by Matt Burgess
Vladimir’s face goes blank. His pink lips don’t twist or curl or bend; his mouth is a dumb slot set into the bottom of his face. His eyes move from left to right, scan his interrogators: one black guy; another black guy, heavier and shorter than the first; and a Hispanic, the one who’s talking, and the shortest of the three. Vladimir’s eyes move without fear or excitement or confusion, as if he were a third grader reading a quadratic equation. As if he were staring at a pile of bricks. He blinks often.
“You speak English?” Alfredo whispers.
“Jesus Christ,” Curtis says.
“Ecstasy,” Alfredo says. For Vladimir’s benefit, Alfredo pantomimes dropping a little round pill onto the tip of his tongue. He makes his eyes go wide, smiles with all his teeth. “You eat them and dance to techno? Start feeling fantastic? No? Doesn’t ring a bell?”
Curtis punches Vladimir in the chest. He falls backward into the chain-link fence. The metal squeaks and strains as the fence flexes to keep Vladimir upright. His mouth hangs open. The air has jumped from his body.
“Those are Air Jordans?” Alfredo says, pointing to Vladimir’s shoes. “I haven’t seen those in a while. What year are they?”
Vladimir rubs his chest, chews on the air around him. Winston, Alfredo, and Curtis are circled around him, and around that circle a larger one has formed: the onlookers, the Catholic schoolboys with leather bookbags slung over their shoulders. These kids watch in profile, their bodies half turned in case they suddenly need to run for their lives.
Curtis drags his tongue across his upper row of teeth. He leans in close to Vladimir and breathes softly onto his face. “Run your shit,” he says.
Vladimir moves as if submerged in honey. From his pocket he takes out a money clip—a thin wad of tens tucked into the fold—and hands it to Curtis. Vladimir reaches back in, roots around, and pulls the pocket inside out. A white tongue outside his pants, the tip flecked with fuzz. That’s all he’s got: a money clip and some lint.
“This jersey expensive?” Alfredo says. He pinches the fabric between his fingers. “You get it off eBay? How much those Air Jordans cost?”
“Take off your shoes,” Curtis says.
To untie his sneakers, Vladimir crouches down into a catcher’s stance. Blond hairs uncurl from the bottom of his hat. The back of his neck needs a shave, Alfredo thinks. He grabs the kid’s shirt and eases him back up. Poor Vladimir. It’s his first ball, and he doesn’t know whom to listen to, when to sit down and when to stand up.
“I’ll get my own sneakers,” Alfredo whispers. “But the Ecstasy. Can you please give one of these black guys your Ecstasy?”
Vladimir turns his other pocket inside out. A set of house keys—attached to a dirt-smudged rabbit’s foot—falls to the ground. Toppling out after them is a silver-and-black cell phone, and some loose change, too. The coins jangle as they hit the sidewalk. Vladimir looks down at the ground. He smells faintly and sweetly metallic, like a can of soda opened and left out overnight. His hands are steady, but his eyes have gone moist.
“Oh jeez,” Winston says.
Curtis throws a left hook, punches Vladimir in the ribs. There’s a dull phttht, the sound of a bowling ball getting dropped in the sand. Vladimir falls to his knees. Hunched over, his forehead kissing the sidewalk, he holds the side of his rib cage with one hand, and with the other hand he slaps at the pavement beneath him.
“Come on,” Winston says. “Maybe we should go.” In a circular, unconscious movement, he rubs his chest, inadvertently wiping chicken grease all over his shirt. “Maybe we should just get out of here.”
“Shut up,” Curtis says. He sticks his hands in Vladimir’s back pockets. He looks in his hat, and, finding nothing, tosses it into the street. He bends over and crooks a finger into Vladimir’s socks, feeling around the kid’s ankles and heels. The futility of the search, not to mention its intimacy, its skin-on-skin contact, seems to embarrass Curtis. As he straightens up, he gives Vladimir’s shoulder a shove. “Take off your pants,” Curtis says. “And squat.”
“Come on,” Alfredo says. “It’s not up his ass.”
Curtis smiles. “See? I’m so incredibly stupid. I don’t know these things. Tell me, Alfredo. Please. Where’s the E at?”
They look around. While nobody was paying attention, the high school rubberneckers have vanished. Those kids have money, they’ve got parents who can spend six thousand a year on tuition, but they are still an urban crowd—they knew how long they could watch and they knew when to slink away. Only a matter of time before the skinny black kid with the all-bone fists turned his interrogation toward them, and so they took off. Maybe to go get the wheezing Vladimir some help.
“Hey, Winston,” Curtis says, still smiling. “Where’s this E at?”
Alfredo considers putting his glasses back on, but it doesn’t seem necessary. He squints and sees nothing. This long stretch of sidewalk is wide open, without sharp corners or alleyways. And because it’s outside a school, in front of a tow-away zone, there aren’t any parked cars nearby. No tires or front bumpers where a supply of X might be stashed. If Vladimir doesn’t have the drugs on him, then he doesn’t have any drugs at all. Alfredo rubs his overstrained eyes.
“I think we should get out of here,” Winston says.
Again, inside Alfredo’s pocket, his phone begins to hum. “What time is it?” he asks no one in particular, and perhaps accordingly, no one answers him. It’s gotta be pretty close to four, he thinks. He could check his phone for the time, find out for sure, but he doesn’t want to see his home number flashing and chastising, Isabel on the other end of the line, her knuckles turning white. Incoming … a frying pan to the head. He reaches for Vladimir’s waist and unclips the kid’s pager. Vladimir recoils, collapses his body inward.
“Don’t worry,” Alfredo says. “Hey, listen. Tilt your head back. Breathe in through your nose.” Alfredo holds the pager up to his eyes. He puts his glasses back on, checks again, and sees that the pager is off, the LCD screen dim, blank save for the ghost outline of digital eights.
“What time is it?” Winston says.
“Three twenty-seven,” Alfredo says. Vladimir begins to push himself up off the sidewalk. He opens his mouth, and Alfredo kicks him right in the neck.
The last time Alfredo’s tias visited from Puerto Rico, they reached in for a cheek pinch and then stopped. Straightening their backs, they eyed his mustache with suspicion. It can’t be, they said. This is Alfredito? The third grader who used to memorize license plates? He had changed beyond recognition. Sometimes he can’t even recognize himself. There are old family photographs in shoeboxes, in albums, in frames on the walls of the Batista house, and when he sees the kid in these photographs—the little boy with the bow tie, standing with his nursery-school classmates; the little boy who’s got his arm around his brother’s shoulders at Coney Island; the little boy holding a stuffed duck or a baseball, or sitting on the kitchen table eating cake with his hands—when he sees this kid in unremembered clothes in unremembered rooms, playing with unremembered train sets, he can’t quite believe that the picture person is him, one and the same, Alfredo Batista.
It awes him to see Vladimir gag. On all fours, red-faced, Vladimir crawls on the sidewalk, away from Alfredo. He doesn’t get far.
Curtis hooks his hands under Vladimir’s armpits. He yanks him up, braces him against the chain-link fence. Vladimir’s eyes are open and white. His feet pad at the ground as if slipping on ice. Close to his face, Curtis pants with an almost sexual excitement. He’s been taken off his leash. He snaps his hips, deals from the shoulder, and hits Vladimir in the mouth. Vladimir’s head smacks the fence. Perhaps because of that head-on-metal clang, no one hears the soft tear of his lower lip. His eyes are closed. A tooth—a lower canine, yellow rimmed—punctures the lip and pops clean through to the outside of his face. Around that tip-filled hole, blood swells, drips down his smooth white chin.
Winston walks away. Alfredo, seeing his friend leave, gives pu
rsuit.
“Hey,” Curtis says. “Where you guys going?”
“Keep the money clip,” Alfredo says without turning around. “It’s all yours.”
“But hey. Hold on. Are we still doing that thing tomorrow?” He’s a little boy whose pals have just gone home for supper and taken their ball with them. “We’re still doing that dogfight, yeah?”
Alfredo doesn’t answer. Winston, elbows out, is hustling down the block, and Alfredo needs to jog to keep pace. “Hold up,” he says. His boots aren’t made for running; they pound preexisting blisters. “Slow down, wouldya?”
“I gotta go home.” Winston, like Alfredo before him, does not turn around to answer. He rounds the corner, putting Curtis and the boy out of sight.
“Winston.”
“I’ve gotta go home, okay?”
Alfredo grabs him by the elbow and turns him around. “Would you just hold on, please?”
Winston won’t look at him. Half his forehead is streaked with sweat; the other half, dry. A preexisting condition. When hot or anxious, the right side of his face perspires; when eating samosas or Sammy’s halal or KFC spicy chicken or pizza slices overflaked with red pepper, the left side beads up. Alfredo blames the drug abuse. The pot, the coke, the E, the everything else—somewhere along the way a switch got flipped, Winston’s glands derailed.
“Please,” Alfredo says. He pulls Winston by the elbow, steers him toward the pay phone on Seventy-second Street. They have a history with this particular phone. When Alfredo and Winston were ten years old they used it to make prank calls; at eleven they tagged the side of it with a black Magic Marker, “Yap” for Alfredo, “Sagat” for Winston; at thirteen, and working off the instructions of Jose Batista, Sr., they cottonballed the phone and others in the neighborhood; and now, at nineteen years old, Alfredo picks up the receiver and dials 911. When asked what his emergency is, Alfredo looks at Winston and tells the operator a little kid has been hurt, knocked out on Seventy-first Street, between Thirty-first and Thirty-second avenues. He’s surprised by the evenness of his own voice. He didn’t expect to be so calm, to ask for an ambulance in the same easy tone he’d use to order a gypsy cab or a pepperoni pizza. The operator asks for Alfredo’s name, and he answers by hanging up. He sticks his finger in the coin return slot, just to make sure.
“All those kids saw us,” Winston says. “They saw our faces.”
A red and yellow bodega squats at the end of the block. Signs advertise the store’s wares, but for whatever reason the plurals have been lopped off. The bodega promises its customers cigarette, magazine, sandwich, bus ticket to Atlantic City. Alfredo points his chin at the place. He tells Winston, “Come in here with me. I want to show you something.”
Bells clatter as Winston and Alfredo push through the door. Behind the cash register, the Pakistani proprietor jabbers Urdu into his headset, talking to some long-distance relative in Islamabad or Peshawar or someplace Alfredo’s never heard of. The man smiles at them as they walk past his counter. They pass the coconut ices, the ramen noodles, the mousetraps and ant traps, the single rolls of toilet paper, the dusty packages of Indian rice, and they keep going till they reach the back of the bodega, where giant refrigerators rise up out of the ground. Behind the frosted-glass doors sit six-packs of Budweiser and forties of malt liquor, each can and bottle individually priced.
“We’re gonna get drunk?” Winston says.
Alfredo reaches into his pocket and pulls out Vladimir’s pager. With his thumbs, he pushes the top off the plastic case. He slides it carefully along its grooves. Inside the pager, where one might expect wires or microchips or triple-A batteries, are little round pills of Ecstasy. Neatly stacked in three rows of—the numbers burst in Alfredo’s head—nineteen pills each, minus five that Vladimir must have already sold that afternoon. Fifty-two pills in a hollowed-out pager.
“Abracadabra.”
Winston looks at the pills. “I told you,” he says, but there’s no swagger in his voice.
“How tough was that kid?” Alfredo says. “Took a beating and wouldn’t give it up. Know what I mean? I tell ya, I’d like that kid to work for me.”
“You don’t pay enough.”
I don’t make enough, Alfredo thinks. But right now, in his hand, he holds fifty-two pills, with a street value of $25 apiece. Talking about—Alfredo’s math is immediate—$1,300. That’s Christian Louis money. That’s money that could help pay for cribs, cradles, high chairs, humidifiers, mobiles, titanium strollers, diapers, plush giraffes, breast pumps for Mama, clothes the baby will grow out of, and the endless parade of pediatrician visits. Of course $1,300 can’t cover all that. All by itself a crib with a waterproof mattress can cost close to a G. But $1,300 would help. At the very least it could buy more drugs, which could be converted into more cash for more drugs for more cash for more drugs and on and on and on. But this package ain’t for me, Alfredo reminds himself. It ain’t mine, it ain’t mine.
Winston licks the tip of his finger and plucks out a pill. Instead of swallowing it whole, he chews on it, so the MDMA can zip into his bloodstream.
“You gonna give my brother twenty-five bucks for that?” Alfredo asks.
“Take it out of what you owe me,” Winston says.
Again, Alfredo’s phone hums, and he feels the tug of its telecommunicative leash. Time to go. He fits the cap back onto the E-beeper and slides it into his pocket. It’s got to be close to four o’clock, if not later, and Alfredo is nine blocks from home. He and Winston make moves toward the front of the bodega. The Pakistani behind the counter cups his hand over his headset’s mouthpiece. He wants to know if he can help them find anything they need. Oh sure. Alfredo needs a time machine, stronger lungs, a pit bull, a healthy baby, a Lotto ticket for his father, a more mentally balanced brother. Actually what Alfredo really needs right now is one of them Ecstasy pills. After watching Curtis punch a hole in Vladimir’s mouth, Alfredo would love to swing open a neurological floodgate and get a brainful of serotonin howling through his body. He could take just one pill, he tells himself, and give Tariq the remaining fifty, a nice round number. Outside the bodega, the sun is shining.
“I don’t hear any ambulance sirens,” Winston says. “Where’s the whoop-whoop?”
Alfredo decides to keep the E in his pocket. He doesn’t need the guilt. He doesn’t need another file for the cabinet: Ecstasy, June 14, 2002, afternoon, another drug I shouldn’t have taken. Besides, Alfredo has a long day ahead of him. He can’t show up at the hospital with his pupils all dilated, his teeth grinding. Isabel would be pissed. Or worse—she’d be disappointed in him.
2
The Incredible Floating Fetus
The denizens of the clumsily named Elmhurst Hospital Emergency Room Waiting Room—the wounded, the pregnant, the hypochondriacs, the sneezers and coughers and terminally ill, the insured and uninsured, the kids who need stitches, the careless bagel cutters who gashed open their hands—they all sit on the edges of their chairs, their ears cocked toward the nurses’ station, waiting for their names to be called. Not Isabel Guerrero. Alone among these waiting room waiters, Isabel is happy to wait. Happy to lean back in her shit-brown metal folding chair and put down roots.
On the inside of her eyelids, Christian Louis floats. He’s in a diaper. He’s got a wine-splashed birthmark on his cheek. In a voice that’s somewhere between a baby’s and a man’s, he tells Isabel he has spina bifida. Where does he learn such words! Yesterday he told her, smiling, that he had Down syndrome. The day before, cystic fibrosis. There are hundreds of birth defects, diseases where the nervous system shuts down and kidneys collapse, where babies get hooked up to machines and never come off—and with her unborn child whispering these diseases in her ear, Isabel is shook. She believes Christian Louis. She knows Jose’s—sorry, Tariq’s—return is a bad omen, a black crow on the health of her child. Leave this waiting room? No thanks. Isabel stays right where she’s at, undiagnosed.
Not that she’s comfortable or anythin
g. I’m sweating like a pig, she thinks—and she doesn’t even know if pigs sweat. Babe? That animated oinker in Charlotte’s Web? They seemed pretty dry. She thinks of the pigs she’s seen in real life, like the ones over at the churrascaria on Northern Boulevard, but they were all dead. So, okay, she has no idea if pigs sweat or not, but goddamn, she’s sweating, that’s for sure. And it’s not even hot outside. And they didn’t even walk here. Alfredo had said his feet hurt, and Isabel took a step back and spread out her arms. Twenty-nine weeks pregnant. One hundred and sixty-two pounds. With breasts that were already big but have gotten bigger, more tender, sensitive it seems to changes in weather, and hanging off her like sacks of potatoes. Isabel said, “Your feet hurt? You gotta be kidding.” He wasn’t. He insisted they take the Q32. From that air-conditioned bus to this air-conditioned waiting room, Isabel hasn’t even had a chance to work up a sweat. And yet … she sweats. Like (maybe) a pig. She pretends to scratch the back of her neck and gives her armpit a covert sniff. Nothing horrible. Fabric softener, salt, a little something earthy. On the inside of her eyelids, Christian Louis drifts by, doing the backstroke. He says, Hey Mama. Maybe this anxiety you’re feeling has less to do with my potential spina bifida and more to do with … oh I don’t know … Uncle Tariq? Let’s talk about that!
Isabel says, Nah. Let’s talk about how hot I am. She wishes she were the kind of woman who could just peel off her sweaty shirt and stuff it in a garbage can. Imagine? Not giving a shit like that? That’s a Sigourney Weaver in Aliens move. That’s some Thelma and Louise action. Imagine Alfredo coming back—from the bathroom, the parking lot, the water fountain, the operating room, from wherever the fuck he’s at—and finding you here, in the front row of the waiting room, wearing only your sneakers, your sweatpants (elastic waistbands!), your bra, and that’s it, nothing else, just your big tata pregnant breastesses swinging in this AC-generated breeze.