 inches. Dark hair, brown eyes. Wearing a red shirt and his pilot’s cap, blue sneakers with fluorescent stripes, carrying a blue cloth backpack with dinosaurs imprinted. Persons having any information, please call 212-555-4545. $10,000 Reward.
The picture above the text was of a small dark boy with wobbly eyes and a tentative half smile. A bowl of messy hair and a softly rounded nose: both handsome and silly-looking at the same time, like someone who had never given a t
hought to danger.
She imagined the young boy, unable to defend himself against the huge world, wandering the streets that could seem so cruel if you did not know your place in them. She thought of Engales’s mean eyes. Of his rocky voice, telling her never to come back. She thought of the bloody bandage of his arm and his bloody shirt. Then she remembered the folded paper she had taken from that shirt, stuffed in her own pocket. She pulled it from her pocket now, opened it.
It was him. It was Jacob Rey. Raul had been carrying around a picture of this very same lost boy.
Lucy felt her heart roar in the way it only could in dreams. Fate was at work here, she could feel it. The loss of the boy and the loss of the hand would now be sewn up together into the same chunk of her mind and her heart, linked by the fact of their tragedies and by the dream that encompassed them. Linked by a shirt pocket and a Tuesday in September: the fates of the boy and the man, her own fate right in between, colored by the moon’s scary glare.
She began to sense that the air had changed. It held the manic buzz of tragedy, as if its particles were being rung like alarms. It was the same buzz from the night of the Met murder. The same buzz she had felt through the screen of her parents’ TV when she had watched the footage from the ’77 blackout. It was both eerie and exciting, frenzied and more alive than ever. It was during a tragedy, Lucy thought right then, that a woman who hated you hugged you around the neck. That a group of people who didn’t know one another searched together all through the night. That mothers roamed the streets in packs, swooshing their warm lights. It was during a tragedy, she tried to tell herself, that fate would intervene in the form of love. Something would save her. And she would save something.
Impulsively she flicked on the flashlight. She yelled Jacob’s name into the night. She had no way of knowing then what she’d do if she actually found a lost boy, how her heart would pound, if her blood would go cold, if she could save him or help him at all. She’d have to wait a few weeks for that, until one showed up at her door.
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