Before You Go

by Tommy Butler

  “They’re kids,” says Bannor. “As often high as not. If you want to relieve them of a gun, that’s fine by me.”

  “I don’t want to put you in danger.”

  Bannor waves this off with his typical composure. I suppose that once you’ve foreseen your own death, other perils don’t concern you much. We climb a short rise to stand before the Blockhouse—a square one-story structure built in 1814 to defend against the British. It is more block than house—the few openings in its thick stone walls are just large enough for the business end of a musket. If there’s anything inside, I don’t know what it is. A sign out front says that the fort once contained a cannon, but that it is now “empty, roofless, and securely locked.”

  “They go out on Saturday nights,” says Bannor. “They don’t always bring the gun.”

  A flicker of warmth passes through my chest. I can’t tell if it’s gratitude, fear, or something else. “Thank you, Bannor.”

  He shrugs. “If you say so.”

  After he left Harlem, Bannor toppled southward down the eastern edge of Manhattan until he landed in Alphabet City, so named because it’s bounded and intersected by Avenues A, B, C, and D. “Though if it were up to me,” says Bannor, “I’d give it an F.” He now lives on the fifth floor of a boxy walk-up that at one time might have been described as a tenement, and hasn’t changed much since.

  On Saturday night, he meets me at the corner of his street to escort me past several shadowed stoops, where some of the locals gather for the evening’s illicit activities. “Everybody knows everybody here,” Bannor explains. “Better if they don’t take any undue interest in you.” The night is warm, and Bannor is dressed casually, in brown slacks and a short-sleeved button-down shirt. It’s the first time I’ve seen him wear anything other than his trademark tweed suit and homburg hat. Evidently he doesn’t feel the night’s agenda constitutes a special occasion. I don’t hold it against him.

  The front door of Bannor’s building hangs open. Inside is a dark, cramped foyer, illuminated only by the faint light of a distant streetlamp. I try to close the door behind me, but the lock’s strike plate has been torn from the doorframe. The bolt protrudes uselessly from the door, with nothing to fit into.

  “Leave it,” Bannor tells me. “It’s been that way awhile.”

  A narrow and even darker stairwell snakes its way up through the building’s core, its walls scrawled with graffiti both strident and inscrutable. We reach the fifth floor and head down a long hallway toward the rear of the building. Here, incongruously, a well-maintained row of ceiling bulbs reveals freshly painted walls, both of which I suspect are Bannor’s doing. Most of the doors display at least two locks, if not three, though Bannor’s has but one. “What do I have that anybody wants?” he asks.

  The austerity of Bannor’s apartment supports his claim. A single sparsely furnished room serves as kitchen, bedroom, and living area. One other door leads to a compact bathroom, and a lone window opens to a fire escape on the building’s backside. Yet the room’s tidy economy, and a few thoughtful touches, belie the poverty of the rest of the building. A vibrantly colored Mexican rug sets off the kitchen area. Handmade throw pillows adorn the bed. A large dent in a red teakettle somehow evinces not clumsiness but character, and a dedication to usefulness over ostentation. The space contrasts sharply with my and Jennifer’s apartment. There is no Italian espresso machine, no closet stuffed with coats, no extra bedroom in which no one ever sleeps.

  Though the decor offers some insight into Bannor’s nature, I can see just three personal items in the apartment, all hanging on the refrigerator. The first is a photograph—Bannor in his tweed suit and hat, standing with his arm around a woman in a yellow skirt. At their backs is a tall fence and what looks like a lion in the distance. Nestled between them is a little girl in a blue dress. Her hair rises in a jubilant frizz above her head, as if electrified by the wattage of her broad grin. The photograph itself is held in place by the second personal item—a ceramic magnet that looks like it was painted by a young hand. It is in the likeness of a miniature blackboard. Written across it, as if in chalk, is the word DADDY.

  “The Bronx Zoo,” says Bannor. “Have you been?”

  “No,” I say. “Looks like a special day.”

  Bannor nods. “A long time ago.”

  I turn my attention to the third item on the refrigerator—an unopened letter addressed to “Mr. Albert Bannor,” with a return address of New Orleans.

  “From my wife,” says Bannor. “Ex-wife.”

  “She’s in New Orleans?”

  Bannor nods. “They moved there a while back. Just before you and I met, actually. She said she wanted our daughter to get in touch with her heritage. I told her Harlem is our heritage, but she sees things differently.”

  “Don’t you want to open it?”

  He shakes his head. “Not yet.” He moves to the door and raises his hand over the light switch. “It’s going to be dark,” he says. He flips the switch, making good on his prediction. As my eyes adjust to the blackness, Bannor moves past me and opens the window that leads out to the fire escape. “Right,” he says. “All set, then?”

  I follow him out the window. The rear of the building faces those of its neighbors, as if they were shunning one another. The space between is still as midnight. I’m reminded briefly of another fire escape, and of Sasha, but Bannor doesn’t stop to rest his back against the bricks and light a cigarette. Instead, he drops silently down the ladder to the floor below. I shadow him until we are crouching outside the window directly under his. The dark pane reveals nothing.

  “Looks like they’re out,” says Bannor.

  “How do we get in?”

  In answer, he slides the window open. “They don’t worry much about being robbed.” He takes a small penlight from his pocket and hands it to me. “And we’re not getting in. You are.”

  I crawl through the open window and drop into the kitchen—the first of a line of rooms that extend in railroad fashion toward the front of the building. The thin beam of the penlight reveals a rusted gas stove, a metal folding table, dirty dishes piled in the sink. A cockroach scurries behind a coffeemaker. Opening one plain wooden cabinet after another, I find a few pots, pans, and mugs, but no gun.

  I slip down the long hallway, passing through a living area dominated by a large flat-screen television that seems out of place in the squalor of the apartment. In the bedroom, splayed carelessly over the dusty floor, are three soiled mattresses, only one of which is fitted with a sheet. I turn to the lone dresser, rummaging through crumpled clothing until I find what I’m looking for—a heavy revolver with a wooden grip and black barrel. With a fumbling effort, I manage to open the cylinder and confirm that it’s loaded.

  I shove the gun in my pocket and head back toward the kitchen. As I navigate the darkness of the living room, I kick something hard. It yields at the blow, clattering in all directions on the hardwood floor. I cringe at the noise, and fear that I’ve broken whatever it was into pieces, but the penlight reveals a scattered pile of compact discs. Kneeling down to gather them, I see that they’re video games, the kind that teenagers would play. A corresponding game console is hooked up to the flat-screen, with several joysticks lying idly by. Beside them, more ominously, are the needles Bannor had mentioned, along with spoons, a lighter, and two small plastic bags full of brown powder.

  “There are children starving in Africa,” my mother used to say. “You should be grateful.” This was her refrain whenever I was upset in a way or to a degree that she didn’t think was valid. She didn’t mean that I should be grateful that there were children starving in Africa, of course. She meant that I should be grateful for what I had, particularly because other people had so much less. The theory, I guess, was that you could not be sad if you had something to be grateful for, and that you always had something to be grateful for because there were children—whether starving in Africa or lost to heroin addiction in New York City—whose suffering was
unquestionably worse than yours.

  It took me years to discover at least two fundamental flaws in this argument. First, gratitude isn’t happiness. If it were, the dictionary would just use one word for both. Second, if you follow this line of thinking to its conclusion, it unravels. Ultimately, how bad do things have to get before you are permitted to feel sad, or lost, or hopeless? By my mother’s theory of happiness, everyone who still has something to lose should be boundlessly joyful. The only person who can claim any right to feel miserable would be the single unluckiest person in the world, and even he might have trouble arguing his misery with my mother, since things could always get worse for him, too.

  I don’t know why or for how long I linger there, staring stupidly at the paraphernalia of drug addicts and regretting their misfortune. Eventually I stir myself into motion again—echoes of my mother’s words having done nothing to change my mind, just as her well-intentioned reasoning never made me feel better. If anything, it made me feel worse. Grateful, yes—but also sad, that the world could be so unapologetically cruel, and guilty, for not being happier in it.

  I creep back into Bannor’s apartment to find him sitting at the small dining table, waiting for me. Unwilling to linger, I move toward the door.

  “Success?” he asks.

  “Yes. Thank you, Bannor.”

  “You can stay here if you want,” he offers.

  “Thanks,” I say, but I open the door anyway.

  “You’ll be going home?”

  Home. The word sounds strange to me, but it’s as good as any other. “Yes.”

  “Okay, then,” says Bannor.

  The windows of my apartment are lightless. Jennifer is out of town, and I’m not expecting company. I approach from the far side of the street, my fingers twitching, my skin prickling as if it were on fire. When a figure steps out from behind the ginkgo tree, my hand instinctively dives to my pocket for the gun, then stops when I recognize Bannor. It seems just a minute earlier that I had left him in his apartment, though in truth I don’t know how long it’s taken me to get here. It might have been quite easy for him to outpace me. In the lamplight, his closely cropped hair is a silvery shimmer.

  “Jesus, Bannor. You scared me.”

  “Odd, isn’t it, that you can still be scared? I mean, considering.”

  “I guess.” I don’t really want to consider it. I don’t want to consider anything.

  Bannor gestures toward the front door of my building. “Shall we?”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I tell him. “I think you should go home.”

  He frowns. “Elliot, if tonight is going to be your last on this earth, I’d like to be there for it. And if not—well, we can order pizza.”

  I register his joke mechanically, without finding the humor in it, without wanting to find the humor. “I’m not going to be ordering pizza, Bannor.”

  He nods. “I’m not afraid. You don’t need to be, either.”

  “Of dying?”

  “Of anything.”

  I don’t want to argue, or even ask what he means. I turn to climb the steps to my building. When Bannor follows me, I’m too tired to protest. He trails me inside, up the staircase and into my apartment, settling into a chair beneath the living room window. I drift to the center of the room and linger there in the dark, unsure of what to do next. If there was a plan, I’ve lost it. Perhaps it’s Bannor’s presence that unnerves me. Or the weight of the gun in my pocket.

  The gun. Right. I take out the revolver, daunted by its heft. “It’s good that it’s heavy,” I say, not sure who I’m speaking to, or why I’m speaking at all.

  “Okay,” says Bannor. His voice is tiny, like a miniaturized version of a voice.

  “I should get a bag or something,” I say. “For the afterburner.” I meant to say aftermath, but my mouth seems to be moving on its own now.

  “No need,” says Bannor. “I’ll take care of things.”

  My free hand grasps a chair from the dining table and slides it to the center of the room. My legs buckle, dropping me into the seat, and my torso bends forward until my elbows are resting in my lap. The other hand grips the gun normally, pointing it at the floor. It hangs from the end of my arm like an anchor.

  “It’s good that it’s so heavy,” my mouth says again. “But it’s not a rule or anything. There’s no animal.” Manual, my mouth meant to say.

  It’s easy, really, in the end. The hand turns the gun around, like this, so that its thumb is on the trigger and you’re staring down the muzzle. The other hand grips the barrel, holds it steady.

  “You are a lonely electron,” says my mouth.

  The revolver is so heavy. So heavy and so real, its wooden grip slick with sweat, its metallic body cold and dark. The mere sight of it invokes unwanted emotions that threaten your intent. Fear. Revulsion. But it is exhausting to be an electron. All that spinning and spinning through the vast empty space of the atom. It is all so terribly exhausting. It would be pleasant to be done. A relief to be done. And easy, really, in the end.

  The hand raises the gun.

  “Elliot Chance!” The shout detonates through the room. The voice is familiar, yet thick with emotion in a way I don’t recognize. I look up to see Sasha’s silhouette in the entryway. Her hands are raised to her chest, clenched into fists, as if she’s going to fight someone.

  “Bannor, you left the door open,” says my mouth.

  Sasha steps over the threshold. “No,” she says. “Absolutely not. Put it down.”

  This is not a request but a command, which is all it takes, apparently, to frustrate whatever purpose I thought I had. I set the revolver gently on the floor at my feet. Sasha turns on a lamp, then comes to stand beside me. She’s not looking at me, though. She’s glaring at Bannor.

  “What the hell are you thinking?” she demands. Though I expected the question, I’m relieved to see it isn’t directed at me. “You gave him a gun?”

  “No,” says Bannor. “He stole it.”

  “Goddammit, Bannor!” Sasha actually stamps her foot on the floor. She seems almost maniacal, her short hair jutting out in all directions as if it had just exploded from her scalp. It occurs to me that she may have been sleeping. I have no idea what time it is.

  “Elliot’s life does not end tonight,” says Bannor.

  “You don’t know that!”

  “I know when I’m going to die,” explains Bannor. “And I know that Elliot is there when I do.”

  This revelation stops Sasha, who seems as surprised as I am to hear this new twist to Bannor’s prophecy. She lets out a deep, frustrated sigh. “Bannor, that’s—”

  “Insane?” he asks.

  “Irresponsible.”

  Bannor nods. “Maybe so,” he says. He rises from the couch and starts for the door. On his way out, he pauses beside Sasha, leaning over to give her a fatherly kiss on the top of her head. “That’s why I called you.”

  He slips out, closing the door behind him. Sasha turns her ire to me. Her glower sends a bolt of adrenaline through my chest, a surge of energy that clashes with my utter exhaustion like an oscillation of fire and ice, expanding and contracting my senses until I feel myself begin to splinter.

  “I don’t believe you,” Sasha says tightly.

  “But you do,” I tell her.

  “What?”

  “You do believe me,” I say. “We didn’t ask to be here, remember? We didn’t bid for these lives at auction. You said.”

  “That was hypothetical.”

  “Not for Pearl.”

  Sasha’s look hardens further, as if I’ve struck a blow I didn’t intend. “This is different,” she says.

  “How?”

  “Because I’ll miss you!”

  The brittle edge to her voice stops me. I don’t know how I ended up in this negotiation with Sasha, or how she ended up on the other side of the negotiating table. I thought that we were aligned on these matters. The last thing I want to do is worsen the pained look
in her eyes. “I’ll miss you, too,” I say softly.

  “No.” Her words come at an angry clip. “You won’t. Because you’ll be dead. You weren’t even going to say goodbye.”

  “I thought we said our goodbyes. That we had our ending. I thought that was the point.”

  “That you could just go kill yourself?” Sasha’s patience begins to fray. She doesn’t seem to know what to do with the shreds. “No, that was not the point.”

  “Sasha,” I say quietly. “What if I’m ready?”

  “You’d be selfish, that’s what.”

  “Was Pearl selfish? You said it was her decision. You said—”

  “Well, I changed my mind!” The breaking of Sasha’s voice seems to shock her. She turns and hurries for the door as if to escape further damage. “It’s selfish, Elliot,” she says on her way out. “Tell yourself whatever you want, but it just is.”

  The door slams, sending echoes that reverberate through the room before eventually sinking into the dull silence left behind. I lower my head into my hands and stare down at my feet. Sasha’s words rattle noisily through my mind, grieving me in a way I hadn’t expected. A long moment passes before I realize that she’s taken the gun.

  Before

  So there you are, at the Door of Wonders.

  Merriam smiles nervously. Jollis gives you an affirming nod. “Okay, then,” he says. “Let’s do this.” He faces the door, grips the brass ring at its center, and pulls.

  On the other side, an open plaza stretches boundlessly in every direction. From one unseen end to the other, hovering at regular intervals just above you, are luminous objects. Stars, you think, until you squint past their initial brilliance. For each is no bigger than a breadbox, and no two are alike, resulting in what you somehow know is an endless array of colors, shapes, luster, and movement. They spin and pulse, glimmer and flow. Most are abstract, but others take on vaguely familiar forms—a flickering lamp, a bubble in a stream, a flash of lightning in a summer cloud.