Why We Came to the City

by Kristopher Jansma

  Jacob unscrewed the cap and caught the scent of J&B—George’s favorite. With a sinking in his heart, he at last understood why George had kept rushing off to the bathroom in the hospital and at Bistro 19. He couldn’t decide if he wanted to smack him or crush him in his bare arms.

  Whatever ambitions Jacob had held as a boy—to hear the voice of God, to wrestle with angels, to unite everything—he knew now that he’d become too selfish, too discontent, too upset. Maybe that had always been true, but especially after Isaac, he’d known for sure that Jacob Blaumann was no Messiah. He’d never been as good as the boy he thought he’d been. Nobody he knew was that good. Nobody could possibly be.

  Then on his first day of freshman year he’d walked into a small room with bunked beds and shaken hands with George Murphy, who in ten years had proved to be the kindest and most generous person Jacob had ever known. And for all his griping, he’d needed George to be the good things that he’d long ago given up believing in. Only now his savior had been holing up in men’s rooms, sipping scotch, trying to numb the world’s unfairness.

  “I think it’s your dad calling?” William said, lifting up Jacob’s phone.

  Jacob almost laughed—why would his father be calling? He stared down at Oliver’s picture on the phone, feeling the buzz in his hand until the screen grew dark. “I’ll call him back later,” Jacob lied.

  William seemed about to say something, when they heard the buzzing again now, not from Jacob’s phone but from inside George’s shoe, down near William’s foot. On the screen was Irene’s lovely face, framed in black. Jacob motioned for William to answer it.

  William pressed the big green button on the screen and held it to his ear. “Sara? It’s William Cho. George is just in the bathroom—what’s the matter? Did something happen?”

  Jacob felt the rush of a hundred voices all at once, his blood vessels and neurons and toenails and eyelashes all screaming in every language at once. He heard the sound of the toilet flushing in the bathroom as William tried to calm Sara down on the other end of the line.

  “Shushhhhh,” he said, “Shushhhhh. Shushhhh.”

  THE DISAPPOINTMENTS

  JULY

  William counted his disappointments on both hands. There was, one, the ninety-eight-degree heat burning through the window of the bus, as it, two, crawled through Staten Island traffic. Three. He was there, on a weekday afternoon, because, four, he had finally been laid off at Joyce, Bennett, and Salzmann. At first he’d been almost glad to have it over with, but then, five, none of the other firms had been hiring. Six, his severance and savings were being so rapidly consumed by his rent that it seemed like only a matter of time before he would be forced to move back home again. He was vexed by a peculiar curdled milk smell, seven, emanating from the woman in the row ahead. Also, the periodic vibration of his phone alarm in his right pants pocket, which he couldn’t reach to disable, eight, reminded him that he and Irene were now a half hour late, nine, for their appointment with a guy named Skeevo, ten, whom she had been buying pot from lately (it helped with the nausea, as well as her overall mood), but who today had called about something else that he wanted her to see, all the way in Staten Island, down near the Fresh Kills Solid Waste Transfer Station.

  And yet, despite two hands’ worth of disappointments, William caught a reflection of himself grinning like an idiot, all the fingers in his reflection’s left hand holding all the fingers in the reflection of Irene’s hand, and all the fingers in his reflection’s right hand playing gently with the reflection of her hair.

  William was aware, at least as long as Irene was around. Aware of the faint burned smell that always got jumbled up in her hair, postradiation. He’d gotten used to it after a month. How many more weeks of treatments did she have left? One? Two? Time was rushing laughably by. Not like the past several months, when he’d buried himself in work (for all the good it had done him) and rerouted his heart on dates with the Society of Korean Daughters of His Mother’s Friends. But now William was sitting beside Irene, aware of the vibrations of her throat against his shoulder as she awwed at a little baby in the next row, happily gumming the leg of a Barbie, naked except for one black glove.

  His phone buzzed again; it was wedged directly against Irene’s outer thigh. She looked away from the baby, craned her head up at him, and whispered, “Is that your mother calling again, or are you just happy to see me?”

  She looked so damned ridiculous trying to give him sexy eyes while the left one was covered with a black felt eye patch. She’d bedazzled it with rhinestones in the shape of a skull, claiming it was an ironic statement about Damien Hirst. William said it made her look more like a pirate than the eye patch alone. Irene said that was the irony. William didn’t understand, or care.

  He didn’t care about a lot of things far more important than that. He didn’t care that he was unemployed. He didn’t care that he’d forgotten to make his June credit card payment and would now be charged a one-hundred-dollar fee, the first time this had happened in his life. He was actually a little excited. Ordinarily, he would have carried the guilt of that hundred dollars around in his gut like a bullet for the rest of the year. He’d have cared that the socks he put on that morning were not only two different shades of blue but of different thicknesses, such that his right foot ached and sweated while the left was fine. He’d have been distraught that Irene was still sick—worse, maybe, even than before. He did care, of course. It was just that these cares, like all the others, were wiped from his mind now that she was holding his hand.

  In moments when he was alone, the circuits in his brain containing these ordinary cares and fears overwhelmed all others, and he couldn’t even sleep. But when Irene was around, even the disappointment he felt about her big surgery not going smoothly seemed to clear.

  The morning after their epic night of barhopping, Jacob, true to his word, had brought William back to the hospital. While Sara had been dealing with the still jelly-legged George, William had slipped around the cheap curtain that hung around Irene’s recovery bed. He had been worrying about what to say: that he was sorry for leaving her in the train station; that he had woken up every day since then thinking of her before even remembering what planet he was on; that he had tried to call her dozens of times; that he had compulsively been donating to the American Cancer Society online at work; that he had run in a 5k to raise money but it turned out that he was a lot more out of shape than he expected and had limped the last 3k on a strained ankle. But the second he’d seen her lying there, these worries began to evaporate from the inside of his head.

  She’d looked nearly concave, with thick bandages wrapped over the area surrounding her left eye, and her right eye fixed on the TV high up in the corner. But that right eye had swiveled to him. The lid around it had snapped up like a cheap blind. She’d seized his hand, pulled him to her, and locked her lips onto his. An alarm went off; she’d pulled off her pulse monitor clip and yanked her IV stand half over. A squat Dominican nurse had rushed in and threatened to put Irene into restraints. William had had to walk two laps around the ER. When they released Irene, the two of them had gone directly back to his apartment—actually no, they’d made one stop, back to her place to pick up some clothes and the scarf she’d bought for him at Christmas, which had remained wrapped and on the counter. Then back to his place, where she’d stayed every night since.

  In a week she’d sold her bed on craigslist and rid herself of every other unneeded belonging, so she could maximize the work space in her East Fourth Street apartment. Every day she worked there but refused to show William, or anyone, what she was making. She never even spoke about it—but she always arrived at William’s itchy to return, talking only vaguely about working on something larger, something that she and Skeevo seemed to be into together.

  Even now, Irene seemed quietly elsewhere as she and William followed the other passengers off the first bus and toward the next, an S6
2.

  She looked down and said, “You don’t need to hold my hand.”

  But she didn’t pull away.

  “But I like holding your hand. ‘I wanna hold your ha-a-a-a-and . . .’” William tried to sing.

  She screeched and tried to cover his mouth with her other hand, but he persisted.

  “‘Oh, please . . . say to me-e-e-e-e. You’ll let me be your man . . .’”

  He finally had to stop when, on the held-note, Irene got most of her fingers into his mouth, and he could no longer form words.

  “OKKK FWINE YLOOOU WIHHN.”

  Irene let him go and shot him another look that was difficult for William to decode without being able to see her eyebrows. The second bus smelled refreshingly of burned Dunkin’ Donuts coffee.

  Once seated, Irene turned to William to explain. “I can still see out of the other eye. I’m not going to wander into traffic.”

  “I didn’t think you were.”

  The eye was fine. They had gotten the tumor out from beneath it without any damage to the nerves. It was still swollen, though, and with the thick black stitches there, it freaked people out. Hence the eyepatch, which still freaked them out but in a kinder way.

  After the first tumor had been removed, the doctors had planned to head in for the one on her elbow, when one of them had noticed some swelling under her armpit. Thinking it might be a reaction to the anesthesia, they’d run a fresh scan, only to find suspicious shading on one of her lymph nodes. Just days earlier they’d done a complete battery of PET scans and found everything clean, but now there was definitely something. They stopped before beginning the surgery on her arm.

  Now she had a “compromised lymph node.” This was, as Dr. Zarrani put it, “a big disappointment.” The cancer had gone off the skeletal rails and passed into her glands, from whence it could travel, fluid borne, to distant organs. It meant that the first rounds of chemotherapy had done very little, possibly nothing, and that they’d have to “really crank it up a notch now.” It meant adding ifosfamide and etoposide to the poisons they were secreting into her veins each day in the chemo lounge. But William wasn’t thinking about that now, only about the coconut smell of her hand lotion and of Irene’s relief when she learned she wouldn’t to have keep her arm in a cast all summer—and so would still be able to work on her sculptures.

  The S62 bus squealed to a halt just to one side of the Staten Island Mall. William followed Irene off the bus into the mall parking lot. Steadily, the rest of the people headed toward the forty-foot-high signs for JC Penney’s and Loews Cinemas. Irene pulled William in the opposite direction, crossing one vast parking lot after another—each a little less crowded than the last—until they seemed to be a half mile from the actual mall. Irene danced over the cracks in the pavement, as if to not break the back of some mother somewhere. That was another mystery that William had a hard time thinking about. Where was her family in all of this? He became preoccupied by the light glinting on her legs as she leaped.

  Far off in the distance, William spotted a red pickup truck parked by a chain-link fence. Hitched up behind it was a little two-wheeled U-Haul trailer with its orange rolltop up. A man who William presumed to be Skeevo was rifling through the odd items inside.

  He was tall and wore a grease-stained flannel shirt buttoned to the top and to the wrists. His pants were ripped, revealing kneecaps the same mocha-tan color as his neck and hands. Despite the July heat, he was wearing a half-disintegrated hand-knit winter cap.

  Irene let go of William’s hand. Disappointment settled in as she moved farther away, and it grew measurably along a neat curve in his mind, like a once-meager debt accruing interest. He walked faster, trying to reduce the distance between them. With each stride he felt the load leveling off. By the time he got to her side again he was out of breath, but happy again. He shook Skeevo’s hand as if they, too, went way back. William didn’t even mind that his grip felt like a car door closing on his hand.

  “What’d you bring me?” Irene asked, moving around to the back of the U-Haul and beginning to sort through the scrap. Things clanged and scraped.

  Keeping his eyes on her, William shook Skeevo’s hand and introduced himself. “You work over at the dump?” he asked.

  “Kind of,” Skeevo replied. “It’s not really a dump anymore.”

  “The Staten Island dump isn’t a dump?”

  Skeevo cast his eyes out past the fence, across the busy highway, toward several enormous green hills. “The Fresh Kills Landfill’s been closed for, like, ten years. It was supposed be temporary—you believe that? Back in 1947 . . . then you know, one thing leads to another, and soon enough it’s the biggest landfill in the world.”

  Irene had fully disappeared inside the U-Haul, and William was feeling at an utter loss. Then she emerged with a single ski under one arm, looked at it a moment in the light, dropped it to the asphalt, and dove back in again.

  Skeevo was still going on about the not dump. “When they finally shut this thing down, it was taller than the Statue of Fucking Liberty. Back in the sixties, when the astronauts went up into orbit, the only man-made objects they could see from space were the Great Wall of China and this.”

  “That’s . . . distressing,” William said, although he didn’t feel distressed at all, because Irene was pulling half a child’s stroller out of the U-Haul with a quizzical look. She placed it in a pile to one side, which William took to mean she was considering it. “So what, um, what is going on with the landfill now? They’ve finally closed it?”

  “They’re turning it into a park,” Skeevo announced proudly. “Going to be three times the size of Central Park.”

  William hummed. “And Skeevo—is that a . . . Polish name?”

  He took his wallet out and thrust an ID in William’s face. “Skeevington Monkeylips McBalzac the Third,” he said. “I changed it when I left home. Got the idea from Reeny here, actually. I think everybody should be able to pick their own name, don’t you?”

  William looked nervously for “Reeny,” but she was deep inside the trailer. How exactly did she know this very possibly insane person? And what did he mean he’d gotten the idea from her? Was Irene Richmond not her real name?

  But then Irene began shrieking from the back of the U-Haul. William rushed over, imagining a collapsing wall of sharp objects and broken glass. Instead he found Irene straddling a segment of a large steel I-beam—running her hands wildly over its ridges and warps. Something had clearly happened to it, for the thing looked, William supposed, more like a T-beam now. The bottom edge was melted to nearly nothing. He wondered what could have done that.

  “I knew you’d like it,” Skeevo grinned.

  “Help me get this into the light!” Irene cried.

  It took the three of them shoving as hard as they could to get it closer to the open door of the U-Haul. William guessed it weighed over four hundred pounds. He sniffed his hands after pulling them away and recoiled at the harsh, burned-chemical odor. Irene was acting as if she had uncovered the Treasure of the Sierra Madre. What did she see in it? She was so happy—he hadn’t seen her like this since they’d kissed at the hospital, not even when they were in bed together. She was like a child, overtaken by a joy far exceeding her total volume.

  William closed his eyes a moment. He’d spent his whole life avoiding drinking or smoking cigarettes or pot, for fear of being addicted, and now here he was hooked on a drug that was in desperately short supply. He opened his eyes again and saw Irene and felt no doubts at all.

  “We found it up in the northwest quadrant of the old landfill. They’d been relandscaping it, trying to do something about the grade for the spill-off. One of the bulldozers snagged this thing. They let me have it before anyone important figured out what it really was.”

  “What is it?” William asked.

  “My guy there tipped me off. It’s from one of the Twin
Towers,” Skeevo whispered. “Some of the rubble they cleared from there got dumped in the landfill before they closed it up again.”

  William found himself taking a quick step backward, but Irene was bending down closer so she could study it better. Then, without warning, she lifted the patch from her eye to reveal the red, puffy mess beneath it. Back in the apartment she kept the patch on, even when they slept together and even when she was actually sleeping. She took it off only in the bathroom to clean the black network of stitches. They ran around her eye socket like narrow railroad tracks.

  “Jesus,” Skeevo said, a crack in his voice as he looked away.

  But William didn’t mind. He was too busy watching her brilliant blue iris working behind the lid, nearly swollen over it. He watched as she studied its corners and edges, running her hands up and down its length.

  “Can we get this back to the city?” she asked softly.

  Skeevo agreed to give them a lift in his truck. Irene squeezed between him and William in the front seat, navigating them to the K Gallery, where she had access to Abeba’s welding tools. As they drove out of the parking lot and back up through Staten Island, Skeevo and Irene caught up on old times while they shared a joint. He didn’t ask about her eye. Instead, he wanted to know how she and William had met, and William liked how she relayed the story of meeting him at the Christmas party. The way she stroked his cheekbones as she described first seeing him. Maybe it was just the pot smoke getting to him, but it seemed like a hundred years ago.

  William stared dreamily out the window as Skeevo told them all about his own fantastic-sounding life. He’d gotten married, had a child. He and Irene complained about traffic and global warming and capitalism as they drove up and over the glorious gray Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. Eventually Skeevo fished a cell phone out of his pocket and thumbed-up a video he wanted Irene to watch. It was of his wife—a pretty young Chinese woman—sitting in a plane seat somewhere, holding a baby boy with an enormous head. The head was so enormous, it seemed to be all this woman could do to support it in two hands. Skeevington Monkeylips McBalzac the Fourth—at least for now.