“But we’re not here to swap notes on watering holes, are we?” The boy was really too easy to needle into speech. “I mean, unless you’re planning to buy the place.”
“Any plans, on either side, I would hope could be discussed privately.”
“We can talk in front of S.G. What there is to know, she knows.”
“I’m sure.” Now the waitress slid Amory’s newspaper to the edge of the table to make room for drinks. The girl was struggling with the mylar bag of chips when the boy reached over to open it for her. He wanted her attention freed for whatever passed between him and Amory Gould. In all probability, then, she knew next to nothing, but was along as an insurance policy, a witness that on thus-and-such a date, at thus-and-such a time, this meeting had transpired. There was an implied threat, but this was part of why the PHP had appealed to him all along: Who would ever believe anything any of them said?
Nicholas downed his mezcal. Made no sign of noticing the burn. “To be honest, I’m impressed you’d show your face down here.”
“I’ve always suspected this neighborhood’s reputation for criminality was at least one part hysteria. Look around you. Salt of the earth.”
“It would show more nerve if you’d stay after dark.”
“I’ll make a note to avoid it. That means our time is limited, though.”
“Why don’t you just say why you came? I assumed we’d served our purpose,” the boy said.
“Ah. But this was exactly the thing I hoped to hear.”
“Hear what?”
“Did I ever conceal that I had a purpose in coming to you?”
Nicholas reached for a chip. “No, no. I wouldn’t say concealing was what you did.”
It should have set Amory at ease. But as the woman kept coughing and a car slid by, scattering the rainy light, he thought back to the time when he himself had been closest to feeling his plans had come to nothing—the spring of 1975. He’d spent the previous dozen years swelling his firm’s coffers with Central American lucre. Through two successive coups and a guerra civil, he’d kept the Bandito beans harvested and the Exigentes rolled and a black market in American-made munitions profitable. Yet the fiscal crisis in New York, for all the little opportunities it opened, threatened to foreclose bigger ones. Again, though, what Amory’s dealings with Bill’s children years ago had taught him was not to try to create from nothing. Instead, he shaped such conditions as could be shaped; as for the rest, he waited.
Then one day, in the course of checking up on his nephew’s activities, he’d learned of this house on East Third Street, and of the intriguing alias of its occupant. To wrest further information from the city bureaucracy was easy enough, but slow. By the time the files reached him, Ex Post Facto was no more. The carbon-copied rap sheet of “a.k.a. Nicky Chaos” should therefore have held little interest. Vandalism, disobedience, possession. But just as he was about to shred the document, an item stayed his hand: an arrest for attempted arson in Bushwick that June. There’d been a string of more successful fires in the same area, Amory recalled, but in this case no pecuniary motive could be discerned; the building spared from flame had already been condemned. Two accomplices had fled on foot, but the accused had evidently made no attempt. High on narcotics, no doubt. For though Nicholas would later be freed via long-distance bond, in the police file was a most fascinating set of notes from the night of the arrest. Suspect made no attempt to deny ownership of the kerosene and the matchbook. Suspect instead claimed solidarity with the oppressed. Suspect argued that fire dramatized the material conditions, the collusiveness, the need for change … the awful banality of the ideas, in flatfoot prose, hurt Amory’s eyes to read, and yet, and yet. Something about these ambitions, the scale perhaps, had reminded him of nothing so much as a young Amory Gould.
It was how he’d introduced himself a week later on East Third Street: as a man of ambition. When it came to ends, they were on opposite sides, naturally. Still, it had been remarkable to discover in Nicholas’s own words a potential congruence of means.
The boy had edged backward through the front hall, baffled but already, Amory saw, inflamed. “I don’t understand. I never signed the confession. How did you get a copy of that?”
One could have said anything here, so long as one kept beaming and spoke quickly and in hushed tones and did not appear to be steering one’s audience toward the parlor. Amplify the plumminess. Establish a debt. “Success in this life depends on connections. I’m fortunate to represent, in my business dealings, a family rich in them. For example, I believe you have a history with my nephew. William Hamilton-Sweeney. Billy.”
“But we’re at total loggerheads, Billy and me.”
“I trust, then, I can count on your confidence about this visit. And I should add that on my side, I’m acting as a free agent. Not a soul knows I’m here.”
The windows in those days had been blocked only by dust and pollen. An even, golden light filled the room they sat down in, saturated the boy’s strong chin, his rawboned features, and underneath, his air of quick intelligence. An ape of God, was the phrase that occurred. As a child smarter than the rest he must like Amory have been subject to schoolyard taunts, but with the total stillness of the house, and the heat—the casements were open an inch or two—it felt as if they were beyond all that. Beyond time. Something shifted in the boy’s expression. Hands on knees, he leaned forward. “Holy shit. Billy’s uncle. You’re the fucking Demon Brother, aren’t you?”
Amory had found the nickname distasteful when it first reached him. But then he’d seen the beauty of it. It was a giant puppet, a white screen he could hold over his head. The fear, the desire, others would supply.
What he proposed to Nicholas was a kind of wager. Charges dropped, records sealed, the boy could resume his arson campaign, though this time in the already smoldering Bronx. And provided he kept within boundaries Amory defined, he could be sure the police would not stop him. Budget cuts had left holes in their deployments. Indeed, Amory had access to the triage plan, and would pass along certain sites and times where the game could be pursued with immunity, he said. “Or I understand you studied social science? Think of it as a test of competing theories.” When the last claimants to the torched acreage had been driven out for urban renewal, per Amory—or when the spectacle of the system’s neglect finally galvanized the underclass, per Nicholas—it would be clear whose vision of human nature had won. Whatever the case, Nicholas would get to stay on in the house. Amory had taken the liberty of having a corporate investor from south of the border secure the deed.
“And if I don’t go along with this, you’re going to kick me out? Make sure I go to jail?”
“I don’t work by coercion, young man. When people enter into a bargain, they must do so of their own free will.”
“But how do I know you’ll hold your end up, once my fires do their thing and you see the people start rising up?”
“The same way I know you won’t mention my visit here today to our mutual irritant, William Hamilton-Sweeney the Third. We proceed on faith.”
In the event, of course, it was the reverse he needed to see now: that Nicholas, five months after the Blight decree, had accepted defeat. For what Amory had neglected to mention was that he need not assume control over the South Bronx property by property: that, once the arson had passed a certain threshold, his plans could be accomplished by fiat. Toward the girl, who’d made short work of her chips, he now nudged a glass. “Please. Drink.”
“No,” Nicky repeated. “I guess you told me how it was going to be, and I guess that’s how it is. You didn’t need to come all this way for a victory lap.”
“I’m afraid your friend has me all wrong.” He had turned to see what the girl would do. What she did was finish her mezcal and then shoot a look of despair at the empty glass in her hands. She would rather, in other words, be anywhere else. Amory wondered what Nicholas had over her. “I’m here to ensure there are no hard feelings.”
“
Do you think that’s what it was about for me?” Nicky said. “Feelings?”
“We can agree then that we’ve reached the end of our walk together.”
“That’s a little poetic for me, but yeah. What do you have, if not your word?”
“You don’t know how immensely pleased I am to hear it. And just as a gesture,” and that there should be no lingering tie between them, “I’ve had my compadre the investor burn the deed on East Third Street. The house is yours to do with as you wish. Your property.”
“I guess there’s no getting outside that, is there?” Just then a horn honked. A beaten-down van had pulled alongside a hydrant. Its driver was lost in shadow, but it wasn’t impossible, given the light and the angles, that whoever it was could see Amory Gould. “That’s you, S.G.,” said the boy, and after shaking the last drops of mezcal onto her tongue, the girl rose and slung her satchel onto her shoulder. From under the flap peeked weathered volumes. She caught him looking, and he was surprised to find, before her mask went up, that her despair was hatred, and meant for him alone.
Then he and his protégé were eye to eye, in a silence that echoed the long one from ’75. It was only in the fall, on the phone, that Nicholas had made excuses for taking all this time to decide, and Amory could repeat the gesture of indulgence he’d first used years ago, on Block Island, with that other boy he’d thought to use then—what should have been a beautiful killing of birds, relative to the number of stones. The problem, really, had been a misapprehension about control. You couldn’t trust people to be tomorrow what they had been yesterday. Yet he knew now that with fear, as with fantasy, you didn’t need to. They would control themselves. And if he’d just observed that these so-called Post-Humanists had found a new object for their rage, then he also needed to know they were afraid. Afraid of all Amory knew. Afraid of all he could do. He left off rubbing his arm and raised his hand to signal for the check, and when the waitress came he thanked her in the same florid Spanish he used on the Subcomandante. Then he turned to Nicholas. “¿Y me olvido de algo primordial, quizás?”
It was time the boy saw that he’d been caught out: his father was neither a Latin American ethnic nor an intelligence officer, but only a pleasant-looking former medic, a widowed surgeon living in Newton, Mass. And the son was, among other things, a world-class dissembler who’d watched one too many James Bond films.
“That is to say, there’s one other thing we should cover.” Amory moved the drinks from the middle of the table and returned to its place the Daily News. He’d never before seen Nicholas speechless. He admired the effect of his hand resting there, a white spider tapping a leg. “This unpleasantness in Central Park … I feel I should assure you I had nothing to do with it. For if I had, if either of us had, it would be entirely outside the scope of our agreement, and the protection that extends.”
“What unpleasantness? I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Nicholas stared him in the eye, to avoid looking at the paper. Which was another mistake; that he felt the need to lie here was so revealing. The Blight Zone he’d helped bring about not only hadn’t defeated him; he was planning to retaliate … and something would have to be done about that. But no sense rushing anything. Amory played the long game. “No? Even now, no idea?”
“Not a one,” Nicholas managed. “But I think I’d better split before someone gets the wrong idea about the two of us.”
Only after the boy was gone did Amory reach for the remaining mezcal. And oh how it did burn. The woman outside coughed again. He felt in his pocket for the nickel from earlier. He could always have moved to another booth, but you acquired a taste for self-assertion, a kind of pride. For Amory, there had been no diplomas from a Princeton or a Yale; he hadn’t had the connections of his witless brother-in-law. But since acquiring the Block Island house, he’d kept on the walls the family pictures of the people who’d owned it before, the way tribal chiefs hang on to scalps. And look at him now—facing, and accepting, the colder burning that was life on earth. He would force the rest of them to accept it, too. He looked to the woman outside the window, rapped the nickel on the glass, right by her head. And when she turned and he showed her his true face, her cough died in her throat. He didn’t even have to motion her along.
49
ON THE SUBJECT OF HATE, Charlie’s Bible remained ambiguous. Which probably, given the ambiguity of every other power that might have guided his misguided life, he should have seen coming. Like how on the first day of high school his mother had told him to be himself, even as she reached out to straighten the clip-on tie she was making him wear. He could hear her upstairs now, her feet pressing faint concavities into his ceiling as she roamed from oven to fridge, humming along with the old countertop radio she hadn’t touched in years. She must have wanted something to fill the silence, since tonight the person she would normally have been on the phone with was speeding toward them through the dark. She’d sent the twins to the sitter’s; it was to be just the three of them at dinner. Any minute now, she’d call down for Charlie to come up, which meant he was running out of time to figure out how to feel. He continued to page halfheartedly through the little green Bible. Taken as a whole, the thing offered not much of the frictionless and abstract loving-kindness he’d found back in January in the eleventh chapter of Mark, the love of bumper stickers and old pop songs. Instead, God the father was largely a god of sticking it to your enemies—“Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones”—and even meek Jesus threatened the disloyal with everlasting fire.
A car door slammed outside. The doorbell was the same cheery two-tone that a few years ago would have summoned Dad to the front hall. The whole house was disloyal, Charlie thought. And here came Mom calling down for him. Well, screw that. Let them greet each other, shake hands, hug hello, whatever, he refused to be rushed. From along the baseboard, he retrieved the red tee-shirt he’d worn back in pee-wee league. There’d been only the one size, extra large, because no one wanted the fat kids to feel self-conscious. Some of the iron-on letters had begun to peel off, but you could still make out Charlie’s number, unlucky 13, and the name of the team, which had also been the name of the sponsor, Boulevard Bagels. (Go … Bagels!) Last summer, he’d cut the sleeves off and sliced big vents from mid-torso to armhole, exposing tufts of armpit hair. He appreciated the way the shirt turned his ugly body into a weapon against the world. The way it said, See what you did to me? It fit so tight now you could count his ribs. In the mirror, he mussed pomade into his regrown hair, got it to stand up in small orange hedgerows. He stuck out a sick-looking, grayish-pink tongue and placed on it an eggy white spansule. Disco biscuits, Nicky called these, which was why Charlie had to fight embarrassment every time he asked for more. Disco sucked and would always suck, Every Good Punk Preferred Speed—but the Phalanstery was a kind of potlatch for narcotics, and given a choice, Charlie would take the slow drown of downers every time.
The pill’s coating had started to melt on his tongue, and soon its bitter innards would reach his taste buds, so he swallowed it dry, relishing the little pain as it passed the Adam’s apple. He snapped shut the old mint-tin where the rest of his stash was stashed. (The ’ludes wouldn’t fit in his Pez dispenser.) He lifted his big, black combat boots and clomped slowly up the stairs, enjoying the tremendous noise each step made, imagining his mother and the faceless man cowering. He paused behind the door, hand on knob. Even now it wasn’t too late to fall back downstairs, to hurt himself bad enough for an emergency room visit. It might have been a respectable way out. Instead, he committed a disloyalty of his own: he opened the door.
The man in the foyer was neither as grotesque as Charlie had hoped nor as handsome as he’d feared. Just alarmingly chipper as he held out a hand. Charlie, a foot taller, could see down onto the lush carpeting of his head. And the toupée was only one of a number of ways in which the man was the opposite of Charlie’s father. They also included his rabbity front teeth and h
is Star of David medallion and his turtleneck; Dad never wore turtlenecks. “Morris Gold,” he said. “Call me Morrie.”
The drugs and the costume were doing their jobs: they gave Charlie distance and power. He ignored his appalled-looking mom and seized the hand and didn’t let go. “I was starting to think you were imaginary.” It oozed from his mouth like refrigerated syrup.
Mom chuckled nervously. “Charlie doesn’t normally dress like this.”
“This is fashion, Ramona, my daughter’s friends all wear this stuff.” The pressure of the man’s hand was perfectly calibrated, neither over-firm nor effeminately limp; he didn’t seem to realize that Charlie was crushing it into powder. In his other hand, the neck of a jug of pink wine looked diminutive, sweat dampening the label. “I wasn’t sure red or white, so I split the difference.”
“Should I get that into the fridge?”
“I’ll do it.” Charlie watched his own hands, at the end of hundred-foot robotic extensions, grab the bottle. Mission Control, his brain, had to issue distinct commands to get him safely through the swinging door. Rotate 110 degrees. Extend left foot. Extend right foot. Lower arm. And then the long bulbs in the kitchen were lighting the countertop like porn: rods of sweaty cheese prodding cocktail olives, spinach lolling in wooden bowls, pale crisp lettuce leaves cupping ice-cream scoops of tuna salad. There were six of these, in case anyone wanted seconds, and for dessert, her famous apricot balls, toothachingly sweet. And amid it all, irrigated by a paddy of its own juices, the brown bulk of the brisket. The smell was too much for Charlie. He braced himself over the sink for a minute, waiting to throw up, but had the presence of mind to reach out and turn off the radio, so that if the voices now moving into the dining room were to rise above a murmur, he might be able to hear what kind of impression he’d made. When it turned out he wasn’t going to puke up the pill, he decided he needed a drink. He removed the wine’s little foil collar and stared at the corkscrew until it became apparent how to use it. David and Ramona had never been drinkers. He hadn’t even known they owned proper wineglasses, honestly, but there they were, in a cabinet above the range hood. He poured three, one substantially fuller. He drained that one down to match the others. He turned the radio back up, turned it to a station playing one of the hirsute wanker bands beloved of his peers. It had the virtue of being loud, at least. Activate thumbs. Two hands around three stems. Back through kitchen door; rotate.
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