But after a brief period of feeling well, she began to feel worse than she had before treatment. The nitrogen mustard was killing her white blood cells far more quickly than it was killing the cancer cells. After a month they stopped the injections and Naomi had a mastectomy, followed by radium treatment.
She was depressed for a long time. He held her while she cried about the loss of her breast. He told her she was beautiful to him no matter what. And it was true. When he looked into her eyes all he saw was the woman he loved, not the disease that had maimed her. And slowly she came out of her depression, and things began to feel normal again.
But nine months later the cancer returned. It had gone through the chest wall and infested her lungs.
He stayed by her side, he took care of her, he washed the dishes and did the ironing when it got so she couldn’t keep up with the housework. But something else happened as well. He felt himself growing colder toward her in a way he hadn’t before the cancer returned, felt himself preparing for her death.
He hated what was happening but didn’t know how to stop it. Some part of him, some self-protecting instinct, simply went about walling off his heart, and his love, despite his wishes.
He remembered when they were dating, how being near her had caused his heart rate to increase. He remembered marrying her, how slipping that ring on her finger had been like walking through a strange door ten thousand miles from anywhere you’ve been before — a strange door standing alone in the middle of the Arctic, say — and finding yourself, once on the other side, miraculously, at home. He remembered the way her laugh could make him fall in love with her all over again. He remembered all this, but each day these things were more distant than the day before. He became more and more removed from the emotions attached to these memories until they could play in his mind and he would feel nothing. It was like the memories were not his own. They were simply stories he’d heard.
That was bad, but worse was looking at her and being unable to feel anything. He would stare into her eyes, search them, trying to reach the love he’d once felt, but could not. She hadn’t changed, everything he loved about her was still there, as was his love, but that wall was built, separating him from this woman he was probably going to lose, and soon.
In early December, four months ago now, he did.
They said good night, I love you, and shut off the lights. She swallowed her pain pill in the dark, and they lay together without speaking. He must have known it was coming, for he listened to the sound of her labored breathing for hours before drifting into sleep himself. By the time the sun came up on the next morning she was gone. He didn’t cry. It simply wouldn’t come.
The emotion was in there somewhere, he knew it was, but it was walled in.
He moved out of the house the next day, packed a few things and left. He still pays the mortgage, but the house sits empty and locked. He can’t bear to go back. He’s afraid something there — a photograph, a piece of clothing, a scent — might break the wall around his heart, and now that she’s gone, gone and unrecoverable, he doesn’t want it broken. He doesn’t want to feel the loss.
He doesn’t want to feel anything.
When Carl told the boy’s mother they were going to have to arrest her son, her face contorted with agony and she called him a bastard and a motherfucker and a son of a bitch, and beat on his chest and shoulders with her fists. He let her. He simply stood there placid. He let her and he said he was sorry and he said he understood what she was going through and gave her the number at the boarding house and said she should call if she needed someone to talk to, and she said she’d never call him, never call one of the sons of bitches who took her boy away from her, you heartless motherfucker.
He doesn’t want to feel anything.
3
He takes off his fedora and wipes his sweaty forehead. The sweat feels greasy. His stomach is sour. He doesn’t know how he’s going to make it through the day. He might have to visit his connection in the hop squad, pick up a one-dose bindle, something to get him through. It’s become almost impossible to make it clean.
Friedman pushes his way out of the diner and walks to the car. He pulls open the door and slides into his seat.
Carl puts the Ford into gear, pulls it out into the street.
4
Carl walks across the squad room to his desk. He feels much better than he did fifteen minutes ago; he feels nothing at all. He managed to get hold of his connection in the hop squad, pulled him out of bed cursing and met with him beneath the palm trees in the park just south of City Hall. Then he headed back inside and found an empty room, a janitor’s closet, locked himself in, and sat alone with a lighter, a piece of tin foil, and a pen casing. After a couple hits he nodded off, tears streaming down his face. When he came back to reality he picked himself up and dragged himself to a restroom, washed his face of sweat, and dried off with a few paper towels.
He’s a new man.
He sits at his desk. It’s quiet at this hour, the room almost lifeless. His normal shift is eight to four and he’s used to the sounds of talking, shuffling papers, ringing telephones, but he’s glad those things are absent. The silence of the room echoes against the silence within him, and rings out further and further, making him feel part of a vast emptiness that stretches to the outer reaches of the atmosphere and beyond.
It’s perfect.
He thinks of the report he has to type up, looks at his notepad, then at the comic book sitting beside it. The corners are bent and torn. A rip across the front cover has been repaired with tape, yet a rectangle has been clipped from the back, the space undoubtedly once occupied by an irresistible coupon for a Real Sheriff’s Badge or Martian Ray Gun. At the top of the page, between the price in one corner and the publisher’s colophon in the other, these words:
Everybody falls in. .
DOWN CITY
The cover shows a man lying in a gutter with a swastika carved into his forehead. A uniformed policeman stands over him with his gun drawn. Behind this scene, a row of warehouses, simple brick buildings with metal roll-up doors. Skyscrapers jut behind the warehouses crooked and malevolent as fangs. The silhouette of a man can be clearly seen flying from one of the skyscrapers’ windows. Shattered glass hangs around him.
Carl wonders whether he jumped or was pushed. He supposes it doesn’t matter.
Everybody falls in Down City.
He flips the comic open, turns to a story called ‘Little Hitler’, the story the boy said inspired him to carve that star into his stepfather’s forehead, and reads it.
It concerns a man who angrily wanders Down City each night hunting Jewish women. He waits till they’re isolated, then comes up behind them and stabs them. After they’re dead he carves six-pointed stars into their foreheads. He doesn’t want anybody to misunderstand his motives. He might take their money and their jewelry, but they’re dead because they’re Jews.
One night while he’s lurking in the shadows, about to attack, a policeman comes upon him. He runs, but instead of getting away he trips over a curb and falls on his own knife, which, rather improbably, carves a crude swastika into his forehead. Then a truck hauling jars of gefilte fish runs over him as he lies in the street. The policeman stands over him in the last panel, looking down at the mangled corpse, and speaks the final line of the story: ‘What goes around comes around, I guess.’
Carl closes the comic.
The boy carved the wrong kind of star into his stepfather’s forehead. It wouldn’t have mattered even if he’d done it correctly — he tried to frame a comic-book character for the murder, and a dead comic-book character at that — but still, he carved a five-pointed star into his stepfather’s forehead rather than a six-pointed star. Somehow that makes it sadder, more pathetic.
But panic will paralyze your mind. Emotion takes over. You know you have to do something and you do whatever you think of, no matter how strange or stupid, just to keep moving. Doing something is important, not sitting still
is important, far more important than any action you end up taking. It seems that way in the midst of panic, anyway. It’s only later, as you look back on the trail of destruction you left behind you, like a tornado that cut its way through a city, that you realize stopping, doing nothing, would have been wiser. You’ve only made things worse.
Plus the kid’s thirteen. Carl has seen grown men do poorer jobs of covering up their own crimes, men in their thirties and forties and fifties.
He looks to the typewriter. He might as well do it. He pulls the machine toward him, grabs three forms and slips two sheets of carbon paper between them, rolls the paper sandwich into his typewriter. After another moment, and an under-the-breath curse, he gets to work, banging hard on the keys to ensure the marks make it through all five sheets of paper.
NINE
1
Seymour Markley, in blue-and-white-striped pajamas, pads barefoot across his hardwood floor, down the wide book-lined hallway, through the tastefully decorated living room, to the thick, hand-carved maple front door. He grabs the glass doorknob and pulls, wondering who could be knocking at this hour on a Sunday morning.
At first he doesn’t recognize her. There’s a part of his brain that knows he should — the short brunette hair; the vacant blue eyes; the full, soft-looking lips — but the context is wrong, and at first he has no idea who she is. He blinks at her through his wire-framed spectacles, lips parted but soundless. He’s about to say something, yes, can I help you, I think perhaps you’re at the wrong house, when recognition comes. It comes all at once, like a fist to the gut.
He glances over his shoulder to make sure Margaret is still in bed, to make sure she isn’t standing in the hallway watching this, then looks back to the woman standing on the other side of the threshold. He believes her name is Vivian. That’s what she calls herself at work, anyway. She works as a B-girl, and sometimes more, at a place called the Sugar Cube. Out on the street behind her, in a green Chevrolet coupe, sits another woman. He recognizes her as well, but has never heard her name spoken aloud. Or if he has he’s forgotten. The woman in the car appears to have been crying very recently. She looks at them, at Seymour and Vivian, through the passenger’s-side window. She has blonde hair. Her face is pale. She looks like a ghost.
Or maybe Seymour’s simply been unnerved by seeing these women out of context. He feels slightly dizzy.
‘What are you doing here? How did you find my house?’
‘I’m sorry to bother you at home,’ Vivian says, touching his arm briefly, ‘but we need help.’
‘You can’t be here,’ he says, glancing over his shoulder a second time, ‘you simply cannot be here.’
‘But I am here, and I’m not leaving until you agree to help.’
‘With what?’
‘Candice’s boy is in some trouble.’
‘Who’s Candice?’
‘The woman in the car. She works with me.’
‘What kind of trouble?’
‘Legal trouble. Why else would I bother you on a Sunday morning?’
‘What did he do?’
Vivian pauses, looks hesitant.
‘What did he do? You didn’t come here to not tell me.’
‘He killed a man.’
‘What?’
‘I know. But you’re gonna help us.’
‘Or what,’ Seymour says, feeling anger start to swell within him, ‘you’ll tell my wife? Do you really think she’ll believe you? You’re just a whore. I can claim it’s nothing but an attempt at blackmail. Why don’t you get the hell out of here?’
‘Nobody has to believe me, Seymour,’ Vivian says. ‘I have pictures.’
‘You have. .’ He blinks at her. His eyes feel dry, itchy.
She mimes the taking of a photograph, says, ‘Click.’
Seymour cannot think. There’s a hitch in his mind. All the gears have locked up. Then, after a moment, after that strange mental hang-up has resolved itself, his brain starts working again and thought returns to him.
‘Okay,’ he says. ‘But we can’t talk here. I’ll meet you and your friend-’
‘Candice.’
‘I’ll meet you and Candice at nine o’clock. There’s a diner called Fred’s not far from here. We’ll talk there.’
‘Nine o’clock?’
Seymour nods.
‘You better show up.’
‘I will,’ Seymour says, and pushes the door closed.
He turns around and puts his back to it. He looks down the length of the hallway, toward the room where his wife still lies in bed. He knew better than to do what he did. He always knows better, every time. But something in him, some base part of him, thrives on that knowledge, and rather than stopping him it pushes him forward. Into places where a man can buy anything so long as he has enough money folded into his wallet. He lets the women lead him upstairs, or to the back room. He watches them undress. He lets them come to him, not at all assertive himself, lets himself pretend he didn’t know what would happen, what it would lead to. That’s part of the game. Most of the time he has to be so much in control that he likes giving it up on these occasions. But it also makes him feel disgusting to do what he does. After it’s over he feels sick. He fears syphilis. He fears gonorrhea. He comes home and scrubs his body in scalding water and tells himself he will never do that again. It’s filthy and he’s filthy for doing it. He avoids his wife for a week, sometimes two, to make sure he hasn’t contracted anything that he might give her, though it’s less out of concern for her wellbeing than out of fear that he’ll have to explain to her why she must get penicillin shots. But despite the way it makes him feel, despite the guilt, a couple months later he’s in his car again, driving, telling himself he’s not going where he knows damn well he is.
Sometimes he manages to restrain the urge for as long as six months, but never more. He hates himself for it. Immediately afterwards he hates himself, but the mind is a strange thing, and when the venereal diseases do not arrive, when it’s clear that God hasn’t punished him for his transgressions, the guilt and shame fade away.
But it looks like God’s punished him after all, doesn’t it? He’s certain he never told Vivian his last name, nor would he ever have told her his job. So how did she find him? How does she know who he is, what he does?
Don’t be a fool, Seymour. Your name and photograph are in the newspaper on a regular basis. You were elected to office. You’re a public figure who failed to keep his private vices private.
God didn’t do this; you’ve brought it upon yourself.
He walks down the hallway and pushes into his bedroom. Margaret, in bed, opens her eyes and smiles at him sleepily.
‘Who was it?’
‘Barry. Looks like I’ll have to go into work for a few hours.’
‘But it’s Sunday.’
‘I know. You’ll have to go to church without me.’
2
Candice sits in a diner with a mug of coffee cupped in her palms. Outside she hears cars rolling by, horns honking. Back on Bunker Hill her next-door neighbors keep chickens in their backyard for eggs, and usually by this time of morning she’s spent the last hour or two listening to their rooster greet the sunrise. Neil hated it, swore he would poison the goddamn thing, but she’s always liked the rural images it put in her mind: farmhouses and green tractors parked in fields. It reminds her of her youth.
Right now she misses that sound. She misses the comfort of it.
She looks down at the black liquid in her cup. She can’t believe her son did what she knows he did. The coffee is thick as crude oil. She thought she understood the relationship Sandy had with his stepfather but she had no idea. Steam rises from the surface of the liquid. What kind of mother misses that much hatred, that much pain? If she’d known, if Sandy had told her, she would have changed things. She would have made Neil move out. She bought the house with her ex-husband, Lyle, but she hasn’t seen him in seven years, and though his name is still on the papers at the bank, she’s mad
e the last eighty-five payments herself. It’s her house. It never belonged to Neil. If she’d known how bad it was for Sandy she would have done it, she would have made Neil pack his bags and leave.
She tells herself that, but it isn’t true, is it? Sandy did tell you. Maybe he didn’t tell you in so many words, but he’s only a boy, and in a dozen other ways he let you know what was happening, and you ignored it. You told yourself it would work out. You were selfish, you wanted Neil around, you needed someone to lie beside you in the dark, so you ignored what you knew was happening. You pretended what was happening wasn’t.
She picks up her coffee and takes a sip.
She glances over to Vivian sitting in the booth beside her, looking out a dirty window to the street. Families in their Sunday best heading to church, or maybe to breakfast before service begins.
Without turning away from the window she says, ‘He’ll be here.’
‘Do you think he’ll be able to do anything?’
‘He’s the district attorney. He can do something.’
‘Do you think he will?’
‘If he wants to keep his wife. If he wants to keep his career.’
‘How could I have let this happen?’
Vivian looks toward Candice. She remains silent for a long time. Then she says, ‘You didn’t let anything happen. It happened, that’s all.’
‘Neil’s gone. My son’s gone. They were everything, everything I had.’
‘Sandy isn’t gone.’
‘How could he do something like this? My sweet little boy.’
Vivian shakes her head. Her eyes tell Candice the only answer she has. I don’t know.
Candice doesn’t know either.
‘Drink your coffee.’
She does.
After a long time Vivian says, ‘I think there’s a place inside everybody where it’s always nighttime. A place we keep locked up. But if the latch breaks and lets the night out. . maybe shadows fall on everything.’
The Last Tomorrow Page 7