With sleep, too, the drug helped. Aping C.L., Mercer had pinched out his afternoon j., saved the end bit, the roach, for later. He’d thought he might try writing some, here in his room where it all had started, but instead he just lolled on the bed. One or the other of his parents was now a snorer; he could hear it a floor below. How many years of wire-to-wire labor, of worries, of pains in the neck and ass their boys gave them had they gone through just to get to the point in life where it was acceptable to fall asleep halfway through The Jeffersons? It wouldn’t have been fair to them to dwell in the lonesomeness welling again inside him, and now he had an alternative. Which was to relight the joint. In the springtime dark with the windows open and the smell of leaves drifting in, he again grew casual, expansive, unraveling like an old sweater. He devised a little game wherein he gripped the business end of the joint with his lips and breathed in and out, feeling the temperature near his face rise with each breath. The trick was to pluck the joint away just before it burned him. And soon after it either did or didn’t, he would feel the world begin to slope away underneath him, the surface of a gathering wave.
ONLY ONE THING CONTINUED TO GNAW AT HIM, he thought: that Saturday Night Special C.L. kept stashed in the barn. Out pulling weeds from Mama’s vegetable patch the next morning, he ran through the reasons not to worry. First: They’d both been handling firearms since childhood, when Pop had issued standing orders to kill on sight any crow that came within a country mile of the corn. Second: After two tours in Vietnam, maybe C.L. just felt safer with a weapon nearby. Third: These days, C.L. seemed at least as compos mentis as his brother. On the other hand, Mercer now knew himself to be a kind of catechist of rationalizations. Had his experience with William taught him nothing? Had Chekhov? And if that thing went off and killed anyone, it was liable to be C.L. And so, that last night before he was to fly back to the city, he resisted the pull of sleep. He waited for the domestic creak and shuffle to subside. Then he slipped down the back stairs and out the screen door, which he was careful not to let slam. The crickets were louder here, and a full moon threw the house’s shadow over half the yard; beyond, trees took over, and he stole from one to the other, a shadow himself. Only upon reaching the shell drive did he look back. The house was dark, except for one window flickering on the second floor. He hadn’t been aware C.L. had a TV in his room. Clearly, he hadn’t been aware of a lot of things.
Pushing deeper into the farm, the blue land swollen under all those stars, he felt like a figure in a dream. The heavy barn door screamed like an alarm, but then came the old, sure thunder of the wood rolling back. As he groped around in the hollowed-out place beneath the shipping pallet, he tried not to think of the snakes C.L. had warned about, of wriggling millipedes, of eyeless soft insects. At first he felt only the Mason jars of grass. They no longer seemed quite so valueless, but to steal from C.L. would have compromised the purity of his dream-mission. He thrust his hand deeper, holding his breath. It came upon a solidity of metal. Carefully, he oriented the barrel away from himself and dragged the gun out.
Black irregularities in the moonlit pasture outside betrayed his mower’s oversights like ink on an exam book. If his girls could see him now … He felt a sudden kinship with them, their feigned composure, their inability to imagine the repercussions of choices they were presently making. With his hands, he dug up a patch of damp earth, maybe eight inches deep. The land of his upbringing was under his nails and in his nose, as Pop always meant it to be. It seemed a shame to let it dirty up a good gun, so he used the shirt off his back as a wrapper. He was a priest now, pagan, half-naked in the night, performing obscure rites of interment. Or he was the lead player in his own novel, or in one of those new arcade games William loved, compelled to repeat some totemic motion until he got it right. Only once did he feel, as he had on New Year’s Eve, that someone was standing among the trees, watching. Well, let him watch, damn it. Something was being enacted here, as if it had been this deeper mission calling Mercer home all along. And now that he’d completed it, maybe he would be allowed to advance through to the next level, to a world where no one got shot.
51
REGARDLESS OF WHATEVER HE’D SAID TO HIS SISTER in the heat of his outrage, William was finding it hard to husband his dough. If he took twenty, or thirty, or forty bucks out of the bank, he’d burn through it in a single day. On the other hand, some recent lost weekends in the war zones of the outer boroughs had him too spooked to carry more. Several times on lonely streets late at night, he’d had the sensation of being followed. This had started when he’d still been living with Mercer, actually; you’d sense yourself being watched and then turn around and there’d be no one there. And then once, in a flyblown Bed-Stuy shooting gallery, too zonked to move, he’d felt a friend of a friend of a friend lift his graven head, heard him whisper to someone else, Shit, man, do you know who this cat is? as if there might be enough cash in the wallet of Billy Three-Sticks to take them all on the Permanent Nod. Which just went to show you had to be careful of other people.
The rule applied to domestic life, too. The first few weeks after moving out, he’d been crashing in Bruno’s guestroom in Chelsea. He’d assumed his old benefactor would be pleased to see him free again, but some inkling of the circumstances seemed to lurk behind Bruno’s Austrian restraint. Failure to ask what had happened read not as tact, but as evaluation, as disappointment, and perhaps even as a subtle pressure to get clean.
So William had said sayonara and moved the few things he had to his studio in the Bronx. Sure, he was the only white guy for blocks, but he felt sometimes that being raised by Doonie made him an honorary brother. Anyway, color wasn’t the source of his agita up here. It was the half-finished canvases gaping from the wall. Evidence, his magnum opus was called. The title had come before almost anything else. He’d planned to finish before telling Mercer much beyond that. Perhaps at first he envied Mercer’s sanity about his own work, his refusal to boast about his productivity, which must have been considerable, for all the hours he put in. Later, though, after he realized he himself was procrastinating, William had kept quiet out of shame. And now not having spoken about Evidence made it seem even less real. He still forced himself at least once a week, out of a kind of spite, to mix up his pigments. But the daily discipline of brush and canvas had long since deserted him.
Indeed, by April, his main discipline was forestalling until early evening, or at least late afternoon, an experience infinitely more beautiful: the leisurely walk over the Grand Concourse or the long plunge down to the Deuce to cop. As a surfer reads waves, he’d learned how to predict the intervals when the government tightened the supply, and how to ride out dry spells. (If they weren’t only temporary, cops would have been out of jobs.) And he’d learned to appreciate rush hour, the scoring time, when he flowed out to be with the world for a few minutes before diving back into himself—it had the form of anxiety, only drained of the content—and to relish the pellucid air of five o’clock, the colors of the medium he was moving through.
One day, when the supply was good, he was back in Times Square. Daylight Wastings had just ended, but even this early, the neon flashed come-ons above his head, Peepland in red, Peep-o-Rama in blue and red, to match the come-ons catcalling from all around. “Reds.” “Blues, blues.” “Ten dollars, the hand; twenty, the mouth; fifty, full service!” It was a glimpse of the alternate future: not a nuclear holocaust, or a communist utopia, but a life organized completely on market principles. He wanted to stop and admire all these people living like it was the day after tomorrow. Instead he angled head-down into the crowd, trying not to be recognized. In the pocket of his old Ex Post Facto jacket, in the little hole he’d cut into the lining, was a paper envelope of heroin, like the sleeves they put stamps in at the post office.
Hard to say, then, what drew his eye up toward the marquee of a porno palace as he approached the corner of Broadway. He must have felt a disturbance just beyond the boundless world his eyes perceived. Ma
ybe like dogs we know when we are being hunted. Anyway, in a single glance, he comprehended a body bigger than the bodies around it and somehow distinct from them. It was a white guy, a real hulk, damn familiar-looking, with whiskers and flyaway hair and a slightly fantastic or spectral gaze that raked the crowds from the shadow of a hat brim. William had seen this getup once before—from the window of the loft, he thought—and suddenly his anxiety was just anxiety again; he had been followed. This was the follower. Some kind of narc, it seemed, with that silly hat, the unconvincing length of that hair. He was waiting to bust William. But he hadn’t spotted him yet.
William’s instinct, oddly, was to do exactly nothing he hadn’t already been doing. Or not so oddly. Wasn’t this what you were supposed to do in the presence of a wild animal? Move calmly away. Running will only enrage it. William didn’t look again but resumed his businesslike pace across Broadway. His hands sweated in his pockets; he could dump the drugs, but loved them too much. Fortunately, the block between here and Sixth Avenue teemed with New Yorkers as degenerate as himself, and when he felt dissolved among them, protected by them, he looked back and saw no such person waiting on the traffic island.
Later, locked safely inside his studio, he would wonder if he was imagining things. In any case, he was going to reward himself for keeping cool with a dose large enough to make him puke. Somewhere nearby a building demolition had been in process all day, but it registered at present only as intervals of rumble in the floorboards and a felt compassion for the rats of this city, surrounded on all sides by predators, made homeless by the rubble. Of course, it was not the rats he kept seeing as he hunkered over the blackened spoon. Or as the knot inside him untied and dropped him on the dusty floor to lie in his jockey shorts and drift in and out of the portal the shifting sun drew across the wall. It was the shadowy face of that presumptive stranger. No stranger, really, than the one he’d see if he got up right now to examine the mirror. For William, too, was haunted. Hunted, maybe, for something more than his drugs. Or Billy. He’d been jumped a few months ago, and had not wished to repeat it. But he had lost the will to move, or possibly the ability. And so what, he thought now. Fuck it. Let them come.
52
YOU COULD TRACK Mr. Feratovic, the super, by the sound of his walkie-talkie in the hall. Mostly it picked up stray transmissions from vacuum cleaners and passing taxis; the only person who ever used it to contact him was his wife—or so Richard had told Jenny, during one of their late-night bull sessions. He could tune in the signal on his police scanner, hear Mrs. F. calling her better half down to dinner. Didn’t he find eavesdropping a little unfair? she’d asked. That day at the start of May, though, she had a question about some contractors’ scaffolding that had appeared outside her window—about whether renovations prefigured a rise in rent—so when she heard the telltale static approaching the door, she disabled the police lock and stuck her head out. She found the super attempting to corral Richard’s Scottish terrier, Claggart, into a corner with his big brown boots.
The poor dog, obviously traumatized, allowed her to swoop in and rescue him. As she moved toward Richard’s door, though, the super shouted, “Not home, miss.”
“Excuse me?”
Mr. Feratovic was what you might call well-preserved. He could have been as old as seventy, but wore short shorts and a starched undershirt year-round, and his arms and calves were knotty with muscles. He squinted and leaned toward her, as if into a stiff wind. The wet cigar-end in his mouth made it hard to decipher what he was telling her, except for the last bit: “You let the dog go, see what happens.”
So she set Claggart down. Mr. Feratovic held open the stairwell door, and Claggart bolted for it. The boots stumped down the stairs in hot pursuit. Jenny had little choice but to follow. By the time she reached the first floor, Claggart was sitting rigid in the vestibule, facing the street. Nose-prints smudged the glass. “You see? I find him here, exactly like this. Your friend, Miss Nguyen, he is not home.”
“We’re just neighbors,” Jenny said, wondering why she was so quick to correct him.
“You want I should lock him up until your friend gets back?”
“No, I’ll watch him.” She picked the dog up and, afraid to look at the super’s face, slunk back upstairs. Claggart whimpered a little and tried to get a view over her shoulder, his canine heart thumping from exertion. But how had he escaped in the first place? Steel doors barricaded the stairwells. The recessed elevator buttons were ill-suited to paws. And to protect his record collection, Richard kept his front door locked. Everyone did now. Even socialists.
That night, she kept waiting to hear the snap of Richard’s deadbolt, the three claps with which he summoned Claggart whenever he returned home, the golden enchantments of the Wurlitzer leaking through the wall. But when she used the spare key he’d given her and fetched Claggart’s dogfood, the flat next door was cold and dim and somehow creepy. It didn’t look like the home of a man whose return was imminent. Still, there had to be a reasonable explanation—Richard loved the dog, and wouldn’t have just abandoned him. It was a conviction that would stay with her, however illogically, even after Richard’s body turned up a week later, waterlogged, bleached, knocking against the pier of a boat slip in Brooklyn.
SHE’D HEARD IT FIRST from Mr. Feratovic, who’d heard it, he said, from the police. She would remember later how the super had looked so seriously down at Claggart, who crouched behind her, growling. How he’d shifted his unlit cigar from one side of his mouth to the other without using his hands. How he’d steamed away, leaving her clutching the doorknob for support. The eeriness of the hallway then, as if she were the only astronaut left on a space station orbiting the earth. But she would not cry, she’d told herself, as great, silent tears rolled down her face; she would not give Mr. Feratovic the satisfaction, when there had to have been some mistake. She would spend hours flipping stations on the radio, searching for it. She got no word either way. By midnight, she was ready to hurl the appliance out the window, watch it shatter in a cheap supernova on the black street below. Then she remembered: the goddamn scaffolding would catch it.
IT WAS GRIMLY FITTING that the Daily News, that first weekend in May, should bear testimony of Richard’s death (an “apparent suicide”). After that, word spread through the building like a contagion. Was it true? the neighbors said. Have you heard? But to a person, they fell silent at Jenny’s approach. She wanted to tackle them, to sit on their chests until they confessed their suspicions about her and Richard, to make them repeat after her: “We were just neighbors!” Even at work, she felt conspired against. Paperclips scuttled to the bottom of her totebag. Paintings lost themselves in storage. The frosted skylight above her ticked with a shower that didn’t let up for weeks. What light it let in was murky and aqueous, and she kept imagining sinking into water herself, the light on the surface receding, her breath stuck in her throat. How could anyone just give up like that? she wondered. And again: How could he have walked out on the dog? Unless his death had been an accident? Was it worse to be an idiot or a coward? No, coward was worse. It would mean she was going to have to hate him forever—and hate herself, for not having stopped him, the night they’d quarreled. Never before had foul play seemed like something to wish for. Still, if his wallet had been missing … Or if he’d, like, been in a love triangle, mixed up with the wife of a KGB assassin … But she’d left paranoia behind her. The unaligned miseries of life on earth were proving to be more than enough.
Then one day near the end of the month, a coffee cup appeared on the desk before her—not one of the blue paper numbers the deli used, but a diminutive porcelain mug filled with espresso from her boss’s special machine. Steam curled off the crema. She didn’t dare look up; five seconds ago, she’d been muttering under her breath, imagining she was alone. “If you like, I can take it away,” Bruno said, finally.
“No, thank you,” she said. “It’s really thoughtful.”
He seemed to hear this as an invit
ation to take the chair next to her desk, his preferred place to sit and bitch about the caprices of his artists—though as far as she’d ever been able to tell, his days were spent mostly in upmarket cafés. “Something is bothering you, Liebchen.”
“I’m fine.”
“You should be sleeping more.” He would have liked nothing better than to manage every detail of her life, like a kid with a doll. It was the transparency of this instinct that Jenny appreciated, or the transparency of the transparency; Bruno knew himself to be living vicariously. In fact, he’d started to look lately like there was something keeping him up late with worry. “I have a doctor friend who could write a prescription.”
“I get more sleep than I know what to do with, Bruno. I’m the Wilt Chamberlain of sleep. I don’t need pills.”
“Ah. Well. I apologize, then …” This was new: he was offering, as if at great personal cost, to respect her autonomy. It was a kindness that almost made Jenny burst back into tears. She wanted to reward him, but how could she begin to explain the complications? Her hands wrestled on her desk. When she looked up, Bruno was giving her that X-ray look of his from beneath his shaved dome. “You know, when you first started here, Jenny, men turned to watch you walk down the street as if you were one of the ikons in the old paintings, a gilded circle around your head. Being men, they would be only too happy to collect you. But not Jenny Nguyen, I said. She’s too smart to be taken in. Of course nothing is more attractive than someone who needs saving.”
“Wow,” she said. “How much do I owe you, Dr. Freud?”
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