by Jack Womack
"I'm sorry," he said. "It's too easy to see what people think."
"But you have to tell them?" I said. "People don't have enough to worry about without strangers raping their minds?"
"People never worry about what they should," he said, "and so often rape happens with someone you thought you loved. You wouldn't trust me if I weren't a stranger."
"Don't they hate you for this in your neighborhood?" I asked. "Reminding people of what they want to forget?"
"It's a sin to see wrong and do nothing about it."
"So God's the greatest sinner?" I asked, the Bernard in my soul leaping forth.
"Yes and no," he said. We passed an old post office recycled years ago into a Health Service clinic. A long line of silent people awaited entry into the waiting room. Brass railings green with verdigris guarded its graffitied walls. A sign affixed to the granite tallied late additions to the six billion.
NEEDLES AVAILIBLE DAILY
9AM1PM
Hope Will Find A Way
"Even They have to make the best of what They've made," he continued. "Does it make sense that in a better world this would be a better world?"
I wondered what might be expected of God-Godness if Their apparent messenger could sound so transcendent. "You see what you showed me all the time or only if you want to?"
"How else?" he asked, laughing. A wild wind, an angel's breath, swept his hair across his forehead, for a moment taking twenty years from his look. "I've learned to live with what comes to me."
"Can you see the future?"
"Can't you?" he asked, sweeping his arm out before us. The familiar whoop of an oncoming siren sounded as an infant's wail. Facing the street, we lifted our arms above our heads. The mayor's limo rolled uptown, surrounded by motorcycle cops, preceded and followed by flatbed trucks carrying soldiers thrusting their rifles forth in every direction, pins in pincushions.
"He never visits my neighborhood," he said. "When they pass I'm always tempted to keep walking as the hearingimpaired do-"
"You'd be shot as they're always shot," I said.
"Considering how he treats the innocent, how does your Mister Dryden deal with the guilty?"
"Depends on who's guilty of what," I said. "He never gets his own hands dirty." My earlier question returned to mind. "You never said if you could see the future. Can you?"
"Some people's futures," he said.
"Whose?"
"Mine," he said. "Yours."
Reaching the corner of Duane Street South we stopped for the light; someone else stopped. There was nothing Thatcher had taught me so well as the acceptance of fear's comfort. Seeing no one, I knew they were there.
"We're being followed," I said.
"No, we're not-"
"Listen."
Food wholesalers still plied their trade along Duane Street from their old brick buildings; trucks idled beneath overhanging metal awnings as teamsters loaded them with milk and cheese. The din was conveniently loud.
"I don't hear anything," he said.
"Let's get out of here." A dark triangle of park lay between Duane Street's legs. Within the small plot were dozens of sleepers wrapped in the blankets upon which, the next morning, they'd peddle magazines retrieved from dentist's offices. Bernard said it was easier, now, to live in Calcutta; it was never cold in Calcutta. Growing used to the pounding of the trucks' heartbeats I heard again what I didn't want to hear, footsteps racing with quicker rhythm than ours. Wishing I'd worn lower heels, I trotted leftward, Lester close behind. I heard the pop of a firecracker; having heard the sound, knew I hadn't yet been shot.
"God," I said. "Run!" We dashed up a side street on the north border of the square, our feet slipping over Belgian block. The street was so narrow that its low buildings seemed three times as high as they were; only a solitary lamppost broke the two-block gloom. An enclosed bridge of almost Venetian appearance ran between buildings nearest the light, several stories above the street. We could have as easily run into the last century and not known, so unaltera bly ancient were our surroundings. Where the dark was deepest we pressed ourselves into a wall.
"Why are we running?" Lester asked as we waited.
"They're shooting."
"Who?" I shook my head, imagining a deli's wealth of selections. The assailants of Jensen, working their way through the repertoire; Jake, having acted upon second thoughts; soldiers taking target practice, a sniper warming up before performance, an accountant upset with her husband. Some shot only for the love of the sound.
"Anybody after you besides us?" I asked.
"Not anymore," he said. "Do you think he's behind it?"
"We'd never know. Gus would be handling it if that's the case-
"The old guy?"
"He's had experience-"
"Breaking children's fingers?"
"He shot three Presidents." All remained quiet, but it didn't matter. Patience was all; we couldn't move, if we were to be missed. Had I been left to simmer in my own juices I might never have moved again. A door slammed, down where the trucks waited to pull out, and I glanced at their lights. When I turned around I saw Lester walking into the middle of the dead street to wait there, as if to see who might notice. As he stood beneath the streetlamp's halflight, Lester almost appeared to glow from within, his aura assuredly no less radioactive than numinous.
"Nothing's happened to us yet, Joanna," he said. Returning to where I stood, fastened onto the brick, he took my arm and pulled me away. Down on Duane Street the trucks revved, pulling out to make their deliveries. My stomach burned as if my ulcers were newly aflame; I sank to my knees, my strings cut. Wanting to throw up, I threw out only near-tears, crying without wet, without sound, that no others might see, or hear, and so gain awareness I didn't want them to have. "No," he said. "It's all right. It is." As he stroked my back I began to recover, drawing long, dry breaths; my head reattached itself to my body. "A truck backfiring. Must have been. If somebody was after us we've given them plenty of opportunity."
"They have that anyway," I said; it did seem safe enough, for the moment. Lester helped me to my feet; when we walked off I noticed the street's name. I'd never heard of Staple Street but others must have, for they lived there. A nearby window showed kitchenlight; boxes of catfood on the sill, a dead plant, a plastic hanukiah. We turned right, toward Hudson Street.
"This happen to you often?" Lester asked. My mouth ached as I answered, so harshly had I bridled myself against my tears.
"It didn't used to," I said. "This is too much. I hate being afraid all the time. I hate what I am. How I live-"
"Don't say that."
"I hate what I've done. What they've done to me. I hate so much and I can't let it out." So often so-called new men purport to admire the inherent gentleness of women, only demonstrating they know women no better than old men; too often a woman recirculates her rage through herself, settling upon the likeliest victim in the most practical way. Men play at anger, as at a game; so many times, in those days, I too could have taken a machete and hacked through any subway-car's passengers, but for a reason.
"You hate what you've let them do to you?" he asked.
"That too." Hudson Street looked so much more of our time than had Staple Street that you could almost imagine people still using it. Cars two to twenty years old lined the curbs. Traffic restrictions ended a block below Canal Street, and as we drew closer the streets began filling with traffic. On the city entrance of the Holland Tunnel, at the end of Canal, the Army ran a haphazard checkpoint, stopping and searching vehicles for improprieties that might be seized and resold. The line of cars awaiting entrance into the city ran, at all hours, five miles deep into Jersey; Dryco and Army cars had their own lane, and so passed more easily. The rumor was that the soldiers, to cut costs, reused their testing needles on their successive suspects.
"We cross north?" Lester asked. No taxis grazed our flanks as we raced across Canal; no tanks flattened us, rolling down their center lane. One of several
doublelength semis almost blew us over with its wind, careening past. On the trailer was the Kraft logo; superimposed upon that, the Dryco smile.
"You were right, what you said. I'd trust a stranger before I'll trust a friend."
"For the right reasons?" Lester asked.
"Friends always expect you to behave in a certain way. When you don't, sometimes, they're disappointed, sometimes they hate you. Sometimes I think people have friends only to make sure they can always be hurt."
"So you behave differently around strangers," he said.
"I'm looser," I said. "Thatcher likes everyone highstrung. And the people I've known the longest and have been the closest to are also the biggest liars I know, so-"
"How much do you think has rubbed off on you?"
On the far corner an enormous office building had been torn down years before for luxury apartments never built. Hundreds of smaller residences were scattered across the lot in its stead: boxes and crates, ill-pitched tents, tin-walled huts, clusters of cardboard. At the neighborhood's center stood a small frame shack, surely the home of that community's Thatcher.
"Enough, I'm afraid," I said. "I used to have so many more friends."
"What happened to them?"
"Bankrupt between breakfast and lunch," I said. "Lost their jobs. Their apartments. If I saw them I wouldn't know them now."
"You would," said Lester.
"It was just luck it didn't happen to me," I said. "Bernard moved to Dryco just before. I moved as well. The right place, the right time. I couldn't help it."
"It's all right-"
"It'd never happen again," I said. "Everything hinges on his behavior. My life depends on how crazy he gets. I don't like it."
Along these blocks the remnant of a more traditional neighborhood remained: a diner, a deli, a row of shops partially rented. In the deli window was a sign written in Korean and English, reading Japs Keep Out, looking so old as to refer to Axis-allied Japan. The doors of stores were open to catch cool evening breezes. Two young girls thrashed about on the sidewalk, arguing and cursing, pinning one another with pipestem legs; they looked Jake's age, or younger. A gang of boys hooted; several older men watched, keeping their hands in their pockets. The girls screamed, oblivious to sideshow eyes.
"You said that older man killed three Presidents," Lester said. Three teenagers, their shaved heads making them resemble mad insects, shoved by us as they made for the brawl. "Who was the third?"
"Gus was on the grassy knoll," I said. The crowd's scream faded to a whisper, the farther we drew from it. Lester took so long to respond that I wondered if he'd heard me.
"You're serious?"
"That's what Thatcher told me. As I understand it Gus didn't know Oswald was there until they started shooting. I suppose they were as shocked as anyone."
"Who fired the shot that killed him?"
"Gus isn't sure," I said.
One last small shop sold mineral specimens, petals of stone, roses plucked from the rock. I doubted the doctors had a lease. After that the street passed through dead blocks, every building's windows and storefronts boarded up as against the flood. Flowered decals brightened some windows' blinders. Sprigs of colorless grass sprouted through the broken sidewalk. So abandoned in haste did all appear that I imagined entering any of the buildings, finding coffee still warm in cups, toothpaste still wet upon brushes, and not even a scrap to show where everyone went.
"That your company's mark?" Lester asked, pointing toward an upper floor. Plastered below the cornices were block-long posters advertising the new development shortly rising on that lot. They'd missed the target completion date by three years. It seemed too late to idly seek logos, but at last I saw what he saw, a small design in no way resembling Dryco's empyrean leer.
"Bank of Nippon," I said. "Their mark. These are some more frozen assets. I'm sure he'll wind up with them eventually. I've lost track of half of what they have."
"Do they own everything?" Lester asked, seeming overly aware of what everything contained.
"Every business has a little bit of Dryco in it."
"How'd they do it?" he asked. "Luck? Did they plan it?"
"Their government reps found out about the revaluation before it went into effect," I said, explaining it as I'd heard it from Bernard. "Some of them suggested it. Before it went through the Drydens'd already traded the old money in for new bills. They wanted to see their competition in the drug field out of business as badly as the government did, of course. When the market crashed Susie was the only one able to buy. She bought fifty percent of seventy companies. That was all they needed."
"What was he doing at the time?"
"Conferring in Washington," I said. "By sunset the deals were done. I don't think either of them knew before it happened how far they'd be able to take it."
It was such an odd feeling to speak to another without interruption, certain too that I was being heard. "She seems the more pragmatic of the two," he said. "She knows about you and-"
I nodded. "Everybody knows, I think. Sometimes I talk to Avi about it. Bernard never wants to hear." Somewhere to the north something blew up. I wondered if we'd find my house where I'd left it. "Thatcher was sort of a rebound, after Avi."
On the side of a building was another aging billboard, this one older than many. God Sees Those Who Come Unto Him was the message printed below the photo. Swastikas were scrawled across the picture's faces, the survivors on their day of liberation. Avi's father had been in Maidanek during most of the war. With his family he left Crown Heights when the Army entered Brooklyn. Avi sent half of his salary every month to their upstate shtetl. Does he know how you earn your money? I asked him, on our last night.
He knows a purpose beyond understanding, Avi replied.
A guard's supposed to defend. Thatcher says kill and you go after anyone he wants.
It's my job.
Nazi, I called him.
There's no comparison. The Drydens are like a mother animal rolling over and suffocating her young as she sleeps.
They're not so unconscious.
Nor are you, he said, kissing my hands. I allowed myself to reenter my unavoidable world. "Joanna?" Lester asked. "You there?"
"I'd never thought about Thatcher before," I said. "Not in that way. Not until later. So much could have been avoided. I might still be myself."
"Maybe," said Lester. "They provide maps without roads. We have to hack our own path."
"They," I repeated. "Are there really two of Them?"
"Way I describe it isn't strictly accurate," he said. "Problem of popularizing. Everybody understands, at least, way I tell it. The split between Their aspects is a decided one, I'm never sure which One I'm hearing until I listen a spell. And I can always talk to Them, see, but They don't always talk to me.
"But you can talk to Them-"
"Not incessantly," he said, "and They don't tell me everything."
"If They're separate," I asked, "what tore Them apart?"
Signs noting curfew were so peppered by gunblasts that they could have been used as graters. As two halftracks rumbled downtown no fresh shots rang out, no footsteps echoed but our own, and none in command chose to stop us for interrogation. I dreamed of safety, so close to home. "Creation," he said.
"How?"
"A difficult birth," he said. "Whether They're truly split, I'd hate to say. I'm not sure that They even know. It's a spiritual division more than a physical, I believe."
"If They are split," I said, "could They ever reunite?"
He nodded. "There's a problem in that."
"What else is new?-"
"If They do, the world will be made anew. But that means the world as we know it must end."
"It must?" I asked. "You know that?"
"They pull up the corner of a blanket sometimes and show me what's underneath. When They feel like it They show me something else. It's up to me to draw the inferences. The blind men and the elephant, nothing more."
Ki
ng Street was a block away; something hung from my corner's lamppost but it didn't look as if it had ever been alive. Tank-treads rutted the new-tarred pavement, looking as fossils on the land. "Thanks for walking with me," I said. "I live around the corner. Would you like to come in?"
"Sure."
"I'm sorry I ask so many questions," I said.
"You know the story of Job?" Hearing no response, he continued. "Job questioned God. God questioned Job in return. They made an arrangement and Job returned to his life. Years later a stranger called on Job, demanding to know the answer to a question. 'He tells you to speak to Him as an equal and you let Him treat you like that?' the stranger asked, and Job answered, 'Listening to Him as He spoke I realized that the Creator may need neither sense nor sanity to do as He does, and that our failings in such may be more godlike than we know. It seemed most reasonable to agree with everything He said."'
I brushed the day's debris from my steps with my foot into a neat pile at the bottom. My neighbor screamed, welcoming us home; Lester seemed afraid until he saw I could no longer respond to her voice. Bernard once told me how the screams of children in his building kept him awake at night. "That wasn't all that happened," Lester continued. "'You have no more questions?' God asked Job, he told the stranger, and Job had one more question, but worried that he'd tested God too much, and so for an endless time only mouthed the word with his lips. 'You don't learn if you don't ask,' God said.
"'Why?' Job finally asked, but God was gone."
FIVE
Switching off the alarms I flipped on the overheads, bringing light throughout my house. "This is all your place?" Lester asked, hovering behind me as if fearful to step further into the entry. Once he came in I reset the alarm, locked the five locks, slid the police bar back up. If anyone lay in wait I had a gun in my purse, but I had never had to use it.