At exactly half past nine that evening, after a hot bath and a shave, he puts on a fresh shirt and clean jeans, makes his bed, dims the lights and puts on some music—early Frank Sinatra. At five past ten, Poison rings his apartment, and he lets her in. She has hair the color of Mercurochrome and a freckled face that belies her twenty-eight years, a slight discrepancy with the nineteen years she claims in her ad in the Village Voice.
Efren shows her a clip of the ad as soon as she steps in. “You look exactly like your photograph,” he says. She doesn’t smile, but heads straight to the sofa, where, slumping, she suddenly seems smaller than she is. “I can’t offer you a drink,” Efren says. “Too cold to go out and get anything. Do you like the cold?”
“Two words,” Poison says. “Take-out.”
“No, I don’t think so. I mean, it’d be such an imposition to ask people to deliver anything in this weather. I never really understood people who did that, order take-out in foul weather, that is. It just seems so inconsiderate.”
“Yeah, but it’s their job. Plus they get tips.”
“Anyway, what I meant to say was, I apologize for not having anything to drink.”
“I don’t drink,” Poison says. She has a voice that sounds like a whine, as though she never learned to speak properly until, say, age six. It’s jarring and artificial. He likes that.
“Is Poison your real name?”
Poison laughs. “Of course it is.”
“Who’d name their kid Poison?”
“It’s my name, okay? I chose it myself. ’Cause that’s what I am.” When she talks she has a way of jerking her upper body forward, as though the slightest intake of air made her ample bosom too heavy to bear.
“Are those real?”
“What?”
“Those breasts. Are they real?”
“Of course they’re real. What the fuck do you think they are, plastic?”
“Oh, I didn’t mean anything like that. I mean they’re just so lovely, that’s all. Under the light of that lamp.”
“Yeah, right. I need a drink.”
“You said you don’t drink.”
“Gotta start sometime.”
“You want some chocolate milk?”
“Jesus.”
The doorbell rings again. Efren presses the buzzer and says, “Come on up.”
“You expecting company?” Poison asks.
“Yes.”
“You never said you were expecting company.”
“I am.”
Efren opens the door for Taylor. Taylor is a big black guy with a pretty face and close-shaved head.
“I was hoping you’d like Taylor,” Efren tells Poison. “Just you and him.”
“You pay extra,” Poison says. “If you watch.”
“It’s a blind date,” Efren says. “I wanted you to meet someone nice.”
“The fuck you did,” Poison says. “You gonna pay double.”
Taylor sits across from her and throws a small plastic packet on the table. “What’s the matter,” he says. “You got a problem with black guys or something?”
“Yeah, I got a problem when it’s not in the fucking agreement.”
“Taylor never asks me to pay double. Taylor never asks me to pay anything.”
“Well, tough. I’m not here to meet people, you know? What the fuck you trying to do?”
“Hey,” Taylor says, spreading his arms out and hanging them on the back of the seat. “It’s your business. I’m just a guest here.”
“Well, why don’t you two have a go at it,” Poison says. “Maybe you’ll like it.”
“You shouldn’t be so inflexible,” Efren says. “You never answered my question.”
“What?”
“Whether you liked the cold.”
“I hate it, okay? Wish I were in fucking Bahamas. Or Israel. Anywhere but here. That good enough for you?”
“Do you like what you do?” Efren asks her.
“I dreamt about it since I was a kid, okay?” Her fingers have wandered towards the packet on the table, and now they are tracing the edges of it shakily.
“Go ahead,” Efren says. “Taylor brought it for all of us.”
She scoops the packet and tears it open viciously, like a bird of prey tearing a mouse. She dips a forefinger in and sticks it up her nose, inhaling deeply, closing her eyes.
“Good girl,” Efren says.
“Price has gone down a bit this week,” Taylor says. “I can get you more, if you like.”
“It’s a good time to have a habit,” Efren says.
Suddenly Poison is choking. She wheezes and sneezes and spits out a glob of milky white spit. “Stupid fuck! It’s fucking baby powder, you stupid fuck!”
“What?” Taylor picks up the packet, feels the powder with his finger, and says, “Fuck. Well, I’ll be fucked.”
“Yeah, you’ll be fucked, you fuck, making me snort baby powder. Think I’m stupid, you fuck? Think you can get any fuck with this shit? I ain’t fucking you, or you, or any fuck. You’re not getting anything with this fuck.”
Efren hands her a tissue. “Go home, Poison. You’re no fun.” He pulls out some bills and gives them to her.
“Well, yeah, fuck that. Blind date, my ass.” She stuffs the bills in her jeans pocket. “You think you can get ass with baby powder, shove it up your ass, fucking faggots.” She’s still spurting a string of invectives as he shows her out, and when he shuts the door her voice, a sputtering of fucks, echoes through the hall. When he turns around Taylor is grinning under the lamp, his arms stretched out.
“Blind date, my ass,” he says. “I told you she ain’t gonna buy it.”
“It was a surprise. People get interesting when they get surprised.”
“Well, she didn’t find it interesting, you know what I’m saying?”
“She seemed like a nice girl. Don’t you think she was a nice girl?” Efren picks up the packet and smells the powder. “It does smell like baby powder, you know.”
“Well, you told me to fill it with baby powder, that’s what I did.”
“Funny. Anyone could have told it from the smell.”
“She seemed like she wasn’t used to it.”
“She’s only nineteen.”
“My ass.”
He gives Taylor money and Taylor gets up to go. “You have a good life,” Efren tells him.
“You’re a fucking nut job, man,” Taylor says. “But as long as you rich, you can be as fucked up as you want.”
“Oh, I get it now,” Efren says.
“What?”
“ ‘Wearing smells from laboratories. Facing a dying nation.’ ”
“Yeah, right. Well, you just have—”
“It’s the lyrics of a song. From Hair. You remember Hair?”
“No.”
“It’s been running in my mind all day. It was driving me crazy. Does that ever happen to you, Taylor? Like you want to remember something, and it’s just there, but it won’t come out?”
“Happens all the time.”
“And now I can’t remember the lines after that. Of moving paper fantasies. That doesn’t make much sense, does it? Then again the sixties never did. Or was it the seventies?”
“Yeah, man, whatever.”
“Well, too bad we couldn’t do anything tonight.”
“You got my number, man.”
The next morning, like a wake-up call, Christina is on the phone again. “Call her up, at least. You know where she is.”
He buries his head under a pillow and groans. “Sweet Christina, how can I even think of calling up when I just blew two hundred bucks on an experiment that went nowhere?”
“Or if you can’t, come to court tomorrow. She needs all of us. She cared about you, dammit.”
“She still sends me money, like a good mom. You know that, Christina?”
“That’s tomorrow at nine.”
“And I want to make that money work, you know?”
“Be there.”
> “Do something useful, for a change. You think that’ll help, my lipo suctioned one?”
Two hours later he is heading for the subway station at Church. The wind is cold, the sky bright but full of tattered rags of clouds, and all along Canal muddy puddles gleam like costume jewelry. He takes the A train to Seventy-second, reading the paper all the while and looking up only when his stop is next. Since he moved to New York, he’s always had this uncanny ability to know when his stop is next. It’s an acquired instinct. You could blindfold him and shut his ears and he’d still know. He walks east to Central Park, and keeps on walking around and around the Great Lawn for a couple of hours until the wind gets colder and the sun hides behind ash-gray clouds and becomes a smear of light. He comes to a hot dog stand off the Delacorte Theater and asks for a hot dog with everything on it and a Classic Coke. A young Hispanic boy approaches him and asks for change. He picks out three dimes and hands them to the boy. The hot dog vendor, an Albanian immigrant with a scraggly mustache, says to the boy, “Go away now, get the fuck out of here.” Efren tells him to make that two hot dogs and two Cokes. Then he catches up with the boy and gives him the extra order. The boy is taken aback. He extends his hands to accept the offer and then pulls his hands back, looking quizzically at Efren.
“It’s a hot dog,” Efren says. “You eat it. That nice man wanted to give it to you.”
The boy takes the hot dog and the Coke with a smile that looks like a grimace.
“Come on,” Efren says. “Let’s eat by the lake. A picnic.”
The boy doesn’t seem inclined to do so, but he steps behind Efren, as though the meal put him in his debt.
“You got a name?” Efren asks him.
“Raul Echeverria,” the boy says.
“A fine name. A gentleman’s name. An honorable name. How old are you?”
The boys thinks for a while. “Twelve.” And then, “Eleven.”
“A fine age. A wonderful age. When I was eleven I tried to learn how to roller-skate. Do you roller-skate, Raul Echeverria?”
“No.”
“Neither do I. Pulled my fucking arm out. A bad fall. Poor motor coordination or something. You got a family?”
“My father, my brother, and my uncle.”
“Where do they live?”
The boy pointed north, vacillated, then pointed south.
“That narrows it down,” Efren says. “Let’s eat.”
They sit on a bench by the lake. Ducks paddle towards the bank. Efren tears a piece of bread and throws it at them. They fight over the piece, creating ripples in the green water.
“Thank you for coming on such short notice,” Efren addresses the ducks.
The boy chuckles.
“You have a nice smile, Raul Echeverria,” Efren says. “You should do that more often. The world’s not that bad.”
“My father say New York is full of bad people.”
“And he’s probably right. But New York doesn’t speak for the world. You tell him that. Tell him I said so.”
“My father say don’t come home.”
“Why not?”
“Because I see him and Maria.”
“Oh. I’m sure whatever it may have been, he and Maria wouldn’t want you to stay out all night.”
“He said he kill me. He hit me here.” He rubs a hand against his belly.
“Does it still hurt?”
“No.”
“Then you’re okay. I think.”
“You are doctor?”
“Jesus, no. What the hell am I? I guess I’m a scientist. A man of science. I conduct experiments. I set up situations, and I try to predict the outcome. To see what people do under certain situations. Do you know what I mean?”
“No.”
“It’s like this. I experiment with people. I don’t stick pins into them or give them stuff or whatever. I just watch them. Well, I don’t do just that. I sort of manipulate situations. You know what I mean?”
“No.”
“Well, for instance, I walk down Broadway, and I see an old lady, and, out of the blue, I offer to help her cross the street. You know what happens when I do that? They get terrified. They look around for the police.”
“That is science?”
“Oh, bright boy. I knew there was something in you. I could tell. How about this. I take the subway to Brooklyn. Past midnight. There’s a drunk drooling on the train. There’s no one else. He smells of piss. I walk to him and shake him awake and give him ten dollars. I go back to my seat. He staggers up, walks to me, sticks a knife to my ribs, and tells me to hand him all my money.”
“To give ten dollars is stupid.”
“Incredible. Raul Echeverria, you are wunderbar. You want a job? Analyze all my experiments or something. Wish I could pay you though. Hot dogs are probably all you’ll ever get.”
“Why you do it?”
“Good question. I don’t know. I have a whole library of them, but I don’t know what to make of it. An entire catalog of human responses. How about that? The only conclusion I’ve ever arrived at is that people can no longer respond to kindness. But that’s pretty obvious. Did you know that humans are the only creatures capable of conceiving evil? Animals don’t do that. Animals just want to survive. But that’s pretty obvious too. So why do I do it? Don’t know. I’m in a rut, Raul Echeverria. I’m a terrible failure.”
By this time it’s getting dark. The fading light turns everything blue and faintly luminous. Efren buttons his coat all the way up to his neck. “I’m going now. You go on home, too.”
The boy doesn’t move from his seat.
“You can’t stay here all night,” Efren says. “Come along.”
They take the train back to Lispenard, sitting side by side and staring blankly at the ads on the train. They seem like a father and son whose constant companionship has absolved them of any further need for conversation.
On their way up to the apartment Marjetica pokes her head out and sees them.
“Marjetica, meet my little cousin, Raul Echeverria.”
Marjetica’s powder-pale face beams a radiant smile, which instantly fades to a look of concern. “But your lung sickness?”
“Gone. It’s a miracle.”
“Your cousin is from Philippines?”
“No, sweetheart. Dominican Republic. Or Puerto Rico. Extended family. It’s a very long story. Good night.”
In the apartment the boy looks at the wall of tapes and the disheveled mess of soiled clothes, towels, a blinking monitor, Coke liter bottles, and all the trappings of Efren’s solitary life. He tries to turn the TV on.
“It doesn’t work,” Efren says. “I blew it up.”
“What that mean, blew it up?”
“I don’t know. I was just staring at it. There was this stupid game show or something, and I was too lazy to pick up the remote. So I was just staring at it and thinking I wish the thing would blow up, and it did. Zap. The screen went dead. It was so odd.”
He pours some milk and opens a box of ginger snaps and a can of instant chocolate. “Suppertime,” he says. He scoops the chocolate and drops little islands of it in two glasses and gives the boy a teaspoon to stir his milk. The chocolate clings to the spoon like mud. The boy licks the spoon clean and then drinks the milk.
After that Efren gives the boy an old sweater and says, “Here. Wear this. It’s yours. You can keep it. What do you want to do now?”
“I want to sleep.”
Efren clears the sofa of debris. The boy lies down and falls asleep immediately. It’s as if a light just blinks out as soon as he lies down. He looks younger when he’s asleep. Maybe he was lying about his age. Efren spreads a quilt over the boy. Then he spreads out a few things strategically in the room: his microcassette recorder, a Cross pen, his watch, his wallet. Then he goes to his bedroom and sleeps soundly, perhaps more soundly than he has in days. He sleeps late the next morning. It’s cold and gray, the sun itself has a hard time getting up. Then he realizes what day it is. “S
hit.” He gets dressed, grabs his coat and ski cap, and walks to the other room. The boy is still sleeping, curled on the sofa. Efren picks up his watch and wallet. Then he decides to leave the watch. He closes the door gently behind him.
When he reaches City Hall there’s a group of people, mostly Filipinos, already gathered at the steps. Several of them are carrying placards. One of the placards says: MAGNANAKAW! THIEF! Someone is dressed in a skeleton costume left over from Halloween. She is doing a kind of wriggling dance, waving her arms like a hula dancer. On her costume she has pinned a sign saying INANG BAYAN. MOTHERLAND. Police are trying to rein everyone in. Efren stands across from the demonstrators, behind the police line. A limousine pulls up. Flashbulbs spark like a short circuit. The crowd presses against the police ranks. From out of the limousine Imelda Marcos steps out. She is a tall, pale, imposing figure. “Putang ina mo, Imelda!” the woman in the Halloween costume yells. There’s applause and then the heckler’s booed down by another faction of the crowd. Efren edges his way closer to the police line. Imelda Marcos walks up the steps. She is wearing a low-cut gown, as though she’s going to a ball. A décolleté, for Christ’s sake, Efren says to himself. Her wrists are cuffed. She teeters upwards, assisted by her lawyer and bodyguards. As she passes the crowd she acknowledges with an almost imperceptible smile both curses and applause. Efren jostles for space. And then he is face to face with her. She looks straight at him. Straight in his eyes, her expression unchanging. Then she is swept up by journalists and guards and disappears into the federal courthouse. Efren catches a glimpse of the hem of her absurd gown; it has gathered some of the spring mud. The crowd soon rushes after them. Efren finds himself alone on the steps. Litter flies about him in small, tattered cyclones.
“Efren! Come inside, or you’ll freeze to death!” It’s Christina, bolting down the steps. “Where have you been? I’ve been going nuts calling you. I’m so glad you came. You look terrible. Jesus, you lost a lot of weight.”
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