“Just cut?”
The answer took a few seconds in coming. “Yes.”
“No concussion?”
Jay didn’t answer directly, instead glancing at the file that supposedly held his life in paper form. “I thought you had everything about me in there, such as medical records?”
“Everything isn’t known at once,” Mr. Wright told him. “That’s partly why you’re still talking.”
Threat? Reminder? Carrot, maybe? Did it matter which his captor’s words were? Jay was talking, after all, and it hadn’t killed him. A few mental rivets were hissing, threatening to pop, but all was holding for now.
But, then, he’d hardly told a thing yet. Just a story. A fairy tale, some might say. A tale of bright and sunny times.
But times changed, Jay knew. How would the rivets do when he got to that part. A part not so far off, now.
“Concussion, Grady?” Mr. Wright asked once more.
Jay looked at him. He’d come this far. He could go on. Would go on. And from the odd paths of his captor’s questions, striking this way and that way like the spastic needle of a compass at the north pole, he knew he would have to lead the way. “What do you think, some whack on the head gave this thing to me? Well, it didn’t.”
“You sound like you know how you got it.”
“I know exactly how I got it.”
“How?”
“I was leaving work on Friday,” Jay began.
“Day five of your...streak?”
Streaks end, Jay thought. Nightmares could come back, and back, and back again. “Right. Anyway, it was like any other Friday. I was walking to the subway like I always did, was going to meet the guys at Buffalo Kabuki’s like almost every Friday. Except that night they wanted to drink it up, you know. Celebrate my sudden success. Fine with me. I was starting to get into it. Starting to like my new little gift, and besides, I wanted to see that waitress again because that damn name of hers was still bugging me.”
“Irrelevant shit?” Mr. Wright prompted.
“It turned out not to be,” Jay said soberly. “You see, I was thinking about her like crazy the last few hours of work, and when I was walking down the street just outside the office I was racking my brain—What is her name? What iiiiis it? Walking and asking myself that, and then...” Jay drifted back, stepping into the moment, the memory, and he could feel the city pulse around him, could hear the traffic ahead on Broadway, could see the spire of Trinity Church and below it very near the curb he could see Sign Guy. “...and then I saw his sign.”
Mr. Wright drew a shallow, anticipatory breath that was lost on Jay. “What did it say?”
Seven
A Gift Horse
H E R N A M E
I S S U Z Y
For a second it didn’t register, and in that tiny slice of time the sign that Jay Grady saw as he approached the crosswalk at Broadway and Wall was just another odd proclamation that the bum had given the world that day. But when the first suspicious synapses fired in his brain and made the very logical connection to a particular and recent event (not to mention the very question—the very one!—that was sputtering about in his head right then), Jay slowed abruptly, as if the air before him had suddenly thickened. A few yards short of Broadway, with traffic still zipping over the safe lane the crosswalk would soon be, he stopped completely and gaped at the sight before Trinity Church.
Her Name Is Suzy
And damned if it wasn’t. Double damned if it wasn’t. Suzy the waitress. Suzy with the wiggle. Suzy whose name had eluded him since a week ago this very day. But now...now he knew. He knew! But...
That wasn’t exactly right. He didn’t know; he had been reminded.
Only, how could that be?
For a moment he wondered if he should be questioning events of inexplicable nature, considering all that had happened. All that he had accepted, or acquiesced to, without understanding. On a river in a current he could not see, could only ride with his eyes still wide. Yes, that current he had deferred to. The knowing that was its flow he did embrace. But this? This sign the bum had propped against his knees and what was told upon it? This sign about pretty little Suzy, whose forgotten name he would have learned that night in any case? Where did it come from? And why? And how?
New questions, Jay thought, but ones that could be asked. That would be asked.
And on that determination, Jay’s body seemed to emerge from the molassified air that had engulfed it and he walked on. Toward the crosswalk, stopping at the curb and waiting for the light to change. Waiting and staring and wondering, and even rationalizing. Was the sign simply some coincidental cosmic hiccup (was everything that had happened, for that matter?), or was it more? More than black paint on whitewashed wood? And just what the hell might ‘more’ be?
Jay stared and wondered, in a way both wary and curious, wanting to know what this sign was, what it meant. He waited for the light to grant him passage. Waited and watched, and across the street the tall, slender spire of Trinity Church, silhouetted with the glow of the fading day behind it, laid a dim gray shadow across Broadway. A shadow in which Sign Guy sat, looking toward Jay.
No—looking directly at Jay. Looking and smiling, and between the flicker of cars passing between them, Jay saw the bum’s left hand come up, and two fingers spread to flash him the peace sign across the river of traffic.
Peace, brother. That was what he was saying, his lips forming those two words between flashes of cars and taxis and the occasional delivery truck. Mouthing his queer little greeting, to which Jay blankly nodded recognition and watched as the V of his two fingers slowly collapsed to a loose fist atop that day’s very serendipitous sign.
The light changed and Jay moved, stepping between the fat white lines with hardly a conscious thought of the motion. He felt drawn forward, sucked toward the far side of Broadway by the void of an unfilled desire, an unanswered question. He simply had to know about the sign. Had to.
The bum’s happy gaze stayed upon him as he crossed, and at the opposite curb, where Jay could have turned right toward the subway (where years later he would wish he had turned and just run, baby, run) and a night at BK’s with the guys to celebrate one very incredible week, he did not. He stopped, and he looked left, and he saw Sign Guy beaming at him, and he went to him.
“Peace, brother,” Sign Guy said again, his greeting audible now, the traffic noise just a background hum that paled around his sharp and pleasant tone.
“Your sign,” Jay said, skipping any pleasantries.
“I gave it a new coat of white last night. It looks good, doesn’t it.” He admired his handiwork with a glance, then patted the top of the sign like a father might the head of his toddler and looked back to Jay. “Stark, I think. Makes things clear. Very clear. Don’t you agree?”
“What does it mean?” Jay asked quite directly.
A look, a funny look, a coy look, maybe, and then, “It means what it means, of course.”
Jay shook his head, because that was not good enough. No way. Not for this, it wasn’t. He needed an answer, a real answer, and he was going to get it. “Listen, I need to know exactly what—”
And then he was cut off, in voice and space, as someone stepped before him and stood between him and Sign Guy.
It was a man. A very happy man from the look of the sappy, sweet smile he was registering, and a very well off man from the look of the suit and the Rolex he bravely wore on his left wrist, and an apparently giving man considering that his right hand was coming out of his pocket.
And a familiar man, Jay thought with some surprise as he got a better look at the fellow’s face.
Jesus, it was Jim Lewissomething, Jay realized. Lewiston. Jim Lewiston. The same Jim Lewiston who was a manager at Framer, Winston, & Lindley, a high flying brokerage as unlike S&M as sex was to jerking off—same result, vastly different approach. Jude had pointed him out to Jay one day on the Street after work, telling who he was and, as important to Jude, how much he made. I
t was a bunch of green, Jay remembered, but even that didn’t fully explain what he thought he saw next.
Jim Lewiston’s hand emerged from his pocket clutching a folded bill between his fingers, and toward Sign Guy’s Yuban can he reached. The slit lid was his target, and through the opening the offering disappeared, but not before Jay glimpsed it. Yet it could not be what he saw. He must have been mistaken, because why would a maker like Jim Lewiston give a bum a hundred dollar bill? Why would anyone give a bum that much green?
Then Jim Lewiston straightened, without a word to or from the bum he had just given so generously to, and he turned and walked past Jay, leaving as quickly as he’d come. Just left with that damn happy crack of a smile across his face and Jay’s puzzled gaze pecking at his back.
And then, when Jim Lewiston, broker and big, big donor to at least one of the city’s transients, was lost among the flow of people tramping up Broadway, Jay turned back to Sign Guy and his own merry mug. “Hey, did that guy just...”
“Just what, brother?”
“He just gave you a hundred dollars, didn’t he?”
“He gave,” Sign Guy responded without truly answering. “You gave, too, I recall.”
“He gave you a fucking C note!” Jay said with some exclamation. “I gave you some...” And Sign Guy was nodding now, nodding and smiling like some comic whose clever, clever joke had just been got. “...some...”
“Some change?” Sign Guy offered, but Jay did not reply with word or gesture, not a peep nor a tip of his head. His mouth hung partly open, air moving in and out automatically, which was a good thing because if he’d had to think of such trivial matters as breathing right then he would surely have suffocated. His thoughts as they were ran amok, a hundred different ones it seemed, but all radiating in some way from this little thing between him and the bum. This little thing that suddenly seemed not so little at all. (forget the Suzy sign, man, what the hell was going on now?) “To be precise—and why not be precise when one can—you gave me one dollar and fifty five cents. Three quarters...” And his gay blue stare set upon Jay in a way that was bright and unsettling, the bad beauty of an eclipse’s corona all about his eyes. “...three dimes...” And Jay’s own eyes beat back now, raging wide, synapses firing unchecked, incredulous thoughts and realizations cascading madly behind the glaze of his stare, a grand joke to which there could be no laughter because it was turning out to be no jest indeed. “...seven nickels, and fifteen pennies. I must tell you, though, that despite your gift I was surprised not to hear a thank you.”
“A what?” Jay asked, dazed and dazzled. “What do you mean?”
“I recount for you,” Sign Guy said. “You gave me some change, I asked if you were rich, you said, and I quote, ‘I wish’, and, well, you do have a certain tool now that is useful toward that end.”
Jay swallowed and rubbed a hand over his mouth. “Are you saying that you...” Then his head shook, responding to his own unfinished question. To the ludicrousness of even entertaining the thought. “No. No way.”
“No?” Sign Guy asked. “Well, unless dancing coins spoke to you before our first meeting, then I believe I can take the credit.”
“I...” Jay began to say, but words were suddenly mountains, daunting and alien. Dancing coins? Had he said dancing coins? Yes, he had. But how could he speak of such things? How? “I don’t...”
Sign Guy nodded, his understanding honed sharp, like the glinting edge of a cutting blade. “Why try? Just accept it. It’s your wish, remember.”
Confusion spun in Jay’s head like the foul and dirty spawn of a cyclone. “But why...how...”
“How doesn’t matter. And ‘why?’ Well, some things are just meant to be. You found me, or kismet pushed you my way, and you had your wish, and, well, I was inclined to give you that little boost even before I knew....” And there Sign Guy paused, seeming to take stock of what he was saying. Or about to say. “Let’s not muddy this up with extraneous matters. We’ll just let it be and say that you gave, and I gave, and on we go to see what the ringmaster has in store.”
“Wait a minute. You’re saying you gave me this...thing because I gave you some change?” Jay shakily asked the bum. “That man just gave. More than I did. A hundred dollars, he gave you.”
“Well, despite fate’s funny hand in bringing us together, you did choose to give,” the bum told him.
That proclamation of the obvious stumped Jay. What was Sign Guy saying—that Jim Lewiston had not chosen to give?
“He certainly did not,” Sign Guy said in answer to the unspoken question, and Jay’s already shaky expression went slack with shock. “Few people with real money choose to give. They need to be...” He searched for the proper term here. “...‘helped’ along.”
“You...you...” And once more Jay’s words stammered to only that point before flaming out.
“Know what you’re thinking?” Sign Guy shrugged. “Child’s play.”
Jay felt his knees go warm and soft, and he reached to the light standard near the crosswalk to steady himself. When his legs no longer were noodles he looked to the bum and gestured to the slab of wood against his knees. “And this sign? That was for me.”
Sign Guy grinned within his grin, an expression which Jay thought sickly sweet, like sugar on sugar on sugar. “I’m sorry—a man has to have his fun. And it did allow us to have this chat, didn’t it? It let us, oh, clear the air I guess.”
“Suzy,” Jay said aloud, and for what reason he did not know.
“That’s her name, don’t wear it out, as they say.” And then the bum chuckled, the sound seeming very odd in concert with that smile. It was a disconnected sound, and Jay could feel quite plainly the gang of goosebumps rise beneath the stiff back of his collar.
“You...gave this to me?”
“Guilty.”
“Because I gave you some change?” Jay pressed, belief coming hard—kicking and screaming hard.
“Where I come from, you repay good deeds,” Sign Guy said, parroting somewhat poorly from memory. “Or something like that, wasn’t it?”
Jay nodded dumbly and let go the light pole.
“I’m not an uncultured beast, you know.”
“And...and the guy who gave you...gave you the hundred?”
“Does he get anything?” Sign Guy said, posing Jay’s inquiry himself. “You know what they say—the joy is in the giving.”
Was this possible, what the bum was saying? Was it? Jay thought on that, and within the jumble of yeses and nos and maybes rattling around in his head he had to admit the fact that there was no more rational explanation out there that he could see—other than the possibility that he had gone totally batshit.
“You’re not crazy,” Sign Guy assured him, speaking to unspoken concerns.
Jay considered that for a moment, culling little from the effort. Just another possibility. “Maybe you are...”
“That opinion has been voiced by more learned men than you,” Sign Guy said, his head cocked a bit at Jay now, the twist of his smile angled like some lopsided pink gash upon his face. “Which reminds me—are you feeling all right?”
“What?”
“Any debilitating headaches or feelings of mania?”
Jay stared at him for a moment, then shook his head.
“Your girlfriend...you have a girlfriend, right? Carrie, I believe?”
His stare flared at the knowing now aimed at him. He nodded.
“She’s all right, too, I hope. Hasn’t been hacked to bits or forced to drink some cocktail of caustic chemicals, has she?”
“What are you talking about? She’s fine. She’s fine. Is there something—”
“No, no,” Sign Guy assured him. “If you say she’s fine, she’s fine. Maybe not perfect, but she’s breathing and walking and talking, and that’s what matters at this juncture. No side effects, so we’ll say a big thanks to the ringmaster and be on with it.”
“But...how is this possible?” Jay asked, those four words a
plea, and he seemed ready to fall to his knees and beg a reply. “How can this all be?”
“You question good fortune,” the bum observed curiously. “Why not just let be what will be, let come what will come.”
Jay looked silently to the blue dusk filling the street.
Sign Guy’s gaze lay upon him now with surprise, with doubt. And with amusement. “You still don’t believe.”
“I’m having some...some trouble with all of this,” Jay admitted very freely.
“Doesn’t matter, actually,” Sign Guy said, his smile relaxing now to a simply happy expression. “You don’t have to believe. You got this far. Now you just have to...go along for the ride.”
“The ride,” Jay repeated, thinking that wasn’t a bad way to describe this. One helluva ride.
“And use your...” He stopped, and thought, and then said, “...your ‘donzerly light’ when the spirit moves you.” He winked at Jay. “Good name for it, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” Jay agreed (donzerly light, boy, donzerly light), and he thought at that moment that he knew perfectly well how Alice had felt upon her trip through the looking glass. Wonderland it was. Fucking wonderland indeed, but with a smiling bum instead of a crazy fuck with a way out hat. Oh shit, oh shit, this was some insane ride he’d gotten on.
“You’re still troubled.”
Jay half chuckled. The other half of the sound was closer to a gasp. “This is all a lot to digest, fella.”
“I suspect it will get easier. Beyond that...well, that slate’s still blank to me, strangely enough. Does make it interesting, though.”
Oh man, this bum was talking in nutty circles, and this whopper he was laying on was—
“I told you, you don’t have to believe.”
Again the bum had read him. Known what he was going to say. How? How? “This can’t be real.”
“But it’s happening,” Sign Guy told him, putting one check in the mental ‘yes’ column.
“It’s not logical.”
Sign Guy thought on that. “Logic is the relative of fear. That’s what I’ve come to believe.”
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