“You think I’m scared.”
“Maybe you should be scared.”
“Maybe you should shut up and leave this to me. I said we’re going to do it. We’ll do it.”
“To him then?”
“Okay. But for gosh sakes, Amparo, we’ve got to think of something to call the bastard besides ‘the dirty old man’!”
She rolled over out of his armpit and kissed him. They glittered all over with little beads of sweat. The summer began to shimmer with the excitement of first night. They had been waiting so long and now the curtain was rising.
M-Day was scheduled for the first weekend in July, a patriotic holiday. the computers would have time to tend to their own needs (which have been variously described as “confession,” “dreaming,” and “throwing up”), and the Battery would be as empty as it ever gets.
Meanwhile their problem was the same as any kids face anywhere during summer vacation, how to fill the time.
There were books, there were the Shakespeare puppets if you were willing to queue up for that long, there was always teevee, and when you couldn’t stand sitting any longer there were the obstacle courses in Central Park, but the density there was at lemming level. The Battery, because it didn’t try to meet anyone’s needs, seldom got so over-populated. If there had been more Alexandrians and all willing to fight for the space, they might have played ball. Well, another summer …
What else? There were marches for the political, and religions at various energy levels for the apolitical. There would have been dancing, but the Lowen School had spoiled them for most amateur events around the city.
As for the supreme pastime of sex, for all of them except Little Mister Kissy Lips and Amparo (and even for them, when it came right down to orgasm) this was still something that happened on a screen, a wonderful hypothesis that lacked empirical proof.
One way or another it was all consumership, everything they might have done, and they were tired, who isn’t, of being passive. They were twelve years old, or eleven, or ten, and they couldn’t wait any longer. For what? they wanted to know.
So, except when they were just loafing around solo, all these putative resources, the books, the puppets, the sports, arts, politics, and religions, were in the same category of usefulness as merit badges or weekends in Calcutta, which is a name you can still find on a few old maps of India. their lives were not enhanced, and their summer passed as summers have passed immemorially. They slumped and moped and lounged about and teased each other and complained. They acted out desultory, shy fantasies and had long pointless arguments about the more peripheral facts of existence—the habits of jungle animals or how bricks had been made or the history of World War II.
One day they added up all the names on the monoliths set up for the soldiers, sailors, and airmen. The final figure they got was 4,800.
“Wow,” said Tancred.
“But that can’t be all of them,” MaryJane insisted, speaking for the rest. Even that “wow” had sounded half ironic.
“Why not?” asked Tancred, who could never resist disagreeing. “They came from every different state and every branch of the service. It has to be complete or the people who had relatives left off would have protested.”
“But so few? It wouldn’t be possible to have fought more than one battle at that rate.”
“Maybe…” Sniffles began quietly. But he was seldom listened to.
“Wars were different then,” Tancred explained with the authority of a prime-time news analyst. “In those days more people were killed by their own automobiles than in wars. It’s a fact.”
“Four thousand, eight hundred?”
“… a lottery?”
Celeste waved away everything Sniffles had said or would ever say. “MaryJane is right, Tancred. It’s simply a ludicrous number. Why, in that same war the Germans gassed seven million Jews.”
“Six million Jews,” Little Mister Kissy Lips corrected. “But it’s the same idea. Maybe the ones here got killed in a particular campaign.”
“Then it would say so.” Tancred was adamant, and he even got them to admit at last that 4,800 was an impressive figure, especially with every name spelled out in stone letters.
One other amazing statistic was commemorated in the park: over a thirty-three-year period Castle Clinton had processed 7.7 million immigrants into the United States.
Little Mister Kissy Lips sat down and figured out that it would take 12,800 stone slabs the size of the ones listing the soldiers, sailors, and airmen in order to write out all the immigrants’ names, with country of origin, and an area of five square miles to set that many slabs up in, or all of Manhattan from here to 28th Street. But would it be worth the trouble, after all? Would it be that much different from the way things were already?
Alyona Ivanovna:
An archipelago of irregular brown islands were mapped on the tan sea of his bald head. The mainlands of his hair were marble outcrop-pings, especially his beard, white and crisp and coiling. The teeth were standard MODICUM issue; clothes, as clean as any fabric that old can be. Nor did he smell, particularly. And yet…
Had he bathed every morning you’d still have looked at him and thought he was filthy, the way floorboards in old brownstones seem to need cleaning moments after they’ve been scrubbed. The dirt had been bonded to the wrinkled flesh and the wrinkled clothes, and nothing less than surgery or burning would get it out.
His habits were as orderly as a polka dot napkin. He lived at a Chelsea dorm for the elderly, a discovery they owed to a rainstorm that had forced him to take the subway home one day instead of, as usual, walking. On the hottest nights he might sleep over in the park, nestling in one of the Castle windows. He bought his lunches from a Water Street specialty shop, Dumas Fils: cheeses, imported fruit, smoked fish, bottles of cream, food for the gods. Otherwise he did without, though his dorm must have supplied prosaic necessities like breakfast. It was a strange way for a panhandler to spend his quarters, drugs being the norm.
His professional approach was out-and-out aggression. For instance, his hand in your face and, “How about it, Jack?” Or, confidingly, “I need sixty cents to get home.” It was amazing how often he scored, but actually it wasn’t amazing. He had charisma.
And someone who relies on charisma wouldn’t have a gun.
Agewise he might have been sixty, seventy, seventy-five, a bit more even, or much less. It all depended on the kind of life he’d led, and where. He had an accent none of them could identify. It was not English, not French, not Spanish, and probably not Russian.
Aside from his burrow in the Castle wall there were two distinct places he preferred. One, the wide-open stretch of pavement along the water. This was where he worked, walking up past the Castle and down as far as the concession stand. The passage of one of the great Navy cruisers, the USS Dana or the USS Melville, would bring him, and the whole Battery, to a standstill, as though a whole parade were going by, white, soundless, slow as a dream. It was a part of history, and even the Alexandrians were impressed, though three of them had taken the cruise down to Andros Island and back. Sometimes, though, he’d stand by the guardrail for long stretches of time without any real reason, just looking at the Jersey sky and the Jersey shore. After a while he might start talking to himself, the barest whisper but very much in earnest to judgeby the way his forehead wrinkled. They never once saw him sit on one of the benches.
The other place he liked was the aviary. On days when they’d been ignored he’d contribute peanuts or breadcrumbs to the cause of the birds’ existence. There were pigeons, parrots, a family of robins, and a proletarian swarm of what the sign declared to be chickadees, though Celeste, who’d gone to the library to make sure, said they were nothing more than a rather swank breed of sparrow.
Here too, naturally, the militant Miss Kraus stationed herself when she bore testimony. One of her peculiarities (and the reason, probably, she was never asked to move on) was that under no circumstances did she ever
deign to argue. Even sympathizers pried no more out of her than a grim smile and a curt nod.
One Tuesday, a week before M-Day (it was the early a.m. and only three Alexandrians were on hand to witness this confrontation), Alyona so far put aside his own reticence as to try to start a conversation going with Miss Kraus.
He stood squarely in front of her and began by reading aloud, slowly, in that distressingly indefinite accent, from the text of STOP THE SLAUGHTER: “The Department of the Interior of the United States Government, under the secret direction of the Zionist Ford Foundation, is systematically poisoning the oceans of the World with so called ‘food farms.’ Is this ‘peaceful application of Nuclear Power’? Unquote, the New York Times, August 2, 2024. Or a new Moondoggle!! Nature World, Jan. Can we afford to remain indifferent any longer. Every day 15,000 seagulls die as a direct result of Systematic Genocides while elected Officials falsify and distort the evidence. Learn the facts. Write to the Congressmen. Make your voice heard!!”
As Alyona had droned on, Miss Kraus turned a deeper and deeper red. Tightening her fingers about the turquoise broomhandle to which the placard was stapled, she began to jerk the poster up and down rapidly, as though this man with his foreign accent were some bird of prey who’d perched on it.
“Is that what you think?” he asked, having read all the way down to the signature despite her jiggling tactic. He touched his bushy white beard and wrinkled his face into a philosophical expression. “I’d like to know more about it, yes, I would. I’d be interested in hearing what you think.”
Horror had frozen up every motion of her limbs. Her eyes blinked shut but she forced them open again.
“Maybe,” he went on remorselessly, “we can discuss this whole thing. Some time when you feel more like talking. All right?”
She mustered her smile, and a minimal nod. He went away then. She was safe, temporarily, but even so she waited till he’d gone halfway to the other end of the seafront promenade before she let the air collapse into her lungs. After a single deep breath the muscles of her hands thawed into trembling.
M-Day was an oil of summer, a catalog of everything painters are happiest painting—clouds, flags, leaves, sexy people, and in back of it all the flat empty baby blue of the sky. Little Mister Kissy Lips was the first one there, and Tancred, in a kind of kimono (it hid the pilfered Luger), was the last.
Celeste never came. (She’d just learned she’d been awarded the exchange scholarship to Sofia.) They decided they could do without Celeste, but the other nonappearance was more crucial. Their victim had neglected to be on hand for M-Day. Sniffles, whose voice was most like an adult’s over the phone, was delegated to go to the Citibank lobby and call the West 16th Street dorm.
The nurse who answered was a temporary. Sniffles, always an inspired liar, insisted that his mother—“Mrs. Anderson, of course she lives there, Mrs. Alma F. Anderson”—had to be called to the phone. This was 248 West 16th, wasn’t it? Where was she if she wasn’t there? The nurse, flustered, explained that the residents, all who were fit, had been driven off to a July 4th picnic of Lake Hopatcong as guests of a giant Jersey retirement condominium. If he called bright and early tomorrow they’d be back and he could talk to his mother then.
So the initiation rites were postponed, it couldn’t be helped. Amparo passed around some pills she’d taken from her mother’s jar, a consolation prize. Jack left, apologizing that he was a borderline psychotic, which was the last that anyone saw of Jack till September. The gang was disintegrating, like a sugar cube soaking up saliva, then crumbling into the tongue. But what the hell—the sea still mirrored the same blue sky, the pigeons behind their wicket were no less iridescent, and trees grew for all of that.
They decided to be silly and make jokes about what the M really stood for in M-Day. Sniffles started off with “Miss Nomer, Miss Carriage, and Miss Steak.”
Tancred, whose sense of humor did not exist or was very private, couldn’t do better than “Mnemone, mother of the Muses.” Little Mister Kissy Lips said, “Merciful Heavens!” MaryJane maintained reasonably that M was for MaryJane. But Amparo said it stood for “Aplomb” and carried the day.
Then, proving that when you’re sailing the wind always blows from behind you, they found Terry Riley’s day-long Orfeo at 99.5 on the FM dial. They’d studied Orfeo in mime class and by now it was part of their muscle and nerve. As Orpheus descended into a hell that mushroomed from the size of a pea to the size of a planet, the Alexandrians metamorphosed into as credible a tribe of souls in torment as any since the days of Jacopo Peri. Throughout the afternoon little audiences collected and dispersed to flood the sidewalk with libations of adult attention. Expressively they surpassed themselves, both one by one and all together, and though they couldn’t have held out till the apotheosis (at 9.30) without a stiff psychochemical wind in their sails, what they had danced was authentic and very much their own. When they left the Battery that night they felt better than they’d felt all summer long. In a sense they had been exorcised.
But back at the Plaza Little Mister Kissy Lips couldn’t sleep. No sooner was he through the locks than his guts knotted up into a Chinese puzzle. Only after he’d unlocked his window and crawled out onto the ledge did he get rid of the bad feelings. The city was real. His room was not. The stone ledge was real and his bare buttocks absorbed reality from it. He watched slow movements in enormous distances and pulled his thoughts together.
He knew without having to talk to the rest that the murder would never take place. The idea had never meant for them what it had meant for him. One pill and they were actors again, content to be images in a mirror.
Slowly, as he watched, the city turned itself off. Slowly the dawn divided the sky into an east and a west. Had a pedestrian been going past on 58th Street and had that pedestrian looked up, he would have seen the bare soles of a boy’s feet swinging back and forth, angelically.
He would have to kill Alyona Ivanovna himself. Nothing else was possible.
Back in his bedroom, long ago, the phone was ringing its fuzzy night-time ring. That would be Tancred (or Amparo?) trying to talk him out of it. He foresaw their arguments. Celeste and Jack couldn’t be trusted now. Or, more subtly: they’d all made themselves too visible with their Orfeo. If there were even a small investigation, the benches would remember them, remember how well they had danced, and the police would know where to look.
But the real reason, which at least Amparo would have been ashamed to mention now that the pill was wearing off, was that they’d begun to feel sorry for their victim. They’d got to know him too well over the last month and their resolve had been eroded by compassion.
A light came on in Papa’s window. Time to begin. He stood up, golden in the sunbeams of another perfect day, and walked back along the foot-wide ledge to his own window. His legs tingled from having sat so long.
He waited till Papa was in the shower, then tippytoed to the old secretaire in his bedroom (W. & J. Sloan, 1952). Papa’s keychain was coiled atop the walnut veneer. Inside the secretaire’s drawer was an antique Mexican cigar box, and in the cigar box a velvet bag, and in the velvet bag Papa’s replica of a French dueling pistol, circa 1790. These precautions were less for his son’s sake than on account of Jimmy Ness, who every so often felt obliged to show he was serious with his suicide threats.
He’d studied the booklet carefully when Papa had bought the pistol and was able to execute the loading procedure quickly and without error, tamping the premeasured twist of powder down into the barrel and then the lead ball on top of it.
He cocked the hammer back a single click.
He locked the drawer. He replaced the keys, just so. He buried, for now, the pistol in the stuffs and cushions of the Turkish corner, tilted upright to keep the ball from rolling out. Then with what remained of yesterday’s ebullience he bounced into the bathroom and kissed Papa’s cheek, damp with the morning’s allotted two gallons and redolent of 4711.
They had a cheery breakfa
st together in the coffee room, which was identical to the breakfast they would have made for themselves except for the ritual of being waited on by a waitress. Little Mister Kissy Lips gave an enthusiastic account of the Alexandrians’ performance of Orfeo, and Papa made his best effort of seeming not to condescend. When he’d been driven to the limit of this pretense, Little Mister Kissy Lips touched him for a second pill, and since it was better for a boy to get these things from his father than from a stranger on the street, he got it.
He reached the South Ferry stop at noon, bursting with a sense of his own imminent liberation. The weather was M-Day all over again, as though at midnight out on the ledge he’d forced time to go backwards to the point when things had started going wrong. He’d dressed in his most anonymous shorts and the pistol hung from his belt in a dun dittybag.
Alyona Ivanovna was sitting on one of the benches near the aviary, listening to Miss Kraus. Her ring hand gripped the poster firmly, while the right chopped at the air, eloquently awkward, like a mute’s first words following a miraculous cure.
Little Mister Kissy Lips went down the path and squatted in the shadow of his memorial. It had lost its magic yesterday, when the statues had begun to look so silly to everyone. They still looked silly. Verrazzano was dressed like a Victorian industrialist taking a holiday in the Alps. The angel was wearing an angel’s usual bronze nightgown.
His good feelings were leaving his head by little and little, like aeolian sandstone attrited by the centuries of wind. He thought of calling up Amparo, but any comfort she might bring to him would be a mirage so long as his purpose in coming here remained unfulfilled.
He looked at his wrist, then remembered he’d left his watch home. The gigantic advertising clock on the facade of the First National Citibank said it was fifteen after two. That wasn’t possible.
Miss Kraus was still yammering away.
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