Intruder

by Peter Blauner

  “I was aware of his loss,” Dana says, balancing her words as precariously as books on her head. “But I never really had a chance to talk to him about it.”

  “I see,” Baum says, with a twitch of sarcasm. “You don’t know much about my client, do you, Ms. Schiff?”

  “Im aware that he needs to be hospitalized.”

  Baum smiles thinly and swings back to the defense table, dropping one file and picking up another. He pauses to put a hand on John G.’s back, but Gates doesn’t move. He just sits there with his head bowed in abject sorrow. For a fleeting moment, Jake catches a glimpse of the human being beneath all the raving and screaming. He wonders how he could have felt threatened by this shabby diminished little man.

  In the meantime, Baum is making another run at Dana. “Are you aware, Ms. Schiff, that a staff psychiatrist who’s interviewed Mr. Gates within the last twelve hours found that he’s not an imminent danger to himself?”

  “He hasn’t seen Mr. Gates when he’s high,” Dana shoots back.

  “That’s not the question.” The judge wags a gnarled finger at her. “Mr. Baum asked if he was an ‘imminent’ danger. We’re not talking about what he might do tomorrow or the next day. We’re talking about how he is right now.”

  Dana looks over at Gates slumped down in his seat. Then she stares out at Jake, but he can’t think of any way to signal her. “I guess he’s all right at this particular moment.”

  Baum starts to ask another question, but the judge is on a roll. “Young lady,” he says. “Let me give you a little history lesson.”

  He’s been waiting all afternoon to give someone a lecture. And in Dana, he has a captive audience.

  “Back when I was a young prosecutor, before the Civil War”—he flashes a roguish smile—“I had occasion to investigate some of the more infamous mental hospitals in our area. I saw people forced to wallow in their own excrement and a man chained down naked, being force-fed through a tube. Such things did happen! But thanks to miraculous drugs, we no longer have to keep these unfortunate individuals in these filthy hellholes. We can return people to their communities.”

  It really is true, Jake thinks. In most jobs, they make you retire once you get too old and stupid to function. Whereas that can be your beginning as a judge.

  “No further questions,” says Baum.

  Dana steps down, looking dizzy. The judge takes a few minutes to review his papers and confer with his clerk. In the meantime, doctors, lawyers, and patients involved in the next few cases file into the back of the courtroom. Jake spends a few seconds trying to tell them apart.

  “I must say, Mr. Baum,” the judge says, finally clearing his throat. “I’m in complete agreement that there would be no point in keeping your client in the hospital against his will.”

  A phone rings twice in the background and then stops. DeLeon looks disappointed about missing the call. “As far as his current activity on the street is concerned, I’d remind Mr. Hamilton and Mr. Schiff that most of the old loitering laws have been thrown out recently, except where they apply toward drug dealers and prostitutes soliciting business.”

  Of course, as half the New York bar knows, the judge roams the West Side Highway like a Texas ranger on Friday nights, searching for working girls in his Lincoln Town Car.

  “I’m going to ask that your client stay away from the Schiffs and start taking his medication,” the judge tells Baum. “I leave it to Mr. Gates and his doctors to work out whether he wants to stay on at the hospital.”

  “Then he’ll get out right away,” Hamilton Jr. protests.

  A Criminal Court judge has already given Gates time served on the vandalism and resisting arrest charges.

  “Then so be it,” says the judge. “I’m suggesting Mr. Gates find himself a treatment program within the next thirty days. Otherwise, you’ll be back before me, Mr. Baum, and I won’t be so lenient.”

  The gavel comes down. Baum offers his hand, but John G. doesn’t shake it. He just looks dazed, as if he hasn’t been present for most of the hearing.

  Dana comes over looking forlorn and Jake hugs her. He’s furious with himself. It’s not losing an argument before a judge. It’s the feeling that he’s let his family down at his chosen profession.

  “Let’s get outta here,” he says. “This place is starting to depress me.”

  21

  You know,” says Dana, “the whole time we were in court today I was thinking about—”

  “Connecticut.” Jake finishes the thought.

  The Schiffs are making their way down Broadway after dinner. It’s the kind of languorous summer night that slows the step, makes the air stand still, and engulfs the lit buildings in a buttery haze. Even the long-legged high school girls seem to drift instead of zip by on their Rollerblades. In the distance, the old Ansonia Hotel looks like a cloud made of concrete.

  “We’d probably lose a third of our investment in the house,” she says in a tense voice. “I’m not blind to that. But we’d still be able to afford a place in Westchester or Connecticut. Maybe not Scarsdale or Greenwich. But Tarrytown, for sure. I looked in the Times. They were selling an imitation colonial for four-fifty ...”

  “Dana. . .”

  “You could still practice here and we could live somewhere else.”

  Alex begins to slouch, as if he’s trying to shove his entire upper body into his pants pockets.

  “Dana . . .“Jake starts shaking his head. “Dana, will you listen to me for one second?”

  “What?”

  “Look over there,” he says. He points to a run-down old coffee shop across the street that’s somehow held its ground between the lacy boutiques and pretentious condominiums. “You know who works behind the counter?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “The ex-president of Liberia.”

  “I thought they ate the ex-president.”

  “That was the other one. I’m talking about the guy before him. I helped him get his green card. On his employment application, he put down, ‘Former sovereign ruler of developing African nation. Commanded army of three thousand.’ ”

  “No way,” says Alex.

  “It’s true.” Jake turns toward a Korean deli on the far corner. “I met the guy who owns that place twelve years ago, when he was sitting on a milk crate outside snapping green beans for the salad bar. Now he just bought an apartment house in Queens and he’s got half his family from Seoul living over there.”

  “So?” says Dana.

  “So that’s the Ansonia,” says Jake, as the old hotel’s rococo facade comes into focus. “That’s where Saul Bellow wrote Seize the Day. Stravinsky and Flo Ziegfeld lived there too. Before your time, Alex, they had Plato’s Retreat in the cellar.”

  “What’s Plato’s Retreat?”

  “It’s where I met your mother.”

  “It’s not.” Dana draws back her fist. “So what’s your point, Jake?”

  “My point is, this is still the greatest city in the world. This is where we raised our son. And I’m not going to let some screwball stampede me off the reservation.”

  “Can we get some ice cream?” asks Alex, as Dana starts to sigh in exasperation.

  They stop and watch their son bound into the nearest red Háagen-Dazs parlor with the most animation he’s shown all evening. He’s reached the age where his parents are a constant source of bother and humiliation. Again, Jake finds himself wishing there were a second child in the space between them, a little one who would actually enjoy still having his mother and father around.

  “You know, I think the city you’re talking about doesn’t exist anymore,” Dana says. “Sometimes I wonder if it ever existed.”

  “It existed, all right. And I’ll tell you something else. A hundred years ago, things were just as bad as they are now. They had the Plug Uglies and draft riots. Half the population was squeezed into lower Manhattan and dying of typhus. But you know, no matter what happens, the city always keep going.”

  “I’
m beginning to wonder if that’s such a good thing.”

  “Please help me get something to eat. . . Please help me get something to eat...”

  John G. is shaking his cup to a rhythm no one else can hear and chanting the Upper West Side beggar’s mantra.

  As soon as he got out of the hospital, he headed right up to this part of town and smoked himself a jumbo. But after a couple of days of being clean, he finds it’s requiring greater and greater quantities to truly get off. Instead of that familiar buzz, he just feels angry.

  Angry at the doctors who wanted him to stay at the hospital. Angry at the people who put him away in the first place. The Schiffs. The Shits. And angry at the ice cream customers who won’t give a man a quarter to get high on a nice summer night.

  “Please help me get something to eat, you goddamn motherfuckers . . . Please help me ...”

  Why should he bother being polite? Now that he’s getting back down in that nasty dank little crack groove, he doesn’t see the point of being nice to anybody.

  And then he sees them. It’s almost as if he’d summoned them. The people who tried to put him away. The Shits. The Schiffs. What’s the difference?

  “Hey, you motherfuckers!”

  The lady grabs her husband’s arm. Their kid walks out of the ice cream parlor holding a vanilla cone. John G. tells himself it can’t be them. It’s his mind playing tricks on him again. But then he remembers they live right around the corner from this place. In the house they stole from him.

  At first, Jake can’t believe they’ve run into John G. again so quickly. But then he looks around. A hot summer night with a long line of guilty liberals outside an ice cream parlor on the Upper West Side. Where else would you go if you were a panhandler?

  “I said, hey, you motherfuckers!”

  Alex comes out with an ice cream cone.

  “Gimme some of that, you little motherfucker. I’m hungry.” John G. tries to grab it from him.

  All the teenage bravado instantly disappears. The boy huddles by his father’s side.

  “What are you afraid of?” says John G. “You’re not in any ‘imminent danger,’ are you?”

  “Come on, let’s go.” Jake puts one arm around his wife and one arm around his son and starts walking downtown.

  “ ‘Imminent’ means right now.” John G. starts to follow them. “Not tomorrow or yesterday. Right now!”

  He knocks over a garbage can on the corner. Jake feels his wife’s shoulder shaking and sees the ice cream cone trembling in his son’s hand.

  “Gimme some of that ice cream, you little motherfucker. I’m your father. Do you wanna see your father starve?!”

  The Schiff family starts to move more quickly. Past hardware stores, Tex-Mex restaurants, and sidewalk vendors with blankets full of Dumpster goods and antique lamp shades.

  “What are you all running for?” John G. shouts as he lurches after them. “Don’t you know what ‘imminent’ means? ‘Imminent’ doesn’t mean I’m gonna kill you right now. ‘Imminent’ means I’m gonna kill you in a minute.”

  Finally Alex can’t take it anymore. Perhaps it’s the memory of the box cutter being waved in his face. He drops his ice cream cone and sprints right into the traffic going both ways on Seventy-ninth Street. From the corner of his eye, Jake sees a taxi turning west on Broadway and a pair of headlights coming straight toward his son.

  Some primal instinct takes over. He jumps off the sidewalk and comes running at Alex. His heart is banging against his ribs. He reaches the boy at the yellow center median and pushes him out of the way with both hands.

  Alex goes stumbling toward the safety of a bus shelter on the south side of the street. Jake turns, just in time to see a pair of headlights come rushing at him. His body stiffens and his breath freezes. There’s no time to get out of the way. The brakes screech and light moves across the windshield.

  But the cab stops less than two feet in front of Jake. He looks down at the scratched yellow hood and breathes a sigh of relief.

  And then a bike messenger in purple Lycra shorts and goggles plows into him going the other way.

  22

  A seagull crying. A motor starting.

  John G. forces his eyes open and finds himself on a park bench along the Hudson River promenade. Tall white houseboats float beside old gray docks. Caribbean women with music in their voices push small white babies in well-appointed strollers. A merciless sun stares down hard.

  He’s not high anymore. But in his mind, he keeps hearing the screech of brakes from last night and seeing the cab rushing at Mr. Schiff. The lady standing next to him screams and then her voice melds with the one in his head. And when he looks again, the headlights are rushing toward a child.

  The shifting molecules. She waves to him from across the street. The light turns red.

  Her last words were, “I love you, Daddy.”

  He shuts his eyes and covers his face with his hands.

  “You all right?”

  A wiry old white man in a black Speedo bathing suit is staring at him.

  “Yeah. No. Yeah.”

  “You sure? You don’t look all right.”

  John G. blinks three times, trying to pull reality together. “You know what time it is?”

  “ ‘Bout quarter after three,” the old man says, shaking his head and going back to his tai chi exercises.

  Five more hours until evening. John G. doesn’t trust himself to be outside anymore. He’s done too much damage already.

  He goes to the railing and looks out at the river. He feels sick at heart. An oil-black duck swims amid the driftwood. John G. wishes he could at least be around someone or something from the old days. But all he sees when he looks ahead is New Jersey.

  Another homeless guy comes trundling along in a battered straw hat, pulling a shopping cart full of soda cans.

  “Say, bro,” John G. calls out. “There any safe place to sleep around here?”

  The guy turns; his face is like an eroded beach and his beard is like a piece of seaweed stuck to his chin. “I been staying in the tunnels.”

  A train’s horn blares in the background and John G. starts to vaguely remember something one of the guys said at the shelter. The one with the big belly, who smelled from Chinese food and urine. He said he’d rather be back in the tunnels under the park.

  “It’s all right down there?” John G. asks.

  “It ain’t the Hilton.” The man in the straw hat moves on, as if pushed by a strong breeze.

  The horn blows again in the distance. Big train heading south. Probably the Amtrak Albany-to-Washington line. It gets John thinking about how he once had a train of his own. Eight hundred thousand pounds of flesh and steel harnessed by the handle in his hand.

  The memory brings him to his feet and he begins to follow the sound through the park, all the way to the Seventy-second Street entrance. He sees another homeless guy in a big gray coat disappearing through an opening in the iron fence under the West Side Highway. The entrance to the tunnel. He goes over and sticks his head between the bars. There’s just a yawning void ahead.

  Part of him doesn’t have the heart for this. But the other part remembers the screaming brakes and Larry Loud’s breath on the back of his neck. It can’t hurt to look.

  He squeezes the rest of his body through the fence and starts to edge along a jagged concrete ledge to the left. But then some of the stone crumbles and he falls six feet straight down.

  His body screams from all the outrages he’s perpetrated on it the last few months, but then the pain subsides. Slowly his eyes begin to adjust to the darkness. What he sees is a long gray tunnel, stretching out for miles and miles to the north. Only a stark shaft of light slanting through an overhead grating hints that there might still be a world outside.

  On the right, some twenty-five yards away, a stubby white man missing an arm stomps Rumpelstiltskin-style around an oil drum full of fire, daring John G. to pass.

  The frightened part of his mind is
telling him to turn back. But the other part is going Doris Day on him. Que sera, sera. Whatever will be, will be. Maybe he does belong here. He’s either reached the end of something or the beginning.

  To the left, there’s a kind of underground man’s neighborhood behind a low stone wall. Five identical cardboard boxes, side by side, like homes in the suburbs. He comes over and looks inside one of them. In the darkness, he can make out a GE toaster oven, an old Zenith black-and-white TV with rabbit-ears antenna, a Waring blender, pots and pans. Just like Aunt Rose’s place. Except all the electric equipment is hooked up by extension cords to the streetlights through the grating twenty feet overhead.

  A hoarse voice calls out. “ ‘Scuse me, mister, you lose something?”

  Lose something? It’s like a question he’d ask himself. Only now somebody else is asking it. He takes his head out of the cardboard home and backs away.

  Rumpelstiltskin. The one-armed man who’d been stomping around the fire is staring at him. From a distance of ten feet, his reddish brown hair looks like it’s been scalped back off his forehead, and ugly purple blotches are visible all over his face.

  “No,” John G. says, patting his pockets and feeling discombobulated. “I didn’t lose anything here.”

  “Then get the fuck out!”

  The one-armed man picks up a black cast-iron skillet and throws it at John G.’s head. “WHHAAAAAAA!!!”

  It crashes into a wall a full foot away and snaps him into a new state of alertness.

  “Get the fuck out of here!!”

  But before John can move, a red brick catches him flat on the chest and sends him staggering back against the wall. Booosshhh. The air goes out of him. His lungs feel bruised and his head feels light. He can’t seem to catch his breath.

  Rumpelstiltskin is advancing on him with a rusty tire iron and an avid look, as if he can’t quite believe he’s finally found someone he can dominate.

  “I SAID GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE!”

  John G. can’t stand. Now he’s going to die. He’s sure of it. In a way, it’s a relief. This is what he’s deserved all along. He hears traffic shifting the heavy steel road plates above and he closes his eyes, awaiting the final blow. He smells wood smoke and tries to come up with a mental picture of his wife and child to hold on to at the end.