The Cloud of Unknowing

by Mimi Lipson

  Of course the first person he saw was Kitty’s friend Lisa, sitting on the curb. Seeing her put him in danger of thinking about Kitty, which, if he wanted to do that he would have picked up a stromboli and stayed home. To make matters worse, Lisa was talking to a beautiful, creamy-skinned girl—Linda? Leena? Lola?—one of those witchypoo girls he always saw around West Philly barefoot, in velvet elf dresses, smelling like hippie candles. He didn’t want to risk making eye contact with either of them, so he ducked into the vacant lot next to the liquor store.

  Isaac sat down on a truck tire and straightened out his legs. His knees ached from squatting with the edging sander. He drank his forty as fast as he could, in gulps that outpaced the garbagey taste of the malt liquor, and waited for full darkness. While he waited, he thought about the Aerostar. It had AC. Also plush velour seats and power windows. He’d seen it parked at the gas station on Baltimore Ave with a for-sale sign in the back window and talked to the mechanic who was selling it. He was pretty sure he could get it for less than the nine hundred the guy was asking. He let himself imagine loading tools in the back: his own sander and edger, a chop saw and a top-nailer, a good compressor. Sam, his boss, had a full-size van. The way Isaac figured, a minivan was the ideal work truck: comfortable, civilized, easy on the gas. Take out the bench seats and you could fit a sheet of plywood in the back. Best of all, minivans were despised by your average goon and therefore stealth. He’d been telling people about minivans forever. No one listened to him. After a while he heard the first band start up inside. He stopped off for another forty and crossed the street. Lisa and the witchypoo girl were gone, thank God.

  The Snakehouse was actually a compound of two connected buildings. To get to the warehouse where the bands played, you passed through a storefront gallery. People were lined up against the back wall, faces in shadow, sweat-glazed arms and legs lit in flashes by the streetlight coming through the big front windows. An industrial floor fan moved the air around. Isaac forked over his dollars and got his hand stamped and plunged into the sweltering cave next door.

  The warehouse was still nearly empty—just a few guys holding paper bags, standing around at the far end of the room. On the low plywood stage, a skinny kid lunged in tight circles, croaking satanically into a mic he held in a white-knuckle grip. The sound coming out of him seemed to have nothing to do with his body. He reminded Isaac of a ventriloquist’s dummy. Again and again, he narrowly avoided colliding with a contrastingly large and immobile kid grinding away at a guitar that hung almost to his knees. His face was hidden behind a curtain of hair. These guys were okay. The logo on the kick drum was amateurish: the letters “G.F.A,” snared in a spider web. Isaac could definitely help them out there.

  The back door was propped open, and when Isaac’s eyes adjusted he saw a silhouette in the doorway and recognized the cones of Bozo the Clown hair. It was Greg—Craig? Shit, he was terrible with names. A Snakehouse regular. He and whoever he was talking to were huddling in a furtive way that set off Isaac’s drug radar.

  “Hey, Greg!” He yelled to be heard over the satanic croaking as he approached the drug huddle. “Gimme some of that! What is it?”

  Greg and his friend exchanged a look and Greg leaned in close to Isaac’s ear. “NNDM,” he yelled.

  “What?”

  “MNDN.”

  “What is it?”

  “NNDN.”

  “Whatever. Gimme it.”

  The three went back out to Lancaster Ave and around the corner to Greg’s friend’s car. The guy started explaining about the MNMN. He said it was a compound he and his partner had just invented. They were Penn students or chemists or something. It was cool, actually, what he was saying. If you came up with a new molecule that the government didn’t know about, it wasn’t technically illegal.

  “What do you do, snort it?”

  A few minutes later, Isaac was back in the cave watching the first band break down their equipment. He didn’t feel much of anything. Maybe a little jittery. It had, if possible, gotten hotter in the warehouse, so he stepped out the back door to wait it out between sets. Behind the buildings that made up the Snakehouse, the storefront gallery and the warehouse, were the ruins of another warehouse. Gutted by fire and exposed to the elements, it had grown over with city flora. It was like a courtyard. Isaac leaned against the remnants of a brick wall and breathed in the sour perfume of the ghetto palms. Kitty called them “trees of heaven.”

  This was his favorite part of the Snakehouse complex. If he could get over his shyness and penetrate the scene, he’d transform this place. He would make thrones out of the rubble, and an amphitheater of scary organic shapes like Gaudí. He would paint the back wall white and project movies, and he would be the king of it out here. He wondered if Lisa had seen him, or if she’d said anything about him to the other Snakehouse people. He thought now that she had seen him. He was sure she’d looked at him without looking at him.

  Maybe he hadn’t done enough of that MMMM. He took out the bindle and snorted half of what was left. There was a warm, spreading sensation, like right after you piss your pants, but he felt it all over his body. It was interesting, but it only lasted for a minute, so he snorted the rest and sank into the deep shadow of the warehouse.

  A slow, kicking beat pulled him back to the surface, and then a single bass note in the key of dirge. And then a guitar riff that traveled like a slow, sludgy current on wire, twisting into the shapes of letters. HDR? FDR? D.R.I., G.F.A., MMND, MDM. He followed the sound back into the cave, which was filled now with smoke and fleshy flesh and sulphurous light. It was hotter than ever. He felt a splash on his neck. Looking up, he became transfixed by the condensation pooling on the pipe above him until, suddenly and irrevocably, it occurred to him that he might have puked all over himself. He tried to get closer to the light coming from the stage so he could see if it was true. He searched for an opening in the wall of meat, then gave up and fought his way back in the other direction and through the door to the gallery, gulping for air as he burst out onto Lancaster Ave, but finding only warm gel. There was no puke on him.

  He went back across the street to the vacant lot and sat on his truck tire and stared at the throbbing halo around the streetlight. The climate on Lancaster Ave had achieved a reptilian kind of homeostasis with the climate in his skull. After a while, he realized that the music had stopped. He got up, too quickly, and his stomach heaved. A flume of malt liquor splattered the weeds and the tire and the brick wall. He stood for a while, bent over, feeling suddenly clammy, and when he looked up, the halo around the streetlight had disappeared. Whatever that shit was that he’d snorted, it seemed to be out of his system. What a rip-off. He decided to get another forty and walk home.

  A bum stood in front of the liquor store. Hot as it was, he was wearing a colorless windbreaker, zipped all the way up to his chin. He looked familiar. Something about the way he was hopping from foot to foot. His thin ankles poked out of orthopedic-looking shoes.

  Of course, it was Eddie. Isaac hadn’t recognized him at first, because he knew him from the deli on Chester, near his house. Eddie was like part of the street furniture, as fixed to his spot as a mailbox or a streetlight. Once, he’d shown Eddie his sketchbook, and ever since, the guy acted like he was in love with him or something.

  “Hello, Picasso!” Eddie’s face opened up into a gummy smile when he saw Isaac.

  It occurred to Isaac that he’d been followed. “What are you doing here, Eddie?” he said.

  “What am I doing here? This my old stomping grounds. What are you doing here, blessed boy?”

  “Right now I’m going to buy myself some beer.” Eddie kept on moistly beaming at him. “Aw hell, you want a forty? My treat, buddy. I just got paid.”

  “You don’t have to give me nothing. I ain’t ask you for nothing,” said Eddie.

  “I know,” said Isaac, “I want to.”

  He went inside and asked for two Olde Englishes.

  “You gotta take it
someplace else though,” said the cashier.

  Isaac reached in his front pocket. Instead of the roll of twenties, he pulled out a wad of Kleenex.

  “Fuck.”

  He tried his other pockets, and then his wallet. No, his roll was gone. “Forget it,” he said. He walked out, past Eddie, and west on Lancaster.

  “Hey! Picasso!” Eddie called after him.

  “Sorry, Eddie,” Isaac yelled without turning around.

  Six fucking days on his knees, scraping and edging and sucking in polyurethane fumes. Apparently he’d done all that for free, like the fucking slave that he was. His stomach heaved again, but there was nothing in it. Yuppie bitch telling Sam to “make sure those guys don’t go in my kitchen.” Drinking out of the fucking hose like a dog. With what he’d had in his pocket he could have paid for the Aerostar.

  Six days. Fuck. He thought of the Penn guy, the chemist. Maybe he’d dropped his roll in the car. Then he thought about the other guy, his roommate’s friend, lying on the couch in front of the TV when he came home and got in the shower. Of course. That piece of shit went through his pockets. Isaac was sure of it.

  He turned on 42nd Street, across Walnut and into the green canopy of the old maples. The air was still heavy, but the insects had gone quiet. When he stopped to listen for them, he heard footsteps and spun around. Eddie was following him, half a block behind.

  “I’m sorry, Eddie. I lost my money.”

  “I told you I ain’t ask for nothing. I’m headed home just like you are.”

  “Okay.” He waited while Eddie caught up and they walked together silently.

  “I lost my whole paycheck,” Isaac said after a bit. “In cash. A roll of twenties.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, it blows. I know who took it, too.”

  “You gonna get it back?”

  “I don’t know. Probably not. I don’t want to talk about it. So, that’s your old stomping grounds? Over there by Lancaster Ave?”

  “Ludlow. 37th and Ludlow.”

  “Isn’t that all Penn buildings? I never noticed any houses over there.”

  “It used to be nothing but houses over there, before they plowed it all under. Yeah, that’s where I grew up, 37th and Ludlow.”

  “No shit? Your house got knocked down?”

  “Not just my house,” Eddie said, hopping a little. “We had a— a—” He waggled his hands. “Over on 34th and Walnut we had a movie theater, stores, everything you might need right there in the neighborhood. A drug store. I used to run deliveries after school, take my money and go to the movies.”

  “I never heard about that.”

  “I expect you haven’t,” he said. “I am not one bit surprised. I call that place Atlantis now. Atlantis, you know? But the real name we called it was Black Bottom.”

  Kitty would have wanted to know about that, thought Isaac a little sadly. It was the kind of thing they’d talked about: secret history.

  “Penn tore it down so they could build all those labs and shit?”

  “Well, that’s one thing. The other thing is, they ain’t want us in a so-called slum. So now everybody living in a worse slum somewhere else, if they living anywhere at all.

  “Wait, did Penn tear it down or the city?”

  “You tell me the difference.”

  Isaac wasn’t sure what that meant, but it sounded right. “How old are you, Eddie?” he asked.

  Eddie stopped for a moment, and Isaac waited while he thought about it. “I’m forty-two years old. Forty-two, or forty-one or forty-three. One of them.”

  When they got to his house, Isaac said good night to Eddie and let himself in.

  Eddie crossed Chester Street and looked up to the attic window, where the blessed boy stayed. A light went on. Pearls before swine, Eddie thought. When the light went out again he turned to leave and noticed something under the tire of a car. He squatted down to look. Yes, there it was. A roll of twenty-dollar bills.

  The Minivan

  I met Isaac when he was doing some work at my house. I think he asked me out because he admired my fiberglass spaghetti lamp. He was foxy, punk rock, bratty in his banana curls and calculator watch. Mostly, he was hilarious. On our first date, at a bar in South Philly, he told me all about his plan to poison the crackheads in his neighborhood by scattering cyanidefilled vials on the sidewalk, and about shooting pigeons by the bucketful in a warehouse he’d once lived in. He had me in stitches with his megalomaniacal fantasies of turning a certain abandoned factory into a fortress of solitude, where he would build his own personal road-warrior batmobile. We sat at the padded vinyl bar and hoisted mug after mug of lager, thrilled to have found one another. Outside, we groped behind a dumpster. We groped in a dumpster. Of course, this was before I knew he wasn’t kidding about any of it.

  One morning a few weeks into our affair, we sat on his sofa and looked at his photo album. Here was baby Isaac, standing unsteadily in a hallway, gripping a bench for support. Here was Isaac as a slack-lipped high school metalhead, eyes stoned and affectless beneath a frizzy mullet. Here he was perched high up on a roof truss in the warehouse, aiming a BB gun at the camera. Next to him was his old dog, Death Isaac, since lost in an acrimonious break-up. There were random snapshots of things he liked: a brutalist municipal building, an ornate Victorian window grate, a boat in a weed-choked lot behind a cyclone fence, christened “The A-HOLE” in stick-on mailbox letters. We flipped through pages and pages of photos of floors he’d installed or refinished over the years. Isaac described each one: red pine, tongue-and-groove oak, maple parquet. Occasionally there was someone in the background or off to one side holding a shop vac or a bucket, but Isaac didn’t identify them as he leafed through the album with me.

  He stopped at a picture of a skinny blonde girl in the passenger seat of a van. I thought he was going to tell me about an ex-girlfriend; maybe the one who’d kept Death Isaac. Instead, he began waxing nostalgic about the van she was sitting in. It was an Aerostar, he said, with plush velour seats and AC and power everything, and it was the nicest car he’d ever had. This launched a disquisition on the subject of minivans, which he said were perfect work vehicles. A minivan got better gas mileage than a pickup truck or a full-sized van, but you could still fit a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood in the back. And then you could sit up front in a nice civilized captain’s chair, with a cup-holder and everything. He liked his creature comforts. He told me he had drawn plans for a prototype of a modern minivan when he was ten years old, and he therefore felt that it was, in a certain way, his invention.

  But Isaac had no minivan now, and indeed no driver’s license. An epileptic, he had crashed his Aerostar into the side of a church during a grand mal seizure. The Aerostar was totaled and he was taken to the emergency room, where the doctor who treated him put a medical suspension on his driver’s license. He couldn’t get his license restored until he could prove he hadn’t had a seizure for six months. This would require appointments with neurologists. Also blood tests, various costly scans and imagings, and who knew what else. Furthermore, he wasn’t remotely seizure-free. He had hangover seizures, stress-related seizures, strobe light/trance music/op art seizures. He had just-for-the-hell-of-it seizures. “Everyone should have a seizure,” he told me. “It’s intense.” He hadn’t seen a neurologist since they sprang him from the hospital. He couldn’t. He had no health insurance. And rather than apply for Medicaid, he’d done what came naturally: he had slid effortlessly, numbly, fatalistically off the grid.

  Somehow, he was maintaining a floor-sanding business on his bicycle. A floor sander, in case you’ve never seen one, is a huge, unwieldy thing made out of cast metal. Isaac’s weighed probably two hundred pounds. Then there was the buffer, the edger, milk crates full of sandpaper, five gallon buckets of polyurethane—all this had to be transported to and from the job. Astonishingly, he was able to get the housewives who engaged his services to shuttle him and all his equipment and supplies in their SUVs and drive him to Home Depo
t and Diamond Tool and Bell Flooring, often making several trips a day due to his chronic disorganization. He wasn’t apologetic or even particularly nice about it—he was basically a petulant, sarcastic teenager about it—and yet these housewives loved him with all the exasperation and indulgence that their inner soccer moms possessed. I saw it with my own eyes. They clucked disapprovingly at his diatribes against recycling and in favor of apocalyptic forms of population control, but still they made him nice lunches and sewed buttons on his shirts and paid him in cash because he didn’t have a bank account.

  His inscrutable charm worked on me, too. The clichés pile up as I try to explain: He made me laugh. I could be myself around him. I’d never met anyone like him, gimlet-eyed and crazy in equal measure. Ultimately, what really got to me was that he was so guileless. He concealed none of his emotions, positive or negative; everything he felt seemed to register on the surface of his skin. Within a month he had moved into my house.

  Summer came. Isaac and I rode our bikes all over town, and he took me to his favorite spots in his old neighborhood. He showed me buildings he’d pillaged or planned to pillage for glass wall sconces, doorknobs, and other treasures. At a decommissioned bank under the Frankford El he had me look through a hole in the plywood at a grand chandelier hanging from the vaulted ceiling. In the vacant lots around his old house, junkies had arranged sofas and chairs, milk crates, and industrial spools into cozy conversation pits.

  At some point in our travels we came across a mid-’80s Dodge Caravan, sun-dulled and putty-colored, beached on a Fishtown sidewalk in the shade of an ailanthus tree. It had a for-sale sign in the back window. “I’m gonna buy that minivan,” he said, and he wrote the phone number down in his sketchbook. I probably laughed, if I reacted at all.

  I forgot all about it. Then one afternoon I came home and found Isaac sitting on our stoop, shit-faced drunk. Having nowhere to be that day, he’d polished off a bottle of vodka he found in the freezer and then called the phone number in his sketchbook. “If you can get it to South Philly, I’ll give you four hundred dollars cash for it,” he’d told the no-doubt delighted owner of the Caravan. A few minutes after I got home, the minivan pulled up to the curb in a cloud of white smoke and rattled to a stop. I took a look and went back in the house.