Her eyes sink through him. 'Paul, Paul, Paul,' she says.
He isn't dressed to stand in the cold, and his ears sting, hot and numb at once. But he doesn't move. He doesn't want to lose what little he can say he has: this moment now, the memory of the last hour: her words and his, the flickering of her face, the uncontrived delicacy of her hands and the way they use the air. Two months ago she sent him an email. I wanted you to know, it said. She's Claire Brennan again; Claire Metzger has ceased to exist. The explanation was much longer, of course – it bulged with apology, guilt, pity, self-pity, and accusation – and, after he had read through it a second time, more calmly, he then calmly deleted it. He now recalls only its single noteworthy detail. It has been a point of minor obsession, in fact. One by one, the people with whom he shares a name are vanishing.
She is standing in the open door, and her face wears a curious, half-hearted expression. Some words shuffle up to his lips, since it seems to be his responsibility to speak, to release her back to this new life, but before he can do so he hears the words he might have wished for if he had thought there was any hope of hearing them: 'I guess you may as well come up.'
There's a problem with the trains. Paul's usual line isn't running properly between Manhattan and Brooklyn, and, like all city-dwellers, he takes it personally. Tonight the disruption is all the more excruciating because, in the limbo of a station where arrivals and departures are as rare as comets, there is nothing to guard him from his thoughts. Shortly after eleven, Claire asked him to leave. She didn't say why, but then again she didn't explain what inner swerve led her to ask him up in the first place. In the embarrassing aftermath he dressed hastily, aware that his nakedness had suddenly become a stain, a trespass; all told, he couldn't have been in her apartment for more than an hour. Only her bedroom, really, and the lights were out; he didn't even use the bathroom. Paul doesn't feel like a man who got what he wanted, even though, before she upended him with the invitation, he would have said there was nothing in the world he'd rather have.
Midnight has come and gone. He emerges from his stop trailing a group of three people, two men and a woman, whose conversation concerns a bar they want to find. It's a Sunday night, thinks Paul. But their enthusiasm appears unconditional. They are young, and perhaps, like him, have unconventional jobs, no place they belong in the morning. He feels empty, absent, dry, and, as they go in the opposite direction and their chatter shrinks to a papery crackle behind him, he walks toward home, mildly appalled by the idea of other people, of the claims company would make on him. He doesn't want to think. He wants only the privacy of sleep.
One block from the turn onto his street he hears the growl and bark of a new mix of voices, loud ones. Ribbons of laughter snap at the air. It is exceedingly rare to find people on his street at this hour, and he's still too far away to tell how many they are, but the speech has a shrill, excited quality; from a distance joy can sound like terror.
He makes the turn and sees them, stationed away from the ungainly glare of the streetlamp and – inevitably, he thinks – in front of his own building. Two stand, hurling back violent swallows from bottles sheathed in paper bags, and a third man, helpless from the load of alcohol in his body, is already on his knees, his arms chasing wildly around his head. Annoyed in advance at whatever idiocies they will heckle him with as he passes, Paul quickens his pace and sets his face in an uninviting scowl. He straightens his back, as if his posture alone can articulate his unwillingness to engage even in brief, good-hearted banter with these drunks.
He sees the two upright men splash liquor onto their friend. Christ, that's too much. Can they even feel how cold it is? Something is said – to Paul's ears it sounds like Drink soma, whatever that means – and again they all laugh. Though he is more than a block from his door, he digs around for his keys, wanting to get indoors as easily as he can. Not until he's close enough to see their faces does Paul realize that he has misread the scene. The man on his knees isn't laughing; he's silent, his face alert with fear, and he isn't a man at all, just a boy, perhaps sixteen or seventeen. He's maybe Middle Eastern or South Asian. He could be one of the kids Paul saw earlier playing soccer in the street. When again one of the men speaks, following another dousing from the bottle, the words are clear: 'Drink, Osama.'
Paul hesitates only briefly, then starts to walk directly toward them. Without a clue as to how such an episode materialized on his block, he understands that he has to intercede, and imagines that as soon as they realize they aren't alone the two louts will clear out.
He is too late. Before reaching them he watches in horror as the boy is forced to the ground from behind; there's no mistaking the fleshy clap of face and pavement. No one moves to help him up. Then, with two long strides, one of them administers a punishing kick to the ribs. At the sight Paul's hands strangle the fabric inside the pockets of his coat. Nerves scream. They want him to do the sensible thing, the selfish thing – to run away. A vague principle holds cowardice in check. The fear of shame prevails. Men don't run.
Paul has never been in a fight. Something shivers inside him, an alien energy that takes control of his actions, and, without being fully conscious of doing so, he searches himself for a weapon. There are the keys, whose touch and innocent chime seem too ordinary, too domestic. But he has nothing else. His fingers, looking for a sensible way to hold them, play with the keys. He chooses one and closes his hand around it; it nestles between the middle and ring fingers, a good fit. The firmness of the metal calms him somewhat: the key's teeth feel convincing. A startling image surfaces unbidden: throwing a punch and tearing a hole in someone's cheek. Nothing like this has ever occurred to him, yet it is solid and familiar, as if it has always been there, this immediate and unexpected resourcefulness, an idea locked in the genes.
He stops. Ten feet separate him from them. He's been seen.
No one speaks. The men, who are white with hair cut close to the scalp and dress identically in black leather jackets, stand a bit awkwardly, like actors onstage who have forgotten their lines. Yet nothing about them indicates a trace of concern or panic – he isn't a policeman, he hasn't any visible claim to authority. Tattoos of intricate, spidery black grip the base of each man's throat, crawling upward, almost to the hinge of the jawbone. The boy, twisted and limp and tangled around himself like wet cloth, is still in too much pain to rise. Spots of blood pepper the concrete; the violence didn't begin with Paul's arrival. The boy's nose is a mess. Both men wear the surly, dull expressions of the uneducated, and both are considerably younger than Paul – twenty-two, twenty-three. He reminds himself that he is calm.
Sensing that someone has to break the silence, he says, 'I think he's had enough.' Meanwhile he sizes them up. Is it only sport to them, a flare-up of spontaneous drunken aggression, or has Paul stumbled onto something much darker, a premeditated assault, a sick idea of American justice? The boy's race can't be an accident.
'Who the fuck are you?'
This response comes from the shorter of the two, who, though he stands farther from Paul, projects the greater menace. His eyes drift from alcohol, perhaps also from the drugged aftermath of violence, yet they communicate a sharpness, a stability and assurance that suggest he won't be knocked aside just because he's drunk, just because he lacks Paul's advantages in age, education, and status.
'Look. Why don't you just go and leave him with me? I live right here. I'll make sure he gets home. We can all forget this ever happened.'
He has offered an exit, a way to save face, by suggesting that they've proved their point, which feels like a betrayal of principle: it concedes that they have a point, that until now their actions have been perfectly reasonable. It makes him complicit, somehow. Under the close-cut cap of pale hair, almost white in this light, the man's face makes an expression of mild amusement. Paul would have preferred to issue a stronger, a categorical, denunciation, not to surrender to the terror mounting within him. But it is there, terror, and it isn't going away. Nor
are they.
'He's just a kid,' Paul says, directing his words at the presumed leader. He adds, as an afterthought: 'Someone has certainly called the police by now. You're making an awful lot of noise. I could hear you three blocks away.'
They make no response. With each subsequent statement, each new effort to reason with these men, he senses the mounting futility of it; at each word they are more rooted to the spot, more invested in their brutal act. Something in his chest swells, as if his body is suddenly too small to contain what's inside. Sweat stipples the skin of his face even in the cold, and because of the cold it stings; but inside he is hot, and hurricanes of blood churn between his bones and spin out to the ends of his arms.
The nearer man looks back for instruction and at this cue his partner, clearly the author of this event, opens his mouth at first merely to grin, knotting up the skin of his face like a gargoyle's, and then, with a great smoky breath, he laughs. Soon they're both laughing, these two men, whose white faces emerge vividly from the night behind them.
Through the laughter one of them says, 'Man, don't be an idiot – fuck off,' and everything begins to happen very quickly: something surges through Paul like electricity: the key feels hot in his hand, tight between the knuckles. Talk is useless. He throws a punch at the near man, and though it lands on target he didn't set his feet, he's off balance, and the motion feels horribly unnatural, an imitation of something he once saw. It has the desired effect – the man staggers back – but the other is already closing in. He attempts another crooked punch and this time pays the price: his grip on the key loosens. The man's jaw pushes it back into his hand, and the whole key chain falls to the sidewalk with a weak splash.
First the one, and then both, attack him. He doesn't know how many times he's struck, as his consciousness telescopes away from his senses, the hard, dull blows railing his body from front and back and accumulating in a flat, wooden pain that spreads through his side, under his ribs, warm and uneven; his legs buckle, the sky tilts swiftly away from him at a fierce angle, and the sidewalk flies up to receive the back of his skull. Even his mouth registers the impact – a zinc flavor coating his tongue from root to tip, a flavor like the admission of defeat. For an instant his mind closes, everything shutting down, turning to black. He's aware only of the pavement beneath him, the distinct unnatural feeling of lying on a plane of such hard stuff. Above him the men's voices are muffled.
'Who is he?'
'He's a dumb fuck, that's what he is.'
Paul's head clears, and they sense it; they look down. A moment passes in which nothing happens, a slice of possibility: they may be content with just this, Paul lying on the ground and humiliated but without serious injury. He waits. One of the two men – the leader, he's certain of it – comes toward him, and before Paul can trace the path of the boot he feels it in his ribs, a sharp wedge of pain, the impact ringing through stiff limbs. He feels terribly fragile; his fingertips feel hollow. Almost immediately, the man delivers another kick of the same force and trajectory, and with a groan Paul rolls away, onto his other side.
No one's in a hurry to leave; they laugh. The men have settled in once more, adapting to the idea of distributing their violence across two victims instead of just the one. They have ugly faces, with heavy jaws and cheeks blasted red by the weather, full of bleak brutality. Maybe this began as an idle amusement, but it has become a piece of business that must be brought to an end.
They are rolling Paul onto his back, almost coddling him, treating him for the moment like the injured creature he is. This is new to him, the grammar of violence, these small intermissions used to emphasize the cruelty. His bones ache. Do they plan now to kill him? He is defenseless; the muscles in his legs flatten on the ground like wet sand. The chance remains that these men know a boundary. Even in the haze of drink and violence they may still respect the bright line between beating a man and killing him. There's no telling. Then the leader, with the menace legible on his face, lifts his leg and clamps a boot firmly down on Paul's neck.
One good push would do it – crush his windpipe, put an end to everything. The man doesn't give it. Not yet. Paul summons the strength to lift his arms and take hold of the man's ankle, but he can't do much from this position and makes no effort to throw off the leg; the determination isn't there. Instead he merely holds it, like a child clinging with both hands to his mother's arm.
'How's that? Comfortable?'
The man's speech is self-consciously tough: his words are part of the posture he uses to keep his lieutenant in line.
'You cut my friend. Don't you see what you did to him?'
'Didn't you hear him? Terence told you look at my face.'
But he can't: no part of him can move. He hears the metallic rip of a zipper's teeth and then the gentle cackle of urine splashing on pavement. His nose fills with its warm, animal smell.
'Maybe he's sorry now. Are you? Are you sorry for trying to help your terrorist friend?'
He begins to increase the pressure on Paul's neck. Bright, urgent flashes appear at the edges of his vision. He pushes his nails into the man's legs but through thick denim the gesture is meaningless. The pissing stops, and the voices above him grow faint. He gurgles.
Glass shatters near his ear. The other man has dropped his bottle only inches from Paul's face. The crude aroma of malt liquor mixes with the urine and swims into his nose while his hands rattle the ankle like a broken doorknob before falling away to flop pointlessly against the rough asphalt. As he floats closer to darkness, the back of his hand brushes something unexpected, a quick, light prick. Pain has become a single idea – the weight of the boot – and to discover it elsewhere is startling, perverse. His hand turns to examine the object: smooth, cold, and deeply curved in the middle, like a shell. Glass from the broken bottle. Paul scoops it into his fingers and brings his hands back around the man's ankle. This earns another smirk. He slips the glass between the fabric of the pants and the bare leg, inching up the long, inviting bulge of calf and then trowels it under the skin, using his thumb for leverage. He forces it in as far as he can and with all his remaining strength drags down. It sickens him, opening this gash in the man's leg: he doesn't use a sawing motion, as he would for tough meat, and the flexed muscle resists its passage; the irregular edge of the glass stutters through flesh, a dense, grisly tremble between his fingers, but he doesn't stop, even as he feels the opposite edge pierce his own skin, he ignores the pain, continuing to press and pull, even as he feels a warm dribble of blood.
Several things happen at once. The foot lifts from Paul as the man, howling, leaps and then staggers away. His accomplice, panicked and unsure what has happened, takes a few running steps from the scene, as if Paul has unleashed a hidden power. Air explodes into his lungs as he gasps and wrestles it in; a dry retch rises from his stomach. For a moment the leader looks unsure whether to follow his partner. Paul still lies on the ground, but he's proven to be less than ideal prey, capable of biting back. Then, as if suddenly realizing the extent of his injury, the man's face crumples in agony. At first he limps around, and then with a cramped, graceless haste he chases his friend into the darkness.
Paul groans. The pain in his throat begins immediately to diminish, though he still struggles to breathe. He coughs and spits, trying to evacuate the salty taste of blood, and then, as he sits up, a damp ache spreads across his back and shoulders. He places a hand on his ribs where he was kicked – nothing seems broken. Already he realizes what he has escaped. He won't even need to go to the hospital.
The boy is already on his feet. The moment does not have the sense of rushed camaraderie that shared traumas are said to bring about. Rather, the kid has a defensive, angled stance; tension constricts his battered face, a tender unrest upon the smooth features, a murmur in the skin. There's no gratitude in it. In the cold, the blood around his nose has already dried to a black crust, and he seems to be waiting for instruction from Paul. The adult. The samaritan. Paul does not feel any more
certain of the appropriate course of action. It's the boy who fixes the point. He turns and, without a word, runs. In a matter of strides he sheds the punishment his body just endured. Paul hasn't got the energy to call after him and doesn't know what he would say if he did. He wonders what causes the boy to flee now, after the threat has passed, and then sees what might have done it: in his right hand he still holds the large shard of glass, and even in bad light it plainly shows the stains of its recent use.
2
By morning bruises have blossomed across his ribs. They have the sheen and deep color of rotting plums and hurt to the touch. The cuts on his hand weren't deep – scabs already cover them – but there is a long red welt on his throat, above the collar, which hasn't diminished at all. He worries that the man's boot broke something under the skin that will never heal.
It is Monday. Paul has a meeting with a book editor who contacted him about an unspecified project. He would prefer to remain in isolation, and feels an arthritic reluctance to rejoin the outside world. For an hour before leaving he sits in his apartment in a state of mental exhaustion; even to think he must contend with the massive headache which, rising up like an iceberg, greeted him almost at the instant of consciousness and split apart the watery half-dreams that flicker between sleep and waking. Last night's multiple events compete for a claim to his attention. Only hours ago he was pinned to the pavement, as close to death as he has ever come, although there's no way to know if they intended to go through with it – with killing him – or if they had already reached their threshold when his hand found the piece of glass. He was in such pain. Unaccustomed to violence, he perhaps wouldn't have known the difference between pain that kills and pain that doesn't. Regardless, he feels glad, almost proud, to have done it – to have located, in a time of need, this resourceful solution. Paul fondles the secret like a new acquisition, and from it, from this isolated incident framed safely in the past, he receives an unexpected, pleasurable jolt; momentarily he forgets Claire. His thoughts are tinged with a pale madness – he feels wild to have survived such a thing, and his heart boils in a residue of adrenaline. The sensation is like nothing he's ever known; he can sense in it an addictive strength. What raw, extra ordinary violence his hands are capable of. It will be strange to re surface in a world that knows nothing of what happened.
City of Strangers Page 3