The mist snaked between the buildings of the Lower East Side, whispering resentful tales of its stolen waters and depositing a fine, cold, damp dust on Finn’s face as he headed out in the collared shirt and clean pair of jeans that he had held back for meeting Dilly’s parents. The shirt smelled of Dilly’s cinnamon oil and the plan was to leave with the book in his hand.
He lengthened his stride so that the walk to Penn felt like exercise. He liked early morning training, had often run from his aunt and uncle’s house before breakfast, pumping his visible breath angrily into the cold air, dispersing it with a flurry of quick miniature punches, running at speed across the common and indulging in detailed fantasies of violence against his uncle and then his brother.
Jack was on his knees at the open fridge, looking at food he didn’t have the will to eat. He had eaten three meals in the previous ten days, and none at all in the last three. When he stood up he moved too fast and he had to grip the counter to avoid fainting. He took a slow, deep breath and was rocked by the realisation that if he did not take up Dilly’s invitation to Long Beach, which she had repeated this morning, he could not guarantee he would ever see Finn again.
He shuffled into the bathroom and looked at his reflection. This flu was as organised as Jack was and had outmanoeuvred him. Despite efforts to tidy himself up, Jack did not look tidy. The trim, orderly assimilator of the derivatives market that habitually greeted him in this mirror was out of town. He took a razor and soap from the impeccably clean glass shelves inside the mirror cabinet. Two days earlier, shaking with weakness and deprived of sleep by his cough, Jack had carried out the twice-weekly clean of the bathroom and kitchen while listening to Mahler’s 4th and by the end of it had been surprised that the faint trace of depression he was feeling but would barely admit to was soothed by imagining not Holly’s return to the pristine apartment but Finn’s. He guided the razor through the shaving foam on his neck until it reached his chin. He stood a while then let the razor slip from his hand into the sink, disarming himself before further damage was done. He held his right hand up in front of him and watched it vibrate to the rhythms of his perennial battle against all forms of weakness. In front of him now was the reflection of a man bearded by white lather, with a single, clear track of smooth skin through the soap and, from it, a trickle of blood. He washed the soap off his face and plugged the cut.
He took it easy going to the elevator, walking slow, with his head down to avoid head-rush, and arrived in the lobby as Eddy started his shift.
‘You look excellent,’ the doorman said.
Jack thanked him with a burst of his hacking cough that made even a self-obsessed failed comic wince with sympathy. ‘That cough’s getting worse, fella, not better.’
‘I’m outta stuff,’ Jack said, weakly.
‘They do Phenovo Linctus at the pharm on 98th Street. It’s like nuclear cough mix, pal. Whatever you’re using isn’t doing it for you. Phenovo leaves like a film of honey on your throat. I love it, cough or no cough.’
Hesitant though he was at taking Caustic Eddy’s recommendation on anything, Jack felt convinced by the fact that the new cough medicine was twice the price of his own. He bought two bottles and told the shop assistant not to bag it, immediately measuring out a 20ml capful and slugging it back.
‘You look rough, dude,’ the shop assistant said. ‘I see you a million times in here getting personal items for your girlfriend and you don’t look like this.’
Jack let pass the man’s inappropriateness and his scandalous misuse of the present tense. ‘Right…’ he said, putting the medicine into his Barbour weekend bag, a present from Holly last Christmas, which he had not taken to using until she’d convinced him it was not a handbag. (She’d enlisted her mother in Seattle to back her up by phone.)
‘What is the deal with your neck?’ The assistant pointed his finger at the single track of smooth pink skin running through Jack’s beard. Jack walked out. On his way to the downtown 6, he sat against a dented newspaper box and waited for another threat of fainting to pass. In the Penn ticket hall he stopped again and came close to double vision. The hall sang a breathless tune around him, a distant jungle noise distilled from a multitude of voices reverberating around a place where he could see nobody talking to each other. He bought a return ticket to Long Beach and checked the departure board against Dilly’s text instructing him when to turn up and where to go. It pissed him off that his oversexed little brother hadn’t pried himself away to give him a call or send a text in all this time.
He drifted in and out of sleep as the train dragged him out of the city. In a backyard on the outskirts of Lynbrook, on a patch of grass between a leaf-strewn trampoline and a pile of shattered fence panels, a boy and a girl were playing. They had straw-coloured hair and the shapes of their mouths and the set of their eyes were identical. The girl, leggy and lank, was a study of concentration, assessing the top of the boy’s head as she took up position beside him. The boy was standing to attention, his arms straight by his sides, his face convulsed with nervous laughter, his body shaking as his sister swung a straight leg up and over his head. She smiled triumphantly and the boy collapsed into a fit of giggles. The last Jack could see, they were taking their places to do it again.
‘We used to play that game,’ Finn whispered, to his breath-cloud on the window. He was one train behind Jack, watching the same game twenty minutes later, as the lanky girl tired. Other kids would queue behind Finn to have Jack kick his leg over their head and when Jack clouted Bill Barnes in the ear a fight ensued, but Bill Barnes could neither fight nor Jack defend himself for their hysterical laughter, and Finn remembered the pile of children jumping on top of each other, a human haystack of bellyaching laughter and the realisation that he and his mates were getting too grown-up, too tall, to play the game with Jack any more.
It hadn’t occurred to Finn until now, that he might remember the young Jack better than Jack could remember himself, and it struck Finn that he should maybe cut his big brother a bit of slack next time he saw him.
The train crossed the estuary and smoothed an arc into Long Beach. From the bend in the tracks, Finn spied a miniature Manhattan floating above the lagoon. Long Beach station was a different style of movie set from Manhattan. Back to the Future, Groundhog Day, a certain size of American town Finn felt familiar with. On a red-painted bench against the far wall of the ticket hall he saw his brother, lying asleep beneath a week’s beard, his head resting on what looked like a woman’s handbag, and his hands clutching a small bottle of medicine to his chest.
‘What the hell…?’ Finn said. He immediately wondered if it meant bad news, until he remembered that they had already emptied the tank.
Jack stirred, discovered he’d fallen asleep and forced himself awake. ‘Hey,’ he said, in a daze.
Finn was still incredulous at the sight of him. ‘What do you mean, “Hey”? What are you doing here?’
‘What do you mean, what am I doing here? I’m exactly on time.’
‘For what?’
‘Our weekend in Long Beach?’ Jack asked.
‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’
‘I’ve been getting texts from your girlfriend every day to come join you guys out here and I’ve asked her to get you to call me every day.’
‘Her name is Dilly and she’s not my girlfriend any more. She left me and I haven’t seen her for over two weeks.’
They fell silent. The mere act of conversation had exhausted Jack, who put his head in his hands and groaned. Finn began to work on a new approach to the day, given that running away from Dilly and her family very soon after arriving might take some explaining to Jack, and the book was not something he could explain to Jack.
‘So why are you here?’ Jack asked, trying to think straight.
‘Oh, you know,’ said Finn, ‘just to get a couple of things she has and, you know, as friends. But you don’t need to stay.’
‘Thanks.’
‘
I just mean, you don’t seem well.’
‘Frankly I could do with the sea air. This is crazy – can you please let me get you a cellphone?’
‘Can you please let me shave the rest of your face? You look like a pimp. You look like… someone else.’
‘Well, I’m not, so hard luck.’
‘I’ve got a phone.’
‘You’ve got a cell?’
Finn stuttered. ‘Yeah, but only since, like, yesterday.’ He changed the subject. ‘You do look like utter shit.’
‘I don’t feel too bad.’
‘What’s your current definition of too bad? ’Cos that track of shaved skin through your beard looks kind of mental.’
They shared a hot chocolate and Finn ate a banana and a muffin and would not relent until Jack agreed to eat some of the muffin.
‘I really am not hungry,’ Jack protested, and laughed in annoyance as Finn pushed a piece of muffin between his lips.
‘When was the last time you ate?’
‘Four days, or three, I can’t remember.’
‘For fuck’s sake, Jack.’
Jack measured out another 20ml of cough medicine and pulled a face as he swallowed. Watching him, Finn wondered if perhaps the sickie Jack had tried to cover with the five hundred bucks had in fact just been a genuine sickie, and a generous gift. He cursed himself, over the money.
He took his phone out of his pocket. ‘Here, I’ll give you my number.’
‘How d’you get a cellphone?’
‘I stole it.’
‘Funny.’
‘My boss gave it to me.’
‘When you say your boss, have you got an actual job?’
Finn shifted on his seat and smiled valiantly at nothing. ‘No, I’m imagining it, Jack. You’re the only person in the whole world with an actual job.’
The two brothers slipped into their unconnected silence, in the back streets of which Finn wondered why Jack said things like that, and Jack wondered why Finn had gone quiet on him again. Jack shut his eyes. Through the glazed roof, the sunlight fell in pools on to Jack’s cheekbones, curing his face of its pallor. Finn watched as Jack slouched down on the bench and instantly slept again. I hate you, he mouthed, and watched his brother’s chest rise and fall, heard the rattle of his breathing, looked at the dishevelled exterior for a glimpse of Jack somewhere inside.
‘What’s new?’ Jack croaked.
‘Thought you were sleeping,’ Finn said.
‘I was sort of asleep and thinking at the same time.’
‘Very efficient. Very you. What about?’
‘All sorts… All the holes underneath Manhattan. Holly’s tennis skirt. My tree. The real colour of blood. Work, of course.’
‘You’re talking weird.’
‘I feel a little weird, to be honest,’ Jack muttered.
‘Is that why you have a handbag?’
‘Fuck off.’ Jack puffed out his cheeks at the effort of sitting up. He held out his hand and Finn lifted him to his feet.
In the restrooms, the brothers stood side by side. Jack threw water over his face repeatedly. He examined the red rivers in his bloodshot eyes and watched on in amazement as his baby brother rearranged his mop of hair with no more than three strokes of his wetted fingers and appeared, instantly, utterly conventional.
23
The enchanted smile on William’s face placed him somewhere in his late teens; the goofy, small-town Illinois years. His smile had that same open, amused, what-just-happened quality to it and this was some achievement on the smile’s part, given that everything else about him (his broken body, his parched skin, his pyjamas) suggested a man who had never been youthful.
He sat propped up against an expanse of pillows, in the beatific afterglow of the anaesthetic. He was already looking back on the experience as a time of magic, a sleep which had been deep as the ocean, yet momentary, and in the depths of which he had been united with a truer version of himself than waking life had ever revealed. Before the sublime descent into sleep, the man in white had laced warm honey into his blood. Even the memory of it was rapture.
He turned his head and found Joy and Leo on chairs in the corner of the room, slumped against each other in sleep. His head was light, not with a clarity of thought but the removal of it, a serene awareness that something, he didn’t know what, had gone from him. This disappearance did not alarm him. Nothing would ever alarm him again. On the contrary, he felt reconciled to his arrival at this juncture, where he sat in a hospital bed with the singular task to breathe and then to breathe again. The prospect of recovering his health to the extent that more than this was expected of him was not appealing. The only thing that appealed was more of the honey.
In the absence of a second helping of his flavour-du-jour Fentanyl/BZD cocktail, he shifted between two states of consciousness, the first an acute awareness of his own body, the second, a vivid sense of a universe without him in it. Although he was not aware of his light-footed dance between these two perspectives (if he had been aware, he could not have experienced the second) it began to dawn on him that a man’s search for his self was flawed from the get-go, in that the thing being searched for was doing the searching. Hmm. When he peered out through the cracks in his opioid shell at a world in which William Fairman did not exist other than as a passive pair of eyes looking out on the world, this seemed not only reasonable but satisfactory. He suspected that, for the first time in his life, he was high. It was not the time for making decisions.
He slept, and when he woke he felt constricted. Less honey, more blood. Joy was sitting by his side, reading a folder of notes for a Campaign Against Victimless Crime meeting.
‘See? You woke up, isn’t that great, Will?’
‘Possibly.’
She laughed nervously. ‘Make up your mind.’
His hand patted the sheet in an invitation to climb aboard. She lay carefully beside him, and, as she showed no sign of wanting to talk, William indulged in holding her and recalling the moments after the anaesthetic was administered to him. He thought about it the same way he used to daydream about entering Joy’s body, ecstatically, vividly. He recalled the gelatinous descent into oblivion. The memory of it was the only thing clear to him, and he feared losing it the same way the bereaved feared losing a dead man’s voice.
‘What happens next?’ Joy asked.
He could feel the rise and fall of her breathing, and he felt unaffected by everything, untouchable, as if nothing mattered at all. He presumed that he reeked of the absence of physical desire. The dead air of the room was drying their lips and he had the sensation that his mouth was closing over. The memory of a picture came to him, a painting he had once seen, of a man and a woman kissing, their faces and mouths covered by cloth. He had seen it on his one visit to MoMA but could not remember the artist, although he was certainly well known. He tended not to remember the names of famous artists and had enjoyed how this had made Leo despair in the old days, when Leo was passionate.
Leo slept on, exhausted by vigil, until a nurse came and instructed Joy to leave and take Leo with her, so that William could rest undisturbed. Joy kissed William’s lips and Leo stood over the bed saying a silent, smiled goodbye.
The bus took Joy south and at the first red light Leo drew alongside on his bike. He watched her reading some paperwork and pulled a face at her when she looked up. She laughed and they were thirteen and eleven again. She stuck out her tongue as he pulled away quicker than the bus. He cycled hard, wanting to get back to the gallery, concerned that he had been neglecting Astrid. (He needn’t have been; she was enjoying having the run of it.)
He was back at work when he saw his sister appear outside the gallery, posting her papers into a trash can on the sidewalk. He came out to her.
‘I thought you were going to a meeting?’
‘I was – the Campaign Against Victimless Crime.’ She pointed to the papers in the bin. ‘Which I realised comes with a cast-iron guarantee of a total absence of joie de vi
vre. I counted the word sin thirty-four times in the notes and it’s given me a strong desire to beat the crap out of some thing.’
They walked together and she found herself gripped by the beginnings of the sort of hysterical laughter that annoyed Leo so as a teenager. ‘I feel kinda hysterical,’ she said, and giggled. ‘I want to ask him if the two of them eat our exotic fruit when they’re having sex.’
He took a hold of her. ‘I can accept that you are unsure but I know William has never done that to you. So promise me, wait until he is out of hospital and strong enough to talk about this.’
She pulled a face that reluctantly agreed, and which was then disfigured by contempt for an installation she spied through a window. ‘Let’s go in,’ she said.
‘You hate this kind of thing,’ Leo said.
‘Exactly.’
He watched her stride in, spoiling for a fight, and join the small crowd in a mute disjointed procession around the Piece. He listened to the whispers in the room and the rustle of clothing and watched as Joy brushed against the back of another man and whispered her apology as he turned and she moved away. Leo was surprised by her deftness. She viewed the same man from afar. She looked at others, men and women, setting herself before a certain detail of the artwork she found incomprehensible and shifting her glance to study whoever pleased or drew her eye, staring at them freely until she needed to glance back to the crap assembled in the middle of the space. She circled people, followed them, touched them. She allowed herself to be watched and followed. She projected versions of herself across the hushed floors. Then, as abruptly as she had entered, she left.
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