“Actually, I gave my last exam two weeks ago, I told you that. I’ve been more or less free since then.”
“Well, we missed you at Christmas. C.L. missed you, I know.”
“They let him come home again?”
“Your father missed you.” And always there was this, the sfumato of guilt. Always your father. Yet if he’d told her to put the old man on the phone … what would either of them have done then? “Maybe you could make it down for Easter.”
“Geez, Mama. It’s January first. I’ll have to look at my teaching schedule.”
“They don’t let the kids off for Holy Week? What kind of school is it?”
“Not everybody’s a Christian, Mama.”
“Well. Spring break, at least,” she said, even though they both knew he wouldn’t be back for that, either. And, no better than she was, he agreed that he would think about it.
After ringing off, he had to lie face-down on the futon with the throw pillow over his head. He could hear William up and dressing on the far side of the beaded curtain. It parted and clacked back together. “Am I to surmise you’ve been talking to your family again?”
Mercer grunted, powerless not to wallow a little.
“What did we say about this? You’ve got to just make a little box in your mind, put them in there, seal it up.”
But what Mercer wanted wasn’t advice; it was commiseration. He flipped over onto his back and let the pillow fall to the floor. William had turned on a lamp, but otherwise, it was night. The blue windows of the warehouse across the street had gone black. “My father is an insane person,” Mercer said.
“Don’t be dramatic, sweetheart. Everyone’s father is an insane person. It’s a box they make them check on the hospital form before they let them take you home.” But William was back on autopilot; he wasn’t looking at Mercer but rummaging through the garment rack that served as their closet. Mercer watched from the futon, as though gathering evidence: the lamplight reaching its fingers across William’s neck, his slightly anxious face, his swollen eye. The day in bed, the Chinese feast, was a lie they’d both wanted to believe, but now William was once again distant and away, and things were going to end. Relapse or no relapse, William would eventually leave him. “Have you seen my coat?”
“Which one,” Mercer said, though he knew very well which one.
“The one you gave me, honey. The beautiful one.”
Here it was at last: an opening. But how was he going to explain why he’d taken the coat, and how he’d discovered drugs in it, without revealing where he’d gone last night? He needed more time to prepare. “Oh, that? I had to take it to the cleaners.”
“Why’d you do that? Which cleaners?”
“They’ll all be closed now. I lit a candle on the bookshelf there and I knocked into it like an oaf and splashed wax everywhere. I’m really sorry.”
“This was yesterday? Well, when did they say it would be ready?”
“I don’t know. A week?”
“A week?”
“I didn’t realize this would be such a big deal, William. It’s not like you were wearing it.” He was trying to decide whether William’s difficulty staying calm confirmed his fears. Though maybe this need for confirmation was itself a kind of confirmation.
“I guess I’ll just take this.” William grabbed his motorcycle jacket, his Ex Post Facto jacket, off the floor. “I’ll try to be quiet when I come in.”
“You’re going out?”
“I’ve been malingering too long, honey. Work to do; I’m weeks behind on the diptych. And I expect you’ll be turning in early, with your cold and all.” William gave him a quick, cool kiss on the cheek, and with that he was gone, leaving Mercer somehow more alone than he’d been before—as if it were having once not been alone that made the difference.
15
THAT SUNDAY, when Ramona Weisbarger stuck her head into the basement, she would find Charlie lying back on the dandelion shag with clamshell headphones clamped to his ears and his eyes closed and his hands folded over his chest like a pharaoh’s. He was sensitive about light, as about everything else, and two years ago, the year of David Bowie, all the lamps in his room had been covered with scarves, so that she began to wonder if he might be homosexual. Now there was only the gray light from the window up near the ceiling, which made him look a little peaked. His color had been bad at dinner last night, too, and he’d barely said a word, but she’d chalked that up to him staying up till all hours New Year’s Eve with the Sullivan kids, whom Maimie let run wild. And she hadn’t at the time noted his failure to appear for breakfast this morning—there was plenty else to worry about—but when one of the twins complained about weird noises coming from Charlie’s room, she’d come down and found him like this. She knew better than to ask if anything was wrong; there was no surer way to start a fight. Instead, she asked what he was doing, and got no response. Her knuckles drummed a tentative solo on the doorframe. “Earth to Charlie.”
He opened his eyes, pointed without expression to the headphones. He mouthed the word: Headphones.
So take the damned things off, she might have said, back when she’d had a husband to back her up. Since the blowup this summer, though, uneventful little exchanges like the one just passed had come to seem like blessings, and she never thought to wonder whether they weren’t worth shattering.
Not that the headphones really obstructed much. The radio had been turned all the way down, she would have noticed if she’d wanted to, and beyond the airless voids around his ears, Charlie could hear her quite clearly, as he now heard the stairs creaking with her retreat and, directly above him, the twins arguing about who got to go fight the monster and who should stay behind. How could she not have noticed the money missing from the babysitting envelope? How could she not have wondered why he’d come home so early Saturday morning? How could she not have noticed the alcohol boiling out of his pores at dinner? When she reached the first floor, he went to shut the door again, which, in some pathetic gesture toward maternal omnipotence, she’d left open. This time, he locked it.
He lowered himself back to the rug, gingerly. Twenty miles away, at Beth Israel Hospital, the best friend he’d ever had was lying in more or less the same posture, and all he wanted to do was go and be with her, watch over and protect her, but he was too late, and now he’d trapped himself here in this wood-paneled prison, where no one knew that the victim, the one whose name the radio said they weren’t releasing, was Samantha Cicciaro, or that her friend Charlie Weisbarger had been with her both before and after the shooting, or that any second now, some machine might start making the dreaded beep that meant her heart had stopped. It seemed to him, studying the chaotic stalactites of the sprayed-on ceiling texture, that every person on earth was sealed in his or her own little capsule, unable to reach or help or even understand anyone else. You could only ever make things worse.
The facts supporting this theory he’d spent the weekend dredging up one by one: the graffiti on the tile of the 81st Street station, the exit gate like a barber’s jar of combs, the rending sound it had made as he pushed through it. He’d even been humming, he now remembered—humming!—as he’d ridden up to meet her. It was a habit he’d had since he was a kid, something grounded so deep inside his body he couldn’t always be sure he wasn’t doing it. Or maybe he liked the conceit of not being quite in control of himself, which meant he couldn’t be held accountable. Plus when you hummed audibly in public, other people kept their distance. This had become increasingly important over the last year, when he’d been forced to spend more of his life in waiting rooms, in a house teeming with black-clad cousins and people from temple, in the office of Dr. Altschul, the board-certified grief counselor. But there weren’t like great throngs of people on that uptown train. It had been either just shy of midnight or just after—not a time anyone wanted to be caught out of range of TVs and friends and girls to whom they were ready to give their virginity. Charlie himself was only here because he’
d lost track of time. His dad had left him a watch in the will, but Charlie refused to wear it, at first as part of some general rebellion against the tyranny of clock-time, and later (after Grandpa had pointed out that it was a perfectly good watch, and that David could have left it to his own blood descendants, Abe and Izzy) as a kind of penance. He consequently had no idea how late he was to meet Sam. He had hope, though. That, plus—for real this time—a serious need to pee.
Aboveground, the snow had started falling again. Trees on the lawn of the Natural History museum, which apparently was right here, were ensnared in ceramic bulbs, and in the red and blue and orange balls of light around them he could see it was coming down fat and at an angle. A solitary bus shooshed past as the traffic signals went green. Amazing, how quiet the city could get here, between the high buildings and the wilderness of the park.
She’d said the benches by the subway exit, and Charlie, unable to keep track of the lies he’d told about his Manhattan savvy, had acted like he knew what she was talking about. And now here was a mile of benches stretching away in either direction from Eighty-First Street, along the granite wall that bordered the park, and no sign of Sam, which meant that it could be earlier than midnight and she hadn’t come yet, or later, and she’d given up. Or that she’d said Seventy-Second instead of Eighty-First, which—crap—she definitely had.
It took him a minute to figure out which way was south. He moved at a trot, peering into the snow for the faintest silhouette up ahead. His boots crunched under him. The park on his left was forbiddingly black, and it was a well-known fact that after dark it belonged to muggers and dope fiends and fags. Stories of the decaying City had reached even unto Long Island. On the other hand, the movement was jostling the contents of his bladder, and if he didn’t pee soon, he was going to like rupture. He was coming up on a break in the wall. With no sign of Sam, he steeled himself and plunged through it, under the trees.
He had stepped off the path and was maybe a second from getting his fly open when a voice made him stop: a single syllable that seemed to come first off the stone wall and then off the path, and then to gallop off uselessly through the underlit underbrush. “Help,” is what it said. In the silence that followed, he became aware of his own breath, the wind gusting, the fierce bleat of blood in his ears. Perhaps in his agitation, he’d mistaken one of these sounds, or some mixture of them all, for the vox humana. He stepped farther away from the path. There was a steady ache now in the region just behind his beltbuckle; systems of hydraulic tubes and reservoirs whose names he’d failed to learn in first-period Bio were asserting their demands: if he didn’t relieve the pressure right now … but before he could cross the five or so feet that would have guaranteed his privacy, it came again. “Help!” And now, much dismayed, he found himself back on the path, lurching out of the circle of light, in the direction of what had registered at bone level as a kind of call to arms.
An unlikely respondent, Charlie Weisbarger, battling the winter-bare branches, slipping over slick spots where feet had trod snow into ice. Still, he was helpless not to imagine himself coming to the rescue of this person who had called out. Male, by the sound of it, maybe cornered by a mugger, or maybe, if Charlie was lucky and the incident was already over, needing help only to call the police. He would emerge from the park a hero. Sam, waiting under a streetlight, would throw her arms around his neck.
The pattern of footprints on the gray-white path grew more involved, then less. There was no third cry; he was beginning to think he’d overshot his mark, or imagined the whole thing, when he heard quick steps coming up behind him. He looked back and found the path empty. Except. Except behind the flanking shrubbery, someone was panting. Against his better judgment, he let himself be lured from the path and circled the bushes, waiting for the moment when the branches would thin out enough for him to see clearly.
The ground sloped away. Here, under the trees, the earlier snow was untouched. It made a gray swale against which he spotted a few black shapes, rocks. There was the border wall, taller here, because the ground was a good fifteen feet below street level. And there, beneath it, was a black shape murmuring, kneeling, about ten yards from Charlie and facing away. Or two black shapes. A black man, hunched menacingly, and the body on its back in the snow.
Charlie couldn’t go forward, or even breathe: he was afraid a cloud of breath would float across the open space and call attention to him, and then he, too, would become a body stretched out on the snow. But he couldn’t just leave, either—not even with his wang starting to actually throb from having to pee so bad—because he realized, was realizing even now as his eyes adjusted, where Sam had been all this time.
Then a siren sounded somewhere, a far-off wail, and the black man glanced up from whatever he was doing. He staggered to his feet and stumbled off, trailing one hand along the wall, as if trying to exit a maze. With the sleeves of his white jacket bunched up, he was even more underdressed than Charlie, and the weird part, Charlie would realize later, was that he seemed to be headed toward the siren, rather than away. As soon as he was out of sight, Charlie was on his knees beside Sam. She looked so small all of a sudden—when the fuck had she gotten so small?—under the thick coat that had been spread over her. That she wasn’t shivering scared him. Her mouth was slack, her eyes closed. The coat was a dark spot. The snow around her head was dark, too, and sludgy, the snow he was kneeling in, and when he touched it and brought his fingers to his face, there was a burnt smell like the drill at the dentist’s. The solidity of her arm against his leg. The weight of her. “Oh, God,” he said. “What did he do to you?”
The hole that had opened in his chest threatened to swallow him. He may have started to pee a little. Above his head, sirens called and answered, a kaddish ramifying down empty streets. It is happening again. Still. He nudged her shoulder. “Sam, come on. Wake up.” He knew already it wasn’t a question of waking. “Sam. It’s me. I came to save you.” If she’d only stayed by his side. Why hadn’t she? And this, too, would pain him in retrospect, because he shouldn’t have been thinking about himself at this moment, or imagining it didn’t happen however it had happened. He would have to live with the fact that this was how he reacted to other people’s suffering—selfishly—and there would be times, he already knew, when he would wish it was him lying there unconscious, instead of awake, having to make choices.
Up where the wall ended, beams of blue and red whirled, cantilevered out over the park. He could hear doors slamming—as now, in his basement room in Flower Hill, he could hear the radiators wheezing, the artless feet of little brothers on the stairs. Even before they knocked on his door, he yelled, “Go away!” With his eyes closed, it felt like he was ripping a tumor out of his chest, and still the sickness remained. He tried once more to summon some foggy, bearded figure who would hear him. Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner, but Abe and Izz had retreated, and beyond the headphones all was silence. The bearded figure had likewise run away from him. Or had he, Charlie, been the one to run? Because, when push came to shove, he’d run from Sam, too. He saw himself again kneeling by his friend, literally red-handed. A voice, the voice that had earlier called for help, had been up above the wall, where flashlights poked holes in the night, scattering the birds: “It’s this way.” Charlie’s bladder had released at last, and warmth had trickled down his leg, and he was biting his lip not to cry out loud in shame and misery and terror, and at what seemed the last possible second, on pure instinct, he’d bolted back through the bushes and onto another path and sprinted off deeper into the dark, clutching his groin. He assumed they were on his heels.
By the time he realized that they weren’t going to catch him, that no one even knew he’d been there, he’d reached the park’s center: a huge, bleak field stretching away to a fringe of black trees. Except for his breathing, the silence was perfect. The purple-gray clouds were still, brittle. The muggers who should have been prowling around were nowhere. In the distance, buildings were lit-up prison tow
ers, no life in them. It was like a nuclear wasteland, with Charlie the only thing alive. His jeans were soaked with urine. And tears and snot were frozen on his face, so he must have been crying. All he wanted was to lie down and close his eyes, but something in him felt that if he did, he wouldn’t open them again, and something else, something pusillanimous and unpunk, could not even now consent to that. He stripped off his damp jeans and Fruit of the Looms, wadded them up and pushed them into a bush. Naked from the waist down, he used a handful of snow to try to wash the pee off his leg. He’d heard people stranded in the Arctic buried themselves in snow for warmth, but he was too much of a wuss to keep this up for more than a second. He took the pajama bottoms from his jacket pocket and pulled them on and, leaving behind the rest, broke across the field, aiming for the tower at what seemed to be the corner of the park. His legs were going numb, numb, numb with the wind through the thin cotton, and numbness made things a little better, so he ran even harder, promising himself that soon he would be home in his bed and when he woke in the morning this would all turn out to have been some really crappy dream.
WHEN HE SLIPPED UPSTAIRS late Sunday afternoon, his mother was on the phone with the Asshole again; he could hear from the foyer the murmur of the voice at the other end of the wire. The time when the light available outside the house exceeded the light in the living room had passed, and still Mom wouldn’t reach the two feet to pull the lamp chain. She just sat there, like an old person. Then the doorframe was behind Charlie and his fingers were closing on the jacket she hadn’t reminded him to wear and lifting it from the hook. It seemed impossible that two nights ago, when this jacket had traveled with him to the City, he’d been so full of hope, he thought. And now the kitchen door clicked shut like his youth behind him.
The held breath of the world at five p.m. in winter. The sky above the haloes of the streetlights, electric air indifferent to anything happening below.
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