“I’m supposed to lead you away from Roman.”
“And why’s that?” Myers had the cards flat on the table. He filled both our glasses.
“Because what you’re looking for isn’t in a bank. It’s at this big old theater on Third Avenue. It’s hidden there. The whole bank thing is a setup.”
“A setup?”
“That’s right, Myers.” My stare was straight and hard. I had on my stiff poker face and he would never get past it. “We’re supposed to do a bank search. Stake out some branches and hope to find her. She’ll get away, and you’ll think she took the money with her.” I was lighting another cigarette. “But the money will be sitting right here in the South Bronx, safe and sound. Roman didn’t come out and say it, but he pretty much offered me the money to lead you away from there.”
“And what about the girl? Why would she drop you a tape? What did she want from you?”
I took a good deep puff, then swallowed down that shot. “She wants me to drop you.”
Myers laughed. “Great,” he said.
“She’s going home. She didn’t care about the money, Myers. She only wanted to fuck you over. I don’t know what the hell you did to her.”
“She’s a woman, isn’t she?”
“What does that mean?”
“It means it doesn’t have to make sense. Listen, I really don’t think I believe you for a minute.”
“You don’t believe her either. But it seems she loved David Rosario. She didn’t plan to take the money from him. She left it with his people. She delivered it, hid it, and is making her way home. Wherever that is. Do you know where she comes from?”
His eyes went blank for a moment, two dark coals.
“She’s from Boston,” he said, reaching over to grab the cigarettes. He shook one loose.
“You were talking about choices,” I said, feeling like the entire room was starting to swim hazy. “She wanted to leave you that choice. You can chase after her, or you can go get the money.” I dropped the cigarette in the ashtray like I was disgusted, like I was through. “I don’t think you’ll get both.”
“What about you?” There was something on his face I couldn’t identify, which twisted and disfigured those pretty all-American features. “You’re telling me you decide at the last minute to do the right thing, and screw yourself out of a quick break with the past, along with some big cash?”
I closed my eyes I rubbed my temples I fought off the sick.
“I made a mistake,” I said, not sure if I was talking about now or then. “All I want is for you to go away. Take your feds and your Arabs and all your national security bullshit and just go away. Just leave the South Bronx out of it.”
The music was a loud pounding and I didn’t even know what it was, some rhythmic plodding monster with too much cowbell, too much timbales.
“I’ll cover you,” he said. “You’ve got a deal. Can we get the fuck out of here now? This music is driving me crazy.”
20.
Monday morning.
Drizzle gray. Sidewalks stained a dark wet. Streets usual with cars, peds. Cops cruise lazy. Riot gates rattle upwards. Boxes of cheap sneakers outside a discount store. An electronics store booming bass tracks.
The row of fluorescents make musical clinking sounds as they wake. Escalators grr to step. The coffee machine sputters as it delivers. Elevators hum steady on test runs and blink lighted numbers. A certain stockboy lingers around the cuties at the cosmetics counter. Bankable realities, predictable even in sleep. There was no thread, no link. Alex could come and go at any time. Nothing would be altered. He would not be missed. It was the daily rut of life that hinted at permanence.
Monk told him it wasn’t a bad thing, to remember. He gave him a copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s book, The Sirens of Titan. It told the story of the army of Mars. It was made up of people kidnapped from earth. The people had been implanted with devices that caused them intense pain should they disobey by trying to remember who they were or where they really came from—from earth, the very place they were being trained to invade and destroy. Monk said it was almost the story of Puerto Rico. It was the first real good laugh that Alex shared with anyone all weekend. It was always true: When dessicated images rushed in, out of sequence, Monk was the best person to clear up the fog. He could hammer out the narrative, form bridges between moments. How funny that this time it seemed Monk who needed a bridge, who hung on his words, whose eyes showed wonder and amazement. Alex suspected that Monk did not believe what he had seen, a form of madness that served as inspiration. Alex confirmed reality, and in that same way Monk returned the favor. After he left Monk’s, though, something else sank in. It was the return to the inner click of the clock. The return SNAP like typewriter carriage to the monotony of everyday ritual. It hit him worse today, the climbing solo into the tiny red Honda Civic, the driving solo to work, the sense of weary surrender to the obligations of another Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday workday.
Henderson’s department store was a block thick, 149th Street to Westchester Avenue. Five floors, twenty-one departments. Leading the way in the grand redevelopment of the South Bronx hub. Incorporated several independent businesses on the ground floor, including a restaurant, a photo shop, and a shoe store that ran along the Third Avenue side. In its long window, shoes struck poses. This was where Alex found Benny after he pulled up the riot gates.
Benny’s problem lately was shoes. He had developed a severe fixation with them. He cut pictures from magazines and newspapers. He was banned from Miki’s parties, because at her house shoes are removed and lined up in the entryway, two by two. Benny swiped shoes, swapping sometimes for whatever he had on. He asked Alex for catalogs, for lists of the best shoe stores in town. Looked up foot fetish clubs and websites. And he started making regular appearances at the shoe store.
“Not again,” Alex said.
Benny was standing in front of the long window. Clutching a coffee and waiting for the curtain to go up on his favorite vitrina.
“Hey, I’m fine, thanks for asking,” he said. “You don’t have to act like I need therapy or something. I only came to visit. Maybe check out those new men’s casuals that came in last week.”
Benny followed him inside. The store was not open yet. Mac was still vacuuming carpets. Adrian and Douglas were unpacking the last shipment in the stockroom. They knew Benny. They all said hi. Benny looked awful nervous standing around all those tiers of shoes. The delicate way the high heels were tilted, posed ladylike to accentuate those curves—the strapless sandals, furry mules, studded suede. His face was shiny with sweat.
“I don’t think you should be in here looking at shoes, man.”
“It’s not the shoes, Alex. Fixations always have their roots in something else. It’s always like that. A man who collects stamps has a licking fetish. I just came to see you. Say hi. I know it must have been a long weekend. What with the anniversary and all.”
“Anniversary?”
“Yeah, this weekend. You can’t tell me you forgot. Damn, I feel like one of those spots on THE HISTORY CHANNEL. This Week in History. Something special happened this weekend. Can you remember what it was?”
“This Week in History.” Alex covered his face with his hands for a moment. “The first woman to fly across the Atlantic. 1928. Amelia Earhart flew as a passenger in a plane that took twenty-four hours forty-nine minutes to cross the Atlantic.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“The plane was a Fokker FVII-b,” Alex said.
“The lengths some people go to. I meant something personal. Something that happened to YOU personally three months ago this weekend.”
Alex shook his head, walking toward the stockroom. “I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember. You think I believe that?”
Benny was the kind of person who you walk away from, who follows. Belinda was the same. She liked to mark anniversaries. There was that one month anniversary, that two month anniv
ersary, that third month. Alex always forgot. Now she was gone and there were no more anniversaries to forget. There was no point now in paying storage costs. He had planned to waste away the weekend in a mad, delirious blur. It might have been just that, if he had maybe followed Monica upstairs. Maybe then, no flowered dress hanging from his shower curtain rod.
“Considering all that,” Benny continued, “I thought it would be a very long weekend. The stiff need for extra medication. So I really only meant to ask you about the drinking.” A whole wall of ladies’ pumps, climbing steep to stiletto, gave him pause. “So how’s the drinking?”
“No,” Alex said.
“Is that what you’ve been doing, piling useless facts in there to cram out the unwanted? Amelia Earhart, Jesus Christ. Look, I brought you a coffee. Help sober you up. You know I don’t drink coffee. I don’t do stimulants of any kind. You know that.”
Benny tried to hand him the coffee but Alex wouldn’t take it. He had pulled out feather duster number seventy-eight quill, and was stroking the curvy strapless sandals with it.
“Oh yeah,” Benny said, stepping back to watch. “Do that.”
Alex stopped stroking. He grabbed the coffee, uncapped it, took a sip. Mac had just finished vacuuming. Adrian put the finishing touches on a sign for the window.
“Okay, here.” Alex handed Benny the feather duster number seventy-eight quill. “Just look busy.”
Benny snatched that shit and began right away dusting, at first too furiously so the high heels fell over from his overeager. Alex had to calm him slow him remind him that the shoes weren’t going anywhere. They were his captives, his willing playthings. He could take his time and treat them like ladies. And so Benny calmed down, gradually working himself up again so that by the time he got to the chancletas he was sheeny with sweat.
“Six months, three months, does it really matter? You probably meet a new woman every day. Every new one takes a coat of paint off the old one. Does it work like that? It’s a cycle, a mechanism. It’s always related to something else. Maybe guilt? You’d be surprised how often guilt comes up at all these encounter sessions, I’ve heard it a million times. It’s all about habits, man. That’s what I’ve learned. A cigarette, a drink, a cup of coffee—it becomes a habit. Habits are hard to break, unless you replace one habit with another. Andrew Weil says that. It’s the same with dieting.”
He gave Alex a poke with the feather duster number seventy-eight quill.
“You have to burst the old bubble. You have to create a new habit, man.”
Benny escorted him outside as if he knew it was time for the cigarette to go with the coffee.
“Don’t fool yourself.” Benny handed him the feather duster number seventy-eight quill. “By perpetrating these cycles of repetition, you keep the past alive. You’re not getting over anything. On the contrary, you’re making it a bigger part of your everyday life.”
Benny handed him a card.
“Sexaholics Anonymous?”
“That’s right, bro. Could really help you. I have a FEAR OF CROWDS group session coming up. I gotta get on the subway.”
Benny gave him a pat on the shoulder, then headed up the block toward the train. He gave Alex a glance back, an admonitory finger-wagging.
Alex sipped the coffee. Lit a cigarette. Thought about her and felt a nervous twitch in his guts. He was thinking his life had always been meaningless. This memory-no-memory thing was just a symptom. A man wouldn’t waste time trying to remember things that don’t matter. He hadn’t been trying to remember. His thing was forgetting. This time he felt differently about that. He had never had to think about this process before. It was unconscious, a result, whether drinking or not, whether some button he unconsciously pressed or not. This time, he was thinking about it.
Alex was thinking that he wanted to remember. He wanted to see her clearly, coming and going. He wanted to remember every moment that went down, whether bed whether fire escape window whether she was whispering in his ear. “I was never here.” He had never been around anyone who tried to make him forget. That was new.
He was staring across the street now, at the grandiose Banco Popular. The permission letter that she had in her things had this address on it. It was one of those little synchronicities that left him a little more pensive.
“I think you’ll see her again,” Monk had said. Why? Why did he get that feeling?
“I think you’re wrong,” Alex had replied, as Monk walked him downstairs. They’d stopped by Hector’s newsstand on the corner, the place where Monk punctually picked up his daily copy of EL DIARIO. “I have enough meaningless experiences. Maybe it’s why I prefer to forget.”
Monk had seemed to accept that as he nodded to Hector and grabbed his copy of the newspaper. “But maybe the thing isn’t so much about how meaningless things are,” he said, “as how much meaning you are willing to give them.”
Now out on the street he started to think about the meaning or not-meaning of wasting his time working in the shoe store today. He had no desire to go back in there and try to have a normal day. He had never felt such a strong impulse to just walk away from it. When Adrian came out looking for him, he felt like smacking the guy.
“What is it? What? Can’t you do anything yourself? Can’t a guy have a cigarette in peace?”
Adrian grinned. “You’re crabby,” he said.
The coffee left a black stain on the sidewalk.
21.
The subway headlights made her squint. It was an action poem gone bad. The floaty slow rocking. A black tunnel through the belly. PJ Harvey asked, do you remember the first kiss? Red light, green light. She sat her ass right where it said PLEASE GIVE THIS SEAT TO THE ELDERLY OR HANDICAPPED, across from SAY GOODBYE TO BAD SKIN! Train sharp-dipped into curve with screechy howl. Lights flickered, cars bouncing slow glide into station. The rush of air WHOOSH as doors opened and bodies pressed in or made firm. The 59th Street N/R stop at Lexington has to be one of the worst designed train stations in all of North America. The platforms are narrow and obscured throughout by construction. People crowd the only two stairwells, so on both sides push-shovejostle while waiting for first sign of train blowing in. Always packed because both uptown and downtown trains arrive on the same platform. Trains slam wind from opposite sides and rush hour’s always on one way or the other. And yet, when the train climbs out from tunnel to above
one of the best views of Manhattan available on the N train as it curve twists along bridge to sky. Crossing East River to Queens PAUSING long enough for all tourist cameras to go SNAP at that crowded island, afloat asea with its two shiny towers
the thick steel masts of a great ship
(as she had always seen it on a card in a picture book through a dream)
Queens, the book said—the most populous and diverse borough in all of New York. (Aren’t they all?) Blocks are long. Tons of newsstands, bakeries, and laundromats. Lots of Greeks who drive their cars as if the devil is chasing them. (More accidents on Queens Boulevard per capita than any stretch of road in the entire state.) Ava’s knowledge of Astoria came from Trudy. Her boyfriends were generally from everywhere scattered, so she got to know places like Belmont like Bay Ridge like Brighton Beach, and this Astoria—how Ava remembered just off the N stop at Broadway, how their walk together took them past banks banks banks. At least five branches in a row of long blocks. Her home branch was on 86th Street, but there was no way she was going there. Could be people waiting for her. Same for her apartment, same for work. Alan would be looking for signs. He’d have his electronic ears wide open. The moment a transaction went through, he would know. He would trace her. Ping! She had seen him use bank transactions, credit card purchases, looped video sequences from mall security cameras. It was why she came up with this little side trip to Astoria. If he was going to spot her, she would make sure he got a bead on her in a place far from where she planned to go. Alan could also very easily put a block on her account. Not only could she not remove money, e
ven from an ATM, but if she was stupid enough to try and cash a check at another branch of her bank, they might stall her and notify the police. She didn’t think Alan would do this, at least not yet. Was she just hoping, was she being stupid? At the most, she could hope to beat him to it. The last thing Alan would want to do is give her some warning that he was on to her. He preferred to tail someone secretly and pop up on them, out of the blue. She would be entering the bank. She would be standing on line. She would look to the side and she would see him, standing beside a sign advertising free toaster ovens for anyone opening a new savings account. This was the stuff of screams. She would stick to the ATMs.
The first bank she hit was just one block down from Broadway. She kept telling herself to keep cool, keep calm. She could hit five banks in twenty minutes and walk off with about two thousand dollars, imagining him sitting in front of a map with his twinkling lights and his connectthe-dots. He was circling to TRIANGULATE her position, he would be sending out units, notifying police squads, while tracking her movements until he would lose her. Until she did something else to give him a new track, because it might be better to lead him toward something than away from—where had she heard that before?—and then she was dipping her card to get inside the ATM room of a bank still closed since it was not yet 9
just barely opening time as she inserted her card, thinking there was no way he could have done it, there was no way. (She typed in her pin code.) The screen seemed to freeze for a moment. There was a strange, ominous flash. The screen went blue.
WE ARE UNABLE TO PROCESS YOUR REQUEST.
ACCESS TO THIS CARD HAS BEEN DENIED.
PLEASE CONTACT A BANK REPRESENTATIVE.
The rest was blur. The rest was a mad rage a red light a green light and how she wanted to smash things. There was a block on her account! How? How had Alan worked so fast? There was no way he could have done that this very morning. He couldn’t have done it over the weekend—the murder went down on Saturday. There was no way he could have known prior to that, or suspected she would run. Yet the block was there, already set up in the machine. Now her card had been confiscated. She couldn’t even try another machine. That’s what made her the angriest, the thought that Alan had already laid a block on her by Friday, one full day before the setup, the handover, the action sequence. Alan had cut her off. Before any betrayal, he had betrayed her first. There was no other explanation.
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