by Rick Moody
The large woman affixes herself immediately to the cellular telephone, or rather to its tiny pendulous headset. As if she’s talking to herself, as if she has just alighted in the car after a stay in the psychiatric wing of the Methodist Hospital. The boundary between telephone call and additional shouted instructions is difficult to pinpoint. “Off of Smith Street! You think I’m paying you to park?” As if she wants to ensure that he should listen to the entirety of her conversation.
He learns many things. He learns about her place of business: “I’m not going to be in time for the meeting. Right. Drilling out in front of the house. They struck a water main. Six feet of water in the street. A union guy got hurt. There’s a liability angle, according to my lawyer. Electricity’s out, too. I don’t care what you tell them. We are in extended discussions with what’s-his-name, right, from the television show. He wants to be attached. Broad audience appeal. Just remind them. Use these words. Broad appeal. Can you remember? I’ll reschedule.”
The intersection at Atlantic Avenue has been under construction since the Persian Gulf War, which is when he arrived. At night it’s an archaeological dig. The city is in layers below the surface. They are burying a military bunker here, under the subway station, and under the bunker they are burying antiquities stolen from the nations of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley. The men are wearing hazmat coveralls, and sparks are raining from their welding equipment. It’s all a tangle when he tries to get across Atlantic Avenue, even down by the other hospital. This passenger is like one of the cats in the zoo. Big cats before feeding hour. Pacing the cages as if they are going to devour the very walls. His boy loves them. His boy is full of joy, and the displeasure of the cats is a revelation to him. His boy has very little memory, and so every day is full of novelty. A leaf of the newspaper skittering above a sidewalk is a revelation. All smells are beloved of his boy. The smell of refuse delights him.
“Dr. Weiss?” she’s saying. “Is it a bad time?”
Saturated with artifice.
“No, no, no. Of course. Well, something’s going to be done. To ensure stability in the markets. Something has to be done. That’s not what I called about. I had to phone the paramedics to come pick her up. They know her by name now, they’ve been over so many times. They actually call her Rosa. Rosa this, Rosa that. Snickering behind her back. I heard some crashing around. Like a demolition crew had moved into the basement. Which is basically true, because it looks demolished. She’d locked herself into the apartment, had the chain up. She shut herself in the bathroom. God knows how long. The cat was starving. I don’t know when she feeds the cat. The cat looks like it has anorexia. No, I couldn’t get in, and she wouldn’t come out of the bathroom, so what was I supposed to do? The television was turned up so that I could hear the news anchor in my own bathroom. I asked her repeatedly to let me in, I was firm but I didn’t engage, and I could tell she’d been at it, you know? A certain way she sounds. Too flexible. You know pretty much as soon as you hear her.”
When he is not driving, he loves to be driven. He loves to see the lights, the skyline, the traffic shimmering above the water. In his own country, you get to know people in traffic jams. You learn their children’s names, their grandchildren’s names. You talk politics. You are with these people for a long time. You have a fistfight, and then later you invite your combatant to dine with you, should you ever emerge from the traffic. Once, he started a poetry circle with young people he met in a traffic jam. Like many drivers of car service vehicles, he has an advanced degree. In European literature, from the University of Delhi. He is most interested in televised narratives. They had American programming, dubbed, on the satellite stations of the Punjab. The program he most admired concerned oil barons of Texas. This program was, of course, deeply indebted to the nineteenth-century novel, to the three-volume sagas. He believes Horatio Alger is shit, actually, though his work is to be studied as a foundation for the American television serial, which is a thing of beauty.
The dispatcher sounds like the muezzin calling to the Muslims. Certain words are repeated. Thirty-one, thirty-one, JFK, thirty-one, two twenty-eight, pickup, Seventh Avenue, two twenty-eight. He fiddles with the volume on the radio so that it appears that he’s not listening to the telephone conversations in the backseat.
“I had to break the chain on the door. Just give it a good shove. I just leaned into the door some, gave it a good shove, and the chain came right out of the wall. I’ll spackle it. Anyway, then I walked right up to the bathroom door and I said, ‘I know you haven’t fed the cat. I know you’re lying to me. I can tell when you’re lying to me. What do you think it’s like to be lied to constantly? Do you think that’s pleasant?’ That’s what I said. She gets outraged, like it’s an invasion. She’s yelling that she needs some time to herself and will I please go away. The thing is, it smells pretty awful. I can tell even from out in the hall that there’s some kind of emergency going on in there. I just say, ‘Fuck it, Ma, I’m coming in,’ and the guy on the television is yammering about concession speeches, and the cat is yowling about wanting to get fed, and I force the bathroom door, and that’s when I saw the blood.”
One drive he particularly likes: to Coney Island. He has a story about the roller coaster named the Cyclone. His wife, to whom he was engaged to be married when aged sixteen, according to the wishes of their parents, is always worried about their son. She is unnecessarily worried; she follows him about, keeping his hands out of things, because he has to put his hands on everything to feel what it is like. If there is rice pudding dessert on the countertop, as there sometimes is, his son must put his hands in the rice pudding dessert. He likes the texture of rice pudding. If there is curry or a korma or a biryani on the table, his son will attempt to put his hands in or on the dinner, before eating it, even if it should burn him. When there is rain, his son proceeds first through the door and into the street with his hands aloft, as if he wishes to catch rain. His wife takes their son to the school for other children who attempt to catch rain, and this school, because it is operated by the City of New York, is worthless, and though his son at one time had the possession of a few words, he is no longer using very many words, and his wife prefers that he stay in the house except when he is at the worthless school operated by the City of New York. His own beliefs are different. He believes that his son needs to be exposed to many things. His son needs to see the Statue of Liberty; his son needs to smell the herbs of the botanical garden and the animals of the zoo. When he is able, he sneaks his son to the cinema, where they see action films and sometimes Bollywood.
Then there is the amusement park called Coney Island. There is the boardwalk of Coney Island, there are the shouts of barkers at the playground, which are also like the calls of the muezzin, and there are the tastes and smells of the playground. He has journeyed to the playground of America. He has returned home to his wife, who is watching a television program about someone wishing to be a millionaire. To his wife, he says, “I want to take my son to Coney Island.” His wife objects, of course, to the trip to Coney Island. She says that their son is a learning-disabled boy, which is not a term that he cares to use. He prefers to think that his son is a sorcerer’s apprentice, so advanced in the studies of his craft that he has no time for the things of this world. His wife protests anew and then she breaks away from the conversation while attempting to guess the correct answer of the contestant who wishes to be a millionaire. She ridicules this contestant. Then she protests again.
Nevertheless, it’s his decision because he is the one spending twelve hours a day driving this car. And so it is decided. They will go to Coney Island, though his wife says that there are rules about who can ride. Here’s how they go: via the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, to the Gowanus, to the Belt Parkway, to Ocean Parkway, and they park their Chevrolet sedan to unload the women in their salwar kameez, his wife and her cousins, so that they might walk along the boardwalk. What a day. Sparkling. It is glorious for every person who lives there
, no matter where he comes from, whether he comes from the steppes of Central Asia, or the desert of the Middle East, or the jungles of Africa, or the rain forests of South America. The bridges, the Statue of Liberty, the view of New Jersey, where his cousins live, this is glorious. The sea is glorious. The open water is glorious. They shoot plastic rifles at plastic ducks, and he gives his son a key chain with a Bengali tiger on it. They eat the snack called french fries. His son has an abiding need to put french fries into the mouths of everyone present. Even some strangers are willing to have these french fries put into their mouths.
And then when the moment is right, and the sun at its zenith, they begin to make their way toward the Cyclone. His wife says, “No, no! Not on that thing!” But he does not pay attention to her imprecations. The ticket booth is before them, and he hears the cries of riders of the Cyclone hurtling through space. The man in the ticket booth is weathered from his many years at the Cyclone, such that he looks like one of the seagulls of the Coney Island boardwalk, which are so gray and so fat and so nasty that you cannot pause from putting a morsel of food into your mouth, unless a seagull should take it from you. His son has recently learned this painful lesson.
“Excuse me, sir, is it possible that I may bring with me my boy here, onto the ride?” Pointing to his son, whose beatific expression is marred only by the strands of drool and by his squashed features. The man in the booth of the roller coaster called the Cyclone cannot be bothered with the semantic categories of intelligence. He has seen it all before. He has seen the riders with no arms; he has seen the riders with withered legs. He has seen blind persons, who fold up their canes and remove their sunglasses. He has seen it all, an ebbing and flowing of physiques. Into this door, America goes, and pays for its ticket, and from this one America emerges, wobbly in the knees—if it still has knees. The man in the booth waves his hand in a dismissive way, as if to say that the roller coaster is no discriminator of intelligence. Only size matters, just size, and his son is now fifteen years old, and he is interested in many kinds of mischief with regard to his bodily secretions, but there is no disputing he is large enough for the ride. “Excuse me, sir, but now I thank you. It’s a momentous day, sir, on which you should treat my son with respect, because he represents the renewal of blessings upon this country. Thank you for your consideration.” The man in the booth spits into a paper cup.
He could go further, of course. He could speak of the Indus River civilization; he could speak of the millennia of accomplishment on the part of the Vedic Aryan civilizations, of Graeco-Bactrian art, a thousand years before that Jewish woodworker ever got his failed business going in the city of Jerusalem. He could speak of Mongol invasions, British occupations, of the Civil War, of Jinnah and Nehru and Gandhi, of his own father, a shopkeeper, in the rioting, of his father’s uprooting of the family from what is now Pakistan, where it was said that a Sikh family could no longer be safe. He could speak of the Sikh emigration, of its scattering, of the Punjab and its ferment, of the Sikh tendency, at least in his family, toward restlessness. He could speak of coming here, of always knowing he was going to come here one day, for the boy, so that the boy could ride this roller coaster, so that the boy could know these things that his father did not know when he was getting concussed on the streets of Delhi. Yet he says nothing. He smiles, and he leads the boy and the women up through the maze to the tracks of the Cyclone. Here is the car of the roller coaster disgorging itself of a dozen teenagers. He and his son take up position in the frontmost car, and the jaded operators of the roller coaster pull fast the restraining bar, and his son is speaking the strange clicking language that he favors, which sounds like an exotic African tongue, and then there is the sound of the chains dragging the car of the roller coaster toward that first summit, and all the women in the back are screaming, and his son is seeing Shiva the destroyer.
There is an interval of dramatic silence in the monologue of the large woman in his car, because she has arrived at an inexplicability in her recitation of events. Her eyes are filled with moisture, which Ranjeet can see in the rearview, but this woman will not be made a mockery of, not in a car service vehicle, which is at the present moment stuck in a sequence of lights before the Brooklyn Bridge, at the edge of an empty section of warehouses near the neighborhood called Dumbo, a neighborhood of strangely dressed young people. After the interval of silence, she rises toward the summit of her own narrative.
“Well, of course the first thing I had to do was clean all of that up, because I wasn’t going to leave that all over the floor, the john all backed up for when the paramedic guys arrived. I mean, I’m not going to go back to the house after that and clean it up, and I’m not going to leave it for the cleaning woman. So the first thing is I’m down on my hands and knees, and I’m cleaning this up while she’s in the tub berating me, saying all the usual stuff. I was a disgrace, blah blah blah, why can’t I get married, like, why do I have to be like I am, which is a disgrace, why is her only daughter one of those sorts of women, and does this reflect badly on her in some way? I mean, it’s not like she had a lot of boyfriends after Dad left. Same old list of grievances, I don’t have to tell you. She gave me curlers once, did I tell you that, and she’d invite guys from off the street—no, okay, sure, I understand. Yeah, I’ll finish up . . .”
Did they envision in the last century that one day this bridge would welcome men and women from India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, men and women from Ivory Coast, or Ghana, or Malaysia, or Sri Lanka, welcome them into the conspiratorial enterprise of Manhattan, promising, for example, that a man like Ranjeet could enroll his son in the schools here, so that his son would not be lying in an empty room with a cement floor at the back of a tiny apartment in Delhi because no academy would take him in or teach him anything, such that he would have to take up begging, and no one would have him, except perhaps Christian churches, no one would massage his strange toes, no one would kiss his strange Mongolian eyes? The bridge, with its stone towers, east and west, seems to answer resoundingly yes to such a question as this, when imagined by a car service driver during dull stretches of traffic, and he finesses the merge onto the FDR before she has even finished explaining again to the psychiatrist about her mother’s sickness, which Ranjeet can’t yet diagnose, though he does hear something about a pancreas. This is a thing he does not know well. The women do not drink alcoholic beverages in his family; the men do not drink alcoholic beverages, except that occasionally they do, occasionally they go out into the parks and they drink and take off their turbans, at least in his family they do this, though they do not let it affect their many responsibilities.
“I’m supposed to have this meeting this morning. About the new project, and it’s ruined, it’s ruined. How the fuck am I supposed to get one of these movies made if I’m always back at the house trying to keep her from ordering me zircon-encrusted jewelry from some newspaper circular so I’ll be able to attract the right kind of man? Or calling the call-in programs, saying that the immigrants don’t respect the nation, even though she’s practically an immigrant herself, and she’s leaving me notes about how I’m supposed to produce an heir or else.”
A spell begins to overcome Ranjeet. The spell of that perfect word, that pair of syllables that changes everything. Movies. It is a word as perfect as the two perfect etymological American exports: okay and Coca-Cola. The word movies may have its origin in Sanskrit, movati, in which one pushes or shoves; movies, culturally speaking, involve a fair amount of pushing and shoving. It is a global romance, a word of American promise as is no other, a word that summons the glittering prizes offered by this land of opportunity, the word movies. He knows about movies; he knows about films of bodybuilders, about teen sex comedies. He knows about sequels. His son also likes animated cartoons with violent passages. The word movies transports Ranjeet Singh, leading him to power up his own cell phone in order to call his cousin Hardeep in Jersey City. He must shout because his cell phone is not effective. They are now a two
- cell phone Lincoln Town Car, hurtling under the Williamsburg Bridge, alongside the East River, in Manhattan. There is a Coca-Cola sign, look there. To the wife of Hardeep, he says that he cannot talk to her now, “Please don’t start about purchases you have just made, just please hand the telephone to Hardeep,” and then, in Punjabi, a dialect known for its colorful curses, he tells his cousin Hardeep the situation. There is this rather large blond woman in the car, and he does not know for certain, but he believes that the woman in question is employed in the business of the movies. Could it possibly be that she is in the movies? Could it possibly be that he has a famous person in his car? Once he had a politician in his car, the president of the borough of Brooklyn in his car, but this did not impress him. Not like the present instance. Because of the nature of his studies at university, he tells Hardeep, he knows movies. Wait, let him listen a little more. And Ranjeet strikes a pensive pose.
“Yeah, of course, these things really make me want to engage in acting-out behavior. I mean, the terminology makes me want to vomit, but I don’t know what else to call it, so for today, I’ll just say I’m having thoughts. Okay? Does that make you happy? Does that mean that I’m no longer exhibiting resistance? I missed a really important meeting this morning. I used to have a career, you know? I actually made the occasional movie once upon a time. Now I’m cleaning the shit out of the bathroom of my alcoholic mother, who has soiled herself and is sitting in the dry bathtub, drinking, with the television blaring, and I’m thinking about acting-out behavior.”