Restoration Heights

by Wil Medearis

  “Clint is the only cop involved so far. And he’s black, and lives here, so it really isn’t that simple.”

  “Right, right. That complexity is a nice layer, though. Systemic injustice pitted against personal ties. Some of these elements you would have to clarify, take a position. It is just a beginning. But it’s so promising.”

  “And look, this is a pretty remarkable coincidence,” Dean said. “To get this offer from this woman now? You could quit Lockstone.” Reddick almost interrupted to tell him about being fired, but thought better of it. Dean continued. “The timing is unbelievable. You’ll be able to devote full attention to your work at the precise moment when you have some work that deserves your full attention.”

  “Right. Which, her offer—I wanted to get both of your opinions.”

  Dean cut him off. “My opinion is you have to go with this. Let Hannah go, man.”

  “Opportunities like this don’t come around all that often,” Beth said.

  “Six months? Opportunities like this never come around.”

  “Speaking of opportunities...” Beth cut her eyes at Dean.

  “Oh, right,” he said. “We should get another beer first.”

  “I need one, too.” Reddick followed them into the kitchen, dazed that the night had spun out of his hands so quickly. What they said couldn’t possibly be true—he had never thought about the case as art—but their confidence caught him flat-footed. He needed to peel away, to go for a walk or play ball and work through their reactions.

  Instead he opened a beer.

  “Remember Mara Jost?” Dean leaned against a counter.

  It took him a moment. “That dealer that came to your studio?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “He got an email from her today.”

  Dean nodded. “She wants to put me in a two-person show next year. In her main space, in Chelsea. If it goes well...”

  “Which of course it will.”

  “If it goes well she’s interested in adding me to her stable. Permanently.”

  Reddick paused, absorbing it. He turned to Beth. “And you...?”

  She shook her head. “She didn’t mention me, which is fine. You know, fine. I’m just so excited for Dean right now.” She grabbed his hand and squeezed to make her point.

  Reddick paused, then hugged him. He felt no envy—which surprised him—only a kind of stupefied joy that Dean had thwarted the impossible odds, had skirted the gatekeepers of professional success. It had the thrill of an athletic feat.

  “That is fucking fantastic, man. Seriously. That is really, really great. You’ve worked so hard for this.” He let go. “So what’s next? How ready are you?”

  “Well.” Dean went to the couch and sat down, Beth beside him. Reddick followed. “That’s kind of the other side of this. You know how long these pieces take to assemble. I need to finish two more by the show, and at my current pace that isn’t going to happen. So I’m leaving Lockstone.”

  Beth scooped his hand back up, beaming. As proud of his success as if it were her own.

  “It’s a huge gamble, I know. But I have some savings, I talked with my parents already and they think it’s a great idea. This chance will only come once. I have to go all in.”

  “Definitely. You have to go for it.” Reddick paused. “Did you tell Lane yet?”

  “I’ll call him tomorrow. I’ll offer two weeks but he probably won’t take it. I’m sure there’s a line of guys he could plug in.”

  Reddick winced. “Yeah. I got that impression as well.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Reddick told him about getting fired. “Holy shit,” Dean said, “now you have to take Mrs. Leland’s offer.”

  “I wouldn’t say I have to—I’m not completely broke. I could maybe make it a month. Don’t worry, I’ll be able to cover my half of the rent regardless.”

  Now it was Dean who winced. “The thing is—that’s where I was going with this—leaving Lockstone puts me on a pretty tight budget. An I-can’t-afford-two-rents tight budget.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’m going to move out.”

  “Right.”

  “It’s what I need to do. I’ll give you a month—over a month, until March first—to find someone to take the room. You know it won’t be hard, with the demand for this neighborhood.”

  “No, right. Sure.”

  “I’m sorry, man. But you can see it’s the right decision for me.”

  “What will you do?’

  “I’m just going to sleep in the studio.”

  “Well, if you need a place to shower.”

  “One of the guys down the hall actually put a shower in his studio. He has this weird corner space with his own sink, so he just rigged something up.”

  “He’s, like, an actual certified plumber,” Beth said. “I mean, that’s what he does for money.”

  “So it’s pretty nice,” Dean continued. “We’ve been using it the past couple days. He’s offered it to the entire floor.”

  “You’ve got it all figured out, then.” Reddick leaned back into his chair. The sense of shared joy was already dissipating. Dean was taking his success with him, and with Beth. Reddick had seen it coming, but he had expected it to fold into their current lives, to offer surface upgrades—reform, not revolution. This was something larger; it was dividing their futures. Their relationship already straining against the momentum of separate trajectories.

  Maybe one day, in some house—not the Sewards’ but one just like it—he’ll install one of Dean’s sculptures.

  There were still beers to float the optimism, to aid the natural buoyancy of good news. They talked their way through a pair of six-packs. The conversation darted occasionally back to Mrs. Leland’s offer. Dean and Beth doubled down on their position—he couldn’t let an opportunity like this go.

  “You’ve never lacked talent,” Dean said. “Just a subject. Just something that you were truly passionate about.”

  Which was how the night ended. After a final round of congratulations for his friend’s improbable break, Reddick stumbled into his room thinking of passion, thinking of how he had made a mistake—he was not wrong to be consumed by the case. He was wrong to try to contain it.

  Nineteen

  In his dream he watched Hannah’s body dissolve beneath an avalanche of water, bits of flesh carried away by swirling eddies. He woke up without a hangover—his body adapted to the increased frequency of heavy drinking, accepting the nightly abuse as routine. Beth had slept in Dean’s room instead of on the couch. He made coffee and took it to the window. It had rained overnight; the snow and the sidewalks were soaked, the sky gray as ash. His macabre dream lingered, begged him to read into its details—Hannah washing away, a girl’s body surrendered to water, Coney Island all over again. His case had seemed as concrete as that one, the crime as obvious, but now all he saw was his own conjecture, his ineffectual desire to make this into something, to make it fit what he wanted it to be.

  Dean and Beth got up and the three of them ate breakfast. They found a somber iteration of last night’s good mood and clung to it. Beth left first, Dean a half hour later, his work ethic undiminished by success. He credited his long hours in the studio for getting him this far. It was only a partial truth. A driving capacity for hard work was just your price of entry. It bought the lottery ticket but didn’t determine which number was called. That was left to vaguer forces, to the alchemy of an inscrutable system—to motivations too subjective and innumerable to prepare for. Take fifteen years of your life, encase them in lead and drop them in a fire. Perhaps they will turn to gold.

  But it had happened for Dean. Or was in the process of happening, and Reddick might have been too pessimistic about what it could mean for him. Perhaps there would be some spillover. Perhaps if he had the right subject. Harold’s advice
came to his mind, its hard-nosed clarity. Then go do that shit.

  He thought of her hands disintegrating, the B movie details. What did it hurt to try? It could just be a way to stop thinking about the way she looked in his dream.

  He went into the studio.

  He imagined an installation, a collection of objects that could function individually but worked together. Start with a pencil because it was easy. Quick sketches—a natural extension of the map. The construction site, augmenting his memory with photographs, working loosely, playfully, not bound by naturalism. It came back so easily. A tactile reflex stored in the fibers of his hands, independent of the mind. Drawing felt fantastic. The sensation of it was the facet that no one talked about enough, the physical pleasure of the movements. Restoration Heights, a Brooklyn street—did he have a photo of Sensei? Search, search—there, on a blog documenting the last protest. Wait, no, that wasn’t him. The kufi threw him off. But it didn’t matter, what he needed was the suggestion of a man. For now. The hard facts of individuality could come later.

  He drew the alley and Hannah at the end of it. He tacked the page on the wall and found a tube of black acrylic and filled in the space around her, punched up the lines around her face, the drama and the composition nodding back to his days copying Frank Miller—wait, no—Eddie Campbell. Much better. He didn’t think about it, didn’t think about anything. He ran on instinct for an hour and a half, stopped to wet his throat. He came back and looked at Franky and Buckley.

  What about those two? Maybe he should build something for them. A physical structure to embody two men making a career out of the erection of physical structures. Erection sparked a phallic chain that he quickly disregarded—too ham-fisted. He recalled a professor saying that you should start obvious or you risk not making your point, but no, not now. He had to build something ramshackle, disheveled, something that aspired to grandiosity but was tainted by an obvious, inherent corruption. Ambition as a moral flaw. Only he didn’t have materials to build with. He could make a list, go shopping, but he couldn’t leave now, couldn’t break his surging rhythm. He decided to sketch the structures out—as they came together he realized the sketches might work on their own. Maybe. What kind of building was Buckley, what kind was Franky? Did they rot in different ways? These were decisions that seemed right on the page.

  He felt the beginning of hunger but ignored it. His confidence grew. Some of this stuff looked really good. Better than anything he had done in a few years, for sure. Dean and Beth had a way of burying what they meant in jargon but they were perceptive. He ought to trust them more—what had Sarah said about the messenger not affecting the truth of the message? Sarah. It was too soon to text her but she would be thrilled, he knew it. In the glow of the work anything seemed possible—pieces of his life coalesced into something he could bear. Like in games when the hoop swelled to twice its diameter, the size of a garbage can—he couldn’t miss. Yeah, it was only a start—just a few hours in to what would have to be hundreds, and he knew bad days would come, but this was everything he needed. It felt like he had been asleep for months, years.

  He was empty after four hours, raw and tender and calm, moving with a sort of slow-motion clarity, without the possibility of frustration or disappointment. He stepped back to look at what he had done. It was all fledgling ideas and first steps, but it was rich with promise.

  * * *

  He needed air. He left, headed up to his coffee shop. The rain had stopped, the afternoon warm—ten degrees above freezing—and humid. The streets seemed less like roads and more like a series of interlocking waterways, navigable channels through islands of slate and brick, cars splashing across their surface, hinting at illusory depths. Sopping drifts disintegrated, feeding puddles that ran the length of the block. The barista was outside smoking.

  “Hey,” she said, “are you coming in?”

  “Yeah, but take your time. In fact?” he nodded at the pack in her hand. “Maybe I could bum one and join you?”

  It was a habit he toyed with in college—reset your mind with nicotine after a few hours’ work, then head back in and evaluate. Eventually he had gotten tired of the smoke sapping his stamina and quit. This was his first cigarette in half a decade—it tasted like seared garbage, but it let him chat with the barista, pass the time. They went in, she poured his coffee and he tossed a few extra dollars into the jar, for the cigarette, and walked to the tables in the back.

  “You serious?” Clint was seated with his back to the rear wall, his bulk dwarfing the tiny table. He was reading his phone, ignoring the Walter Mosley paperback in front of him, the folded Daily News beneath it. His aviators rested near the apex of his shaved head, unneeded in this soppy weather, but ready. He had removed the lid from his towering coffee; the milky liquid inside looked tepid, nacreous. He put his phone down, leaned back and folded his hands over the crest of his hard belly. “Is there anywhere I can go to get away from you? I got dinner plans with my wife tomorrow night, you going to show up at the next table?”

  “Only if you think they won’t have room for all three of us to sit together.”

  Clint kicked the chair out from beneath the table next to his, catty-corner to his own, and nodded at it.

  “I don’t need to bug you right now,” Reddick said.

  “Man, sit down already.”

  Reddick didn’t want to stay, he felt too airy, too aloft, to have this conversation. He wanted to sustain his buzz, to amplify it. His studio full of fresh artwork called to him. Clint was a reminder of commitments, of failures, that he suddenly wanted to wiggle free from.

  But the cop didn’t know any of that. “You think about what I said? That you need to look carefully? Pay attention to specifics?”

  “I did. I made some progress, actually.”

  “That’s good—because there are facts, if you can get to them. That’s what I was trying to say to you, about what good police do. We got eyewitnesses we can’t always believe, evidence we can’t fully trust—plus you got your own self-interest distorting the tiny bit of solid information you do manage to dig up. It’s not a question of whether or not you’re getting something wrong, only how much. But listen to me. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a truth behind it all. There is a fact of the matter—always—even if you can’t see it. What you have to do is keep sorting through all the bullshit to get as close to it as possible.”

  Reddick twitched, nervous to reveal what he had learned to Clint—that all of the cop’s favors and support had come to nothing. “I’m starting to worry the whole thing has been a waste of time.”

  “You said you made progress?”

  “I did. That guy Ju’waun found me.”

  Clint looked concerned. “You alright? He threaten you?”

  “He tried, at first. It was like you said, though, his heart wasn’t in it. We ended up just talking.” He told him about Ju’waun’s revelations, how the connections Reddick had imagined between the two sides of the case were almost all a misunderstanding. “I’m starting to feel like you were right, what you said to me the first time I came to you. Maybe she just left him, and there was never anything to this at all.”

  “So you believe him?”

  “I checked it out. There was a mugging that night. And his reaction—he wasn’t acting.”

  “That sounds like some shit Harold would do.” Clint frowned. “What about the party, though? She was definitely there with those two.”

  “If she was about to leave her fiancé, I don’t know, picking up a guy at a bar makes sense, doesn’t it? I remember she said to me, about being so wasted, that she had earned it. That sounds exactly like what someone would say if they were leaving an unhappy relationship, right? She had earned a night out, earned a random hookup. If she decided, despite the money, she wasn’t happy with Buckley—it couldn’t have been easy to leave, and she was doing it. She had found the strength, she was celebrati
ng. I didn’t think about it before. I didn’t want to. It all seemed like too much of a coincidence. But the harder I look, the less mystery is actually there.”

  “You know who you sound like? Me, a week ago.”

  Reddick glanced across the table, expecting smug satisfaction, but all he saw was disappointment. “I thought you’d enjoy saying that a little more. I’m sorry I wasted your time.”

  “You kidding? Most of what I do is a waste of time. That’s the job, crossing off all the things that don’t matter until you’re left with something that does.” He looked down at his phone, his book. “So that’s it, then?”

  “I haven’t made up my mind yet. But I think it might be.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  Reddick thought about Mrs. Leland, the money. The possibility of following Dean’s lead, grinding in the studio, of having more days like this one, when the work becomes a catalyst for a beatific calm. He thought of Sarah, and that his world was somehow blooming with promise.

  “You know I’ll be in the Y.”

  “I know. You should try the weight room sometime, though. Adding a little muscle to your scrawny ass would probably help your game.”

  Reddick stood up, reached across the table and shook Clint’s hand. “Anything’s possible.”

  * * *

  The afternoon stretched in front of him. He had to make a decision, to call Mrs. Leland and either swallow his pride or sacrifice the money to his principles, but why do it today, why ruin this. He went home, decided to take one more look at the work, to restart the high that Clint had interrupted. The drawing of Hannah was tacked between the two halves of the original map. New paper was collaged around it, riffs on his original, probing notations. He had been thinking of texture, the faint shine of the graphite and the hairy softness of the paper.