When he came out of the bathroom, she helped dress him. Usually men acted triumphant after having sex with you for the first time. But he seemed moody again, and asked her if she minded if they left the hotel separately, just out of deference to the chance that he might run into someone he knew.
She pretended not to be bothered. “That’s fine, Charlie.”
He pulled on his suit jacket, tossed the room key onto the dresser.
“I want to see you when you get back,” she said.
He nodded. “Six or seven days. Maybe sooner.”
“You mind if I check with your office?” she asked, realizing that he couldn’t call her.
“You can, but my secretary won’t tell you when I’m returning.”
“Can you tell her to tell me?”
He knotted his tie. “I can, but she’ll find that unusual.”
“I might be a little hard to reach. That’s why I’m asking.”
He considered this. “You never gave me a phone number.”
“No,” she admitted.
“I could just call you when I get back,” he said.
“Maybe it’s better if I call you.”
He stared at her but didn’t say anything. He’s too smart to ask why, she thought.
“Call my office in five days,” said Charlie, “and tell my secretary, whose name is Karen, your name. I’ll leave a particular message just for you.”
“Okay,” she answered.
“Okay—just okay, or okay-good?”
“Okay-good.” She hugged him. He made her feel safe, he really did.
AFTER HE LEFT, she went to the window and wondered if she might see him outside. It would take a few minutes to get downstairs, and she waited until finally a tall figure that looked like Charlie crossed the street carefully, perhaps with pensiveness, and limped into the shadows under the trees. I kind of love him already, she thought, but I’m not going to let myself do that. She got up and walked to the bathroom and washed her face and reapplied her lipstick and put all of the soaps and shampoos and other miniature toiletries into her bag. She looked in the minibar and took a couple of the airplane bottles. Then she took the rest of them, plus a candy bar and a jar of cashews. She opened a whiskey and finished it in three swallows. Wow, she said. Then she brushed her hair again and sighed aloud and said okay into the mirror, trying to convince herself that she was ready to leave, that everything was fine. Why wouldn’t it be?
No one bothered her on the way out, no one looked at her as if she was a hooker or something. The doorman in the gray top hat and white gloves just nodded and asked if she needed a cab and she said yes, feeling a little dreamy. This was the way money worked. If there’s money, people open the door for you. The cab pulled up. So, okay, it was an older-man thing. Fine. It wasn’t going to be about sex, not really, but she’d been turned on, actually. Next time would be better. He’d liked her, she was sure. He’d taken a while but he’d responded. She felt good about it, even happy.
The cab flew down Fifth Avenue, the lights of midtown pinwheeling past, and she could tell that the driver was surprised where she was going, considering where he’d picked her up. She asked him to stop at the corner of East Fourth Street, where she got out and picked up some groceries at the all-night deli. A minute later, inside her doorway, she found her key and then sleepily climbed the steps.
She reached her floor carrying the groceries and glanced down the hallway—her door was open. She stopped. All the doors to the other rooms were shut; behind one she could hear reedy Indian music and maybe smell the drift of pot, but the hallway felt empty, desolate. No one had noticed she was standing there, just as apparently no one had noticed that someone had opened her locked door. Who was in there?
She took one more step. Maybe it would be better to go back to find the landlady. But Mrs. Sanders was an old woman with cat food in her ear. She took two more steps, heard nothing. If someone was waiting for her, he’d be standing silently. She pulled a glass jar of tomato sauce out of the bag to throw. She slipped off her shoes and slid down the hallway.
All the lights in her room were on. She pushed at the door. Inside—her bed, her bureau. They’d poked around but not torn it up. The boxes of papers belonging to Melissa Williams were untouched.
The bathroom—a sound. She screamed and threw the jar of tomato sauce. It broke against the wall, the sauce leaving a smear of red down the tiles.
She waited.
Nothing. She looked in the tub. How stupid she felt. It was simple. Maybe Mrs. Sanders had been through and had forgotten the lights and door. Maybe the electric meter needed to be read. Something like that.
It was when she pressed her door shut to lock it safely that she saw the Polaroid taped at nose-height. At first she didn’t understand. It was simple to understand, she knew, but she was not yet understanding. She wasn’t ready to understand it. The fact of the photo, as well as the care with which it was placed, were confusing in and of themselves, but not as much as what it showed—a man with a trimmed beard looking right at her in fear. It was Rick, that was Rick’s face, with some kind of swollen, bluish wound to his cheek, and he was holding up—something—he was looking right at the camera, face sweaty and afraid, and he was holding up his—now she saw it, saw the horror—they’d cut it off. His left arm, above the elbow, something clamped on it to stop the bleeding—they’d cut off his left arm just above the elbow, cut clean like a butcher cut a ham, and with his other arm he was lifting the stump up to her. Come forward, his eyes said, go back.
She knew then, beyond her fear that Rick had been punished for her acts, that he had again turned her life against the direction she sought. She understood, without the how or the why, that he’d led them to her. All she wanted, had ever wanted, was to be free, to have some peace. She felt the return of a very old weight, a weight she’d first carried before she’d been arrested, when she knew she had to escape Rick and the others; it was huge, a pile of bricks, a weight that had achieved its most vicious unmovability in the days after she’d arrived in prison, when, looking at the walls and the razor wire and the deadened eyes of the women around her, she’d thought, If this is what has come of love, I will be careful in the future, I will think about how I love in a different way, because the old way has just about killed me. I will start new on love and not expect it to look or sound like it did before. And that was what happened with Mazy, who was so hollowed out by sorrow that she’d responded to the simplest of affections with parched appreciation. The weight had lessened then, as Christina decided that she’d live among the other women and not against them. It was not their fault she was there. Now, looking at the clean, wet cross section of Rick’s muscular arm, and with Charlie’s crisp business card in her purse and his semen between her legs, she felt the old weight return in its full measure, the heaviness like a pile of bricks the size of a church, and she thought again—not yet with bitterness or sudden fear but with an appalled sadness: This is what has come of my love.
EMERGENCY ROOM, BELLEVUE HOSPITAL
EAST TWENTY-SEVENTH STREET AND FIRST AVENUE, MANHATTAN
SEPTEMBER 22, 1999
THE GIANT TOMATO PLANTS lay in exact lines, each perfectly staked, and he walked along them in the sun, touching the basketball-sized fruits, most red, some still green, and their absolute perfection pleased him; not one was bruised or damaged by insects. If he pressed his nose through the vines and peered close to the tomatoes, actually brushed his eyelashes against their tightened skins, he could see inside them like translucent balloons; to his delight each contained his mother’s red face, her eyes shut in private exhaustion, her mouth open just enough to take another shallow, labored breath. She’d tied a handkerchief over her thinning hair. Her eyes opened unevenly, like the weighted lids of a doll. Hello, Ricky-love. Mommy’s tired today. She smiled with a false sweetness that begged him to go elsewhere for affection, for she was busy dying—your mother is very sick, son, we have to keep the house quiet for her—and the
n she could no longer even smile, and her eyes closed, again unevenly like a doll’s, except this time one eye remained open a few seconds too long, watching strangely. He drew back from the tomatoes and resumed walking through the rows, toward his yellow truck parked nearby, and as he stepped over the soft earth, the plants changed in size, not only shrinking from the height of his shoulders to his waist to his knees to his feet but the rows narrowing as well, such that he understood that his size was changing, that he was growing up and away, so much that the tomato plants were now merely a green velveteen fuzz he brushed with his fingers. An excremental black ooze appeared, exactly the same stuff that came out of the diseased oysters that dragged up in the fishing net. You didn’t want the oysters, they made you sick, but here they were growing all over his truck, little ones covering the bumper and hood and doors and roof, and he had to flick on the wipers to keep them off the windshield. The wipers crunched the oyster shells, leaving a brown-green smear across the glass. He got out of the truck and grabbed the snow shovel he kept behind the backseat. You had to scrape them fast before they grew back, and of course he was taking some of the paint off the truck, couldn’t be helped. He worked for a few minutes and pushed the oysters into a crunchy pile, shoveling them like heavy-grade gravel, then retrieved the gas can from the truck and splashed it over the oysters. The matches were in his breast pocket. A quick puff of flame, then black smoke. Fucking oysters. The shells softened and sagged in the heat, burning like rubber, bubbling and fusing into a blackened soup that cooled quickly as the flames died away. A large black pancake remained. He pushed the blade of the snow shovel under one edge and lifted; as he suspected, a glistening metallic undersurface revealed itself. With the shovel he loosened around the edges and flipped over the giant black disk. The thing was immensely heavy; he could feel the quadriceps in his thighs gather, tightening the tendons around his knees, his calf muscles knot as they contracted. Easy, Rick, keep it balanced so you get the perfect flip. The edges sagged over the snow shovel like a dead thing. He took a breath and flipped the shovel. It landed heavily and the shimmery underside resolved itself into a silver pool. He bent over, peered down. He dropped his leg in, boot and all, and lifted out the flapping tail of a sea bass attached to his leg. He could feel it thrashing independently of his intention. A beautiful thing, every scale perfect. He dropped his fish-leg back in and pulled out his normal leg. Toes wiggling in a warm sock. Excellent. But what about his arm, could he do it with his arm? The question made him anxious. Come on, Rick, you pussy, you pussy-lover. Put it in. Paul would never do it. Paul would say, You got away with the leg, don’t put in the arm. Don’t fucking do it. Don’t! Well, this was where they were different, he and Paul. At age twenty-nine he had injected himself with human growth hormone for three months and won the New York State Regionals, his biceps as wide around as a can of paint. At age twenty-four he had swallowed some kind of chemical in liquid suspension that was used to stimulate male horses on stud farms. Very illegal, very dangerous, and according to the other body-builders, very amazing—and then he’d fucked a girl off and on for six hours straight, his dick swelling up so hard that the skin began to fail, even splitting in a few places. Never mind the hallucinations and the sickening spasms in his chest. Never mind that he lost seven pounds. The next day his lower back was so cramped he couldn’t walk, and the girl was under the care of her gynecologist. It was not his fault that she attempted suicide when he said he didn’t want to see her anymore. At nineteen he had walked up the main cable of the Brooklyn Bridge, sliding one foot in front of the other as the slope of the cable steepened toward the top of the bridge’s stone tower. When he reached the summit, he’d spray-painted his name over the other names, smoked a cigarette, and thought about jumping. So what was the big deal about sticking your arm into a pool of silver? At fifteen he and two other guys had set the southbound service lane of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway on fire, using ten mattresses stolen from a motel outside JFK International that they’d soaked with gasoline. So fuck you, Paulie, fuck everything about you, your car and your wife, your paper shredder and your clean teeth. What have you ever done? I always did it, and I’m going to do it now. You always hated me, and I always hated you. I’m going to stick my arm in there and show you. He shoved his left hand into the cool thickness of the silver. Felt almost wet. Right down past the elbow, opening and closing his fingers in the warm chill of the liquid. When he pulled his arm out, it was a roaring wide-belt floor sander, spitting the silvery liquid everywhere. A loud fucker, vibrated his whole body. Industrial stand-up model, ran on 220 power. Took two guys to carry it up a staircase, but here he was waving it around. Better than the fish. Don’t let the spinning belt touch you, take the flesh right off. He dropped the floor sander back into the shining pool. He could feel the machine stop spinning, the weight disappear from his shoulder. Everything was okay. But what came out was a length of rusted anchor chain that pinched him, pinched and rubbed and hurt, you could say that the fucking chain even burned, strangely, right through his arm halfway above the elbow, burned in a perfect line so much that you couldn’t touch it—oh, God, you wanted to touch it to see if it was really true, but it hurt so much that—
“The Narcan is working,” a calm voice announced. “Maybe ten seconds more.”
He opened his eyes to look at the arm, to see how the chain snaked around it, even cut through it, probably cut through it, and when he did, he saw three men watching him, men he remembered but did not know. The floor was littered with fast-food bags, and they’d brought in a television.
“Oh, please!” he cried, his mouth hurting thickly. “Make it go away!”
“Can’t do that, Rick,” answered the one named Morris. “Your heartbeat was getting a little sleepy on me there. I had to snap you back.”
He was laid out on a table in a bloody T-shirt. He lurched up. His right arm was still cuffed to the table. His left arm barely extended past his sleeve. A metal clamp was taped into the bandage. “You fuckers cut off my arm!”
Morris laid a heavy hand on Rick’s chest. “Easy,” he said, pushing Rick down gently, familiar with bodies in distress.
“My arm! You fuckers cut off my arm!”
“I did a very beautiful job packing that arm. Textbook.”
I’m weak, Rick thought.
“You going to ask him about the money again?” said the one named Tommy.
“He doesn’t know anything,” said Morris, resting his palm on Rick’s forehead.
“How can you tell?”
“How?” He frowned. “I’ve treated something like two thousand people in shock. You can’t lie when you’re in shock.” Morris took Rick’s pulse, checked his watch. “The body doesn’t work that way. The body forgets things in shock, but it doesn’t lie.”
“What time is it?” Rick asked.
“Late. Early. Two a.m.”
“Is my arm here?” he called upward.
“You arm’s in the cooler,” said Tommy. “We got it on ice. Like beer.”
“Can I have it?” he asked in a faraway voice.
Morris shook his head. “Not yet.”
“When?”
“When we’re done here.”
He felt unable to lift his head. Hot but cold. “When is that?” He closed his eyes. He understood the pain as a kind of exposed wetness; if he could get the arm stuck back on, then maybe it would stop. His foot and rib and mouth hurt like there were holes in them, nails and glass and bone slivers. “What the fuck do you fucking want?” Rick cried at the ceiling.
“What does anybody want?” said Morris. “We want the cash.”
He felt his breathing now. Some problem with his rib. The pain in the arm was wired into the breathing. He twisted to look.
“The more you move, Rick, the more the skin will differentiate at the edges of the wound.” Morris pulled a candy bar from his pocket. “Here.” He tore away the wrapper, broke off a piece, and pushed it between Rick’s lips. “Get some sugar going.”
“Where’s my arm?”
Morris pointed and Rick lifted his head, just enough. A red plastic cooler, big enough for about a hundred pounds of tuna steaks. Sealed with duct tape, even. He collapsed back onto the table.
“Tell me about the money, Rick,” said Morris.
“When we get to the hospital.”
Morris handed Rick the candy bar. “We can’t take you into the hospital.”
“Drop me at the corner.”
The men looked back and forth. “He doesn’t know about the boxes,” Tommy said. “Not after that.”
“Probably got some stash somewhere, though.”
“How much you got, Rick?”
“Oh, fuck,” he breathed. “Maybe forty thousand.”
“Not enough, man.”
He’d known a hundred guys like them. “It’s all I got.” He ate the rest of the candy bar. It was helping. Maybe he could talk okay, despite the pain of the tooth. Morris wanted to get this thing wrapped up. “Take me and my arm to the hospital—to the corner, whatever. You each get something like … thirteen, fourteen thousand bucks. I don’t have any more money. I had all my cash in my aunt’s place.”
“Yeah, we know. Where is it now?”
He found the texture of the ceiling interesting.
“What’s wrong with him?”
“The sugar is hitting him pretty hard, I think.”
“Where’s the truck, Rick?”
“My truck. In a garage.”
“Look in his wallet for the ticket.”
They pulled it out of his pocket.
“Nothing.”
“Give the man his wallet back, we don’t need picky-shit cash.”
“How did you find me?”
Morris ignored the question. “Where’s the garage, Rick?”
He felt strange. “You know,” he explained, “I saw my mother inside a tomato.”
THEY MAY NOT HAVE BEEN honorable men, but they were reasonable, especially when the reason was easy money and the prisoner was babbling, and so they threw an old coat over him, hiding his bandaged stump, and half-dragged him outside into the old taxi, the lettering and medallion number painted over poorly, the interior torn to hell, and sat him in the back, which made his stump and ribs hurt, and they each grabbed a handle and dropped the cooler into the trunk just like they said they would, and put the toolboxes in the front. He glanced down the block and under a streetlight saw a skinny dog looking back, something hanging from its mouth. Morris handed Rick a big bottle of Gatorade and said, Drink the whole thing. Drink it now, keep your fluids up. He did it and maybe felt better. One guy sat on each side of him, and after the long night neither had a beautiful smell. Morris sat at the wheel and pushed them crosstown on Fourteenth Street, a few people outside walking along peacefully. Hey, they cut off my arm! He would never say that because then they might not take him to the hospital, and besides, he was feeling a little weak, to be honest about it, his foot and ankle hurt as much as his arm, he couldn’t really breathe the way he wanted, he was still thirsty and his head hurt. He wanted to sleep. Just get there, just, just.
Afterburn: A Novel Page 36