by Matt Burgess
She dipped her nose to the wool and gave it a whiff. “You don’t smell alike,” she said. “You and your brother.”
“No?”
“No. You’re a little bit funkier.” She slipped the cap over her head. It fit so snugly that she seemed to have a little difficulty tucking her ears under the wool. She smiled. As if she were at the supermarket, in the produce section, prodding a melon, she brought her mittened hands to his temples and gave him a squeeze. “You’ve got a really small head,” she told him.
“Thank you.”
“Sorry,” she said, still smiling, looking not sorry at all.
She walked away from him, toward home, through the sidewalk’s thin blanket of snow. She stepped in the footprints she’d made coming here, as if she were playing a game, or as if she wanted to leave behind as little evidence of herself as possible. When she got to the end of the block, she turned around and waved, and Alfredo’s hand—without his permission, acting on its own—went up in the air and waved back.
The following night temperatures had dropped even further, and once again—procedure be damned—Winston refused to sit by himself in the Alleyway. If he was going to freeze to death, he at least wanted some company, someone he could talk to through their respective blocks of ice. And so he and Alfredo were together, in the exact same spot (outside the bodega), doing the exact same thing (selling drugs to nonexistent customers), when Isabel came around the corner again.
Under his breath, Winston said, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.” And then he disappeared. The bastard. Alfredo tried to grab him—come on!—but Winston wiggled away, hid himself inside the candy store. Abandoned, Alfredo watched Isabel approach.
From a distance of three or four feet, she tossed him his hat, which he fumbled, too eager as always. When he stooped to pick it up, he saw that the cap looked cleaner, brighter, as if the time spent on Isabel’s head had been restorative, a much-needed vacation.
As she had done the previous night, he brought the hat to his nose and gave it a whiff. “You washed it,” he said.
“I just smell like that, actually.”
“Really?”
“Nah, I washed it.” Like Alfredo, she seemed to have a tendency to laugh at her own jokes. “Thanks for letting me borrow it,” she said. “It was really nice of you. Really nice.”
“Well, when I offered it to you I didn’t think you were actually going to take it.”
Instead of laughing like she was supposed to—it wasn’t her joke, after all—she asked Alfredo if he liked dioramas, and Alfredo responded, naturally, by asking, “Dioramas?”
“I’m going to the Museum of Natural History tomorrow,” she said. “In Manhattan? They’ve got these huge dioramas with antelopes and cavemen. Stuff like that. They got dinosaurs, too. The bones. I don’t know. I thought if you like that kind of thing, you’d maybe wanna come with me.”
“You have a boyfriend,” he said.
“I’m not asking you out on a date, you dick.” She pulled the hat out of his hands and put it on her head. “Don’t you have any like female friends?”
“No.”
He didn’t really understand why she’d want to hang out with him—he still doesn’t—but what he told himself at the time was that despite his slight edge in the funkiness department, he reminded her of Jose. That’s all. With her boyfriend locked up, she settled for palling around with the next best thing: his little bro. The comparison flattered Alfredo. And the idea of a female friend actually sounded kind of nice. Maybe she’d help him pick out more flattering pairs of jeans, maybe she’d drag him out of the borough every now and again for some culture and shit, foreign films and art openings and diorama museums and opera boxes with them little mini binoculars on a stick.
Early the next morning, he picked her up at her place, and together they rode the E train, then the C, to Eighty-first Street. They wandered through the Museum of Natural History until he complained of sore feet—big wuss, remember?—and then they ate bowls of chicken noodle soup in the fourth-floor cafeteria, where between slurps they agreed that the very best thing they saw that day was a ninety-four-foot-long replica of a blue whale, suspended from ceiling wires in the Hall of Ocean Life. They imagined what it would be like to be swimming next to one of those blubbery monsters, with its mouth gaping open, threatening to swallow them whole.
Over the next couple of weeks, with increasing frequency, Isabel and Alfredo went back into Manhattan, which seemed so very far away. They went everywhere. To Times Square and Union Square, Chelsea, Bryant Park, that roller rink the Guggenheim. They got hot chocolate at City Bakery. They sat in the lobby of the Pierre Hotel, where they pretended they were waiting for some glamorous friend. They went to FAO Schwarz, so Isabel could dance on the giant floor piano like Tom Hanks in Big, but the line was too long so they walked through Central Park instead. She even brought him to the video store where she worked, although they didn’t go inside because what was there to see? On their first few expeditions they talked about Jose, and when they weren’t doing that they tried to out-funny each other, top each other’s jokes—but eventually, as Alfredo and Isabel grew more comfortable, those impulses faded. He told her about his considerable collection of phobias, and she told him about her history with her mother the puta and Raul the Cubano. When they discussed the future they agreed that they both felt ready for the ground to shudder under their feet, for life to bring them something different, some kind of dramatic upheaval, not yet realizing that this was their something different, their dramatic upheaval.
On a Saturday night in late February, Isabel and Alfredo—as friends, as friends!—went to Greenwich Village, where he’d made reservations at an impressively schmancy jazz club. For an hour and a half they sat in mandatory silence, drank seven-dollar screwdrivers (at least no one carded them), and listened to the supposedly world-famous Darren Gelato Trio. It was incredibly boring. At intermission, with the check on their table, Isabel pulled Alfredo outside for a cigarette. You smoke? he asked. Not exactly, she told him. Searching her purse for a phantom pack of cigarettes, she led Alfredo past the bouncers, ambled to the end of the block, turned the corner, and ran.
Alfredo chased after her. She’d never run out on a check before, not once, never done anything like it in her whole entire life. Drunk on adrenaline, she flew down the sidewalk. Tightness spread through Alfredo’s chest. He heard the buzzing in his ears. Four vodka OJs and ninety minutes of jazz—all of it stolen. He knew that if he kept running, he’d collapse, right there on Sixth Avenue. “Hold on,” he said, clutching her coat.
She turned around, steeled herself with a quick breath, and leaned toward him, her mouth parting softly. He thought she was trying to tell him something. So as to hear her better, he turned his ear to her face and she missed his lips, kissed him accidentally at the corner of his mouth. Miserably embarrassed, he tried to explain. I thought you had something to tell me. I thought you were saying something! She asked him to please stop squirming. She grabbed his chin and kissed him again—thank God—caught him this time flush on the mouth. When she pulled away, her eyes were wide open. She blushed, because it was her turn to be embarrassed.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s just that, oh I don’t know. I’m sorry. Is that okay? It’s just that I wanted to, I guess. Is that okay? What I just did?”
He looked down to see his hands on her hips. His mind stammered. He pulled her toward him and together they fell backward against the fence of the West Fourth Street basketball courts. The chain links caught them, kept them up on their feet. She straightened the glasses on his face. Then she kissed him again, kissed his mouth, kissed his neck, slipped her thigh between his legs. Because she wanted to. He slid his hand into her coat sleeve, to feel the warmth of her skin. She laughed. She was wearing his wool cap, and he pulled it down over her eyes—confirmation, she later told him, that he was the right man for her. He felt calm. He felt happy as her kisses traveled up the side of his neck. Around the
corner from the jazz club, only a few yards away from the mountainous bouncers, with that unpaid check still on the table, Isabel brought her mouth to Alfredo’s ear and whispered, “What if we get caught?”
So there you go. Alfredo didn’t initiate that first kiss and he never sold out his brother to the police, but he’s initiated countless kisses since, and as he sits next to Tariq in the backseat of this cab, Alfredo decides that he’s going to sell him out tonight. Didn’t drop any dimes two and a half years ago, but he’s going to drop one now.
“Listen,” he says, as the cab speeds toward the Northern Boulevard exit. “I got some shit to take care of. You mind if I drop you off at home?”
Tariq stares straight ahead, still and quiet, with his hands folded peacefully in his lap. Alfredo doesn’t know how to read that. He hates the idea of leaving his brother in the same apartment as Isabel, but it’s not like they’ll be alone—both Mama and Papi will be there—and besides, you can’t rat someone out while they’re hanging off your elbow. Right? Since Tariq converted potential allies Baka and Pierre into definite enemies, then Alfredo—who feels as if he’s gotten along just fine in this life doing whatever his brother wouldn’t do—needs to convert some potential enemies into definite allies. Needs to invite some cruel motherfuckers of his own: the police. He plans to go down to the Dunkin’ Donuts on Seventieth and Northern and wait for the Anti-Crime cops to show up, as they do every night, two or three times a shift. He’ll ask them if they’d like to crash a dogfight. If they’d like to put their cuffs on his brother, the ex-con, the man on parole.
The cab exits the expressway and accelerates through Corona. With a string of green lights ahead, Alfredo and Tariq are getting closer to Jackson Heights, closer to home. Outside the window, the Langston Hughes Library gives way to a liquor store, which gives way to an Argentinean steakhouse, which gives way to a parking meter with a red canvas bag wrapped around its face.
Alfredo feels itchy all over, and he wonders if he’s caught the poison ivy, or if this is just his mind attacking his body.
“You’ll be okay?” he asks. “With getting dropped off at home?”
Tariq continues to stare straight ahead. “Where you going?” he asks.
“I gotta grab a cup of coffee with somebody,” Alfredo says, which is both a lie and not a lie, one of his specialties. “I’m gonna be mad quick.” He reaches over and taps the face of Tariq’s digital watch. Alfredo wants this emphasized. How fast he’s going to be. “Back before you know it,” he says.
“You think you can fool me?” Tariq says. “Coffee?” His grin extends into the scar on his cheek so that it becomes one long lopsided smile. “You got a girl, Dito? A little something on the side?”
“See?” Alfredo says, scratching his neck. “That’s what I’m talking about. Right there. Maybe you didn’t hear me before, because you were sleeping and all that. But I was saying that I didn’t think you were as dumb as you seem. And now lookit: you got me nailed.”
“You are, aren’t you? You’re going to see a girl. You little shit.” He laughs. “I’m not as dumb as I seem, huh? You know what, Dito? I’m not so sure that’s a compliment.”
“It’s comments like that,” Alfredo says, “that prove my point exactly.”
11
The Door Factory
Tariq knows that in a certain kind of book—not the Book, of course, but a pretend book, a make-believe book—a man in his spot would have to deal with moats and drawbridges and arrows and catapulted boulders and cauldrons of black tar and devils and demons and dragons and dwarves and bearded ogres and trickster brothers and who knows what else. This man, the hero of that make-believe book, would be standing out in the open air, just as Tariq is standing out in the open air, and he would look upon a large fortress-like structure, just as Tariq is looking up at his parents’ apartment building, and blood would rush to the crown of that hero’s head, just as Tariq’s blood rushes, surges, leaving him dizzied. When the cab dropped him off, his brother gave him a set of house keys and told him, again, that he’d be right back. Sure, sure. Right back. See you in a jiff. These keys weigh heavy in his hand. The building pulls him toward it.
Not yet. Be patient. There are still moves to be made.
He walks down to a corner of Northern Boulevard previously populated with newspaper machines, all of them lined up like a squat robot army. Not anymore. People were apparently paying for one paper, opening the latch, and thieving them all. Just cause they could. And so publishers, mindful of profits, took their machines off the corner. Besides the stench of garbage, the only thing left here are the free papers: the penny-savers, the Queens Tribune, the Queens Gazette, the job-hunting circulars. It doesn’t look like a robot army no more. It looks like a bunch of cheap plastic row houses, with all the tenants inside calling out to Tariq desperately. Take one! Grab one! Free! Free!!
He goes to the end of the line, to a little green house with little attic windows jutting out of its roof. The door swings up. He finds inside two neat stacks of paperback books, which are all the same issue of Apartment Finder, June 2002. A sticker on the inside of the house—he’s shoved his head all the way in, drawn by the plastic smell—says Warning: Destruction of This Property Will Result in Civil Fine or Imprisonment.
Okay, whatever. He sticks one of the books in his back pocket, where it crinkles his parole paperwork. He’d like to take all the books and toss them down the gutter, to disadvantage the apartment-hunting competition, but these little green houses are probably all over Queens. To make a significant dent, he’d have to go to each and every one, and really—who’s got that kind of time?
Eight hours since Tariq bolted that Charleston Chew in the Macy’s dressing room, and since then he’s had nothing to eat. No pizza at Gianni’s, none of Mama’s spicy chicken, not even a burger at Whitestone Lanes. And now it seems too late. He’s missed out on his chance. While incarcerated, he’d often stay up two nights in a row, reading in the sliver with his cheek against the bars, and on the third night, although bone-tired, he’d feel too jittered for sleep. He feels like that now. Too hungry to eat. Standing outside the Laundromat, across from Papi’s old store, Tariq wonders if his stomach has left him, transplanted itself into one of the bodies nearby, into the Chinese delivery-man who pedals past him, reeking of lo mein, or maybe into any one of the ants at his feet, disappearing down a sandy hole between sidewalk panels.
This is as it should be. The straight path is paved with hunger. Muhammad, peace be upon Him, fasted in the caves of Mount Hira and returned home the Prophet. Deprived of food himself, Tariq feels only a pulsing pain behind his eyeballs, and although he can live with pain—and with scars on his face and specks of glass under his eye, and with betrayal and insult and disrespect, and with backbiters and maligners and jinn-possessed demons—he worries that this dull hunger will prevent his thoughts from proceeding in orderly ranks.
The sign on the Laundromat’s door reads Change Is for Customers Only and it takes Tariq too long to understand they mean change as in quarters and dimes. As if embarrassed for him, his stomach grumbles noisily. Inside the Laundromat, a bald-headed black guy, one of those customers with the right to receive change, looks up at Tariq pushing through the door. The guy sits in a chair next to a washing machine, with his feet rudely propped up on another chair. He’s working on a laptop. A real pro—his mother must be awfully proud, Tariq thinks—he doesn’t need to look down when he types. Allowing him to stare at Tariq. And why? Because of these pathetic Converses? Because Tariq’s walked in here without a laundry basket? Meanwhile, these Rocawear jeans alone cost ten times more than everything this black guy’s wearing put together. And yet, unable to help himself, unable to summon the requisite pride, Tariq punks out and looks down at the floor. He doesn’t know why. He feels an uncomfortable tingling, the same tingling one of them ants must feel when crouched under a magnifying glass.
Still tingling, he hurries over to the magazine rack, where he grabs a circular
called Rentals, a circular called Rent 411, and, thickest of all, a circular called The Real Estate Book. He feels the guy’s eyes on the back of his head. He hears his fingers striking the keyboard. He punishes that laptop, as if he were writing down everything Tariq’s doing, narrating all of his movements.
When Tariq stops, the man stops, and he doesn’t start typing again until Tariq walks past him, carrying the three rental magazines over to the bulletin board. Because everyone in this Laundromat conspires to annoy him, a fat Ecuadorian woman sits directly under the board. The TV above the dryers plays a telenovela, which the woman watches with her mouth hanging open and with her fingers absently worrying the beads of her necklace. Tariq has to lean over her—his crotch inches from her ear—in order to read the business cards thumbtacked to the board. Psychics next to personal injury lawyers next to massage specialists next to computer repairmen. A homemade flyer advertises babysitting services. The nanny’s phone number is repeated on little strips of paper, which dangle off the flyer like piano keys. Another flyer offers a reward for a lost dog, a floppy-eared beagle. Tariq leans over farther, brings his face closer to the cork of the board. Classic 2 Bdrm for Rent. Now we’re talking. A two-bedroom is exactly what he’s looking for—it’d be nice to have an office for his studies, with a little sewing machine set up in the corner for Isabel—but he doesn’t take the flyer’s dangling piano key because he knows “classic” is just a fancier word for old.
More apartment listings hang off the board, but in order to see them he’d have to sit on this woman’s head. The guy stops typing. Waits for Tariq to make the next move. With all these dryers going, with all this static electricity in the air, the Laundromat smells like the first few minutes after a lightning storm. Tariq clears his throat to see if the guy will start typing again, maybe even write that down—The monster clears his throat—but instead the woman looks up at him. She flinches when she sees him leaning over her. He never meant to frighten her, but come on lady, who asked you to sit directly under the fucking bulletin board? Now that he’s here, now that she’s staring at his scar, he has to do something to justify his presence and so he reaches out blindly and rips a random piano key off the bulletin board. He’s still muttering apologies when the Laundromat door closes behind him.