by Ed McBain
I left my General Tso’s chicken sitting on the kitchen counter with the cover still on the aluminum dish, got a laundry bag from the shelf above my seldom-used washing machine, put the things into it (sacking them up, I couldn’t believe how light they were, or how long I’d waited to do such a simple thing), and rode down in the elevator with the bag sitting between my feet. I walked to the corner of 75th and Park, looked around to make sure I wasn’t being watched (God knows why I felt so furtive, but I did), then put litter in its place. I took one look back over my shoulder as I walked away. The handle of the bat poked out of the basket invitingly. Someone would come along and take it, I had no doubt. Probably before Chuck Scarborough gave way to John Seigenthaler or whoever else was sitting in for Tom Brokaw that evening.
On my way back to my apartment, I stopped at Fun Choy for a fresh order of General Tso’s. “Last one no good?” asked Rose Ming, at the cash register. She spoke with some concern. “You tell why.”
“No, the last one was fine,” I said. “Tonight I just felt like two.”
She laughed as though this were the funniest thing she’d ever heard, and I laughed, too. Hard. The kind of laughter that goes well beyond giddy. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d laughed like that, so loudly and so naturally. Certainly not since Light and Bell, Insurers, fell into West Street.
I rode the elevator up to my floor and walked the twelve steps to 4-B. I felt the way seriously ill people must when they awaken one day, assess themselves by the sane light of morning, and discover that the fever has broken. I tucked my takeout bag under my left arm (an awkward maneuver but workable in the short run) and then unlocked my door. I turned on the light. There, on the table where I leave bills that need to be paid, claim checks, and overdue-book notices, were Sonja D’Amico’s joke sunglasses, the ones with the red frames and the heart-shaped Lolita lenses. Sonja D’Amico who had, according to Warren Anderson (who was, so far as I knew, the only other surviving employee of Light and Bell’s home office), jumped from the one hundred and tenth floor of the stricken building.
He claimed to have seen a photo that caught her as she dropped, Sonja with her hands placed primly on her skirt to keep it from skating up her thighs, her hair standing up against the smoke and blue of that day’s sky, the tips of her shoes pointed down. The description made me think of “Falling,” the poem James Dickey wrote about the stewardess who tries to aim the plummeting stone of her body for water, as if she could come up smiling, shaking beads of water from her hair and asking for a Coca-Cola.
“I vomited,” Warren told me that day in the Blarney Stone. “I never want to look at a picture like that again, Scott, but I know I’ll never forget it. You could see her face, and I think she believed that somehow . . . yeah, that somehow she was going to be all right.”
I’ve never screamed as an adult, but I almost did so when I looked from Sonja’s sunglasses to Cleve Farrell’s CLAIMS ADJUSTOR, the latter once more leaning nonchalantly in the corner by the entry to the living room. Some part of my mind must have remembered that the door to the hallway was open and both of my fourth-floor neighbors would hear me if I did scream; then, as the saying is, I would have some ’splainin to do.
I clapped my hand over my mouth to hold it in. The bag with the General Tso’s chicken inside fell to the hardwood floor of the foyer and split open. I could barely bring myself to look at the resulting mess. Those dark chunks of cooked meat could have been anything.
I plopped into the single chair I keep in the foyer and put my face in my hands. I didn’t scream and I didn’t cry, and after a while I was able to clean up the mess. My mind kept trying to go toward the things that had beaten me back from the corner of 75th and Park, but I wouldn’t let it. Each time it tried to lunge in that direction, I grabbed its leash and forced it away again.
That night, lying in bed, I listened to conversations. First the things talked (in low voices), and then the people who had owned the things replied (in slightly louder ones). Sometimes they talked about the picnic at Jones Beach—the coconut odor of suntan lotion and Lou Bega singing “Mambo Number Five” over and over from Misha Bryzinski’s boom box. Or they talked about Frisbees sailing under the sky while dogs chased them. Sometimes they discussed children puddling along the wet sand with the seats of their shorts and their bathing suits sagging. Mothers in swimsuits ordered from the Land’s End catalogue walking beside them with white gloop on their noses. How many of the kids that day had lost a guardian Mom or a Frisbee-throwing Dad? Man, that was a math problem I didn’t want to do. But the voices I heard in my apartment did want do it. They did it over and over.
I remembered Bruce Mason blowing his conch shell and proclaiming himself the Lord of the Flies. I remembered Maureen Hannon once telling me (not at Jones Beach, not this conversation) that Alice in Wonderland was the first psychedelic novel. Jimmy Eagleton telling me one afternoon that his son had a learning disability to go along with his stutter, two for the price of one, and the kid was going to need a tutor in math and another one in French if he was going to get out of high school in the foreseeable future. “Before he’s eligible for the AARP discount on textbooks” was how Jimmy had put it. His cheeks pale and a bit stubbly in the long afternoon light, as if that morning the razor had been dull.
I’d been drifting toward sleep, but this last one brought me fully awake again with a start, because I realized the conversation must have taken place not long before September Eleventh. Maybe only days. Perhaps even the Friday before, which would make it the last day I’d ever seen Jimmy alive. And the l’il putter with the stutter and the learning disability: had his name actually been Jeremy, as in Jeremy Irons? Surely not, surely that was just my mind (sometimes him take-a de banana) playing its little games, but it had been close to that, by God. Jason, maybe. Or Justin. In the wee hours everything grows, and I remember thinking that if the kid’s name did turn out to be Jeremy, I’d probably go crazy. Straw that broke the camel’s back, baby.
Around three in the morning I remembered who had owned the Lucite cube with the steel penny in it: Roland Abelson, in Liability. He called it his retirement fund. It was Roland who had a habit of saying “Lucy, you got some ’splainin to do.” One night in the fall of ’01, I had seen his widow on the six o’clock news. I had talked with her at one of the company picnics (very likely the one at Jones Beach) and thought then that she was pretty, but widowhood had refined that prettiness, winnowed it into severe beauty. On the news report she kept referring to her husband as “missing.” She would not call him “dead.” And if he was alive—if he ever turned up—he would have some ’splainin to do. You bet. But of course, so would she. A woman who has gone from pretty to beautiful as the result of a mass murder would certainly have some ’splainin to do.
Lying in bed and thinking of this stuff—remembering the crash of the surf at Jones Beach and the Frisbees flying under the sky—filled me with an awful sadness that finally emptied in tears. But I have to admit it was a learning experience. That was the night I came to understand that things—even little ones, like a penny in a Lucite cube—can get heavier as time passes. But because it’s a weight of the mind, there’s no mathematical formula for it, like the ones you can find in an insurance company’s Blue Books, where the rate on your whole life policy goes up x if you smoke and coverage on your crops goes up y if your farm’s in a tornado zone. You see what I’m saying?
It’s a weight of the mind.
The following morning I gathered up all the items again, and found a seventh, this one under the couch. The guy in the cubicle next to mine, Misha Bryzinski, had kept a small pair of Punch and Judy dolls on his desk. The one I spied under my sofa with my little eye was Punch. Judy was nowhere to be found, but Punch was enough for me. Those black eyes, staring out from amid the ghost-bunnies, gave me a terrible sinking feeling of dismay. I fished the doll out, hating the streak of dust it left behind. A thing that leaves a trail is a real thing, a thing with weight. No question about
it.
I put Punch and all the other stuff in the little utility closet just off the kitchenette, and there they stayed. At first I wasn’t sure they would, but they did.
My mother once told me that if a man wiped his ass and saw blood on the toilet tissue, his response would be to shit in the dark for the next thirty days and hope for the best. She used this example to illustrate her belief that the cornerstone of male philosophy was “If you ignore it, maybe it’ll go away.”
I ignored the things I’d found in my apartment, I hoped for the best, and things actually got a little better. I rarely heard those voices whispering in the utility closet (except late at night), although I was more and more apt to take my research chores out of the house. By the middle of November, I was spending most of my days in the New York Public Library. I’m sure the lions got used to seeing me there with my PowerBook.
Then, just before Thanksgiving, I happened to be going out of my building one day and met Paula Robeson, the maiden fair whom I’d rescued by pushing the reset button on her air conditioner, coming in.
With absolutely no forethought whatsoever—if I’d had time to think about it, I’m convinced I never would have said a word—I asked her if I could buy her lunch and talk to her about something.
“The fact is,” I said, “I have a problem. Maybe you could push my reset button.”
We were in the lobby. Pedro the doorman was sitting in the corner, reading the Post (and listening to every word, I have no doubt—to Pedro, his tenants were the world’s most interesting daytime drama). She gave me a smile both pleasant and nervous. “I guess I owe you one,” she said, “but. . . you know I’m married, don’t you?”
“Yes,” I said, not adding that she’d shaken with me wrong-handed so I could hardly fail to notice the ring.
She nodded. “Sure, you must’ve seen us together at least a couple of times, but he was in Europe when I had all that trouble with the air conditioner, and he’s in Europe now. Edward, that’s his name. Over the last two years he’s been in Europe more than he’s here, and although I don’t like it, I’m very married in spite of it.” Then, as a kind of afterthought, she added: “Edward is in import-export.”
I used to be in insurance, but then one day the company exploded, I thought of saying. Came close to saying, actually. In the end, I managed something a little more sane.
“I don’t want a date, Ms. Robeson,” No more than I wanted to be on a first-name basis with her, and was that a wink of disappointment I saw in her eyes? By God, I thought it was. But at least it convinced her. I was still safe.
She put her hands on her hips and looked at me with mock exasperation. Or maybe not so mock. “Then what do you want?”
“Just someone to talk to. I tried several shrinks, but they’re . . . busy.”
“All of them?”
“It would appear so.”
“If you’re having problems with your sex life or feeling the urge to race around town killing men in turbans, I don’t want to know about it.”
“It’s nothing like that. I’m not going to make you blush, I promise.” Which wasn’t quite the same as saying I promise not to shock you or You won’t think I’m crazy. “Just lunch and a little advice, that’s all I’m asking. What do you say?”
I was surprised—almost flabbergasted—by my own persuasiveness. If I’d planned the conversation in advance, I almost certainly would have blown the whole deal. I suppose she was curious, and I’m sure she heard a degree of sincerity in my voice. She may also have surmised that if I was the sort of man who liked to try his hand picking up women, I would have had a go on that day in August when I’d actually been alone with her in her apartment, the elusive Edward in France or Germany. And I have to wonder how much actual desperation she saw in my face.
In any case, she agreed to have lunch with me at Donald’s Grill down the street on Friday. Donald’s may be the least romantic restaurant in all of Manhattan—good food, fluorescent lights, waiters who make it clear they’d like you to hurry. She did so with the air of a woman paying an overdue debt about which she’s nearly forgotten. This was not exactly flattering, but it was good enough for me. Noon would be fine for her, she said. If I’d meet her in the lobby, we could walk down there together. I told her that would be fine for me, too.
That night was a good one for me. I went to sleep almost immediately, and there were no dreams of Sonja D’Amico going down beside the burning building with her hands on her thighs, like a stewardess looking for water.
As we strolled down 86th Street the following day, I asked Paula where she’d been when she heard.
“San Francisco,” she said. “Fast asleep in a Wradling Hotel suite with Edward beside me, undoubtedly snoring as usual. I was coming back here on September twelfth and Edward was going on to Los Angeles for meetings. The hotel management actually rang the fire alarm.”
“That must have scared the hell out of you.”
“It did, although my first thought wasn’t fire but earthquake. Then this disembodied voice came through the speakers, telling us that there was no fire in the hotel, but a hell of a big one in New York.”
“Jesus.”
“Hearing it like that, in bed in a strange room . . . hearing it come down from the ceiling like the voice of God . . .” She shook her head. Her lips were pressed so tightly together that her lipstick almost disappeared. “That was very frightening. I suppose I understand the urge to pass on news like that, and immediately, but I still haven’t entirely forgiven the management of the Wradling for doing it that way. I don’t think I’ll be staying there again.”
“Did your husband go on to his meetings?”
“They were canceled. I imagine a lot of meetings were canceled that day. We stayed in bed with the TV on until the sun came up, trying to get our heads around it. Do you know what I mean?”
“Yes.”
“We talked about who might have been there that we knew. I suppose we weren’t the only ones doing that, either.”
“Did you come up with anyone?”
“A broker from Shearson, Lehman and the assistant manager of the Borders book store in the mall,” she said. “One of them was all right. One of them . . . well, you know, one of them wasn’t. What about you?”
So I didn’t have to sneak up on it, after all. We weren’t even at the restaurant yet and here it was.
“ I would have been there,” I said. “I should have been there. It’s where I worked. In an insurance company on the hundred and tenth floor.”
She stopped dead on the sidewalk, looking up at me, eyes wide. I suppose to the people who had to veer around us, we must have looked like lovers. “Scott, no!”
“Scott, yes,” I said. And finally told someone about how I woke up on September eleventh expecting to do all the things I usually did on weekdays, from the cup of black coffee while I shaved all the way to the cup of cocoa in front of the midnight news summary on Channel Thirteen. A day like any other day, that was what I had in mind. I think that is what Americans had come to expect as their right. Well, guess what? That’s an airplane! Flying into the side of a skyscraper! Ha-ha, asshole, the joke’s on you, and half the goddam world’s laughing!
I told her about looking out my apartment window and seeing the seven A.M. sky was perfectly cloudless, the sort of blue so deep you think you can almost see through it to the stars beyond. Then I told her about the voice. I think everyone has various voices in their heads and we get used to them. When I was sixteen, one of mine spoke up and suggested it might be quite a kick to masturbate into a pair of my sister’s underpants. She has about a thousand pairs and surely won’t miss one, y’all, the voice opined. (I did not tell Paula Robeson about this particular adolescent adventure.) I’d have to call that the voice of utter irresponsibility, more familiarly known as Mr. Yow, Git Down.
“Mr. Yow, Git Down?” Paula asked doubtfully.
“In honor of James Brown, the King of Soul.”
“If you say
so.”
Mr. Yow, Git Down had had less and less to say to me, especially since I’d pretty much given up drinking, and on that day he awoke from his doze just long enough to speak a dozen words, but they were life-changers. Life-savers.
The first five (that’s me, sitting on the edge of the bed): Yow, call in sick, y’all! The next seven (that’s me, plodding toward the shower and scratching my left buttock as I go): Yow, spend the day in Central Park! There was no premonition involved. It was clearly Mr. Yow, Git Down, not the voice of God. It was just a version of my very own voice (as they all are), in other words, telling me to play hooky. Do a little suffin fo’ yo’self, Gre’t God! The last time I could recall hearing this version of my voice, the subject had been a karaoke contest at a bar on Amersterdam Avenue: Yow, sing along wit’ Neil Diamond, fool—git up on stage and git ya bad self down!
“I guess I know what you mean,” she said, smiling a little.
“Do you?”
“Well. . . I once took off my shirt in a Key West bar and won ten dollars dancing to ‘Honky-Tonk Women.’ ” She paused. “Edward doesn’t know, and if you ever tell him, I’ll be forced to stab you in the eye with one of his tie tacks.”
“Yow, you go, girl,” I said, and her smile became a rather wistful grin. It made her look younger. I thought this had a chance of working.
We walked into Donald’s. There was a cardboard turkey on the door, cardboard Pilgrims on the green tile wall above the steam table.
“I listened to Mr. Yow, Git Down and I’m here,” I said. “But some other things are here, too, and he can’t help with them. They’re things I can’t seem to get rid of. Those are what I want to talk to you about.”