“It ain’t gonna help to stand there,” Burnett said.
In an eerie, distant voice, the man said, “I been in this business twenty years. I know what voltage I took. It don’t matter what I do. I know I’m a dead man.”
“Sit,” Burnett said.
His burnt skin cracked and flaked like dried frosting when he bent his legs to sit. We strapped him into the chair and carried him out, and once in the light we saw that his right hand was just a blackened nub. His sneakers were melted to his feet. The whole lower part of his right leg was black. He did not seem to be in a lot of pain. Deep third-degree burns kill the nerve endings and are not painful. We got him in the ambulance, lay him in the stretcher, and got a cop to drive. Burnett bent to start an IV, going right through the burn in his arm, finding the live flesh beneath. For a moment I did not do anything. I just looked on. I was looking at my father. Burnett said my name and I came back from far away. I started on the other arm, and as I did I saw the guy’s heartbeat on the monitor bouncing around crazily. He gripped me with his one good hand.
“I’m about to die,” he said in a small voice.
“We won’t let you,” Burnett said.
“You don’t need to lie,” he said. “I know what’s happening.”
Burnett and I went on quickly—IVs, bandages, monitor, blood pressure. We were only a few minutes from the hospital. As we turned onto 136th Street the guy gripped my hand and said, “I didn’t expect to die like this. So fast.” His eyes closed and I thought maybe he’d passed out, but then I saw his lips moving and realized he was praying. As we pulled into the hospital his heart stopped. We brought him into the ER, and they were still working on him, kind of offhandedly, when we left. He was dead. Out on the street Burnett said, “You were a little slow back there.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“How long’s it been?”
“Seventeen weeks.”
He stood on his heels.
“Well,” he said. “Welcome back.”
58
The waiting room at the clinic on the first Tuesday of the month, HIV day. All the men and women with bony arms, bony necks, bony knees, open infected sores, hacking coughs that made ratchety sounds in scrawny chests, and weird infections that wouldn’t go away. At the beginning, before the medical examinations, there was a half-hour support group pep-talk sort of thing. Emily usually sat in the back, rolling her eyes. But that day she got up, walked forward slowly, and stood in front.
“I’m Emily. I’m twenty-two. I’ve been positive for four years. When I was first infected, I’d get drunk. Do drugs. I thought when the time came I’d just blow my brains out. Why not? Who cares, right? But I’ve tried to live a normal life. I’m a fencer. You know, with a sword. Recently I had my best bout ever. I won the tournament. I’m getting better every day. I . . . wanted to share that.”
Half-hearted claps and she walked back with her head down.
“Stupid,” she said.
“Nah, that was nice.”
“I feel like an idiot. Fuck.”
But I could see she was glad she’d done it.
A minute later she was getting her vitals taken, blood drawn, a brief physical exam. They sent the labwork immediately, so she got the results before she left. The T-cell count was like a running tab on the illness, and she always told me her results as we walked out. That day she did not.
“What was your count?”
“It was fine,” she said.
“What was the number?”
“The same.”
She’d always told me the exact number before. As soon as we were back at her apartment, she got her fencing gear and practiced in the courtyard for a long time. She came back in, took a shower, then read in bed. Later that night she told me that her T-cell count, which had always been more than seven hundred, had fallen to two-twenty.
59
A gangly black guy with an afro, a navy tank-top, and discolored skin.
“You do this a lot?” he asked.
“I haven’t for a while. I was hurt.”
We turned into a space between two buildings and came to a steel barrier twenty feet high, razor-wire on top. I smelled something musty. There was a little door in the steel barrier. He paused, and I said, “I can pay you. How much do you want?”
“You a friend of Gil’s, or you just know him?”
“I think he’d say I was a friend.”
The man, whose name was Bontecou, paused, began to say I could have it free, then said, “I have a piece of meat in my pocket. Cost two dollars. You can pay for that.”
“I’ll give you five,” I said and gave him the money right there. He took the bill, folded it once, and placed it in his breast pocket. He buttoned the pocket, then opened the steel door and we entered a courtyard with a concrete floor and cages along the sides, stacked one on top of the other. Rabbits pressed their soft noses against wire mesh. Seven or eight cats sprawled in the sun, prowled along the wall, yowled. There was a sandbox in the corner where a shovel, divot down, rested against the wall.
“This is it?” I said.
“Smaller than you expected.”
“I didn’t expect anything.”
“It’s the way to be. You aren’t disappointed, then.”
A hose snaked from the window of an adjacent building. Bontecou saw me looking at it and said, “I don’t steal.” He turned a knob and water burst forth. He held the hose away from his body. “It’s not for me. It’s for the animals.”
He filled several large bowls with water, drank from the hose, then dropped it and turned the knob. The water slowed to a trickle.
“What happens in winter?”
“I put up plastic, heaters. I can’t keep’m all. I have to get rid of some.”
The courtyard was formed by the walls of three old brownstones. Behind a door in an abandoned building came various whines and yelps. Bontecou walked to this door, placed his ear to it, then opened it quickly and slipped inside. I followed him. A hanging bulb lit a tiny concretefloored room with twenty dogs resting lethargically along the walls, all lumped together, sleeping. The city was in shambles, and animal shelters everywhere were losing funding, filled to capacity. Wandering among the animals, Bontecou tapped a dog here or there with the back of his hand, running fingers through fur.
“People know I try harder than the city. I think one of them can make it, I’ll let’m go upstate. Into the barrens. I don’t mind making the trip. I’m glad to make it.”
He came to a large mutt, maybe eighty pounds. Long, dirty fur. Gray hairs around the mouth. Droopy head. The mutt was unsteady on his feet and smelled like urine. Bontecou said he’d been sick for weeks, getting worse and worse. He thought he needed dialysis, or a transplant. Bontecou gripped his collar and gave him a pull and then the dog came on his own. I stepped into the courtyard, squinting. Several other dogs tried to come out, but Bontecou pushed them back with his foot and shut the door. He hung the padlock on the ring without closing it. Scrapes and whines inside. The old dog took a few steps into the bright courtyard and then stood still, blinking.
“Stand in front,” Bontecou said. “I don’t want him looking back at you.”
Bontecou took out a lump of wax paper, a little red juice dripping onto his hands.
“I try to get’m out in a week. Ten days. This one’s been back there two months. He’d starve upstate,” he said.
“You think this is better?”
“I do, yes,” he said simply. “Among people he knows. Yeah. That’s better.”
There was a sort of toolshed with a wooden door. Bontecou reached inside and came out holding a bat. There were nicks along the heavy end. I took a shot with the bat dangling from one gangly arm. Hearing the click, he turned, holding the bat, and I lowered the camera.
“Go on, go on. It’s what you’re here for.”
I moved around for another angle. He unpeeled the wax paper. The old dog’s nose twitched.
“I ain’t a vet or a
nything. I don’t have medicines. I do what I can.”
Laying the bat against the fence, he opened the paper to reveal a lump of red meat. He tossed the meat onto the concrete, then, crumpling the paper, flung it aside. He found the bat with one deft hand. The mutt sniffed along the dust toward the meat. He reached the meat and Bontecou paused to let him taste it. I got a shot of Bontecou swinging and I heard a thud, a cracking sound, like a coconut breaking. He swung again, but he’d gotten him with the first, and he knew he did. Bontecou looked determined in the first photograph and grim in the second. Afterward he bent with two fingers held out. I got that shot. I got a shot of him looking up at me with his hand still on the dog’s neck. I took a picture of the dog with the misshapen head, blood coming from the ears. Then I took a picture of Bontecou’s face without the dog in it. There were tears on his cheeks. I took another shot of his face. And another. And another. And then I held a sack for him as he lay the dog in gently.
60
Jamaican rum on the hood of a Buick, paper cups, and merengue music. Rogero leaned against the bumper.
“So let’s see it, Frank.”
“What makes you think I got anything?”
“I know where you been.” Rogero cocked his head toward Hock. “You’ve seen ’m.”
“I have.”
“Well, what the fuck?”
“Give it up,” Burnett said.
“Jesus,” Geroux said. “Look at him. He’s gettin shy.”
“Come on, Frank.”
I took out four photographs. I had them all ready—a portrait of Bontecou against the steel door, a blurred shot of him swinging, a shot of his face just afterward, and a photo of Bontecou standing over the sack with the knotted neck, the bat laid out at an angle behind him. I set these four prints on the hood of the Buick, and Geroux, Rogero, and Burnett crowded together, leaned over, and looked at them. Rogero looked only briefly, then said, “So, where’s the dog, Frank?”
“In the sack.”
“Yeah, I see the sack. Where’s him gettin hit? You get that?”
“I got just before. And just after.”
“I guess you didn’t think we’d wanna see that?”
“I thought it was better without that.”
Grinning, Rogero looked at Burnett.
“Did we get G-rated without anyone telling me?”
“This is the family version.”
“The new New York,” Geroux said.
“We got the old guy crying but we don’t got the dog,” Rogero said, and Burnett just stood there with his arms crossed, as if he were saying, What’d I tell you?
“Frank,” Rogero said.
“What?”
“We ain’t kids here. The dead dog’s the money shot.”
Hock stood back, eyes glazed, holding a cup.
“What do you think?”
He shrugged casually. He was drunk.
“Fuck if I know.”
“Come on.”
“You’re the expert.”
“Bring in the fuckin dog,” Rogero said.
“Have a drink,” Geroux said to me, and held the bottle out.
61
For all that time I was in recovery, and for the first weeks after I returned to work, I labored over a single shot of Carabez and Shorty. Initially I developed the photograph as a wide shot, with the two men relatively small against the stark wall. There was a grittiness and a moodiness to that shot that pleased me. It was the way I would have developed the shot a year before. But my tastes had changed a little, or were changing, and a part of me found the photograph almost melodramatically depressing. I tried to frame it closer so it was only the two men without the stark room around them, without the one bare bulb. Then I went even closer, showing only the heads and torsos. A day passed and I developed the print from the shoulders up, just leaving the two friends with their arms around each other, and not showing anything else. A part of me felt I’d caught the essence of what the photograph was about—two friends together— and stripped away everything unessential: the guns, the stark room. But another part of me felt I’d taken out the most interesting part. Without the room, the guns, or their clothing, it was the sort of thing anyone could have done. It was like Bontecou without the dead dog. I pinned the two versions of the photograph of Carabez and Shorty side-by-side on the corkboard—the one with guns, the one without. I looked at them from time to time but I couldn’t decide which I liked better.
62
An A-frame house with a sharply peaked roof, an enormous spruce in front that must have been planted when the house was built, and beyond, through branches, a disjointed white M that seemed to float—the middle of a high school football field.
“When I was a senior I got it on with my boyfriend, Glenn Mackey, listening to the announcer give cheers over the p.a. system. Mom was in the hospital. Probably my best week of high school. The week mom almost died.”
Walking away slowly, glancing back at the house one more time, then turning the corner. Lawns, trees, open space, the sound of birds. A different world from Manhattan. I’d never seen Emily’s hometown. I’d never even asked about it before.
“Your father lived here?”
“Not for long. Until I was eight.”
“You never talk about him.”
“I don’t remember much. He never came back. He married again. Mom never said anything about him. He was a drinker.”
A kiddie park on the right with a sandbox made by four railroad ties in a square, a turtle that sprayed water, rocking plastic ducks and pigs on springs, and a slide that was shinier in the middle from the constant polishing.
“I think she was glad he was gone. She liked it that it was just us. I had these two plastic horses. I used to play with them when she wasn’t around. Make up skits. About horse shows. People falling off, suing the owners, everything. I remember, in the eighth grade, I was still playing with them. That’s weird.”
“I can think of weirder things.”
“That was thirteen. Then, at fourteen, it was like a flip in my mind. I started fencing, and I said, Fuck that. Fuck staying home. Home was a depressing place for sick people. The team did everything together. I didn’t care about home after that.”
Six gray chains hung three rubber swings. Emily and I sat and rocked and twisted, sometimes bumping against each other.
“I knew she was dying. I just didn’t wanna see it. Later, when it finally happened, I was in college. I was only home one day. I practically blew off the funeral. Then, a couple years later, when I found out I was positive, I was like, See what you get? Payback. Now it’s your turn.”
Bare spots beneath the swings exposing sandy soil. I watched her sneakers twist and cut and tap the swing one way or another.
“So whatever happens with me at the end, it’s not like I don’t deserve it. Like if you wanna take off or whatever, it’s not like I’ll blame you.”
“Are you worried about that? About me taking off?”
“I’m not worried. It’s what I’d do if I were you. What I did to my own mother. So I’m not going to blame you. And anyway, it’d be for the best.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “It would.”
Two junior high school kids, too big for the spring animals, were rocking them back and forth violently—a ratchety, rhythmic squawking. Beyond that, faintly, they were testing the p.a. system on the football field. One, two, three. Distant crackle of static.
“When I think about it now, when I start to worry about it, I fence, I have a bout. I can pretend I’m a normal person. But when it really starts to happen, when I’m weak and sick and disgusting, then I think . . . maybe I’m the sort of person who’d just say fuck it. And I wouldn’t want to do that to anyone. Particularly to you, Frank. That can’t happen to you twice. I’d rather you left.”
“Well, I’m not leaving.” I was quiet a moment. “Was that what you were doing when I met you? Were you thinking about it?”
She shook her head slowly.
“I was there to see it. I thought it would be ugly. Gruesome. And that it would scare me. That if I saw it I wouldn’t want to do it. That’s why he unlocked the door.”
“Well, that’s stupid.”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s not going to help.”
“Maybe it would.”
“Trust me. Seeing something like that is not going to help.”
“Yeah,” she said stubbornly. “I think it would.”
63
Through the small square window in the front door I could see her getting out of the taxi, paying the driver, hurrying toward the stoop. Burnett leaned against the wall in the lobby, smoking a cigarette. The radio rested upright on a windowsill. He held it to his ear, listened a moment, then, turning, gave me a knowing look.
“You’ve infected her.”
“With my perversion.”
“Right. With your perversion.”
She was coming up the stoop. Burnett was smiling at her. She lowered her eyes.
“You’re gonna want these,” he said.
He took out a mask and some Vicks. I put the Vicks under my nose, and so did she, and then she put her mask on, and I put my mask on, and Burnett motioned up the stairway with his cigarette.
“It’s a good one,” he said.
On the third floor, an open door leading to an amazingly cluttered apartment, the home of a hopeless packrat. All the other rooms, including the kitchen and the bathroom, were filled to the ceiling with stacked newspapers, magazines, old clothing, old toys, furniture, sporting equipment. A bedroom packed to the ceiling with rows and rows of cardboard boxes taped shut and labeled—BOOKS, PHOTOS/TESTS, MOTHER’S THINGS/SHEETS—and on to the last bedroom in a narrow aisle between the debris, like a dirt path through high shrubs. The last door in the hallway on the left swung wide to reveal a room completely vacant and spare and sterile, with a bare-wood plank floor and a chair toppled on its side. In the middle of the room a man hung from an electrical cord that was bound to a hook in the ceiling. He’d been hanging for at least three weeks, and his neck was two feet long, his T-shirt stained by some brownish liquid that had run from his mouth and nose, his eyeballs bulging out crazily, and his legs blackened and rotten. All around, on the walls, on the windows, on the body, hundreds of sluggish black flies rose up and swirled as we moved. Buzzed lethargically. I stayed at the door and Emily walked ahead of me, stepping around the body slowly. “Emily,” I said, but she waved a hand at me. I said her name again. She was gazing at the body without saying anything, without looking at me. I realized she did not want me there. She wanted to be alone. I leaned off the door and walked out and went down the stairs. Back in the lobby, Burnett stood with the radio near his ear. He glanced up, smiled at me.
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