Little Disasters

by Randall Klein

  Home carries the scent of brown sugar and maple bacon, greeting me at the bottom of the stairs, faithful and inviting. I call these blow job cookies, privately, to Rebecca, because she only makes them for special occasions—my birthday or the anniversary of our first date. Today I’m being rewarded for starting this project, for my discount work for a grieving couple, a noble deed Rebecca deems maple-bacon-sugar-cookie-worthy.

  Aha. When I open the door I see who is holding my son, and I realize the cookies aren’t for my work. They’re to calm me down or, barring that, distract me. The woman holding my son looks just like Rebecca after a few hundred catastrophic choices. Her hair is stringier, dirty-looking, if not actually dirty. Her skin shimmers, with a gleam like plastic, as if permanently under the fluorescent lights of a hospital. She has Rebecca’s face with the warmth sucked out of it, her body minus a few pounds too many, Rebecca’s curves planed down to angry, ramshackle bones. And when she holds Jackson, she looks like Rebecca holding Jackson, only with the added element of risk, as if she’d drop him, or trade him for opiates.

  “Hi, Jolie,” I say, my hand instinctively moving to protect my wallet.

  “Michael Gould.” Her voice is even more gutted out than the last time I saw her. I can’t imagine how she achieves that hoarseness. She could drink bleach, I suppose, or have an infinite supply of lit cigarettes sticking out of her mouth. Otherwise, it’s another mystery from the Agatha Christie of sisters-in-law. She cracks a smile, as jagged as the rest of her. “How the devil are you?”

  “Where’s Rebecca?”

  She emerges from the bathroom, kisses me hello, squeezes my arm, and gives the least subtle behave yourself look possible. “How was the job?”

  I recount the day, layering in as much boring craftsman detail to lard the story. By the time I get to the end they regret asking me in the first place. No follow-up questions to tease out details I don’t want to give. I hunker down on the couch next to Jolie and motion for my son, coo and cuddle with him like a good dad should, get him the hell away from my sister-in-law until I know what she has coursing through her veins at the moment.

  “We had a very interesting day,” Rebecca singsongs. The bell goes off on the timer and she clicks the button to stop it, then takes a batch of perfectly browned cookies out of the oven. “I got a call from Dawn. She’s closing Riziki.”

  “Oh shit. That was fast.”

  “It was, but not to worry, she says, because she’s opening up a new restaurant called Mavuno. It means harvest.”

  “Also in Bed-Stuy?”

  “Oh no,” Rebecca explains. “Mavuno is going to open up in the up-and-coming neighborhood of Brownsville.”

  “I don’t think I have ever set foot in Brownsville.”

  “Finally, one for my bingo card.” She laughs at her joke. Jolie does too, and it sounds like shaking broken glass. “I called a car service and dropped Jackson off with your mom for a few hours, and went to see the space.”

  “You went to Brownsville?” I ask, incredulous. Jolie reaches over and pokes a crone’s crooked finger into the soft folds of Jackson’s thighs. “Why does she need you to see the space?”

  “Because”—Rebecca trumpets her news—“Dawn de la Puente wants to bring me on as a partner. Five whole percent.”

  Rebecca Gould, restaurateur. My mind spasms through a litany of emotions. Husband Michael cheers hooray and tells her how proud I am of her. Accountant Michael reminds her how in debt we are to my parents, and 5 percent of a restaurant, even way the fuck out in Brownsville, is still too rich for our blood. Artist Michael rants against corporate selling out, that she’s the Becky of Becky’s Bites, dammit, and that’s her canvas. She shouldn’t be stuck figuring out inventory and hiring. Father Michael shakes his head, dismissively, because Jackson needs the flexibility our current schedules offer. Otherwise, we may as well leave him with Jolie and hope he doesn’t learn how to tie off from watching her.

  “That’s an honor,” I say. Praise first. Now I’ve been supportive and can ask, “How do you feel about that?”

  She brushes it off. “I gave it some thought. I have no interest in owning a restaurant. Not with Dawn, and not in Brownsville, and not right now. Right now is no risk and modest profit instead of plenty of risk for potential profit. Was a fun thought to entertain for an afternoon, but I like what I have going.”

  Attagirl.

  Rebecca goes on. “When I left the restaurant space, I told the driver to wait for me, but he didn’t. So I was standing on a corner in Brownsville waiting ten minutes for him. And I couldn’t go back in and face Dawn again, because I’d already told her I wouldn’t be investing, so she was pissy with me. I started walking.”

  “In Brownsville.”

  “In Brownsville. I get maybe one block and I still can’t find the car and, trust me, it would stick out, but guess who I run into?”

  Jolie throws up her arms, smiles broadly, revealing a mouth full of reconstructed teeth. “Me!”

  “How fortuitous.” I ask the obvious question. “What brought you to the welcoming climes of Brownsville, Jolie?”

  She triumphantly slaps a coin down on our coffee table. I shift Jackson and look. It’s a three-month chip, from AA or NA or one of those church basements Jolie has frequented over the years. Whether this is a fresh chip or something she earned years ago from some rare ninety-day stint of sobriety, and now brings out to grift people like her sister I don’t know. TO THINE OWN SELF BE TRUE, it reads. A better phrase would be Try to Not Fuck Up Quite So Much.

  “It’s actually a few months old. I’ve five months clean.” She puffs out her chest. “And I’m going to meetings every day, and I have an apartment, and a job, and a boyfriend.” Oh those nouns, how they shapeshift into cot, corner, and pimp.

  “Tell us about all three,” I say and hold Jackson up. Bubbles come out of his mouth in response. He’s on the descent into a nap, so I lay the warm baby on my chest and hope he drifts off. I can’t be tense with this lump of doughy love lazing against my heartbeat.

  “Well, the apartment is in Jackson Heights. It’s small, but I live with a couple other addicts, so it’s good, because we keep each other level, you know? And the job is through the city, so I have insurance and everything. I go to schools and do student outreach.”

  “How does that work?”

  Jolie’s eyes go everywhere when she talks. She addresses a roomful of giants and dwarves. “Like, I go and talk about the choices I’ve made, and the people I’ve hurt, and how young I was when I started on drugs and alcohol and blahdy blahdy blah. It’s boring talking about yourself all day. And they only want to hear the really bad shit, you know? And then I sit around in some vacant office for the rest of the day and students can come and talk to me one-on-one, like I’m their counselor. Sometimes I make shit up, because if I’m trying to scare them straight, I want to really scare the fucking shit out of them, you know? So I tell them that my first boyfriend told me he loved me, so we didn’t use condoms and then when I got pregnant he and his friends gang-raped me so I’d miscarry. Never happened, but those little eyes turn into dinner plates.”

  “You’re doing God’s work,” I drawl. “And the boyfriend?”

  “And the boyfriend,” she echoes. “It’s new, so I’m going to keep that one to myself for the time being, if that’s all right.”

  “You minx. You vixen. You outdoor cat.”

  “Meow.”

  “Jolie waited with me until I finally found the car,” Rebecca pipes in, “and since she hadn’t met Jackson yet, I thought today would be the perfect opportunity.”

  “Oh. Did my mom meet Jolie?” I try to keep the weight out of the question but fail.

  “I waited in the car,” Jolie rasps.

  “I thought we’d have dinner and then you could drive Jolie back to Queens.”

  Yeah, that’s not happening. I’m not sitting in a car with Jolie for an hour and hauling ass back and forth to Queens. Rebecca knows this, she’s just pu
tting up a token effort, but she’ll reach into her purse and give Jolie eighty bucks to cover a car back with enough left over for what will hopefully go toward food. It’s not that I don’t like Jolie—she’s an intriguing guest star—but seeing how my wife looks at Jolie as she spins her ninety-day chip, a mix of pride and trepidation across Rebecca’s trusting face, I hear the future phone call, made from a police station, or a hospital. Jolie is a story that doesn’t end well. Jackson turns his garbanzo bean head toward her, blinks a few times as if he can see her future, and elects to nap instead. Take her in, son, every wrecked inch of her. She’s your family. She’s your cautionary tale.

  Paul Fenniger

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  11:13 AM

  I skulk forward, step by cautious step. There should be emergency lights, but there aren’t. That’s what Perry told me. He said these tunnels are lined with emergency lights, for construction, and track work, and that they run on a different line than the third rail. They can keep the tracks cold but light the way for us. Only they haven’t.

  Or they can’t. The glow I had seen from the train was the train itself, its taillights illuminating the ten feet directly behind. We’re past that now. That light is gone. The train itself let out a last hiss before whatever gave it power also shut down. It’s near pitch-black in the tunnel, and I hear the whimpering of the people in front of me. These are the slow, the terminally slow. Old people, people who probably should have stayed on the train and waited for guides had that been an option, but also a few dozen enduring their own personal hell. Afraid of the dark, of rats, of enclosed spaces, these are the petrified, walking stiff and gasping for air.

  After we helped everyone off the train, the conductor introduced himself. Perry shook my hand and thanked me while chastising me that they don’t need heroes down here today. “Like putting your own mask on first before helping someone else,” he explained, “like on a plane. Just get yourself out of the tunnel.” He doesn’t know what’s going on. Or he’s not telling me. Are we buried alive? Is that what he isn’t saying?

  Standing behind the train with Perry, I considered for the first time that I may die today. There were people who died on impact when the planes hit the towers. And then there was the exodus. And from that there were those who never got out. I can’t be the only one thinking about this in the tunnel. I can’t be the only person waiting for our sky to fall. It would be a watery grave—a rumble, a fissure, a drip, and then the flood.

  I cannot die today. I cannot do that to Jenny. Not under tons of cement in the new bottom of the East River.

  After repeating that they do not need heroes, don’t want heroes, the conductor asks me to hang back and help people through. Keep them calm. “You’re a big guy.” He assesses me. He had to run ahead with his flashlight, give people a sense of where to go. I watched his light bounce forward, a single firefly in the tunnel, until it became a pinprick off in the distance and I was left behind with the elderly and the terrified.

  My eyes have adjusted enough that I can see my own feet, one in front of the other, stepping in the well between the tracks, lifting every few steps to get over the ties. I look down for a few paces, then up to mark myself against the half form in front of me, working a slow rhythm. I don’t want to get ahead of the people I’ve been charged to guide.

  “Not much farther,” I say under my breath, loud enough for the people around me to hear. Whispers carry in the tunnel.

  A man’s voice, about twenty yards ahead, yells “Enough,” like a battle cry, and then what follows roars in response. There are the grunts of bodies being knocked to the side and falling onto the tracks, the wails of bruises and cuts, the slapping of footfalls as this man charges forward, no longer buying into the social contract of calm and steady walking. Screams echo through the tunnel, both at the chaos he’s unleashed, and at the fear of what might follow, that if one guy plowing everyone over isn’t punished, then there’s nothing to stop might from making right as even more people knock the weak aside, leaving them in the tunnel as rat food.

  There comes silence like a knife’s edge, three camps making a collective decision. Those who think they could run forward and get out of the tunnel sooner are deciding whether the risk involved is too great, whether running blindly through a darkened tunnel is more likely to lead to injury than to freedom. Those who know they can’t run—the people around me, for instance—are deciding whether to stand stock-still against the walls, to wait out the storm of people, to take their chances with the rats and the dimming of the flashlights, to hope that after the first swell of people emerges first responders will flood into the tunnel and carry them out.

  Then there are those on the fence, people who have no intention of standing one second longer in the tunnel than they need to but are no more willing to increase their level of danger. They are waiting to see what the other camps will do.

  The footfalls of the running man end in a loud clang and a yelp. He’s run into something larger or more solid than himself, or tripped on a tie and fallen. He moans, “My leg!” It’s all the cue the three camps need.

  The risk is too great. There’s nothing to be gained from pushing. We sally forth, one step at a time. I expect to pass him, to see some darkened version of him hunkered down on the track, waiting for medical help. But I never do. Even he continues onward.

  Michael Gould

  Present Day: July 19, 2010

  11:15 AM

  Every car in Manhattan is leaving the island. The roads leading to the GW Bridge, up Riverside and the Henry Hudson, up Broadway and Amsterdam, are gridlocked. More than gridlocked—they stand still, drivers wearing out their horns trying to jailbreak through intersections. A green Hyundai climbs onto the sidewalk to make its way across town, the driver at least having the wherewithal to slow to an idle roll as pedestrians part the sea to let it through, slapping the hood angrily. I step out of its way and look in, see a man with his tie still perfectly knotted, his sleeves still buttoned, eyes tense as he hunches over his steering wheel. He clicks on his emergency blinkers and attempts to slide back into traffic at the end of the street. There isn’t a cop around to stop him.

  Cabs, as I learned, aren’t taking passengers. The drivers line up in every illegal spot they can find, flipping the switch for their not-in-service lights, idling in front of fire hydrants and driveways.

  I’ve passed a few subway stations, which, by this point, have caution tape across the entrances. People hold out their phones, spinning in circles, still trying to get a signal. Everyone I pass is holding a water bottle and a phone, the two last tools of this apocalypse. There’s still no information as to what is happening in midtown. This boggles the mind, this information blackout. Everyone becomes a conspiracy theorist, sharing tales of foreign invasions or a series of car bombs. An alien invasion gets posited with a y’know, fuck it insouciance. This prompts another favorite New York pastime: if that’s the case then why this? If it’s aliens—a woman shakes her head, taking offense at the very thought—then why would the buses be shut down? Why don’t aliens want me riding the bus? I just keep walking forward, sliding in and out of foot traffic, a step faster than the people around me, making my way toward the very bad place that everyone else flees.

  The crowds grow sparse as I move farther south. The heat and lack of public transport are enough to keep the lookie-loos at home. So as long as the electrical grid doesn’t crap out entirely, people can sit in the relative comfort of air-conditioned rooms and watch the tragedy unfold. There’s no need to scurry toward it for the I was there factor.

  At 138th a squat pecan of a man sits in front of his store on a lawn chair, sipping a bottle of High Life with a hose across his lap like a dead snake. His wares stacked behind him, some sort of hybrid bodega and junk shop. He’s got Hula-Hoops and flower pots out front, a cooler of soda, rags and bones and forgotten things. He smiles at my approach. “Spray you with a hose?” he asks.

  I contemplate his offer.
I really can’t get any more wet, my body drenched in its own sweat. “Please.”

  “Two dollars.” He grins wide.

  “Two bucks to spray me with a hose?”

  “Very hot. Will cool you off. Good deal.”

  Fucked if he doesn’t make a good case. “How long?”

  “Long as you want.”

  “You’ll spray me until I say to stop?”

  “Two dollars.”

  “Right. And can I fill my water bottle from the hose too? Still only two dollars?”

  This he contemplates. “Okay.”

  I hand him my remaining five and he peels three ones off a roll and hands them back to me. He readies the hose, takes aim at me, but I give him the universal signal for one second. I take my shoes off, no need to get those soaked. And my socks, ball them up and put them to the side. I tuck my iPhone into the toe of my right shoe, my wallet into the toe of my left. These I set out of the splash zone, closer to him than me. This requires a degree of trust I could not fathom when the day began.

  I stand six feet from him, strike a Vitruvian Man pose, with arms and legs spread. “Wait. What’s your name?” I ask.

  “Luis.”

  “Luis?”

  “Yes.”

  “Please don’t spray me in the balls.”

  “You got it.” In an instant, I’m soaked head to toe in glorious, New York hose water. It smells of pennies on sidewalks, smells the way a dog does on a hot day, but it’s cool and cascades down my body, every drop a gift. I run my hands through my hair, gather the water in my palms and soak my face. Luis laughs as I spin and let him coat me from head to toe. Then I drop to my knees and Luis stops. I shake like a dog.