The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

Janos set a small pile of bills on the check, weighted them down with a little glass pitcher of soy sauce. He boxed up the remainder of the glorious cake. He rolled up the canvas with the exquisite woodcarving knives tucked inside. He gathered the watch parts and foreign coins from the pink tablecloth and put them into the soapstone box. He stacked it all in front of himself like a man waiting with his suitcases for a train, but he didn’t move to go. He checked his BlackBerry again, glanced at me, glanced away.

  I was embarrassed, of course. But something was tearing inside me, as if my ribs were pulling away from my lungs, as if my shoulder blades were broadening, stretching, cracking. I didn’t feel right. I couldn’t explain what was happening to me. I didn’t know why I hadn’t told Sarah about the house: my first big secret from her. This Peter was her first big secret from me, apparently. Unless there were others. I felt slightly queasy, and stupid, and stubborn, and obscurely wronged, though I was, by any measure, the asshole at the table.

  Janos said, “When I was your age, I had already been poor and rich and poor again and I was scratching my way back up. I wonder sometimes if this is an American thing, this drift. This attachment to drifting. I don’t understand it.”

  “I’m not drifting.” I wondered if I was going to throw up. My breath shortened, strained. My teeth hurt. “I have a plan.”

  “Gabriel.” In profile, Janos’s craggy face was leonine. His cufflinks were thick, plain gold bars. “Gabriel, my dear. Buying a house you can’t afford is not a plan.”

  “I think something’s wrong with me,” I said. How much cake had I eaten?

  “No,” said Janos. “It’s just life. It pulls quite hard.”

  But he was wrong. It wasn’t life, or not usual life, anyway. It was the change. It was on its way, moving toward me, already lifting me. I thought it was the glowing windows of the house pulling me toward them across the river, and I rowed as hard as I could toward that light.

  On a gray, freezing Thursday during which nothing was happening at The Hudson Times and my section was tidy as a freshly mowed lawn, the dead docile in their boxes of type, I got a tense call from Sarah. Could I come right now. Please.

  I arrived at the crooked house behind the house to find Sarah sitting in her living room on her makeshift sofa. The fur had slipped down to reveal the black cotton futon beneath it. Sarah was biting a nail, looking as beautiful and undecided as I had ever seen her. There was a smudge over her right eyebrow. The floor was covered in boxes, some closed, taped, and labeled, others with clothes or shoes or pans sticking out of the tops. The curtains had been taken down and were lying in a crimson heap on the floor. The unfiltered light was brighter than usual. There was a pronounced draft. The room felt shaken molecularly, as if a rhino or a hippopotamus had just galloped through it and away, out the back door. Sarah wore a gold band on her left ring finger. Her brown eyes were wide. She was wearing jeans and a plain blue thermal shirt and a long indigo scarf around her hair, as if she was an ordinary woman in an ordinary old house with water-stained walls where the air was already going flat.

  I sat down next to her and she nestled against me. Her familiar scent. “Where are you going, honey?” I said. I thought she must have found another, cheaper apartment. Or, I tried to think that I thought that.

  “Vermont. I married the puppetmaker.”

  I nodded slowly. “Okay.”

  “The moving van’s coming soon.” She put her head on my shoulder.

  “You should finish packing.”

  “Yeah.”

  The makeshift sofa was soft. The heat banged in the pipes against the cold. For an instant, I thought that maybe if I fucked her, I could get her to stay. But no part of the rest of me was interested in that. I was her brother, at best, chaste and melancholy, with pale, midwinter hands. I pulled her against me and I could feel her, her quivering. I didn’t forgive her. I went upstairs to pee. The windowsills in the bathroom were empty, with grimy patches. The tub was scrubbed clean and white.

  Then we sat side by side on the sofa. I tapped her new, hard gold ring with my finger. It was the plainest of bands, blank and simple against my fingertip. “Wow. Very real.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You’ll like him. He’s just a person. He has a beard, sort of.”

  “I didn’t get into the show,” I said.

  “Me neither.” Sarah rubbed her eyes. Then she got up as close as she could to my ear and whispered, “Gabe. I’m sorry we had a fight. I love our story, but it’s time.” I wondered grumpily which kind of time she meant—mythic or historical. Though I knew, of course, she was right. And women, poor things, had that ticking clock, cruel taskmaster, inside them. “And Gabe,” she said, “if you get in trouble, ask Saint Margaret. You know where she is.”

  “Saint Margaret,” I said. “God, we haven’t been there in a while.”

  Sarah shrugged. “I’m just saying. She helped me.” She turned the wedding ring around on her finger. It was slightly too big.

  The van came, but she left most of her stuff behind. She left the makeshift fake fur sofa and the dusty pink dress with the torn lace on the living room wall. She left a coffee-stained cup on the kitchen table. She left one emerald-green high-heeled shoe. She left a half-empty box of sugar cubes in the refrigerator. She didn’t, however, leave a thick, Sarah-sized, epic, devastating letter anywhere, addressed to me or anyone else. When she got into the van, next to the man who would drive her to Vermont to begin her life as Mrs. Priest, the puppet-maker’s wife, she first set the accordion, wrapped in three blankets and tied with lots of twine, up front on the floor on her side. Maybe, I thought sourly, she’d play “Goodnight, Irene” for her children. Maybe they’d dance around the living room, build a castle out of sugar cubes in the dining room, pour food coloring over ice in the kitchen sink. Send me Christmas cards they’d made themselves, gluing eggshell Santas with cotton-ball beards to colored construction paper. I’d send something clever and tasteful, and too expensive, in return. I knew my part. She clambered in around the accordion and closed the door. She waved a little wave through the window.

  After the van pulled away, I went back into her tilted house, walked through the echoing, water-stained rooms one last time. I put the emerald-green high-heeled shoe on the top front step, arranging it carefully, jauntily, as if any minute she’d come running back, laughing, to slip the missing shoe on her bare foot. But the emerald-green shoe just sat there empty. I felt like the Prince with a runaway Cinderella. I closed Mrs. Wieznowski’s rusty gate behind me. In my pocket I had a long piece of torn pink lace. I took it out and wound it around my fingers as I rode the subway back to Manhattan.

  I looked at the faces of the people sitting opposite me. They seemed tired, worried. That Pound poem was on a placard above their heads, but the subway car didn’t seem anything like a wet, black bough. It just seemed like a subway car. It rattled the way it always did. On the subway floor, something had spilled, turned grayish black, and gotten a newspaper page stuck to it. The half-page sports section of The Hudson Times. When I got home, I sat down in a kitchen chair. I still had my coat on. I pulled the length of dusty-rose lace across my palm, straightening its thready rows of tiny flowers.

  I put the length of lace down on the kitchen table and went to Janos’s. I waited in the downstairs living room until he came home from work. The fireplace was cold. The coffee table was swept clean. On it was a note from the maid: Need more Bon Ami please and soft sponges thank you mr janos. Feeling strange and hollow, I took Janos’s enormous, regal fur hat, his ally against the impending winter, from its wrought-iron hook in the entryway and put it on. It clasped my head in its heavy embrace, still so warm it might have been breathing. The rich black fur tickled my ears and neck. Janos’s head was bigger than mine, so the hat tilted, unable to get a solid footing. In the mirror, I was a surprisingly attenuated, pale figure, with sharp cheekbones, large eyes, my penumbral hair like a prisoner’s, and the majestic black fur hat tumbling into my eyes. Gabriel, at Janos
’s, on Sarah’s wedding day. Something bothered me. Something seemed to be missing. I moved closer to the mirror to try to see what it was, or where the missing thing should have been, but I couldn’t make it out. Just my own blurry face. The big, ungainly hat tilting, uneasy as an ill-fitting crown, above it. Poor hat, I thought.

  The front door opened. Janos came in. “Gabe,” he said. “What are you doing?”

  The hat slipped over my eye. “It’s Sarah,” I said. My voice cracked.

  “Is she all right?”

  “She got married. She’s gone.” I stood there awkwardly. “Neither of us got into the show, either.”

  Janos gently took the hat off my head. “Ah,” he said. “It will be all right, you know? You will visit. There will be another show. Next time, you will win.”

  But I knew that none of that would happen. I just knew. The blue figurine was not a kind spirit, as it turned out, but a vengeful one. A dark knowledge, like an anchor, dropped from my center straight down into the earth. I rested my forehead against Janos’s and felt his force, his warmth, the lines in his forehead. I kissed him, both because I wanted to and because I didn’t know how to explain that I was panicking. I didn’t know how to say I think I’m losing. I think maybe I’ve already lost, so I kissed him again, more forcefully this time, and I tasted the espresso in his mouth and pushed his coat off and unbuttoned his shirt and moved my hand inside it. His chest was warm. He pulled me against him with the lonely, hungry sigh that never seemed to get less lonely or hungry no matter how long we were together, and that always made me think of those rows of Hungarian boys in their beds in that tattered Catholic boarding school, Janos staring, awake in the dark, his thin scabby legs.

  We went upstairs and moved together. My belt, his belt, clattering to the floor. The flesh of his belly was undergirded by muscles that even now seemed strong as drawbridges, thick bands that could move whatever needed to be moved. I tasted the crepey skin of his balls, the smooth hardness of his dick. He lay back on the bed with his hands behind his head and his brow furrowed. I wanted him to stay hard forever, and I also wanted him to come forever, until my jaw ached and the streets turned from glass to rushing water. They almost did. Then I lay in his arms and curled around him, my ear to his heart. It beat, and beat, and beat, quickly, and then more slowly, just like hearts do.

  “So are you ready to come home to me, my love?” he said into the dark. I pretended I was already asleep, my knee on his thigh. I didn’t answer. In the morning, I thought, I’ll ask him again about the bid. I was so close.

  But in the morning a feather brushed my cheek.

  I was drinking the coffee Janos had made me. When he made coffee it always tasted as if it had been made half out of rust—that’s the way he liked it, rusty and sweeter than sweet, like the Manhattan Bridge immersed by a tsunami of sugar. He was on the phone: some market was already open, or just closing, somewhere. He was speaking in German, though not necessarily to Germany. I decided to go into the atrium with my coffee and see what the Tweeties were up to. I sat down on the stone bench, sipping the rust and sugar.

  The Tweeties were in one of the thin, three-story trees. I could see the delicate upper branches swaying from their tiny weight. I was running over what I knew about the habits of goats for Anna, who was in hiding in a convent, tending the nuns’ goats. I really wanted to finish Stolen at Twilight and get more money. Maybe Fleur could advance me for Stolen in Flames. Outside the glass, Janos paced back and forth in boxer shorts, scratching his ass and pouring himself more coffee. Inside, the sounds were so subtle you wouldn’t hear them unless you were alone and still: a branch shaking as a Tweetie hopped onto it, the almost subliminal whir of the fan that was hidden somewhere. And another sound—I don’t know if it was sound, technically—of three stories of air distilled in a lush green column.

  You couldn’t eat any of these trees, so Caroline wouldn’t have liked the atrium; she would have thought it was artificial. That’s why she said she left New York, because the city had become too artificial and manicured; it had lost its wild, secluded areas, its productive wreckage. She said Berlin still had great wreckage. Berlin, she said, was New York in the sixties. It had mystery. It was obvious to me that the real reason Berlin was better was that Carsten was there, though Caroline wouldn’t admit it. The only thing better than Berlin, she said, was Cracow. Anyway, I was content in the atrium. I could have lived there, almost. Slept there, definitely. I wondered why I never had.

  The Tweeties, who tended to travel together, glided down to the birch feeder, careless streaks of yellow chattering away, and at first I was thrilled when the wing of one brushed my face, a feather on my cheekbone. But then a voice that I barely recognized as mine was screaming with pain. It was as if that feather had sliced me open to the bone.

  Janos hurled open the glass door, his phone clattering to the floor. When he reached me, I was doubled over, the birds peering down at me from high in their Three-Story Tree, cheeping inquisitively. He couldn’t know that I was on fire, that a feather had incinerated me. I felt his hand on my chin. He peered into my eyes.

  “I—” I said. I was in so much fucking pain. I was in so much fucking pain.

  “Lean on me,” he said. “Come out of here.” Janos was not a large man, but he felt vastly sturdy to me at that moment. My knees were exploding. My skin was salted with lye. My hands were cinders. Yellow birds were trapped in my lungs, piercing them with the scrabble of their sharp, dry feet.

  “Ah,” I said.

  “Shhh,” said Janos, grabbing up the phone. “I’m calling an ambulance.”

  But already, before the ambulance came, a flower of blood was blooming under the skin on my right forearm. I have to say, it was beautiful. It was purplish blue. I thought about how much Sarah would have liked it, how she might have painted it, just before they covered the flower with gauze. We jolted through the city to the hospital, Janos holding my incinerated hand gingerly between his two cool, strong hands and looking questioningly into my eyes. Another flower bloomed on my left arm, near my wrist. One on each side of the gate. Old friend. My head ached dully, then ferociously, then dully again.

  They admitted me for observation and began testing me for everything. I knew it couldn’t be HIV—I’d recently had that test—but it felt bad, and large, and dark, as if a ship had sailed in between my ribs. Janos wangled me a private room. They gave me a pill for the pain, and a dinner that had grainy mashed potatoes with it. A nurse tried to turn on the television set for me, but Janos stopped her, and he was right. The pill had lulled my skin and bones to placid quiescence, but not my ears—they got confused if there was too much noise, like wild animals in traffic. Janos made low-voiced phone calls to other doctors, better doctors, who said they’d be there the next day. In the quiet hospital room, I felt sweetly sad and oddly composed, like a clean, folded white shirt. Outside the windows, the city was dark.

  “Janos,” I said, “will you read to me?”

  He frantically patted his pants pockets, as if a book might be concealed inside, then sprinted down to the gift shop. Laughing, he came back with Fleur’s first book, Stolen. The four girls on the cover, like whorish paper dolls. Eighties hair. “It was this crap, the Bible, or the Enquirer,” he said, waving it, with its garish cover, in the air. “I’m not sure there’s a difference.” He shook his head.

  “It’s okay. That one’s my favorite.” I felt nauseated; my bones felt fragile, as if they ached down to the marrow.

  He turned off the glaring overhead fluorescent light, turned on the bedside lamp, and sat down in the orange naugahyde visitors’ chair. Putting on his glasses, he opened the cheap paperback and pressed the thin pages down. “We were all stolen,” he began in his smoky mongrel accent, “stolen right out of our shoes.” I closed my eyes and turned on my side to listen, though I already knew it by heart.

  When the other, better doctors arrived the next day, they crowded into the room and went over every inch of me with various
instruments. They sent x-rays of me overseas by computer and then huddled around the computer, pointing. They agreed. They disagreed. It took all day.

  “Well,” they said as evening fell. “Well.”

  “Am I?” I said.

  The oldest better doctor, who was technically retired but had flown in from Seattle, stood at the end of my bed with his liver-spotted hands spread on the metal footboard. “Gabriel,” he said, sounding like Walter Cronkite, “we believe that you may have what we call a lazy cancer.” He gestured shyly in the air. “It’s—”

  “Take it out,” I said.

  The other better doctors looked at me sympathetically. The one who wore stylish glasses bit her lip. “We can’t,” said the oldest better doctor. “It’s in your blood.”

  “My blood has cancer?”

  The oldest doctor shook his head. “No. It’s actually somewhere between leukemia and a cancer. It’s very difficult to diagnose—there is a margin of error here. We do feel reasonably confident that we’ve gotten it right. But, Gabriel, the good news is that while it’s not quite curable, it’s only fatal now and then.”

  The doctor with the stylish glasses gazed at the floor, folded her arms. Janos looked relieved. “So, the treatment,” Janos began, but I interrupted him.

  “What does that mean, ‘now and then’?” A ferocious itch, like a little flame, broke out at the base of my spine.

  The oldest better doctor looked me in the eye in a practiced, gentle way. “There can be opportunistic infections. Heart problems. Liver failure. Things can develop, but usually they develop quite slowly, which is why we call it lazy, or indolent.” He nodded confidently in Janos’s direction, including him in the medical team. “We’ll have to keep a close eye on you, and you may find that your pace of life slows down somewhat. You’re going to have to rest, and there may be flare-ups, as with rheumatoid arthritis, that are restricting and even painful. You may have an odd growth or two, perhaps a lipoma. We’ll have to watch that those aren’t too close to a lymph node. Usually this strikes people much later in life—you must be an old soul, Gabriel.”