by Dale Peck
What I know of the rest I know from Lando, which means I know that about half-a it’s shady and the other half’s a out-and-out lie. But it’s all I got to go on, you know what I’m saying, it’s all I got to remember my brothers by, besides the fucking newspaper story which I disbelieve even more than I disbelieve Lando’s version. What Lando said was that by the time they got to the crackhouse them crackheads was like totally bugging. Everybody was sporting this like Chinese monkey I-ain’t-seen-shit-I-ain’t-heard-shit-I-don’t-know-shit attitude, but meanwhile they so fucking worked up they bouncing off the walls, can’t even sit still to smoke up they crack, and they—aw, fuck it, Jamie. You wanna know what happened? They found him in a closet. Hard to call anything anything in a crackhouse, one corner’s the same as every other corner, people sleeping in the bathtub, shitting in the kitchen sink, turning tricks in the front door, everything coated in smoke and smelling like piss and the only thing left in the place bigger than a crack pipe was whole pieces-a plaster ripped right out the goddamn walls. Crackheads used em as pillows and blankets and toilet paper, and they used a couple to cover up Ellis’s body too, and that’s all that was covering him. They’d taken his clothes right down to his Tommys, or I guess it wasn’t Tommys back then it was still Calvins but it whatever it was they got em and they got his sunglasses and his Rolex and his ring. Not a mark on him, but that didn’t make him any less dead. And, well, you know, Parker did what any self-respecting brother would do. He fucking flipped out. He started shooting up the place with the gun he got from Lando, everybody ducking for cover, including Lando, who says that somewhere in all the commotion he dropped his gun—which, by the by, baby, off the cuff and off the record, I have a hard time believing. Nigger didn’t get to where he is by dropping his gun just cause somebody shooting at him. But the jury bought his story not least I suppose cause he testified from a hospital bed. Nigger didn’t have no gun but the police shot him anyway, and if no polices went to jail Lando didn’t go to jail either, not guilty by reason of liberal guilt, and so I guess that’s the official version. Except for, oh yeah, Parker. Which one was Parker? My brother? Parker? One thing I can tell you for sure about Parker: crack or no crack whoever it was got a hold of Lando’s gun wasn’t so bad a shot as Parker was. Police hauled forty-seven crackheads out that place and not one-a them had a scratch on em. Only injuries was to my brothers. Now figure that shit out, Jamie, work it out in your head till you know what it means and then tell it back to me so it makes sense. Ellis they shot through the eye and Parker they shot through the ear. See no evil, hear no evil. And me, well, I just shot myself in the foot cause I was in too much of a goddamn hurry to take off my coat, and—
And? What, Claudia? And what?
And…poof.
Poof?
Poof: she opens her eyes.
She’s still buttoned up in her father’s coat, still wrapped up in that dress, one foot still soled in one of those shoes, the other bare, the needle still hanging from a vein. What’s the first thing she checks? Divine.
She’s in the back foyer, behind that treasure chest ice box where her mother kept the popsicles and fudgesicles and creamsicles, summers and winters both. The heat from the coils is so intense she’s soaked the overcoat’s wool through with her sweat, but underneath it Chez Divine seems to have resisted her efforts at demolition. She unbuttons the coat, checks him more closely. He’s quiet for a moment, then—oomph. Son of a bitch, she thinks, but then she thinks, I guess I had that coming.
She leaves a note for her father before she leaves his house.
I was here but you weren’t, she writes. I’m sorry I missed, she writes, but she forgets to add the word you.
three
CLAUDIA DIDN’T COME HOME that night. Didn’t show up till late the next day, sweating and wheezing, barely able to walk or breathe. She was so ill she had to sit down twice on her way up the stairs, but she refused to take the elevator, said Nellydean had “ears like a hawk” and she didn’t want to deal with her.
“And don’t you fucking tell her, Jamie,” she hissed at me, as if I’d ever voluntarily sought out Nellydean. “What’re you doing downstairs anyway? Waiting for me to get home? Sorry I’m late, Dad.”
Her rage was terrifying and inexplicable, but I was more concerned by her appearance.
“Don’t you want to see a doctor—”
Claudia’s nails bit into my arm, nearly pulling me to the floor. She opened her mouth to say something but couldn’t catch her breath. Her coat had fallen open, and I saw she wasn’t wearing the dress from yesterday. She had on a pair of rolled-up cargo pants and a man’s shirt. I don’t know why I thought this was significant—the clothes were probably just Reggie’s—but still, in many ways that dress was everything I knew about Claudia, and without it she was nothing more than a stranger in my home.
“Claudia,” I pleaded. “What happened?”
Claudia pulled her coat closed. It looked like she was trying to rest her face on her knees but her stomach was too big. Her head hung limply off her thin neck, and underneath her chin her breasts looked not so much big as bloated, sagging. The collar of her shirt was soaked through with sweat.
I stood there, searching her for a clue as to what was wrong. What I could do. Finally I reached to touch her as I had yesterday, but her shoulder jerked away, her head shook back and forth. “Uh uh.” She gulped in air. “Your mother was right,” she said then, her voice so faint I wasn’t sure I’d heard her correctly.
“My mother…?”
With an effort, Claudia lifted her head. She pinched my right wrist between her thumb and index finger, flipped my hand back and forth as though it were the skeletal remains of a little lifeless bird.
“It would have been worse. If she’d stayed.”
For the next ten days she hid in her apartment. She left her door unlocked but I refused to pass its portal. Nellydean stayed away as well, though whenever I ran into her in the shop or the stairwell she glared at me as though I were responsible for Claudia’s condition. I only remember the number of days because the next date that stands out in my memory is January 31.
I.e., laundry day.
In fact there had been a half dozen laundry days in the last week and a half. I didn’t know what else to do. I had nothing else to do. For the past six months the only thing in my life had been Claudia. Where she’d gone I’d followed, but now she was in a place that excluded me, and in her absence I fell back on old habits. Or tried to anyway. I made dates and even went as far as their apartment buildings, but I could no longer bring myself to go through with them. I would stand in front of a stranger’s door, one of Trucker’s costumes hiding inside Ellis’s old winter coat, and tick off the time it would have taken us to do whatever we would have done, five minutes or five hours, then turn around and head back to No. 1. Sometimes I went out two or three times in one day. I journeyed to Flatbush, Bensonhurst, Park Slope, Newark, New Jersey, any place—anything—to pass the time.
But somewhere in the back of my mind I kept track of the real date, and when two full weeks had gone by since Claudia and I went to hear Reggie sing I logged on, made an assignation, set out from No. 1 with every intention of keeping it. The date’s name was 1HotTop4U, but the man who was more on my mind was Sonny Dinadio. It had been two weeks since I’d taken his money and his envelope, which presumably told me what he wanted in exchange for the cash, and I knew I was going to have to see him too. Even if I didn’t go to him, I figured he was bound to show up sooner or later.
I could hear the terrible creaking even before I stepped out into Dutch Street. It came from the south, but when I exited the shop and turned toward John I saw nothing. The Belgian blocks were covered with a half inch of refrozen slush and I tried to remember when it had snowed, let alone when it had melted. As I walked tentatively toward the sound I let my mind relax, tried to imagine what might make such a racket. A part of me prayed for something on a par with Thomas Muirland’s leap into the Hudson Riv
er or Claudia’s treasure hunt—something from the fever dreams, say, or something from our president’s terrorist nightmares—but somehow I knew exactly what was coming around the corner.
The carriage showed up first, its ball bearings whining against each other with a terrible noise, then the wraithlike apparition of Justine came trailing after, almost as if he were being pulled in the carriage’s wake. The bottom of his dress was stained in layers of black and gray, and inside the silver helmet his shrunken face darted left and right, up and down, like a bird on the lookout for predators, or perhaps for prey. When he saw me a wide smile split his dirty cheeks.
“Your mother told me to watch out for you,” he said, pushing his mounded carriage toward me. “And I have. Jane’s been watching out for you. She’s been watching out.”
His words were eerily similar to Sonny’s (I been watching you) and I thought about that, about how we were all paying attention to everyone else instead of ourselves, one great big circle jerk of misdirection. I wanted to ask him about that, and I wanted to ask him about his new name too, but the creaking baby carriage suggested these were moot points. I waited for him to say something more, but Justine-now-Jane (and before that Justin) simply leaned into his load and pushed faster.
As the carriage drew alongside me, I noticed it wasn’t newspaper that filled it, but office paper. The entire bassinet looked to be filled with stationary and letterhead and spreadsheets from brokerage firms and traders and investment bankers, and whether the papers came from before or after September 11 I felt I understood a bit of the weight that Jane’s emaciated frame had to push around. Sisyphus came to mind, but so did Tiresias, the gender-switching prophet. I was willing to bet Jane had something interesting to say about my future, but only if I asked the question correctly. Try as I might, though, I couldn’t think of anything to ask whose answer I didn’t already know.
By that point he was past me, showed no signs of slowing down. Despite the discrepancy in size between Jane and his burden, the rusted ball bearings, the slush that caused his feet to slip out from under him, he still had a good clip going, and I was tempted to stand there until he disappeared, then head about my own business. But a piece of paper detached itself from his cargo and, flitting through the air and skittering over the ground, came to rest a half dozen steps in front of me. The smudged white rectangle was virtually invisible on its bed of dirty frozen slush, and for some reason it felt vital that I return it to Jane. Yet at the same time I didn’t want to touch it. It didn’t matter if it had blown from the fallen towers or if it was just a piece of trash Jane had snatched from the gutter: though lighter than a straw, it seemed to me this single sheet of paper would be the thing that broke my back if I attempted to pick it up. Because, let’s face it: it wasn’t the paper I wanted to retrieve, to rescue. It was Jane. I wanted to pick up his burdens in the same way I’d picked up Claudia’s and Thomas Muirland’s, take them on myself in a way I’d never been able to take on my own. But when I did actually work up the nerve, I ended up falling flat on my face: I’d been standing in slush for so long my feet had gone numb. Not even three pairs of socks could keep them warm in that weather, in those sandals.
But my face had fallen within inches of the page, and there, clearly, was a number, 239, and above it three lines:
I’m sure of this:
Nothing mundane is divine;
Nothing divine is mundane
When I looked back at Jane, he was just turning north on Broadway. From this distance, from the back, he resembled Claudia as much as Nellydean. I had a distinct sense that something was going to happen, but only if I pursued him, and I asked myself if I wanted that, if I was ready for it, whatever it was. And I’d be lying if I told you I said yes to either of those questions, but I followed him anyway, limping on my numb feet, the page from the Incomplete Poems clutched in my hand. I may be an orphan but I’m still a child of my generation. I still wanted answers, for their own sake, if not for mine.
Jane was turning west on Fulton by the time I caught up with him. West on Fulton, south on Broadway, east on John: I held back to see if he’d complete his circle, his squared-off O of desperation, and as soon as he turned north on Dutch Street I called after him, but he didn’t respond to his name—to any of the names I tried—so I shuffled forward and stepped in front of his carriage. He tried to steer around me to the left, and when I stepped in front of him again he jerked to the right, and when I blocked his path a third time he simply abandoned his load and ran. He turned back toward Fulton, but he ran like some grotesque caricature of Morticia Addams, little mincing steps, little mewling cries, and before he’d made it to the top of Dutch Street my hand landed on his shoulder, a shoulder so thin it made mine feel beefy, and he simply collapsed on the sidewalk.
“J-J-J-Jane,” I stuttered my way through his names. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
He’d tucked his face into the filthy lap of his dress, and when he sat up it released the full power of his odor. It hit me so hard I nearly fell to the sidewalk, and I think I would have run away if I hadn’t seen the two sagging wattles of cloth over his chest, the four stains on the front of his dress, an archipelago broken off from the mainland of someone else’s life. I noticed his dress was sleeveless then, that it didn’t smell. Only Jane smelled.
“Jane, who gave you this dress?”
I could just make out his eyes as they squinted at me. “Claudia.” His voice surprised me. It wasn’t a woman’s voice, or a drag queen’s: it was a man’s, by which I don’t mean that it was deep but that it was old. It wasn’t a boy’s. It was aged, worn down, and with a world-weary sigh and breath like a compost pile Jane laughed at me through the protective plastic mesh of his helmet’s frontpiece. “Who in the hell gave you that outfit?”
I looked down at myself. Underneath Claudia’s brother’s coat I wore Trucker’s orange jumpsuit, its broken zipper crudely fastened with a long row of safety pins.
I held up the wrinkled piece of paper.
“You dropped this.”
Jane shook his head. “No, you dropped it.”
I peered at the face that said those words. Between the helmet and the dirt all I could make out was dimples and bumps, cheekbones, dark smudges that might have been eyes or might have been nothing more than grimy smears. I shoved the page in my pocket and tried again.
“Jane—”
He cut me off with another shake of his silver head. “Why don’t you just call me John.”
I thought about this and decided not to call him anything. I opened my mouth to speak, then closed it again. His voice was hard and his eyes attempted to be hard too, but I could see a distance growing in them and I knew I was only going to get one chance, one line of inquiry, maybe even one question, before he was gone again. Before he was Jane again, or Justin, or Justine.
For the first time I noticed the two arms poking from Claudia’s dress. They were as rickety as the jointed limbs of an expandable wooden ruler. I saw the neck between them, nearly as thin—as thin and corded and old as Claudia’s neck—and only then did I see the silver chain that descended either side of his throat into his empty cleavage. I hesitated, then hooked my fingers on his collarbones and slipped my thumbs under the two halves of the chain, as if whatever it held might prove to be as heavy as the body it hung from. I looked at my hands, curled over those two hollow bones as though I might rip his breastplate in half. The chain felt slimy as it slid over my thumbs; the broken link had been mended with a twisted paper clip. Then it came into view.
The key.
My mother’s key.
John didn’t resist when I lifted it over his head, but his eyes burned with curiosity as I slipped it over my own. I thought about asking him “Who?” again, but instead I said,
“Why?”
And he laughed. John-Jane-Justin-Justine laughed at me in a soft little singsong, and I knew I’d missed my chance.
“Oh Jamie,” he hissed and giggled. He sprang up as though t
he key had been the only thing holding him down. “Silly silly Jamie. Do you really think you’re the first person to ask that question. Why? Why? There’s no such thing as why, Jamie.” He scooted back from me. “One why always leads to another, all the way back to the primal bleat: why oh why was I born?”
He was hissing at me as he’d hissed that first night on Dutch Street, his noxious breath misting the frozen air and clouding my vision, but even so I saw through it, the sibilant consonants and the helmet and Claudia’s dress, and I understood he was no more crazy than I was. He just played the part with more conviction.
“Let me be a lesson to you, Jamie,” he said as he stood up, minced his way back to his baby carriage—he may have been skinny but he was a man, and his skeleton, at least, was bigger than Claudia’s, its movements restricted by her tight dress. “Don’t go down that road. I went down it and look where it got me.” He leaned into the carriage but before he could get it rolling he warned me again. “Don’t make my mistake, Jamie. I’ve started and stopped my life so many times I’ve lost count. But I still don’t know the reason why.”
At first I thought it was an avalanche. I thought the snow had fallen off the side of a building and come toppling down on us. But even as I realized there wasn’t any snow left to fall, just a half-inch of guttered slush, I heard the belated screech of brakes and the thump of Sonny’s van bounding over the curb and smashing into the carriage full of paper, which exploded as though it had a detonator inside it. Explosions are a bad metaphor in the post-9/11 universe, not to mention paper falling from the sky, but what can I say? That’s what happened. The paper that had been in the carriage was falling on us again, just like snow, and before the last pages had settled on the ground Joey was barreling through the flying pages straight at me. I backed up but one of Dutch Street’s narrow walls blocked my escape. Joey put his hand on my shoulder as he’d put it on the cabbie’s shoulder so long ago, and my ass hit the sidewalk. On the other side of the mountain of his body I could see Sonny Dinadio throwing, throwing someone, throwing—