Little Disasters
Page 35
When Rebecca and I have discussed all the latest business, most of it pertaining to Jackson, she takes out a cupcake and a candle, because candles won’t stay in cookies, though I’m sure Rebecca will find a way soon enough. I carry a lighter now, and up to twenty things to light at a time, so I light it for him and we sing. The ceremony is a little lost on him—he just wants the cupcake and can’t quite figure out why it’s glowing with a danger stick, why Mommy would stick something he can’t touch into something he’s supposed to eat—but we blow it out for him and a minute later his face is smeared with icing and Rebecca bemoans the bath she’ll have to give him and how hyper he’ll be right up to the crash.
I had to stop eating her cookies. Rebecca still brings me a couple every time I see her, and I accept them, but give them to a homeless person when I can find one, or I throw them out. I couldn’t go on any more Proustian journeys—those rabbit holes make for a dark dive.
We make plans for me to see him next weekend at my parents’. She’ll bring him over. Then Rebecca and Jackson leave. I can’t stay on this bench for long without a kid, but I don’t want to go. I walk through the Interior back to the subway.
*
• • •
Today is also the first day the D train is running on its own line again. Six months and they’ve finally cleaned up the debris, set right the tracks, gotten the signals working again. It no longer shifts lines at Herald Square, picking up the thread again at Columbus Circle. The detour cost everyone three extra minutes of hassle every trip, and as of today we can find something else to complain about. I take the D up to Morningside Heights, to meet with a Columbia student who wants a goddamn apothecary table. I sit and fume and picture the check in my calloused hands for station after station after station. I don’t even notice when the train stops again where it’s supposed to.
The man sitting across from me on the train holds today’s Post, which shouts the headline BEATS WALKING, with a picture of the mayor outside of Herald Square. The mayor grins, as does the guy holding the paper, staring right at me. “Beats walking,” he jokes a catchphrase, long past frayed. I muster a nod in response. We’re not going to high-five because the trains are doing what they’re supposed to be doing, buddy. There are too many stops left on this trip, and I’d rather spend them with the inevitable subway mariachi band than connect with a stranger.
In the basement of a building on Forty-seventh Street, an antiquated boiler finally broke. It broke by exploding, sending the metal casing shooting through two floors before it lodged in the ceiling of the second floor, an out-of-business Judaica shop. Shrapnel also tore a gas line, and the flooding caused the circuits to spark, setting off another, larger explosion. Both explosions caused debris and flooding on the subway tracks below the building.
The building itself is empty. Every single floor is unrented office space, the landlord waiting out the swoon to hike up rents again.
Meanwhile, every day, the mayor’s office receives assorted threats, both handwritten and typed, and it forwards these to Homeland Security. The mayor, on the morning of July 19, 2010, gets an early briefing not on the building explosion and fire, but on the subway damage, and the Department of Homeland Security can’t say for certain that this isn’t an attack on the transit system. The mayor yells, “Shut it down,” bringing all public transit to an immediate halt.
Because it’s the hottest day of the year, the electrical grid up and down the Eastern Seaboard takes on a catastrophic strain. Brownouts and blackouts cause some cell towers to shut down, generators kick on, but a few million New Yorkers all trying to call at once meant that no one got through. Crews couldn’t get where they needed to go to make repairs because everyone with a car clogged the roads.
All of this gets explained to the mayor before noon, but he keeps the terrorism narrative going all the way through his press conference at six, when he insists that they continue to investigate the cause of the fire and that the MTA, New Jersey Transit, Metro-North, and LIRR service will be restored under heightened security. When the reports start to come out, the Post finds a picture of the mayor making the stupidest face possible and pastes it under the headline CHICKEN LITTLE.
My mother has kept me updated on every development in this saga. As soon as I learned I was wrong as to the cause, I tuned out. I’m rubbing my own nose in my own mess enough these days.
An appliance broke and I walked a marathon. The whole time I wanted it to be bigger than it was, but I wasn’t the only one. It’s the dirtiest of shared secrets. Every death that day was preventable, people who should have stayed put instead kept walking, and seven people died of complications related to heatstroke. But we wanted the four-figure body count, the benefit concert, the flags at half-mast. We wanted to be able to tell the world where we were on July 19. We wanted it to all mean something, because otherwise why did we go to all that damn trouble?
*
• • •
Things took a wrong turn somewhere. I’m well into my thirties and living in my parents’ basement. My mother is mostly angry with me because I’ve made it harder for her to see Jackson now. But she cooks and fusses over me and gets upset when I stay in my studio too late, which I do with increasing frequency. I always shoot a text to Rebecca that I’ll be there in case she needs anything, or in case she wants to bring Jackson by, and then I get my work done quickly and sit for a while, or go up onto the roof and stare out in any direction, though most often with my back to Manhattan, facing where I used to live, hoping to live there again.
My father looks at me with scorn now. He slapped me, actually slapped me, when I told him what I had done. My father has never hit me in my life and he put his palm across my face with intent. Take family out of the equation, take fidelity out, integrity and honesty as well. My father was raised to believe that you never cede what you have. Someone may take it from you, but if you love something, you never give it away. Same goes for people you love. He spends a lot of time in rooms other than where I am, and eagerly awaits the day I move back out.
I’d like to. I want to move out and back in with Rebecca and Jackson. She’s not asking for a divorce yet, so that’s good. The only time we’ve really spoken about it was a month ago, a slight thaw after five months. She said that sometimes she misses me, which reminds her of how angry she is with me. So every positive thought is counterbalanced by a negative one—not the best starting point for reconciliation.
I asked her if she hates me. She thought for a moment and said that no, she doesn’t hate me, but seeing me reminds her of how passionately she is capable of hating herself. She didn’t know that about herself before I taught it to her. That and our son are the two lasting gifts I gave my wife.
I still think about Jenny constantly. It’s like I read nine-tenths of a mystery and then the only copy of the book was stolen from me. How the fuck does it end? The wondering consumes me.
If I’m supposed to hate her, I don’t. I’m not angry at Jenny for having sharp teeth; she’s an animal. I’m angry at myself for spending so much time in her jaws.
She’s gone apeshit online, which isn’t the Jenny I remember. She has a Facebook account where she posts her opinions on the stories of the day. The Jenny I knew was as political as an ear of corn, but now she’s reading The Nation and listening to Democracy Now! and sharing her thoughts on every damn thing.
She posted the other day that she’s pregnant again. I don’t know who she’s sharing this news with. I don’t know any of the people she has listed as friends. Jenny never spoke of them in all of our time together.
But when I’m spinning wood on the lathe, or planing a tabletop, or doing anything where my mind can drift, it’s Paul who occupies my thoughts. It’s Paul Fenniger, who so happily and readily gamboled back into that relationship. Who still calls her his partner after she treated him like a prop. How does he live with himself? He posts pictures of the two of them grinning like children on the Staten Island Ferry. Like nothing happened.
Like the whole year was just lost to a long blink. He’s what keeps me tense, short of breath, awake at night. It’s Paul I fucking hate.
Why does Rebecca not have that capacity to forgive?
They pose, smiling, his hand on her bump. Who took that fucking picture? Who else have they invited into their orbit? What does that person know about me?
Nothing. She’s told that person nothing. And she won’t. I will become another secret, as good as a lie. Until the next one hears a story about how I too was disposable, how everyone but him she could take or leave. Another lie she’ll dress up as a secret.
But I remember. I remember every minute leading up to that day, and every minute leading away, and that day at its center, the rotted core of a faithless heart. I remember in wood, and I remember in steel, and in stone, in those tangible materials with which we rebuild once the smoke has cleared and the debris has been carted away, once everything razed is ready to rise up once more, slithering from the ashes, step by seething step.
Acknowledgments
Thank you, Kate Miciak, mentor and friend.
Thank you, early readers Emily Winslow and Martha Witt. The first drafts of this book were workshopped at the Sackett Street Writers’ Workshop, and Erinn Kindig and Julie Sarkissian’s contributions were invaluable.
Thank you, Ellen Levine, Scott Miller, and Alex Glass, as well as Susanna Porter, Caitlin Alexander, and the team at Lot 2. Your support got this book finished.
Thank you, Allison Hunter and Chris Russell. May every author be so unreasonably lucky.
Thank you to the teams at Stuart Krichevsky Literary Agency and Janklow & Nesbit Associates. Thank you to Brian Tart, Andrea Schulz, Kate Stark, Lindsay Prevette, and everyone else at Viking. Thanks also to Shelly Perron for her excellent copy editor’s eye. If the designer on this book added a signature worth of pages, it wouldn’t be enough to name everyone deserving of recognition.
Thank you to Kaori Miller, Ben Feldman, Stephen Luber, Victoria Horn, and to Kaori Miller a second time. Thank you to Ithacans.
Thank you to Melissa Ford and Wendy Isaac. Thank you to Olivia, Sadie, Gabriel, Penelope, Jonathan, and Josh. Thank you, Cynthia and Todd.
Thank you to Robert Klein and Joan Klein.
Thank you, Morgan Geisert-Klein. That hyphen is what I’m most grateful for in this world.
About the Author
Randall Klein is a writer and a book editor living in Charlottesville, Virginia. Little Disasters is his first novel.
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