“Did you marry?”
“No, we never did.” He shakes his head. He is still staring at the floor. “Francisco, have you ever been completely in love—a forever love?”
“I don’t know if I have or not.”
“Oh,” he says, looking up, embarrassed. “I’m sorry.”
“Why didn’t you marry?”
“The last time I saw her, we were saying good-bye at the Des Moines bus station. It was September, and I was heading east for my second year. She looked me deep in the eyes and said, ‘I love you very much. I will always love you.’ ”
“That’s beautiful.”
“Francisco, when a woman says this to you with a certain kind of look, it can mean one of two things. It can mean exactly what it sounds like. Or it can mean she’s preparing you for a broken heart—the heart she knows she is going to break.”
Billy tells me this without a hint of bitterness.
“I don’t understand,” I say. “What happened?”
“She wrote me a letter a few weeks later. She told me that it would be impossible for us to marry. She was only five feet six, she explained, and I had just crested seven feet and was still growing. I probably weighed three hundred pounds, and none of it fat. It wouldn’t work, she said. Biologically and psychologically it wouldn’t work. I wrote back and pleaded with her, argued that many short women are married to very tall husbands. I asked her what she meant by biologically and psychologically. She sent me a reply that spelled it out. She said it might not be possible for us to have a child, or maybe even a normal sex life, and even if we did conceive, the baby might be a giant like me. Giving birth could kill her. And she didn’t want me to go through life thinking I had killed my wife. She wanted me to be happy. She encouraged me to find someone very tall to love.”
“It’s plain to see she still cared about you.”
“I think she still did at that point. But it made me feel grotesque. Like I was a monster.”
“You are certainly not that.”
“I argued and argued, letter after letter, but in the end she wouldn’t budge. She fell for some other guy and married him.”
Billy stands up and rubs his eyes. He sighs, “Well, it was a long time ago.”
I say nothing, but I am thinking about the photo enshrined in the other room.
Winter must be drawing to a close. The days are sunnier now, and snowbanks are melting away into the city’s storm drains.
Billy tells me I have lived with him for nearly three months. More and more often, he takes me on walks or trots to his favorite places: the view from the Battery. Washington Square Park. Madison Square Garden, a basketball game between the New York Knicks and the Brooklyn Nets, during which I fall asleep.
On one occasion Billy asks me if I would like to see the site of the World Trade Center.
“What is that?” I say, feeling suddenly uneasy.
“You remember. The Twin Towers. The place where so many people died.”
“No, I don’t remember it,” I blurt with too much intensity. “I don’t want to go there.”
“Okay, Francisco, I understand. It was the worst disaster in the history of New York City. You’ve had some stressful experiences, and other people’s sufferings would be too much for you right now.”
I swallow the lump of fear in my throat. I don’t always grasp his thinking, but I know he means well.
Life goes on. We visit the zoo in Central Park, the Frick art collection, the Empire State Building (a giant ape once stood on top of it and fell to his death), and the American Museum of Natural History (our merganser is finer than theirs). We have also developed the habit of eating our Saturday night suppers at Dina’s.
“Hi, Billy! Hi, Francisco! What’ll it be today, boys?”
She still has the elephant tattoo on her forearm, but the Greek letters are missing. It must be painful to have a tattoo removed.
On a warm afternoon we take Giacomo Loncari out for a jog in Central Park. When I first meet him, I discover that the landlord is a wizened little man held in place in his wheelchair by straps.
“How do you do, sir,” I say. He grunts in reply. As we go down in the elevator of his apartment building on Lexington, he examines me from the corner of his eyes, suspicious and, I think, hostile. However, I can see he dotes on Billy.
We progress slowly enough along the sidewalk until we arrive at the entrance to the park. As soon as Billy’s feet hit the broad walkway he begins to trot, pulling ahead. Giacomo squeals with excitement. His gnarled hands work just fine on the throttle, and the wheelchair rockets forward, gaining on Billy, zigging and zagging to avoid the occasional pedestrian who fails to notice the looming stampede of a giant and a runaway mechanical stagecoach. I am running now too. Before long I’m forced to admit I cannot keep up with either of them. I collapse onto a bench, scattering pigeons. A matron in a suede coat and diamond earrings is sharing the bench with me. She leans over and asks:
“Did I just see what I think I saw?”
“Yes,” I say somberly, nodding, “it was a giant.”
“You saw it too?”
“I did.”
“And there was something chasing it?”
Again, I nod.
“How very singular,” she says with a look of pleasure, straightening a silk scarf at her neck. “Well, I suppose it’s to be expected. This is New York City.”
One night, Billy takes me to the Chinese restaurant a few blocks south of our place. When he ducks inside the front doorway, making many little bells chime, employees appear from all directions, smiling broadly, bowing. The grandparents who own the restaurant emerge from the kitchen and hasten over with happy cries to pat Billy on the arm, to beam possessively upon him, to guide us to our seats. There aren’t any other customers at this point. Ours is a wide booth covered in red leatherette. Billy fits into it without too much discomfort, his legs stretched out so his knees won’t lift the table. I sit across from him but remain unnoticed.
The owners’ children are suddenly busy talking Chinese into cell phones. The waiters and waitresses, the grandchildren, are busy talking New York English into their cell phones. The grandparents hover over us, pressing close but held back a degree by a certain oriental reserve. Soon the restaurant is packed with their friends and relatives, all ordering meals, all observing Billy. The tables closest to us fill first. There is even a transfer of money between two parties who exchange tables. Handheld devices and cameras flash, taking photographs and videos.
A man arrives with a cardboard box wrapped in ornamental tissue and tied with a red cord. Inside is a new set of shoes for Billy. Much haggling ensues. Billy tries to push more money on the man than the cobbler wants. The man steps back, will not take the cash. Billy can pay for the materials, he says, but the labor is free. Billy insists on paying for both. The man refuses, his “face” offended. Billy accepts defeat. Smiles erupt all around. Then, we feast.
The hailstorm of eggs on the roof grows steadily heavier. Now Billy spends a good deal of time each day boiling them and then chopping them up to make egg-and-mayonnaise sandwiches. The entrance to the apartment is congested with bales of day-old bread, which he has begged from local bakeries. Our mornings are spent making sandwiches, and throughout afternoons and part of the evenings we distribute them on the streets. More often than not, people refuse our offers—even obviously needy people. I try to imagine what it is like to be suddenly confronted by a total stranger who happens to be an enormously powerful eight-foot-tall man, bending over you with an incongruously childlike face, urging upon you a sandwich wrapped in wax paper. Would you trust him? Would you even engage him at first sight?
Wherever we go in our rambles through the poorer districts of the city, many people swerve to avoid him, or simply stop and stare. If he tries to speak to the gapers, they break into a trot. Mainly they do not see me, unless I split up with Billy and keep a half-block distance between us. Interestingly, the truly hungry are always glad to accept
a sandwich from me. I gloat over this.
I suppose Billy has experienced enough rejection in his life to be untroubled by people’s doubts about his intentions. Cheerily, he presses ever onward. Most of his successes are in neighborhoods where he is known, or on the breadlines where he regularly volunteers.
One afternoon, Billy and I work side by side at a soup kitchen run by a local church. He hands out sandwiches and bottled fruit drinks to street people. I ladle hot soup into styrofoam cups. I wonder what is in their minds. Doubtless, most of them, if not all, possess a full set of memories. They have a lot of dignity in their own way, even though there is plenty of variety in temperament and character—like people everywhere. There are con artists among them, of course, but that is true of every level of society. Then it hits me like a blow: though I’m not a con artist, I am a social parasite.
“I’m a social parasite,” I mumble despondently during a lull in the serving.
“You’re what!” Billy scowls, jerking his head back and staring at me.
I dare not repeat what I said. I try to deflect:
“I was just talking to myself.”
“You are not a parasite,” he breathes in a low rumble. “You are my friend. And these people are our friends.”
Chastened, ashamed of myself, I seal up my negative mood and try to focus on meeting the needs coming down the line. I begin to notice that when you serve soup and sandwiches to needy people, they almost always express their sincere thanks. They usually give a word or a smile, a look in the eye, a joke, a compliment. Now and then they try to tell a little story. I learn to listen, to respond appropriately.
For five days this week, Billy has stayed close to home. I hear him sawing and hammering somewhere in the building. Occasionally I hear the screech of old nails as they are being pried from wood. I smell the sweet-astringent odor of wall paint. He is repairing things for Giacomo, I presume.
I am sleeping less during daylight hours. I am reading things now, short passages from his dusty old book collection. It’s a pleasant distraction and it exercises my mind. I cannot focus for long and sometimes feel disconnected from the material, though it is now always intelligible. For both my sake and Billy’s, I keep a Webster’s Dictionary in the apartment. I seldom go into the hidden room, other than to look for a book. There are hundreds upon hundreds of National Geographic magazines in there too, shelf after shelf of yellow spines. The older ones are more interesting—the 1920s to 1950s. There are fewer copies toward the end of the century, none after the turn of the millennium.
How do I know the meaning of things like years, decades, millennia? And the vocabulary, which seems to be well stocked and functions instantaneously? Is neutral data stored in one cupboard of the brain, and personal items in another? It is totally perplexing. Was I hit on one side of the head? Was I assaulted or did I fall? Or did I strike against myself from the inside out, so to speak?
I am washing the supper dishes when Billy comes down from the roof with a basket full of eggs—the fourth of the day. The pigeons are laying again, further increasing the daily harvest.
When we have finished our chores, I sit down at the table and Billy surprises me by bringing out his single bottle of wine. He squeaks the cork off, pours me a tumblerful, and another for himself. I have lived here for three or four months, and this is our second drink together.
“Wine?” I say.
“Tonight we are celebrating!” he declares with a grin.
“What is the special occasion?”
“You’ll see.”
He takes me down the corridor to one of the other apartment doors. A stepladder leans against the wall. A cloud heap of speckled plastic sheets lies nearby. The spray-painted warnings about bugs have been sanded off.
“This was Jimmy’s place,” he explains. “Now it’s yours, Francisco.”
He pushes the door open and we go in. I smell fresh paint. He flicks a switch and the room is illuminated by an overhead light. Is that a chandelier hanging from the ceiling? Yes, it is!
“Didn’t cost me much,” he says. “Missing a few crystals, and nearly electrocuted me rewiring it, but it was fun, kind of mini shock therapy.”
I stand by the doorway, taking it all in: There is no furniture. The hardwood floors have been scraped down to their original surface, pristine, save for a few dents where bedposts or dressers long ago left evidence of their presence. The walls are pale yellow and bare of decoration. The foot-high baseboards are enamel white, as is the single window frame. The glass shines, offering a view of another brick wall.
Sitting in the exact center of the floor is a yellow toy car. In fact, a Matchbox racing car.
I stare at it, paralyzed.
“Was yours plastic or metal?” Billy asks.
“I don’t know,” I whisper, choking, feeling bats flitting about in the attic of memory. I see my rubber boots, and beneath them a web of cracks radiating slowly outward. I hear splintering ice. My heart is hammering hard for no reason.
Billy drops to his knees with a thump-thump and bends over the car. He picks it up and guides it along the floor, making vroom-vroom sounds with his lips. He launches it hard, and it zings across the floor and crashes into a wall. Chuckling, he crawls over to retrieve it. Turning around, he goes vroom-vroom again and pushes it. It races on its whizzing wheels across the room toward me.
I kneel and catch it in my hands. It is metal. And now I remember that mine, the one lying at the bottom of a pond somewhere, was also metal.
It’s my turn. I skim the tires a few times and shoot it back to Billy. My aim is bad, and he is forced to leap in order to catch it. He misses and rolls onto the floor, guffawing, making the window rattle. Then, up onto his knees and vroom-vroom.
Back and forth we send the car. Soon I am smiling, and before long I am laughing. It is a strange sound—or strange to me—and now I realize that I have not laughed in a very long time, not since the thing that happened to me—whatever it was.
Billy pulls a small red car from his pocket, grins with raised eyebrows, and sends it flying across the floorboards in my direction. It crashes against a wall. I fetch it and send it back to him.
The playing gathers momentum. Now we are side by side, thumping around the room on our knees, pushing our cars in a race. We’re making vrooms with our lips and squealing tires with our throats, and crash sounds, and more vrooms as we circle and sideswipe each other, spin out of control into a head-on collision, and then resume the race.
Without warning, the door bangs wide open and we hear a shout: “What the. . .!”
With our tires still spinning, we look up and see a man standing in the open doorway pointing some kind of rifle at us. He quickly leaps inside the room, followed by four other armed men. They are dressed in black clothing and combat boots, their helmets and visors masking their faces. The letters FBI are stenciled on their flak jackets.
“Down on the floor, hands behind your backs!” one of them shouts.
We flatten ourselves, hands behind our backs, our cars still in our hands.
Thin beams of red light are trained on our heads.
“One move and you’re dead!” barks a soldier, policeman, robber, killer—we don’t know what they are, but we’re not going to move a muscle.
We lie there for what feels like an hour or two, listening to heavy boots storming on the stairway and up and down the corridor. I hear doors splintering somewhere in the building.
Muffled conversations, sometimes in and out of our hearing range. The invaders speak as if Billy and I are inanimate objects. From the corner of my eye I see two men in suits and ties, with badges on cords about their necks. They confer with the combat men.
“Any sign of a factory, any components?” asks one of the suit-and-tie agents.
“Nothing, sir.”
“Packages, metal drums?”
“Nothing. Some dusty stuff in the cellar, just shovels and tools, broken bicycles, a bag of toy cars, old household junk. The onl
y electrical is blown screw fuses for a panel box, but no wiring spools, no timers or remotes. Otherwise the place is empty, except for an antique collection in one of the rooms on this floor. It took some time to go through the drawers and cupboards, but all we found was the weirdest collection of trinkets you ever saw in your life. It’s a no-threat situation.”
“All right. Collect any cell phones you find, and the computers too.”
“There aren’t any, sir.”
“Are you serious?”
“Not a single electronic device anywhere in the building. Just our own surveillance tech.”
This is followed by a long silence.
“Okay. Take out all our wires. It’s a false alarm.”
“When they said plastic and rewiring, it sure sounded like the real thing.”
“Yeah, well, plastic and rewiring are common words.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Let’s get back to the office. I need to chew off some ears at DHS.”
“I just called them. Seems their border people sent a red alert when they arrested these idiots, then forgot to tell us they were cleared.”
“Better safe than sorry.”
“Yup.”
“Okay, evacuate.”
They are gone. Billy and I sit up and rub our stiff limbs. We look at each other. Did this really happen?
We take a stroll through the building. To our great relief we find that the troops and agents entered the hidden room of the mind through the doorway in our apartment, which had been open at the time of the visitation. On every other floor, the apartment doors have been kicked in. The bins of chicken feed on the roof have been toppled, their contents spread about for sifting. With a sigh, Billy sets to scooping it up and refilling the bins. He sweeps up the chaff in a dustpan and throws it outside for the girls.
That done, we go back to my new room and play race cars until bedtime.
Billy informs me at breakfast that the room is not intended to be my separate apartment; he is not kicking me out, not even subtly, he hastens to assure me. He wants me to leave it empty so that I will fill it only with mnemonic prompts, in the hope that accumulated visual triggers will reach a critical mass.
The Fool of New York City Page 8