by Dale Peck
—1999
V.
There are moments of great lucidity and moments even I recognize as delusional, but most of the time I linger somewhere between. Is this death opening the door for me, I wonder sometimes, or life, holding on to me? Holding me back. I feel as if I’ve been made privy to a new aspect of human existence and I’m tortured by its beauty, and by the fact that it’s probably not real. The pressure to believe weighs so heavily at the end. To believe in this bed, this room, this city. To believe in the people walking outside my window and their migratory thoughts, sitting on my sill like a bird at a feeder, offering a glimpse of themselves but taking away one more kernel of my life. I am being pecked to death. I am being eaten. But in return I am becoming a man of visions. My body is too insubstantial to hold back the thoughts and feelings of my fleshier fellow citizens, and they flood into me. But will my death dissolve them, or finally allow them to become real?
Dues
First of all, Adam. He creaked up beside me on a bicycle that looked like it had been welded out of leftover plumbing parts. Pull over, he said with all the authority of a keystone cop.
He was cute enough. In particular, the hair: black, thick, sticking out of his head in a dozen directions. Long thin legs straddled the flared central strut of his bicycle like denim-covered tent poles and he stared down at my own bike with eyes the color of asphalt—the old gray kind, with glass embedded in it to reflect light.
But this wasn’t a pick-up.
That is my bicycle, he announced. A trace of an accent?
I don’t think so, I said. I paid for this bike.
Then you paid for stolen merchandise, he said, his consonants soft, Eastern European. Shtolen mershendise. I think you should show me where.
I’d gone on a tip. Benny’s East Village. You won’t believe his prices, a friend told me. Isn’t that the burrito place? I said. In fact my friend had said, They’re probably all stolen, but what you don’t know won’t hurt you. He steals burritos? Bicycles, my friend said. Come on.
By the time Adam and I arrived the shop had closed for the day. Adam’s thin legs labored to turn his creaking pedals, and it occurred to me I could have outrun him, but I didn’t. The sun was setting at our backs and our shadows stretched out in front of us like twinned towers. I thought we were a pair. I thought we were in it together.
Benny sat on a swivel chair on the sidewalk, a television propped in front of him on a pair of milk crates; a tin of rice and beans wobbled on his lap. We’d been there only a few minutes when a man half carried, half pushed a bike up the street. He held it by the seat, lifting the back wheel off the ground because it couldn’t turn: it was locked to the frame. After inspecting the bicycle, Benny paid the man from a roll of bills he pulled from the breast pocket of his T-shirt, stowed the bicycle under the grate of his store, and returned to his chair.
I turned to Adam.
I guess I should have investigated further.
You should have.
He was pulling his kryptonite U-lock from his belt, and I inferred from this action that he wanted to trade bikes. I dismounted, and was unwinding my chain from the seat post when his lock caught me in the side of the head. Fireflies streaked through my field of vision when the lock struck me, but I didn’t actually lose consciousness until the sidewalk hit me in the forehead.
Charlie sponged the grit from my face. What was stuck to solid skin washed away easily, but the bits of gravel embedded in the gashes on my cheek and forehead had to be convinced to relinquish their berth. I closed my eyes against the water trickling from his rag.
One summer when I was seven or eight I carried cupfuls of water from a stream and poured them down chipmunk holes. The chipmunks would remain underground for as long as possible until, wobbling like drunken sailors, they staggered into the sunshine. I would lift them gently into a tinfoil turkey tray I’d habitated with rocks, plants, a ribbed tin can laid on its side (a sleeping den, I’d thought), and then I’d watch as the chipmunks revived, explored their playground tentatively, and then, inevitably, hurdled the shiny wall and scrambled back down their holes.