The World of Tomorrow

by Brendan Mathews

  “Michael, is it?”

  Yes. Michael would be killed in order to make clear just how seriously Gavigan took this endeavor. If Francis still refused to play his ordained role, then the next to fall would be his brother in the Bronx—

  “Martin, am I right?”

  And his family. It had been so hot these past weeks. Perfect conditions for a house fire.

  Francis felt like a man coming off a three-day drunk. The color drained from his face and beads of sweat prickled at his hairline. He had called Gavigan loolah only minutes before, but now it was he who was losing his mind. How had he dragged them into this? Michael, Martin, Rosemary, his nieces.

  “To be clear,” Gavigan said. “You are not buying back your own life. That is already forfeit. You are playing for the lives of your brothers and their families.”

  “They have nothing to do with this!”

  “They have the misfortune of being related to you.”

  Francis ran a hand over his scalp. He was soaked on the outside, empty on the inside. “Shoot me,” he said. “I’ll get your money and you can shoot me dead.”

  “You are marked for bigger things now,” Gavigan said.

  “You don’t just kill a king!”

  “He’s just a man. He’ll bleed, same as you would. Same as the men you killed in Ireland. The only difficulty is getting to him, and that’s a problem you’ve solved.”

  “I didn’t—” Francis faltered. Did the words exist that could get him out of this bind? “It was your people. They did this. They blew us all up.” He licked his cracked lips with a dry tongue. “It wasn’t my fault.”

  Gavigan’s eyes glowed. He had been imagining the plan brought to life, but this last word from Francis snapped him back to this room, its heat, the smell of gasoline, the clatter and echo of the cars. “We’re beyond fault now, little Dempsey. There is only one question left open: Who else is to die for your sins?”

  THE BOWERY

  DURING THESE PAST FRANTIC days, it seemed to Michael that he never awoke in the same place twice. On one side of the great hole in his memory there were only two beds: the mattress piled high with beardy wool blankets where he slept in Ballyrath and the stiff, narrow cot at the seminary. On this side of the gap were the cabin aboard the ship, the posh hotel, and Martin’s couch. If he really stretched his memory, ransacked the scraps of images that brought him to the earliest moments after Whatever Happened, he saw flashes of another room and another bed: a ropy pattern on a chenille coverlet, a window with the drapes drawn, a single line of sunlight on the far wall like a white-hot exclamation mark. He had lain there, in and out of consciousness, pummeled by the Noise and unable to move his head. Things weren’t as bad as that now, but here he was in some other bed, and when he thought about how he had gotten here, it was the same old story. The day had ended suddenly, with a crash, and now time had elapsed and he was in a new place.

  He used to read before bed. During the years when it was he and his father in the house—Martin long gone to America, Francis seeking his fortune in Dublin—they ended most days sitting before a turf fire, a lamp burning on the table as night sounds settled over the cottage: the wind buffeting the thatch, the hiss of the fire, the delicate tick of the mantel clock. The clock was one of the few relics of their life in Cork. The only items in the cottage that could trace their provenance to the Cork house were small and easily carried, as if they had been snatched from the house as it burned: the clock, some books, a few blankets, a single framed photograph of the family taken with Michael draped in his christening gown. (They were hoping for a daughter, Francis had often told him.)

  Michael didn’t think of himself as particularly happy during those long nights, but seen from this distance those were sweet and peaceful times. Da would be scanning some book of poetry while Michael made his way through the Aeneid, or when Da loosened the reins of his nothing-after-the-sixth-century policy, perhaps Gibbon’s Decline and Fall or, for laughs, some Walter Scott. Was Da at that table now, alone in the lamplight, placing the bookmark among the pages and wondering where in the world his boys were? He and Martin had quarreled so mightily that when Martin finally made good on his promise to go to America, it brought a calm to the cottage. In time Francis grew restless too and rather than fight about it, he simply left. But could Da have ever expected them to stay? There had been some talk of Francis going to university but he showed little interest in formalizing his haphazard education. One day, despite their father’s hostility to cities—Cork, especially—Francis announced that he was bound for Dublin and that was that. Michael and Da had an easier rhythm to their time together. Maybe it was because Michael remembered nothing of life in Cork, of how things had been before the accident that took his mother and, Martin always claimed, changed their father in some irreparable way. Ballyrath was the only home Michael had ever known and his father was always the only way that Michael had ever known him.

  Would he ever set foot in Ballyrath again? And when he did, would his father still be there, at the table, his book open before him, asking Michael to bank up the fire against the chill of the night?

  He had let his mind wander. When he could read before bed, sleep came to him slowly. There was time to reflect on the day that was ending and to think about the day to come. But since Whatever Happened, sleep—the loss of consciousness, really—came quickly and without warning. He didn’t even know if he could call it sleep. It was a collapse, a demolition from within. He just hoped that he would continue to come out the other side, bleary-eyed but halfway sane, fortunate to be among the living.

  LILLY BUSIED HERSELF with the coffeepot. She didn’t have much in the way of creature comforts in the studio: no icebox or stove, and the water pressure in the tap that fed the sink was flaccid and full of stammers and half-starts. But she had to have coffee, and in a hardware store on Delancey she had purchased an electric hot plate and a pot for brewing caffè ristretto. When she’d first arrived, she could keep milk on the windowsill, but the heat of the past month had made that impossible. She brewed a sludgy concoction and loaded it with sugar. It wasn’t exactly the Café des Artistes, but it was better than the endless cups of dishwater that Americans called coffee. She caught herself making more noise than usual, dropping spoons and clattering her cup into the saucer, but she could have blown the whole building down and the sound of it wouldn’t have roused her guest. The boy was clearly exhausted—he had slept for more than twelve hours—and she had to admit the same about herself. The New York List had kept her on the run, and even when she wasn’t in motion, the gears inside her head never stopped turning. But this morning she had awoken refreshed, if not exactly restored. Curled up against her catatonic guest, even in this relentless heat, she’d had her best night of sleep in weeks. Maybe in months.

  The boy was awake and on his feet before he noticed that he was without his trousers and his shirt. Lilly stifled a laugh and made a show of placing one hand over her eyes. With her other hand, she pointed to the chair where his clothes were draped. She hadn’t removed his socks and suspenders, which somehow would have felt more intimate than stripping him of his pants. He quickly gathered his garments and dressed, then sheepishly presented himself at the narrow table where Lilly took her coffee. She indicated the cup: Would you like some? He shook his head. He still seemed disoriented—strange room, strange woman, a new day.

  She started to ask a question, then cut herself off. She had plenty of paper, along with ink and charcoal and pencils. If words were going to fail them, then fine, forget words. They would go beyond words. With a few deft lines, Lilly sketched a town house like the ones she had seen on her rambles through the more elegant parts of the city: three stories, with stairs up to the front door and tall windows. If he was from anywhere, one of the brownstones seemed a fair place to start. His clothes were dirty but well made. That shirt had not been fished out of a relief bin at one of the Bowery missions. Lilly pointed to the sketch, then to her guest, and shrugged: Where?r />
  He looked at the picture, nodded, then reconsidered: No-no-no. He waved a hand over the building, as if to erase it, and began to shape a structure with his hands. Gestures in the air. Lilly handed him the charcoal and pantomimed the act of drawing. His lines were halting, shakily drafted. At first he seemed to be sketching a barn, with high walls supporting a roof that pitched sharply downward at each end. He added a small box along the bottom—if it was a door, it was too small to accommodate horses or cows—and then with a series of slashes across the front he suggested row upon row of small windows. Yes, a sense of scale! A large building, at least ten stories tall. An apartment building? A hotel?

  Her guest stopped drawing. He ran his hand through his hair, which now stood out on his scalp in a great unpomaded spray of black. On one of the first nights when Josef took her to the movies in the arcades off the square, he had arrived with his hair gleaming and his part sharp as a knife’s edge. But by the end of the short feature, his hair had sprung up, a cockscomb. “Why do you bother?” she asked him. Josef played at being offended. “Being the Clark Gable of Prague doesn’t come easily,” he said.

  MICHAEL SCRUTINIZED HIS drawing. It wasn’t a bad likeness of the hotel, with its gables and its mansard roof. But where exactly was it? Somewhere between the park and the statue of Atlas, on an avenue lined with jewelry stores and skyscrapers. He snatched up the pencil and drew two parallel lines beneath the hotel. A road. On the other side of the road he drew a grove of trees with bushy crowns and between them the sinuous lines of the footpaths he had walked with Francis and the girl with the kindly eyes. He then drew a pair of ovals, one floating over the other, and connected these with the poles of the carousel horses. He added a pair of stick-figure horses, though if they resembled any sort of animal, it was more likely a dachshund than a stallion.

  “Is that supposed to be our hotel?” Yeats said from behind his shoulder.

  “Of course,” Michael said, without turning around. He was becoming accustomed to the poet’s comings and goings. “Francis must be out of his head with worry about where we—I am.”

  “Francis can’t help us find the answers we need.” Yeats walked to the other side of the table, within arm’s reach of the woman. He leaned over her shoulder, scrutinizing the sheet of paper. “Madame Antonia,” he said. “The map must lead us to her.”

  Michael let the pencil fall from his hand. “He must be tearing the city apart looking for me—him and Martin, too.”

  Yeats removed his spectacles. His eyes were hard and black. Gone was the mole-ish squinting; this was the man from the ship. The agate-eyed devil in the moment before the Noise demolished him. “Your brother abandoned you on a park bench—which, I’ll remind you, is hardly the first time he’s left you alone to attend to his own… appetites, shall we say? Yesterday you said that you were lost, but that map you’re drawing will only lead us farther from the truth.”

  Michael had grown tired of Yeats and his talk of Madame Antonia and the truths she could reveal. But he had a point about Francis, whose disappearances were as abrupt and common as the ghostly poet’s, and if there was anything to this spiritus mundi business—well, was it any more unlikely than the stories he’d read in Lives of the Saints? Michael looked back to the sheet of paper. “And how exactly,” he said, “would I draw a map to Madame Antonia?”

  While Yeats suggested a new set of landmarks—gondolas, the Leaning Tower, perhaps a rudimentary Colosseum—to conjure the spirit of the Italian neighborhood, Michael made a few preliminary stabs with the pencil: a long, slightly bent hull; a tall fanlike stern. More than anything, it resembled history’s least threatening Viking longboat, and though Yeats urged him to add a gondolier, Michael dropped the pencil. If Yeats wanted a gondola, he would have to draw it with his own bony, spectral fingers. Meanwhile, the woman had lost interest in his feeble sketching and refilled her cup from a small metal pot. He caught a whiff of the sharp tang of coffee. Wasn’t there anyone in this city who made a decent cup of tea?

  LILLY SIPPED AT her second cup of coffee and peered at the mass of lines and curlicues. Perhaps the paper and pencils had been a bad idea after all. But then so had bringing him back to the studio. When she had asked others to sit for a portrait, she offered them a cup of coffee at the end of the session. For the children, she kept a bag of sweets in the cabinet above the sink. Her current guest seemed to fall halfway between coffee and sweets. He had the look of a puppet from one of the Prague street performers: pop-eyed and red-faced, a florid kopf on a skeleton’s frame. But how could she simply offer him coffee and candy, and then with a wave say thank you and farewell? He seemed in no hurry to leave as he alternately sketched and stared, sketched and stared. As she busied herself in the makeshift kitchen, she snuck glances at the paper. The castle in the forest had been joined by—what? A boat? A snake? A giant swan?

  The boy again dropped the pencil, exhausted by the effort of mapping the what or the where inside his head. No, he didn’t seem in any hurry to go anywhere. So what was she to do with him? She could bring him to the police; for all she knew, there could be a search afoot for a deaf-mute last seen wandering in the vicinity of the Automat. But the police, no, she couldn’t go to the police. She would have to tell them that she had only three days left on her visa. They would require an address. Her name would be marked down in a file. So the police were out, but he could not stay at the studio. This was not the time for taking in strays. It was impossible, all of it. How had she gotten into this mess?

  He had looked so—so heartbroken yesterday, and once she had snapped him with the Rolleiflex she wanted more, and so off to the studio they went. He had followed her so willingly and somehow she assumed that after the photograph was taken she would walk him back to the diner, wave good-bye, bid him adieu. But now what was she supposed to do with him? She had not realized just how fragile he was. Whatever secrets brooded within were more than his narrow frame could bear.

  LILLY AND MICHAEL stood beneath the elevated tracks as a train pummeled the rails with such force that it rattled Michael’s teeth. His hand was in his pocket, fingering the bills that Francis had stuffed there the day before. Had that really been only yesterday? For the first time he wondered if Francis had known all along that they would be separated, and that was the reason he had given his brother his own stash of walking-around money. As they’d passed pushcarts hawking fruit and pickles and secondhand shoes, dirt-caked potatoes and spools of ribbon, Michael trained his eyes on the storefronts and the second-story windows. Yeats had said that in an emergency, any decent medium might do, and that he would count on whatever second sight his ghostly state offered to sort the frauds from the bona fide mediums.

  Lilly considered the vast brick building across the street. It stretched half the length of the block, a home for horses in the days before the automobile and now a shelter for men who had found themselves rendered obsolete. One of the arches, built broad enough for horses and carts, had been partially filled with bricks of a different color to create a pair of low doors topped by a hand-lettered sign: MISSION OF ST. JUDE. ALL WELCOME. PRAISE THE LORD FOR HE IS RISEN. LO! UNTO YOU A CHILD IS BORN. MEN ONLY. NO PERMANENT RESIDENTS. Both doors were propped open and with the elevated train having crashed and screeched its way downtown, Lilly could now hear a piano and a battery of raised voices coming from inside. She took Michael by the elbow and steered him across the street toward the swell of what must have been a hymn but which resonated like the grim recitation of a national anthem, accompanied by the heavy plodding chords of a left hand made for bricklaying, not piano playing.

  A man stepped from inside and scanned up and down the street, looking for souls in need of salvation—particularly the souls of men who required no permanent accommodation. He wore a dark blue uniform with scarlet piping at the cuffs of the jacket and a matching stripe that edged the trousers from hip to foot. He had pushed back the peaked cap on his head so he could mop his brow with a limp handkerchief. While the uniform was
meant to give him a military bearing, he looked instead like an usher in a middling cinema.

  All she had to do was hand the boy over to his care. The man would know what to do. The building must be full of strays like this boy, whose wide eyes scanned the cross-shaped sign, the elevated tracks, the scoured-brick façade of the mission, and the row of storefronts on the opposite side of the street: nickel breakfast joint, rag merchant, cigar store, pawnshop.

  As they drew closer to the door, other men straggled in. One wore a white shirt stippled with faded yellow spots, and Lilly wondered how long it would take for her guest’s shirt to lose its creamy luster. Another man almost collided with her; a turban of gauze covered half his face, and above his eye radiated a stain, black at its center and then red waning toward pink at the edges. Lilly stopped short and the boy caught her by the arm, steadying her. With a nod he indicated the bandaged man and made a comic wince: Ouch!

  The missionary greeted each man who walked through the door, looking him in the eyes and giving every offered hand a thorough pumping. Some men he gripped by the elbow, others received a pat on the shoulder or a few words of welcome. Some were sheepish in the face of such generosity, others beamed under this moment of casual regard. The boy still had Lilly by the arm and he nodded to her again, but she knew this time he was asking if she was all right. She bobbed her head—Of-course-of-course—and took his hand.

  She was supposed to be tying up loose ends, putting everything in its proper place—but how could she even think of abandoning him? Besides, she had at least half a dozen items left on the New York List and wouldn’t it be more pleasant if she had someone—anyone—to accompany her? If Josef could not join her for tea at the Waldorf-Astoria (no. 8) or a visit to the World’s Fair (no. 11) or a movie in Times Square (no. 15), then this boy would have to be his stand-in. He was, in many ways, the ideal companion. He was kind, and his quick action averting a direct impact with the bloody turban proved that he was reliable. He wasn’t going to ask uncomfortably personal questions or prattle on with inanities at the Museum of Modern Art (no. 19). If he had a tendency to fall over at odd times, well, she had overlooked worse habits in men in the past.