27
William sensed that it was morning and that he was outside. The cold that went deep in the bones and offered the illusion of wellbeing came upon him. He found himself coiled on the ground. Above him, a breeze stuttered through the flat, open-handed cedar branches. Pain awaited him, he knew, but for now the oddness of awakening in the Manhattan open and the raised roots of the tree seemed able to hold it at bay.
He had always so loved the rhythmic pleasure of daily life and the belief in something great, but now, in light of the void, the rituals felt all dried up. It seemed of no significance how much longer he remained or what he did with the years he had left. He had no desire to die, no idea how to live. His only craving was to float again downriver to the top of that silky, slow-falling honey cascade and slip over the edge to where there was no pain.
He sat up and held his knees and took some deliberate breaths. The hurt in his body awoke too, like a sheet inside him unfolding, deep and not yet jagged. Above him, he saw the bowl of fruit in the window and imagined he could hear Susan singing to herself somewhere in the apartment, although this was not possible.
The door to the building was held open by a bag of cement. There was dust across the tiled lobby floor and boot-prints leading to a ground-floor apartment. Jay-Z sang from a paint-splattered radio and the throb of it took William’s breathing by the hand as he climbed the stairs. He took a moment to straighten up before he knocked on Susan French’s door.
She said nothing about his appearance but smiled with everything she had; her eyes, her mouth, the whole delicate intricacy of her fragile relationship to the world, it all poured into the smile which met him.
They sat a while on the cat-smell couch, and she watched him patiently, did not want to ask questions about why he was in a dressing gown and bruised in the face and walking like a shattered man. He wasn’t saying, so maybe she shouldn’t ask.
‘Do you have any painkillers?’ he asked.
She laughed at the idea that she wouldn’t and leapt up to get him whatever he needed. She returned with the pills and sat cross-legged on the floor at his feet.
‘I was hit by a truck,’ he told her.
‘Shit!’
‘I’m okay. I needed some air and I thought I would take a walk over to see you, my dear girl.’
She smiled and adored him. ‘I’ll do anything for you,’ she said.
‘I’d like you to go and get Joy for me. I need her.’ He hesitated, as he realised he couldn’t remember his own address, and instead he tried to describe how to find it.
She made them coffee, putting on socks and sneakers as it brewed, watching the pot from the comfort of an ex-boyfriend’s sheepskin coat and extracting a tiny, infinite delight at seeing a second mug beside hers. Before she left she repeated William’s hopeless description of where he and Joy lived. When she had gone, he noticed the emptiness the way a child would hear every creak and groan in an unfamiliar house. He took a look at Susan’s bed and the clothes rail that stood in the small gap between the bed and the walls. She was wearing half of what she owned. They could have done more for her.
In the bathroom, he bowed down to the pain and washed his face, brushed his teeth with toothpaste on his little finger. He put the tube of paste back in the cabinet above the sink, between a flat yellow packet labelled Naloxone and a jar of Tiger Balm. In the fridge he found a Jiffy bag with a small block print of a grinning Apache Indian. He took the syringe and needle from the bag and went to the bedroom. He got into the bed and pulled the duvet up to his neck and sipped his coffee. After another sip, he lay on his side and hugged the bedding around him and stared at the needle a few inches away on the bedside table. His body became musty and warm in its own sweat and he found it easy to close his eyes and imagine Joy lying behind him, her flesh pressed against him. He slipped a little towards a halfway house between unconsciousness and the room, and he recalled the sensations of making love to Joy, the refuge of her body, swimming in the warmth of belonging to her, and the amazement, every time, that he could evoke such pleasure in her. To lie naked with her had always been to William an act of escape from some broken place he had not yet reached, and it was escape from his pain that he wanted now, while the girl searched for a home and a wife that he could not remember how to describe. He took the syringe and carefully, naïvely, yet without hesitation, inserted it into the cannula and injected, with the expectation that when he woke Joy would be beside him and Susan nearby too, somewhere in the apartment, like a family. This was a hope, not a belief. He plunged towards insensibility, like the moment of landing in water stretched out in time, dragging him deep. His body weight shimmered through him from the soles of his feet up to the crown of his head and he felt the pleasure of letting go of it all, of hope and expectation and faith, and, after he had wet himself and the warmth trickled down his leg, there came to him enough joy in a second to last an eternity.
Susan headed home mid-morning, having walked the streets of Clinton for two hours with no idea what she was looking for and no desire to find it. She stole croissants from a chic café that was too busy for its own good and ate one of them as she walked through the door of her apartment. It was warm from the oven and tasted rich and buttery and made her happy about life. She found William in her bed and the detritus of his actions beside it. He looked peaceful and old. She understood immediately. She had seen this sort of coma before. She held his head and plumped up the pillow beneath him. She tucked his arms to his chest and neatened the duvet around him so his feet weren’t sticking out. She stroked his forehead and finished her croissant, sitting on the side of the bed. She put the chain on the front door and took off her coat and put a big pot of coffee on the stove even though she knew William could not have any, and she washed the two mugs and placed them beside each other on the counter. She felt his presence in the apartment, even as his breathing slowed and became impossible to detect. She drank coffee and held his hand. She lay behind him on the bed and buried her face in the bedding against his back and she felt the mass of his body and thought of him choosing to come here to her and, hidden from view, tucked into the folds of this, her least lonely morning for many years, she smiled.
She put music on for them both. She took frozen burgers from the icebox and fried them with beans. She cleaned the living room as she ate, returning to her plate on the low table between the small, angular movements with which she used the dustpan and brush. She sat on the end of the bed to finish her food and stroked William’s forehead and talked to him about many things she would like to do, and later she dialled for an ambulance.
28
Leo looked down at his reflection in the surface of an oil-slicked puddle and caught a rare sighting of himself outside Manhattan. His reflection rippled in time with the judder of trains on the Manhattan Bridge overhead. Sand-slipped glass in the dusty windows of a tobacco warehouse made ghouls of the reflections of the neighbourhood and he wasn’t sure why he was here, why he was keeping an eye open for realtors’ boards on warehouse buildings. This lack of direction aside, the day reminded him of early forays into Chelsea when he first grew tired of SoHo, and into SoHo when he first arrived.
These streets had once been the dead-ends that lay in the shadows beneath towering overpasses of rail and road, the streets from which a romantic’s view of a great, rotting metropolis are made. A man sped by on a red Lambretta, shouting into his cellphone. On a noticeboard outside the deli there were rooms for rent, a bike for sale, yoga classes, Lawrence Mino’s Carpentry and Architectural Design service, mannequins at twenty dollars apiece, window-cleaning, office and apartment cleaning, high-res scanning services and Ulysses Nagato, tantric masseur, offering two- and four-handed massage. Presumably, Leo surmised, Ulysses had a massage partner.
He caught his reflection again, in the window. These were, of course, not mean streets any longer. They had not yet had the guttural texture refined out of them completely, but all the telltale detail that Leo’s world imported to an
y neighbourhood was already pitching tent here. Despite this, and the unaccountable sense of unease Leo felt this fine spring day, these streets felt good to him.
He ate in a restaurant with the Manhattan Bridge and the East River spread out before him. It had the piercing acoustics of a school dining hall in riot and was packed: feeding time at the Jerry Springer Show. An uncomplicated pleasure at being alive glanced against him, hard enough to remind him he was a coward who had stopped looking at the world. His table was green Formica, bubbled, splintered and torn. On the adjoining table, two women pushed the unidentifiable carcasses on their plates away from them and groaned, leaning back as far as the laws of obesity permitted. In a playground beneath the Manhattan Bridge, two boys swung on a truck tyre screaming and laughing as a brawny, slope-shouldered man spun the tyre in fast circles. Nearby in the park, a large group were having a picnic, singing ‘Happy Birthday’. Leo couldn’t hear them but it was clear from the cake held aloft what they were singing, and that some were embarrassed to sing aloud and others were not.
A large, cumbersome boy stepped across Leo’s line of sight, blocking from Leo’s view the picnic and most of Lower Manhattan.
‘’Scuse me…’ the boy said.
He sat down opposite Leo, clattering a white cane against the seat and knocking the table. The boy was in his late teens. His eye sockets sat deep and redundant in his skull, his eyeballs half-turned inwards to the walls of the sockets. Patches of fluffy, pubic-like hair held biscuit crumbs to his face.
‘What are you eating?’ he asked Leo, loudly.
‘Chicken salad.’
‘Why?’
‘I like it, I like chicken.’
‘Where’s the chicken from?’
Leo laughed, then checked himself. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Why?’ The boy spoke over the last breath of whatever Leo said.
‘We don’t know where every chicken comes from, I don’t think. But I like to eat it.’
‘Why?’
‘What are you going to eat?’ Leo asked.
‘Where do chickens come from?’ the boy said, speaking relentlessly, without placing emphasis on any single vowel or word.
Leo replied softly. ‘Where do you think?’
‘The farm.’
‘Guess so,’ Leo agreed.
The boy took a sliced-bread bag from his backpack, then a broken polystyrene cup and a flask. He took some cheese sandwiches from the bread bag and began to eat, chewing with his front two teeth, bullets of food flying out of his mouth as he spoke.
‘What are you doing here?’ the boy asked.
Leo leaned back a little, to avoid the flying food. ‘I’m taking a look around.’
‘Why?’
‘Because it’s such a lovely day.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Manhattan.’
‘Where?’
‘Gramercy Park, do you know it?’
‘Do you live in a park?’
‘The area’s called Gramercy Park.’
‘Do you live up a tree?’
Leo smiled, allowed himself to laugh a little. ‘Where do you live?’
‘Staten Island.’ The boy continued in deadly monotone, ‘Do you know the S56 bus?’
‘No.’
‘Why don’t you?’
‘I don’t use buses so much.’
‘How much is a hairband?’
‘Er… I don’t know, I don’t use them either. How much do you think they are?’
‘Does your wife use them?’
‘I don’t have a wife.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why don’t you have a wife?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Because you could cut her hair.’
‘I suppose I could, if I was married.’
‘Have you got a daddy?’
‘Not any more,’ Leo said.
‘Have you got a mummy?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘They’re dead.’
‘Have you got a son?’
The shape of the boy’s skull was uneven, long and angled, a rhombus, as if he had been pulled too hard, too mercilessly out of his mother’s body. One ear was higher than the other.
‘Yes,’ Leo heard himself say. ‘Yes, I have.’ He had the false impression that the restaurant had fallen silent and that everybody had listened to his lie. The clouds cast fast, pretty shadows against the steel stanchions of the Manhattan Bridge.
‘Does he live in the park with you?’
‘Yes, he does.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘His name is Finn.’
‘Do you have a doggy?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘We’re not allowed them in the building.’
‘You and Finn?’
‘That’s right. Have you got a dog?’
‘Can you stay and talk to me?’
‘What do you prefer, cats or dogs?’
‘Can you stay and talk to me?’ The boy remained inexorable and without emotion.
‘I can stay a while,’ Leo said. He wanted to take a flannel to the boy’s face. Or he wanted someone else to.
‘This cup doesn’t feel too good.’
Leo looked at the polystyrene cup. It was falling apart and, every time the boy took hold of it, it broke a little more. Despite this, the boy began to unscrew the top of his flask.
‘The cup is broken,’ Leo said.
‘What is?’
‘Don’t use it.’
‘What is?’
‘The cup, your cup.’
The boy began to tilt the flask.
‘Don’t use it, it’s fucked,’ Leo said, to get his attention.
The boy stopped and smiled, and muttered a dirty laugh, revealing a slab of cheese stuck to the roof of his mouth. Then, he let out a series of loud, piercing screeches that froze the diners and cast the restaurant into silence.
‘Was that a good monkey sound?’ the boy asked.
‘It was very good,’ Leo said. ‘Shall I get you a better cup?’
‘Don’t go.’
‘I’ll come back.’
‘You won’t.’ The boy raised his head and called out, ‘Can I have a cup please, ’scuse me!’
One of the women on the adjoining table leaned over and slid a cup in front of the boy, who picked it up.
‘Is that a clean cup?’ the boy asked Leo, knowingly.
‘No,’ Leo said, with regret. ‘It is not.’
The boy smiled, fatefully, and shrugged. He crushed the cup in his hand. Leo called a waitress over and asked for a clean cup, then lowered his voice and offered to pay a cover charge for the boy because he didn’t want her to kick him out. The waitress told him there was no need, that the boy always brought his own food and drink in. Leo offered to pour the boy’s coffee for him and as he did so he smelled the relief of the other diners who hadn’t had the insane blind boy sit at their table.
‘What would Finn say if you gave him dog food and creamed corn for dinner tonight?’
Again, Leo laughed beneath his breath. ‘I wouldn’t do that.’
‘Not to Finn?’
‘Not to Finn.’
‘Why?’
‘Dog food is for dogs; it’s not nice for people. I wouldn’t do that to him.’
‘To Finn?’
‘Yes.’
‘How old is Finn?’ the boy said, continuing to clip the end of Leo’s answers.
Leo hesitated. He glanced at a couple nearby who he knew were listening. He blushed, and muttered to himself, ‘How old?’
‘How old is Finn?’ the boy repeated, robotically, his voice insistent yet without emphasis.
‘Nineteen.’
‘Is he full of singing?’
Leo smiled. ‘I don’t know what that means, but it sounds nice.’
‘Is he naughty?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘Why?’
Leo shrugged, distracted by as-yet-unfocused thoughts about Finn and the empty warehouse spaces of Brooklyn.
‘Is Finn naughty?’
‘He stole some money.’
‘Finn?’
‘Yes.’
‘Did they arrest him, did the cops come to your tree and arrest him?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘He promised me he wouldn’t do it again.’
‘Do I smell like a panther?’
Leo laughed aloud. So did the boy, with a deep, filthy, hysterical burst. Then the boy screamed again, one piercing, high-pitched scream.
‘I don’t think it will feel too good,’ the boy went on, ‘if the cops come and take you away and don’t let you sleep in your bed and they make you stay in their house and they ask you if you’ve been bad. I don’t think that would feel too good, do you think it would feel good?’
‘I think it wouldn’t feel nice.’
‘It doesn’t feel too nice at all. They take your mom away. Is Finn a tree?’
‘No, he’s a boy.’
‘I’m nineteen.’
‘Same as Finn.’
‘Is Finn nice?’
Leo stared at the boy. The boy’s mouth hung open, waiting for the reply. There was food in his mouth, and spittle. His buck teeth bit on his lower lip (when he paused from eating or talking). The bags beneath and within his eye sockets were profoundly grey. Leo felt a surge of love move through him. It felt hot in his spine. He felt love.
‘He’s very nice. Just like you. He’s a nice boy.’
‘Finn is nice,’ the boy muttered, reflectively.
There was silence. The boy smiled to himself, at whatever it was he was thinking. ‘Is it time for the coffee spoons?’ he asked. ‘Is it time for the spoons to make lots of noise? Are they dancing? Is it noisy?’
Leo looked around at the other diners, many of whom were watching.
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