“I need a few seconds to grasp what’s on the other side. The window, the one I saw from outside, is open. Toilet paper everywhere, soaking up water. And there, thrashing around on the floor, is a frayed pigeon. It’s gotten stuck on one of those glue traps you use to catch rats. For years now, they’ve been scattered around the station, because we’ve been having a rat problem. Or what we assumed was a rat problem. And loyal listeners will be aware of the Zigler axiom that beneath the feathers, pigeons and rats are the same animal. Now there’s dirty down and fuzz flying off everywhere; all that remains is to give the thing a good stomp and be done with it. Barbaric, you say, to which I reply, no, this is the very essence of civilization. A willingness to do the stomping, before the vermin bite your children and contaminate your grain.
“But as I raise my shoe, the bird darts toward the toilet like it knows the end is near. It can’t quite fly because one wing’s still glued to the trap, and it’s making this cooing, this mourning dove sound, but with an undertone of absolute emergency. What am I supposed to do? There can’t be more than a couple minutes left on the record now, I’ve got to get back to the booth, and I don’t want to leave the thing like suffering.
“Have you ever tried to pick up a pigeon? This one basically panics and shits my hand, so I flip the glueboard upside down, remembering this as a falconry trick, only no dice. The bird is surprisingly lightweight, but those wings can generate a hell of a lot of force, and I’m pretty rattled, my instinct is to hold the board gingerly, but that would just lead to dropping it. So I’ve got it out and away from my body, trying to avoid getting pecked to death, and I climb up on the wobbly toilet seat and very slowly when the wingbeat subsides put bird and board and then my head out through the transom, where the sun is just coming up, praise be to the dashboard Jesi, red morning, streets beginning to articulate again, but there’s no time to commune with you, New York, I disengage the wing from the glue, and then I’ve got to do the legs, too, but soft, so as not to rip anything, which occasions another flurry, and all of a sudden I’m furious at the position I find myself in, I don’t know if I mean in the bathroom or in this city or as a human being or what, but I’m yelling, ‘Hold still, goddammit’—and everything I ever told you is a lie if the thing doesn’t go completely still, pluck pluck, the legs come unstuck, and without thinking I open my hand and it just … plummets. My shoe goes into the crapper, my sock is wet as I speak, but what do I care, because I’ve just cost a living thing its life. Only: four stories down, a few feet from the sidewalk, the damn thing remembers its wings, and with a few flaps it’s escaped into the sky. I’ve got no time to process, as they say, the record is dying, Slow Fades, this one, so I lollop with my one wet shoe back into the booth and lean toward the mic, breathless, which is where you came in, whoever you are, and why I’ve been here now for the better part of two hours, doing all this processing on air.
“Or okay, fine, you got me, maybe it didn’t all happen this way. Or is a fantasia on other stuff that did—doesn’t matter. What matters is the signal this story delivers as we near the top of the hour, which is this: ‘Dr.’ Zig has misdiagnosed you, Damen und Herren. I’ve had most of my facts right, mind you, but still somehow the picture I’ve been drawing is full of holes, because I never really believed you capable of change. And even now they’re writing over history, finding ways to tell you what you just saw doesn’t exist. The big, bad anarchic city, people looting, ooga-booga. Better to trust the developers and the cops. But let no one tell you you didn’t change into something else last night, New York, if only briefly. It’s been enough to make me think maybe I can change, too. So I want you to do me a favor. It’s 5:58 a.m. I want you to turn your radio off. I know I’m supposed to be here ’til seven, but if every last one of you would just turn me off, right now, I could shut the fuck up and no one would know it. Like Peter Pan, only upside-down: if you just stop clapping, I can walk out the door. Maybe we’ll even run into each other out there, you and I. We won’t have to recognize each other, so long as we don’t speak. It’ll be like starting from scratch. So get up off your collective ass now, New York, and please, just please—”
WEST SIDE—5:58 A.M.
THIS TIME OF MORNING, trucks from Manhattan’s last remaining factories should be stacked at the Battery Tunnel, diverting traffic onto surface streets, but the backup is paltry; anyone looking to get out of the city is already gone. What diverts Pulaski instead is the thought of having to descend into darkness again, with the sun finally having started to rise. Instead, after killing the radio, he cuts across Chambers to the bridge, and is soon soaring up over the harbor, and thence onto an expressway that for once merits the name. Pedestrian overpasses fly by. Signs for the Verrazano are grimed but legible. In the car there’s only the hum of asphalt punctuated by expansion joints. Everywhere else, on the water, on the windows, on the rusted chainlink, is light, is light, is light.
Then, just as he reaches Port Richmond, the cobra-lamps over the highway snap on. The sky behind them is the color of a gum eraser—it tends to get that way in summer, something to do with landfill gases—so the brightness is nothing to write home about. Still, it puts a lump in the throat. The neon ninepin out front of BowlRight Lanes flicks through its angles of collapse. Bulbs flash on one of those wheeled letterboards, NOW OPEN WEE DAYS AT 10, referring either to Shenanigans Irish pub or the Greek Orthodox church next door. In the bays of the carwash just before the subdivision entrance, two sponges whirl like dingy sheepdogs, their dreadlocks reaching out for a car that is not there.
Some kind of circuit must have blown on his garage-door opener, too, for as he pulls into the drive the door is going up, then down, then up again. He can see Sherri’s Thunderbird inside, which is odd, unless Patty came last night from Philadelphia to pick her up? He parks in the driveway. The slam of his door sounds overloud, even to him, and startles a few wrens from the neighbors’ privacy hedge. It’s possible he himself is a little frightened. You remember that saying, “Today is the first day of the rest of your life”? There’s something awful about that saying. “Stay here,” he mouths through the window, to the still-silent form in the passenger’s seat. He stands and watches the garage door go up and down, up and down, a few more times before heading inside.
“Sherri?” He makes, by habit, to put his service revolver in the lockable drawer of the table by the front door, but then reconsiders and checks the safety. In the kitchen, the heating element on the coffeemaker has come on with the power, coaxing a curdled deli smell out of yesterday’s coffee, but no one’s there. Their bedroom, too, is empty, the bed with its motel corners. He heads upstairs, leaning heavily on the railing, hardly noticing another door-slam outside. Their bedroom used to be up here until about five years ago, when Sherri complained it was too big—a way of sparing his feelings—and they had movers come in and take everything downstairs to the smaller room where a son or daughter would have slept. Now she calls the old bedroom “a room of Sherri’s own.” She likes to sit on her papasan chair with an afghan in the winter months when the pool is covered over and have her tea and read her book. The curtains that are never drawn are drawn, and the room smells of candlewax, and it is here on the round chair that Pulaski finds his wife, curled up asleep with the earpiece of her little transistor radio in her ear.
He limps toward her, the shag of the carpet swallowing all sound, and when he’s close enough takes out the earpiece. There is no noise. Either the battery died or she turned it off. “Sherr?” He pulls back one of the curtains. Light from the pool redoubles itself on the ceiling, building in wavery white lines, waves of light buffeting this little room. He wants to get closer to her, but to kneel now is basically impossible. He’s stuck looking down, though it feels like she’s the one above.
She opens her eyes. Their blue still startles. “Have you been up all night?” she says. It’s not an angry question, but maybe she’s beyond anger.
“I called. I thought maybe you went to Patricia�
�s.”
“Why don’t you go to bed, Larry? We’ll talk things over in the morning.”
But he can’t just go to bed. She’s been right here the whole time, not ten miles from the Hamilton-Sweeney Building. “It is the morning,” he says. “What things?”
“You know what things.”
“Look at me, sweetheart.” He grasps after the words. “They’re going to be different from here on out. I’m going to be different.”
“Larry, how can I trust you?” There follows a long period of looking at each other. Still, he can’t quite read her face. Because this, too, takes work; when did he forget? Then she reaches up for the sleeve of his sportcoat. “I can’t believe you’re still wearing this, with this heat,” she says. “You know you lost a button.”
He wants her to keep on holding his arm, but it’s too late to say anything. He limps back to the window, pulls his shield from his pocket. The sun seems hungry for it. How you identify yourself: with flashing metal. He pulls up the screen and side-arms the badge with an ease that surprises him. It arcs up, flapping its leather cover like a busted wing until he loses it for a minute in the light, and then it plops, perfect sound, in the shallows of the pool. “Hey!” a girl’s voice says out there. “That was almost my head!”
She is under a flowering catalpa; the most he can see through the scrim of green is the shimmer of a Rangers jersey. “Old man?” she calls. “That you? Is it time for my entrance?”
He turns to look at Sherri. “Honey, you remember how you talked about needing projects to fill the time, if we were going to move upstate? I’ve got someone I think you should meet.”
ANOTHER COAST—THREE WEEKS LATER
HE’D ALWAYS FOUND AIRPORTS SOOTHING SOMEHOW. The in-between-ness. So many bodies, superficially distinct, rushing along the terminals. After his previous misstep, during a decade of semi-exile, he’d spent months in these places, almost as much time as he’d spent in the air. ATL. TGU. MIA. Remarkable, even at the dreaded Paris-Orly, to feel oneself precipitate out of ten thousand other people, merely by refusing the rush. And, wasted time being the handmaid of pointless hurry, he would use this suspension not to loaf, but to prepare for his return. His features were unmemorable. Lenses diluted his eyes. A hat hid his blank head. His luggage was plain and functional as only luggage can be and did not bear his name. He might sit at a gate not his own and assume the affect of a salesman bound for Cleveland, his briefcase full of carpet samples. Or a Kentish auctioneer. A baker from Spokane. Or at a bar in one of the lounges strike up a conversation with whoever looked loneliest, and not a word from his mouth would have weight, nor would it matter. What mattered was setting a goal, however arbitrary, just at the outer limit of the attainable: the target would buy him a drink, say, or carry his bags to the gate. And how did he calibrate these goals, achieve the maximum available yet avoid the steep penalty for non-attainment he’d laid out for himself years ago? Through a patient estimation of his fellow travelers’ secrets. It was secrets that bound people, he believed. Secrets always ready to hand. So many different secrets, and underneath—by virtue of their secrecy—the scandal of their sameness. This one sex, this one drink, or some other, dreary shame.
And did this sameness still cover everything, in light of his own more recent failure? Arriving at LAX for the next leg of his flight, Amory Gould was beginning to wonder.
As he stepped from the cab to the bright sidewalk outside the concourse, a consternation of passengers, shirttails flapping, boarding passes in hand, was flocked around a service counter. There had to be dozens of them, enough to fill a plane. He gathered, in short order, that there had been further setbacks, in this season of systemic malfunction. A mainframe down yesterday in the Rockies, delaying some connections, knocking out others. A cascade effect through all the nodes. And as he was habitually hours early for check-in, and as this irruption offered by its very difference a species of interest, he resolved to pause here at the edge of the edge, as it were, and to study what had lately puzzled him more than any individual: the psychology of a crowd. Yet when he moved to sit upon a nearby bollard, he found someone else already there, taking in the fray. A short woman of Asian extraction. Her baggage rested near her feet. Her sneakers did not quite touch the ground. And what brought him up short was less this than an intimation of affinity, as if she existed right here with him, outside. Above. Where most people wouldn’t have noticed his approach she glanced over, watchful. Well, of course. From her perspective, it would seem as if he were the one seeking company. He struck a match. Bent to puff at his cigarette. “Quite a show, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” Her alertness now revealed itself as partly exhaustion. “Sure, I guess it is.”
When she declined his offer of a smoke, he returned matches to pack and pack to vest pocket. Had a long, melting drag. And evaluated her again. No, she seemed a promising guinea pig, if he could figure out what she might be made to do. “Business or pleasure?”
She seemed perplexed. “Beg pardon?”
“You’ll indulge me. A little diversion I invented to pass the time, with all the travel I have to do for work. I look at a fellow passenger, and I try to guess: is it business or pleasure that brings him here. Then I find out if I’m right.”
“Oh. I’m just out visiting family for a weekend. I’m not sure it counts as either anymore.”
“Family does tend to take it out of one.”
She looked a little embarrassed. “All of us here were scheduled to fly back to New York yesterday on a DC-10 that as far as I know is still refueling in Wichita. This is the second all-nighter I’ve pulled in a month.”
He puffed again. The tremor of a raw nerve. What could it be? Aside from encounters with maids and at breezeway ice machines, it had been a while since he’d spoken to a flesh-and-blood human. Possibly his reflexes had slowed. But this was why it was good to practice. Anyway, her regrets themselves didn’t matter; it was how they could be turned to account. “As it happens,” he said, “I’m coming from New York myself. Well, came some weeks ago now. Just after the blackout. You must have been in it, too.”
She looked at him.
“See, I knew there was something about you,” he continued. “But I do wonder that someone your age, your whole life ahead, would even bother to go back. In fact, it’s what convinced me to pull up stakes. A whole city, effectively irredeemable.”
“That’s funny, because there was a moment not too long ago when I had this idea the good guys might be returning to take the joint over. A little colony of light …” She caught herself. Though was that still wistfulness in her voice? “Anyway, I don’t have much choice but to go back. I start graduate school at the end of the month. But what about you? On to bigger and better things?”
“Hong Kong,” he said, which was true, if provisional. As this had been provisional, this long layover in a city he detested, holed up in his wretched airport hotel, waiting for the knock that would mean federal agents, and meanwhile working the phone. He’d assumed his new life would wend south, into the shade of the Subcomandante. But it had become widely known that Amory Gould had had a falling-out with his sponsors. The merchant bank to which an old associate had matched his hastily forged résumé was in Asia. Asia, about which he was trying to be optimistic. And perhaps this was more optimism, more striving, but he realized now what he might convince her of, and in so doing prove himself to himself. “I don’t suppose you’ve been?”
“I’ve never been west of Mendocino. Not since I was three.” Her expression had hardened a little. Perhaps he’d been wrong about women after all. She was obviously bright. And was that an announcement, sounding behind this ungovernable mob? He made his tone soft, confiding.
“You know, your bag is already packed, if you would prefer to spend your last weeks of freedom on a real adventure, rather than return so soon to that difficult city.” No turning back now; careful. “There are trans-Pacific flights boarding, even at present …”
“You
ever tried to change a ticket on this short a notice?”
“Call it a whim, but perhaps I could help.”
“You’re right, that’s a hell of a whim.” There it was again, wistfulness. Hesitation. The pressure of the withheld.
“Let’s just say I’ve been fortunate in life,” he says. “Fortunate and driven. Nothing makes me happier than helping a young person of similar drive. You could return to school this fall with at least a bit more of the world under your belt. And we’ve lived through something together, you and I. There is a certain confraternity. In any case, it wouldn’t be a gift so much as a loan.”
“I wouldn’t know where to send the repayment. You haven’t even told me your name.”
“Or I’m sure an open return could be arranged. Isn’t an open ticket what people like us are looking for, really?” Beyond the immediate assurance that he was still the man he’d been, he was seeing already a future where in five or ten or fifteen years it would work its way back to him, this favor, through the grid of connections he would throw across the jungles and the plains. He was being forced to reinvent himself—unless of course one was only ever always inventing oneself—and he would need to seed favors in this new quadrant of the world, people who could help him translate his ambitions into actualities. Or what was this all for? Still he was mindful to hold on to his Exigente, the dizzy ember. The edge of the edge of the edge …
“It’s a generous offer, really, mister, for being so fucking impulsive,” she said. She worried a clasp on her carry-on. Then she shrugged. “But we’re just not the same. Even if it might take me a long hard time to know what they are, I’ve still got things to find out back there. So thanks again, but I should go buy a danish, and a magazine. It looks like I might have a while yet to wait.”
And she was gone from the bollard before he could respond, plunging herself into the mass of Manhattoes and tourists all jostling the beleaguered skycap who had no planes under his control. It was as if she’d never really been here. Amory concentrated. Tried to send himself into the skycap. Or past the crowd, into that girl. There may have been something wrong with him after all. Along his arm now he could feel the firm circles under the soft white cloth, the little map they made of his corrections, the freshest not a month old. He would not have thought he’d be adding to it so soon. But Amory Gould was nothing if not hard-nosed, and was already turning slightly away from the crowd, and without looking down beginning to remove the cufflink from his rumpled but still beautiful sleeve. You can get away with anything right out in the open, so long as you don’t look down.
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