Fearless

by Rafael Yglesias

  A young man in a blue hospital gown looked at Carla’s leg and at her left hand and flashed a penlight into her eyes. “She’s okay,” he said in a clipped dismissive voice, almost a rebuke. He hurried away, followed by an attentive nurse.

  Because of him Carla noticed for the first time that the back of her hand had an inflamed red stripe across it. She remembered the burning sensation she had felt during the crash. Other sensations and images came fast: Bubble wedged in her lap, his hair brushing against her chin; the spinning people and seats, the roaring tigers, and the horrible shock of her empty arms.

  “Help me up!” she called. She tried to will her legs over the edge of me gurney. The broken one refused her order.

  She looked around. She was in a hallway. Blue letters pasted on a glass panel told her she was outside the emergency room. Through the window she saw a middle-aged man’s chest split open like a chicken on the butcher’s counter, his mouth overwhelmed by tape and a white funnel. The sight was fleeting—they drew a curtain around him. Everywhere there were people and hurried activity.

  The people here are really sick, Carla. So lie down and shut up. You’re all right.

  “Oh God,” she said sadly. A state trooper glanced over at her. He stood with his arms folded facing the entrance’s double doors, as if expecting wrongdoers to make a charge. She waved to him. He frowned. And then he came over. He made noise when he walked. His belt was loaded with things. “You seen a two-year-old boy with black hair?” she asked.

  “They took the kids to Pediatric Emergency,” he said, still stern, as if she were at fault for not knowing they would. “Looking for your son?”

  His accent squeezed the sounds into a whine. She had to repeat his sentence to herself before she understood it. “Yeah,” she drawled. Her tongue was thick and slow. Must be the shot. “What did they give me?” she asked. When the cop didn’t understand her question Carla mimicked an injection with her thumb and fingers.

  “Don’t know. Could be morphine. I’ll ask somebody about your boy.”

  He moved off behind her. She attempted to turn herself in order to watch where he went. Her eyes were surprised by the glare of the fluorescent panels on the ceiling. She blinked, her elbows slipped, and she fell back with a thud.

  Just relax. Give yourself a break.

  “Hi, honey.” A voice wakened her. She wasn’t aware of having fallen asleep.

  The face she saw was wrinkled and big and square. Large glasses twitched. They were lightly tinted and had a twinkling jewel at each corner. Carla recognized the frames as being the same as her mother’s. They were an extravagance, costing over two hundred dollars.

  “My name is Bea Rosenfeld. I’m a social worker and a family therapist…” she smiled beneficently, tilting her head as if making a joke: “…and some other things. My husband says I like being a student, but you know how men like to belittle what they don’t understand. I guess women do too—but what do you care? You’re in pain. How’s the leg? Has a doctor seen you?”

  Carla nodded. “It’s broken.”

  “That looks temporary,” Bea said, glancing at the cast. “I was told you said you were traveling with a little boy. Your son?” She studied a sheet of paper. “What’s your name?” Before Carla could answer, she added: “Or what was the name on your ticket?”

  “Carla Fransisca.”

  “Beautiful name. Franchesca—”

  “No. Fransisca.”

  “Right…uh huh. Okay.” Bea’s glistening frames rose up from the paper and shined at Carla. “Well, I think you should know that he’s missing.” The glasses reflected two bars of fluorescent light. She told Carla the fact boldly. She put a big warm hand on Carla’s uninjured one. “Was he in a seat or in your lap?”

  “I couldn’t get him in the seat! The belt wouldn’t work!” Carla felt stupid yelling, but she was nervous that her story wasn’t going to be believed. “Ask the stewardess,” she pleaded in a hoarse voice. “Even she couldn’t make it work! It got stuck!”

  “Nobody’s saying anything to contradict you, honey. Okay? I’m asking questions to find out some fact that might help us find out what happened to your son.” Bea studied her sheet of paper. “The airline hasn’t made a seating plan available. You don’t remember your seat number, do you?”

  “Forties. It was in the forties. Forty-eight?” Carla pulled on Bea’s hand to prompt her.

  “I don’t know. Really. I’m telling you everything I do know.”

  “Is he dead?”

  Bea was neither shocked nor wary of the question. “I don’t know. I know he isn’t here in this hospital and they tell me that all the children are here. But that’s not definite. I don’t want you to assume that they’ve got all their facts straight. There’s a lot of confusion. Can I call someone for you? Your husband? The airline is supposed to notify everyone they can reach, but you probably know how to get to him faster. If you tell me a number I’ll call him now and tell him you’re here and you’re fine.”

  “He’s at work,” Carla said.

  “Do you know that number?”

  “It’s in Manhattan. It’s 555-4137. That’s a 212 area code.”

  Bea was writing it down. “Okay. What’s his name?”

  “Manny.” Carla was exhausted by this conversation. After Bea left, she collapsed. Her head hurt. Feeling returned to her injured leg; it throbbed and there were pangs just below the knee. All her muscles also wakened to pain. Up and down her back, through her shoulders, down to the tiniest muscle in her arms, they were bruised.

  She moaned.

  A nurse came over and said, “They’ll be getting to you in a jiffy. We’ve got a lot of people who are badly hurt.”

  Shut up. What have you got to complain about? You’re alive, ain’t you?

  She cried as quietly as she could.

  In his room at the Sheraton Max took a shower. He turned on the hot water so high he nearly scalded himself. When he was done he stood between the twin beds facing a wall mirror, rubbed himself dry, let the towel drop and studied the full length of his body. He had a trim and vigorous figure, thanks to both genetics and regular exercise. A fine down of black hair draped over his pectorals and swirled about his dark nipples. Max shut his eyes and touched his chest lovingly, as if it belonged to someone else. Then he skimmed down with the flats of his palms, feeling his rib cage and fatless flanks, his pulsing stomach and rubbery penis. It was a young man’s body. He opened his eyes and saw a middle-aged head on top. His kinky bush of hair was all gray and the curls were exhausted, squashed at their apex, unfinished circles. His face looked overused and it was. He wondered how many times he had scraped the skin with a razor, fried it in summer, blasted it with exhaust or cold. His ears were big, growing into the elephantine excess of old age. His mouth was pinched by fatigue and his pale lips showed disappointment at the corners. Worst of all, his light blue eyes, which used to twinkle with wonder and mischief when he was young, were dead. They cowered beneath a prominent forehead inhabited only by worried and angry thoughts.

  He stroked his penis with one hand and held his testicles in the other. He had no sexual fantasy in his head, no tickle of desire prompting him. He wanted to be erect.

  The old unhappy face changed. His eyes brightened, his skin relaxed. His cock lengthened, surged away from his shadowed pelvis, and announced him to the world.

  Satisfied that everything worked, Max dressed. While putting on his clothes he remembered his fight with Jeff over his choice of jeans and a polo shirt. The purpose of this trip to LA was to win a major job from the owner of a chain of discount electronics stores. The owner was interested in hiring them to design and oversee the construction of his expansion into New York City. The immediate project was worth a lot of money—as much as their architectural firm had earned over the past two years—for what would probably be six months’ work. And there was also the promise of more. Nutty Nick stores planned similar expansions into Philadelphia, Washington, Atlanta, and Miami.
If Mr. Nutty Nick approved, it was possible that their design might become the basic model, which meant money coming in for years and years with a minimum of additional effort.

  As always, under pressure, Jeff didn’t contribute to the work. He chose instead to fight bitterly with his wife in the evenings and to spend his day at the office placing make-up phone calls. After a week of that he caught a cold and had to go home early to prevent it from becoming much worse. When Jeff finally did put time in, he made elementary errors which required redrafting, no matter what one thought of the concept. In short, by the time Jeff had overcome all his difficulties and announced he was ready to “pull an all-nighter” so they could meet Nutty Nick’s deadline, Max was finished with a complete plan.

  “No need,” Max said and showed him blueprints with Jeff’s name listed as co-designer.

  Jeff was generous in his praise of Max’s work and he had a suggestion about inventory storage that, although minor, was neat, impressive, and even inexpensive. Jeff seemed unembarrassed to have contributed so little. Perhaps that was because, as Jeff never tired of reminding Max, his socializing had gotten them this opportunity in the first place. A year ago, at his country club on Long Island, Jeff met Nutty Nick’s accountant and got the assignment to renovate a Nutty Nick branch in Great Neck. Max’s work on that minor job so impressed the boss in LA that they were given this chance.

  But it was my work on the store in Great Neck, Max said to the Sheraton mirror. You spent that whole month arguing with your wife.

  “You want us to get turned down, is that it? You want to fail? That why you’re dressing this way?” Jeff had taunted him as they entered Newark airport.

  “He’s hiring architects, not salesmen. These nouveau riche businessmen want to think they’ve hired an eccentric, an artist. That makes them a patron. Suddenly he’s not Nutty Nick interviewing second-rate architects, he’s David Rockefeller hiring I. M. Pei.”

  Jeff had blinked, rolling the lids down over his bulging eyes, as if what Max had said was too ugly to see. He said mildly: “We’re not second-rate.”

  Max was alone in the room once this memory stopped its replay. More alone than he had been before. He was absent Jeff and also absent the desire to finish their business.

  He sat down and considered how he felt.

  He felt pursued.

  So he ran. He left the room less than an hour after renting it.

  The crash’s activity had spilled into the Sheraton’s lobby. A group of men who had helped in the rescue efforts stood around a fake stone fireplace telling a few of the hotel staff what they had done and the gruesome sights they had seen.

  Max waited at the front desk behind a television crew who were loaded with equipment. A reporter, or at least me only one in a suit, told the desk clerk they were from ABC.

  “National news?” the clerk said with a hush in his voice.

  But the clerk got no answer since the network reporter, overhearing the rescuers’ talk of the crash, had drifted in their direction.

  “I need to rent a car,” Max said to the awed and distracted clerk.

  The reporter gestured to his crew to start shooting while he interviewed the rescuers. They answered eagerly. A camera appeared and was pointed at the storytellers.

  “Excuse me,” Max said to the clerk.

  “What?” The clerk had contorted his position behind the desk to put himself in the background of the cameraman’s shot.

  “My car’s going to be in the shop for two days. Where can I rent a car?”

  “The mall,” the clerk said and pointed behind him.

  Max left without checking out. They had an impression of his credit card anyway.

  The car rental was a glass room set by itself in the middle of the mall’s parking lot. The agent, a skinny red-haired girl, probably a high school student doing a summer job, asked him: “Is something going on at the airport? My boyfriend drove by and shouted that he heard a plane had crashed.”

  “I don’t know,” Max said, wishing to make sure his business was transacted without conversation.

  Unfortunately she got a phone call while writing up Max’s agreement form. “No shit,” she said to the receiver and then apologized for her obscenity with a look. “A jet’s crashed at the airport,” she explained. “No. A customer,” she said to the phone. “Oh my God,” she gasped, hearing a horrific detail. Her pen was idle. The paperwork lay half-done underneath.

  “I’m in a hurry,” Max said softly.

  She ignored him. She had paled at another ghastly item. Her face went slack. “Really? I’m never getting on a plane. I swear to—”

  Max knocked on the counter, rapping it hard until she looked at him. “Fill out the form and call him back. I’m in a hurry.”

  She stared at him, in dumb outrage.

  “Please,” he said.

  “Yeah…” she drawled sarcastically to the phone. “Story of my life. I’ll call you back.” She put the point of her pen on the form and demanded angrily: “You want insurance?”

  The question reverberated for him. He couldn’t answer right away.

  “I thought you said you were in a hurry. You want insurance?”

  Max smiled. “No,” he said. There were tears in his eyes even though his mouth was spread wide in a goofy grin.

  “That means you’re responsible for any damage to the car.”

  Everything seemed to be chock-full of ironies. “I’m responsible,” Max said and he let out a laugh. It sounded loud and a little deranged.

  “Okay,” she said and now hurried, obviously leery of him.

  He took what she had available, which was a small white Ford, not glamorous or fun to drive. He was thrilled to control it, however.

  He studied the map the redhead had included in the envelope containing his rental agreement. He understood it with ease. That was unlike him. Usually maps blurred into incomprehensibility, service roads melting into freeways, turnpikes becoming rivers, huge urban centers disappearing; and what he could decipher inspired little confidence: he worried that what he thought he understood would inevitably turn out to be wrong in the greater reality of the road. It was embarrassing, he thought, for an architect to have so much trouble reading a blueprint of the earth’s surface design.

  Not this time. He found the interstate just where the map said it would be and he got on. His heart soared at the sight of the almost empty road. He put the air-conditioning on high, was pleased to discover that the previous renter had tuned the radio to a rock station, and flattened the gas pedal, delighted by a novelty: the speedometer readout was in digital numbers. He watched the old numbers blip off, the new numbers blip on, seventy, eighty, higher and higher, until he was driving into strange territory going faster than he had ever gone before.

  THE

  GOOD

  SAMARITAN

  6

  Max saw that death was everywhere, had been everywhere all along, only he hadn’t seen it as death. On the highway he passed four cemeteries and a car being towed from an accident that was probably fatal. He noticed the stains of several recently killed animals on the pavement; and there was the corpse of one, lying gray and squashed, on the road’s shoulder.

  He laughed when, after driving east for a little more than two hours, he saw this sign: WELCOME TO PITTSBURGH. He had gone to college at Carnegie-Mellon and at age seventeen the same words, maybe even the same sign, had always made him laugh, especially because Carnegie-Mellon’s location was the best argument against enrollment. “Pittsburgh is the asshole of the United States,” his Uncle Sol had commented when Max announced his intention to go there.

  Recently Max had read that Pittsburgh was voted the most livable city in the United States by a survey. No doubt its air had benefited from the collapse of the steel industry. The article said Pittsburgh had made a particularly successful transition to a service economy, the same transformation that had become the fate of the United States generally. Max knew what that meant. It meant lot
s of yuppies and renovated brownstones, maybe even the same ramshackle ones that he and his friends used to rent. Actually he remembered there were plenty of great old buildings whose dilapidated utility could be converted to the current fashion of living in work spaces and working in living spaces. He could easily imagine young lawyers turning the ruined town houses into offices and the old warehouses into living lofts. Pittsburgh had always had pretensions to civilization. Even in Max’s day there had been Carnegie’s guilty and self-ennobling charities to the arts, housed in great buildings that probably looked much better without the air filled by the belching of his money machines.

  Truth is, Max had liked the asshole of the United States. It was a real melting pot, where you could see steel sizzle and glow: a town of genuine production. There were workers who hated him because he was young, dirty, and free. There were students who wanted to become engineers and get ahead even if it cost them participation in the sexual revolution. He thought both groups admirable. He also liked his own kind, the students who wanted to act and take drugs; or play music and take drugs; or write plays and movies, and take drugs. And, above all, there was a higher purpose: the Vietnam War to march against, and a black population that had been taking shit for centuries and was amazed you were on their side. At least for a while. What he didn’t know, and understood now as he toured through his old campus, was that he had been in the middle of death all the while, the end of both Americas, imperial and idealistic.

  Max drove to a hill only a mile from the campus where he and three buddies had rented a four-story turn-of-the-century brownstone. He pulled into a spot in front of a hydrant and looked up into the windows. The predictable had been done: root-canal therapy on the decay. The inside had been gutted and replaced with the embalming fluid of renovation: plasterboard, polyurethaned pine flooring, Thermopane windows. In what had been his bedroom he saw a young mother carry a baby across to a dresser. From his angle he guessed she was changing the infant. Her long hair was straight and brown. Her expression was intent on her chore, neither happy nor harassed.