“I embarrass you.”
“Don’t pretend that’s not exactly what you were trying to do just now.”
You love it, he wanted to remind her. You love me. But she was already halfway to the elevator, and he wondered again if there was something wrong with his memory. He looked at her and still saw Princess Tiger Lily grateful for her rescuer, but apparently his refusal to grow up was no longer an asset. “I’m sorry,” he said now.
“Like hell you are. You’ve never been sorry. That’s the whole problem.”
“About everything.”
She turned to scrutinize his face, wondering what “everything” might mean. He wondered himself. Sometimes things just came out. “What is it you want, William? You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want something.”
Touché, he thought, as the elevator doors rolled back to reveal a plump woman in plaid who held a rubber plant. William would just as soon have waited for the next car, but Regan was already squeezing in on one side of her, so he took the other. Scratched steel gave back his reflection. Regan was right, he was no Valentino. He’d lost weight, and there were little red slits where his lips were cracking. He needed a shave. He didn’t smell fantastic, either.
The plaza at the foot of the building bulged with humanity, women one-handing food from vendors while packs of jacketless young men checked them out. “You grabbing a late lunch?” he said. “Because this is perfect. You can take me, we can talk.”
“If you wanted to talk, William, the time was four months ago. Things have gotten a little hectic since then. Or did you not hear the press conference?”
“It doesn’t have to be lunch.” He scanned again to make sure he wasn’t being followed. “We could get coffee instead. Your treat.”
“I don’t have time for this. I have a life, you know. I’m meeting someone for dinner.”
“Good for you. I always had my doubts about what’s-his-name.” He knew Keith’s name, of course; it was only that he couldn’t help himself. But as she turned away, a belated shame broke over him. This was where he’d been supposed to be by thirty, one of these janissaries of the corporate state. Instead, he’d spent much of the spring on the nod in his studio, surrounded by what most people would have called trash. Even now, three and a half weeks clean, he kept collecting whatever municipal signage might fit under his cot at the halfway house, and then smuggling it up to the Bronx. To persist in a project you know seems crazy: Did this mean you were crazy, or the opposite?
Just then, the woman from the elevator trundled over to a trashcan already overtopped with junk and deposited her rubber plant at the center. “Hey!” William bounded across the plaza, jostling his way past secretaries and bankers. “Hey! What are you doing?”
“It’s dying,” she said.
“Well, that’s no reason to throw it away.”
The woman shot him a look of purest contempt. He was formulating something nasty to say to her when his sister caught up with him. “Have you lost your mind?”
It had been Mercer’s question, too, but Regan had a way of making him second-guess himself. He might even have apologized to the fat lady, had she not already melted into the glassy heat. “It’s money, isn’t it?” Regan said. “If it’s money, just ask for money. Don’t put me through this.” You assumed whatever was vivid to yourself was vivid to others, and vice versa, but she was going to make him spell it out, for the first time in either of their lives.
“If you must know, Regan, what I came for is your help.” Then he plucked the rubber plant from the trash and, with a great and beleaguered dignity, headed west. He didn’t stop to see if she’d followed. Didn’t stop, in fact, until he reached a bench under the dried-out sycamores behind the Forty-Second Street library.
“Fifteen minutes,” she said, taking off her watch and setting it between him and the rubber plant. “That’s all you get.”
“I don’t understand why you’re so angry.”
“What do you want me to say? Oh, thank God, my brother’s finally decided he’s ready to receive me? Life doesn’t work like that, William. You don’t get to just disappear for however many years and then come click your ruby slippers and make it all go away.”
“Now you know how I felt when you showed up at my place that night.”
“I wasn’t the one who ran away!”
She was being obtuse on purpose, he thought. She’d known every time he’d come to a family dinner drunk or stoned, and had known almost before he’d known it himself that he was queer. So how could she not now see the hell he was going through? “Listen. I didn’t mean that about Keith. I’m sorry you’re having problems.” He worked the edge of a scab of paint under a fingernail and tugged at it, thinking of needles probing his toes. “Maybe we’re just fundamentally destined for unhappiness.”
“I don’t see the point in looking at things that way, William. It’s adolescent.”
He could feel his tongue swelling in his mouth, his knucklebones aching for that sweet relief he would never feel again. “I’m saying, when you look at this family, you’re getting divorced, I’m thirty-three and my life is basically defunct … Sort of makes you wonder, is all.”
“If this is what we deserve?”
“That’s not what I mean, Jesus. If anything, the reverse. I mean no matter what you deserve, how far you run, your fate stays stuck to your heels.” Her eyes were glistening, but for some reason he couldn’t reach out and touch her. It was like some gestures were so simple they were beyond him. “Hey, stop feeling sorry for me for a second, okay?”
“It’s not you I feel sorry for, jerk. Have you ever thought about what it would do to Daddy if something happened to you? What it would do to me?”
Everybody had to die sooner or later, he said. And Daddy would be relieved.
Apparently William didn’t understand anything. Anything.
“Well, I’m glad to hear you say that,” he said. “Because, as it happens, this thing I need your help with is that somebody’s trying to kill me.”
She sniffed. Smiled a little despite herself. “You always did have that effect on people.”
“No, I’m serious.” And he proceeded to tell her as much as he knew.
AFTER THOSE LATE-NIGHT PSYCH-OUTS on the streets of deepest Brooklyn and the one verifiable run-in in Times Square, William’s stalker had taken up position somewhere near the border between waking life and dreams, which, given the amount of dope William was into at the time, were hard enough to tell apart anyway. All it took was someone unusually tall in his peripheral vision, a sense of moving shadow, and he’d feel sure the Specter—he’d taken the name from a comic he used to read—had tracked him down again. He’d spin around to find only a rustling tree, or a splash of shade in the shape of a face on a parked car’s windshield. But then some friend or neighbor (to the extent that he still had any) would mention that a guy flashing a press credential had come around, asking about him by name. Or rather, by his handle.
One evening at the end of April, after a week or two of this, he was riding a near-empty train back uptown from Union Square when he spotted the Specter peering through the doors between cars. Or possibly another Specter, dressed similarly in a sportcoat and hat. In any case, this time, he was real. How had William known? The height, for one thing: that head rising to block the light. And the messy salt-and-pepper beard hiding the mouth. Most frightening, through the smeary glass, were the eyes. They were somehow too intelligent for this Specter to be a narc, as William had thought. Yet somehow swimmy, damaged. Remote. As if they’d already bored through to the obverse side of the canvas. And then he understood that this man had come to send him there. To kill him. A bell dinged. The subway doors slid back, or one of them did, its twin being stuck in place. The junk he’d sampled downtown had turned to lead in his veins. He could have sat there, let it consume him, and was even in some ways so inclined, but there must have been beneath all the dead weight something still alive in him, and when it spoke, it was in M
ercer’s voice: Run. As the communicating door racketed back he lurched through the narrow gap that placed him on the platform. He knew better than to look back.
Along the soot-dark tracks, up some stairs, and then left, down a corridor lined with movie posters. It was one of those weird hours in the transit system when the normal crowds disappeared, leaving behind only black pocks of gum and passageways that seemed to stretch out forever. Impossible to say whether it was his echoing footfalls that sent rats up ahead scurrying to their holes, or the sight of his Specter like a bad moon behind. Turning to check would only slow him down. Then his fingers were closing on the metal of the exit gate, which groaned into motion … and stopped. Thick loops of chain held the gate shut. His steps echoed all around.
He turned to defend himself. The Specter, halfway back along the flickering tunnel, held out his long hands, as one might to a badger backed into its hole. Particularly if one intended to soothe the badger just long enough to throttle it to death. William saw off to the side another exit gate, this one blessedly unchained. A downtown train was gathering force in a nearby tunnel, preparing to platform. He tried like hell to recall the layout of this station, but his brain was a block of cheese the rats had gnawed holes in. Or the junk that had promised to fill the holes had. He bolted, pushed through the turning gate and took the steps three at a time. At street level, he didn’t check for traffic before crossing; a car skidded, horns blared, someone called him an asshole, and then he reached the far side of Eighth Avenue. Down the downtown stairs, grasping in his pocket, please, let there be a token. And then he heard the gasp of an incoming train that had stopped one level down. He shot down the passageway, a cramp knifing between his ribs. He almost lost his footing on the steps, but made it onto the very last car of the train, where two black-hatted Satmars eyed him skeptically. He willed the doors to work. Oh please oh please oh please. And with a bing, they closed. Opened. Closed.
The Specter had made the platform, thinner now than in memory—William could see his shapeless fedora through the train’s rear window—but he was shrinking even further, until the blackness of the tunnel swallowed him.
THAT HAD BEEN AN EXPRESS TRAIN, William said, and he’d ridden it to the end of the line, too terrified to get off. He’d spent the night in a diner in Ozone Park, Queens, drinking refill after refill of coffee, watching the sun come up over the old textile factories. Mercer had been right. He didn’t know how to live. But how had he ever convinced himself that it was anything else he wanted? That he wasn’t terrified to die?
He hadn’t planned to go into such detail about all this with Regan, or about how hard it turned out to be to get into rehab—it would have felt too much like he was trying to impress her—but once he got going, he couldn’t stop. “It’s true. Demand exceeds supply. You need four straight positive piss tests to get into the methadone program on Fourteenth Street, like to prove you’ve got a problem or something. But by the third or fourth day, I wouldn’t have wanted to quit anymore. So I ended up going all the way out to Coney Island. I handed over my wallet and keys, they locked me in a rubber room for a week while they tried to get my dosage right. I know I should have been glad afterward, but what I felt was absolute grief. The first time they let me out unsupervised, I walked out to the beach and just lay down in the sand and cried. I don’t know if I ever really stopped.”
When he looked up, the color had drained from Regan’s face. She was twenty years old again. “But what about these people you say want to kill you, William?”
“That’s the thing, though,” he said. “I got off the methadone in June, and I’ve been staying at this halfway house in Sheepshead Bay. But I still go up to my studio in the Bronx sometimes to drop off stuff I might want to use, if I ever start painting again. Then last night, I find this demolition notice on the door there. And it smacks me that the whole time I was strung out, feeling hunted, the entire neighborhood was being razed around me. As a Blight Zone.” Regan crinkled her brow, like a judge hearing an argument. “Can’t you see it’s connected? The Liberty Heights development, that big fire in April, Daddy getting indicted, the hitman. And I think I know how to make it all stop. But this is where I need your help.”
Then her voice was doing the thing it always did: “William, I don’t see how I can help.”
“Sure you do,” he said. “You can get me in to see Daddy.”
80
SINCE THAT FIRST TIME IN JANUARY, unbeknownst to anyone, or even almost to himself, Keith Lamplighter had been returning at least once a month to the plastic chair next to the hospital bed. He’d slip in first thing in the morning, before work, anxious to avoid being spotted; his habit of signing in under a fake name indicated what a terrible idea this was. Not coming, though, was not an option. It wasn’t that he still expected Samantha to wake up, or that he even felt close to her anymore, but she was his responsibility, somehow, and these lonely vigils reached something in him that church wasn’t able to: the very thing the old kook with the shopping cart had pressed on with an ectoplasmic finger.
Now he hunched forward and clasped his hands together and tried to locate the transformation he’d felt dawning in himself after that encounter—like a back door opening in a dream. Déjala ir: Go to her? Go from her? Was he supposed to say goodbye to Samantha before he could get Regan back? Just tell me what to do, he thought. No, wait. Maybe that was the problem, right there. For as long as he could remember, his first thought had been only for himself. He would try putting someone else first and see what happened. He scrunched his eyes and bore down on the still-inchoate thing inside him. Show me how to help, he was thinking, or murmuring—Make me an instrument of your will—when he heard the rattle of loose change behind the privacy curtain, where the bed, every previous visit, had been empty.
He feared Samantha’s new roommate was having some kind of episode back there, but the emergency that greeted him when he pulled aside the curtain was a zitty kid in street-clothes, kicking off the sheets with his combat boots, some kind of implement in hand.
“Hey,” Keith said.
The kid didn’t have a bad face; beneath those pimples and the home-cut hair were features that posted feelings like a billboard. In this case, panic. He rolled off the bed, waved the thing in his hand around as if fending off demons, and darted toward the door. Keith, whose blocking reflexes had never really faded, moved to cut him off. Somewhat less pronounced were his skills as a wrestler, and so when he caught hold of an arm, sending the implement skittering across the floor, it was all he could do to keep the kid from going for it. “Hey! Calm down! Where’s the fire?”
“What fire?” The kid wouldn’t look at him.
“I’m saying, what’s the big rush?”
“If you don’t let go of me, I’ll scream for security.”
The kid squirmed free, but Keith reached the thing on the floor first. It was a switchblade handle, not even out of its sheath, black with a silver button. “Why should I worry about security? I’m not the one with a knife.”
The kid went a shade paler. “It’s for self-defense. I’m a friend of the patient’s.”
“Yeah? Me, too.”
“So how come I never heard of you?”
“Or acquaintance, is maybe the better word.” Now it was Keith’s turn to squirm a little. “You know what? I was just going to get food, so why don’t you stay here and visit? I insist.”
Hanging on to the kid’s weapon made this an easier sell than it might otherwise have been. He barricaded the door with his body until the kid had slunk back to the plastic visitor’s chair by Samantha’s bed. But something wasn’t right here—not least what happened when he tested the button on the blade. Keeping one eye on the room to make sure the kid didn’t leave, Keith stole over to the nurse’s station, temporarily vacant, and picked up the phone. There was no reason, really, for him to be carrying around the battered business card the reporter had pressed on him in February—to use it would be to acknowledge the role he’d p
layed in Samantha’s life. But maybe he’d just been waiting for the right moment to give himself up. For now he dialed the printed number and prayed someone would answer, so that he could inform whoever he was, that there was someone here he might be awfully interested to meet …
81
THE FELLOW ON THE PHONE insisted on giving his name, but it wasn’t easy to hear, what with the cowbells and whistles, the tattoo of war drums outside. And though Pulaski could always have closed the window, the sound seemed to forbid it. He swiveled his chair into the slab of hot sun. Applied a thumb to one eyelid, an index finger to the other. Lamplighter. Lamplighter? “Do I know who that is?” Probably not, the caller admitted. But he was standing right now on the intensive care ward at Beth Israel Hospital, where he’d apprehended someone who might be of interest. And boom, there it was, Beth Israel. This wasn’t going to be one of your catch-and-release-type herrings, the palm-reader’s revelation, the suspicious van seen miles from any crime. Moreover: “Apprehended, did you say?”
Well, not exactly, the caller conceded, but he was standing right outside the Cicciaro girl’s room, which is where he’d stumbled upon a youth in hiding.
There was an electric squeal below, like metal on slate. Pulaski recognized it (with some satisfaction at how this would sit with the Deputy Commish) as a megaphone. The marchers had brought a megaphone. Next they’d be issuing demands. The whole seething mass seemed to hold its breath. “A youth?”
“Like a teenager. A boy.”
Pulaski squeezed again. “You want to describe him for me, please?”
The man on the phone saw like a man, with no real eye for detail, but each nudge—height? weight? complexion?—yielded more specifics, until the ellipses of unnamable color behind Pulaski’s eyelids became a greasy face framed by wrought iron. A head of red hair he’d seen last week on Second Avenue. “There’s really something fishy about this kid,” the caller concluded. “He had what looks like a knife.”
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