The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye

by Jonathan Lethem

  Don, his movements exaggerated and slow, put a rock of coke into the glass pipe and flicked his lighter enticingly. The Sufferer trotted forward, like it had read the script, and Annette and I almost fell on our faces.

  Douglas didn’t find it funny. “Get back out here,” he said to me, and when I obliged he reached over and slammed the door shut with Annette inside. “Sit down,” he told me, and I did it.

  The Sufferer, of course, paid him no mind. It went past us all, into the kitchen.

  “What’s on your mind?” said Don drawlingly, lighting the pipe.

  “I want you and your monster out of Annette’s life, Light,” said Douglas. “She’s told me plenty about you.”

  “Why not? I’m her boyfriend.”

  “You’re not her boyfriend,” snarled Douglas. “You’re her dealer. Only you’re not even around enough to do a good job of that.” From the kitchen came a crash of breaking glass. Douglas looked in, then turned back to Don. “You get Annette hooked and then she’s gotta go out and find her own because you smoked up your whole shipment. You pathetic piece of human garbage.”

  “Fuck told you that shit?”

  “What, is it a shock to find out that you’re known, you sleazeball?”

  Another crash from the kitchen, and then a sound like chimes: the Sufferer wading through the glass or ceramic it had broken.

  “What’s your—monster-thing doing?” said Douglas. I got the feeling that his castigating Don was the fulfillment of a long-standing fantasy, only the Sufferer wasn’t part of the scenario.

  “I told you, it’s not my thing, I don’t tell it what to do, man.”

  “Is that why you’re trying to unload all this stuff on my sister—the monster won’t let you use it anymore?”

  Don just smirked. “The monster’s ‘using it’ with me. I don’t tell it what to do and it don’t tell me what to do.”

  “It’s following you because you’re dead, you loser. You’re smoking your life away—it’s like your death angel.”

  “That’s not right,” I said. “It’s nothing like that. It’s an empathy thing, it’s responding to the life in Don—”

  “Yeah, right. The life. You people are walking corpses.

  And I’ll finish you off myself if you don’t leave my sister alone.”

  “You wanna kill me, huh?” said Don.

  “I will if I have to. Before you destroy my sister’s life like you destroyed your own. Before one of those death creatures comes prowling around for her.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “You never met a Sufferer before, you have no idea how they operate.”

  “You never met me before, either,” said Don.

  “I heard all I need to know from your sleazebag pusher friends,” said Douglas.

  “What?” said Don, suddenly attentive.

  “When you disappeared, Annette started buying from this black dude who called around for you. Real pimpy type of guy. I had to call the cops on him. I should call the cops on you.”

  “Who—Annette!” Don jumped up.

  “Randall,” said Douglas. “Randall whose shipment you singlehandedly smoked up. I’m surprised you’re not dead by now.”

  Annette looked out of the bedroom. “You gave him my number, Light, remember? He called here looking for you about, I don’t know, four or five days ago—”

  “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said Don. “Give me my gun.” He knelt down and began scooping the vials back into his parka.

  “Take your crap with you,” said Douglas. “Go get nice and high on it. But I think I’d better keep the gun.”

  “Fuck you, man—”

  “No, fuck you.” Douglas clicked the safety off. I was surprised he knew how. Then he put his foot on Don’s shoulder and shoved him back on his ass on the carpet. “No more bullshit, Light. You leave Annette alone, no calls, no late-night visits, got it? And I’m keeping the gun. You’re lucky I don’t call the cops.”

  “Call the cops, see if I give a damn, man. You don’t have a fucking clue.” Don stood up. He came up to Douglas’s shoulder, but he was crowding the gun, and Douglas took a step back. I thought about trying to step in and realized my whole body was trembling.

  The Sufferer came out of the kitchen, pumping forward on its massive black legs, and rushed up to where Douglas stood. It opened its strange black mouth and emitted a sound, something between a howl and a moan. Actually, it sounded like a man bellowing as he fell down a bottomless well, complete with echoes and Doppler effects.

  At the same time chunks of broken glass fell out of its mouth at Douglas’s feet, and on his shoes.

  Douglas pointed the gun and fired, at almost the exact same spot on the alien’s big bulldog chest. The noise, in the quiet apartment, was deafening. Douglas dropped the weapon and grabbed his hand, wincing.

  Don immediately picked it up.

  “Go,” he said to me, and nodded at the door. Then he bent back down to collect the last of his vials, sweeping up the empties along with them.

  Douglas stood holding his hand, watching the Sufferer. The creature had rolled back on its haunches at the impact of the gunshot, and now it was shaking its head vigorously, and spitting out more shards of glass.

  Don pushed the gun back into his belt and hustled me towards the door, and then turned and slapped Douglas ever so lightly on the cheek. Like he wanted to wake him up, not hurt him. “You mess up your hand?” he said. Douglas didn’t say anything.

  “Maybe your sister can rub it for you. See ya.”

  We ran to the elevator, the Sufferer leaping after us.

  Out on the street Don said: “Hell was it doing?”

  “It got you your gun back,” I said.

  “Yeah, but what was it doing, eating the dishes?” He knelt down and looked in the Sufferer’s mouth. “Jesus.” He reached in and pulled out a chunk of glass that was lodged there. The Sufferer snorted and shook its head.

  “It’s like the one soft spot, the whatchacallit, Achilles tendon,” Don said. “I wonder if I could kill it by shooting it in the mouth?”

  “Donnie! That’s not cool. It saved you up there. Besides, you can’t kill them, I read it—”

  “Okay, shut up.” He tossed the glass out into the street, under a parked car.

  “Now what?” I said, and then quickly made my nomination: “The airport? Or Port Authority, catch a Greyhound upstate?”

  Don didn’t say anything.

  “Upstate, New York State, isn’t breaking parole, right? You can do anything you want, doesn’t matter if the Sufferer’s following you. I bet they’ve never seen one of these guys up there, huh?”

  “I gotta sell the shit,” said Don. “The triangle on 72nd and Broadway. I can move it there. C’mon, we can walk across.” He started towards Central Park.

  We ran after him, me and the Sufferer. “Don, wait. Why can’t we just go? What are you stalling for?”

  “Damn, Paul, you can’t just show up with this idea and rush me out of town. Maybe I don’t want to go to California. Maybe at least you ought to let me clear up my damn business before we go, okay?”

  “What? What?” As if the robbery hadn’t happened, or as if it weren’t connected to the plan, a plan he’d already agreed to.

  “Relax, okay. Damn. We’ll go. Just let me unload the stuff, okay?”

  We walked to the edge of the park on the empty streets, the three of us. In silence, until Don said, without turning: “It’s been a while since we were in touch.”

  “What? Yeah, I guess. What do you mean?”

  “That’s all, just it’s been a while. We didn’t, like, keep up on each other’s lives or anything.”

  “Yeah,” I said, chilled.

  Central Park at night made me think of high school, of smoking pot with my Upper West Side friends. White people’s drugs, drugs for the kids who stay in school, go to college. While back in Brooklyn, Don was finding the other kind, the drugs for the black kids, t
he ones who wouldn’t go to college even if they bluffed it through high school.

  Now my West Side friends were all off at college, in various parts of the country, and I was back in town to sell drugs at 72nd and Broadway, under their parents’ windows.

  The Sufferer seemed to like the park. Several times it roamed wide of us, disappearing briefly in the trees. When we crossed Central Park West, though, it was back close at our heels.

  We set up at the benches on the triangle, along with some sleeping winos. There was a black kid, too, who kept crossing the street to the subway and ducking inside, then crossing back to the triangle. He and the Sufferer exchanged a long look, then the kid went back to his pacing routine, and the Sufferer jumped over the bench, into the little plot of land the pavement and benches encircled. I hoped it would stay there, more or less out of sight from the street.

  “This is dead, Don.”

  “Relax. It’s where you come, up here. It’s the only place to score.”

  “It’s Tuesday night.”

  “Junkies don’t know weekends, man.”

  “We’re gonna get arrested. This is just like a target, like sitting in the middle of a target.”

  “Shut up. You’re being a chump. Forget the cops.”

  A chump. The unkindest cut. I shut up. Don got out his pipe and smoked away another rock of the product. I had a hit too. The Sufferer didn’t seem as interested. And we waited.

  The traffic on Broadway was all cabs, and—surprise!—two of them pulled over and transacted business with Don. One was slumming West Side yuppies on their way to a club, men overdressed, women waiting in the back of the cab, relieved laughter when the males returned safely. The other was two blacks in the front seat, the cabbie and a pal, with the cab still available. I ached to push Don in the back and take off, but I stayed shut up.

  Another customer walked up, from the park side. He caught up with the kid, who shook his head, nodded at us, and made his jog across the street to the subway station again while the street was clear. Don made the sale and the guy headed back the way he’d come.

  I was just noticing that this time the kid hadn’t come back to the triangle when the truck pulled up. A van, really, like a UPS delivery truck but covered with layers of graffiti and minor dents, and missing doors on both sides. It pulled around the triangle the wrong way, bringing down a plague of honking from cabs.

  Don said: “Oh shit.”

  “What?”

  “That’s Randall’s truck.” But he didn’t move, or reach for the gun.

  The driver kicked the emergency brake down and turned to us holding a toy-like machine gun. I figured it wasn’t a toy. “Is that Randall?” I said.

  “Nah. Shut up now.”

  The man in the passenger seat came around the front. Well dressed, unarmed. “Light,” he said.

  “Yo, Randall.”

  “Get in the back. This your man?” He raised his chin at me. His voice had a slight Caribbean lilt.

  Don shrugged.

  “You took my safe house tonight, my man?” Randall asked me. He was clean and pretty, like some young, unbeaten boxer. But he had a boiled-looking finger-thick scar running all along the right underside of his jaw, and where it would have crossed his ear the lobe was missing.

  “That’s me,” I said, dorkily.

  “Come along.” He made it sound jolly. He opened the back. Inside were Kaz and Drey, sitting on tires, looking miserable.

  I tried to catch Don’s eye, but he just trudged forward and stepped up into the back. I went after him.

  I glanced over my shoulder, but didn’t spot the Sufferer. Bandall climbed in behind us, slammed the two doors shut, and went up to the front. There wasn’t any divider, just a big open metal box with two bucket seats in front of the window, and a steering wheel on a post to the floor. The driver handed Randall the little machine gun and took off across Broadway, down 72nd Street.

  Don and I leaned against the back. I looked out the back window and just caught sight of the pay phone on the far side of the subway entrance.

  We rattled to the end of 72nd, under the West Side Highway and parked out on the stretch of nothing before the water. It’s always amazing to get to the edge of Manhattan and see how much stuff there is between the city—you know, the city that you think of, the city people use—and the real edge of the island. You think of it as being like a raft of skyscrapers, buildings to the edge, and instead there’s the edge of the island. Boathouses, concrete and weeds, places that nobody cares about.

  Unfortunately, at the moment.

  The driver serving as gunman again, Randall opened the back and steered us out into a dark, empty garage, a sort of cinderblock shell full of rusted iron drums and piles of rotting linoleum tile. The floor was littered with glass and twisted, rusty cable. A seagull squawked out of our path, flapping but not taking off, then refolded its wings and wobbled outside once we were safely past. Kaz and Drey both looked back dubiously, acting more like fellow captives than Randall’s henchmen, but Randall kept nodding us forward, until the moonlight from the garage entrance petered out and we all stood in darkness.

  “You messin’ up, Light,” said Randall.

  “Here’s your stuff,” said Don, scooping in his parka pockets. He sounded afraid. I wondered where the Sufferer was.

  “That’s good. Give it to Drey. You make a little green out there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You smoke up a little, there, too?”

  Before Don could squeak “Yeah” again Randall stepped forward and smacked him, viciously hard, across the mouth. Don’s foot slipped and skidded through the broken glass, but he kept from falling.

  “Relax, relax,” said Randall suddenly, as though some protest had been raised. “We ain’t killing you tonight, Light. But we gotta talk about this funny stuff, you chumps playing with my money. You think you takin’ Kaz but it’s all my money, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s like it’s all a game, like Monopoly money, you and Kaz can just fuckin’ play with it.”

  “Kaz didn’t do anything wrong,” said Don.

  “Kaz a sucker get taken by a chump like you.” He raised his hand and Kaz flinched. Leaving his hand in the air, he turned to me. “Who’s your man here?”

  “Paul.”

  “He your brother?”

  “Nah.”

  Randall looked at Kaz and Drey. “This the dude?”

  Kaz nodded.

  Randall stared at me, but he was still talking to Don. “You tell him Randall got some easy money, some play money, just laying around? You tell him I’m a fuckin’ chump?”

  “Randall, we didn’t even take your money. Just some dope, man. We only took money off Kaz and Drey.”

  “My dope is money, stupid. My dope is product. Not for you to fuckin’ smoke. Why you so stupid, crackhead?”

  At that moment a shadow slipped in through the moonlit garage entrance, then almost disappeared into the darkness. The Sufferer. I felt relieved, like it was the cavalry. But when it came into the circle it stepped up beside Randall, and then I saw that it wasn’t the same. It was bigger than ours, its eyes were longer, slits instead of ovals, and the strangely human nose was pushed to one side. A scarred Sufferer, for Randall.

  “Here’s my thing,” said Randall. “I heard you got a thing, yourself. You been seen around town together.”

  “Uh, yeah. So what?”

  “So what? That the only reason I came up here to talk to you myself, you think I bother with a fuckin’ chump like you? Only reason my man didn’t do you in a drive-by on Broadway.”

  “What, you like them? You can have mine.”

  “Naw, why you have to get fresh, Light?” He leaned over and slapped Don again, but lightly. It was the same slap Don had used on Douglas, exactly the same. Don was a reflexive mimic. “You disappoint me.”

  Don didn’t speak.

  “What does it want?” said Randall.

  “I don’t know
.”

  Randall made a face. “I can’t get rid of the sucker. It wants me to stop—stop livin’ the life?”

  “I said I don’t know.”

  “Because I’m not a user, Light, I’m not like you. What’s it trying to say to me?” Randall lurched forward and Don flinched. Intimidation, I sensed, was a way of life for Randall. It even leaked into interactions where he wanted to propagate trust. He couldn’t help it.

  “Nothing,” said Don.

  Randall turned and paced in a tight, impatient circle. “I wanna know, Light. Why this thing in my life, what the meaning is. Tell me.”

  It occurred to me that Randall thought Don knew because he was white.

  “Nothing.”

  “Must want something, everybody wants something, Light. It stop you from using?”

  “It doesn’t give a shit, Randall. It smokes rock. It’s a party animal, man.”

  “Gonna turn me in? Working for the Narcotics?”

  “Sure, I don’t know. This is fuckin’ stupid, Randall.”

  Randall wheeled. “What you sayin’? It’s gathering evidence, man? Tell me what you know!”

  Kaz and Drey shifted nervously. The gun man cleared his throat.

  “Nothing, Randall, man. It can’t fuckin’ talk, it’s from another planet, man. Can’t turn you in. Relax. It’s really got you rattled, man.”

  “So tell me what it wants.”

  “Nothing. It’s just . . . trying to, you know, get along.” Don sighed. “Really, Randall. Everybody wants it to be about something, or up to something, but it’s just, like . . . attracted. All the explanations are bullshit.”

  “That’s not right,” I blurted. “It’s like a guardian angel. It’s drawn to you because it senses something—”

  I hesitated, and saw that I had everyone’s undivided attention.

  “—because it feels this sense that you’re, uh, important, your life is important, and so it’s drawn to you.” I was going in circles. “It’s not judging you, it’s not moralistic. That’s why it doesn’t try to stop you, try to change your behavior, why it’ll even share the pipe. Drugs aren’t the point, it’s not some simplistic thing like they make it out to be, it’s more subtle than that. It wants to be around you and protect you because—your life is important. And it’s afraid that you don’t—care enough. So it’s trying to do that, to care—”