Before My Life Began

by Jay Neugeboren

  I didn’t smile. Maybe they were bluffing. Maybe what they planned to do was to tell me that Abe had said things about me. Maybe they planned to tell me that Abe was already dead so that I would fall apart and agree to help them, so that I would betray Abe. The oldest trick. I tried to anticipate all the things they might say to me. If they told me that they had taken Gail and Emilie and were holding them somewhere…

  It seemed crazy to me that a few hours before I’d been kissing my wife and nuzzling my daughter—touching skin that was, in memory, like satin—and that now I was trapped in a dark space waiting to find out if I would live or die. I imagined Gail looking out our living room window, watching the street, waiting for me. Would she be nursing Emilie? The body didn’t know how to lie, she said. When she was upset or worried, her milk was different, and Emilie would sputter, would draw her knees up in pain.

  Gail would, at this moment, I told myself, be looking out the window, watching the street, hoping to see me, while I was here, watching Vincent’s hands and eyes, measuring distances and gestures, calculating my chances. What made sense?

  “Listen. This ain’t easy for me, Davey. Believe me. Only since I’m the one that knows you best, they chose me to give you the message.”

  He rubbed his hands together, light flashing at me from his pinky ring.

  “If I try to leave?”

  He shook his head sideways, like a bulldog shaking off water.

  “Ah, you wouldn’t be that stupid. You got a good brain, Davey. Everyone knows that. You can make something of yourself in this life. You ain’t a bum like me. Now Rothenberg, he had a good brain too and he got to use it for more years than you would of expected, all the dirty deals he pulled. But in the end the chickens all come home to roost, right?”

  “You’re stalling.”

  “Sure. You would too, if you had to deliver a message like the one they gave me for you.”

  “Tell me.”

  “No rush, kid. No rush. Bad news is never in a hurry. I mean, I figured you and me would want to be alone here for a few minutes when you got the news, away from what they got going on upstairs, see, where we got to go in a minute to get the other things straightened out.”

  “Tell me.”

  I thought of myself with Gail, heading west on a train, gazing out at low hills, at fields of Kentucky blue grass. Emilie had her nose pressed against the train window. She was pointing to the horses.

  “Sure, kid. Only see what a friend I been to you—how I made sure to get you away from your mother and your kid so they ain’t in trouble? Because, okay, since I don’t mean to tease you or nothing, the news is that your uncle had a bad accident—the worst kind—and that Mr. Fasalino wants to express his condolences to you personally. He’s waiting upstairs so—”

  I moved for the door, but he was ready for me, his gun in my stomach. He talked softly, told me he knew I was upset, but that I should be careful so that we could both live longer. I felt the blood surge through me, crash against my chest, and even in my rage I knew enough to remind myself that he might not be telling the truth, that he might be trying to set me up, to use me. But for what?

  “Accidents happen, right? I mean, kids can fall off sliding-ponds and break their necks, and pretty young mothers can slip in bathtubs and crack their skulls, and whole families can go up in flames because a piece of newspaper happens to float down over a gas range at the wrong time. Even the insurance companies tell you that most of the worst accidents happen at home.”

  His gun was pushing my lips against my teeth, forcing my mouth open, making me back up against the wall. I tasted cold metal, smelled burnt gunpowder, listened to him give me advice: I couldn’t be too careful. Did I understand? Accidents could happen, and if he were in my shoes he would think mostly about looking out for number one. Did I hear him?

  “I hear.”

  “That’s a good boy, Davey. You said the right thing.”

  His gun was gone. I wanted to spit, to get rid of the bitter taste. What good was anger, he wanted to know. He knew how much I loved my uncle, but what good would anger do for me now? What was gone was gone. I should calm down and let myself feel what lay beneath the anger. I should act on that.

  Then, smiling warmly, he whacked me across the midsection with all his might. I was too startled to cry out, and I heard him cry too, as he swung, so that the breath burst from me as if a bag of it had exploded. I gagged, doubled over. I heard his voice tell me that I was to take his word that all they wanted was for things to be peaceful. They didn’t hold me responsible for anything Abe or Mr. Rothenberg had done. I gasped for breath, my hands clutching at my stomach. The world went black. I let my head drop lower. Vincent pulled me up by one ear, so that I would look into his face. Now did I understand?

  “Nobody wants blood,” he said. “Nobody likes accidents, Davey. Mr. Fasalino ain’t interested in your wife or your kid or your mother. Mr. Fasalino don’t want nothing from you but your good will, see. Like when somebody buys a candy store or a small business, they don’t want the guy they buy it from to be going around bad-mouthing them, you know what I mean? They want goodwill in the community so they can keep the customers along with the fixtures.”

  Somebody called down to us and Vincent yelled back that things were under control, that we would be up in a minute. Men seemed to be floating around in the smoke, drinking and laughing. I thought of Abe and his friends, naked, walking around Al Roon’s Health Club, their bodies moving in and out of the clouds of steam like ghosts. Vincent said that Mr. Fasalino had children and grandchildren of his own, that he wanted me to have a good life. Mr. Fasalino was a generous man. I looked at Vincent and I imagined Gail, retching into the toilet. I saw my mother, in the kitchen, raking at her hair. I saw Abe, a gun in his hand, standing in the bathroom doorway, staring at Gail. She screamed. She flung herself at his face, screeching, clawing. Emilie was in the bathtub, and while Abe tried to get hold of Gail’s wrists, Emilie slid slowly down the side of the tub until, inch by inch, her head disappeared under soap bubbles.

  “You can’t have everything in life,” Vincent said. “I mean, like with me and Sheila. We all got losses, Davey, and we gotta know when to cut.” His eyes were actually watering. He assured me that he’d spoken to Mr. Fasalino on my behalf. He rubbed his hand across his forehead. The handle of his gun was slick with sweat. The light was spilling down on us now, thick with smoke. Somebody yelled at him to haul his ass upstairs, that Mr. Fasalino was getting impatient.

  “Sometimes when we get real sad we think we gotta act like we’re angry, but ain’t that crazy, Davey? My Momma used to say to me, ‘Vincent, if you’re sad, you gotta let yourself be sad.’ I mean, you think I asked for this job? So you just relax, okay? The worst is over.” He shook his head. “Jesus. If I had a mirror you could look into, you’d see how crazy you are with anger, what a face you got on.”

  He gestured to me to start up the stairs with him, and as he did I saw that there were two rings on his left hand, the tiger’s eye on his pinky, a second ring on his wedding finger. Had I lived through this scene before? Had I imagined it. He turned to me, eyes moist, a strange sick smile on his lips, and as he gestured to me again to follow him—while he said things about being sincere, about really being sweet on Sheila—I saw the stone from Abe’s ring glow red through the smoke, and I wondered if I’d known all along that it would be there. Abe! The light seemed to tumble down the staircase now, brighter than ever, the smoke curling and turning in balls, and when Vincent raised his right hand, the gun in it, to shield his eyes from that light, I had him against the staircase wall, my right arm jammed against his windpipe. Abe! I slammed Vincent’s wrist against the wall and the gun fell. The doorway upstairs was wide open, a high foreshortened rectangle of light and smoke. Vincent squirmed, kicked out at me, tried to call for help. Abe! Vincent’s eyes blinked furiously with fright, with panic. I bent down, wiped along the step with my palm, found the gun, and even as the noises and voices descended f
rom above, I felt calm and ready, so calm that I could not even hear the sound of my own heart.

  The light on the staircase changed from yellow to white—brighter and brighter—and it was as if, inside my head, within that white light, I could suddenly see all the years of my life stretched out to the end of time like a series of empty rooms in a vacant apartment, all the doors open, all the rooms clean and white. Abe! And when I heard the shot and felt the gun slam backwards against my palm, and when I heard Vincent moan and slump against me, his hand on my shoulder, it was not at all as if I were dreaming, but more as if I were remembering a dream I’d once had. I was walking out of the apartment slowly, room by room, backwards, across waxed floors. Abe stood in the doorway behind me, gun in hand, looking down at the body. Gail and I sat on the bed, unable to make him see us. Vincent held his stomach, looked at me with pinched, bewildered eyes.

  “Oh Jesus, kid, why’d you do a stupid thing like that? How you ever gonna fix a thing like this? Jesus Christ, kid…”

  But I was already moving down the stairs, leaping the last four steps, flinging the door open, running for my life.

  “Hey—! Hey you—”

  I turned and fired in the direction of the voice. Then I ran again, between cars, across the street, around a corner, and I was astonished at how wonderful it felt simply to be running, to feel my legs stretching and pumping, to be sucking cool air into my lungs. Abe! I ran and I ran, the black street racing backwards beneath my feet, my toes skimming the concrete, and it was as if I were running across the grass at the Parade Grounds in full stride, going way out for a pass, knowing I could catch up to any ball that anybody could throw. I felt as if I could run forever.

  I saw lights ahead, heard a subway train. I was streaking down deserted streets, past warehouses and small factories and abandoned buildings. I was moving too fast to make out street signs. I headed towards the lights and the noise, at a diagonal, between moving cars. Where had they come from? I heard screeching, horns. I kept running. I saw people in front of me, heard music. I slowed down, stopped, looked back. I smelled sea air. My chest heaved in and out, rasping. How far had I come? Was I in Sheepshead Bay or Canarsie or Red Hook? I remembered fishing with a dropline from a pier at Sheepshead Bay when I was a boy. My mother took me there on the Ocean Avenue trolley. We bought clams and I smashed them on the sidewalk, picked out the white flesh from among pieces of shell, pressed the flesh onto my hook.

  Trust nobody. Abe was right. If I’d gone upstairs and made the wrong move, said the wrong thing… If I’d lost my temper… I backed into a doorway, looked out both ways. Nobody was following me. I lifted the gun barrel to my nose, sniffed in. I saw myself in our apartment house courtyard and I was on my knees, banging down on rolls of caps with a stone, letting the red paper unroll, pounding on the gray dots.

  I shivered, imagining myself biting down on the barrel, recalling the awful feeling when I’d bit down through a steak onto the tines of a fork. I walked at a normal pace, staying close to the buildings, watching the street, on the lookout for slow-moving cars, wondering why I didn’t feel more about Abe, why I wasn’t crying, why my heart wasn’t breaking. I was relieved that he was gone, I realized, and the feeling, to my surprise, did not displease me. Why not? I kept the gun ready, pressed to my leg. I heard men speaking in Spanish, arguing and laughing. In front of an apartment building, four men sat around a small bridge table, drinking beer and playing cards. Behind them, two men straddled chairs backwards. I saw dollar bills held down by rocks. A stand-up lamp was next to the table, its cord running through the air, looped into the window of a first-floor apartment. I didn’t want any trouble. I veered sideways, toward the curb, so that I wouldn’t have to duck under the cord.

  I unzipped my jacket, slipped the gun inside, tucked it under my belt, between my pants and my shirt. Two dark-haired girls were leaning backwards against a car. I could smell their perfume, see their chests rise slightly. They giggled, spoke to me in Spanish, asked if I were lost. One of the men looked up at me from his cards. I smiled with closed lips to show him I meant no harm. He gestured to the girls, winked at me, tossed a card onto the table. Coins clinked in a glass ashtray. The girls laughed, asked me what food I ate to have grown so tall. “¡Mira! ¡Mira! Hey, muchacho grande, you real cute, you like to meet my friend Nydia?”

  Could they see my wedding ring? The girls called to me, asked my name. I didn’t look back. I saw the phone booth on the corner, hesitated for an instant, realized that I had already made my decision: I would not telephone. I was on a wide street where the lights were brighter, but the night sky, blocked by the elevated subway above me, the crisscrossing of girders and tracks, was darker. Where was I? The sign said Liberty Avenue. A man in a stained camel’s hair jacket, no shirt below, sat in the alcove of a liquor store, a paper bag in his lap. I looked down at a sewer grating, blocked by wet newspapers and garbage, by a mass of something brown that looked like a clump of human hair.

  I thought of Beau Jack’s wolf-children, racing beneath the city, chewing at Vincent’s face, stripping his cheek from the bone. I looked back. A pair of headlights seemed to float along the street toward me, as if in water. The headlights stopped where the men were playing cards. I moved out of view, crossed over, then ran. I heard a train rumble out of the station, saw the entrance on the next block, felt something wet hit the back of my head, glide down my neck. The gun dug into my waist, scraping, knocking against my hip bone. Liberty Avenue. The Fulton Line. I could take it to downtown Brooklyn, to Atlantic Avenue. I could change there for the uptown Seventh Avenue IRT. If I made good connections I could be at the Port Authority Terminal in Manhattan within forty to fifty minutes.

  I took the stairs two at a time, fished in my pocket, found change, pushed through the turnstile. They would look for me first at our apartment, then at the office on Flatbush Avenue. They might return to my mother’s building. They might figure I’d want to go home first—to Gail and to Emilie, to pack—or that I would go to Abe’s apartment. Abe was probably right, that they would never count on me being ready to head straight for a bus station. I walked to the far end of the platform, leaned against a billboard.

  If they found me and brought me back to Fasalino, and even if he didn’t get rough with me… I clenched my fists, wanted to pound the billboard, to punch through it, through the teeth of the blond model smiling coyly at a man in a tuxedo who was pouring a glass of Scotch. I blinked and experienced one of those moments Gail and I often talked about, of being in a place I’d never been, but of sensing that I’d been there before. Gail had shown me an article that tried to explain déjá vu by talking about the images our retinas often took in during the splitsecond before our minds registered, rationally, what it was we were actually seeing. In that split second, as in a dream, whole stories—entire lives—could pass, and we would think those moments and lives had taken place, not an instant before, but in some other distant time, in some other life.

  What I saw in that moment was a dream I once had, or thought I’d had, of being on the subway platform late at night, alone, on my way to a party. I’d forced Gail to stay home—we’d argued, she’d pouted—because I knew, somehow, as surely as I’d ever known anything, that if we went together, leaving Emilie behind, we would all die.

  I was very frightened. Gail and I lay in one another’s arms, my head on her chest, my cheek against her swollen breast, and it was clear to me that I had told her of my fears—my dream—for she was soothing me, telling me that it wasn’t so, that it was only a dream. Why should I continue to believe that I would poison her life with mine? Why should I be so frightened of my feelings—of my desire to be tender and gentle?

  I was nineteen years old, almost the age Abe was when he had gone to Mr. Rothenberg the first time. I was nineteen years old and I was living my first life, and in that instant when I wondered if what was happening was happening for the first time or if I were only reliving the remembered moment of a dream I’d once had, what I w
anted more than anything in the world was simply to be holding Gail and explaining to her that what seemed so crazy to me was not that men like Abe and Rothenberg and Fasalino and Vincent led the lives they led and did the things they did, but that their lives existed at the same time ours did—parallel to ours somehow—within the same universe. How could it be? How could we be in our bed, the lights out, fondling Emilie, while at the same moment a man like Vincent could be a few miles away firing a small piece of metal into the skull of someone I loved? And where, I wanted to know—this was the part that made my stomach tighten, that was hardest to make sense of—where was the difference?

  I heard the girls laughing. I looked up, muscles tense, expecting, I realized, to see that the two Spanish girls had followed me. How long had my mind been drifting? Two couples were coming toward me, their arms around one another’s waists. The girls wore silk kerchiefs, tight skirts split at the calves, high-heeled shoes that clacked on the concrete like cleats in a locker room. The guys were about my age and wore black motorcycle jackets, pegged pants. They stopped and kissed, their girlfriends’ mouths pumping and sucking. I tried not to stare. I tried to look at them without looking at them.

  You won’t hurt yourself, will you?

  No. I wouldn’t hurt myself. Not if I could help it. Gail’s words were the same, each time I left home. One of the girls tugged on her boyfriend’s sleeve. He was tall, only an inch or so shorter than me, oily black hair slicked back into a D.A. He tossed a penny onto the tracks, then another. His girlfriend told him to stop, that the train was coming. In the distance, at the vanishing point of the tracks, I saw small dots of white and red. The tall guy pushed his girlfriend away. “Geronimo—!” he shouted, then leapt down onto the train tracks, landing squarely. The girls shrieked. People from the other end of the platform hurried toward us. Was the guy crazy? The train was roaring toward us, banging from side to side, the lights growing larger. The guy stood on the tracks, feet spread on the gleaming rails, smiling broadly, head thrown back as if he intended to let the train roll right over him, to catch it in his teeth.