The Punch

by Noah Hawley

  He has seriously misjudged the nature of her wounds.

  “This is all bullshit,” she says. “I mean, whatever, you came out. You got in your cars and drove down from Poughkeepsie, flew up from Boca, like aren’t you heroic? But you know, my husband never liked most of you. Some. Jack he liked. And you, Erik. He liked his sister Lois in small doses. It’s a joke, really. He was better than everyone in this room, and now he’s dead. And don’t give me that five-stages-of-death shit. Am I angry? You’re fucking right. I never wanted to do this, to get everybody together. It was my kids’ idea, and one of them couldn’t even bother to show up, so I don’t know what you want from me.”

  Everyone is frozen. David stands next to her, a look of horror on his face. She is getting her closure, just not the kind he expected. The love he felt before dissolves into a pool of anger. He is mortified, ashamed. That’s it, he thinks. She has finally flipped her lid. But he is wrong. Doris is stone-cold sober, maybe for the first time in years. Soon it will all become clear. Soon he will understand: Sometimes the path to healing runs straight through retribution.

  “I have something to tell you,” she says. “A secret I’ve kept for sixty years. My husband knew, but he was the only one. And I’ve been keeping it for too long. Why should I suffer? This is the kind of world we live in. I want to say nice things. You think I don’t want to say nice things? You think I don’t want to get up here and talk about heaven and how we all get justice in the end? The trouble is I don’t believe it. The trouble is I think it’s a crock of shit, so instead I’m going to tell you the truth. I’m an old woman. What do I have to lose?”

  She looks around at the faces. Everyone is staring at her, stunned. They all look old to her now, like dinosaurs, on their way out. She zeroes in on Florence and her dentist husband, on dowdy, superior Alice.

  “Girls,” she says, “I want to talk about your mother. You think she was such a goody-two-shoes, such a nice little old lady? Well, guess again. She was a liar and a thief. All she could ever think about was herself. How do I know? Because she was my mother, too.”

  There is a ripple in the audience. She can see it on people’s faces, shock, doubt. Her son squeezes her shoulder. She pulls loose.

  “When I was five years old,” she says, “Ruth met Artie, but he didn’t want a woman with baggage, so she gave me away. She gave me to Zelda to raise. She said you aren’t my daughter anymore, and she went off to start her own family. If you don’t believe me you can look at my birth certificate.”

  She opens her purse, takes out a folded piece of paper. Her hands are shaking. This is her trump card, dug up from storage and carted around with her for the past week. She holds it up in triumph. She can see it on their faces: Nothing is what it’s supposed to be. The family scandal has been dropped like a bomb and now they are all casualties.

  “Mom,” says David. “Mom, for God’s sake.”

  She pulls away from him and moves into the center of the crowd. She is holding the birth certificate up and turning slowly so that all can see. The room is throbbing. Everything seems so bright, as if a light has been turned on behind the scrim of the world. David watches her, his heart pounding. He is afraid. He realizes that he has no idea who she is. All these years she, too, has been a stranger. She, too, has had her secret life.

  “I’m your sister,” she tells Florence and Alice. They are staring at her, horrified. Their day of reckoning has finally arrived. Doris’s heart is racing. She feels light-headed, euphoric. Her husband’s ashes are hidden in her tote bag. She has hauled them down from the hotel. It gave her strength to know that he was here, that she was not alone. He would never leave her alone. He is her husband and he loves her. He accepted her when no one else would. Give them hell, he is saying.

  Take that, she thinks. Take that.

  This is the moment Scott walks in. There is a screech of tires outside and everyone turns to look, and there he is, Scott, the black sheep, and appearing behind him, out of breath from running, is some woman, and the woman has a baby. Inside the bar the scene is one of chaos. Everyone is talking at once. It is a white noise of confusion. Doris is still spinning in the center of the room, oblivious, caught up in her moment. Seeing them, Scott stops in the doorway, daunted. He wants to turn, run. Joy is behind him, stopped beside Sam’s stroller. She reaches for Scott’s arm, his messenger bag hanging on the baby carriage in front of her. From across the room, David sees them. He turns white. Here it is, just like that, the moment of his undoing.

  Stop it.

  And right then something catches Scott’s eye, a photograph. He steps into the bar, drawn in by the giant picture of his happy family. He sees his parents, younger, stronger, happy. He steps toward the image, hypnotized, oblivious to the noise, the confusion. He is overwhelmed by the sight of himself as a child, his own smiling face. It seems impossible that he was ever that young, that carefree. In the center of the room, Doris stumbles, dizzy from spinning. Someone catches her, leads her to a chair in the corner. She is like a box of pencils, a brittle bag of bones.

  “Did you see them?” she says. “Did you see the looks on their faces?”

  Joy steps warily into the bar. She is still wearing her sunflower-yellow hat. Her cheeks are flushed from the cold. The baby, suited up in yellow and black, looks like a bumblebee. David stands frozen. He literally can’t believe what’s happening, can’t believe his brother has shown up accompanied by his other wife. A city of eight million people. What are the odds? And yet at the same time he feels the rightness of this moment, the inevitability. He tried to make a deal with God. He promised to be a better man, but God doesn’t make deals. This is proof of that. David has sinned and must be punished, but it isn’t easy. Like his father he is a fighter. He looks around for Tracey. She is near the bar, just a few feet from Joy. He believes but cannot prove that if the two women ever meet, the world will cease to exist. Matter and antimatter will collide and they will all be destroyed by the blast.

  Stop it.

  Scott steps toward the bar, eyes locked on the photograph, lost in his own private reverie. Joy stays close behind him. She has yet to see David, yet to realize that her whole life is a lie. Watching her cross the room, David has the urge to run, to leap through a plate-glass window and escape.

  So close, he thinks. I was so close.

  “Scott,” says Tracey.

  He looks at her. She steps forward.

  “You missed a hell of a—I don’t even know what to call it,” she says, then notices Joy standing behind him. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Tracey.”

  “Joy.”

  David watches as the two women reach out and shake each other’s hands. He raises his arms as if to shield himself from the blast. Next to him Uncle Jack is trying to get his attention, but David can hear nothing, see nothing, except his brother, his self-involved, fucked-up excuse for a brother. It’s too much, he thinks. The final straw. That’s how dysfunctional this family is. We are supposed to help each other, but all we ever do is fuck each other up. He feels a fury fill him. It is a bright and shiny dagger, a flame of such overwhelming heat, he feels scorched.

  The final revelation hits him with the power of ten thousand suns. He is not the survivor he thought he was, the escapee who made good. He, too, is a freak. He has tried so hard to distance himself from his family’s malfunction, to tell himself he was different, but now he sees that lie for what it is, delusion. God looked down from heaven and saw the hubris of man. The people of the world spoke one language. They communicated easily. They cooperated. Each knew the mind of the other, and because of this they were building a tower to heaven. So God reached down and made a mess of their minds. From harmony he created Babel. David used to think the story related only to the misunderstanding between nations, to their different languages, but now he sees that the confusion goes deeper. What God did was not just make it impossible for men of one country to communicate with men of another. He made it impossible for anyone to communicate with anyon
e else, even if you spoke the same language. He doomed us all to misunderstand forever the will and intentions of others. Why would he do that? Why would he want us to live in chaos, to endure the endless frustration of ignorance, the solitude it brings?

  We’re all strangers—brothers, mothers, sons. Nobody makes sense.

  This is what it feels like to David. He had dared to hope that his family could unite, that they could speak the same language, but now he sees this hope for what it was, hubris. The tower has toppled. He looks at his brother, his mother, and his two wives. They might as well be speaking Chinese, Arabic, Greek. Around them the room boils in chaos, all the cousins, the uncles, the nieces. Everyone is talking at once, but nobody is making any sense. No one is listening. Nothing is getting through. The world has gone mad. And realizing this, David renounces God. The fragile heart of his faith crumbles and disappears. It’s too much. He refuses to worship a God who would let people live in such agony. A God who would let fathers sicken and die. A God who would offer no comfort, who would deprive people even of the ability to take comfort in one another. Being thrown out of the Garden of Eden was not the mortal blow, thinks David, because Adam and Eve still had each other. It was the moment that God set the human race against itself. The moment he took away our capacity to communicate, to speak and listen and understand. This was the moment of ultimate isolation. And a God who would throw his flock to the wind like that does not, in David’s opinion, deserve to be worshipped. So David takes his faith and breaks it like a board, and by doing so, by casting away the one stone remaining in his crumbling foundation, he leaves himself with no grounding at all. He is now free to finally, and for the first time in his life, totally lose his shit.

  Stop it.

  He charges across the room. Scott turns at the last moment, sees David and raises the dog tags, a look of triumph on his face.

  “Look,” he says. “I found them.”

  David grabs Scott by the collar, raises his fist to strike.

  And here we have come to the defining moment, that diamond-hard interstice of worlds colliding. Now is the time when everything happens at once, and too quickly to accurately recount. We have traveled so many miles, have journeyed so long to get here, but it will all be over before you can take it in.

  Stop it. Slow down.

  Let us consider this moment—the moment of instantaneous velocity—the moment before everything collides. Let us freeze the room, the world; David with his fist raised, Scott turning, still hypnotized by the family picture. Let us freeze Joy at the moment of recognition, her eyes widening, seeing her husband materialize from thin air. Let us focus on Tracey, that loyal and beautiful mother of three, her hands rising, trying yet again to stop her husband from doing the wrong thing. See the children huddled at her feet, their oversized eyes and pinchable cheeks. Picture all the relatives frozen in clusters, mouths open, distorted by emotion. Imagine Doris sitting in a corner, leaning forward, feeling dizzy, short of breath, her birth certificate still clutched to her heart, proof, finally, of who she is.

  In a second we will all be moving. In a second the world will resume its chaos. Everything will happen too fast to be taken in. Later, people will tell their stories, give their perspective, but no one will be able to say for sure, definitively, what really occurred. We could hold congressional hearings on national television. Law firms could hire outside vendors to program computer simulations, calculating in three dimensions the positions of all the major players, the angles of impact. Senators from Southern states could stand and offer magic-bullet theories. But there is no way to know for sure what will really happen when the world begins to move again. Joy, in telling her side of the story, would focus on the moment she first recognized her husband, the drastic, life-altering shock of it, her mixture of confusion and understanding as she put the pieces together, as the black swan showed its beautiful, malevolent wings. She would describe the visceral pull she felt in that moment to protect her baby from her husband’s sudden violence. David would talk about how, in a world without faith, everything turned red, how for some immeasurable period of time he lost control. He went insane. Scott, who is soon to receive an unanticipated blow to the head, would be hazy on the details. His impressions would be sensual, the sound of the punch, the way the room tilted at a crazy angle, the weightless feel of falling.

  See them now all frozen in time at the black-hole center of this story. It is one-eighteen-and-sixteen-seconds in the afternoon, Eastern Standard Time, on February 14, Valentine’s Day. Outside the snow has given way to blue skies. Sunlight spills in from windows on two sides. It fills the main room of the bar, which is about twenty feet wide and ten feet deep. To the left is a second room with a dartboard and two audacious piles of shrimp. There is a short hall with two bathrooms. Inside the men’s room were once written the words Go home Kerouac. Near the main bar there is a plaque on the wall commemorating the night in November of 1953 when Dylan Thomas downed his eighteenth and final shot of whiskey, staggered out of the bar, and collapsed on the street. After falling into a coma at the Chelsea Hotel, he was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where he died. St. Vincent’s, by coincidence, is the hospital Scott and David will find themselves at in less than an hour, a broken hand and a broken nose. Cause and effect. They will sit there bleeding, in pain, bombarded by piano music.

  There is a long bar stretched across the rear of the main room. The bartender is a fifty-one-year-old man named George Hennessy. He lives in Brooklyn with his mother. At this precise second he is drawing a pint of Boddington’s. The blond-amber beer hangs in midair. Behind him the hands of the clock are frozen in a disapproving stare. In front of him the surface of the bar is an obstacle course of drips and spills. Look around. See Cousin Florence (now Aunt Florence) stuck in the act of angrily shrugging on her mink coat. Her husband, Daniel, is helping her get it on. Florence is as mad as she’s ever been. She never liked surprises and she never liked Doris and she is about to walk out in a huff. Beside her Cousin Alice (now Aunt Alice) is frozen in mid-turn. She is looking behind her, trying to catch a glimpse of her new sister, Doris, who is seated in the back of the room, looking pale, feeling dizzy. Alice is torn between leaving with Florence (who has always demanded absolute allegiance) and staying, reaching out to Doris. She has always wanted another sister. Florence can be such a bitch.

  See Uncle Jack, with his overgrown eyebrows. He is frozen in conference with his brother Calvin and Calvin’s wife, Claire. Jack is divorced. He has been in love with Claire for six years, but he is too modest to ever say anything. He lives alone in a ramshackle house in New Hampshire and reads books about the Spanish American War. Like his brother Joe, Jack will die in a hospital, but in his case the cause won’t be lung cancer. It will be a head injury sustained from falling off his roof.

  See them all, every one with their secret lives, their secret worlds. They stand inches away from one another, but they might as well be miles apart.

  It is one-eighteen-and-sixteen-seconds in the afternoon on February 14, Valentine’s Day. In Karbala, Iraq, an American soldier on foot patrol has just realized that he has triggered an improvised explosive device. It is the last thought he will ever have, for as soon as the clock starts moving again, he will disintegrate in a hail of shrapnel. In Mexico City the rain has finally stopped after two days and the sun peeks through the clouds, throwing a rainbow against the mountains. And at this moment all around the world, thousands of babies are being born, thousands of graves are being dug. People are kissing and fighting and laughing and crying in numbers too large to imagine. If you step back far enough, the world becomes a blur. If you pull away from this bar, this story, if you retreat out of this city, out of this country, off of this planet, if you rise up out of the galaxy, out of the universe, into the black void of space, everything stops being specific. All you can see is time. And then, if you rush back in, if you drop like a bomb from a plane and rush down toward Earth, toward a target, a single set of coordinates, in tha
t last moment before impact, you can see exactly what it is you’re destroying.

  Everything, all at once.

  And in that moment, we’re all the same.

  For a split second, everything stops, stutters, then, inevitably, it starts to move again.

  David pulls back his fist. Tracey reaches out to stop him. Joy recognizes her husband. Scott comes out of his daze in time to register the anger on his brother’s face, to see his fist come up, swoop forward and connect with the side of Scott’s head, knocking him to the ground. As Scott falls, David drops down on top of him, unaware of screaming from both Tracey and Joy, unaware of the shouts and general chaos of the room. Thirty-seven hours ago he was running down the street chasing the idea of God. He was hit by a cab and emerged unscathed. And now everything has gone to hell.

  He pulls his hand back and throws one last punch, connecting with the bridge of his brother’s nose.

  Bull’s-eye.

  And there it is, the beginning, middle, and end of everything. In terms of our story, this is the big bang, time, light, energy, the universe spinning, expanding. The puzzle is assembled. The picture is revealed. It is a photograph of the Henry family, a blown-up poster of better days. The father and mother sit on the top step of a rustic house in Maine. They are arm in arm, smiling. At their feet are two little boys. They are happy and whole forever.

  Or maybe it is a different picture, a picture of a broken family in a bar, the two brothers now at each other’s throats, the father reduced to ash in a box, the mother forgotten in a corner. We take the puzzle and break it apart, dump the pieces back in the box. Years from now we will find it forgotten in a closet. The picture will be faded, pieces will be missing. We will put it out on the lawn and sell it with the shoes we no longer wear.