by Matt Burgess
A gunshot deadens the air. Blasts the wind from his ears. Confused, he hears beeping. Two more gunshots, and he can’t tell if they’re coming from in front or behind, they’re so explosively loud. He thinks of Isabel and feels something inside of him plummet. He runs faster, panicked. The door upcoming is actually two doors: a wooden door, interior to the apartment, swung all the way open, and an outer door, a screen door, latched closed to the rain. Is Tariq still behind him? Alfredo is too frightened to look. He can’t stop. At the end of the couch, in the dark, Max sits with a cordless phone in his hands. It’s the phone that’s beeping, left off the hook for too long. Max looks small and afraid. He extends his arms out in front of him, palms up, as if bestowing a gift. Almost too late, Alfredo sees what’s coming. With his hands rising instinctively to cover his face, he crashes through the screen door, takes it right off its hinges.
“Gun!” he shouts. His arm has punched through the wire meshing of the door, tearing it into flaps. He falls face forward into the yard, into the mud, and as he falls he shouts, “Gun! Gun!”
When he hits the ground his glasses go flying. Everything fuzzes over, loses edges, definition. Less than five feet away, a blurry-faced police officer, the Latino, kneels next to a body on the ground. The cop looks stricken. He turns to Alfredo with a bovine stare, the skin twitching around his mouth. Mike Shifrin—who else could it be?—lies motionless in the grass. Amazing. That Shifrin is here. That he exists. He must’ve had the drop on the police officer, must’ve gotten to the yard first, and yet he’s the one on his back, his feet crossed peacefully at the ankles, his white shirt bunched up around blood-blooming holes. And the cop is the one who’s still alive. All that academy training. Or maybe his policeman’s trigger just squeezes more easily. The air smells of smoke. Shifrin looks like he’s been shot three times in the chest, maybe more. It’s hard to tell. Alfredo can’t see as well as he’d like—the rain doesn’t help—but he is thinking quickly and clearly, rejuvenated from the bodily sprint through the store. Splayed out on the grass, his elbows in the mud, Alfredo feels as if he exists inside of time and it is a small safe world enclosed on all sides.
Tariq comes running through what used to be the back door. When he sees what’s in front of him—the dead body, the cop, Alfredo low to the ground—he closes his eyes.
“Gun,” Alfredo is shouting. “He has a gun! He has a gun!”
Tariq tries to slow down. Alfredo can see it in the way he tilts his head back, the way his hands lift on their own, which is truly the worst thing he could’ve done, those hands rising, and with a whipcrack of thunder, the first bullet hits him. It rips through his forearm and enters his shoulder, exploding it into fragments of muscle and bone. He is shot two more times in the chest. It spins him. Turning, he sinks down to one knee and slides forward in a crumple, an ear pressed to the ground.
The cop speaks into the silence that follows. “Where is it?” he says. He comes out of his crouch and runs over to Tariq’s body. “I don’t see it. Where is it?”
Alfredo doesn’t know how to answer. He sits in the grass, his head bent, and he paws at the ground in front of him, searching for his eyeglasses. An earthworm gropes blindly out of the soil. It is light red and shiny, almost translucent, and when it slithers across Alfredo’s knuckles, he recoils. He feels sick.
“Where is it?” the cop cries. There is blood in his voice, the threat of more violence. “Where the fuck is the gun?”
When Alfredo doesn’t say anything, the cop slips his boot into Tariq’s open hand. Alfredo wants to tell him to stop—please don’t touch him—but he is afraid to give orders. He feels like he’s waking up from a nightmare, but has still not come all the way out. Something else, something bad, is coming. He picks up off the ground a green piece of paper, a flyer of some sort, blown off a windshield and into the yard. Soaked all the way through, the paper’s numbers and letters run together. Nothing makes sense. Rain drums into his eyes. It falls heavily, this rain. Makes music against the busted screen door, fills the open mouth of Mike Shifrin. A gun lies in the grass, close to Shifrin’s body. If it’s a snub-nosed .38, Alfredo can’t tell. He can’t see that far, nor does he know what a .38 looks like. The cop seems distracted. He stares into the house, ready—as Alfredo is—for the next bad thing. The other two cops must be all the way downstairs by now, trying to convince a basement of angry young men to press their palms to the walls. The gun winks at Alfredo. He could crawl squishing through the mud, could grab it so easily. He could make sure. He allows himself to look over at Tariq, who kneels slumped over in the grass, his legs twisted under him, that ear to the ground as if he were straining to hear whispered, underworld voices.
“Don’t,” the cop says. The pistol he points at Alfredo shakes in his adrenaline-surged hand. “Don’t you fucking move.”
“No,” Alfredo says. His own hands, clenched into fists, hang uselessly at his sides. “Please, no.”
With his gun straight out in front of him, the cop circles behind Alfredo. He kicks him hard between the shoulder blades. Alfredo falls forward. Mud fills his ear. The cop digs his knees into Alfredo’s back, presses down on his already battered kidney.
“Your friend’s dog died,” Alfredo says. Facedown in the mud, he doesn’t know if he can be heard, but he wants all the facts known. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about that dog. I never meant for that to happen.”
His arms are pulled behind him. With a click-click-click, the cop cuffs Alfredo’s hands behind his back. Alfredo prays. He prays that Isabel’s mouth will heal, that Christian Louis will never know. That his parents, after hearing the news, will not close their hearts to him. The mud gives way under Tariq’s head and he slides all the way down onto his stomach, revealing for a flashing moment the indent at the base of his neck. He is dead, and Alfredo has no words of his own to meet that. Silently, to himself, with his thin wrists cuffed so tightly that metal digs into bone, Alfredo recites the Lord’s Prayer. He gets halfway through before stopping at daily bread. He does not ask to be forgiven. Why bother? Alfredo’s hunger for forgiveness exceeds the world’s capacity to dole it out.
Part Three
13
From the New York City Department of Records
14
The Birthday Party
Isabel opens the cupboard and checks on the one. To make sure it’s still there. For what must be the zillionth time today. She checks on the one compulsively, the way a traveler checks pockets and fanny packs, searching for the four familiar corners of a passport. As was the case ten minutes ago, the one glitters in its packaging, hidden behind the pancake mix. It hasn’t moved. Despite the sweltering conditions inside the apartment, it hasn’t melted. It is a good one. Sturdy base, long Victorian neck, little black wick poking out the top. The one looks as if it’s been dipped in vanilla frosting and dotted with rainbow sprinkles. It looks edible, dangerously so. After Isabel sets it on fire, she’ll have to make sure Christian Louis doesn’t grab it and stick it in his mouth. God knows, he’ll try.
When Isabel bought the one, the lady behind the cash register said, “Oh Lord, how exciting. Can you believe how fast time flies?”
Isabel asked Alfredo that very question this morning. She was lying on the air mattress with the baby—check that: with the toddler—while Alfredo stood in front of the mirror, getting ready for work.
“Can you believe how fast time flies?”
By way of answer, Alfredo slapped the wall behind her head. His hand came away with blood on it, the wall smeared with a red crescent moon.
“Don’t do that ish on the walls,” Isabel said.
“You wanna get bit up by mosquitoes all day, be my f-ing guest.”
Christian Louis grabbed hold of Isabel’s hair and stuck the ends in his mouth. On his cheek, a wine stain birthmark seemed to pulse with redness, as it always does in the early mornings. “A year already,” Isabel said, looking at her son. “I can’t believe it. Can you believe it?”
“No,�
�� Alfredo said. He folded his lime-green tie and buried it in his pocket. It was a clip-on, part of his everyday uniform, and Alfredo would rather have cut off his hands than be seen wearing it on the subway. He adjusted the cuffs of his shirt, hitched up his polyester pants. “I can’t. I can’t believe it.”
“You look nice,” Isabel said.
While she looks at the one, Christian Louis tries to get under the sink. He slides his head between his mama’s legs and rattles the cupboard doors, the handles of which are bound by duct tape. When Isabel needs to get at her poisonous cleaning supplies—which is always, what with Christian Louis’s table manners and Alfredo’s mosquito vendetta—she has to slit the tape with a knife and then rebind it, every single time. Which is not that big a deal. The vice president said go out and cop mad duct tape, and so they bought plenty of rolls. They got duct tape coming out their asses. They got duct tape covering the baseboard power outlets. They used to have duct tape sealing the windows shut, a necessity with a moves-making baby in a sixth-floor studio, but it got too f-ing hot to be keeping the windows closed—ninety-one miserable degrees—and so Isabel went out and bought those heavy-duty black metal safety bars. Charged them to the card and installed them herself.
While Christian Louis wiggles between her ankles, Isabel slips the one behind the pancake mix. She could check in the freezer to see if the ice cream cake (Oreo crumb!) is still there, but it doesn’t seem necessary. Where’s a cake gonna go? She slides Christian Louis across the kitchen floor and deposits him in front of a different cupboard, one without any poisons. But because the handles aren’t bound, he expresses little interest. He’s like his father in this way: if it ain’t forbidden, he ain’t interested. He sits still in front of the cupboard, a skeptical expression on his face. But Mama knows best. When she bends over and opens the doors, revealing its bounty, he laughs. He’s a great one for laughing. He reaches into the cupboard and pulls down all the pots and pans. She puts a wooden spoon on the floor in front of him, and he picks it up, because he can do this now. He can pick things up. And holy ish, can he make noise. Spoon in hand, pots in front of him, he goes to work, bang-bang-banging away.
If Alfredo were home, he’d say, “Little man’s gonna be a drummer like that guy in the Roots. Gonna make us a fortune.”
While her baby bangs pots, Isabel sits down in the kitchen chair and blows balloons. They smell nasty, like unlubricated condoms, and after the first dozen she goes a little cross-eyed. The tip of her finger turns purple from tying off the ends. Sweat blots the back of her tank top, but that might have less to do with the effort of balloon blowing and more to do with the throat-tightening humidity inside this apartment. Feeling light-headed, she tosses a balloon toward the drummer boy, and it bounces off his face. He laughs. She tosses another, and this time he swings at it with the spoon. He doesn’t make contact—sawing and a miss!—but if Alfredo were here, he’d compliment the effort, say something like, “Little man’s gonna be a slugger like Piazza. Gonna make us mad millions.” And Isabel would say, as she always does, “Little man’s gonna be whatever he wants.”
One hopes.
She rubs a balloon against the top of his head. His soft dark hair sticks up like he just stuck a fork in an electric outlet. Scratch that. Too frightening an image. His soft dark hair sticks up as if he were … as if he were … as if he were the world’s smallest mad scientist. How would she feel about that? Being the ma dukes of a future corpse reanimator? Sounds great. He could bring her back to life after she dies. They could go on teleportation trips together, celebrate his hundredth birthday on Jupiter. She presses the balloon to the wall, where it clings in place. She wishes she could explain how static electricity works—she’ll look it up on one of the library computers—but the lack of an explanation doesn’t seem to matter to Christian Louis, future scientist, future target of torch-wielding mobs. He stares at the balloon and slaps his forehead. Still laughing, beyond delighted, he grabs another balloon and sticks the tied-off end in his mouth.
Isabel jumps out of her chair and yanks the balloon away. She remembers something her mother the puta once told her about a cousin, a little girl back in Puerto Rico who swallowed a deflated balloon, choked on it, and died. Isabel’s heart is racing. Christian Louis watches her carry the balloon away from him, his arms straining, his fists grasping at air. If there’s one thing she’s learned in this past year it’s that her baby boy is surprisingly difficult to break, and yet, better safe than sorry, the motto of mamas the world over. With a needle plucked from a tomato pincushion, she pops the balloon. It makes a loud, sudden sound, louder than Christian Louis’s drumming. Eyebrows crossed, he opens his mouth as if to deliver a particularly abusive diatribe, and then he bursts into tears.
Two dozen more balloons lie scattered around the apartment, the party’s first awkward guests. She pinches off each of their necks, slides her needle through. There are no bangs this time, no pops. Air trickles out of the balloons in a slow, painless hiss. She quarantines them all in the sink, where the sight of their wizened husks has her chewing her lip. Great. Now what is she supposed to do for decorations? Tomorrow the well-meaning, one-upping Abuela Lizette gets her shot—she’s probably already rented out a declawed bear who brings his own unicycle—but tonight is for the three of them, Alfredo, Isabel, and Christian Louis, their own party in their own home, with balloons, there are supposed to be balloons, and an Oreo crumb ice cream cake, and a super elegant birthday candle. The one! Isabel checks on it to make sure it’s still there—okay, okay, to make herself feel better—and there it is, tucked behind the pancake mix. It is a good one, but it is not the only game in town. As Christian Louis had done earlier, Isabel eyeballs the cupboard under the sink. When they moved into this Corona apartment she bought close to fifty candles—pillar candles, floating candles, tea-light candles, votive candles, lavender-scented heart-shaped candles—and she keeps them under the sink, behind duct-taped handles, saving them for a day that never seems to come, a day when she can slip into a warm bath for an hour, close her eyes, masturbate, and relax. She wants to hold all these candles in her arms, wants to hear their whispered promises.
Christian Louis is still crying. He reaches out for his mother, the balloon popper, the betrayer, and she lifts him up off the kitchen floor. She bounces him in her arms. She is a plane hitting turbulence, and he her only passenger. She flies him to the closet, where behind the door, wrapped up, waits his first birthday present. It is a Fisher-Price musical learning table, but she doesn’t tell him that. It’s a surprise.
“Seventy bucks,” Alfredo had said when he saw the receipt. “For a table? Our parents never bought us anything that cost seventy bucks.”
“Exactly,” Isabel had said.
The table is an interactive toy, she explained. It helps kids learn their numbers and ABCs. It has fifteen sing-along songs—nursery rhymes and lullabies—and Isabel feels confident she’ll know every single one.
“Does it come with volume control?” Alfredo had asked.
She could check right now, but the table’s already been gift-wrapped. She yanks open the closet door, asking the baby in her arms if he can say birthday present, birthday present. Before he can gurgle out an answer, she slams the door shut. He gets a peek, that’s it. When the sneaky little bastard reaches for the doorknob, she whirls him away.
She’s going to tell Alfredo tonight. She’ll wait till after the birthday cake, after Christian Louis has opened his present. She’ll wait for the very peak of Alfredo’s happiness, and then she will pounce. Her timing needs to be perfect, as it must be whenever she does anything: initiate sex, bring up their credit card bill, open her mouth at all. He’s been poisonously moody these last few months. Last few months? He’s been moody since last June. Worse than moody—she could live with moody—he’s been withdrawn. He works as an elevator boy in a deluxe Manhattan apartment building, shepherding the rich from the lobby to their apartments, and from their apartments to the lobby, a never-endi
ng north-south circuit; his boss, Ms. Webb, tells him he’d get promoted to doorman (an escalation in salary and, it seems, in masculinity) if he’d only engage the residents in some chit-chat as they rise and descend, if he’d talk to them about, oh you know, the weather, the Yankees, the latest Broadway shows. But I don’t feel like talking, he complains to Isabel. I understand, she says. I do. But maybe it’s time to reopen that big fat mouth of yours and start yapping again.
He usually shrugs when she says this. Or closes the bathroom door on her. Or rolls over in bed. Or crushes a blood-fat mosquito against the wall.
So tonight she’ll have to wait till his shell shows a crack. Maybe he’ll say a joke or laugh at one of hers. Maybe he’ll smear ice cream cake on Christian Louis’s nose. Sing the itsy-bitsy spider. Look at Isabel kindly, ignoring for once the thin white scar engraved under her eye. He’ll be smiling at her with unguarded, soft-faced affection, and right then, in that moment, she’ll drop the news. Another one’s coming, she’ll say. We’re pregnant again.