The Fatigue Artist

by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  I tried to close his mouth and the jagged hole in his neck. My hands got sticky. I fixed his hair but it was no use. He was beyond repair. The room was crowded with hospital staff. How could I leave him there, so helpless, with strangers? I thought of ways I might get him home and fix him up. I knew he was dead, I just had this compelling urge to fix him up, close his neck and wash him and put clean clothes on him. But they didn’t let me.

  “What happened?” I asked the cop who pulled me out into the hall. I was in that peculiar calm state that goes with shock, much calmer than I’d been about the mouse.

  “I’m terribly sorry for your loss, ma’am. I know this is a great shock—”

  “Tell me what happened.”

  “Well, uh, it’s a complicated situation, ma’am. It’s not really clear, I mean, to explain at this point.”

  “Try me. I have a high IQ.”

  “There was a raid. We came down in a helicopter, see, to get the dealers. It was part of the plan.”

  “A helicopter. In the Bronx?”

  “Uh-huh. But things got out of hand and there was some shooting. Three people were shot, including a cop. Your husband, now. Seems like he was up there hanging out with the dealers—”

  “For Chrissakes, he’s a reporter. He was doing a story for a magazine. He’s been working on it for weeks.”

  “Uh-huh. Dangerous work. Could be the dealers thought he was a ghost.”

  “A ghost?” If he were a ghost, maybe he could hear us. I strove to stay cool as Ev would do—I’d seen him at work, very smooth, very controlled—so his ghost would be pleased with me.

  “A ghost is a kind of undercover cop. You know, he helps set them up.”

  “I see. Well, who shot him? Maybe one of you.”

  “Ma’am, I’m real sorry about your loss. I know you have a lot of questions, and there’ll be plenty of time to answer them down at the station. Maybe this isn’t the right moment. . . . Can I call anyone for you?”

  It’s not true that bureaucracies are cold and faceless. The cops and assistant DAs I got to know over weeks, months, couldn’t have been more courteous and sympathetic, especially after I flashed Ev’s press pass to show he wasn’t dealing or buying, Ev, who couldn’t smoke a goddamned cigarette without turning green. The trouble was, all they ever said was how sorry they were for my loss, over and over like the refrain of a song until I wanted to shout, Fuck my loss, you motherfuckers, just tell me which of you did it.

  Naturally there was an investigation. My friend Mona’s brother Carl, a public interest lawyer, helped me. The case went to a grand jury. The grand jury threw up its hands and exonerated everyone, dealers and cops alike.

  “I don’t believe it. How can that be?” I asked Carl. He was chain-smoking, looking almost as weary as I did.

  “Not enough hard evidence. Everyone shooting at once.”

  Not Ev. He had no gun. “What the fuck do they need? They’ve got bodies all over the place.”

  “Laura, these DAs throw so many facts and so much chaos at the jury that in the end they say, A plague on both your houses.”

  I pushed. I played the holy crusader. A tabloid headline read: “Slain Reporter’s Widow Seeks New Probe of Bronx Shoot-out.” I wasn’t well cast but I pursued it until even Carl told me this was not a movie; in real life there were more unsolved murders than not. I would never get the truth about the bullet that tore Ev’s neck apart. He was dead and I was dead-tired, especially tired of spending so much time in the company of uniformed men, the cops’ blue and the DA’s gray suits.

  I conducted my own kind of probe, sitting in this very armchair facing the river. As soon as I closed my eyes the vision would flash on the undersides of my lids, looking like the movies Jilly used to recount in such minute detail: Ev standing on a dismal, narrow side street lined with tenements, some of them boarded up, a few sullen teenagers leaning against cars, bags of garbage breaking at the seams and leaking orange peels, pizza crusts, and yellow McDonald’s wrappers onto the street. Ev’s wearing the blue shirt and washed-out jeans, very beanpole-ish with his jacket slung over his shoulder—it was an unusually warm mid-March day—talking to a couple of skinny men who keep glancing furtively about. He’s not taking notes; like me, he remembers everything he hears and writes it down later. It’s sunny, but Ev and the dealers are in shadow, near an open door they can dart into just in case. (Why didn’t they?) Down the block, other small groups of men stand around smoking nervously. Now and then a passing car slows down and a hand gestures out the window. One of the men walks over, turns and goes into a building, goes back to the car. Meanwhile, around the corner on the avenue are busy shops, women pushing strollers, old people inching along, a few gripping walkers with string bags swaying from the handles. Suddenly comes a rumbling, not the familiar subway rumbling from down below but a sound that seems to come from everywhere at once, a wartime rumbling few people recognize since they haven’t seen war except on a screen. From above, from the helicopter, it must look like a meadow of upturned heads, flowers seeking the sun.

  The blue and white helicopter is slowly descending, hovering over the low buildings, but to the skygazing shoppers and walkers it seems incredible that it will actually land on a Bronx street on a sunny afternoon. The drone itself is an assault. People shriek and scatter. On the side street, for an instant, they’re too stunned to move. Then they scatter, too. The logical thing would be to run through the open door into the shelter of the building, and in most of my visualizings, that’s exactly what they do. But maybe the dealers know better: in the building they could be trapped, maybe it makes sense to stick to the streets. The cops come leaping from the helicopter floating a foot or so above the ground and give chase, their guns drawn.

  But in the official version the dealers don’t run into the building, Ev along with them, and don’t run down the street either. They run right toward the cops as toward an embrace. They attack the raiding cops. A curious choice, that.

  Well, I’ve run it many ways, I assure you, more ways than I could repeat. And I’ve come to think that Ev didn’t talk about the war, the one he fought in, because he knew how hard it is to distinguish between what really happened and “creative visualizing.” Could it matter to the dead?

  One thing is the same, though, in each vision, or version: Ev baffled, dazed, turning sideways—on the street or in the hallway—to elude the bullet as he eluded me, as if his thinness could save him, making him an impossible target. But the bullet, cleverer than I, knows how to reach him, finds its way right into his papery profile, the left side, just below the collarbone, into soft flesh (oozing a stain on the blue shirt), then another bullet (what for?) higher up, in his neck, and he collapses as if someone’s let go of the strings. A ghost. Drifts out of life like a phantom. He was like a phantom in it, sometimes. And the pain I felt and feel without him is the pain amputees feel in a lost limb, phantom pain.

  I heard about a new method of photography, Kirlian photography, which makes visible the energy field left by an object recently removed. A leaf, say. Cut away half a leaf along the central vein, take a picture immediately of the half remaining, and the completed photo will show a shadow perfectly reflecting the missing half. If they photographed me with that special lens, there’d be a shadow beside me, tall, lean, bemused at the dramatic fate he’d felt so unsuited for.

  A few days after the shooting I went through his desk looking for pages to give his editor. Alongside the typed notes about the dealers’ lives, I found scrawled marginalia in an unfamiliar lingo. Nickel bags. Solid gold. Aphrodisia Cruz. American Eagle. Checkmate. Benny Blue-caps. Crazy Eddie. Tonto and Cisco Kid. Yellows, blues, purple sage. Drug talk, the editor said. Street names. Noms de guerre.

  I used to wonder why he was so intrigued by the drug trade. It wasn’t drugs or trade that intrigued him. It was war.

  When he saw the helicopter he must have thought for a wild moment that he was back in the war. A chopper picked him up when he was wounded, th
at much he told me. And maybe between the time the bullet entered his neck and his last moments, struggling on the hospital gurney to stay alive for me—and God knows I ran, I gave the driver fifty bucks to speed—he was back in the jungle, inhaling terror, not spirit, with every hard breath, sure he’d never get out alive. Though I can’t say, really, what or how he’d think. If marriage is the endeavor to know the other, I failed. Unlike with Q. That’s why I stuck to him. I had to know someone.

  Three weeks after the funeral Jilly came down for the weekend as she’d come regularly for twelve years. At a little after one, she rang the bell then turned her key in the lock. She had a pack on her back. She wore a long flowered peasant skirt, old sneakers, a white T-shirt and a motorcycle jacket, and her hair was up Grecian style with wisps dangling around her cheeks, as if she were trying various identities at once, keeping all options open.

  “You’re here,” I said.

  “Sure I’m here. You look surprised.”

  “I didn’t know if you would be.”

  “What do you think I am, Laura?” She slid her pack to the floor and came and put her arms around me.

  “I was thinking if you didn’t come I might go up to the Bronx to see the street. I have this great curiosity but I haven’t managed to get myself—”

  “I’ll go with you.”

  “Are you sure? I could go another day.”

  “I came to do whatever you feel like doing.”

  It was and it wasn’t as I’d visualized it. The garbage, yes, but the tenements weren’t boarded up and the street wasn’t lonely or grim but lively. Children and teenagers streamed in and out of the houses, and girls in tight, bright clothes stood holding their babies and chatting. A couple of supers swept the sidewalks outside their buildings. A cluster of men played dominoes at a card table in the mild early spring. In between spurts of traffic, boys played soccer in the street. A small-town Saturday afternoon. I was wrong about the angle of the light. The side of the street where Ev had stood was drenched in sunlight, not shadow. On the corner was an old movie theatre showing films in Spanish, several letters on the marquee missing. Next door, along the avenue, was a dingy supermarket with a pyramid of paper towels in the window. A tiny botanica crammed with painted statues of Jesus and Mary and the saints. An OTB parlor with the usual seedy patrons studying the Racing Form. Across the street was a clothing store selling polyester maids’ and nurses’ uniforms. Bicycle repair shop. Pizzeria. Hardware store with a hand-lettered sign outside: Boxes, Tape, String. At the fruit and vegetable stand were piled hairy brown yuccas, plantains, puny oranges and gorgeous overripe eggplants striped white and purple. I wanted to steal something and run. The yuccas, maybe; they looked like grenades, or the sex organs of something very big, bisons. It all told me nothing.

  Jilly and I walked back and forth along the stretch, mourners indeed, going about the streets, then turned the comer to stand once again in front of the building. The door to the basement was closed—maybe he couldn’t have run in after all. Or I might have gotten it wrong and it was an open window he’d mentioned. We scanned the sidewalk for the chalk marks outlining the bodies, but there’d been heavy rains during the week and the few faint traces might have been just another hopscotch game. All the while, people stared at us. I guess they knew who we were. People do, in tight neighborhoods. I wanted to talk to someone but what would I say? Are you by any chance one of the drug dealers my late husband was interviewing?

  At the subway entrance, a yellow-faced skinny man in a brown suit thrust a copy of Awake, the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ pamphlet, in our faces, and I waved him away. Back on our own turf, we went to the local Chinese restaurant and snickered over the errors on the menu. “Listen to this,” I said, “‘Fresh sliced chicken scared to a crispy, various kinds of seasonable vegetable cook in the wok.’ Or how about ‘Egg drop soup served in a large bowel.’” “Thanks but no thanks,” said Jilly. “Look, Laura, it says ‘We can alter the spicy according to your taste.’ How do you like your spicy?” We giggled like schoolgirls. Jilly was in fact a schoolgirl. “‘Cho Joan chicken, first time served in U.S.,’ has been on the menu ever since we started coming here,” she said. “Should we try it?” It tasted bitter.

  The trip was a letdown. We were relieved and disappointed that it hadn’t been more painful, more of a revelation.

  That street never left me, though, like a litany you’re forced to learn in childhood, the catechism or the four questions: it no longer means much, but in idle moments your mind will take up the words the way people fiddle with crumbs on an empty table. I see the street and murmur like a chant: movie, supermarket, botanica, OTB, clothing store, bike rental, pizzeria, hardware, vegetable stand with hairy, phallic yucca. Sometimes it’s in vivid Technicolor, and sometimes faded and wan. We can vary the spicy according to your taste. But it still tells me nothing.

  I DIDN’T GO to the Tai Chi class for a long time after Ev was killed. I watched from the window, missing the teacher and his pithy commands. I read the Samurai creed to remind me of him: “I have no design; I make opportunity my design. .. . I have no friends; I make my mind my friend,” but to tell the truth, the teacher didn’t seem a Samurai warrior any more than I did. I knew he must wonder about me at times, however detached he pretended to be. I even missed the translator, in fact I never pictured the teacher without him alongside. I remembered their phrases about standing firm and rooting my feet in the earth while keeping my body soft and pliable yet alert. But these were words with no meaning anymore and might just as well have gone untranslated.

  Then one afternoon in gray, mild October, I forced myself down to the park. If only he wouldn’t ask where I’d been, just say a casual hello. . . . Spare me the gems of wisdom about yielding and accepting. If he told the joke about having no complaints whatsoever, I’d have to flee and never go back.

  The class hadn’t yet begun; people stood around in small groups. When he saw me, the teacher’s face brightened with surprise and pleasure and he came straight over, the interpreter following along.

  “Laura, how good to see you,” the interpreter translated. “I’ve so often wondered what happened to you. How have you been? Have you been away?”

  “No, I haven’t been away. I’ve been . . . busy.”

  He waited. I assumed he didn’t read the tabloids.

  “A difficult time.”

  His face darkened as the interpreter repeated my words. Again he waited for me to go on, then prompted. “What? Did something happen?”

  “I. .. well, the fact is, my husband was killed a few months ago. Shot in the street.”

  I saw it then, clear as day. The instant I spoke, before the paling but unruffled interpreter had a chance to translate, the shock registered in the teacher’s eyes. The muscles of his face went slack and he moved closer to take my hands.

  “That’s so bad! Terrible. I feel so sorry.”

  “You speak!” I cried.

  As he realized what he had done—the master himself, who anticipated every move, caught off guard by plain human sympathy!—he let out a small gasp.

  “No, no,” he said through the interpreter. “Only a few words. Not really. I’m so sorry to hear this. Please, tell me how it happened.”

  “No, first you tell me why you pretend not to understand.”

  “Pretend?” the interpreter said for him. “I don’t pretend anything. I understand a word here and there. How are you managing, Laura? Are you all right?”

  “Speak to me yourself.” I had learned the lesson well. You need only stand firm and stay balanced. Never resist, just persist.

  The interpreter kept translating.

  “Please,” I said, turning to him. “Don’t repeat what I’m saying. I know he understands. It’s not fair. It’s a deception. Now, tell me,” I addressed the teacher, “what this is all about. Is it some kind of trick? You want a mysterious aura, right? Or some kind of power? You want to keep your distance from us. What is it? You’re not into any hoke
y business, are you? Do you really believe all the things you tell us?”

  “Hokey?” he repeated.

  “Tell him,” I said to the interpreter, “what hokey is in Chinese,” and he did, or I had to assume he did.

  The teacher smiled lamely. “No,” he said. “No hokey business. I speak badly. I can’t say right what I want. In all things I say true.”

  “It’s pure vanity? I’m surprised at you.” Though he did in fact speak badly, with a thick, clumsy accent. Struggling with English words and inflections, he lost all authority.

  “No vanity. Not for me, myself. Say to her,” he implored the interpreter, “what I mean.”

  “He means it’s not personal vanity. It’s for the discipline. It’s important to express the principles correctly.”

  “Not correct only,” the teacher interrupted. “To be “He made fists in frustration and continued volubly in Chinese. Suddenly the two of them, the mutual muses, were engaged in a kind of verbal push hands, partners yet adversaries in a tongue I couldn’t understand, though I knew the teacher was explaining to the interpreter how he wished to be translated.

  “Thorough,” said the interpreter. “He needs to be thorough, and he feels he can’t be in English. Thorough and eloquent. With the right imagery.”