Intruder

by Peter Blauner

  Tears well up in Walt’s eyes. “Please, Phil. I swear, things are gonna be different.”

  Philip sighs and Ronnie pulls hard on Walt’s hair extensions, yanking him to his feet and then pinning his arms behind him.

  “You know I hate it when things have to come to this,” says Philip. “But experience has taught me that it’s very hard for people to change. They need real incentive. Negative reinforcement, they call it. You ever hear of that, Walt?”

  “Yes. No. I’m not sure.”

  “It means I think I’m gonna have to really hurt you to make sure my message gets across.”

  “Phil, no. Listen. You really don’t have to—have a heart.”

  “Have a heart? Have a heart? You’re asking me to have a heart? Fuck you! I was in the Green Berets in Vietnam, you motherfucker. I bayonetted old ladies and stuck grenades up people’s asses. You think it bothers me that you’re gonna cry?” He looks befuddled for a second and then reaches for his fly. “You wanna suck my dick? Is that what you’d like?”

  Walt shakes his head vigorously.

  “What? You don’t wanna suck my dick? What? Is your mouth too good for me or something?”

  Walt tries turning his head to beg Ronnie for mercy, but Ronnie just ignores him and bends back Walt’s elbows, as if he’s about to break both of them.

  Philip takes his hand off his fly. “All right, now look, I want us all to be practical about this. I was thinking when I came over here. There’s no point in breaking your legs, ‘cause then that’s just another excuse for you not to go to work. Then I considered crushing your balls, but that would make you even less of a man than you already are and I don’t want to be party to that. Then I remembered how we once slit open a guy’s eyelids during an interrogation in Vietnam, but that could mean optical surgery and I don’t know what kind of insurance you have.”

  Walt is trembling so badly that foam is gathering at the right side of his mouth like the head of a beer.

  “Are you listening to me, you motherfucker?” says Philip. “I’m trying to be nice to you.”

  “I hear you, I hear you.”

  “Good,” says Philip, taking a switchblade out of his back pocket and nodding to Ronnie. “So I decided to do you a favor. See, I took this college extension course a few years ago and this science professor I knew, he had a very interesting theory about secondary sexual characteristics.”

  Walt tries to squirm out of Ronnie’s grasp but he gets punched in the back of the head and kicked in the stomach by Philip. Then Ronnie hauls him back up to his feet, wraps duct tape across his mouth, and holds a knife to his throat. Philip uses his own switchblade to slit open the front buttons of Walt’s shirt.

  “Anyway,” he says. “This professor, Professor DeLaszlo was his name, he started talking about the mammaries. You know.”

  He puts his free hand on Walt’s hairy chest.

  “Now everybody knows the purpose of a woman’s breasts,” he says. “Right? They produce milk and nourishment for small children. But why do men have nipples? Have you ever asked yourself that?”

  Philip squeezes the left side of Walt’s chest and Walt makes a muffled sound under the heavy silver tape.

  “Well, the professor’s theory was that it has to do with evolution,” Philip goes on. “See, back in the old days primitive man was a hunter-gatherer. Just like all these other animals and primates running around. Except a lot of them were bigger and stronger than him. So this professor’s theory was that man’s nipples gave the illusion that he had enormous eyes in his chest. Especially if you were looking at him through the fucking jungle. Those nipples could intimidate you. But now that we’ve progressed out of the jungle, we don’t need them anymore. Am I right?”

  He grabs a fistful of flesh from the right side of Walt’s chest and gets a buried yelp out of him.

  “So you see, I’m actually being very nice to you,” he says, bringing the blade in close. “I’m only taking something you don’t need anymore. It’s all part of evolution. Right? We don’t have to live like animals.”

  32

  For the past week, John G. has been out of the tunnels and back on the street. Eating from garbage cans and sleeping on grates again. But somehow the feeling’s different this time. He keeps hearing the words “Friday three o’clock” in his mind. That’s when the doctor will give him the results of his AIDS test.

  He stares up at the clock on the Apple Bank building and sees it’s quarter to two in the afternoon. An hour and fifteen minutes until his cause of death will be confirmed.

  It’s hard teaching himself to keep track of time again. For months, everything’s just been a blur—day, then night, then day—and sometimes when he’s been on a crack binge, just night, night, night. But now every moment matters again.

  He hasn’t been getting high lately. It’s not a conscious effort at changing. He just hasn’t felt like it since Abraham died and he took the test. It’s time to say good-bye to the world and for once it seems appropriate to get his thoughts in order.

  After he’d taken the AIDS test, he went back to the tunnel. The police had taken away Abraham’s body and started breaking up some of the cardboard boxes and huts where their friends lived. John G. hid in an archway until they were gone. What was he supposed to say to them? He’d seen everything that happened that night, but he still couldn’t put it together in his head. Mr. Schiff trying to get between Abraham and the stocky guy. Even with Haldol clearing his mind like fire clearing a forest, it still didn’t make any sense to him.

  John had waited until the police took the body away before he made a memorial to Abraham on the trailer’s front steps, using dandelions from the park and the old Hanukkah candles from inside. He meant to say a novena for his friend, but couldn’t think of the words. “Our Father . . .”—that was it.

  He watches 1:46 turn into 1:47 on the Apple Bank clock. Then it says the temperature is seventy-six degrees. The sun feels good on the back of his neck. It makes the hair on his arms stand up and turn around. Across the street, in Needle Park, an old woman in a brown dress is sitting on a bench, throwing bread crumbs at pigeons. John imagines her sitting on this same bench, sixty years ago, with smooth legs and saddle shoes, putting on lipstick and waiting for some smart young man to come up out of the subway and walk her home, arm in arm. Another lifetime.

  Now she sits on the bench alone and John G. waits to hear when he will die.

  He arrives at the medical clinic fifteen minutes late, thinking he’ll be made to wait anyway. But Dr. Wadhwa is already standing by the reception desk, looking impatient.

  “I thought you weren’t going to make it,” he says.

  “Man’s got a right to be late to his own funeral, hasn’t he?”

  The doctor, a little man with thick wavy hair and a dark cherub’s face, furrows his brow and leads him through a waiting room packed with angry pregnant women, sad stoned men, and joyous children unaware of what awaits them here. They remind John G. of exhausted passengers on a late afternoon train. Watch the closing doors. Why isn’t he being made to wait with them? Poor bastards. One of them, a guy with a smear of greasy black-gray hair, has what looks like a massive purple hickey on the back of his neck. On closer inspection, it turns out to be a huge lesion. In fact, his face and neck are covered with lesions. Like he’s being kissed to death. So why am I getting in before him? John G. wonders.

  Wadhwa takes him into a bright narrow office with a desk and an examining table. Pictures of babies and reproductive systems on the walls and a little bit of blood on the floor. Birth, death.

  “Pardon the mess,” says the doctor. “We share space with an OB-GYN clinic.”

  “I’m not fussy.”

  The doctor sits down behind the desk, folds his hands, and smiles.

  “You’re fine,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I said you’re all right. At least for the moment.”

  The sun coming through the windows. A baby cries in the
next room.

  “What’re you talking about?” says John G. “Is this some kind of fuckin’joke?”

  “No, it’s not a joke. Your tests came back negative.” The doctor lowers his deep brown eyes to the file on his desk. “Your T cell count is normal. Your CD 4 is well above two hundred. There are no guarantees, of course, and you will want to get retested in a few months. But for now everything appears to be fine. I wanted to tell you personally. I thought you’d be pleased.”

  The shelter. The tunnel. The hospital. We have a few more questions before you go, Mr. Gates. You’re being held at the station. Wait for the signal.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Whoever told you they’d given you AIDS might not have had it themselves or perhaps didn’t transmit it to you.”

  A voice calls Dr. Wadhwa’s name over the public address system and he looks distracted. For some reason, John G. finds himself fixating on the way the doctor has his lab coat fastidiously buttoned up. Not like American-born doctors letting theirs flap open casually. This guy doesn’t take one button for granted.

  “So that’s it?” says John G.

  “Yes, that’s it.”

  He feels angry. Cheated. A side of him won’t accept this. He’s been ready to welcome death with open arms. Everybody dies, Daddy. He hears Shar’s voice so clearly she could be sitting on his lap. He should be dead now. He should be with her. He could have saved her when the light turned green. She died in his arms. The guilt of being alive is like a heavy stone on his chest.

  The doctor rubs his forehead and checks his watch. “I must say, Mr. Gates. I’m somewhat surprised by your attitude. In the part of the world I come from, millions of people die of disease and hunger. Yet you’ve been given the gift of life and you don’t seem the least bit moved by it.”

  John G. stares down at his hands. “I just need time to adjust, I guess.”

  “May I ask you something?” Wadhwa swivels in his chair.

  “What?”

  “Are you taking any medication for your . . . ?” He makes a vague circling motion next to his head.

  John G. takes out the amber Haldol bottle and rattles it at him. Just two or three pills left. He didn’t think he’d be needing much more.

  The doctor takes the bottle and studies the prescription on the side. “You might want to stop upstairs and get this refilled.”

  He hands the bottle back and reaches into his pocket for a card. “I’d like to make one other suggestion.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I know that some of the homeless people we see at the clinic go on to a place called the Interfaith Volunteers Center on the Upper West Side. I thought I’d give you the address if you were interested.” He hands over the card.

  John G. takes it without looking at it. He’s too busy staring at the pictures of the babies on the wall. Black ones, white ones, brown ones, yellow ones; some old enough to walk, others newly born. Right now, he feels like one of them. Reborn here in this grubby old hospital, surrounded by the sick and the dying, people who deserve a second chance far more than he does. But it isn’t the pink-and-white cooing kind of birth. It’s more like being wrenched from a warm, dark, comfortable place and forced out into a bright, frightening world where nothing is certain.

  “Congratulations.” The doctor stands and offers his hand. “You may have another thirty or forty years ahead of you.”

  “And what am I supposed to do with them?” says John G.

  33

  How you doing, Mrs. Schiff? My name’s Philip Cardi. I’ve been doing some work for your husband.”

  It’s eight-thirty at night. Jake is upstairs, making a phone call. Philip stands on the front stoop, grinning through the bars of the front gate.

  “Oh yes, he’s told me.”

  “Mind if I come in?”

  Dana gets the key and lets him in.

  Philip steps into the foyer and gives her a long once-over twice. She blushes slightly and leads him into the living room.

  “So you’re the psychiatrist, right?”

  “Psychiatric social worker.”

  He gestures like he’s taking off his hat to her. “It’s wonderful your husband lets you work.”

  She crosses her arms. “Well, it’s not so much that he lets me work,” she says, shifting her weight from foot to foot. “It’s that I choose to work.”

  “Yeah, I guess you can do that if you’re not home raising children.”

  He takes a blue glass pitcher off the credenza and looks at the bottom of it. Why is he making her so uncomfortable? She wonders. It’s not just the long rude stare. It’s a certain arrogance, almost a sense of entitlement as he moves through their living room, picking things up and examining them.

  “So why is it that you’re coming by so late, Mr. Cardi?”

  “Your husband and I, we have some unfinished business to discuss.”

  His smile feels like fingers on her face, probing into places where they don’t belong. She doesn’t want to be alone with him anymore.

  “Jake!” She calls up the stairs. “You have a visitor!”

  Philip puts down the pitcher and starts flipping through a coffee table book about African art. “You ever hear about the things these guys do to their women? How they cut them?” He makes a tut-tut sound as he turns the page. “Right in the privates, so they can’t experience pleasure.”

  “Women have it tough all over,” she says stiffly.

  “It’s sick. That’s what it is. A bunch of savages mutilating each other.”

  Jake comes thumping down the stairs, wearing pinstriped trousers and a white shirt from work with the tie undone. When he sees Philip, his eyes become slits and his mouth hardens.

  “Honey, can you give us a couple of minutes?”

  “Sure,” says Dana, looking uneasily from her husband to Philip. “Holler if you need anything.”

  She goes bounding up the stairs and Philip watches her gray sweat bottoms and bare feet disappear along the landing.

  “She’s a real piece of ass, your wife,” he says. “I sure hope you know what to do with her, Jake.”

  “What the hell do you want?”

  “I still want that school contract for the asbestos work. You thought any more about that?”

  “I think I told you to go fuck yourself. Isn’t that the way we left it?”

  Philip whistles and puts the African art book down on the Mies van der Rohe glass coffee table. “Well, that’s not a very lawyerly thing to say, is it?”

  “You get out of my house.”

  “Hey, your wife invited me in. Maybe she saw something she liked.”

  The fraudulent neon smile again. How could Jake have allowed himself to be taken in so easily by this fake macho camaraderie? Hey, Brooklyn is Brooklyn. He realizes now the whole thing was some kind of setup. He should’ve known better. He’s represented dozens of criminal defendants just like Philip. But this time he let himself be blinded. He’s sometimes told himself he’d give up his own eyes to protect his family; now he’s done it.

  “I’m giving you a choice,” he says to Philip, circling in close enough to smell his aftershave. “You can leave now or I’ll call the police.”

  “Oh the police!” Philip throws up his hands and thrusts out his lower lip. “That would be something! I think I’d like to talk to the police. I might have some interesting stories for them about something that happened the other night under Riverside Park. I think they call that felony murder, what you did. They take your license for that, don’t they?”

  “I didn’t do anything, Philip. You swung the bat.”

  “Yeah, who’s your witnesses? The homeless guy from the subways? Gates? He’s dead. Remember?”

  “If it’s your word against mine, I know who they’re going to believe.”

  Philip’s face reddens. “You try turning me in and I’ll bring this whole fucking house down on your head.”

  Jake takes a quick glance up toward the top of the stai
rs to see if Dana or Alex have been standing there listening. But there’s just a white plastic garbage bag waiting to be taken out.

  He takes another step and goes chest-to-chest with Philip. “Now you listen to me,” he says quietly. “I don’t knuckle under to you or anybody else. Understand? My friendship with Bob Berger is not for sale and my wife’s ass is not for your eyes.”

  “I think you’re forgetting who you’re talking to,” says Philip, pulling his shoulders back and drawing himself up to his full height.

  “No, I know who I’m talking to. I’m talking to a guy who committed the actual murders the other night. So before he starts talking about somebody else, he’s going to have to talk about what he did and then go to jail. They don’t do much plea bargaining with murder two cases.”

  Philip’s pretense of a smile is gone. All Jake sees before him is a weak chin and a soft forehead. And in an instant, he knows he probably could have taken Philip in a fair fight. Again, he’s flushed with guilt for not having done more to stop things the other night.

  “You must figure you’re a pretty good poker player, huh, Counselor?”

  “You get out of my house and you stay away from my office.”

  “What if I call bullshit on you?”

  “Try it,” says Jake, remembering what Philip said to Abraham in the tunnel.

  “Maybe I will.” Philip smiles and bows, as if he’s just received a bit of thoughtful advice. “Kiss your wife good-bye for me.”

  Once more, Jake has to hold himself back from throwing the first punch. Rage is bubbling up inside him like carbolic acid. Philip stops to look at the framed Ben Shahn PEACE poster on the wall and then moves toward the front door.

  “It’s all right, I’ll let myself out,” he says. “You gave me the keys. Remember?”

  34

  Back upstairs in his study, Jake closes the door and picks up the telephone.

  “Andy, it’s Jake again,” he tells his lawyer’s voice mail. “I’m going crazy here. You gotta let me know what’s going on with this case or tell me to get another lawyer. My balls are in a vise, buddy.”