by Dale Peck
I swiped at my eyes again, and when they were clear a catlike face stared up at me. It took me a second to realize it was Claudia, all the way down on the shop floor.
“Hey, could you—”
“Don’t worry, I got it.”
As Claudia’s voice overlapped mine I remembered again the riddle I’d thought of in her father’s apartment: a train leaves New York City, traveling west at sixty miles an hour… I felt a tug in the extension cord like a dog straining at its leash. Vibrations thrummed in my fingers, in my arms and shoulders and stomach and ass, and for a moment I considered relaxing my muscles and letting my plans tumble down the shaft after my mother's key. But there was Claudia’s voice again, catching my thoughts, stuffing them back in my brain.
“What do you think?” She waved the glowstick around, tracing filigrees in the air. Three letters in I realized what she was writing.
“Claudia, come on. That’s a terrible name for a baby. And what if it’s a boy? Did you ever think about that?”
Claudia continued tracing letters in the air. “So. Tonight’s the big night, huh?”
I must have made some kind of face—and Claudia must’ve been able to see it four stories down—because she dropped the glowstick. “Look, tell me to butt out if I’m butting in, but are you sure you want to get with this guy? I mean, he is a little old for you.”
“You mean, like, ‘old enough to be my father’?”
“God, is he that old? Man takes care-a himself.” She shook her head. “Look, maybe I’m being over-protective. Mommy hormones, all that shit. It’s just, I don’t know. You been a little weirded out since you came back from his place is all. I mean”—she smiled to ease the sting of her words—“you’re always a little weird, but you’ve been even weirder the last few days.”
Before I could think of something to say I felt another tug on the extension cord.
“I’m-a go plug this in.” She heaved her upper body out of the dumbwaiter, leaving the glowstick curled in the space where she’d lain, its arc as delicate as the initial of her name. A moment later a light came on behind me: I guess the chandelier still worked. I waited for Claudia to return but nothing disturbed the silent waves of heat floating up the shaft. C., the glowstick taunted me. C.? See?
I decided to head out for groceries before it got too late. As I made my way up Dutch Street I sniffed at my underarm. A day of moving and cleaning hadn’t exactly left it first-date fresh. I checked the time to see if I’d be able to bathe before K. got here—eight after seven already, although that hardly seemed possible—then reached a hand up to fiddle with the key around my neck, and even as I did I realized the two gestures had become paired for me: first Trucker, then my mother. But the key wasn’t there, of course. It was at the bottom of the dumbwaiter. I thought of running back for it but didn’t have time. Oh well. As far as I knew it hadn’t opened anything in at least a decade. One more night could hardly make a difference.
The fetid odor of fish hit me as soon as I turned on William. It was hard to believe anything could be edible after a day on these scorching sidewalks, but I couldn’t afford the fancier fish places up in the Village, and besides, I preferred the wordlessness of Chinatown shopping. You point, the fishmonger hefts a foot of ice-shiny perch, you frown as though actually looking for flaws, then nod, and even as the fishmonger folds your selection in a Chinese newspaper he holds up five fingers and you count out the wrinkled singles one at a time.
But the silence was disconcerting as well. Fountains of words were building up in me, and in the Korean deli on the corner of Ann and William I did speak, lest something burst from my mouth like the words that had spewed out of the book in Claudia’s father’s apartment. What I said was:
“Sewing needles?”
The woman behind the counter handed me a package containing twenty silver slivers, their spiked ends aligned like the teeth of a lethal comb, then rang me up and stared vacantly into space while I counted out the last of my change.
I glanced at my wrist: 7:32. The setting sun was just beginning to smear the horizon with streaks of industrial red and orange on the Jersey end of Ann; over Brooklyn the sky was the color of blue steel. Dutch Street, as always, was hotter and darker than the rest of the city, the entrance to No. 1 hotter still, and darker, but I didn’t want to turn on a light in case it drew Claudia’s attention or, even worse, her aunt’s. I ran up the stairs, wondering how K. would negotiate them in the dark; I doubted Nellydean would take him in the elevator. But when I got to my apartment I was surprised to find the door standing open.
I walked toward the dining room, barely illuminated by three flickering bulbs in the sixteen-armed chandelier.
“K.?”
I set the groceries on the table and unplugged the chandelier and the room went dark, padded back down the hall.
“K.? Are you here?”
8:19. Had he come and gone? Surely he wouldn’t have left so quickly? And how had it taken me almost fifty minutes to walk one block, climb four flights of stairs?
Suddenly Trucker’s watch felt too heavy for the thin bones of my wrist and I had to rest my hand on the ledge of the wainscoting. I would have taken it off but it seemed to me that the metal band held my hand to my arm like a heroine in a Hawthorne story, and if I loosened the clasp my hand would fall off and something would spew from the fissure, not blood but some poisonous goo that would reveal me for what I was.
I found him in the bedroom. He stood in the window, a silver-edged shadow. On a horizon precipitous as Dutch Street the distance between sunset and nightfall is measured in inches and minutes. In the city beyond the narrow alley in which I lived the sun was only just starting to set, but my room was already so dark I could hardly make out K.’s face—his mouth, his eyes, the hair at his temples, silver like our dinner’s shiny flukes.
He was still looking out the window when he spoke. “Quite a setup you have here.”
“It’s a roof over my head.”
“I suppose that’s one way to put it.” He nudged something on the floor, and I had to squint to see that it was an extension cord, its cracked plastic coating bandaged by fraying duct tape. “Do you get all your power through these?”
“Only on the top three floors.”
“You do realize that’s a fire—” He shook his head, took a step toward me. “I can’t understand why you don’t accept this Manny person’s offer. Even if you want to stay in the city you could buy something a lot nicer than this junk heap.”
He was close enough to touch me, but he didn’t touch me, as if he were waiting for something—permission maybe, or maybe an excuse to call it off.
“His name is Sonny,” I said, my voice louder, faster than I’d intended, “and I haven’t accepted his offer because Claudia told me my mother buried some kind of treasure on the property before she died. It’s in the building or maybe out back, in the garden, and it’s worth a fortune. More than anything Sonny could ever pay me. Claudia offered to help me find it if I let her live here till she has her baby.”
The words tumbled out of me, ridiculous, unbelievable—and the most honest thing I’d ever said to him. K.’s face took on a tinge of distant, almost anthropological curiosity, as Kevin From Heaven’s had earlier in the day, and then, as Kevin From Heaven had done, he shrugged the evidence away.
His nose wrinkled. “You smell like—”
“Fish,” I finished for him, even as he said, “Pot.”
He sniffed a second time. “That too.”
All at once his palms were on my shoulders, and when he spoke again his voice was quieter, calmer. “You’re shaking like a leaf. Is something wrong?”
When I answered him my voice was quieter too, but sounded no less shrill to my ears. I said, “Why?” to K., and he studied me a moment.
“Is that a joke?”
I pulled myself close to him as if for warmth. “I’m just cold.”
K.’s palm brushed the crewed expanse of my skull and a cool mis
t filled the air. “You’re sopping wet.”
I shrugged. It seemed too early to mention night sweats, or maybe too late.
The shirt under my cheek was starchy smooth, and K. himself smelled freshly laundered, as if his body had been unfolded from a dry cleaner’s plastic with his clothes. I sniffed deeper and there I was, the clothes I’d worn through three—four?—blistering days, the skin beneath, unwashed for the same length of time.
“You’re hot too,” K. said, tipping my head back and laying his hand against my forehead, running a fingertip the length of each of my eyebrows. I think I’m running a little fever, I said, or thought I said, but maybe I didn’t say it because K. was kissing me before I could have said anything. It was ten after nine when I pulled away to tell him I had to get the condoms. In fact they were in my pocket, and when I got to the dining room I pulled them out. I pulled out the perch too, the needles. The tiny spikes were aligned just like the skeleton of the fish beside them, and before I knew it I’d pushed one of my fingers through the skin of the perch and ripped it open and extracted a toothpick-thick bone I found just behind the head. I was afraid the bone might not be strong enough, or sharp enough, that my shaking fingers might not be equal to the task, but the bone pierced each of the foil-wrapped condoms easily, and afterwards I threw the package of needles down the dumbwaiter and washed my hands, not because they smelled but because they were even dirtier than they had been before, and I hurried back down the hall.
A creak in the lintel of the bedroom door stopped me. I felt it before I heard it, the weight of my wasted body bending the hundred-and-fifty-year-old wood and the sharp report of its protest, and it was the sound coupled with the sensation that stopped me. For the past seventy-two hours I’d moved through the world as if I were just outside my body, beside it, behind it slightly, watching it wend its way around various obstacles like a dust-hungry Roomba while I kept my gaze focused squarely on K. and Claudia, Nellydean and Sonny and Justine. But that creak impressed my corporeality upon me, reminded me that the body I was about to offer K. was as real as his, as solid and heavy, not only with sweat and grime but with history. With blood. That something was buried in my blood, and it wasn’t treasure—or words for that matter, that could be shaken out of a book like sand from a shoe. I’d made up a few stories about K. in order to get myself to this threshold and doubtless he had his own fantasies of me. But none of those stories was about to sleep with him. Only I was.
K. didn’t get off the bed. His voice was light, unconcerned. “James?”
I clutched the three pierced condoms in my left hand like a cross between poker chips and loaded dice, stood before K. as white and empty as the book of poems I’d held in Claudia’s father’s house. But K. only looked at me quizzically.
“Jamie?”
In a way that made it easier. K. called me by the name my mother had used when I was still an infant—when she was still alive, when she was still here—and when I took that first step into my bedroom I didn’t feel like I was walking into the future as much as I was surrendering, one more time, to my past. Still, by the time I made it to the bed I was shivering so badly that K. asked me again if anything was wrong.
“It’s just that I’ve never done this before.”
He laughed. “I find that a little hard to believe.”
“I mean I’ve never had sex in a bed before.”
“Oh.” K. laughed again. “Oh my.”
In the end I let him go first because I was selfish, or maybe I was perverse. Was it perverse to want to enjoy him, just once? Maybe. But in retrospect I think it was just proof that I’d been deceiving myself all along—that I was no more crazy than my mother had been, and every bit as selfish. Whatever the case, I unwrapped the condom myself, unrolled it on him myself, I rolled over and wrapped my sighs in a faceful of pillow and the worst part of it was that I did enjoy it. I’m haunted by that pleasure still.
It was only after he’d slipped out of and off me that I climbed on top of him.
“I don’t do that.” K.’s voice was sleepy and self-mocking, syrupy with the sound of lust satisfied.
“Tonight you do.”
I heard his breath catch. Felt him stiffen beneath me, then, a moment later, relax.
“I suppose I owe you. Just go easy on me, kid, it’s been a long time.”
If I squinted I could see the hole in the foil, but the hole in the condom was invisible. But the hole I was looking for was the one I’d sought earlier in the day—if not a note, a hole—and I found myself wondering if even a virus could squeeze through something that small. I should've used my mother's key, I thought, reaching for my chest reflexively. But the key still wasn't there, and I laughed under my breath.
Self-consciously—was he doing something wrong? how could he make it better?—K. asked me what was so funny.
“Oh, nothing. I was just thinking of that story you told me.”
“What story was—aaah!—that?”
“The one about that girl. On Long Island. The one whose family sent her away. After you got her pregnant.”
“I didn’t…I mean…what made…you think—of!—that?”
Trucker’s watch said it was 12:30 in the morning when I found the chain on the bedside lamp and pulled it, and even as light added its shadows to the room I felt the ghostly tug of Claudia's hand around my neck, and I wondered if this was the lock the key had been meant to open.
“Oh, Jamie, please,” K. covered his eyes with one hand, “why would you want to do something like that?” Then he took his hand from his eyes and looked at the semen dripping onto the wet hairs of his stomach through the perforated tip of the condom. “James?”
“That girl? She was my mother.”
1: Fort
“Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!”
—Edgar Allan Poe
quoted in Jorge Luis Borges, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote”
one
THE CITY WAS DYING, you could see it from the air. Those rows of up-thrust gray rectangles: what were they but the markers of an overcrowded cemetery? And the bright lights streaming from within. What could they be but souls, bent on escape? Soul after soul, gravestone after gravestone, so many souls they spilled out of their gravestones and so many gravestones they crowded out the graves, tall ones, taller ones, the tallest ones of all, as if death were some kind of competition: I’m more dead than you are, you son of a bitch.
And my plane shot up the center of this. Straight up Fifth Avenue it seemed, flying against traffic and against gravity, flying so low that the antenna-tipped tops of those tens of thousands of lighted gravestones grazed its bloated belly. The air was rent with crystal spikes and steely spires, their swords sliced right through the substantive world as if it and not death were the dream. They slashed the sky and smashed against each other, and their crashing made a kind of din, the cacophony of souls caroming off each other, so many souls colliding against so many other souls that my plane was rocked by the turbulence of their search for even one person, one dreamer, to give them form, a story, to give them life. They grabbed my plane and shook it so hard that luggage bins snapped open and carry-ons and wrinkled jackets and loose sheets of paper flew about the cabin. Listen to me, they seemed to say, like a parent trying to knuckle some sense into an errant child. Listen to me!
And I did listen. Maybe I only listened because there was nothing and no one else for me to listen to, but through the plane’s rattle and the babies crying and the parents screaming Dear God! I thought I heard a softer noise, a beautiful sound, a song of some kind. The song of the dying city. The city was dying but my mother was dead. Maybe six months dead, maybe nine, maybe eleven. Maybe my mother had been dead for more than a year. None of the functionaries who’d managed to track me down through nine cities in eight states knew for sure, but they were sure she was dead. They couldn’t tell me how she’d died and they couldn’t produce a corpse for me to view, couldn’t even point me to a gravestone wit
h the consoling finality of birth and death dates, but they were sure, they were absolutely certain she was dead, just as the city she’d left me was dead. Was dying at any rate, and struggling mightily in its death throes. The dying city unraveled beneath me with the collapsing symmetry of an infantry under siege. I felt it tickle the bottoms of my feet, I choked on the smog of gridlocked souls. I pressed my face to the window and peered down in search of something, some spark, of meaning or at least of sense, to help me understand the manqué my mother had left me in lieu of herself, but all I saw were the innumerable lights fleeing into the night sky. Welcome home, the lights winked at me. Now say goodbye.
FROM CLOUDS TO CAVES. Mausolea above, catacombs below. You fly to the dying city with the birds only to tunnel in the last few feet with the worms. With relentless urbanity they deny the nature of the beast. They call it the train, they call it the subway. But in the beginning at least my eyes were open, and I knew I sailed the underground river on Charon’s barge, and the echoed groaning I heard was Cerberus barking in the distance. This was my first New York lesson: everybody takes the A train, but the lucky stick to Manhattan’s skinny length, avoiding the endless accumulation of streets and souls that is the outer boroughs.
The ride from the airport took two full hours—two hours during which entire families seemed to get on and off the train, black, Hispanic, Asian, sometimes white, but then almost always speaking some glottal Eastern European tongue. What I mean is, the other passengers all seemed foreign to me, alien, whether by dint of skin color or language or custom, yet of the thousands of people who passed before my eyes none was stranger than the pale, skinny, shaggy-haired boy whose hollow reflection stared back at me from the window opposite my seat, and I did my best to avoid his frightened, fascinated face, focused instead on the parade of flesh marching past. According to the watch Trucker had given me it was well after midnight, but nobody seemed to give a damn about the hour, the heat, the entrances and exits. Makeup was put on and shirts were taken off, hands were slipped inside waistbands (sometimes their own, sometimes not), kisses exchanged or stolen or pushed on pouting girlfriends just learning to exploit the power of crossed arms and sealed thighs, toenails pared with stubby knives, babies changed, breast-fed, burped, scolded; and I watched all this with one suitcase flat beneath my feet and another, upright, clamped between my legs, and I was glad the second was there because it hid my dick, which seemed to rise and fall with the opening and closing of the doors. It wasn’t the doors that made it rise and fall. It was just the feeling in the air, the heat, the energy, the over-the-fucking-topness of it all. Whatever it was, it was no more sexual than a morning erection—and it was like morning, for me, being on that subway, going into Manhattan, coming from John Fitzgerald Kennedy International Airport, coming down from the sky, coming from Kansas if you want to get right down to it. I was coming in off the farm, I was on my way to the big city to claim an inheritance from a mother who’d been taken from me before I’d ever known her, and even though it was the middle of the night it was like morning to me, it was like a new day dawning. It was like my mother’s death had allowed my life, at last, to start, and the place where it was going to begin was called Dutch Street.