The Punch

by Noah Hawley

  “I miss that.”

  “Give me a break. You hate the cold.”

  “I know, but don’t you ever miss something you hate? I tell you what I miss really. I miss the act of hating it. Hating things makes us who we are. Like now I hate traffic. I hate smog. I hate all the actress wannabes who screw up my coffee order at Starbucks. My hates are L.A. hates. I used to have New York hates. It’s funny the way things change.”

  “Can I talk to Christopher?” asks David. At Sixty-first Street he turns left, heading for Fifth Avenue. The cold is in his legs, his toes. He can’t feel his nose. Tracey puts the phone down, goes to get her son. David waits, the sound of his own breath heavy in his ears. He crosses Fifth Avenue, and there it is: the park. Buses pass him, heading downtown. A man in six coats pushing a shopping cart rattles past. David always feels weird talking to his children on the phone. It feels so grown up, and they’re these little people. With kids you should talk into tin cans tied together with string. You should pass crumpled notes from hand to hand while the teacher is talking. He hears the sound of running feet, of Christopher and Chloe fighting over who gets to talk first.

  “Daddy, Daddy, hi.” It is Chloe, breathless.

  “Hey, baby.”

  “I ate a clam.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Clams are shellfish. Jews can’t eat shellfish.”

  “They’re not supposed to, but it’s not like they’re allergic.”

  “Like Becky Two Teeth last year. How she ate a mussel and her whole face swolled up. She had to go to the emergency room.”

  “Did you go to school today, pumpkin?”

  “Duh.”

  He hates it when she does that, treats him like he’s stupid. It’s a quality she inherited from her grandmother.

  “How did you do?” he asks.

  “I learned how airplanes fly. Do you know how airplanes fly?”

  He has no idea.

  “Tell me,” he says.

  “There’s lift and drag and the shape of the wing. That’s why they have to go so fast, so they don’t fall out of the sky.”

  “Right. Sure.”

  David walks south along the park. It is a dark void, an urban abscess. Overhead, the trees are bare, strung with white Christmas lights. This is the catch-22 of New York. Just when you decide you can’t stand it for another second, something magical happens. He wishes his kids could be here with him now, seeing it, snow, winter. He pictures their excitement, the discovery of new things.

  “Let me talk to your brother,” he says.

  “Okay, Daddy. Bye, Daddy.”

  He hears her give the phone to Christopher.

  “He wants to talk to you,” she says formally. His heart swells, threatens to burst. They are such tiny ambassadors to the human race.

  “Where are you?” his son wants to know. He, too, is chewing something.

  “I’m in New York. What are you eating?”

  “Raisins.”

  “Since when do we eat raisins before dinner?”

  “Mommy said no more cookies, but fruit is okay. Is raisins a fruit?”

  “They’re grapes,” says David. He has reached the base of the park. Horse-drawn carriages idle in the cold, the horses restless, inured to the chill, waiting for passengers who won’t come. Not on a night like this. The air around David is filled with the earthy stink of horseshit. To his right, the Plaza Hotel shines like a diamond. He should go in, drink something warm, and yet, before him, Fifth Avenue stretches out its moneyed arm, beckoning. He crosses Fifty-ninth Street, heading south.

  “How can they be grapes?” says Christopher. “They’re raisins.”

  “They used to be grapes. That’s what happens. Somebody picks the grapes and dries them out and they turn into raisins.”

  “Who?” his son asks, and David can hear the skepticism in his voice, like maybe his father is trying to fool him, embarrass him in front of the class if the subject ever comes up. How he will stand up and announce in a strong, confident voice that raisins used to be grapes and all the other kids will laugh.

  “I don’t know,” says David. “Farmers.”

  Christopher chews.

  “Did you say your prayers yet?” David asks him.

  “Before bed. You’re supposed to say them right before you go to sleep. Don’t you know anything?”

  David is at Fifty-fifth Street now, moving fast. The walk is warming him up. He is sweating under the arms, even as the cold air burns his lungs.

  “Who taught you to do that?” he wants to know. “To pray?”

  “Nobody taught me. I just do it.”

  “Did you see it on TV, though? One of your friends?”

  “Jesus is God’s son. He died and now he lives in the sky with Grandpa and Blossom.”

  Blossom is the corgi they had when Christopher was five. She was hit by a car, had to be put to sleep.

  “Who told you about Jesus? Do they teach you that at school?”

  In the kitchen, Christopher is lying on the floor, his feet propped up against the wall. He is knocking the back of his head softly against the floor because it feels good. There is a bag of raisins on his stomach. Tracey comes in.

  Christopher says, “Jesus…no, that was Peter. He was an apostle. That means he was Jesus’s friend…uh-huh…No, you go to confession and say you’re sorry and God forgives you…I don’t know…the Holy Ghost…”

  “Who are you talking to?” Tracey asks.

  Christopher covers the mouthpiece.

  “Dad.” Then into the phone: “But you have to really be sorry. You can’t just pretend, because God knows.”

  David crosses Forty-eighth Street. He shouldn’t be doing this, heading south. He has promised himself he won’t go below Forty-second Street, but his legs seem to have a mind of their own.

  “Does it make you feel better?” he wants to know. “When you pray?”

  David takes a raisin out of the bag, tries to balance it on his nose.

  “God likes it when you talk to him,” he says. “I think he gets lonely.”

  David feels like there’s a hole in his heart the size of a ham. His father has been dead for three months. He weighed ninety-one pounds in the end, died mumbling, fists clenched.

  “It’s nice of you,” says David, “to want to keep God company.”

  “Did you know that people in India worship cows?” says Christopher. “They don’t eat them with ketchup like everybody else.”

  “Some people,” says David, “think cows are holy.”

  “I think they taste good.”

  David reaches Forty-second Street and stops. This is it, he thinks, the point of no return. He feels like he is negotiating something here. He wants to understand his son’s faith, because deep down he envies it. As a rational man from a liberal East Coast city, David doesn’t know how to believe in a higher being. In his mind, it is something that yokels do, alcoholics and lunatics. He has that Ivy League prejudice, the same as his mother. There are book smarts and common sense, and then there is the self-righteous zealotry of the undereducated. Picture the Taliban in their cutting robes, roaming the countryside smashing record players and stoning women. Picture David Koresh with his baker’s dozen teenage brides holed up in a fortified compound, firing automatic weapons and speaking in tongues. Religion is the surrender of reason to hope—at least this is how he’s always seen it. But what a lonely world it is when one day you wake up and realize that the list of things you don’t believe in is greater than the list of things you do.

  David is a corporate vice president. He reads the New York Times. He listens to NPR. He knows that we are living in a time of spiritual hardening, where those who believe are waging war against those who don’t. It is a war that David feels has snuck up on him before he has had time to choose sides. This makes it a dangerous time to start thinking about God. Now whatever questions he might have, whatever yearning for a more spiritual life, are politically polarizing. Whatever happened to the
privacy of a man’s beliefs, wonders David, where an otherwise rational person could maintain a quiet faith in what’s holy? When did religion become an arms race? If you don’t believe, they tell you, you will be left behind. You will be destroyed by the might of what’s holy, Insha’allah. These are the stakes you face these days, salvation or annihilation. All or nothing. They are symptoms of grief. That wounded impulse to lash out, strike back. And yet when did grief become the prevailing motivator in this world? From suicide bombers to terror victims, earthquake casualties to abortionists, when did death become the global obsession?

  He thinks this, and yet isn’t David Henry also overcome by grief? His father is dead and he is hurrying downtown, shivering with cold, and what is going through his mind if not the sum total of life’s deepest question—Why are we here? What is the point of living if everyone has to die?—all of it building to an irresistible impulse to pray.

  Traffic roars around him, exhaust clouds rising up like jet trails. The cold is an animal, teeth clamped down on his face. David steps into the street. Tracey gets back on the phone and they talk about logistics. The memorial is in two days. She and the kids will fly out tomorrow. David will meet them at the airport.

  “Are you okay?” she wants to know. “You sound weird.”

  “I’m fine. Just a little tired.”

  “What was all the stuff with Chris about Jesus?”

  “I don’t know. We never talk to him about it. I just—I wanted to know what he thinks.”

  “Should we be worried?”

  David crosses Thirty-seventh Street, has to run the last few feet to avoid being hit by a truck. He is worried about so many things, there doesn’t seem to be room for anything else. His head feels like a beehive sometimes and, though she means well, Tracey can be like a stick, stirring him up. She’s a worrier, a planner, trying to map out every possible contingency. They have an earthquake kit and a flash-flood kit and a drought kit. Her backup plans have backup plans. They live with the possibility of disaster looming over them at every turn. Joy, on the other hand, is fearless. To her the threat of disaster is what makes life fun. For David, a man with two million dollars in insurance, there is a desire to let it all go for once, to free himself of fear, to stop expecting the worst.

  “I’m sure he’ll be fine,” says David. “I know we have this big-city prejudice, but plenty of bright, successful, well-balanced people believe in God. It’s not a sign of inbreeding.”

  “I know. And it’s fine, whatever he wants. I just—I don’t know where he gets it from, if somebody’s teaching him this stuff. Do ten-year-olds join cults? I don’t want him to end up at some airport handing out daisies.”

  He tells her not to worry, says good night. He puts his phone away. His left hand is an ice cube. He keeps walking. That’s the great thing about New York, the thing David still loves, how you walk everywhere. How it’s not unreasonable to go a hundred blocks if the feeling is in you. He hits Twenty-third Street, passes the Flatiron Building, hits Eighteenth, crosses Fourteenth. He is in dangerous territory now. She could be anywhere, Joy, her friends. He heads west, winding through brick town houses into the heart of the Village. He remembers every time he had to visit his dad in the hospital, tubes running out of him, shunt in his neck. He remembers seeing his father sprawled out in bed, skeletal, unconscious, his bedclothes thrown back, and the sight of his father’s shriveled penis, his sad, white pubic hair, was like a physical blow. I sprang out of that miserable thing, he thought, that sad, flaccid organ. How many times did David have to help his father up off the toilet? How many times did he have to drop everything and race to the emergency room? It was exhausting, demoralizing. In the end they took Joe’s dignity, his humanity, and left behind this pissing, shitting human shell. David’s children have more control over their bodies, their lives, more self-determination.

  He reaches Bank Street, takes it to Bleecker. What would he think if he knew that his parents had their first date on this corner, in the bakery that used to be a bird store, that used to be an Italian restaurant, that used to be a butcher shop, that was once a café? This is the way life is in big cities. We are always passing ghosts without realizing. Everything connects, intersects. There are echoes in life, rhymes. On this very spot where David now stands waiting for the light to change, his mother sat at an outdoor table eating ice cream. His father smiled his pirate smile and touched her hand, the moment electric, expansive. It was the beginning of everything and it happened right here where he is standing. How many tears would he shed if he could see them there now, the tears freezing to his face like icicles of grief? David crosses Abington Square Park. He is a block away now. He can almost taste her, his secret wife, can smell the baby-down of his son’s head, his secret love child. He feels like an appliance that’s been left in the on position for too long, a blender or Cuisinart, gears grinding. His skull feels fractured. There is that deep bone ache, that nausea, that powerful sensation of wrongness. Where does it come from? What does it mean?

  He stands across from their apartment building on Jane Street, shivering in a doorway. When he and Joy were looking for an apartment, David chose this place because it was around the corner from the apartment he grew up in. He didn’t tell her that, of course. There was something about starting a new life, a secret life, so close to his childhood home that was irresistible. This way he could keep the truth and the lie together, side by side. This way he could remember who he was, even as he pretended to be someone different. Across the street, Joy’s building glows like a pair of headlights racing toward him in the dark. The doorman is bundled up in the lobby reading a magazine. David searches the facade for their window, sixth floor, second from the right. The light is on. He is so close to this other life, all he has to do is cross the street. He could disappear if he wanted, switch tracks. He could tell Joy he is done with L.A., start a new life here in New York. He could change his phone number, buy new clothes, never look back. No one would ever know. You think it’s the hardest thing in the world, to change your life, but really it’s as easy as falling downhill. All you have to do is let go.

  He takes out his phone, dials her number. He sees her appear in the window, cross the room. She picks up the phone. His heart is in his throat.

  “Hello?” says Joy, answering.

  He doesn’t speak.

  “David?” she says, reading his name on her caller ID. The sound of her voice makes him want to cry.

  “Am I waking you?” he asks.

  “No,” she says. “I just got back from the supermarket. Sam has a little fever. He’s been really cranky all day. How’s L.A.? It’s so cold here I was thinking maybe we should get on a plane, come see you.”

  “I’m in San Diego actually, for a conference. It’s pretty boring.”

  His nose is running, great liquid rivers of snot rolling frigidly toward his mouth.

  “I miss you,” she says. “It sucks you couldn’t come.”

  “I know,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  He can see her in the window. She’s wearing a camisole and a pair of his pajama pants. She is small breasted, hard bodied. She does Pilates four times a week. Her muscles are clean, defined. When she sits on top of him, her body bearing down, she arches her back and he can count her ribs, trace them with his fingers.

  “Are you okay?” she asks him. “You sound weird.”

  When she says this he has an overwhelming moment of déjà vu, forgets which wife he is talking to. There is a moment of panic, but then he remembers that both of his babies are named Sam, so if he feels lost, he can always just ask how’s Sam and he will be safe.

  “I’m fine. How’s Sam?”

  “He’s my little monkey, but he’s got a cold. Who knew babies could make so much phlegm? I chased him around all day with a Kleenex. Sexy, huh?”

  David watches her sway absently in the window. He could cross the street, say hi to the doorman, ride up in the elevator. She would hear his key in the door. He can picture
the look on her face when she sees him, the surprise and delight. How she would take him in her arms and for two hours there would be no death, no family drama. There would just be them, man and woman, husband and wife.

  “Can I ask you something?” he says.

  “Sure, baby. Whatever you want.”

  “Do you believe in God?”

  Beat.

  “Why?”

  “No, it’s nothing, I just—we’ve been married a year and I realized I don’t know.”

  She thinks about this.

  “I grew up Catholic. We went to church every Sunday. My parents were really devout. Did you know there’s actually no Easter Bunny in the Bible? It’s just Jesus on the cross, the Resurrection. The whole thing was too male for me. All that smiting.”

  “I’ve never read the Bible,” he says. “Do you believe in God?”

  He watches her breathe on the windowpane, write something in the mist, his name.

  “I believe in coincidence,” she says, “accidents. I believe in luck. You should see me in Vegas. I get these streaks, hot, cold. It’s funny. I never really think about it anymore. New York isn’t really about God, you know? It’s not that organized. In the Midwest you can see how the idea of God could take hold so strongly. Everything is slower, more deliberate. You live in New York and you start to see how complex the world is, how many moving parts, how many players, and it just doesn’t feel like all this could be controlled, manipulated by one all-powerful deity. New York City, it feels like too much for even God to handle.”

  David’s teeth are chattering now. He has stuck his cell phone into the interstice between his hat and scarf, tied tight, and his hands are jammed down into his pockets. He remembers the flight in from California, looking down at the great grids of Midwestern states. It seems to him the farther you get from the ocean, the more religious people become. It is impressive really, the unflappable belief of the landlocked. Why is it the biggest religions were all born in arid desert lands? Judaism, Christianity, Islam. The god of the desert is a god of ultimatums, all or nothing. Gods born in lush countries are more laid back—Vishnu, Buddha—they’re lovers, not smiters. And while we’re at it, he thinks, why are the most religious people always the ones who’ve had it worst, inner-city kids, warring tribes, the poverty stricken? Why are piety and wealth such opposites? Why are the fortunate, those with a true sense of accomplishment, usually the least devout?