Saint X

by Alexis Schaitkin

  * * *

  IT TOOK him three months to get his hack license. He submitted the dozens of pages of paperwork for the application. He got a medical exam from a Dr. Khutsishvili in Midwood. He took defensive driving at Safe Taxi Academy and sat for the six-hour exam: What landmark is located at the intersection of 33rd Street and 5th Avenue? Which of the following streets runs parallel to Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard? How many roads cross Central Park, and where are the transverses located? When he found out he had passed, the first thing he did was call Sara.

  “I’ll be making decent money,” he told her happily. “I’ll be wiring some home to you and my gran as soon as I can.”

  “My mum needs new tires for her car,” she said bluntly.

  “Your mum?”

  “Yes, she needs new tires for the car I use to take your son to the doctor and to do the shopping. Although you cannot see us, Clive, we are living every day down here, and every day has its expenses.”

  He took a deep breath in. “Can I speak to him?”

  She sighed. “It would only confuse him.”

  For a moment neither of them spoke.

  “Clive?”

  “Yes?”

  “Be careful on those roads.”

  * * *

  HE LEASED a night shift because he heard it was more profitable.

  “Last chance to change your mind,” said the manager at the fleet garage, a middle-aged man named Larry in an old, beat-up Mets cap calcified by sweat and grime, before he took the money for Clive’s first night’s lease.

  “You’ll never see him without that filthy thing,” the driver behind Clive in line said, gesturing at the hat.

  “Don’t even take it off to screw my wife,” Larry said proudly.

  Clive handed him the money.

  “Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Larry said with a smile. “I’ve got hacks getting mugged on the regular. Half these guys have diabetes, and you can say sayonara to your kidneys unless you want to piss in a bottle all night.”

  In the months that followed, Clive found that the things Larry said were true. It was the most punishing work he’d ever done. Customers ran off without paying. He was regularly accused of taking a slow route on purpose. (How was it that these people, these New Yorkers, didn’t know he made less, not more, the longer each fare took?) Some nights, his first fare found him stuck in gridlock on the FDR bound for JFK, where he waited another hour in the holding area for his next fare, and when this happened he knew the best he would be able to do on his shift was to break even, and he would spend the next ten hours laboring simply not to lose money, after which, bone-tired on the bus home, he might see a white woman seated next to him clutch her handbag and smile kindly at him; at first he was perplexed by this sequence of behaviors, but he came to understand that these women did not trust him, but they also did not want to appear distrustful.

  In spite of all this, the work also had its pleasures. The drivers inhabited a secret shared world. He liked to linger after his shift in the garage, where men played checkers and polished off takeaway containers of curry and jollof rice in the break room, retreated into the prayer room with its three threadbare rugs, groused about the new weekly lease rates in Punjabi and Urdu and Haitian Creole. He found comfort in the ritual details of the garage—its smell of motor oil, the rainbow slicks on the concrete floor, the clouds of yellow dust cast off as the mechanics touched up paint. He learned a hidden archipelago within the archipelago of New York: the Pakistani curry-and-chai cafeterias on Lexington, the Haitian spots in Harlem, the dwindling gas stations, the bodegas that carried meter paper. He learned to feed himself in New York from the examples of his fellow drivers. Deals: two plain slices and a can of soda; egg roll and sesame chicken combo. Egg and cheese on a roll from a bodega, scarfed down on the sidewalk, gone before he tasted it. Foods from home, too, peas and rice and pumpkin soup and fish stew with dumplings, though none of it satisfied him; the scent of island food carried on cold air delivered a sense not of nostalgia, but of error. So much of New York was like that, not-quite-memories and almost-evocations that slapped him with his distance from home … the sonorous coos of the turtledoves of his youth emanating from the filthy iridescent throats of pigeons in the streets.

  There was something about the night shift. He discovered that his favorite New York was the one you could only know at four A.M.: The darkness, which was never true black but a trembling blue, as if the city exhaled the residual light of day all night long, and against which the vivid green of traffic lights on the avenues—block after block of them to the edge of sight—was that rarest thing, beauty as pedestrian as it was exquisite. New York was the city that never sleeps, but it did, and as he drove its empty, witching-hour streets and sailed across its starry bridges, he sometimes felt that the city had been abandoned to him, that every other living soul had vanished into the air.

  He left the garage around six in the morning. On his walk to the bus he watched the sun come up behind the buildings. The oystershell light of dawn. How it tugged at him, reminding him of his old bike ride to work at Indigo Bay. Even this daily sadness he did not mind, exactly. The ache of it was its own pleasure.

  Be careful on those roads. He heard Sara’s voice all the time. Be careful, when a car cut him off on the BQE at sixty miles an hour. Be careful, in the pouring rain and when his eyes yearned for sleep. Her words were the most meager of gifts, a small seed of hope that he had not been completely forsaken, and he held fast to them.

  * * *

  ON A night in December of his first year in New York, he picked up a man in a suit outside of an office building in midtown. Once the man had hefted his briefcase onto the seat beside him and closed the taxi door, he declared, “We’re going to Westchester.” The man told Clive the name of a town at the northernmost edge of where he was required to take passengers, and proceeded to spend the ride alternately reading documents and directing Clive. Up the Henry Hudson, the river a black abyss, the cliffs of Jersey twinkling across the water. On to the winding ribbon of the Saw Mill. After nearly an hour, the man directed him off the highway. A few minutes later, Clive found himself on a narrow road driving through what could only be described as the country. It was his first time this far out of the city. He drove up steep hills from the crests of which the villages below glittered like something from an old movie. In a moment of wonder and terror, a silvery deer leapt out from the woods into the road; Clive slammed on the brakes and narrowly missed hitting it. “Jesus,” the man in the backseat muttered without lifting his head from his papers.

  Clive wondered if this man had ever vacationed on the island that had once been his home, or if he would be going soon, this Christmas, even, or to celebrate a promotion or anniversary.

  “Sorry for dragging you up here,” the man said when they arrived at his house, which was huge and had a turret on one side. In the illuminated square of a window Clive saw a pretty wife in jeans and a sweater. The man handed him a generous tip. “Right, right, left will get you back to the highway,” he said. As Clive watched the man walk up his front steps, and his pretty wife open the door and push onto her tiptoes to kiss him, he felt himself fill with anger he didn’t like and didn’t want.

  Right, right, left did not get him back to the highway, and soon he was hopelessly lost. He passed a silo beside a barn, a hillside where pine trees hugged the curve of the earth. Then the sky filled with white. His first snow. In the beginning, the flakes melted as soon as they hit the windshield, so he hardly saw them. He pulled off the road at a park to piss and pull out a map. The parking lot was beside a pond surrounded by trees and hills. He urinated into the gravel of the parking lot, studied a map for a few minutes before giving up. (Half an hour later he would stumble, mercifully, upon an elderly woman walking a dog, and she would direct him back to the highway.) The snow picked up. He was shocked by the lightness of it; it fell faster than it seemed a weightless thing should be able to fall. He stood and watched the snow melt
into the pond. As he looked at the snow on the water, the blue hills beyond, he saw his own sadness stretching out in tandem with the landscape, as if the land knew his affliction, as if it were weary with the burden of human secrets. Suddenly the colors of home struck him as flat and cheap, a prettiness like white sugar. (And it was really only the water that was pretty at all. The land was dry and covered in gray scrub. The towns were overcrowded with concrete houses.)

  The girl was from here, or a place like it. Any one of these big houses might have been hers. Standing in the snow in the middle of who knows where, he tasted the berry of her lips. He saw her dancing; she raised her arms in the air and her shirt lifted to reveal that touchable, touchable scar. He heard her say again all the disparaging things she’d said about the place she was from. She had lied to him. They all had. All the vacationers who went on and on about how beautiful his island was, how lucky he was to live there, how jealous they were. What bullshit. They had this.

  * * *

  EVERY SEASON in New York had its indignities. The stink of urine on pavement in summer. Trash cans stuffed with the corpses of umbrellas during the rainy, blustery days of early spring. By his second winter in New York, Clive saw the season as yet another thing to be gotten through, the clang of the radiator at night, the black snowbanks that uglied the city (or rather, that revealed the ugliness that was always there). Their landlord kept the building like an icebox. This was illegal, but so was everything about their situation, so what could they do? The shower did not get truly hot; the water came so close to warming him without actually doing so that he came to dread bathing, the almostness of it, comfort held just out of reach.

  Roommates had come and gone by then, Ouss and Sachin and Charles the only ones who remained. Sachin was as volatile and Ouss as earnest as ever; he’d recently been promoted to assistant manager at the hardware store where he worked, and was convinced this would turn out to be his “big break.” The others had been replaced once, twice, three times over, the men different in their particulars, though these differences hardly mattered to Clive. Jean-François kept a laminated picture of his father back in Dessalines in his jeans pocket. His father was ill, and Jean-François would be stuck in New York until he died, paying his medical bills. After four months he was replaced by Dennis, a bachelor who had sent home enough money over a decade in New York for his sisters’ weddings and houses and schooling for his nieces and nephews. He went home once a year, for a week.

  Clive had begun to wonder by then if Ouss hadn’t been correct on that first night—maybe this temporary existence was changing them in ways more permanent than they could fully comprehend. He thought of Hamid, another night-shift driver, who loved to brag about the accomplishments of his four children back in Pakistan, but whose plans to bring them over to join him always seemed to get pushed back to the next year, and the next. He thought of Neer, a baby-faced driver who had returned to Gujarat for the month of December for years. When December arrived that year and Neer was still at work, Clive asked if he would be going home at another time, and Neer told him he would not be going at all. Had something happened, Clive asked, was something wrong? Neer shrugged evasively, and Clive was frightened to find that Neer didn’t need to explain. He understood. The family Neer had longed for, eked out this lonely existence for … it had been too long. The noise and chaos of children early in the morning, a wife’s hopes and desires and disappointments—these things were too much now. He had grown too accustomed to a life he’d never wanted in the first place to give it up. That December, the sight of Neer—gazing impassively at the television in the break room, smoking a cigarette on the curb in front of the garage after his shift as the sun tried uselessly to break through the clouds—was enough to bring tears to Clive’s eyes. He missed Sara and his grandmother, missed being in the company of and under the care and brusque direction of women. He was determined not to let what had happened to Neer happen to him. He would not become one of those men for whom family became too difficult, a thing better surrendered than reclaimed. Yet he could feel it happening to him, bit by bit, as seawater erodes rock. He wired money to Sara monthly, but he called less frequently now. Sometimes he asked if he could speak to Bryan, but sometimes he didn’t try, even when he could hear cartoons in the background, punctuated by his son’s airy giggles.

  Sometimes, he could never predict when it would happen, he would be plunged into Bryan’s life. He was stuck in traffic on the Major Deegan. He was trudging through the snow on an unshoveled stretch of Forty-seventh Street. Then he was in the yard at Horatio Byrd, invisible and watching, as a pack of boys (all much bigger than Bryan—in his imaginings his son was a small and delicate child) shoved him and called him bastard. He watched his son curl into himself and cry. Then Bryan turned and looked at him. He was not invisible anymore. His boy ran to him, and he gathered him in his arms, taking Bryan’s small, heaving body into his large one, absorbing the tears and the runny nose and the brave trembling lip into himself, and in that moment he understood, finally, what his too-big body was for. There had been a reason for it all along: to take into himself the suffering of his child.

  Then he was back—the taxi inching along the asphalt, the snow soaking into his shoes. And he felt emptier than it had been possible to feel before he’d had a child to be absent from his life. He should never have left. He should have found a way to stay. If he had not been able to regain Sara’s trust he should simply have demanded it, so that he could remain on the island and in his son’s life. No, he had done the right thing. Sara needed space and time. Eventually she would soften. It might all work out in the end. He felt better, except sometimes he didn’t. Could you ever undo it when a father and son became nothing to one another but voices? He could never decide—he would wonder for the rest of his life—whether his departure was his single most courageous act or just one more example of his cowardice.

  * * *

  IN BED at night, he closed his eyes and sent himself home. His grandmother’s house, white curtains in the kitchen and the oleander tree in the yard. The potholed streets, Mayfair and Gould and Princess Margaret and Underhill. The three-legged goat in Daphne Nelsen’s yard. The secret, nameless cliffs from their nights joyriding with Keithley. Conch fritters and limeade at Perry’s Snackette. The gas station on George Street and the salt ponds with their pleasant stink and clotheslines on which school uniforms crisped in the sun. The spots where the buildings, the hillocks, the scrub parted to reveal flickering glimpses of the sea. The sea itself. He sat on the sand at Little Beach and looked out at the water. He was not alone. On the beach were all the people he had ever known, the old and the young, the living and the dead. They, like he, sat still and solemn with their eyes on the sea, waiting.

  For what?

  Then it began to snow.

  * * *

  IT WAS January of his third year in New York when Clive stopped for gas at the Shell on Hudson Street and the man at the next pump said, “Clive Richardson? Is that really you?”

  He looked up and saw a man standing beside a Range Rover, and after a moment he realized it was Ron Rawlins, who had been in his form at school and who had gone on to attend university in the States. In school Ron had been a square, mercilessly teased for his eczema and acne. He looked good now. His skin had cleared and he wore a gray suit with a lavender tie.

  “I heard you left for here, and here you are!” Ron said.

  He could feel the weight of what Ron hadn’t said. Surely Ron had heard about everything that had happened to him in the years since they had last seen each other.

  “What are you up to these days?” he asked Ron, who happily accepted this shift of focus to himself.

  “Real estate. The market’s hot right now, my man.”

  How he and Edwin and their friends would have laughed and mocked Ron if he had dared to call any of them “my man” back home.

  “You know Berline’s up here, too,” Ron said.

  “Bery?”

 
“I set her up working in the same optometry office as my girl. She’s saving for art school.”

  Clive forced a smile.

  “Hey, man, good on you for making an honest living here,” Ron said, gesturing at the taxi. “Keep it up, you hear?” He pulled out his wallet and flicked a business card at Clive. “You need anything, call me.”

  Early the next morning, when Clive got back to the apartment and flipped on the light, Sachin leapt off the couch.

  “The fuck, man? I’m sleeping here,” Sachin shouted, his eyes crazed. Drunk.

  “Sorry. I didn’t know you were out here.”

  Sachin spread his arms before him. “Well, here I am. Trev’s driving me mad. I can’t stand to sleep where I can hear that joker breathing.”

  “Sorry,” Clive muttered again, and fled to his bedroom. He had to piss, but he didn’t want to go out and face Sachin again, so he relieved himself into a Big Gulp cup from the day before, his urine swirling with the inch of flat cola at the bottom. He lay down, but though he was tired he couldn’t sleep. He imagined Ron Rawlins and his girl and Bery sitting together in a diner. Ron had his arm around his girlfriend, who was small and pretty and American. “You’ll never believe who I ran into,” he would say to Bery, swiping a fry through ketchup and tossing it in his mouth. After he said Clive’s name, Ron and Bery would tell Ron’s girlfriend about him: an illegitimate child, drugs, jail, the girl. Then Bery would snort at a thought in her head. “You know, he punched me in the face once,” she’d say, without bothering to explain the circumstances.

  * * *

  IN FEBRUARY, his roommate Charles returned to Saint Thomas. Three days later their landlord came to the apartment with his replacement. Fazil was a diminutive man with mantis-like limbs and a tidy beard dyed with henna. He was much older than the rest of them, in his fifties at least, and he kept nearly silent. He prayed five times a day, and Clive liked this about his new roommate, though he had no interest in religion himself. It seemed to him that Fazil had released himself to the universe in a way that made him, not happy exactly, but reconciled to his life. He had a habit of picking his nose and flicking his excavations into the corners of their small bedroom, but other than this he was unobtrusive (in his sleep he was completely soundless, so that Clive sometimes worried he was dead) and fastidiously neat, and Clive accepted his one vice as the cost of a roommate who was much better than he might have been.