Paul himself felt slighted a dozen different ways each week. No one seemed capable of seeing that he was hurt by their remarks. He did his best—surely that was worth a great deal in the scheme of things. And yet every encounter hid a potential insult.
Little cruelties. He didn’t discuss them aloud with anyone— more often than not, putting his complaints into words made them sound faintly ridiculous. Occasionally he was moved to write a letter to the editor concerning the latest such lapse in human compassion: the woman who got rid of the cookies molding in her cookie jar by passing them out to kids on Halloween, the man who was charged for leaving a puppy tied to a tree for two days in the pouring rain, the neighbor’s little girl who sneaked into her best friend’s closet and tore up all her dresses when she wouldn’t lend her doll. These people never murdered anybody. These were little crimes, little cruelties. But as these unkind examples accumulated Paul began to see them as monstrous in their implications. His letters were eloquent, but he rarely mailed them.
The little cruelties were the worst. They made each day a series of subliminal defeats. Trying to stop them seemed futile—they were too much a part of life in the city. He could never decide if it was the city changing the people, or the people changing the city.
Sometimes he thought he could hear his son crying in the night. It had been like that for a very long time-the faintest echo of a wail, or a howl, as if the boy had shrunk back to embryonic size or smaller and was being tortured in some other world. He used to check on his son, climb down the two flights of stairs to his room, where he always slept soundly, where the covers had been knocked awry with his feet, and Paul was compelled to fix them, tuck his beautiful boy in, kiss him lovingly somewhere in the nimbus of down that covered his face, awed still again by the sweet smell of him. After a few years he finally stopped the checking—he now knew it probably wasn’t his son who’d cried out, and there no longer was any excuse for the nocturnal visitation.
Sometimes he thought he could hear his son crying in the night. But he knew that could not be. Particularly now, when Joey no longer lived there. He wondered how many times it had happened that you heard a distressed voice in the night—someone crying or screaming, someone asking for help—but you did nothing, because that sort of thing happens all the time in the city, and you didn’t know if the person crying was drunk or stoned or just crazy. And there was always the possibility that there might be danger for you there, even from a phone call, because they always seemed to know who had complained. And in any case you’d give it away by your actions—standing by the windows and holding the curtains apart, to see what the police were going to do.
But Paul still believed it was a bad thing not to call—people might die if you didn’t. People died all the time because of inaction, because of all the small neglects.
The day they moved into their new house didn’t go smoothly. Paul made a mistake arranging for the truck and had to pay double for a replacement. Eve complained that she didn’t have adequate time to pack, and spent the last few days cramming unsorted clothing, papers, and junk into cartons and garbage bags. And at the last minute she discovered a whole new series of complaints.
“I’m going to lose my friends, my Wednesday-afternoon bridge club, and the good fresh meat from Kelsey’s butcher. Not to mention Jimmy the flower vendor—he’s been giving me free cut flowers at the end of every weekday for over five years now!” She looked up from her packing and glared at him. “What are you giving up, Paul?”
Paul couldn’t stand to be in the same room with her when she was like that. He headed for the door. “It’s for our safety, for Christ’s sake! I’m just trying to fulfill my responsibility, but I guess you just can’t see that.”
Joey had been alternatingly crying and sullen. Some of his friends had come by to see him, but he’d refused to come downstairs, even when Paul got angry with him about it. They just didn’t understand what he was trying to do for them.
Christ, they thought he was being thoughtless. They thought he didn’t care about their feelings. They thought he was being cruel.
The new house was meant to protect his family. He’d spent years trying to find just such a place. It wasn’t actually outside the city, but in a small community called Globeville, which had been segmented and virtually torn apart when two crossing interstates were built over it. Most of the commuters who passed over it every day didn’t even know it existed.
The day they drove to the new house Eve had seemed increasingly anxious. Paul found the Globeville neighborhood quaint, and appealingly isolated. Eve thought it looked like a slum.
“Half the stores are boarded up!”
“We can still do our shopping in the city, if you like.” She was going to spoil their first day with an argument. She was always starting the arguments. He never could see any reason to argue.
“I haven’t seen a single restaurant or grocery store that isn’t out of business.”
“There’s a pretty good Mexican restaurant down here, and a couple of bars. And a grocery store, just a little smaller than Kelsey’s, but I’m sure they stock enough for most of our needs.”
“So where is everybody, Dad?” It was the first thing Joey had said since he got into the car.
“They’re mostly old people. People who have lived here all their lives, even some who were here before they built the interstate—that’s one of the best things about the neighborhood. I guess old people don’t always get outside that often.” But Paul himself was vaguely disturbed by the almost empty streets.
Somehow the neighborhood seemed shabbier to him with Joey and Eve in the car. A large percentage of the houses hadn’t been repainted in years. A number of the empty buildings served as warehouses for downtown businesses who wanted storage facilities midway to the suburbs. There were delivery trucks parked along the streets, but very few cars. Most of the cars he could see were in the yards, up on blocks and overgrown with weeds, rusting to a dirty cinnamon color. For a moment Paul wondered if it might be the city air settling here.
But it could be seen as peaceful. Certainly he could see it that way. Despite the fact that the highways were almost on top of them, the combination of trees and elevated roadway kept the neighborhood relatively quiet.
“It is … nice, Paul.” There was hesitation in her voice. Paul looked up. A slight hill on their left. They’d arrived.
The Victorian house was in great shape. Paul had checked it out with the realtor several times. Most of the exterior woodwork—the gleaming white frills and gingerbread—was intact, as if immune to the acidic pollution which had taken its toll on old houses in other parts of the city. The red brick walls and gray stone foundations were firm and showed no signs of crumbling or even discoloration. Perhaps his favorite features were the two round towers—like sentry turrets—that rose from the second story, one at each corner. And for all that sense of age, the house had a modern kitchen and a good heating plant. The house was going to keep the city available to them when they needed it, and yet still provide a sanctuary.
An evolution was afoot; human beings were being transformed within the concrete womb of the city, into what he didn’t even want to speculate. The evidence was all around them, the cruelties accumulating into a disease of harshness spreading throughout every metropolitan area.
But Eve and Joey—they just didn’t want to see it. He probably should have moved them all to the country.
“The neighborhood’s terrible!” Eve’s complaints became a familiar litany. “There isn’t any crime, but it’s so dirty here, Paul. I clean the house top to bottom and it needs dusting again almost the very next day!”
“It’s an old house, Eve. You get dust in old houses. But at least it’s not like the pollution we had to live with before. Admit it. Wasn’t that a lot worse?”
“There’s nothing to do here!”
Maybe if he had it all to do over again he’d move them to the country, but he’d felt the need to monitor the progress o
f the city’s disease, and Globeville provided him the perfect vantage point….
Now, he would sometimes gaze out his bedroom window and see Joey digging up the backyard, straightening up occasionally to examine the balls of dirt in his hands. But Joey and Eve had been gone for years, Eve long before Joey, and in any case Joey would be at least sixteen now, and this was a younger Joey excavating his lawn, silently examining the moist dirt and drier clay, looking for dead Easter chicks.
Sometimes he did not recognize himself. His sadness belonged to someone else.
Eve left less than a year after they’d moved into the Globeville house. He supposed it was inevitable—she missed her friends and she could see nothing in Paul’s theories, which even he knew were becoming a bit of an obsession.
What he could not understand was the way she left Joey behind. He was just a child, her child. He gathered she had said goodbye to the boy, but Joey never would tell him what she’d said.
He changed. Sometimes he could not recognize himself. Raising his son on his own was far different from what he’d imagined it would be. Paul never knew how to act. He didn’t know how to convince his son that his intentions were good, whatever mistakes he might make.
He could not convince his son to love him.
Sometimes he hid his son’s toys. Sometimes he took Joey’s homework out of his Road Runner notebook and threw it away. Sometimes he slipped down to the basement and threw the circuit breakers, and the little boy who was terrified of the dark was forced to struggle through rooms of shadow and sudden night.
Sometimes he heard his son cry out faintly in the darkness and he did not come.
“Your son is bullying the other children.” The voice on the phone was distant, unreliable. He should never have allowed Joey to attend school in the city.
“No, not my son. You must be mistaken.”
“He curses the teachers. He writes vile things on the walls. He defaces school property.”
“No, no. It’s the school. It’s you people. I should be educating him here, in our own home.”
“He’s cruel to …
“What’s wrong is you people! I’ve seen the way you let the children hang around outside the school, smoking and laughing, acting like little adults for Christ’s sake! Not like children at all. You’ve robbed them of their childhoods. No wonder they think they can say whatever they please.”
He slammed the phone down, shaking. He could hear Joey moving around downstairs.
He wondered if Eve had sensed that Joey too had become infected by the cruelty.
He wondered if Eve ever suspected what had really happened to the chicks.
He had gone downstairs to talk to Joey. Maybe he was going to talk to Joey about the chicks. Maybe he was just going to discuss the boy’s behavior in school. He would never be quite sure.
When he walked into the kitchen Joey was sitting cross-legged on the floor. He had two oblong lumps of clay, passing them from hand to hand. He looked serene, contented. He made no sounds, but Paul could almost hear the gentle hum the boy’s mind must have made. Paul looked past his son, and saw that the floor was dirty. Gray and white animal fur adhered to the green tile. A sticky substance stained the floor and the lower part of the pale yellow cabinets. He looked back at his son. Now he could see the faint pinkness in the clay lumps, the edges of red, the small gaping mouths with sharp teeth. For several days there had been a poster on the telephone pole outside their house announcing two lost kittens. The lettering was crude, done with crayon, and above the lettering there was a crayon illustration of the two missing pets-one of them gray and one of them white.
Joey stared at him, as if waiting. Paul’s lips moved silently, as if by themselves. He turned and went back up the stairs.
That night Paul heard things in the darkness, small cries and whispers. He imagined someone somewhere was in need of help. But he did not leave his bed.
The next morning Joey was gone.
Today, on foot and on his way back from the grocery store, he had seen Joey, or someone who looked like Joey, standing across the street from the Globeville house, watching it. He’d run to catch the teenager but the grocery sacks were too bulky and he didn’t want to drop them.
Joey had been gone several years now. Paul couldn’t even be sure he was still alive. The police were of no help—in fact, for a time they seemed to suspect that Paul had actually done something to Joey. As if he were a murderer. That had been a cruel suspicion, and by it Paul knew they’d been infected the same as everyone else. Finally they concluded that Joey had run away to, or been kidnapped by, his mother. They weren’t optimistic about ever finding him.
Paul couldn’t see it. Eve had abandoned Joey, so why would he leave his father? It wasn’t as if his father were a murderer, a thief, a fiend. He knew his son must be dead. Someone had taken the boy from his bed, and the cruelties had just gotten out of hand. They had a way of doing that, cruelties did, as if they had a life of their own.
And yet the boy was outside, in the night, digging up his father’s yard.
It was a cruel thing.
Even chicks had their place in the scheme of things. Their deaths could change how you lived within the world.
Eventually, Paul began seeing Joey, or someone who looked like Joey, nearly every afternoon. Passing in front of the Globeville house, but on the other side of the street, like a shy lover.
At night, the boy excavated his yard.
During the day, Paul could see the changes that had occurred to brick and wood, the subtle disintegrations so like plant blight, or cancer.
Paul made sure his windows and doors were locked at night. Sometimes he would wake up and watch the ceiling over his bed, where the shadows of windblown tree limbs and thick power lines tangled over a dim yellow oval of glare. He thought he could hear the sound of narrow hands sliding repeatedly into soft earth, like a dying fish flapping on a sodden wooden plank.
“It’s not as if I tried to hurt anyone,” he’d whisper to the dark.
He’d hear his own voice crying softly in the distance, and no one bothered to investigate.
He’d seen no one on the street in front of his house for days, but he hadn’t been out, and the weather was breezy. Mostly old people, retired people lived here, and the air might have been too much for them.
Despite the breeze the pollution was bad, which was a little hard to figure. Black, cottony lines of smoke floated low over the buildings—a chimney must be working somewhere, he thought. The sunsets were soiled shades of magenta, orange, red, and bruise-colored. During Indian summer the clouds started to bleed after four o’clock.
The gutters were lined with trash, but then that had happened before. A jurisdiction problem between municipal sanitation departments. There appeared to be more cracks in the pavement out front than he remembered, but these back streets got short shrift on road repair.
Stray slivers of noxious pollution rubbed the brick edges of his house. Red decay powdered the gray-green bushes planted near the house’s exterior walls. Occasionally he’d open a window but then shortly would close it because of the smell. Periods of still air trapped the stench in his neighborhood.
Eve had insisted that the house needed cleaning every other day. He had never much seen the point. He kept the garbage in airtight bags on the back porch, and someday he would haul it all out. He kept the door to the back porch closed, except when he needed to add another bag to the pile.
He watched a many-legged insect—he couldn’t remember the name—leave a thin trail up the dining room wall.
Dead insects filled the windowsills. Some nights the house grew stuffy and he ached to open the windows, but he was afraid.
Weeds grew over the curb and softened the borders of the street.
The guttering along the eaves rusted. One of the exit pipes turned brown and fell into the yard. Then he never saw it again. The grass swallowed it. The grass swallowed the walk and he became afraid of stepping into the yard.
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The pipes made cracking noises in the night. He secretly hoped the pipes would break and separate completely—they linked him to the city’s sewer system.
Graffiti grew along the walls of his beautiful, strong house like a vine, flowing with the grain of the brick, then separating, multiplying, seeking any empty space.
One night his garage roof fell under its own weight, crushing his car, but the gas tank had been empty anyway.
Toward the end of the month it rained for several days. When it was over he stood out on his front porch. Water had flooded the gutters. The sewer vomited. Yolky and cinnamon-colored liquids oozed out of the sewer grates and stained the pavement. A grayish human corpse lay face down with its skull against the opposite curb, the viscous water nudging it rhythmically. Paul had the urge to go down and touch it, pick up the lifeless arm and the head, play with it, pass the disease from hand to hand. Sores spotted his lawn. Paul went back in and secured the door.
He could never decide if it was the city changing the people, or the people changing the city.
Joey dug up his backyard. Great piles of earth lay sprawled, decayed while they slept. They cried softly in the distance, but no one called the police.
Paul wandered the darkened rooms of his sanctuary, the dried bodies of insects crackling under his old socks. Sometimes he would try to open a window, brushing leaves and wallpaper chips and brittle insect hulls from the window ledge, but the window fell apart when he lifted.
He watched Joey painting huge green, white, blue graffiti in the middle of the street. Somebody should have stopped him, but no one left their quiet, worn houses. He watched Joey breaking the windows of the house next door.
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