The Sky Below

by Stacey D'Erasmo

  I hadn’t taken my coat off. “Let me explain.”

  Who knew the Furies could be so cold when they raged? “No. No. No. I counted. There’s enough here for the transfusion. There’s enough here to move. And I know you. If there’s this much in the freezer, there’s another stash somewhere else, isn’t there? Enough for so many things. While we worry about you, and cry, and talk it over endlessly, and sneak off to do research online and wait, Gabriel, we fucking wait for you, you’re so fragile, we have to be so careful. We choose our battles. We manage. We tiptoe. And what do you do?” She picked up the brick, shook the cold money onto the dirty floor. “You do this. You have got to be kidding me. You are heartless. You haven’t changed at all. You never will.”

  “It was for my house,” I muttered, about to cry. “I was saving.”

  “There is no house, Gabriel,” said Caroline, tapping her ash. “I bet you got up to some shit there, too. But let me explain something to you: there never was a house in the first place. You were trying to steal back what never existed.”

  “Maybe not for you,” I said, and then I found myself flattened against the door from the force of Caroline’s glare.

  “You stupid, stupid little boy. You selfish fuck.” She shook her head. She looked old. She was getting jowls, though her black and gray curls seemed springier than ever, electrified by anger. “I’m a fool. But not anymore.” She lifted her chin. “I’m taking my name off the lease. You’re on your own. Maybe that will pull you back into reality.”

  The back of my neck itched. A feather emerging. Inwardly, I smiled. Outwardly, I returned Caroline’s stare. “Do whatever you feel to be in your best interest, Caroline,” I said. “Just like you always have. And, by the way, when are you leaving? And until then, please stop smoking in here, will you? It’s not good for my health.”

  Caroline dropped her cigarette into the dregs of her coffee. “We leave in two days. We want to get that footage of the eclipse.” She adjusted her glasses. I swept past her into my room. I shut the door and curled up in bed, thinking lightness lightness lightness. I rubbed at the back of my neck where the feathers were thickening. They were thick and reddish now on my balls, too. I had a wank; my come was thready, like egg white. Then I fell into a deep sleep.

  The rocks along the shoreline were mammoth and jagged, and we made our way along them slowly, weighed down by the bundles we each had to carry. I grasped a rough declivity, pulled hard, and slipped, scraping my ankle. The wet burlap sack on my back slid perilously to one side. Sweating, I hit it awkwardly with one arm, batting it back into place. A rusty can of tuna fish fell out, clattered down between the rocks. I ignored it. There wasn’t time: the sun was setting. I was drenched, salty, shivering. Up ahead, I could see that Caroline was tiring, too. Her wet calves trembled as she hauled herself up a rock so tall and steep it must have had a local name of its own. She clung to its side, gripping, making progress an inch at a time. My ankle was bleeding and already starting to swell. There were two in front of me, three behind me. No one spoke. I lowered myself down a rock in preparation for the next climb up. The tide was coming in. My ankle, I knew, was broken. Caroline, wiggling on her stomach, rolled over on top of the huge, steep rock and sat up, breathing hard.

  “Gabe!” she called out from atop the tall rock, the wind tugging her black hair against her mouth. “Gabe! Gabe!”

  I woke up covered in sweat. Switched on the light: 2:30 A.M. I reached for the glass of water, the aspirin. I held my hand up to the light: my hand was pale, my fingers thin. White spots flecked my fingernails. My heart raced. I put my hand on my clammy chest, entreating my heart to be still. I flexed my feet, ankles intact. I pinched my beaky nose. The nodule on my thigh was bigger, harder. I made myself concentrate on what I could see from my bed: the curve of the mirror, clutter of keys and change and the black plastic pill bottle on the dresser, the woodcut print of the city skyline on the wall. In the street, someone shouted a name—Derek or Eric. Then silence. Dead of night.

  Next to the aspirin was the small, dark blue, stoppered bottle of Rose of Acacia. I pulled out the stopper, squeezed up a dropperful, and released the inky drops into the glass of water. I drank it in one swallow. I turned my pillow over to get the cool side, lay down, and switched out the light. I didn’t dream again that night.

  As fate would have it—and who said fate has no sense of humor?—the next morning, Janos took me to my appointment with the most special doctor, the top doctor, who was seeing a very select group of patients at the hospital, in a colleague’s office. A nurse drew blood; we waited. Another nurse drew a bit more blood; they gave me bright orange peanut butter crackers. We waited some more. Janos made calls. I was hungry, even after the crackers. I wondered if that was a good sign or a bad one. Finally, the top doctor, a tall, bony, snow-white man, called us into his office. On the desk was a photo of a black family, smiling next to a pyramid. The family of the doctor whose office it was, obviously.

  The bony white doctor had a few numbers scrawled on a prescription pad. “These numbers,” he said, “are very sobering.” He corrected himself. “Mr. Collins, Mr. Laszlo, these numbers are bad.” He held up the pad, but I couldn’t understand what the numbers meant, and anyway, they didn’t look bad or good—they just looked like numbers. Threes and fours, mostly.

  Janos put his head in his hands. His pant legs rode up, exposing his black silk socks.

  “So, do we need to do the transfusion?” I asked as my glittering pile melted. I surrendered. Mama, put my guns in the ground. I can’t shoot them anymore.

  The light in the room dimmed. I thought it was my eyes, my anxiety, but the bony white doctor looked out the window and said, “You know what that is? That’s the eclipse.” He checked his watch. “It’s a beauty. A big one.” He turned on the desk lamp. “I’m sorry to say that we can’t do the transfusion. We have to go straight to chemo.”

  “What?” said Janos. “Oh, no.”

  The top doctor explained that I should be admitted within twenty-four hours, thirty-six at the most, to begin a rigorous round of inpatient chemotherapy. Of course there must be things I’d want to put on hold, bills to pay, but I needed to come in for a while. He said “come in” as if I was a spy and the hospital was the home country where I could relax, speak my native tongue, not be shot at.

  “I’ve seen this movie,” I said. “You’re always the guy not to trust.”

  The top doctor smiled. “I’m sorry.” He asked me if I’d been taking the hideous yellow pill. Absolutely, I said. Every week. They gave me a calendar. The top doctor shook his head. He repeated how sorry he was. He said they’d be very aggressive with the chemo. I was a young man; that was apparently in my favor. I could handle a bigger dose of drugs, but of course the side effects would be worse. The light in the room brightened and the doctor turned off the lamp. “The next full eclipse is in Peru two years from now. Rare things.”

  Janos was not to be distracted. He set his jaw. “We’re getting another opinion.”

  The top doctor said, “Mr. Laszlo, this isn’t a matter of opinion.”

  Out on the street, the vast blue sky shed its light without distinction on all the passersby. From the street, the hospital looked bland, professional. We went to the corner to hail a taxi, where three newspaper boxes leaned against one another. All these things would be here, I thought, whether I was or not.

  A taxi stopped for us. “Barneys,” said Janos. He called Caroline from the taxi and didn’t try to conceal what he was saying. He used no code words.

  As we neared Central Park, I noticed loose groups of people straggling out of it. A few of them had circles affixed to their foreheads, half white, half black, like yin-yang symbols. A line of schoolchildren, all in luminescent vests with thick goggles dangling around their necks. A man with an intricate design of flames and stars painted on his face and naked chest, wearing a skirt made of camouflage material and carrying a flute. A gaggle of white kids with shells and beads woven into t
heir dreadlocks carrying pots and pans, drums, noisemakers, and cymbals. Something resembling a zither, carried by a fat boy with a limp, an ecstatic expression on his face. A woman in business clothes, her jacket over her arm, talking excitedly to the man in the skirt. A man pushing a cart full of camera equipment. The sky was clear, ordinary, healed, as if nothing had happened. I tasted it: licorice, ice.

  “Wow, look at them,” I said. “I guess it was a big deal, like the doctor said.”

  Janos shrugged, resting his forehead against the window.

  “It will be okay,” I said, though I didn’t really think that.

  The taxi stopped and we got out. Janos could be very indulgent. It was an interesting thing about him and money: he didn’t particularly like to keep it where he could see it, the way I did, stacked up in the freezer. Instead, he liked to watch it move and change. He liked to make it go around, turn it into other things: buildings, factories, thousands of acres of oranges, airports that would be built in 2051. Cashmere slippers, an expensive leather jacket, a jet-black Prada suit. “For the ballet,” he said, adjusting my cuffs. “It fits you perfectly.” In the three angled mirrors, I looked like a tubercular young man on the way to his wedding, or maybe his own funeral. Strange how being unwell made you look both much younger and much older. A changeling. Gabriel, thirty-eight, Barneys dressing room, 3:32 P.M. The jet-black suit fit me perfectly. I looked like a blackbird. Or maybe I was a fractal of a blackbird. Maybe this was just three of the Gabriels; if you cut me open there’d be more and more, receding endlessly. I stood up straight in the jet-black suit, shoulders back, thinking of May the Rockette, of the blue goddess, of Fleur. Which one had done this to me? And for what crime?

  When we left Barneys, I said to Janos, “I’ll meet you at my apartment. I want to walk a minute by myself.” He nodded, taking all the shiny black-and-silver shopping bags.

  I went straight to the Met. Early, raw spring was in the air. I stood before Saint Margaret in my lucky red scarf. Poised halfway outside her dragon, she inclined her head. I closed my eyes, kept them closed. Footsteps echoed around me.

  When I got back to my apartment, Caroline, Carsten, and Janos were sitting in the kitchen, wreathed in cigarette smoke. A bottle of Hungarian wine stood open on the table. They’d taken down my three good wine glasses and used the little chunky cut-glass vase for a fourth. Caroline stood up immediately and took me in her arms. I didn’t resist. I didn’t pretend not to know why. I held her tightly, feeling her elbows, the back of her neck, her sprung curls against my cheek. “I’m so sorry,” she said in my ear. “About everything. We’ll stay. As long as you need us.”

  I shook my head in her embrace. “I want you to go home,” I said. “Please.”

  We clung together. I wasn’t angry anymore, or sad, or hopeful. I wasn’t anything I could name. I was simply with her, my dear sister, until finally I let her go.

  Carsten poured us all glasses of the wine, which was surprisingly good, and Janos took cheese and grapes out of the refrigerator. When the wine was finished, Carsten made a large, dense omelet and a salad. We opened another bottle of wine and ate the food. Caroline and Carsten said they had gotten good footage of the eclipse and the eclipse watchers. “Makes you remember film,” said Carsten mournfully. The black-and-silver bags rested, forgotten, by the door.

  While Janos cleared the dishes, Caroline and Carsten lit their customary after-dinner cigarettes. Caroline patted my knee, then she and Carsten got up from the table and moved my three pieces of living room furniture out of the way, clearing a large square. “We’ll build it here,” she said. “But wait, don’t start yet. I have a plan.”

  I nodded, contemplating the bare, scratched-up portion of floor. While Caroline studied the empty square, I pulled the cardboard tubes out of the rolls of paper towels that I had. I pulled the smaller cardboard tubes out of a four-pack of toilet paper, too, leaving the four squishy white carcasses in the dry tub. I dug up a few shoeboxes, a bunch of fancy shopping bags, two pairs of scissors, half a roll of tape, and, from the front closet, what turned out to be yards and yards of wrapping paper in holiday colors, festive prints, with stripes, with stars, with squiggles. Eleven years’ worth, it seemed. Along with the cardboard and scissors and shopping bags, it was a start, anyway.

  Janos finished the dishes, Carsten opened the third bottle of wine, and we began. Around ten, Caroline murmured, “We need Legos.” She’d gathered her hair in a big knot on top of her head and secured it with a rubber band and was drawing with great concentration on sheets of typing paper.

  Carsten, puffing exuberantly, cross-legged on the floor, was laboring to make an elaborate, shiny, swooping thing—a roof ? a patio?—out of one of the Barneys bags. The roof said eys on an angle. Next to him was a substantial purple lake imprinted with white stars; on the lake sailed the silver and gold swans; in the center of the lake, like a gazebo, sat the imitation Fabergé egg on its ebony stand.

  I was cutting small headstones out of shoebox cardboard, which is harder to do than it sounds when your scissors are dull and one third of a blade is missing. I knew exactly where the graves would go, and had cleverly given each one a tab on the bottom so it would stand up, leaning back a little, the way headstones do. I also had a secret plan for the string of multicolored paper lanterns I’d found under my bed. Everyone would be amazed. “Maybe there’s an all-night toy store somewhere,” I offered.

  Janos stood up from his wind farm, scattering rejected paper-windmill prototypes. “I’ll go,” he said. He put on his shoes and left. The apartment walls rattled as the front door closed.

  Carsten heaved himself up and poked through one of my little nests of special things on top of the refrigerator. He returned to the floor, clinking together an assortment of earrings and special bits of curvy metal in one hand. “No,” he said firmly. “What we need is a good glue. Like a glue that is super.” He set out his sparkly finds on the dusty floor and studied them intently. Then he got up and added the bronze bell and the platinum letter opener to his pile. I didn’t mind. The City was already rising around us. A tubular house with long windows by the radiator. The purple lake filled with stars. A green plastic soldier guarding a silo covered in fluffy, red-cheeked Santas.

  My thumb hurt, but I was very into it, too. “Maybe there should be catacombs,” I said.

  “Mmmm,” grunted Carsten.

  “Under the castle,” said Caroline.

  “What castle?” I asked.

  “Shhh. I’m doing that next. Over there. Fuck.” She grabbed the cigarette from Carsten and took a long drag. “I should really quit smoking.”

  “Where did you get all this crap, luftmensch?” asked Carsten. “Some of it is very nice.”

  “I stole it,” I said, high on City and on how well my cemetery was turning out. I was modeling it on Pàre-Lachaise. “From an old lady I used to work for.”

  “Gabriel should have been a spy,” said Caroline from her corner.

  “Caroline,” I said, “remember the year we made the elevator? With the pulleys?”

  “Dad did that one,” she replied, not looking up. “Dad always did the cool machine stuff.”

  “My lake,” said Carsten with satisfaction, “is exceptionally deep. Dinosaurs swim on the bottom. It is called the Midnight Lake.”

  “Gabe,” said Caroline, “you have to call Mom. Promise me. Before they admit you.”

  I cut a window in the shape of a cross into one of the mausoleum walls, curved the wall, and taped it down to the foundation. “I swear. Before they admit me. Look how great this is. The mayor will be buried here.”

  Janos came back forty-five minutes later with a big bag of Legos, as well as a fleet of miniature buses and trains, which he set down on the burgeoning, twisting City streets. Caroline grabbed the Lego bag and dumped all the pieces next to her in a heap. Janos knelt down. “Where is the courthouse?” Under his light blue shirt I could see a slight paunch, though it wasn’t much more than a crescent of flesh.
He would be fifty-eight in a month. His back was as wide and square as ever. His arms and legs were as strong as they had always been. He was aging, it was clear, from the middle outward, like a tree cleaving a rock. Whereas I—I might be crumpling, like a blue flower at a gate. A bird with an arrow in its breast. “I will make us a courthouse,” Janos said, and set to work.

  We didn’t stop until nearly three in the morning, and by then we all believed we had actual bricks and mortar; it had become that real to us. Plus, it looked fantastic. Like Sydney crossed with Tokyo crossed with a dream city. I made a river winding through the middle of it, like the Arno, and a flock of ferries, cut out of toilet paper tubes, crossing the river. That’s how the people in this City got around, tacking from shore to shore. Janos adjusted the spacing of the ferries on the river to accommodate the evening rush. We built a castle out of chopsticks and Scotch tape and pieces of beautiful Japanese paper Carsten had produced from the pocket of a suitcase: creamy white, imprinted with dark blue cranes, flying in place. “Cranes are for long life,” said Carsten. Carefully, we set a votive candle in a glass and put the glowing glass inside the paper castle, turned out all the lights, and, by the light of the shining paper walls with the cranes forever in flight up the sides, talked about the past, the present, and the future, until the sky outside began to lighten and the candle went out.

  An hour or so later, while everyone was still asleep, I slid out of bed. The lump on my thigh twinged as I pulled on my jeans. I dressed, went to the freezer, and, as quietly as I could, removed all the foil-wrapped bundles, stacking them neatly in my old black knapsack, zippering it. I took my passport from behind the box with the vengeful blue trickster goddess and her blue deer. I looked the goddess in her three eyes for a long minute. I latched the suitcase Janos had packed for me for the hospital and picked it up. It wasn’t very heavy. He must not have expected that I would stay there long. On the kitchen table sat the three good wine glasses and the little cut-glass vase, stained with the dregs of last night’s wine. The jet-black Prada suit was neatly draped over a kitchen chair, because we’d cut up and used the suit bag. Scattered across the kitchen table next to the stained glasses were three plastic toy soldiers, a cracked pink button, a seashell, an open pair of scissors, a gold hoop earring, and a cigarette butt. A still life, a box with no walls. It looked like I’d had one of my parties from the old days. A go-ing-away party, perhaps.