The grassy slope ended at the fifty-foot rock wall that towered over the park. Over the edge, I could see the waving branches of a maple, and beyond that an overgrown baseball diamond, weeds growing up in the tan dirt along the basepaths. A man lay in right field with a jacket over his head, sleeping. Cars went by slowly on the far side of the park. Carabez brushed through the grass behind me. “Frank,” he said. I turned. He lowered his gun slightly. “Where you goin, Frank?” He raised the gun again and I jumped out, falling past the tree. There was a moment in the air, much longer than I expected, where I thought how stupid I’d been, how the whole thing was unnecessary, how given another chance . . . and then I was in the warehouse where Emily and I first kissed. I could see those marks in the dust where she’d fenced, see the rusted metal rod she’d used as a foil. She was coming toward me in the blue light. Her hair was wet. Her face turning up toward mine. Outside, I could hear it drizzling.
50
A dream of being chased, of being bound, then much later, soft voices.
“. . . self induced. That’s what kills me.”
“Well, I know they’ve said the same thing about me.”
“He ever talk about it?”
“No.”
“Fifteen-twenty on his SATs. He got all As in school. Every class.”
“He never said that. I just assumed—”
“Yeah, I know.”
“It wasn’t until . . .”
“Yeah yeah.”
Norman’s voice changed positions. He must have been pacing around the bed.
“He was just looking at him. He’d been looking at him for an hour. Obviously he blames himself. Dummy.”
I think I must have murmured.
“He hears that. That’s what he hears. The only thing he hears.”
Emily was very close to me. I could feel her breath on my face.
“He was scared,” she said.
A warm hand on my hand.
“He doesn’t want to be left again.”
I must have murmured.
“Can he hear us?”
“He won’t remember. The drugs. He’s drugged.”
“But he can hear me?”
“He’s been moving.”
“Frank,” she said. “I’m right here, Frank.”
51
It was a day later. Emily was bent over my leg, signing the cast with a green marker. She set the marker on the little bedside table. My right leg and right arm were in casts. My head was bandaged. My front teeth were chipped. I had a saline lock in my left arm. They’d taken the heart monitor off. Out the window, it was raining.
“I talked to your friend,” she said.
“Who?”
“Gil.”
“Hock,” I said. Then, “He told you?”
“Yeah. He told me.”
I lay there looking away. We’d never talked about why I took pictures of sick people, or what I was doing hanging out with Hock and Burnett. I think she’d known I was up to no good, but she’d never said anything about it. Now that it was out in the open she didn’t seem angry. It probably helped that I was lying there in a hospital bed. She felt the ends of my fingers where they came out of the cast, then reached over to my left hand and squeezed.
“I know what it must look like,” I said. “Don’t think it’s on purpose.”
“I don’t think anything.”
“Does Norman know?”
She did not answer right away. I vaguely remembered his voice over me.
“I can just imagine what he’s been saying.”
“He worked on you for . . . five hours or something. He wouldn’t let anyone else touch you. He doesn’t care what you did.”
“He cares.”
“Not in the way you think.”
I closed my eyes. When I opened them she was still sitting there. I was glad she was still there. The light outside was dimmer.
“Do you have my things? Do you have the camera?”
“It’s broken, Frank.”
“And the film?”
“I rewound it by hand.”
“In the light?”
“In the dark, Frank. I rewound it in the dark.”
I lay back and realized that it hurt to smile.
52
I’d been up for nine or ten hours before Norman came in. While I was unconscious he’d been checking on me all the time, but once I was awake he was afraid to come see me, thinking I’d send him away.
“Well, I was almost doing CPR on you,” was the way he greeted me.
“Could’ve said all your predictions came true.”
“Not like I can’t say that now,” he said.
I began to reply, then didn’t bother. I could see he wasn’t happy. He eyed me askance, looking at the bruises and casts and dripping IVs, shifting from foot to foot.
“I talked to your friend,” he said.
“What friend?”
“The one who’s always hanging out.”
“Hock?”
“Yeah, I guess that’s his name. Hock.”
By the way he said his name, I could tell what he thought about him.
“What’d you say?”
“I told him he better get the fuck away.”
“That wasn’t too smart, Norman.”
“I just gotta look at who that comment’s coming from.”
“What’d he say to you?”
“He didn’t say much.” Norman puffed himself up. “You ask me, I don’t think he’ll be coming around here again.”
I tried to keep from smiling, and that pissed him off.
“It’s not like I don’t have other things I could be doing. You want me to go?”
“No,” I said. “I’m glad you’re here. I want you to stay.”
53
The police came the next day and I told them I fell. That I’d been walking in the park and I fell. They knew what had happened, and I don’t think they cared much. They probably figured I got what I deserved. They only stayed ten minutes.
Around seven that night, I felt someone grip the cast at my hand. A dull weight.
“You got seven lives left now.”
I opened my eyes.
“Hey, Gil,” I said.
“It should be worse,” he said, looking me over. “You may think you’re fucked up. But you’re gonna walk outta here.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“So I don’t wanna hear you complainin.”
“I haven’t been.”
He took his cap off and rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand.
“You remember Carabez? The guy you . . .” He made a motion with his fingers as if they were running away.
“Yeah, I remember.”
“I was just talkin to him.”
“What about?”
“You dumb motherfucker.”
“He comin here?”
“He oughtta be.”
“Is he?”
Hock kept his head turned.
“White guy off a cliff near his block. Police runnin all over the fuckin place. It’s been a lotta trouble already. I wouldn’t be goin over there, Frank.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
“But he don’t see you, he ain’t gonna worry about it.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“You been a big fuckin headache,” he said.
I thanked him again. Hock had gotten me a reprieve. I knew it couldn’t have come easily. He looked away for a long time.
“So what happened?” he said. “You wanted to steal it?”
“Fuck no.”
“You were afraid?”
“I guess I was. I guess that’s it.”
“Did you want them to kill you?”
“Why’d I want that?”
“Don’t treat me like an asshole.”
“I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Bullshit.”
“I didn’t want that,” I said again. “Not at all. Not at the ending.”
I think he believed me that last time I said it.
“I talked to your brother,” he said.
“Heard you had a nice conversation.”
“He ain’t too happy with me right now.”
“What’d he say?”
Hock shrugged.
“Your brother’s got a big mouth.”
“I’ve known that a while.”
“And he’s got a hot head. But it ain’t like I don’t know how to deal with a hot head. That’s the exact sort of person I know how to deal with.”
“You tell’m to fuck off?”
“That’s what I didn’t do,” he said. “Someone like him, he’s just gonna escalate to the point of fucking everyone.”
I nodded. That was true.
“So I let him blow his top is what I did. Let him feel like he was getting the upper hand. I figured once he’d done that, he was gonna keep his mouth shut.”
“Smart,” I said.
Hock looked away.
“It was easier than killing him. Not that there wasn’t a moment where I wanted to.” He looked over his shoulder. I thought he was going to say something more about Norman, but all he said was “You took pictures of Carabez and them?”
“Yeah.”
“They get fucked up in the—”
“I think Emily saved them.”
“When you get’m, I want a copy,” he said. Then, “You owe me, Frank.”
“I know I do.”
“So get me a fuckin copy.”
I said I would and he took a step away.
“Hey,” I said. “That guy. The one I was bringing it to. Was he legit?”
“Like I said, Frank, you got seven lives left. They say he was a cop.”
Hock held a hand up and walked down the aisle. He paused at the nurses’ station to see what was on the counter. Then he walked on past.
54
I was in recovery for twelve weeks and spent most of the time in the darkroom. I only had one good arm, and I could not work quickly, so I worked carefully, meticulously. I got Emily to help me. I showed her how to develop and how to make a contact sheet. I showed her how to enlarge, and later we burnt and dodged and cropped some photographs in different ways. In the slow times we went over the old prints. Some of them I liked, and some of them I thought I liked until I looked at them with her and then changed my mind. We went through all my photographs, and by the time I got my cast off we had a pile of two hundred that I thought were my best.
55
Emily and I came out of the stairway into a wide-open, brightly lit room that seemed to be all windows. There was no furniture. There were tarps over some of the wooden cross-slats and paint rollers and poles in the corners. The windows started at shin height and went to the ceiling. I’d just gotten my cast off and I walked awkwardly, stopping to lean against the wall. I was very weak. Emily ran to the windows.
“Hey! We can see the river.”
To the west, and sixty floors down, past the World Trade Center and Battery Park, we could see the Hudson. It was a cool morning in early June, and there was mist on the water. Emily shouldered her bag and we walked back to the stairway, where a workman in a white jumpsuit came out, carrying a bucket of primer in one hand and a coffee in the other. We went past him and up two more flights to a door that opened onto the roof. We were afraid to push it because of the alarm, but when we finally did, nothing happened. It wouldn’t move. She pushed it harder. Nothing. We put all our weight into it. We couldn’t open it. We walked back down to the painters’ floor. There were three other men in paint-spattered jeans and overalls standing in a group with their coffee cups at an open windowsill. Emily and I walked down one more floor and entered an unrenovated office space—rooms with stacked desks, tottering steel bookcases, and old wooden chairs, all pushed against the walls. There were paint chips on the floor; plaster dust coated every surface. Emily tried the window over the fire escape. It did not open. We tried it together and it resisted, then released all at once, sliding up with a horrible grating sound and a sudden rush of cool air. Car horns and the undifferentiated hum of the city wafted in. Emily leaned out, looked up, then glanced back at me.
“You want to?”
“I said I did.”
“Well . . .”
She lifted her bag out the window, sat on the ledge, then swung her feet around. Gripping the frame for balance, she set her feet firmly on the fire escape. I heard her clambering above me. I kneeled on the windowsill, crawled out slowly, found the railing with one hand, and pulled myself upright. Sixty floors below was a mosaic of oilstains, faded cross-walks, and patchy concrete. Emily leaned way over the edge above me, waving. I gripped the railing with two hands as I walked. We climbed past the windows on the floor where the painters were and arrived at a green ladder. Emily slid her hands into the cuffs of her jacket, and, using them as protection, hurried up the rusting ladder, stopping to yell down to me. She was not afraid at all. I went up step by step, not daring to look down. Up top, the crossbars ended and the railings curved over the edge onto a pebble-and-tar roof. When I arrived on the roof, Emily was already on the west end, one foot on the raised concrete lip. She turned and ran back.
“Hey, it’s pretty.”
I walked slowly toward her, limping a little. I stayed away from the edge, afraid to get too close. There were some buildings higher than us, but not many. A feeling of openness, of light. Emily came toward me carrying two foils, one of which she dropped at my feet. A moment later, we were sparring. My leg felt stiff and weak, and I was aware of the edge the whole time. Emily did not seem bothered by the height. She seemed to like it. She stood on the little wall a few times, balancing, and then jumping off. We’d been fencing for about fifteen minutes when we heard a banging on the door.
“Well,” Emily said. “You ready to get arrested?”
“I guess I better be.”
We waited for them to come out, but the door did not open. They shook the door. Shouted out at us. The door did not open. There was one last impotent thud and then nothing. I tried the door myself, but it didn’t budge. I think the lock was rusted shut. Emily put the apron and foils in her bag, slung it over her shoulder, and climbed down the ladder to the fire escape. I followed her. As we approached the open window we saw two men in uniform, half-turned, listening to their radios. Emily and I climbed back up and tried the window on that top floor. I banged on the glass, and one of the painters came toward us carrying his coffee cup. He unlocked the window, and with a lurch it opened.
“How’d you get out there?” he asked.
“We flew,” Emily said, stepping past him. I followed her; the painter just watched us. He didn’t care at all. Two other men with paint rollers glanced over. Emily and I hurried into the stairway. We ran down twenty flights and at the fortieth floor we got onto an elevator filled with men and women in suits. A bicycle messenger with his helmet strapped to a backpack was listening to his Walkman. He looked at us, then looked down. In the lobby a security guard watched us. Emily was ahead of me, carrying the bag on her shoulder.
“Were you just on the roof?” the guard asked.
“What?” she said disdainfully, and kept walking.
A minute later we were in the subway, holding on to each other, laughing. On the ride home Emily sat with the bag at her feet. She seemed pleased, but distant, too, the laughter fading slowly. I didn’t understand that.
“Are you disappointed?”
“It’s just over with. I always wanted to do that. Now I have.”
56
It was springtime when I’d gotten hurt. Now it was summer, ninety degrees out. Hock was in the shade, smoking a cigarette. He nodded to me but did not move from the wall as I approached. I walked over to him and began to reach out with my left hand, but then remembered that I could do it with my right.
“Frank.”
“Gil.”
“How you doin?”
“Better.”
“Let’s see,” he
said, showing his teeth. I smiled, and he bent in and saw where the dentist had put the caps in.
“How’s the arm?” he asked.
I held my right arm up to show him. I opened and closed the hand a few times. I swung it around. I raised my leg.
“So you got a vacation out of it.”
“Yeah, I got a vacation.”
We stood silently.
“Well,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“I better go in.”
I hadn’t spoken with any of them for four months. It seemed like a long time since I’d been at the station, and it wasn’t just distance in months that I felt. I walked in, saying hello to the people I knew. I signed in and got my radio and walked out to the ambulance. Burnett was waiting for me. He had not come to see me in the hospital and I think he was ashamed of that now. He shook my hand.
“How you doin, Frank?”
“Not bad.”
“The arm . . .”
“Yeah, it’s fine.”
He looked away.
“Heard you had some trouble,” he said boisterously.
“Almost.”
“What I heard is that you are one dumb motherfucker.”
“Well. I guess you heard right.”
“I heard you deserved what you got.”
“Yep.”
He stood there smiling.
“You are one fucked-up partner.”
This seemed about the highest compliment he could pay me.
“You ready?” was all I said.
“Yeah, I’m ready.”
He got in on his side and I got in on mine. He put the ambulance into drive.
57
A low-ceilinged basement with tossed garbage, broken chairs, and dirty blankets against the wall. A figure shifted in the dim light. Burnett swung his flashlight to illuminate a white guy with brown, crinkly skin. Most of his hair was burnt off, and his smoldering pants lay at his ankles. There was a burnt square below his abdomen in the shape of his belt buckle. Beside him sat his electrician’s box, and above him there was a tangle of wire ends. He looked at us silently, grave. Burnett jerked the chair over, but the guy just stared straight ahead, his eyes the only white part on his charred body.
Safelight Page 12