His gaze is unsettling, so she turns and starts shutting the doors of the cabinets she’s opened. “I speak from experience here. Our kids got lost on the way home from day camp tonight, and we must have walked ten miles looking for them, my husband and I. But I keep thinking they must have gone somewhere safe.” There’s a little desk where the cook can sit down and write out menus, and on the hutch above are picture frames, including another of the million prints of that photo from Lake Winnipesaukee. She hands it to the boy. “This is them.” He has the kind of fair skin that goes pink with the slightest stirring of blood.
“Wait. This is your husband?”
“Ex-husband. Or almost. We’re separated. He was supposed to pick them up.” Then the oddest thing happens: the boy reaches for her glass, and for a second, their fingers are in contact. When she lets go, he dumps what’s left of the Grand Marnier into his lemonade. Bolts it. Closes his eyes and doesn’t speak for a minute. “We should all just go home,” he says at last.
“Beg pardon?”
“You said this isn’t your place, right? A kid will always want to go home.”
“Are you okay? You’re a little pale.”
They look at each other for a minute. Of course she knows him, she thinks. He has lost someone, too. They are the same, he and she. “Can you show me the phone?”
The telephone cupboard is a little velvet-cushioned room under the stairs. The boy shuts the folding glass doors carefully behind him, and she retreats to a far doorway for discretion’s sake. Through the galaxies of flame on the glass, she can see his slouched shoulders, his face turned toward the wall. I’m in this rich guy’s house, he might be saying into the receiver. Bring the duct tape and the guns. But she feels certain he’s talking to a parent. Asking, she thinks, to be picked up.
“Your turn,” he says a minute later, emerging even more rumpled than before.
“What?”
“Your kids,” he says. “Call home. Keep calling.”
She catches herself about to explain to this boy all the reasons calling an empty apartment again defies logic. But what is there to do, really, besides take the receiver and squeeze past him into the cupboard? Its interior now smells like Will’s gym socks. She’s just pulling the door shut when he reminds her about the radio. “With batteries. You promised.”
“There’s an exercise room a few doors down that hall. I think there’s one there.” And then the boy is gone, and Regan’s sending herself through the little holes in the earpiece. Each ring is a rock dropped in dark water. Leaden circles, nine or ten, spreading outward without striking anything solid. But then, incredibly, there Will is, and the thing he says is not hello but “Mom? Is that you?”
His voice sounds blurry somehow, as if explosions inside have fogged her hearing. Still, he is oxygen; the air could not be full enough of him. “Will, baby, where are you? Jesus.”
“Uh … you called me, remember?” But she’s called so many places tonight that she’s already forgotten which one this is. “The new apartment? Tall building? Big water? Ringing any bells?”
“I mean, where have you been all night? Is your sister all right? I’m just ill about this, we’ve been looking—”
“Cate’s asleep in your bed.” Aschleep. “We’re fine. Geez, if you want to be pissed at someone, be pissed at the person whose fault this is.”
“I want you to stay put,” she says, surprised at her own firmness.
“It’s like four in the morning, Mom, where would we go?”
“Stop that. No more of that. I’m leaving Grandpa’s as we speak.”
“What are you doing at Grandpa’s? Is he okay?”
“Everything’s fine, but I can’t say how long it’ll take your father to find us a cab.”
“Dad’s there?”
“Of course Dad’s here.” She once heard someone describe space orbit as a continuous freefall. His silence now is a little like that, she’s falling through the universe in her little glass capsule. Then she strikes something solid: Keith. It’s Keith he’s been mad at all this time. “Honey?”
“I don’t see why he has to come. He’s the one who stood us up in the first place.”
“Will. Your dad loves you more than anything.” Again that pause, as she realizes it is true. “We both do. Be a little human here.”
“Fine. But if I’m asleep when you get in, don’t wake me. It’s been a hell of a night.” He hangs up, and for once, she is thankful for Felicia Gould’s excess, for the fantasy of elegance she forced on everyone around her, for now the door can be kept shut as long as Regan needs. She doesn’t know why she’s still so afraid to let other people hear her cry, except that presumably the sun is going to rise here at some point, and the world of the past, which has not looked kindly on displays of naked emotion, will reach out to touch the world of the future, like an aerialist finding the next trapeze, or a sleeper remembering herself as she awakes.
When she tracks down Keith, he is on one of those spiral staircases in the great hall, coming down from the second floor. He’s started to report that her father’s sawing logs, and William reading, when she calls out across the open space that she’s finally reached them.
“In Brooklyn,” she says. “At the new place.”
He sits down right there, a few steps above the parquet.
“I told Will we’re both on our way. I figured you’d want to see them,” she says.
His eyes are at exactly the same level as hers, separated only by the openwork of the staircase. He does want to see them, he says. Very much.
This means leaving Regan’s runaway to wait for his ride. William can look after him, make sure he doesn’t steal any of the silver, but she feels she should at least tell him they’re leaving. Which is something she has to do on her own, she says, determined for some reason to keep him and Keith from crossing. If her husband has objections, he doesn’t raise them. (Is this how things are going to be now? And is that bad or good?)
Earlier, she thought William was putting her on, pretending not to remember his way around the penthouse, but dimness has rearranged the side-passages, and for a minute she gets lost herself. Then a radio is chirping up ahead, and after two closets and a cigar room, she finds the fitness center. The candlelight hits a nautilus machine and a treadmill and not one but two scales. Their shadows on the walls look like tools for the mortification of the flesh. There’s a moment when she almost feels sad for Felicia. Then she spots the boy. He’s on a wrestling mat on the floor, his legs tucked up under his chest and his head down next to the radio, like one of those Muslim cabbies you see hauling flattened cardboard out of the trunk at prayer time. It’s what he was doing on the bench outside, she realizes: beaming his requests toward Mecca or wherever.
Now he is either lost to the chatter of talk radio—needing it to tell him something—or asleep. Little ridges of vertebrae push against his tee-shirt along his back. It is warm and damp, but not feverish. Her hand, resting there, looks like another person’s. Like the memory of a hand.
And then it is twenty years later, and all of this is irrelevant. She is waking from a nap, in the mid-to-late afternoon, in the spring, bits and pieces of her flitting down from the corners of a sunny room and assembling themselves into the person she is now. That cramp in her left hand is arthritis. The drone she’s dreamed was a plane is actually the maid’s vacuum in the hall. Beyond an open window birds twitter and buses sigh, but even after she can tell herself these things with some authority, she remains recumbent, a sweaty pillow over her head. Not that there will be anyone trying to get her up. Cate works long hours at a firm downtown, and Regan experiences her these days mostly as a visitor for Sunday brunch. Keith is up in Rye for the afternoon; retired, he’s taken up golf and Republican politics (which amount to the same thing). And Will … Will is an answering machine on another coast—and every once in a while, when she can catch him at an odd enough hour that he has to pick up, a voice, reticent, pixellated by satellites. Still, R
egan wouldn’t trade the life she’s made. She’s got her brother back, and it seems like he might be around for a while yet. And Act 2 of her marriage has been much better than Act 1. The company’s eventual implosion has not only put her and Keith on more equal footing, but also freed her to figure out what to do with herself. At his urging, she sent out résumés, and the next year was hired as head of community relations at St. Mary’s Hospital for Children in Bayside, Queens. The creation of money from money wasn’t ever something that fulfilled her; this is. More importantly, she’s learned to live with herself, which she now knows is a precursor to learning to live with other people. Sometimes in the early evening, she will look up from a magazine to find Keith in the chair cattycorner to her, just looking. “What?” she’ll ask, and he will say, “Nothing,” but with a kind of wonder. You can build a life on this: two people who know each other’s failings electing nonetheless to sit together, in socks, in lamplight, reading magazines, trying not to look too far beyond the day just passed, or the one coming up. Only at the borders of sleep, really, will she ever find herself rooting back along overgrown passageways for a place where her current life split off. And what she comes to, more often than not, is this fantasy she’d once had of having recovered the son or daughter she’d lost, as if that whole night had been a vast Rube Goldberg contraption for showing her that what she wants is not what she’s thought.
Under her hand, the boy doesn’t move. For a few seconds, things could go either way. As long as her eyes stay closed, it’s not impossible she does say something, and whatever happens after that will have become her future, and her current one the dream. But she has come to believe or remembers believing that she has to choose: either the path not taken seventeen years earlier, or the path that leads to her actual children, as opposed to imaginary ones. And this boy has his own life, as does she. It was a mistake to think she ever didn’t.
Still, she keeps her hand on his back a few seconds longer. Tries to memorize the pale lines of scalp branching through his hair. She holds on to the feeling until it is exactly the size of her body, and then she lets go. She’s been awake for twenty-three hours. Her eyes are dry. The sky outside brightens, or doesn’t. The daytime maids will be arriving soon. Under one of the boy’s inert hands she places a note. But already she knows he won’t call. She is never going to see him again. And after a last look, she prepares to return to reality, pursued by the babble of the madman on the radio, like a voice out of a dream.
LAST TRANSMISSION
“—ANYWAY, THERE WE ALL WERE, hands on shoulders. Yours truly ends up in line between a woman in an Arab hair thing and a Hasid who seems nervous I’m going to cop a feel. The tunnel? Hotter than I ever thought a tunnel could be. Flames barely reaching the graffiti and that weird brown residue the trains leave, like inside the barrel of a gun. Turns out to have its own smell, by the way, mushroomy and sweaty and metallic all at once. You’ve smelled it before and thought it was something else. I’m just starting to ask myself are we being led into an ambush when the wall on the left becomes an echoey black vacuum. The platform. The guy behind takes his hand off my shoulder. All these little lights drifting apart. We’re just folks coming home from work again. Then I’m up and through an open exit, screwing on the old face. Because there above, everything is in limbo. Whole apartment blocks as dark as the train. And at ground level, obviously, shades of the Last Judgment. I’ll spare you my man-on-the-street; you just lived through a version of this yourselves. But suffice it to say, many hours and blocks later, when I spot a light in the WLRC windows—don’t let anyone tell you Zig doesn’t put your needs first, New York—I’m instantly thinking, burglary. Then it comes to me that the station has a generator. And at quarter to five a.m., the blocks below Canal are such a ghost town I can already hear music through the window: thump thump thump. And again at the top of the stairs.
“Go look at a disco record some time when the lights come back on. Each side looks like a single song, only stretched out to fill twelve inches, because God forbid when there are wars on and kids starving in Eritrea anything should stop you from shake shake shaking your booty. This particular side is about halfway through, and there’s another record cued on the turntable beside it, so the switchover can be made seamlessly. The broadcast booth’s deserted, but there’s a cigarette burning in an ashtray. I figure Wolfman Jerry, our midnight-to-four guy, must be around somewhere. Me, I’m going to sit and wait for Nordlinger to come, tell me if I’m blacklisted for stirring up trouble or still clear to hit the air.
“To kill time, I pick through some of this mail that’s always piling up in the station. Promo platters, yes, but also publicity shots and autographs, the endless self-promotion. Maybe one of you nutjobs out there has sent in topless pics, I’m thinking, or at least a death threat—something. But every time I glance to see how much time’s left on the record, the swath of grooves between the needle and the spinning label has gotten smaller. Two inches, an inch. You’ll be shocked to learn, boys and girls, that it’s making ‘Dr.’ Zig tense up. This station’s been broadcasting without interruption since like 1923, but someone’s going to have to come switch the record soon or there will just be silence, that irksome pertussion of needle on groove. And we’re getting down to the nitty-gritty here, like a half-inch from the center, a quarter inch, someone’s scrawled ‘Fast Fades’ on the sleeve, any second now the pulse is going to stop, so at the very last possible instant I lean forward and switch the fader. Any idiot could do it, by the way, bloop, push a button, bleep, throw the switch, and you’ve meted out another seven minutes forty of life. Which doesn’t mean disco doesn’t still suck. Let me just wash these down.
“Ah. Better. What was I talking about? Accomplishment, is what I was talking about. My sense of it lasted about as long as the buzz of a smoke does after you stub it out. About as long as the afterglow of intercourse, before the voices start to froth again in the brainpan. Good for her? Good for me? Who leaves first? How soon’s too soon? Because my assumption of what’s been going on has just shifted: there’s no one in the station at all. No Wolfman Jerry, no Nordlinger. Which means no one but me at the controls. It’s a lot of pressure, I’m saying, and there are few places creepier than an empty radio station with the mic this hot and the monitors up loud, because you can’t hear a thing over your own voice. Like if the Kneesocks Killer or the Son of Sam were sneaking up behind me at this instant, I wouldn’t hear. You can talk yourself into being too scared to turn around …
“But wait. Who put this record on in the first place? Whose cigarette butt is this? I start to wonder—don’t laugh now, you city of palmistry and dashboard Jesuses—but to wonder if the place is haunted. I’ve mentioned my buddy who took a dive a few months back, right? And how he came to see me? Four years of silence, and there he was at the door, drunk, with a photograph and some questions about a leak. Maybe it even gave me a little pleasure to say: You’re over the line, pal, I got nothing for you. I can’t believe I never mentioned this. These pills must be eating away my mind. Anyway, I now get the strangest feeling he’s here in the studio with me. Or someone is. Any second now he’s going to swim up before me, or flicker, or however ghosts do, I don’t know, because I’ve always been certain they’re just a way of not having to face ourselves—only why, boys and girls, am I then so scared? Maybe because I’ve just walked six miles in the dark in a city that wants me dead?
“Or maybe because, when you get right down to brass, it’s ‘Dr.’ Zig who’s been the fraidy-cat all along. Yes, I hate to disabuse you aspiring jocks in the audience, but this broadcast booth is nothing but a hedge, a layer of glass protecting you from the horror show that is other people. Screwing around with which is what got this friend of mine in trouble. And I feel like he’s only inches away now, about to lay a hand on me, to start whispering in my ear, like, if things are verily as hopeless as you say they are, Zig, why not go ahead and have the courage of your convictions, pull the trigger—and you know what? I’
m no longer ready to hear it. So I flee back out to the WLRC lounge, which is really just a closet with a couch in it. I’ve still got a few minutes before showtime to recollect myself, pull together whatever my message is going to be to you this morning, New York, when suddenly: a crash from the john. Oh, Zig, I’m thinking. You neurotic pardon my French fuck. This whole time you thought it was just you, there’s been a colleague here using the can. Or else some miscreant off the street.
“What—you were expecting an actual ghost story? I may be a coward, but I’m also an empiricist. I go knock on the door, hollow-core steel, I’m not sure why, though come to think of it, the can’s got one of only two windows in the entire studio, so maybe someone else is worried about break-ins, too. Which would explain the padlockable latch on my side of the door. Remember, I’ve just walked through fifteen of my own riots and found myself too appalled to join. But I’m not going to be a coward anymore. The record’s going to have to be changed again in what my finely honed instincts are telling me is three point five minutes, and one way or another, this is going to have to be settled before I go back in that booth, i.e., the one you’re hearing me from now. So I take a deep breath.
“Take one with me now, New York, if you’re still out there. Shoulder to shoulder. Shoulder to the steel. Listen once more for that racket. Now push.
City on Fire Page 97